Bone Rattle by Marc Cameron (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

brought from home for that purpose. He told Mim he’d graduate them to natural tinder like birch bark scrapings, but for now, he wanted them to be successful.

They inhaled two hot dogs apiece, used their knives to whittle little spears out of some dry spruce sticks, and then went off to explore the beach with Lola, leaving Cutter and Mim sitting in canvas camp chairs by the fire.

Alone.

Arliss took out his pocketknife and began to carve on a piece of dry cedar he’d found beneath the trees. Mim leaned forward in her chair, warming open hands at the fire, and thought how much Arliss was like Ethan. Her late husband had doodled in a notebook with a pencil when he was deep in thought. Arliss carved. The little squint of their eyes, the raised brow, and frequent nodding of the head as they worked through some silent problem to their own satisfaction – it was similar enough to bring tears to Mim’s eyes.

One of the chief reasons she’d gotten along so well with Ethan was his propensity to sit quietly in the same room, just being. Arliss had that quality in spades. They talked on the phone now all the time whenever he was away on assignment. She whined about her shift at the hospital. He’d ask about the kids, checked on the house when there were problems with the water heater or dishwasher. They were like a married couple. Sort of. But when they were together, in those quiet moments in the living room or at the kitchen table when the kids were asleep, they spent great swaths of time going about their own business, content to sit in the same room without a word. She loved that about him. That he gave her space – but still occupied that same space himself, quietly, without demands.

The resin in a spruce log popped like a firecracker, causing Arliss to look up from his carving and poke at the coals. He smiled, which often looked forced when he did it for other people, but appeared to come naturally with Mim. She started to ask him what he was thinking, but decided she didn’t really want to know.

Pocketknife in one hand, hunk of wood in the other, Cutter rolled his shoulders – just like Ethan used to do. He looked around, checking out his surroundings as he did every few minutes.

A group of three women – all on the large side, though Mim was not one to judge – sat in folding chairs down the shore watching their small children splash in the chilly water. They were maybe fifty feet away, just within earshot when the breeze was right. The rough language they used made Mim happy Lola had taken the boys in the other direction. A couple of guys in leather vests sat at the picnic table above them, drinking beer. They laughed periodically – and loudly, in the way that drunk people laugh when they’ve washed away the inhibitions that help them get along with those around them.

Arliss didn’t say anything, but Mim could tell he was keeping an eye on the men at the table.

Another woman, this one looked like she might be Native, with dark hair and bronze skin, walked toward them on the beach. A child of seven or eight meandered beside her. The child, Mim thought it was a boy, though he had incredibly long, curly hair that hung well past his shoulders – kicked a soccer ball as he slogged along in cheap black gumboots. Every so often, he’d get a burst of energy and dribble the ball forward, kicking it at a rock or piece of driftwood.

“I saw her in court today,” Arliss observed, nodding toward the Native woman, his knife poised above the carved wood. “She’s a reporter, I think—”

Just then, the boy kicked his soccer ball directly into the women. It bounced off a camp chair, went airborne, and then beaned one of the kids playing in the surf.

One of the seated women, who wore a sleeveless T-shirt and an extra-wide pair of Daisy Dukes, wallowed up and out of her chair to retrieve the ball. She threw it back to the little boy, frowning and shouting something Mim couldn’t hear.

The boy took the ball and dropped it to the gravel.

The heavyset women turned back to whatever they were doing. The men at the table picked up their beers and started laughing again.

Mim sighed. “What are we doing, Arliss?”

Cutter, already carving again, glanced up from the chunk of cedar. “We’re… What do you mean?”

Mim leaned back in her chair, facing the sky, feeling the breeze and sun on her cheeks. “I don’t know, I just think—”

A startled cry from the beach cut her off.

Apparently, the little boy with long hair had done something to anger the woman in Daisy Dukes again. She began to scream curses at the smaller woman, then grabbed the ball and threw it into the water. Hands on her hips, she watched the ball long enough to be satisfied it was going out with the waves, then wheeled and marched up the gravel beach so she was face to face with the Native woman. The men at the picnic table were up too, beer bottles in hand, making their way out to surround the cowering woman.

Mim’s first instinct was to check on her boys, who thankfully were a couple hundred feet down the beach in the other direction, hunting for shells. By the time she turned back toward the brewing conflict, Arliss was sprinting that way.

Of course he would go. There was about to be violence. He wouldn’t want to miss that.

Chapter 18

Lori Maycomb walked the gravel beach, deep in thought. She liked coming to the Auke Village picnic areas with her seven-year-old son and think. Locked in a semi-fugue state, she was only vaguely aware of the other woman, and paid just enough attention to Joseph to make sure he didn’t get in trouble – almost.