The Bones of Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page B

reluctantly released. Best get this done before the men came up for breakfast.
    Opening the bedroom door slowly didn’t stop the hinges from squealing. Higgs froze in the hallway, waited to see if the boy would say something. Surely he was awake now, but when he pushed the door open the rest of the way and looked inside, the room and bed were empty in the dusty light. The lace window curtains were flung up over the rod, and the window gaped. A brown moth, stranded in the rising sun, fluttered weakly and tried to climb the inch from the frame to the sill. Upon closer inspection, Higgs realized the bed hadn’t been slept in, although a body had at some recent time dented the blankets and pillow. The thought wormed into him that maybe he should be worried.
    It was a boy’s room to the extent that it contained the dusty trophies of hunting trips—antlers, brushes of rabbit, squirrel, fox, and deer, tail feathers of pheasant and turkey, and the two-foot span of an eagle’s wing nailed to the wall. Higgs remembered that one—the boy shot the huge bird accidentally, he said. Bennett made him nail the wing to the wall over his bed so he had to endure the sweet rot as it slowly decayed to teach him a lesson, and Hayward never said a word. He kept the window open for the next year, even when it was thirty below zero last winter, so cold your snot froze your nose shut and stung your eyes, then froze the tears to your lashes. Maybe the boy was more like his father than either imagined.
    His eye was drawn to the revolver on the top of the big oak wardrobe in the corner. What the hell—the boy wasn’t supposed to use handguns. Higgs was in midstride when a door slammed shut downstairs followed by hurried boots on the stairs. He slid into the hallway, just in time to face Hayward.
    â€œWhat—” The boy drew up short and stepped back, his raw-boned face, a younger version of his father’s, darkened.
    Higgs took in the jacket and pants stuck with burrs and bits of grass, the dirt caked on elbows and knees. Was that guilt on hisface? Or merely surprise? The boy had inherited his mother’s eyes, small, quick, capable of hiding things in their flat stare.
    â€œWhere you been, boy?” Higgs hadn’t meant to question him, and it came out like the boy’s father would have said it.
    Hayward shrugged, glanced at his dirt-rimed nails, and spread his right hand and rubbed the back as if it ached. The knuckles were raw. He’d been in a fight.
    â€œFighting?” Higgs raised his eyebrows. “Your pa know you’ve been—” Then he remembered.
    â€œHe don’t care.” The boy dropped his hands to his sides and straightened his shoulders as if his father watched. “What’s it to you?” His voice had all the harshness of the young trying to sound brave in front of a man who knew what his tone really meant. Higgs remembered being that age. He stepped back and held up his hands in deference.
    â€œHayward, son.” His voice shook and the boy noticed. His head jerked up and his eyes darted past Higgs, then swept into his room.
    â€œYour pa’s dead.” Not once through the long hours of searching for, then finding, Bennett, then carrying him back and sitting with him in the parlor, had Frank Higgs felt the finality of those words. Now it was true. Now he’d told someone to whom it mattered. It was taken away, the fact, and made over, refashioned, then it would be remade, over again, until the J.B. he knew was in little pieces, vanished as surely as this afternoon when they would place him in the ground he had fought and loved and toiled for. This thought came and went in the seconds that it took the boy in front of him to blink, shrug, shake his hands at his sides, and then blink again.
    â€œHe’s gone, son, J.B.’s gone.” Higgs felt a cleaver sever the thought from the rest of his mind and patch it onto the side of his heart,