Fiction: Yellow Flowers and a Bag of Bones

Chapter ten: The missing skull

I sat perfectly still on the sidewalk outside of the bookstore as the police arrived and started bustling around, filling the street with uniformed men and women, with a stretcher and coroners and police cars and normalcy. Right now normalcy seemed like a very good thing – between the odd atmosphere of the store and the corpse of the woman who seemed to in fact be the same woman whose journal I had read only days earlier, my head was spinning. I didn’t like it when my head was spinning.

A police man asked me routine questions and I answered them just as routinely, not even capable of being nervous for once, even if my voice shook more than normal. He seemed to think I was in shock over stumbling upon a dead body like that, and gave me a sympathetic pat on the shoulder and told me to rest for a while before I got moving. At least they didn’t seem to think that I was guilty of anything, which was a relief – I wasn’t sure if I could handle interrogations and cops and forms. Especially not seeing as I was supposed to be lying low, not make much of a fuss, not attract attention.

I was doing a splendid job at it.

For some reason, I decided to stick around, watching the police do their thing. The coroners carried the body out on a stretcher, thankfully covered, though the white cotton couldn’t keep the smell away. I wondered if my face was green. I wouldn’t have been very surprised if it was.

Watching work like this fascinated me. These were people who no doubt came to work every day, diligently, doing their eight to four – possibly even longer – jobs without complaining. Serving the community, slaving away for a wage that was probably almost not even enough to feed their families. I wasn’t sure whether to pity or admire them. This was a world that I knew nothing about, seeing as I had never had a steady eight to four job. The mere thought of it had always creeped me out, and so I stayed away from it. Easier that way.

Suddenly there was a cry from inside the store, and more commotion than there really should be, now that the body had been carried out. On sheer reflex, I got up to go inside to check it out, but a police man stopped me firmly in the door, one hand out to create a barrier.

“You can’t go in there,” he said, the tone of his voice making it very obvious that I would not be going in there.

Of course, I couldn’t leave it at that. “W-why not?”

“Because this is a crime scene and an investigation and you are a civilian,” he explained, not very patiently. It should be an explanation I could accept, but moving on from a discovery like this one wasn’t that simple.

“But I w-was the one who f-found the body. Don’t I d-deserve to know what’s g-going on?”

The police man hesitated, and then told me to stay there while he went inside to talk to his superiors. He looked less than happy when he got back, but nodded to me. “Come back around this time tomorrow, and someone will fill you in, if you’re that interested in knowing what’s happening. Does that sound fair to you?”

I nodded. “That s-sounds very fair, t-thank you,” I replied, politely, and turned to leave. Reluctantly. I had to admit that I didn’t want to leave just yet – the atmosphere of the store, as much as it freaked me out, was also more than a little intriguing. Besides, I had to know more about the woman, about who she had been. I might already be the one person in the world who knew the most about her, and yet I knew nothing at all. I wondered how I could find out for sure whether or not she really was the woman whose journals I had read. It wasn’t as if I was an expert on handwritings, I couldn’t determine for sure that the same person had written both the journals and the short suicide note. I thought it was likely, but likely and certain were two very different things.

I found it difficult to concentrate that night, and even more difficult to sleep. All I could think about were the various women that had suddenly snuck into my life, affecting it in various ways. Thankfully, at least Maria wasn’t mysterious; she was simple and straight-forward and cute and pleasant, and I liked her and she liked me back. Nice and easy, even if I wasn’t used to the very fact that a girl actually liked me for me.

Dakota, on the other hand, was not simple and straight-forward. I had only seen her two times, though I had looked for her countless times, and yet she was proving impossible to forget. I wished I could forget, just leave that mystery unsolved, because it would sure as hell make things a lot easier for me. But then there was the look of pure terror on her face the last time I had seen her. Maybe she was in trouble, and I was the only one who was aware of it. Didn’t that mean that I had a duty to help her out? Sure, I had never really cared all that much about duty before, but when the matter at hand was a young, fairly attractive woman, it was a lot easier to not suppress that sense of duty.

Then there was the mystery woman. I had been calling her Star in my head, because of the little stars she had jotted down next to some of the names. I wondered what could have driven her to those kinds of steps, if she had really killed herself, or if someone else had found her too troublesome and staged a suicide. I felt sorry for her, that she had sunk deeper and deeper into the trouble she was in, without anyone to help her.

The next day I was greeted with yellow police tape and just as many people as the day before when I got to the alleyway. On the way I passed several gangs, looking none too happy about having their turf invaded like this, but with so many cops around, there wasn’t much they could do.

By the look on the men’s faces when I approached them, I could tell that they’d rather keep me out of all of this, but I was stubborn and insisting, and eventually they let me in. Possibly just so they wouldn’t have to listen to me anymore.

The police man I had talked to the day before, the kind one who had patted my shoulder, walked up and introduced himself as Janson, telling me that he’d be taking care of me. “A-as long as y-you don’t put m-me in jail,” I said, and he laughed. Normally I really didn’t like cops (exactly because theoretically, if they looked closely enough, they would find more than enough of a reason to actually put me in jail), but Janson seemed nice enough. Besides, he had no reason to think that I was anything other than a regular young man who had stumbled across a horrible sight.

“Come on, let’s sit down here at first,” he said, half pushing me down on one of the chairs that had been brought out to the side of the store. The whole scene looked like a city within a city, with the amount of cars and people and chairs and equipment. It was fascinating. Janson found a sandwich and a cup of coffee for himself, offering some to me as well, but I shook my head. I hadn’t been able to eat since yesterday.

For a while we sat there in silence; him eating, and me looking at the work that was being done. Someone had seemed to scrub the bookstore clean – I could actually look in through the windows now, and it was possible to read the sign above the door. Le Livre Vert. So apparently, it was a French bookstore. Nothing too uncommon really, in a city like this. There were stores that catered to pretty much every nationality possible, and then some.

“The body you found was the one of a woman, who was twenty-six years old,” Janson began, sighing slightly. “Her name was Jenny McLoughlin, and she was Irish. That’s pretty much all we know so far. By the looks of it, she hadn’t been living here for long. It’s almost as if she uprooted from wherever she lived before and then came here just to… Just to kill herself.”

I swallowed. Jenny. My mystery woman had a name now. I wanted to ask him if they had found any journals, but I figured that kind of specific question could be a bit too suspicious. They didn’t need to know the fact that I might just have known this woman. “W-was there any p-personal belongings?” I asked instead. I was pretty good at not being suspicious when I wanted to. I had to be, otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to live the kind of carefree life I did.

Janson nodded slowly, chewing the last of the sandwich as he stared at the store. “There was a wallet, which was how we found out who she was, the suicide note, and a few letters. One change of clothing, no toiletries. Either she was incredibly poor, or she had sold of everything she owned.”

“L-letters? What d-did they s-say?” I tried to sound casual, interested but not too interested, but it was difficult when all I wanted to do was to shake Janson and demand the letters.

He shrugged. “They were a pile of nonsense. Some ranting about four sisters and how she loved one of them and that she had done everything they asked of her, but that she couldn’t take it anymore. Most likely she had a condition. Maybe depression, maybe delusions. Living in a fantasy world with voices talking to her and all that,” he said, smiling even if he hardly sounded amused.

I wanted to jump up and down, but seeing as that would have looked very funny, I merely sat there. Jenny was my mystery woman; there was no doubt about it. I still wanted to get my hands on the letters, but it might not be all that important – I had the information I needed.

I was still piecing everything together quietly when Janson’s voice interrupted my thoughts, “The suicide is fairly straight-forward. It’s horrible to say that it’s easy, but as far as cases go, it doesn’t take a lot of manpower to solve. It’s the skeleton in the store that brought all these people out.”

“S-skeleton?” I couldn’t come up with anything smart to say, because his remark blindsided me completely. I sure hadn’t seen a skeleton in the store yesterday.

He nodded again, slowly and thoughtfully. “Yep. By the looks of it it’s been there for at least twenty-five years, maybe even more. Store must have abandoned in all that time, door open and everything. Horrible, really, that something like that can go by unnoticed.”

“S-so, was the p-person…m-murdered?”

“We don’t know yet, but it looks that way. The skull is missing,” he said, all too calmly. As if he was used to stumbling across twenty-five year old skeletons with missing skulls. I wasn’t, however, and I was suddenly glad that I was sitting down.

“There will be an investigation, of course,” Janson continued. “We have sent off the skeleton for analysis to find out more about the person. Right now we have no idea about gender, age or identity, though the store is registered to one Nicodème Gramont, who we haven’t been able to locate, so chances are that the skeleton is his.”

I paled. Or at least, I was sure that I paled. Visibly. To regain my composure, I bent my head, running a hand through my hair. Gramont. That was one name I had run across far too often lately, and it was starting to mess with my head. Did this mean that the skeleton in the store belonged to Rei’s father? And if it did, how had he died? Where was his skull? And possibly the most important question; did Rei have anything to do with it?

“I s-see,” I said, mostly trying to buy myself some time to come up with something else to say, though even after a few more moments of silence, I couldn’t think of anything smart to say. It wasn’t as if I could reveal the fact that I might just know something about the skeleton man as well as the hanged woman, which would simply be too much. It was already proving to be more than enough for me to handle, and I knew I was innocent in all this. However, the police might not see it that way. Most likely, I should just back away from all of this crap. Definitely would have made things a whole lot easier. And yet… “D-do you m-mind telling m-me if s-something new c-comes up?”

Janson shrugged and looked me over. He probably took me for some bored, poor student with nothing better to do with his time, which was okay with me. I didn’t mind it when people made that kind of assumption about me – maybe it was even part of the reason for why I never tried to change my looks at all. That, and the fact that I felt comfortable like this.

“Normally we don’t do something like that, but seeing as you were the one who found the woman, I guess you have a right to. It won’t hurt anyone. You’re welcome to take a look inside the store if you want, just don’t touch anything.”

I thanked him with a polite smile and a bow, and got up to check it out. Even with the added light and police, the store still felt strange. Once again I had the feeling of stepping back in time, and I looked around, almost expecting everything to have turned into black and white, like images on an old TV, but everything looked normal on the surface. As far as I could tell, no one else felt what I felt either, so it had to be my wild imagination.

Maybe I had just spent a bit too much time around strange little boys and talking rabbits lately.

Unlike yesterday, I took my time along the bookshelves, reading the spines of the books. Even if I was one of the most well read people I knew, I had barely heard of any of the titles. The fact that half of them were in French didn’t exactly help me much. From what I could understand, there were a lot of books on religion, a lot about flora and fauna, a lot about travel. Nothing that really stood out to me.

There was a small crowd gathered near the stair, and I walked closer; carefully, not quite sure I wanted them to notice me. Though considering how focused they all were on a gathering of grayish white bones on the floor, I figured that they couldn’t care less about me. The skeleton didn’t really interest me all that much, because it wouldn’t give me any information. I couldn’t ask a skeleton questions. Except that right now, I wouldn’t even be surprised if it had answered. If it had a skull, anyway.

As casually as possible I climbed the stairs, one step at a time, trying to make them creak as little as possible. A couple of the cops did look up and frown at me, but they didn’t protest. I was surprised, but figured that in this part of town, maybe they were used to things like this happening on their crime scenes. Or maybe Janson had told them to leave me alone. I didn’t particularly care as long as they didn’t stop me or ask me questions.

The apartment above the store had the same strange feel to it, and everything looked aged. It probably didn’t help that everything was covered by a thick layer of dust, apart from where someone had walked around, apparently taking the same look around as I was. Except that I knew what I was looking for. Well, more or less, anyway.

I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or disappointed by the fact that I couldn’t see any pictures, or any personal effects of any kind. The apartment was as generic as a display in a furniture store. The living room, kitchen and bathroom all looked almost too plain, and the main bedroom wasn’t any better. I glanced in the closet, finding suits that looked like they had been fashionable decades ago.

It wasn’t until I opened the door into a smaller bedroom that I found some kind of sign that someone had actually been living here, instead of merely existing here. I could tell that it was a boy’s room by the cars and planes lined up neatly on narrow bookshelves, as well as by the amounts of comic books stacked beside the bed. There were a few drawn pictures taped to the walls, looking like they had been drawn by someone who was young, but not a little kid.

I looked through the closet here as well, finding the same kinds of clothes, the kind that looked like they had been worn many, many years ago. The lone window in the room was too small and dirty by years without washing, and the sun shining in through it cast the room in a sickly glow. I shuddered. This didn’t feel like a happy place.

I didn’t want to sit down on the bed, so I crouched down beside it instead, pulling back the duvet carefully, coughing over the cloud of dust that I brought up with the simple movement. The worn bed sheets were nearly covered with dark stains that I could only assume were old bloodstains, and I was sure that if this had been newer, I would have found tearstains as well. Definitely not a happy place.

Somehow it made me think of my own childhood room, how filled with light and colors and laughter it had been, and I felt bad for Rei – if this had indeed been his room.

I found the answer to that question moments later when I moved over to give the drawings a closer look. All of them were marked with a small R.G. in the bottom right corner, and one was even signed Raphael. So I had found out where he lived either before or after he had stayed at Mrs. Ortega’s institution. By the gap in the drawings I guessed that this really had been his home both before and afterwards.

Rei must have been kissed to sleep by his mother in this bed, and later… Later he might have been beat up by his psychotic father and cried himself to sleep in the very same bed. Maybe I should feel sympathetic for the man lying at the bottom of the stairs, but quite frankly I felt like he had deserved whatever had happened to him.

I flipped through the comic books quickly, recognizing most of them even if they were all old – a few of them were rare issues that I would have loved to own myself, but despite the temptation, I didn’t take them. Not only because I could get in trouble, but also because it felt wrong somehow. Like these comics belonged to Rei and that I had no right to take them.

There wasn’t really much else to look through in the room; the small desk was stripped bare, as if someone had gone through the room and taken everything of interest. I looked through the drawers on the left side of the desk, shaking my head over the fact that they were all empty. Something was definitely not right about that.

And something was definitely not right about the bottom drawer. From the outside, all three drawers looked to be the same size, but on the inside, the bottom one was noticeably smaller. I grinned a little because I had used the very same method to hide things when I was a kid – my parents had insisted that I share everything, that I shouldn’t have any secrets whatsoever, whereas I really didn’t agree with that point of view.

I took a pen from my bag and eased it down in the tiny crack between the bottom and the wall of the drawer. It was loose. Ignoring the urge to cheer, I lifted it up slowly, hoping that Rei hadn’t booby trapped the thing like I had used to do. No traps, the fake bottom of the drawer lifted away easily, revealing a small space underneath.

If I had expected to see something spectacular, I was sorely disappointed. All I found was a small stack of slightly crumpled paper, with what looked to be a few photographed mixed in. However, I figured that it was better than nothing, and probably the best I could have hoped for.

This time I didn’t feel the slightest hesitation about lifting the entire stack from the drawer, slipping it into my bag. I didn’t think that the cops had any right to this information. They didn’t know Rei, but I did, and considering that this was his personal property, I was the one that had the right to remove it. I chose to not ponder the fact that the Rei I knew was still a twelve-year-old boy, when he should be far, far older. I could assume that he was lying to me somehow, but for now I opted for simply accepting the fact that Rei was Raphael, and that he had lived here decades ago.

A small voice at the back of my head told me that I was being insane, but I chose not to listen to it. It wasn’t as if it was the first time in my life that I had come across something seemingly insane.

When I wandered back out again I made sure to stop and chat a little more with Janson, appearing as if I had found nothing out of the ordinary, nothing that could be of interest to them. Janson gave me a lingering look that I wasn’t sure how to react to, but then said goodbye with a smile after giving me his card and telling me to call if I had any questions.

Somehow, I didn’t want to look through the papers in my own apartment, and instead I went to the park, settling down underneath a tree, safely away from other people. I filtered out the photographs first; there were five of them altogether.

On the first, a young man and woman were smiling at the camera, the woman holding a baby on her arm. The back read “Me and Nico with baby Raphael”, but there were no date at all. I looked at the photo again. One of the corners was slightly stained, and it had the appearance of having been left out in the sun for too long; the colors faded to pale sepia.

The second photo was of Rei alone, slightly older this time, holding a toy car in his hand. He was looking at the camera with wide, surprised eyes, as if the photographer had yelled at him. I imagined that seconds after the photo was taken, he had focused back on his car, continued to play.

The third picture was of Rei and his mother. She was sitting on a chair; he was standing beside her with a hand on her shoulder. He looked like he was four or five years old. They were both serious, almost somber, and I thought I could see the hint of a bandage around her wrist, along with a faint bruise on her face. Of course, that could just be the light, but I didn’t think so.

The fourth picture was of Rei and his father, and it looked like the most recent one, judging by how Rei didn’t look all that different from the Rei I had come to know and like. The clothes were different, obviously, but otherwise he looked just like now. I wished the picture had been in colors instead of black and white, because somehow, his hair, eyes and lips looked lighter on the picture, but naturally, it was impossible to tell what kind of color his hair and eyes had back then. Rei wasn’t looking at the camera this time, he was looking at his father, which made it impossible to read his expression. I wanted to know what he felt about his father, but I couldn’t tell.

The last picture was a simple and quick black and white Polaroid, but even the darkness could conceal the fact that it was a picture of Rei’s father, lying in the exact same position as his skeleton was now, many years later. The difference was that he still had a head on the picture, and that he was wearing clothes – I hadn’t seen any traces of clothes around the bones back at the store. Underneath the picture, on the white frame, someone had scribbled down the word “finally”, and nothing else. I wondered if it was Rei who had taken it, seeing as it had been in his secret drawer. And if it was Rei who had taken it, it was difficult to imagine that he hadn’t had anything to do with his own father’s death.

I took a deep breath, drawing in the scent of the fresh grass and clean air around me, and went on to the crumpled pieces of paper. It didn’t take me long to realize that they were crumpled because Rei must have been crying when he wrote them. No wonder; the contents were enough to make my eyes tear up as well – all were little letters to his dead mother, filled with apologies and pleadings for her to come back. There were tales of his days, of how his father would scream at him and hit him, how his father still blamed him for his mother’s death, how his father had changed so much that Rei didn’t even recognize him as his father anymore. How he thought he was going to die if he stayed, but didn’t have anywhere to go – he had tried to run away once, but then his father locked him in his room for three days without food after beating him so hard he couldn’t move.

It was difficult to imagine how scared the boy had to have been. I had been used to a happy home environment, two parents who might be some of the strangest in history, but they were kind and happy and always treated both each other and me with so much kindness and love that it had almost been difficult to not be suffocated with love. The only time I had been smacked by my father was when I set fire to the cat to see what would happen, and even then he probably didn’t punish me nearly enough, considering what I did.

I read through the little letters twice, and then looked at the pictures again. Rei’s past seemed to piece itself together right in front of my eyes, but it wasn’t a pretty picture, and I almost wished that I could take the knowledge away again. It wasn’t strange that Rei himself had suppressed all of this, and I was almost sure that I wouldn’t tell him any of it. It would be better if he didn’t learn about his past; it would probably be far too painful to remember all of this again.

The walk back to my apartment was slow, as I was trying to think. I didn’t accomplish much in the way of figuring things out, however. Rei still didn’t really belong anywhere. As things were, it seemed like staying with me was more of a home to him than anything he had experienced in a long time, and even though I wasn’t all too happy over the idea of having him around for an unknown amount of time, I couldn’t kick him out either. Not after everything I had learned.

Then there was Maria – I had to find the courage to kiss her, somehow. And talk to her more, and take her out on dates. All those things that I had no idea how to actually do. I had seen them in movies and comics, of course, but seeing things done was far from the same thing as doing them myself. However, I figured that this was the easiest problem to fix, seeing as Maria didn’t seem to mind my slowness all that much. I kind of hoped she found it adorable instead of annoying. Not that I had a strong yearning to be adorable, but it was far better than being annoying.

There wasn’t much I could do about Dakota; I didn’t even know if that was her real name, so finding her would be next to impossible. I would keep looking for her, of course, but it had to come second. I felt bad, but I had to prioritize. And my plan had been suffering for far too long already.

With Jenny’s death and the information she left behind, I thought I could get closer to The Four Sisters. It was difficult to know whether or not she had said anything to them about quitting her mission and killing herself, so going to the length of impersonating her would probably be far too dangerous, but I knew that there had to be some way I could use the information she left.

My apartment was dark when I let myself in, and I shuffled along the familiar path to my living room, kicking off my shoes and dropping my coat rather carelessly on the way. It wasn’t until I reached the living room door that I froze, staring at my computer.

The large screen flashed in dark red and black, with white words covering almost the entire screen.

Death becomes you.

The moment I got close enough to touch the computer, the flashing and letters disappeared, as if my computer knew that I was there. Everything looked normal again, but as I sat down, I couldn’t shake the feeling of being surrounded.


~tbc~