Bones don’t make up stories because they want to believe them. They don’t repeat something they overheard somewhere. They don’t have ESP. They are verifiable, carrying in their fissures the truth of our flawed materiality and our uniqueness. The crack in the femur, the holes in the teeth. So there could be no greater evidence, to Anderson’s way of thinking, than the bones positively identified as belonging to Tommy Crawford, which were discovered in an abandoned well in the woods not far from the Clifford residence.
Anderson stood next to Janie, Noah, and Tommy’s family, looking down at the hole in the earth into which they had lowered an expensive box covered with expensive flowers already wilting in the heat. He thought he ought to be observing the reactions of the subjects to these proceedings, but he wasn’t: instead he was thinking that when his own time came, he wanted none of that for himself. Let them leave his hacked-up body on a mountaintop to disintegrate and feed the vultures, as the Tibetan monks did, until the corporeal part of Jerry Anderson was nothing but bones on a ledge. He was thinking it wouldn’t be so very long now, that he would never let his body outlive his mind.
The boy’s father, Henry, was standing next to the hole, the shovel in his hands. He filled the spade and threw the dirt high over the coffin, the earth seeming to pause in midair and fall with a scattering thud, and then he scooped another shovelful without pausing, until it seemed like one long continuous movement, the shoveling and falling earth and shoveling, his face slick with sweat.
They all watched him. Noah, subdued, stood between Denise and Janie, holding Janie’s hand. Charlie had an arm around his mother’s shoulder.
Of course, no amount of data could convince someone who wasn’t open to being convinced. People came up with the answers they wanted. Always did. Always would. Anderson had tried to guard against this in his own work, hired researchers to check and recheck his data and colleagues to review his articles, urging the highest standards of skepticism, but it was inevitable there would be some bias. His colleagues were his colleagues; they had wanted to trust him. He had believed for so long that if he rid his work of even the slightest tinge of subjectivity it was only a matter of time before his data was accepted; it was part of the battle he’d been fighting, only now it was late morning and the air was warm and the scent of the soil was rich and fresh and he felt the fight beginning to lift out of him. Let people believe what they wanted to believe.
Detective Ludden, for instance: the answer that made the most sense to Detective Ludden was ESP. It never ceased to amaze Anderson. Here was this rational professional man with his razor-sharp intellect and world-weary outlook, grasping at some idea of Noah’s super extrasensory perception as inherently more likely than that some fragment of Tommy’s consciousness might continue in some fashion after his death. A samosa vendor on the streets of New Delhi, a taxi driver in Bangkok, would laugh themselves silly at such na?veté. But psychic powers were a phenomenon the police departments in America had at least had some experience with—they had all heard stories of clues being generated this way; some had even employed psychics themselves from time to time. So little Noah Zimmerman was an amazingly powerful psychic intuiting the last moments of Tommy Crawford’s life. Whatever floats your boat, Detective.
And he had to admit, once he had made his peace with that aspect of the case, the detective was surprisingly game. Before they had even positively identified the remains, he had interviewed Noah. Taken careful notes and used them to fill in the blanks, to elicit a more comprehensive confession, not that the killer was holding back. But the detective wanted the facts presented as fully and clearly as possible, Anderson understood this, he wanted to know what happened, and isn’t that what we all want?
Everything squared, more or less, with the evidence. The bones, the bullet-shattered ribs.
The father wanted the killer dead, but the mother felt that there wasn’t much point in that. And the prosecutors had taken the death penalty off the table, since he had confessed, and had been a young teenager when the crime had occurred. And, after all, he may as well work through his guilt in this life. No point in bleeding it on into the next. So Anderson had agreed with Denise on the uselessness of the death penalty, although she still refused to use the word reincarnation.
Tommy’s spirit, that’s how she put it.
Whatever floats your boat, my friend. Whatever floats your boat.