Bloodstream Read Online Free PDF Page B

don’t you?” she said.
    “All about what?”
    “That bone.” Nadine stood watching her, patiently waiting for her contribution to the community pool of knowledge. Like most Maine women, Nadine did a lot of listening. It was the men who seemed to do all the talking. Claire heard them when she walked through the local hardware store or the five-and-dime or the post office. They stood around and gabbed while their wives waited, silent and watchful.
    “I hear it’s a kid’s bone,” said Joe Bartlett, swiveling on the stool to look at Claire. “A thigh bone.”
    “That right, Doc?” another one asked.
    The other Dinosaurs turned and looked at Claire.
    She said, with a smile, “You already seem to know everything about it.”
    “Heard it was whacked up good. Maybe a knife. Maybe an ax. Then the animals got at it.”
    “You boys sure are cheerful today,” snorted Nadine.
    “Three days in those woods, raccoons and coyotes clean your bones straight off. Then Elwyn’s dogs come along. Hardly ever feeds ‘em, y’know. Bone like that’s a tasty snack. Maybe his dogs’ve been chewing on it for weeks. Elwyn, he wouldn’t think to give it a second look”
    Joe laughed. “That Elwyn, he just plain doesn’t think.”
    “Maybe he shot the kid himself Mistook it for a deer.”
    Claire said, “It looked like a very old bone.”
    Joe Bartlett waved at Nadine. “I made up my mind. I’ll have the Monte Cristo sandwich.”
    “Whooee! Joe’s goin’ fancy on us today!” said Ned Tibbetts.
    “What about you, Doc?” asked Nadine.
    “A tuna sandwich and a bowl of mushroom soup, please.”
    As Claire ate her lunch, she listened to the men talk about whom the bone might belong to. It was impossible not to listen in; three of them wore hearing aids. Most of them could remember as far back as sixty years ago, and they batted the possibilities around like a birdie in play Maybe it was that young girl who’d fallen off Bald Rock Cliff. No, they’d found her body, remember? Maybe it was the Jewett girl— hadn’t she run off when she was sixteen? Ned said no, he’d heard from his mother that she was living in Hartford; the girl’d have to be in her sixties now, probably a grandmother. Fred Moody said his wife Florida said the dead girl had to be from away—one of the summer people. Tranquility kept track of its own, and wouldn’t someone remember if a local kid had vanished?
    Nadine refilled Claire’s cup of coffee. “Don’t they just go on and on?” she said. “You’d think they was planning world peace.”
    “How do they know so much about it, anyway?”
    “Joe’s second cousin to Floyd Spear, over at the police department.” Nadine began to wipe down the counter, long, brisk strokes that left behind a faintly chlorinated smell. “They say some bone expert’s driving up from Bangor today Way I figure, it’s gotta be one of those summer people.”
    That, of course, was the obvious answer—one of the summer people. Whether it was an unsolved crime or an unidentified body, the all-purpose answer served. Every June, Tranquility’s population quadrupled when wealthy families from Boston and New York began arriving for their lakeside vacations. Here, in this peaceful summertime colony, they would linger on the porches of their shorefront cottages while their children splashed in the water. In the shops of Tranquility, cash registers would ring merrily as the summer folk Pumped dollars into the local economy. Someone had to clean their Cottages, repair their fancy cars, bag their groceries. The business from
    those few short months was enough to keep the local population fed through the winter.
    It was the money that made the visitors tolerable. That and the fact that every September, with the falling of the leaves, they would once again vanish, leaving the town to the people who belonged here.
    Claire finished her lunch and walked back to her office.
    Tranquility’s main street followed the curve of the