Cedarbones

Chapter 13: A Family Affair

In the kitchen of her childhood home, Shelley spent the afternoon cooking with her son, Vee. In the oven, a venison roast crackled in a butter glaze with turnips and carrots straight from the garden. Every ten minutes, she opened the steaming oven to baste the roast with the browned butter from the pan. Between basting, she prepped a nice garden salad with crisp romaine, pickled red onions, grape tomatoes, shaved fennel, and sunflower seeds. As she worked, she stole glances at Vee peeling potatoes. He struggled, suggesting that David either got takeout most of the time, or whichever Kewpie doll he was dating at the time did all the cooking. Before her thought train derailed the moment Shelley took a deep breath, wiped her hands on a towel, and said, “How you doing, sweetheart?”

Vee fumbled with the potato peeler and wet potato. The potato slipped from his hand and bounced onto the counter, spinning its momentum away. “I’ve never done this before,” he said. “It’s hard.”

Shelley stepped over and rubbed his back quickly, like she did when he was a toddler. Then she picked up the errant potato and grabbed the peeler. Instead of zinging the potato peeler away from the vegetable, like a disc golf player, she used her thumb and fingers to pull the peeler backwards against the potato in clean, patient strokes. “Try it this way,” she showed him. “It gives you more control over the blade, and your potatoes don’t slip out of your hand. Try it!”

Vee gripped the peeler like his mom had shown him, and instead of zinging the peeler away from him, he could pull it toward him in a smooth, clean stroke that cleanly peeled off the skin. “Wow,” he said. “That works so much better.”

Shelley tousled his hair and went back to the salad, a bright smile on her face. After she finished the salad and basted the roast again, Shelley told Vee to boil the potatoes until they broke with a fork, then mash them up with butter and salt and pepper. She had to check on her dad and tell him about dinner.

She exited the back door of the house and walked up to Ove’s lodge on a hill. Its chimney puffed, and the scent of pinewood burning billowed down the hill. Alongside her, the prairie grass brushed against her jeans and palms. The wind blew through the forests like a breath through closed fingers. When she arrived at the open flap of the lodge, her father sat cross-legged at the fire, reading an old book with yellow pages. Leaning up against his side was that mysterious leather satchel she’d seen before, cracked and weathered as if it had lain in a ditch for a century.

When she stepped in and said, “Hi, Dad,” he spooked and quickly shoveled the small book into the bag. “Sorry, I just wanted to let you know dinner is ready. How about you come back down to the house and wash up?”

Ove looked up at her and said, “I don’t feel much like eating today.” His eyes appeared red. Either stoned, or he had been crying.

“I made venison roast,” Shelley said. “Mom’s recipe.”

Ove perked up. “Have you been basting it with brown butter every ten minutes?”

“Wouldn’t be Mom’s recipe if I weren’t.”

Ove stood up weakly and then tossed the satchel onto his sleeping bag bed.

Together they walked down the hill, through the prairie. Each time Ove stumbled, Shelley reached out and used her arm to support him. As much as her work with Connor was taking up a lot of her mind, she remembered walking this hill with her father as a young girl. Only the roles were reversed. When she couldn’t navigate the uneven ground of the prairie, Ove was quick to catch her and hoist her back to her feet, saying, “Oopsie daisy, my lil baby!”

When they neared the back porch of the farmhouse, Ove lifted his head at the oasis of smells coming from the open kitchen window. “You making mashed taters?”

“Yep,” Shelley said. “Vee is making them. Just like Mom’s.”

“Vee?”

Shelley exhaled in a huff. “David has work in Duluth, so he dropped Vee off here to spend some time. Isn’t that nice?”

“I haven’t seen the boy in a few years.”

They climbed the brief steps to the porch and entered through the screen door.

“He’s growing fast,” Shelley said.

“They grow like weeds,” he said. “If you’re not watching.”

They took the first right into the kitchen, and Ove closed his eyes and took a deep breath, taking in the aromas. When his eyes blinked open, he said, “Perfume?” And sitting at the dining room sat a sixty-year-old woman dressed in a nice blouse and black slacks. Ove’s head tilted in response to the strange visitor. “Who is she?”

Shelley led Ove to the table. Her face fell into a calm demeanor as she sat her dad next to JoAnne Farmer. “This is JoAnne Farmer,” Shelley said. She nodded to JoAnne in a coded gesture. “She was the nurse who stitched me up after I fell out of that tree.”

JoAnne nodded back, confirming Shelley’s code. “Shelley wanted to treat me to dinner. And in these times, who can pass up a free meal, right?”

Ove looked at JoAnne and said, “I tell Shelley that all the time.”

Shelley and JoAnne nodded to each other.

Vee brought the roast venison to the table, then the mashed potatoes, and lastly the salad. When he was about to sit down, Ove grabbed by the shirt and gave him a hug. “Nice to have you home, kid.”

Vee and Shelley sat down at the small table. Ove took the knife and meat fork and carved the roast into chunks for everyone. Shelley scooped dollops of potatoes onto each plate, and Vee passed the salad.

JoAnne took the salad and said, “Thank you so much for this, Sharon.”

Shelley paused and said, “It’s Shelley, but that’s alright.”

JoAnne set down the bowl of salad and bowed her head. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just…once I passed 58, my mind gets foggy. It’s hard to remember the simple things.”

Ove set a piece of venison on JoAnne’s plate and said, “Tell me about it. Sometimes I’ll be cooking breakfast and just right in the middle, it’s like I just woke up. And I stand there wondering how I got there.”

JoAnne reached over and patted his wrist. “How often does it happen?”

Ove placed a piece of venison on Vee’s plate and said, “Shit, I forgot. Sometimes once or twice a day.”

Joanne nodded to Shelley in their secret code, and Shelley nodded back. JoAnne continued their probing medical conversation with Ove as they ate. Shelley sat in her chair and dabbed her napkin to her eye, then started eating. With all the chaos around her for years, having a sit-down dinner with her whole family and actually seeing one of her plans work to fruition was almost too much dopamine for one sitting. Just when she thought it was too much, she caught Vee watching her, with a big smile on his face.

Later, after the dishes were done, and the kitchen cleaned up, Shelley walked upstairs and, instead of going up the next flight to her attic bedroom, she stopped off on the second floor near her mother’s old room. Right outside the door, she placed her hand on the banister post that had loosened and caused her mother’s fall. It had always been loose and weak, but her father fixed it up good and strong. Still, that memory haunted her. She bent over the rail. Imagined her mother’s body crumpled on the floor. Her neck broken. Instinctively, Shelley brought her hand to her neck, where her fingers caressed her Algiz pendant from her mother. Finally, she shook her head and turned to the closed door of her mother’s bedroom, where she knocked softly, and said, “Are you awake, Vee?”

Vee laughed from inside and said, “It’s only 8 o’clock, Mom.”

Shelley opened the door and made her way to the bed, where Vee sat, leaning against the wall and working on his laptop. She sat down on the edge and said, “What are you working on?”

“You want to read it?” he asked, spinning his laptop around so she could see the poem he was editing.

Shelley’s eyes widened. “You’re writing poetry?!”

“Yeah.”

“When did that start?” she asked.

Vee rubbed his messy hair. “After you went away. I met a girl at school. Her mom died of cancer, and she told me poetry helped her through a tough time. So she gave me some to read, and we just sort of became quick friends, reading and writing poetry.”

Shelley furrowed her brow playfully. “Just friends?”

Vee bobbed his head back and forth a few times. “Just kissing, Mom.”

Shelley’s face ignited with happiness. “Who is your favorite? I mean poets. Not me or Heidi.”

“Galway Kinnell is my favorite,” he said. “But I’ve been reading a lot of James Baldwin too.”

“Blackberry Eating,” Shelley said. “That’s a good one.”

Vee scrunched his face in concern and said, “Mom. Don’t listen to Dad. That story you’re working on. I could tell through the phone that you were back to normal when you talked about it. Don’t let him take this away too.”

Had she not steeled herself, Shelley’s eyes would have sprung a leak like frozen water pipes, but she held them in. How did she deserve such a fantastic son? With all her mistakes in this world, and like a lighthouse on stormy seas, he’s here to guide her back. She sat up straight and took a deep breath. “You’re right, Vee,” she said. “I can’t let him have that too.”

She patted his socked foot, and he smiled.

“Are you okay here?” she asked. “Because I want to talk to Connor about the story.”

Vee smiled slyly. “Sure, Mom. Go work on the,” he performed air quotes with his fingers, then finished. “Story. I’m sure Connor could use the help.”

Shelley stood up and pinched his big toe. “Easy now.”

On her way back to the staircase, a rogue thought entered her head. A gift she had gotten her father seven years ago. Once it entered her mind, it took over wholly. She strode down the stairs, through the entryway, and out the front door. Past the circular gravel drive, sat her dad’s shed. She opened the door and sneaked to the front of the shed. There, four large, yellow shelving units stood with various forgotten, but “necessary” items throughout her father’s life: three new unused porcelain toilets, a stack of hanging hog barn lights, dozens of coffee cans with thousands of extra screws, nuts, and washers, a half dozen of old, boiled deer skulls, and her target location: five plastic tubs labelled “deer hunting supplies.”

She pulled down the tubs and rummaged through them all. Old musty deer hunting clothes like blaze orange jackets and pants, choppers, wool socks, beanies, ski masks, hiking boots and mucks. Another tub contained rank deer scent bottles, wicks, field dressing tools, buck knives, dragging rope, etc. The third tub held something she had only seen once, but still was not the thing she was looking for: her father’s Marine issue Colt M1911A1, still operational, clean, and freshly oiled. It lay nestled in its leather holster along with a very old box of .45 ammunition. Shelley picked it up and removed it from the holster. Its hash-marked grip clung to her skin. She had forgotten the weight of firearms. It had been years since she had gone hunting or shooting with her dad.

Shelley kept the weapon and put the tub away. Of course, what she was really looking for was in the last tub, an item she knew her dad had never opened—a trail camera. An older model, it couldn’t hook up to cell towers or take video, but with enough batteries and a SM card, it could take pictures when something walked in front and triggered it. Shelley kept the pistol and trail cam and put the tub away. On her way back to her attic bedroom, she knew she had what she needed to get the information she and Connor needed. And having a gun afforded her the safety she would need in case Sheriff Vollen got any ideas.

In the woods off Jackson Lake Road, just west of the Grand Portage, Shelley held her flashlight in her mouth as she tightened the strap on the trail camera. She set it up a few paces away from the Cedarbones totem tree. She had tested it in her room before coming out, so she knew it worked. But she wanted to test it in the dark to see how visible the red LED light was in the forest. When the camera was snugly tight to the tree, she stepped off to the side, then stomped in front of it like a deer, being careful to look at the camera and see the red light. When she triggered the camera, the small LED light blinked red once and was visible, but only for a short time. She thought someone would have to be staring straight at it like her to take notice of it.

With her recording device secured, she let out a deep breath, then reached behind her to check the Colt stuffed in the back of her jeans. Full magazine. Round in the chamber. Safety on. Then she stuffed it back in her jeans behind her. She tramped out of the woods and to her parked truck at the side of the road. With her backpack and burner phone stashed behind the seat, she took out her actual cell phone and dialed up Sheriff Vollen. As the phone rang on the other side, she paced back and forth on the gravel road.

When the sheriff finally picked up, he groggily said, “Sheriff Vollen.”

“Sheriff,” Shelley said. “I just found a body in the woods.”

Over the phone, Vollen exhaled, and said, “Call dispatch. They’ll send an on-duty deputy. It’s 10:30.”

Shit. Shelley thought. She had to come up with something convincing. None of this works with a deputy here. It had to be Vollen. Her mind scrolled through options. Nothing seemed convincing. Then, before Vollen could hang up, she said, “It’s in the woods off Jackson Lake Road, just west of the Grand Portage.”

Vollen paused. On his end of the line, a bed squeaked, like he had just stood up. “Off Jackson Lake Road, huh?” He paused a long moment, scratching stubble across his jaw. “Stay put. I’ll be there in 45 minutes.”

The waiting was the worst part. Shelley nibbled her fingernails, causing one of them to bleed. She paced the road, swing her arms and snapping her fingers to a tune ambling through her head. Squats. She performed a few squats to stretch her legs. The Colt. She double and triple checked it. Magazine, full. Chamber round, loaded. Safety on. Then she went back to her fingernails, the pacing and everything else again, until the faint grumble of a police cruiser emerged from the south, and then minutes after, headlights emerged around the bend. She reached for her phone in her back pocket, set the voice recorder to RECORD, and slipped it back down.

Vollen parked his sheriff cruiser next to Shelley’s truck and exited the vehicle. He neglected to put on his uniform, but he had affixed his badge to his flannel shirt. Before he stepped away from the cruiser, he lifted his revolver out of its holster on his hip and lifted it up and down a few times. That many years on the force, he knew exactly how many rounds were chambered by the weight. Satisfied, he holstered the revolver and looked up. He jolted a bit in surprise. “Shelley Skarstad,” he said. “I didn’t recognize your voice on the phone. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been such a prick.”

After seeing the sheriff’s firearm, the entire operation got very real for Shelley. She swallowed, her throat already arid and shriveled. “Don’t worry about it,” she said.

“What on God’s green earth are you doing way up here?”

“Fluff piece for the Beacon,” she said, her mind thinking of her next words. “On the hazing rituals of the high school football team.”

“Hazing, huh?” he said, like he had never heard the definition of hazing, or perhaps he too was running scenarios in his head. “And this involves a dead body?”

Shelley smiled. He had to be playing dumb. He changed his mind on the phone, because he knows what’s here. “Not so much a body,” Shelley said. “More like remains.” She paused, looking for more. “And by my estimates, they look old. Like 54 years old or so.”

Vollen didn’t even stop to do the math in his head. As soon as he heard “remains” and “54 years old,” his eyes squinted suspiciously. “Well, I guess you’d better show me.” He gestured with his hand to the woods on the right side of the road. “After you.”

Shit. Shelley hadn’t thought of that. She wanted to follow him into the woods. But he manipulated the situation. Of course, he doesn’t know where to go, because he doesn’t know where it is, even though she theorized he did. Nervous, she took the first steps down the ditch toward the woods and began turning her head around to converse with him often, to monitor him. “It’s crazy, really,” she said. “A concerned mother tells me this wild story about her son having to kiss ol’ Cedarbones.”

They stepped into the woods and began their journey as Vollen responded. “Cedarbones, eh? Some kids are just crazy in the head.”

Shelley stalked through the woods, turning her head again to Vollen. “Yeah, kids. Have you ever heard the stories?”

Vollen followed her. His hands were empty. “Nope.”

Lie, Shelley thought, tramping through the woods. Pudge Vanderwal and his mother told the sheriff’s office. There was a record of it, just hidden. “That’s weird. Town legends seem to seep into the culture.”

“Not here.”

The farther into the woods they walked, the more frightened she became. Even with the gun in her pants, she felt like she wasn’t leading him to Cedarbones, but that he was bringing her to a grave. Combined with the worry and the walking, her heart-rate quickened, and sweat brewed at her temples. But she couldn’t quit now. She had to keep the conversation flowing, so she turned to address him again and thought of Connor’s latest lead—the muscle car. Shelley asked, “You modify the engine on that cruiser? Cause it had a serious growl to it.”

Vollen tramped behind her, following her flashlight. “No. Standard issue.”

Stone cold, Shelley thought. Her stomach quavered, not with hunger, but with worry. She turned her head to say something, but her foot caught a root and she fell. Once she hit the ground, she twisted around, fearful that Vollen would grab her.

But he simply held out her hand to her.

She watched his hand and his holster. Seconds streamed by that she thought were hours. Then she reached up and clasped his hand. He helped her up and said, “There we go. Walking in the woods at night can be dangerous.”

Shelley doubled her pace. Her heart felt like it slapped inside her throat. A line of sweat skittered down her spine. Less talking, she thought. Cedar fragrance filled the air the closer they got. With each plodding footstep, their echoes careened through the grove. And though the summer was hot and humid, as they stepped into the low, even at 11:00PM, the eddying air at her ankles grew icy. When the woods often fell silent when she entered them, the surrounding forest seemed noisy, chaotic. It confused her.

Only a few yards more, she thought, looking out of the corner of her eye for the red LED dot of the trail camera. In her nervousness, she couldn’t see it yet. But they may not have been close enough to trigger it yet. Without looking back at Vollen, she said, “It’s right over…”

“Here,” Vollen said.

And Shelley felt the cold steel of the sheriff’s revolver jammed into the back of her head. Her flashlight beamed ahead, highlighting the skeleton grown into the Cedarbones tree.

“I just had to see if you knew,” he said. “And it’s too bad that you did.”

Before he could finish, Shelley spun around and slammed her arm down on his, knocking his revolver and her flashlight free. In the darkness, she drew the Colt from her pants and scanned the area for Vollen. Footsteps crashed all around her, so she pointed in every direction. He couldn’t be this nimble for his age, she thought, when she turned straight into him. His fist landed on her jaw, dislocating it, and in spasm, she fired off a round as her hand squeezed the weapon in a death grip. But Vollen launched on top of her and grabbed her neck, squeezing it as hard as he could. She kicked him with her knees and gurgled out, “You raped…unh…killed hergh!” Shelley swung her gun hand up to the Sheriff’s ribs.

“I had no choice,” he grumbled. Flecks of his spittle landed on her face. “I never meant any of this!” he grunted as he squeezed her neck.

Lightheaded, Shelley admitted Connor was right. This was the stupidest thing she could have done. And it would be the end for her. On the verge of hearing her larynx popping and her mind fading to nothingness, the weight above her disappeared in a blood-curdling scream. Around her in the darkness, Vollen’s shrieks ricocheted from one side of the grove to another. A brutal song rolled through the cedar grove. A verse of branches and leaves whisked through the air in a flourish. Another verse of wood and bark snapping. All of it led to a chorus of thorny vines whipping and ripping skin. And following all those came a last verse of bones being crushed against tree trunks. And in a final, outro chorus, a thrashing, woodland entity twisted and popped Vollen like a balloon in the darkness. The guttural slosh of intestines hit the forest floor wet and heavy, until his gargling screams reduced to whimpers. Whispers of apology, really, and death breaths of regret. The song ended with a thunder, not of rain, but of skin, muscle, and sinew being torn asunder. When the last of the blood rained down on the forest floor, only then did silence return to the grove.

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