I sat down at the table, close to the lamp, and tilted and angled my head to dispel the shadows around my eyes. Finally satisfied that the sinister expression was gone, I turned my gaze to the lamp itself. Its cotton wick nestled just below a slit in a small metal dome; a small hexagonal knob extended from the dome on a spindly shaft, and by twisting the knob I could roll the wick up or down with gears that were hidden within the dome. Twisting the wick slowly down, I watched it gradually disappear, like sand edging downward into the neck of an hourglass as time begins to run out. As the wick’s edge threatened to vanish through the small metal sleeve between the reservoir of oil and the glass chimney, the flame shrank to a pale blue flicker along the charred edge of woven cotton. I twisted the knob in the other direction, and the wick slowly rose, the flame blooming bright yellow again, its edge as sharp and solid as the edge of a full moon. How is it, I wondered, that something as nebulous as burning oil can look so solid? Why isn’t it ragged and flickering, like the flames of a fireplace or campfire? Why is there no fuzzy transition from glow to not-glow? And why can’t my own life feel so well defined, so neatly edged, anymore?
I lifted the oil lamp by its narrow neck, where the metal collar and wick mechanism screwed onto the glass base. Halfway up the base, at its widest part, oil sloshed within the clear container. The wick—a flat ribbon of woven white cotton—undulated within the liquid, like a tapeworm preserved in alcohol. The lamp’s neck felt small and vulnerable in my grasp, and I forced myself to ease the tension in my grip, lest it snap in my hand, sending the glass base and its flammable contents crashing onto the kitchen’s tile floor. I made my way through the house by lamplight, like some restless ghost from a campfire story, checking each outside door to be sure it was dead-bolted. Then I went into my bedroom, locked the door, and sat in my bed, my back against the headboard. I set the oil lamp on the nightstand beside me, scooting its useless electric companion to the far edge to make room. Then I slid open the nightstand drawer and took out the handgun Steve Morgan had loaned me. I studied it—the tiny blue-black pyramids machined into the grip, the matter-of-fact words and numbers etched into the barrel, the small, precise button of the safety, which I clicked back and forth, off and on, in a hypnotic pattern that was nearly as regular as the ticking of a clock.
I told time that way until a pale gray light seeped through the window, gradually erasing the reflection of the lamp’s glow, replacing it with the shapes of raindrops and bits of shredded leaves on the outside of the panes.
CHAPTER 33
THE ANTHROPOLOGY DEPARTMENT WAS LOCKED AND dark when I arrived—not surprising at eight o’clock on a summer Sunday morning. Without bothering to shower or even change my rumpled clothes, I had eased my truck down the narrow service drive that ringed the base of the stadium, parking at the foot of the stairs beside the bone lab. Once inside, I flipped on the fluorescent lights overhead, then impulsively flipped them off again. Enough light filtered between the stadium’s girders and through the grimy windows to guide me across the lab, and for what I needed to do, semidarkness was better than the glare of the fluorescents.
The slide sorter was still plugged in, and the cranial X-ray of Freddie Parnell still lay atop the frosted glass. I switched on the light, and the homeless man’s ghostly skull lit up. I studied the overall contours awhile, then focused on the scalloped edges of the frontal sinus. The contours resembled a coastline, but it was an unknown country I was trying to steer toward. Retrieving the tray of cranial fragments from the Cooke County fire scene, I sighed in despair. It wasn’t a matter of simple navigation; what I had to do—what Miranda had been struggling for days to do—was reassemble a second map, the map of tiny, charred bits we’d plucked from the smoldering ruins of the cabin. If we couldn’t piece together more of that second map, we’d never be able to tell whether its landmarks matched Parnell’s or not.
I flipped the X-ray, so I was looking at the frontal sinus from the back—from the inside of Parnell’s skull, in effect—and then laid the two fragments Miranda had painstakingly reassembled just below the image of the sinus, with their curved inner surfaces facing up. Framed by the openings of the stadium’s steelwork, the daylight was spilling through the windows at a low angle, an angle that highlighted the contours of the cavities in the blackened bone. Staring first at one fragment, then at the other, I rotated and angled the bits in almost microscopically small shifts, my eyes darting from the bone to the X-ray and back again with each subtle movement. You’d think it would be easy to tell if a half-inch stretch of bone corresponded to some portion of a two-inch image, but it was maddening. Instead of a coastal map, I decided, what I was working with was a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle depicting an overcast sky. I was trying to match one tiny detail to the image on the cover of the puzzle box—that’s what the X-ray was like—without actually knowing that this puzzle had indeed come out of that box.