Bone by Bone by Carol O'Connell Read Free Book Online

saw that boy as a runaway.”
    To be fair, a search of the forest had gone on for a solid month, long after all hope of finding Josh alive was gone.
    “It’s always been an open case.” The sheriff slapped one hand down on his pile of paperwork. “This is it, all the files. There are no copies. Now this is a one-way deal. I don’t share anything with you. But everything you find, Oren—you bring that straight to me.”
    No copies? Active files should be in the hands of a case detective. The sheriff had at least five of them to cover a county this size. Why would this man shut out his own investigators?
    “I’m a civilian now,” said Oren, “ and a suspect. What you’re suggesting is against—”
    “Son, this is between you and me. It’s not like I’m gonna give you a deputy’s star.”
    As if the sheriff might be only half bright, Oren carefully measured out the words, “I’m—the— prime —suspect.”
    “Oh, hell, I never thought you had anything to do with Josh’s disappearance, and neither—”
    “When I was seventeen, you asked me for an alibi.”
    “And your alibi’s one thing that isn’t in these files. It was a good one. I believed it . . . but I never put it down on paper.” He tapped his temple. “It’s all up here. So I guess you’re working for me. Now that it’s a homicide investigation, you might need that old alibi.”
    “I never—”
    “No, Oren, you never said a word. Someone else came forward to account for your time that day. You wouldn’t tell me a damn thing when you were a kid. But now you’ll work this case for me.”
     
 
A gang Of ravens made an assault on the bird feeders surrounding the tower room, and the flight songs of smaller birds were fading in the distance. The ravens had no song. They croaked.
    Cr-r-ruck and pr-r-ruck.
    “I don’t see Judge Hobbs. He must’ve gone inside.” Sarah Winston handed the binoculars to her daughter and then bowed her head to look through the eyepiece of a telescope. “I see your father. He’s in the middle of that crowd of reporters.”
    “The sheriff asked him to handle the media. That’s his job today.” Father was not Isabelle’s preferred name for Addison, but all of the four-letter names disturbed her mother.
    More reporters had joined the feeding frenzy below, where Hannah Rice was chasing a station wagon off the grass. When another helicopter descended to the meadow, the housekeeper threw up her hands and retreated to the porch.
    “Oh, Christ,” said Sarah, one eye to the telescope. “You see that yellow Rolls-Royce? That’s Ferris Monty’s car. You remember him, don’t you?”
    Yes, Isabelle had a vivid recollection of Monty, though he had only come to dinner once, never to be invited back. His yellow Rolls pulled into the judge’s driveway. It was a beautifully restored vintage model. She loved the car, but the little man behind the wheel revolted her. She had never shaken off the first impression of him formed in her childhood. “Wasn’t he a real writer once? I think I read something of his when I was in college.”
    Her mother nodded, never lifting her eyes from the telescope. “Thirty years ago, he was a literary star on the rise. But he turned out to be a one-trick pony.”
    This slur was charity. The man had de-evolved into a celebrity muck-raker, a writer of gossip columns and exposés in the form of true-crime books. As a frequent guest on television, he was known to millions of viewers who had never read nor even heard of his one good piece of art.
    “So he still keeps a house in Coventry?”
    “Oh, yes,” said her mother. “And he’s still the only one in town who’s never invited to my birthday ball.”
    Isabelle imagined that the gossip columnist left a trail of slime instead of footprints as he walked toward the Hobbs house. The first reporter had spotted Ferris Monty, and now they all ran toward the slander man like children who have heard the calliope music of the ice cream