The Hollow Ones(31)
Solomon asked, “What was inside the one you did see? On Long Island?”
It was awkward saying this with the two nurses in the room. “Bones. Trash. Beads, hair. Is it some kind of shrine?”
“What kind of bones? What size?”
“I don’t know. I’m no forensic anthropologist.”
“But you know a human bone when you see it. Was it a child’s size? Or adult? It makes all the difference.”
The nurses had him ready now, but were almost hesitant to leave, fully tuned in to the conversation now. “Sorry,” said the younger nurse, to both Odessa and Solomon. “But we have to go.” They started wheeling him through the door.
Odessa said, “Both—I think. They were human bones. Some big, some small.”
“So, there, now—where would you get human bones?” asked Solomon as they wheeled him out the door and away into the hall.
At home that night, her half-eaten noodle bowl was growing cold next to her laptop.
Linus was at his desk by the window, headphones on, writing a brief, wearing the mint-green cable-knit pullover he favored on cold nights. A bit of Frank Ocean trickled out from the padding over his ears. Odessa didn’t know how he could write with music in his head. She would be singing along with the lyrics, getting nothing done.
Linus was keeping an eye on her, glancing over now and then, watching her reflection in the night-darkened window. She could feel it. It was comforting, it was loving. It warmed her that he cared. But she also felt strange, having someone so worried about her. Was he waiting for her to fall apart, or was he looking at his girlfriend and wondering what it was like for her to kill? Or, worse, wondering if she had killed Walt Leppo by mistake. She was the person he shared a bed with.
Odessa wondered how she came across. She found herself double-checking her demeanor frequently: Do I seem sane? And now—never more than tonight, after the things she had learned earlier in the day.
“You going to finish that?” he asked.
“Oh, I’ll heat it up later. It’s good.”
Linus smiled at her. “You were staring into space.”
“I know. I’m fine.”
“Would you be happier watching something?”
“I’m good,” she said. “Just catching up on some news.”
He smiled and replaced his headphones over his ears. Odessa returned to her laptop, paging through search results for news stories about grave robbing in New Jersey and Long Island—opened up in a private browsing window, because she worried how it would look showing up in her search history.
She clicked and read articles about disturbed and defaced grave sites, most of the stories from local papers in the patch.com network. Graves desecrated. Headstones kicked over. Tiffany glass stolen. She narrowed her search to incidents from the previous five years.
One story jumped out. Actually, it was a series of stories, a scandal at the time, one Odessa vaguely remembered seeing on her news feed. “Miracle Baby Remains Stolen from Grave.” That was one of the less gratuitous headlines. The story went back a few years, a bittersweet article about a suburban Jersey toddler nicknamed “Baby Mia.” She had been born with a degenerative brain disease and wasn’t projected to survive more than a few hours. Against all odds, she had lived a month or more past her second birthday. But the health care cost of keeping her alive was prohibitive, and a feature article about the “miracle” girl became an online phenomenon. Baby Mia became a social media hashtag. Placards featuring a photograph of the girl wearing a pink elastic headband around her bandaged head appeared in store windows throughout New Jersey, from Asbury Park to Trenton, even crossing the river into parts of Philadelphia. A special SMS code was set up, a six-digit shortcut allowing direct donations of $10 to her health care fund. Six Flags Great Adventure and Storybook Land hosted fundraiser nights, and she dropped the puck at a New Jersey Devils playoff home game, becoming a local celebrity. The Devils held a pregame moment of silence for their adopted mascot after she finally succumbed to the disease.
Six months later, her burial plot in a graveyard in Allenhurst was discovered to have been excavated, her coffin stolen. The shocking story made network morning shows, and her bereaved parents suffered a second time. While the crime was never officially solved, Odessa found a subsequent story about a narcotics ring being broken up, which mentioned a link to recent grave desecrations, citing Baby Mia’s and the theft of the corpse of a man who died in 1977 from a Long Island cemetery.
Odessa scanned other accounts of corpses being stolen and mausoleums broken into. A surprising number of cases. Grave robbing? In New Jersey? News at eleven. She finally pulled herself out of the internet wormhole, trying to make sense of what she had learned.
Why would someone desecrate a child’s grave? Her first thought was a religious cult, a strain of voodoo. Narcotics rings often venerated certain dark saints or superstitious occult deities for “protection” from arrest. Santeria was the best known.
But what did this have to do with rampage killings? She X’d out of her browser more confused than ever. None of it made sense to her…and yet she was left with a chill deep in her core. It meant something. But what?
Odessa sipped at her seltzer, tinged with lime. Dennis the fish swam about in fresh water in the clean bowl in the center of the table. His delicate-looking fins appeared faded, the maroon of his body looking more orange. She wondered how close the fish had come to death, waiting for its owner to return home. She remembered Agent Solomon being wheeled away, close to the end himself. Dennis appeared to be looking at Odessa, swimming in place a moment before resuming his circling.