I was about to turn thirteen the summer the bones showed up. I didn’t know Maria Grabowski or her grandfather, because they lived farther out than the rest of us, towards the highway but also, somehow, nowhere at all. I did, however, know, or at least know of, Eileen Edgewood, who went to the town school and not the country school, with me.

    The bones showed up, or they rose up, maybe six months after Maria Grabowski’s grandfather died, in the backyard of the house they’d all lived in on Indian Road. It was a long, one story house, painted a sort of mossy green, with plastic siding and a pure white gutter. It was an exceedingly normal house for bones.

    I heard from a friend at lunch, just before the frenzy started, that when Maria’s aunt found the femur sticking up out of the dirt she assumed it was from an animal, and then after Maria’s younger brother, who was the sort of kid who liked pinning live insects in little glass boxes, dug up the human skull, they’d of course assumed it was an old Indian burial ground on account of the name of the road. They had a doctor friend come look at it, who then called the police, because, though he couldn’t be sure, bones that white wouldn’t be more than forty, fifty years old. Probably a woman’s, too. That’s when they brought in a forensics team from the city, some five hours away, and the frenzy started.

    A crowd in our town was a rare thing, but this is the one time I remember having to peek over the heads of other kids and between the arms of the adults. We all stood at the road, pressed up as far as we could to the caution tape. It bent out like a rubber band about to be shot. There were trucks and cars all lined up on the dirt road, and the neighbors, distant though they were, walked up from their lots and through the trees to stand, arms folded, looking at the circus that erupted around the Grabowski’s.

Some of the neighbors knew Maria’s grandfather, and I winced at the crowd of people all whispering about him, because I knew they were whispering too loudly. But what else were they supposed to think? The old man owned the house and the land for maybe eighty years, and before that it was his family’s farm. And he didn’t seem like the type, but its always the quiet ones, isn’t it? And who else would hide a body on this land, out in the middle of nowhere?

    I didn’t see much, but I remember two things: the first was the corner of a jumbled, angular white bag that was laid out on a stretcher. This was towards the end of the day, when some of the crowd had taken to their cars to go watch what the news van had recorded of them. The white bag was laid out like a body might have been, and I imagined all the bones laid out like some museum exhibit, like something out of Egypt, pinned to the board and labelled like a grotesque specimen. This felt so real that for many years I convinced myself and my child-friends that I actually had seen it, the rusty old bones of the murdered girl.

    The other thing I remember, and this actually happened, was a glimpse of brown hair and flash of fabric in the far right window of the house, as Maria Grabowski risked a peek at the storm outside. I remember going home, as we watched the news, thinking about the girl who lost her grandfather only for the whole world to find a bag of bones buried out back.

    The summer days languished on. Each one rose, and rose, and the town suffered in the heat, and then finally it died with a crack of moisture. Nobody knew anything else about the bones, but people speculated, extrapolated. Some kids said it hadn’t been one girl, but two, three, fifteen. It was a practical Gettysburg behind the Grabowski house. Old man Grabowski, who we later learned was named John Paul, was a practical Jeffrey Dahmer. It was a miracle there were any people left in this town after he went on his hell bent killing streak. There were so many bodies out behind that old apple tree that he couldn’t have done it alone, and that was the first time I heard Johnny Paolini insinuate, with sterling confidence, that it was the result of a satanic cult.

    The frenzy would fade, but these rumors didn’t. They stuck to that house and the land around it like tar, so that the weather in all my memories of that place turned dark and gloomy. It was the haunted house in town now, the dark magnetic core despite its obstinate normality. Maybe a year after, Maria and her family would move, not just out of the family farm and the green-plastic house but out of the county, because her dad had taken a job as a regional manager of some chemical factory in the suburbs. This, of course, only fueled the rumors, and the house sat unsold until I moved out and went to college some five years later, and I can’t really say what’s happened to it now except that it’s probably been torn down. Despite the claims that the house was cursed, or worse, haunted by the girl, the reality was that this was the time of the housing market crash and there were a lot of houses in the town that didn’t really have any value to anyone that didn’t already own them.

    It was only years later, when I was just about to turn sixteen, that I was on a date with a girl named Carrie Delaney, who would become my first girlfriend, that I heard what really happened at that house. We were lying in the back seat of my car, an old Buick that my parents had bought me and that I’d stolen that night, with only a learner’s permit, to take out Carrie Delaney, who was in the grade above me. It was the same grade as Eileen Edgewood. We’d parked out back behind the Grabowski’s old house, because it’d been empty for years and no one came here anymore, not even the morbidly curious. I’d forgotten about it too at this point, or nearly, but the story was always in the back of my mind.

    The night was hot – it was summer again, what I will always remember as the summer – and we’d just done it for the first time. I remember, as I will always remember, that feeling of her red hair sort of drifting across my face in sheets as I looked up to her. The whole thing was like warm rain, and I’d thought, or confused, the humid air outside for what was going on inside, that somehow the storm had broken and the heat lightening was inside the car, the repeated rumbling of thunder and the warm, fuzzy sliding of two ignorants.

    “He didn’t kill her,” she said.

    I stirred. I’d nearly fallen asleep, but my skin was cooling and the fake leather of the back seat felt wet and cold. My arm was around her, and our hands were locked together. She was stroking my thumb with hers, and I had the feeling that her eyes were open. “Hm?”

    “Old man Grabowski. I heard it from Eileen Edgewood. They found out that the bones were her great Aunt’s. And that like, fifty years ago she used to date Maria Grabowski’s grandpa.”

    “He didn’t kill her?”

    “No. She died of pneumonia. And her family buried her out in Pinestreet Cemetery, in town. And her Grandpa stole the bones.”

    “Why?” I asked. I propped myself up on one arm.

    She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

    That night I dreamt of heat lightning, and when I woke, I woke thinking about the stolen bones. How hard it must have been to sneak into the Pine Street Cemetery, in the middle of town, with all the traffic going by, and take a spade and un-dig the grave. He must have done it that night, that’s what I would have done, I think, because the earth was still soft and fresh and there would be no grass on it yet. That’s how you wouldn’t get caught. I remember talking to my then-friends about it before we all left for school. What would need to be done? What steps would he have had to take? The prevailing hypothesis was that he’d need to go early in the morning, perhaps four, perhaps three forty five. He’d need to sneak past the night watchman, make quick work of un-digging the grave, and he’d need to leave the coffin behind. This was a point of contention: he surely couldn’t lift the coffin, but would he want to lift the corpse alone? And after the three days before burial, would it be rotten? And why would he want to steal the body at all?

    In the months leading up to my departure for college these questions began to take up more and more of my quiet moments. What would she have been wearing? A white gown, surely, but him? What were the grave-robbing clothes? And why take her home? I thought about asking Eileen Edgewood but for some reason could never bring myself to try. Instead I tried the internet, and when that failed, the historical section of library. This proved quaintly productive. There was a police report that was now public, and a second entry next to it by someone whose name I did not recognize, someone who, like me, had probably found this melancholy rabbit hole and lost themselves down it. She wanted to be an apple tree, the journal entry said, and that was all.