The Bone Orchard: A Novel

“I’ll take you back to your car under one condition,” she said.

“What is it?”

“Don’t say a f*cking word to me until we get back to my house.”

I slid silently into the passenger seat and fastened the belt buckle.

Leaving the parking lot, Tate gunned the engine, raising a spray of sand and gravel behind the rear wheels. She cranked up the police scanner the way a teenager listening to the radio might if her favorite song suddenly started playing. I leaned my head against the padded headrest and watched the blur of green scenery. Deb Davies’s revolver pressed uncomfortably against my tailbone.

I figured that maybe I would drive back to the Square Deal and ask around at the counter to see if someone else there remembered Destiny’s Neanderthal. I could also prod Soctomah again. I no longer felt the need to be respectful of the detective’s seemingly stalled investigation.

We hadn’t driven more than half a mile when a call came over the radio. The Knox County dispatcher was reporting a 10-55—a vehicle accident—on the Old County Road in Rockland. “All available units please respond,” she said. “A car went into one of the quarries.”

“We need to take that,” I said.

Tate looked at me with disbelief. “What do you mean, ‘we’? I’m suspended, and you’re not even a warden.”

“You know those quarries. The cliffs are fifty feet high, and the water is who knows how deep. We’re only a few minutes away. The people inside could drown by the time first responders arrive.”

She didn’t slow down or turn the wheel.

“What’s more important to you, Tate,” I said, “keeping your nose clean or saving someone’s life?”

Tate braked so hard, I nearly got whiplash. She threw the truck into reverse and executed a perfect three-point turn. In ten seconds, we were speeding back up the hill in the opposite direction.

I had passed through Rockland’s stinking quarry land on my drive south, and the image of a car crashing through the guardrail had been vivid in my mind. I might have taken it as a premonition, but vehicles were going off that winding road all the time. Coincidence is a master of disguise.

It took us less than five minutes to reach the accident scene. There was no question we’d found the right quarry. The gaping gash in the steel barrier would have been hard to miss. Other vehicles had stopped where they could—the road was narrow, with few places to pull over—and bystanders were gathered along the cliff, gazing down into the pit. As I had predicted, Tate and I were the first responders to arrive.

Tate slowed, looking for a place to park her truck without it being sideswiped by rubberneckers. I took the opportunity to unfasten my shoulder belt and jump from the idling Tacoma.

“Jesus Christ, Bowditch!”

I ran up the road until I was shoulder-to-shoulder with the other people who had stopped. There was an old couple and a woman with a baby in her arms and a group of teenagers, some with cell phones pressed to their ears, others crying hysterically. I looked down at my boots and saw a steeply sloping limestone cliff. At the bottom of the quarry was a man-made pond filled with water as blue as the Caribbean, and in that water, twenty feet from the shore, was an overturned car. The undercarriage and wheels were completely exposed, and it was clearly sinking.

“Help her! Somebody, please!”

I hadn’t noticed the soaking-wet girl at the bottom of the cliff face. She was clinging to the rocks with bloody hands, trying to pull herself out of the water. Her upturned face was a white oval, framed by strands of dark hair.

I didn’t pause to remove my boots. I just took three running steps and hurled myself off the cliff wall. I seemed to hang in the air for half a second like a cartoon character who has just walked off a precipice, and then gravity grabbed me by the ankles. I fell fast and hit the water hard. I felt the impact all the way up my legs and spine. If the cliff had been any higher, I would have broken a dozen bones and spent the rest of my life in a wheelchair—assuming I’d even survived.

My body had somehow remembered that my arms should be folded across my chest, so I went in like a missile. The force of the drop plunged me deep into the aquamarine water. It was much colder than it looked. The shock caused my heart to clench tighter than a fist.

I found myself staring up at a blur of blue light, which I knew to be the surface but which seemed to be receding faster and faster. I thrust my arms out to stop my descent and gave two powerful kicks. My Bean boots weren’t heavy enough to pull me down, but they didn’t make swimming any easier, especially as my clothes became waterlogged.

My head popped up like a fishing bobber. I splashed around, gulping air and trying to get my bearings. My ears were stuffed up, but the injured girl’s screams were loud enough to grab my attention. I followed the line from her pointing finger to the roiling rectangle of water where the overturned car was going under. All that remained above the surface were the rear wheels, and they were disappearing fast.

I put my face back in the foul-tasting water and began kicking my legs and pulling myself ahead with my arms. I tried to pretend I was back in the lukewarm pool at the Criminal Justice Academy, but my mind wasn’t so easily tricked. Someone was in that sinking car, and that person was dying.

I reached the frothy spot where the car had been moments ago and ducked my head, squinting into the depths. There was a dark rectangular shape beneath me. I did a half somersault and began swimming for the vehicle. It seemed like I’d never catch up to it, that the car would disappear into a bottomless abyss, but it must have caught on something—an outcropping, a submerged tree, maybe even a junk vehicle someone had pushed over the edge—because it came to rest abruptly. A cloud of gray sediment rose around me.

The light was murky. I couldn’t see more than a few feet, especially with the billowing mud, but I found the back bumper and was able to pull myself along the vehicle by moving from the exhaust pipe to the rear wheel to the handle of the back door and finally to the driver’s window.

Inside was a thrashing girl.

She was stuck, her body upside down in the seat. I wasn’t sure if she was just panicked or unable to release the buckle of her seat belt. The blobby air bag was pulsating in the water like a cuttlefish that had wrapped its tentacles around her chest. It was hard to see inside the vehicle itself, but I had a thought that the other girl must have squeezed out the passenger window, which was why there was no air left inside the car.

The girl had long reddish hair that was moving around in the water. When she saw me, her eyes widened and she made a yelling motion with her mouth, which only filled her lungs with more water. She reached with both hands for the window, flattening her palms against the glass. I tried the door handle, but it was locked. When I looked at the girl again, her eyelids had begun to flutter. I held on to the side mirror with one hand, feeling a nerve pinch in my brain as my own oxygen supply started to run out.

I needed a hammer, something to break the glass. When I’d been a warden, I’d bought myself a special emergency tool designed for that purpose. It was in a box back in Elizabeth Morse’s cabin now.

I had my pocket jackknife, but it wasn’t big enough to use as an awl. What else?

Deb Davies’s revolver.

I reached around my back, worried the gun had fallen out during my jump into the water, but I found the handle pushed down into the ass of my jeans. I drew the revolver out and pressed the barrel against the corner of the window, well clear of the girl. Most people think a gun won’t fire underwater, but gunpowder contains its own oxidizer and a bullet casing is waterproof. The slug won’t travel far pushing H2O instead of air. I just needed it to crack the glass.

When I pulled the trigger, the gun leaped in my hand, stinging it so hard, I lost hold of the grip. I saw the pink handle dropping away into the murk and had an impulse to swim after it, then looked up again and saw a hole in the window at which I had been aiming. I punched at the fractured glass and kept punching until blood was streaming from my knuckles. When the hole was large enough, I reached in and tried to unlock the door, but nothing happened, so I kept working at the glass until the opening seemed big enough for me to pull the girl through.

She was unconscious when I grabbed her by the shoulders. I braced my knees against the door and pulled. Nothing happened. Her shoulder belt was still fastened. I was running out of air and could feel a panicking sensation rising in my lungs. I fumbled inside the car for the seat belt and located the clasp. I pushed the button with my thumb. To my utter amazement, it sprang free. There was nothing wrong with the belt. She had just been too terrified to remember how to unlatch it.

I grabbed the girl by the shoulders again and pulled. This time she came through the window. I hugged her with one arm and used the car for leverage, bracing my foot against it and kicking hard for the surface.

I hadn’t realized how close I’d come to blacking out until I tasted air. I turned the girl so her face was pointed at the sky and gripped her around the chest. I began doing the backstroke toward the cliff face. My eyes and nose were burning from whatever filth was in that deceptively blue water, and the taste in my mouth was like I’d been sucking on a rotten egg.