Bone River by Megan Chance Read Free Book Online Page A

wait. I’d talk to her tomorrow.
    I forced myself to attend to the chore of drawing, resisting the call of the mummy. I picked up the bowl waiting on the table, turning it in my hands, running my thumb along the broad form lines of the salmon carved upon it. Junius, who was going to the stove for a cup of coffee, glanced over his shoulder and said, “A camas bowl, I think.”
    But I saw skilled hands carving, smoothing, polishing. I saw, in my mind’s eye, the bowl sitting at the edge of the fire, the oil it held glistening and pungent. I shook my head. “Oil,” I said softly, without thinking.
    Junius frowned. “Why do you say that?”
    I saw the way he was looking at me, that frown between his eyebrows, the same one I’d seen on Papa’s face a dozen times. “The salmon carved on it. And it still smells of oil,” though neither was true. Salmon was a common motif. And the bowl smelled like nothing but dust and old wood.
    “Ah.” Junius nodded and poured the coffee. “Well, write that down too. It’s always good to give Baird a story.”
    I thought he was mocking me, but when I looked at him more closely I realized he wasn’t really paying attention, and I felt a quick relief. I’d always had too strong an imagination when it came to the relics. It was easy for me to envision the life they’d lived—dancers wearing those masks that now hung on the wall while the fringe shivered with their movement; sinkers plunging deep into a cold river, holding nets taut; salmon hooks taking shape beneath the blade of a stone knife. Sometimes those stories felt so real...but I thought I’d learned long ago to keep such ideas to myself.
    It was the mummy. She was too distracting. And my dream...I tried to shake it away and settled myself to the drawing, hurrying through it, keeping my fancies well at bay, not allowing myself to think of the stories these things could tell, but even so, it was growing dark by the time I finished for the day.
    I managed to make it out to the barn, but only for a few moments before I had to start supper. The whole day had escaped me. I didn’t even bother to take her from the trunk. I only stood there, holding the lantern over her, watching the light turn her oak-colored skin to honey and glisten on the molasses-taffy color of her hair, and I was struck by a reverence that made me catch my breath. For a moment, as I stared at her, I felt as if I’d somehow brought her alive. I saw the faint rise and fall of her chest, the flutter of her eyelashes upon her cheeks, and I found myself whispering, “Who are you?”
    I’d no sooner said the words than I felt how foolish they were—not just because I’d spoken them aloud but because I’d expected an answer. She was no more alive than the straw or that harness hanging on the wall. But when I closed the trunk lid, again I felt that sense of suffocation; it was all I could do to turn the key in the lock and walk away.
    I could not stop thinking of her, and it wasn’t just questions about her people or how old she was or whether she was Indian—thekinds of questions I
should
have been asking. Instead, I wondered what had brought her here from hills with long brown grass and wind full of the scent of sun and dust. I wondered if those berries had been her favorites and why she was waiting and why that waiting had turned so afraid.
A dream, Leonie. Not real.
But as the days went on and the dream returned, it seemed so. Sometimes I could feel that grass against my feet, and when I took down my stockings and saw the milk white of my own ankles, I was startled that they weren’t brown. I thought of those berries spilling into a pool like blood as I spooned red currant jam from a jar. I washed dishes and thought of the black and white on that basket flashing as it tumbled down the hill.
    My chores kept me from her aside from a few minutes here and there. I tried to visit her every day—
as if she was an old aunt you feel beholden to
—and