Page 189 of The Bone Code

The earth revolved and rotated.

A new year began.

January 3

Iwas eating leftover Chinese takeout, thinking about booking a haircut, when footsteps sounded on the back steps. Heavy ones.

I rose from the table to peek outside.

Katy stood on my porch wearing desert camo fatigues and cover, combat boots, and aviator shades. An Army-issue duffel lay at her feet. A backpack hung from her left shoulder.

Katy looked lean and tanned. Confident. A different person from the troubled kid who’d enlisted four long years ago.

Fighting back tears of joy, I opened the door.

“Sergeant Petersons reporting for duty.” Smiling broadly, Katy whipped off the aviators and pointed them at me. “You’d better have chocolate chip cookies, soldier.”

I threw my arms around my daughter, lumpy pack and all.

“I love you, sweetheart,” I whispered. “I am so very proud of you.”

I said the words then. Repeated them often throughout her stay.

Katy’s return brought me greater happiness than I can begin to describe. But her presence prompted thoughts of other daughters. Other mothers.

I’d taken a break from death. A holiday reprieve.

Now I was ready.

I made two calls.

January 10

Early morning, my phone rang. The update was better than I’d hoped.

Vislosky’s efforts had produced an address for Bonnie Bird Boatwright. For the past six years, Harmony’s mother had been living in a women’s commune in northern Minnesota.

Bonnie Bird had asked that her daughter’s remains be transferred from the Charleston morgue to a funeral home in Nashville. She’d purchased two gravestones and side-by-side plots. One for herself. One for Harmony.

January 22

My mobile rang as I was returning from dropping Katy at the airport. This time, the news was mixed.

Grudgingly, cemetery manager Rémi Arbour had followed through on my request to contact Ariel, the woman I’d met at Le Repos Saint-François d’Assise—the one who’d given me that tiny prayer card to slip into what turned out to be Ella’s body bag. Hearing Arbour’s wheezy, nasal French triggered a flood of memories of that day in 2010. The graveyard. The markers with their forlorn inscriptions.

LSJML-41207 Os non identifiés d’une femme.

LSJML-41208 Os non identifiés d’un enfant.

He had good news and bad.

The good. Ariel Caldrea was still an active member of the churchon rue Sherbrooke. Parishioners still attended anonymous interments at Saint-François.

The bad. Florence Sorg wanted nothing to do with reburying Melanie and Ella. Though she’d tried, Ariel had been unable to locate any other Chalamet/Chalmers kin.

Counterbalancing good. Since Melanie and Ella were from Massachusetts, and U.S. citizens, Ariel had found a Boston cemetery willing to donate a plot and marker and a church that would volunteer a priest’s services.

Pending my approval, Pierre LaManche would release the remains in Quebec. Ebony Herrin would release those in Charleston. At long last, Melanie, Ella, and Lena would have a memorial bearing their names.

When I spoke to Ariel, she attributed the happy ending to Mother Mary MacKillop, patron saint of abused girls.

I wasn’t so sure.

It didn’t matter.

Three daughters would lie with their mothers for eternity.