By Ann Charles
CHAPTER ONE
Friday, April 9th
“Gramps, your dog found a bone!” Claire Morgan yelled, staring down at the foot-long bone clenched in the jaws of her grandfather’s beagle.
“What’d you say?” Harley Ford stepped out from behind the thick trunk of a hundred-plus-year-old cottonwood tree. He tugged at the zipper of his faded Levi’s. “Damned prostate,” he muttered as he shuffled towards Claire. “I’ve got faucets that leak more.”
Claire bit back a grin. After traveling together for three days straight in his 1976 Winnebago Chieftain, she’d learned everything about him from the volume, frequency, and pattern of his snoring to the number of prunes he needed at breakfast to maintain regularity. He’d left his modesty in Colorado, and she’d lost her sanity long before they had finally pulled into the R.V. park in Arizona--well, most of it, anyway.
“I said Henry found a bone.” She squatted next to Henry and examined the broken end of the white fragment hanging out of his black lips. “It looks pretty chewed up already.”
Gramps stood behind Henry. “Is it made of gold?” he asked.
What kind of a question was that? “Of course not.”
“Then why get your knickers all bunched up over it?”
Ignoring his sarcasm, Claire grabbed the bone and tried to wrestle it from the dog’s teeth. “Damn it, Henry, give it to me!”
Henry growled and dug his back paws into the sandy stream bank. He yanked the bone free of her grip, ran several feet away, plunked down onto his butt next to a prickly pear cactus, and just watched her with the shaft still locked in his jaws. She wasn’t sure who was ornerier, Gramps or his spoiled dog.
Gramps snorted. “As soon as you’re done playing tug-o-war, can we get the hell out of here?”
“What’s your big hurry? Got a hot date tonight?”
“That’s none of your business, young lady.”
Claire chuckled and stood, wiping Henry’s slobber on her cotton shorts. “I wouldn’t be here with you in the middle-of-nowhere Arizona if it wasn’t my business.”
“I told you I don’t need a chaperone.”
“And I told you that Mom put the squeeze on me. She’s expecting a call tonight with the first of my weekly reports on your love life.” Just the thought of listening to her mother’s voice on the other end of the line made Claire’s fingers itch to roll a cigarette. Instead, she dug out a stick of cinnamon gum from her back pocket. Three weeks now without a single cigarette. God, she missed nicotine. Even more than sex.
“If I wanted my private life spilled to your mother, I’d write a story about it for the National Enquirer,” he grumbled, crossing his arms over his chest. “The nosey busybody.”
Henry trotted past Claire, obviously teasing her. She lunged for the bone, but the dog sidestepped her and bounded away. “Would you tell your damned dog to hold still for a second?”
“It’s more fun to watch you chase him,” Harley said, his grin crooked.
Claire tried to breathe deeply, calmly. The sweet smell of sun-baked greasewood trees filled her sinuses. She wouldn’t kill Henry. Not for a bone.
“With your cheeks pink like that,” Gramps mused, “you remind me of your grandma when she was a young woman.”
A warm breeze rustled the leaves of the cottonwood overhead. Her mind flashed to an old black and white picture hanging on Gramps’s wall back in Nemo, South Dakota. In it, her grandma stood next to the very tree that currently shaded Claire from the Arizona sunshine. “She loved this spot,” Claire said, remembering her last trip with her grandparents to this corner of the state twenty years earlier. The echoes of her grandma’s giggles blended with the gurgling of the nearby creek.
“She called it her own little Utopia,” Gramps said, his tone scratchy around the edges. “She’d drag me here for a picnic every day while we were staying at the R.V. park.”
Claire smiled. The man hated eating off a blanket. She fell into step behind him as he marched toward the car.
“Your grandmother had a way of making life interesting,” he added, looking at Claire over his shoulder. “She could turn a funeral into a carnival. I doubt I’ll find another like her--not even in the next fifteen years--but a man needs a woman. Especially an old man.” He whistled for Henry.
“I understand, Gramps. But did you have to round up a harem to find one?” Why couldn’t he just get another dog?
“It’s nice to have choices.”
“Yeah, but there are better, less flea-market-like ways to meet women.” She never should’ve shown him how to use the Internet. He’d become the king of the senior-set chat rooms.
Henry trotted up next to Gramps, practically laying the bone in his outstretched palm. She could’ve sworn the dog snickered at her before dashing ahead.
“You just keep out of my way and we’ll get along fine for the next month.” Gramps handed the bone to Claire. “And don’t forget the rules.”
“I know.” She wiped the sticky, drool-covered bone on her T-shirt. As the trail widened, she picked up her pace until she walked next to him. “Rule number one: Whenever you have a lady friend over, I should make myself scarce for a half-hour--”
“An hour,” he blurted, then glanced at her out of the corners of his eyes. “My equipment is a bit rusty these days. It takes a little more time to get the gears all greased and--”
“Ahhh, stop!” She waved the bone fragment in front of her. “You’re going to make me lose my Twinkies.”
“Fine, smartass. Just make sure you stay lost until I give you the sign that the coast is clear.”
She nodded absently as her gaze locked on the bone. Her footsteps slowed. “This kind of looks like a femur.” The marrow was long gone. She measured the thickness with her finger.
Gramps stopped and looked back at her. “Child, it’s hot, I’m thirsty, and there’s a six-pack waiting in the fridge. Quit playing forensic scientist and let’s get the hell out of here.”
She ran her fingertips along the length of the bone. Its smooth hardness was cracked and bleached from the sun. The other end was broken and rough with the gnaw marks she’d noticed earlier.
“Claire, are you listening? If you don’t get your grandfather back to the Winnebago and pour a cold beer down his throat, he’s gonna keel over from heatstroke.”
“Look at the diameter,” she said, circling the bone with her index finger and thumb.
“Sweetheart, I know you’ve taken--”
“It’s as thick as Mr. Bones’ femur,” she said, remembering the human skeleton that had hung in her Human Anatomy 101 class.
“--more college classes in the last ten years than most people take in their lifetime, but you’re making something out of nothing. It’s just an old bone.”
“You’re wrong.” Her heart galloped. “This isn’t just any old bone.” She thrust it in front of his pale blue eyes. “It’s a human leg bone.”
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