The Secrets of Bones Read online

  Gus was trained. As soon as Jazz stopped four feet from Eddie, he sat down beside her. Wally, not so much. Sensing the opportunity to make a new friend, or maybe just interested in chewing on the broom, he bounded closer to Eddie at record speed. Eddie retreated, hopping backwards down the hallway and toward the closed door of the chapel.

  “No!” Jazz told Wally, and gave his lead a little tug. “Sorry.” This time she was talking to Eddie. “I didn’t know you didn’t like dogs. They’re friendly,” she assured him, but Eddie wasn’t buying it.

  He gulped and his Adam’s apple bobbed. “You’re not … Is that why Frank wants me to sweep upstairs? You’re taking them dogs up there?”

  “Orders from Eileen.”

  It was all any of them ever needed to hear. Eileen’s school. Eileen’s orders. Eileen’s wishes were their commands.

  Which was why Jazz was surprised when one corner of Eddie’s mouth pulled tight. “I bet it’s awfully stuffy up there,” he said. “I’d hate to see those girls be all hot and uncomfortable.”

  “They’ll live,” Jazz assured him. “And they won’t be up there long. Forty-five minutes at the most. Then the next group comes in.”

  His gaze slid to the dogs. “And they’re gonna do…?”

  “Just a little demo,” she told him. “Just to keep the girls occupied.” She moved a step closer to the door, and when Eddie didn’t get the message she asked, “What are we waiting for?”

  “Uh…” He pulled his gaze from the dogs. “The key. Sister Eileen, she—”

  “Of course!” Jazz felt guilty for being impatient. The door to the fourth-floor space was always kept locked, and Eileen was the only one with the key. “Sorry to be pushy,” she told Eddie. “I just need to get up there before the girls show up. To hide my bait.”

  Like most people, he didn’t ask what the bait was. He slid another look at Gus, who thumped his tail, and Wally, who saw it as an obvious invitation for a lifelong friendship and bounded forward again. “And those dogs—”

  “Well, Gus here will find the bait. At least I hope so. Wally’s still learning.”

  Eddie blinked and thought about it. “Okay. Sure, Jazz, only how about you…” He poked his thumb over his shoulder. “You … uh … maybe you can wait over by the chapel door with them dogs until the door gets unlocked and—”

  “Sorry! Sorry!” Out of breath, Eileen arrived at the top of the stairway that led from the second floor to the third. “I got buttonholed by the basketball coach speaking in the health room and couldn’t pull myself away.” She was carrying the ring of the school’s master keys and they jangled when she lifted it. “I’ll get the door opened for you in a jiffy and you two can do what you need to do. Oh, it’s Wally!”

  Unable to resist—Jazz knew she was right about the cuteness factor—Eileen bent and scratched a hand over the puppy’s head. He rewarded her efforts by chomping her thumb.

  When Eileen yelped, Jazz cringed. “Sorry. Puppy teeth.”

  “And I should know better.” Eileen went to the door and flipped through the keys, counting low under her breath. “Let’s get going here so you two can be ready and—” Her hands stilled over the keys and her brow furrowed.

  “What’s wrong?” Jazz asked.

  “Wrong? Nothing.” Eileen flipped the keys back to their original position and started counting again. “One, two, three, four, five, six—” Her mouth thinned. “These are the old keys, the ones we hardly ever use, and I’ve got them arranged exactly the way I want them.” She sorted through them again. “Number one is the garden shed back by the parking lot.” As if to prove it, she showed Jazz a heavy metal key with a long shank, its color dulled by age. There was a sticker on it that identified which door it opened. “Number two is for the old furnace room in the basement that’s been closed off for years. Three, four, five, six,” she finished the count below her breath. “The sixth key on the ring is supposed to be for this door, but it’s not. This key…” She held up key number six to demonstrate. “This is for the sacristy door in the chapel.” Her nose crinkled, she looked through the rest of the keys and finally smiled when she got to the end of the keys on the ring.

  “There it is! I must be losing it. Whenever I used it last, I must have taken it off the ring and didn’t put the key back where it was supposed to be.” She unlocked the door and stepped back. “You two are all set to go. Come and see me, Jazz, when you’re all done today and I’ll come up and lock the door again.”

  Before Jazz could even agree, Eileen hurried back down the stairs.

  “You or me first?” Jazz asked Eddie.

  He shot the dogs a look. “Let me get up there and see how bad it is. Give me a few minutes. Then I’ll…” He thought about it. “I’ll tell you to come up and I’ll wait at the side of the room by the old roof access door. How about that?”

  It was a good plan. At least when it came to making sure Eddie and the dogs stayed far away from each other. The roof access door was nowhere near the stairway.

  The fourth floor of St. Catherine’s had once been the dormitory where the men in training to be priests lived. It was a vast, drafty space with a sloping ceiling and windows tucked into the small space between slanted roof and floor. There was only this one stairway leading up to or down from the room, so in addition to it being noncompliant when it came to safety regulations, the space was inconvenient, and it had never been used in the time St. Catherine’s occupied the building.

  It was unheated in the winter, not cooled in the summer, and good for pretty much nothing except that roof access door Eddie had mentioned, nailed shut for longer than Jazz had been alive, and another access door, also never used, that led to a labyrinth of pipes from the old steam heating system.

  At the top of the stairs the room opened up left and right, and Jazz thought about the photos she’d seen from back when the seminary occupied the building. Fifteen beds on one side of the aisleway in the center of the room, and fifteen on the other. Thirty priests in training to the left of the doorway. Another thirty to the right.

  Jazz couldn’t contain a cynical smile.

  These days, Eileen couldn’t even convince a few girls to go to the chapel to hear a talk on religious vocations.

  Philosophical thoughts aside, Jazz softened the edges of her smile and looked at Eddie. “Once you give me the go-ahead, I’ll bring the dogs up and take them over to the other side of the room,” she told him. “Then when you’re finished, you can go down and you won’t have to deal with them.”

  He ran his tongue over his lips. “Thanks, Jazz. But I dunno.” He opened the door and they were met with a puff of stale air. “I don’t think this is a good room for the girls to be using. It’s got to be pretty dirty up there.”

  “Dirty or not, it’s our only choice.” She waited for Eddie to get a move on. “And the girls are going to be here in just a couple of minutes.”

  As messages went, it wasn’t exactly subtle, but it still took a bit for it to sink in, and when it finally did Eddie clambered up the stairs and Jazz waited for his signal. It didn’t come, not right away, and she caught herself tapping her foot. Eddie was sweeping, she reminded herself. He wanted the room to be as clean as possible before he called Jazz up. And she needed to chill. She still had plenty of time to hide her bait.

  “It’s okay now, Jazz!” he finally called to her, and she took the dogs up the stairs and found Eddie waiting a safe distance from the door. He’d already given the room one quick sweep. There were cleaned, curved tracks in the dust on the floor and Eddie had worked up a sweat. His shirt was untucked; there was a sheen of sweet on his forehead.

  Jazz let him finish, crossing thirty feet or more of empty attic space to stay far out of his way, her shoes slapping against the hardwood floor. She tied the dogs’ leads to a steam radiator not used for a hundred years, and once they were secured Eddie finished up. The small windows up there protested and refused to budge until he gave them a shove, and once they were open a stream o
f fresh air flowed into the room and Eddie scurried out of it, and Jazz hid the bait she’d brought along.

  A tooth in an open container in the crook where wall and ceiling met at the far side of the room.

  A metacarpal behind the radiator on the opposite side of the room from where the dogs waited.

  Passing one of the windows, Jazz couldn’t help but shiver, thinking about how cold it gets in Cleveland in the winter. “What do you think, guys?” she asked the dogs when she headed back their way, and they tilted their heads and listened as if they understood every word. “Two radiators in a room this size? It must have been like the Antarctic up here. I wonder if the priests fought over who got to sleep closest to the radiators.”

  Before she had a chance to consider it, she heard the first sounds of footsteps scrambling up the stairs.

  Wally heard them, too, and hopped up on his back legs, eager for this next adventure, and Jazz waited for the first group of girls to arrive at the top of the steps.

  These were seventh graders, the youngest girls in the school, and just about to step into the old dormitory the two girls leading the pack stopped and looked around, their eyes wide, their cheeks flushed.

  Jazz was just about to tell them to get a move on when she realized what was going on.

  There’s nothing like a locked door and an unused room to spark rumors. Over the years, stories had emerged about the old dormitory. Jazz had heard girls whisper that it was haunted. Some of them even swore they’d heard footsteps up there. Then there was the urban legend about how a homeless man snuck into the school every night and slept there. Jazz had even heard rumors about a cult that gathered in the old dormitory every month when the moon was full, sneaking in, she supposed, the same way that homeless man snuck in, though how either cult or homeless man outwitted St. Catherine’s state-of-the-art security system no one ever bothered to explain.

  “Lucky you, huh?” She smiled at the girls at the top of the steps. “None of the girls at St. Catherine’s have ever been up here, not even the juniors or the seniors. You’re getting to see something none of them ever have.”

  It was enough to put them at ease—at least these two, at least for now—and the two girls in the lead climbed the last step and into the dormitory, their gazes darting left and right, looking, no doubt, for ghosts and homeless men and cult members wearing long black robes with hoods.

  Jazz waved them to a spot on the floor that looked at least relatively clean and had the rest of the girls and their homeroom teacher, Cissy Kaski, sit in a semicircle.

  It didn’t take long for the girls to catch sight of the dogs, and after that Jazz knew all thoughts of how spooky the space was flew out of their heads. They squealed with delight, and a couple times Cissy had to remind them to sit down.

  There were twenty girls in the group, and once they settled, Jazz asked how many of them had dogs at home.

  A few hands went up.

  “And how many of you would like to have a dog?”

  This time, a couple more hands were raised and one girl blurted out, “Puppies are so cute!”

  Far be it from Jazz to argue with that. “But they’re also a lot of work,” she told the girls, and she went over and untied Wally’s leash from the radiator.

  He loved being the center of attention and the oohs and ahs from the girls only made him even more excited. Airedales have a way of prancing when they walk, a combination of runway strut and goofy clowning around.

  When Jazz brought him to stand in front of the girls, the oohs and ahs intensified.

  “Does anyone know what it takes to take care of a puppy?” she asked the girls.

  “Picking up a lot of poop,” one of them announced, and the rest of them groaned.

  “And feeding them,” another one put in.

  “And cleaning up the floor!” one of them wailed because of course Wally picked that moment to pee.

  Jazz had come prepared. She’d brought along a tote bag of supplies, and she pulled out paper towels, a plastic grocery bag, and a disinfectant wipe and cleaned up before she continued.

  “There’s training, too,” she told the girls.

  “Like the way you trained that dog that found that dead girl, right?” somebody asked, undeterred by a look from Cissy that told her it was a subject she wasn’t supposed to bring up.

  “We’ll talk about that,” Jazz promised. “And I’ll show you how some of that training is done. But before a dog is ready to do that kind of work, it has to know basic commands. Even if you have a dog that isn’t going to be a cadaver dog, you’re going to want it to listen to you. Not just so you can show the dog who’s boss, but so you can keep it safe. One of the first things you’re going to teach it is to come.”

  She unhooked the lead from Wally’s collar, signaled him to stay and was stunned when he actually did it, and took ten steps back, then opened her arms and called, “Wally, come!”

  He did, and Jazz pulled a tiny dog biscuit from her pocket and gave it to him along with a whole bunch of praise.

  “You see what I did there?” she asked the girls. “I told him what I wanted him to do, and when he did it, I told him what a good boy he is.”

  “My dad yells and screams when our dog doesn’t listen,” someone in the back row said.

  “It’s only natural to get frustrated with a dog that doesn’t obey.” Jazz swallowed down what she would have liked to add, which was more in line with what a jerk the girl’s dad must have been. “But you never want your dog to be afraid of you. And a dog…” She bent to scratch Wally’s head. “All a dog wants is to make you happy. So you always have to be positive with a dog. You’re always going to be upbeat. When it does what you want it to do, you give it a reward and a great big smile. Does anyone want to try it?”

  A dozen hands shot up.

  Jazz scanned the group. She knew one of the girls was particularly shy, and though her hand hadn’t gone up, Jazz called on Bella Tamarin.

  “Bella, would you like to give Wally a command?”

  The girl’s cheeks paled, but with some urging from the girl next to her, she pulled herself to her feet.

  “Right here,” Jazz told her, and stepped aside so Bella could take her place while she re-hooked Wally’s leash and walked him ten feet away. “Now look right at Wally, smile, and tell him what you want him to do.”

  Bella’s voice was no more than a whisper. “Come.”

  “A little louder,” Jazz told her. “And make sure you smile.”

  Bella did. “Come, Wally!”

  And when he did and he got the treat Jazz handed to Bella, the other girls applauded.

  Red-faced, Bella sat down, and Cissy gave Jazz a thumbs-up.

  “Besides come, you’re going to want your dog to know how to sit and stay and lie down.” Because Wally wasn’t especially good at any of those things, Jazz didn’t demonstrate. “And once your dog is good at obeying you, then you can train it to do other things. Some people like to do agility with their dogs. Anybody know what that is?”

  “Running and jumping over stuff,” one girl answered, and Jazz nodded.

  “And some people train their dogs as therapy dogs. They visit people at hospitals and nursing homes and they offer comfort and companionship. And search and rescue dogs…” She couldn’t help herself; Jazz’s voice choked over the words. Her dad had been, in her humble opinion, the best search and rescue dog trainer and handler on the planet. A firefighter, he’d died in an arson blaze a little more than a year earlier, and she missed him, especially when she was working dogs.

  She cleared her throat. “Search and rescue dogs find people after disasters like a tornado or a flood. They alert first responders so they can get those people to safety. Then there are human remains detection dogs.”

  Jazz hooked Wally to the radiator and brought the other dog to stand in front of the girls. “This is Gus,” she told them. “And Gus is retired now, but when he was working, he had a very important job. Gus helped find dead p
eople.”

  She expected the “Ewwws” and twisted faces, so she didn’t take it personally. “Why do you suppose that’s important?” she asked the girls once they’d settled down.

  Not one of them had an answer, but then, Jazz wasn’t surprised. Death was something a lot of adults didn’t even want to think about. She couldn’t expect it from seventh graders.

  Cissy stepped in. “Every life is precious. And when they lose a loved one, every family deserves closure. So if someone you knew went walking in the woods and never came back, wouldn’t you want to find out what happened to them?”

  “Or if somebody got murdered,” one girl said. “Like that girl who went to school here and Ms. Ramsey found her.”

  “But murder isn’t the norm,” Jazz was quick to point out. “It’s more likely that we’re sent out to find someone who fell and got hurt out in the park and no one knows where to look for them. Or a person has a heart attack and never makes it home. So when something like that happens, the police call in volunteers like me, and the volunteers, we bring our dogs. Gus is one of those dogs, and once he’s trained Wally will be, too.”

  She slipped Gus’s red “service dog” vest on him and the dog stood at attention, his ears pricked and excitement vibrated through him. “Did you see that?” she asked the girls. “As soon as I put on his vest, Gus knew it was time to work. What Gus doesn’t know is that I hid a couple things here in this room for him to find. A bone and a tooth.”

  She ignored another round of “Ewwws.”

  “So now I’m going to tell Gus what I want him to do. When the lady who trained him worked with him, she had certain words she said to Gus, and I’m going to use those words, too.”

  She unhooked the dog from his lead. “Gus”—Jazz swept a hand along her thigh—“find!”

  The dog took off like a shot, crossing the room in a zigzag pattern, his nose going up to sniff the air, then down to the floor in the hopes of catching a scent. It took him less than a minute to locate the tooth on the other side of the room, sit down next to it, and bark three times. He waited there patiently and didn’t touch a thing (Jazz prayed Wally was watching) until she went over and got the tooth.