Except for the Bones Read Free

invitation. “Have you got that ID?”
    “I’ve got better than that, in the car. A lot better.”
    He moved closer, put his free hand on her waist, drew her close. He could feel her body pulsing, throbbing. An engine, revving up. Tonight, Diane was ready for anything—everything.
    But she’d only left the Cape last Thursday, flying back to New York in her stepfather’s plane. And now she was back. Would he have gotten involved, if he’d known she would come up so often? How far did she think a bottle of booze and a handful of pills and some New York grass could go? Didn’t she ever look in the mirror?
    “Okay, gotcha.” Taking his time, he finished the beer, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, put the empty bottle on the bar. “Let’s go.” He turned her toward the door. As she went through, he turned back, winked. The message: score one more tourist.

10:25 P.M., EDT
    D ANIELS DEPRESSED THE BUTTON that drew the drapes covering the floor-to-ceiling plate-glass windows. Because beyond the window, they waited. All of them.
    There were only three elements: Carolyn’s body, himself, and the rest of them. The body was the problem. The world was the threat. And he was the fulcrum, the focus. Move the fulcrum, and the equation failed. In prep-school algebra, the illustration had been a teeter-totter, always in balance.
    Until now—until this hour—always in balance.
    An hour ago his mind had gone numb, leaving him helpless.
    Now, an hour later, his mind was racing. But it was a cacophony of confusion: a once-efficient machine gone wild. When he’d been a boy, his father had given him a steam engine, red-painted, with gilt letters and brass piping. The engine’s governor, his father explained, was essential. Otherwise, the machine would fly apart.
    A smooth, efficient machine. The phrase, he knew, described his mind. The proof was in the statistics, the balance sheet. The proof was in the Forbes biography, the cover story.
    The slate slab that had been fashioned into a coffee table was further proof. The table had cost more than most men made in a year. It had taken six straining, sweating workmen to carry the slab into the house from a flatbed truck and set it on its base. The base was a section of bristlecone pine, thousands of years old, absurdly rare and therefore valuable. The table was placed in the approximate center of the museum-quality Persian rug that covered most of the oak-planked floor.
    And the rug was stained with Carolyn’s blood.

10:30 P.M., EDT
    “W HAT’RE THESE?” JEFF LOOKED down at the two capsules she’d given him.
    “Xanax. ’Ludes.”
    “You think you should do booze and ’ludes and still drive?”
    “It’s just out to their place.” She looked at him, that look she thought was so sexy.
    Except that Diane wasn’t sexy.
    She was rich, and she was wild, and she was willing. But she wasn’t sexy.
    Whatever it was, Diane didn’t have it.
    Did she think she had it? Was that why they were there, parked in her BMW, beginning to touch each other, letting it slowly begin, letting the booze and the pills and the grass carry them along?
    “Your folks’ place, you mean?”
    “I mean my stepfather’s place. Preston Daniels, tycoon.” She spoke with bitterly exaggerated precision.
    “We can’t go there, though.”
    “We can most certainly go there.” Now the bitterness was bleary, blurred by the backwash of whatever she’d taken. But, still, she spoke like the rest of them. He could clearly hear the sound of the private schools, and hired servants. The voices never changed. Neither did the cars, or the houses, or the clothes—or the airplanes.
    Private schools and hired servants …
    Servants like him, paid to clean up their messes.
    He swallowed one of the capsules, swallowed a mouthful of beer. With three other cars—tourists—they were parked in a view area overlooking Nantucket Sound. On the beach below, two figures walked hand in hand along the water’s edge. Two