To Trust a Friend. Lynn Bulock

to make his eyes water. “Once you’re in the building, I’ll head home,” he told her. “I just want to make sure everything is all right.”

      Her answering hug was brief but warm and the surprise of her giving it to him rocked him back slightly on his heels. “You’re sweet and I won’t argue. Thanks.” In a moment she was in her truck and Josh walked quickly to his car so that he could follow her as he’d promised. Around him the jasmine notes of her cologne filled his senses and followed him the rest of the evening through his drive to the lab and all the way home.

      Everything was gone. It was Saturday morning and the Watcher stood in the mud under the trees at the park, looking in surprise at the yellow caution tape surrounding several shallow impressions in the earth. What had happened here? The last time he’d visited, the two bird-watchers were calling the police, but he hadn’t expected this much action this quickly. All they could have found were a few unconnected bones.

      Now that the tall weeds and scrawny saplings that had grown up in his private garden had been washed away by the spring rains, it looked like a different place. Having the police mess around with things on top of that made it unrecognizable. His things were gone. Or at least they’d been uncovered from their hiding places. Somebody had found them, that was certain. The yellow tape and spindly orange plastic fencing might have been made to look like this was just an area the parks service was trying to keep people out of because the ground was swampy, but he knew differently.

      How dare they mess everything up! This was his place, with his secrets. Now what was he supposed to do? As he stood there wondering, there was a rustle behind him, and a voice called tentatively. “Sir? I’m going to have to ask you not to go any closer to the fenced area. If you’re bird-watching, we’re directing people over to the South Trail.”

      For a moment the Watcher felt as if he was going to jump out of his skin. “What? Oh, sure.” Relief washed over him as he realized that to the young park ranger, or whatever he was, the binoculars around his neck and his nondescript jeans and shirt made him look like any other guy out to enjoy a Saturday in the park. “Sorry, Officer. I wasn’t trying to do anything illegal.”

      The kid smiled. “Don’t worry, you haven’t done anything wrong yet. I’m just supposed to keep people from getting into areas like that one where it’s too swampy for us to be sure of your safety. And I’m not an officer or anything, just working here for the summer.” The kid pointed toward his yellow name badge and the Watcher could see that it gave the kid’s name below the bright green line that proclaimed him a volunteer. So he hadn’t done anything yet, huh? Wouldn’t this kid be surprised if he knew? But with any luck, he wasn’t going to know, and neither was anybody else. The Watcher tried to walk nonchalantly away from this ruined place. Somebody was going to pay for this; he just needed to find out who was responsible.

      It was time to go home and look through the newspapers to see what the police said about their finds. That would tell him who had dug up his treasures. Didn’t they realize that it would be their fault when he started hunting again? Without his secrets here, how could anybody expect him to access his memories? Now it would be time to find a new place, and new things to fill that place, even sooner than he’d planned.

      By ten o’clock on Saturday morning, Kyra’s back ached. Her shoulders tightened with the focus of her efforts with the magnifier and the smaller pieces of bone. Sometimes when she was busy like this she remembered Gran sifting through a jigsaw puzzle. The difference was that Gran did her puzzles for fun, humming softly while she matched the pieces. Kyra did her work in a much more serious way, but the painstaking business of matching the pieces was the same. And when she finished putting together one of her “puzzles” it could mean closure for a family somewhere who finally knew where their loved one was.

      More bone pieces, and larger ones, were coming out of the cleaning room now. In the work area she’d set aside just for this purpose, Kyra kept turning bones in different directions, angling them slightly while examining their color and texture. They’d separated out the pieces that were most likely human at the dump site. Bringing them back to the lab allowed Kyra and her researchers to separate out anything that wasn’t human bone.

      Now, after the cleaning, it became clearer which pieces went together. The set of bones that went back the farthest had softer details around the edges and an entirely different color to their surface from the ones that had been in the ground a shorter time.

      Each set of skeletal pieces that Kyra wanted to keep separate had its own gurney, arranged in a horseshoe so that she could have easy access between the three steel gurneys. If anyone asked, the skeletons were just A, B and C, but already to Kyra they were Abigail, Bethany and Chloe. She prayed that some day soon she could give these girls back their real names, but until then she wanted to do all that she could to make them living human beings in her own mind.

      As she identified what seemed to be two of Chloe’s metacarpals, the door to the room swung slightly on silent hinges, making Kyra jump a little. “Who’s there?” Her voice sounded a little high and sharp in her own ears. She wasn’t used to having much company on Saturdays.

      Josh came through the doorway with a grimace. “Sorry. I didn’t even think about startling you. I knew you’d be here, and frankly, I ran out of things to do at home so I decided to come in and try to get something done.”

      Kyra looked at Josh, realizing that this was the first time that she’d seen him out of his weekday uniform of dark pants and a white shirt. Today he wore khakis and a sportier shirt, and no tie, either. “That’s okay. I was so focused on this set of bones and what they’re telling me that I didn’t expect anybody to come in.”

      His brow wrinkled a little. “I have to admit that it’s really strange to me to hear you talking about bones telling you anything. Frankly, I don’t even know how you can tell which ones belong to which…set.”

      His pause told Kyra that Josh still didn’t think about Chloe and the others as real people yet. It would probably take an identification of at least one set of the bones for Josh to see any of them as a girl who had lived, grown, had sorrows and joys like anybody else, and then died. She sighed softly. “They tell me quite a bit, Josh. And explaining how I can tell one person’s remains from another might take me a couple of hours. Once I’ve worked through everything we’ve collected, maybe I can show you.”

      He nodded slightly. “Sure. I understand that you can’t do it right now. Getting as much done as you can makes more sense. Meanwhile, I’ll go in and sort through some more missing persons reports on the computer.” He crossed the room, heading for the door that led to Kyra’s office. “Does anybody make coffee on weekends?”

      “Sometimes. There aren’t many of us in today, though, and nobody’s gotten around to it. I’d welcome a cup if you get some going,” she told him.

      “That I can do,” Josh said, with a ghost of a smile on his lips. “In my department at the bureau, making decent coffee was a survival skill not dependent on gender or rank within the department. If we could have talked them into a cappuccino maker I could have run that, too.”

      He looked around into the corners of the room. “I know this is a brand-new set of labs. I don’t suppose…”

      Kyra had to grin. “Nope, the State of Maryland barely sprang for regular coffeemakers. Weekdays when everything is open, I think there’s a cart in the lobby closest to the cafeteria that serves foo-foo coffee.”

      That brought a laugh out of Joshua for the first time. “Foo-foo coffee, huh? After that iced coffee last night I figured you for a vanilla latte kind of person. Guess I was wrong.”

      “Guess you were,” she said, trying to focus on her work. “When I’m not eating Thai or Vietnamese food, straight, black coffee in any insulated container that keeps it hot and prevents me from spilling it is my beverage of choice.”

      He gave her a mock salute. “Ready in ten minutes, ma’am. I’ll even wash the mug.” Before she could reply he was through the doorway and out of sight, leaving Kyra to wonder what part of what she’d said