Free Sing It to Her Bones by Marcia Talley

“Paul, it’s me. I’m home!” I listened, hardly daring to breathe, until I heard his familiar voice.
    “Out here!” I found Paul sitting on the patio, a sweating bottle of Coors Light in his hand and the Sunday section of Saturday’s Baltimore Sun strewn about on the patio table, its pages fluttering in the wind. Paul had anchored them to the table with a flat rock from my garden. He wasn’t reading. He was talking on the cell phone. “Later, Murray. Hannah’s just here.” Murray Simon was an old college friend, a lawyer with a small practice up Route 2 in Glen Burnie, near Baltimore.
    Paul punched the talk button with his thumb and turned to smile at me. It was the same crooked grin I loved so well, but today it didn’t match his eyes.
    “I’ve been trying to call you for two whole days, Paul. I left messages on the machine. Why didn’t you return my calls?”
    He set the phone aside, caught my hand, and pulled me into his lap, surrounding me with his arms and squeezing tight. I pulled away slightly so I could see his face.
    “Goodness! You’d think I’d been away for a week instead of just a few days.” He kissed me on the mouth, and I relaxed into him, savoring the familiar tickle of his mustache as it brushed my lips and trailed along my cheek.
    “Missed you,” he whispered into my neck. “More than you know.”
    I leaned back, one hand flat against his chest. “You didn’t answer my question, Paul. Why didn’t you call me back?” There were tiny worry lines around his eyes. I stood and dragged a patio chair around from the other side of the table and sat down, facing him.
    Paul set his beer down on the table and put both his hands together between his knees. He leaned toward me, but before he could say anything, I erupted, words tumbling out of my mouth at one hundred miles per hour, “It’s even in the paper!” I pointed to the table. “I needed to tell you that I found a body in the cistern on the old Nichols place!”
    Paul’s eyebrows disappeared into his hair. A look I couldn’t read momentarily lit his eyes. “What? My God. I hadn’t gotten to the newspaper yet!”
    “Actually it was Colonel who found the body.” I described my walk, the headlong dash back to the house,our return to the crime scene, Dennis’s visit with Connie, and the disturbing events of this morning. Thinking about Paul’s ties to the community, I asked, “Do you remember a girl named Katie Dunbar?”
    He shook his head. “Should I?”
    “I just thought you might. Small town and all. Connie and I were in Ellie’s Country Store mailing some packages when Dennis Rutherford stopped in for a soda. He told us the body was hers. She disappeared eight years ago, Paul. Dennis said she’d been murdered.”
    Paul opened his mouth, but I’ll never know what he was going to say because the phone rang just then. Paul said it was a wrong number.
    A few minutes later the blasted thing rang again, but this time Paul ignored it. “Jeez, honey, I feel like an insensitive clod. Sitting here, drinking beer and feeling sorry for myself, after what you’ve just been through. Are you okay?”
    The phone continued to ring—four, five times—making a sound like a strangling turkey—six, seven. “I might be, if you’d pick up the damn phone. Aren’t you going to answer that?”
    “Let it ring, Hannah. We need to talk.”
    “I’ll say we do. Didn’t I just say I’ve been trying to reach you for days?”
    Paul caressed my cheek with the back of his fingers. “I am sorry, honey. I should have been there for you.” His face took on a look of such infinite sadness that my heart seemed to turn in my chest. Suddenly he was not looking at me, and I panicked.
    “Paul, what’s wrong?” A cold fist of fear began to form in my stomach. Mom? The last time I’d talked to her, she’d had a persistent cough that she’d promised to see the doctor about.
    “Not Mother?” I struggled to my feet. “Don’t tell me