The Bones Can’t Be Buried

He was a quiet man with a basset hound that would not shut up. Which was why I stood on his doorstep at two a.m. the night before he was arrested asking him once again to please bring the dog inside. Humphrey, the soft-spoken man, answered (like he always did), listened to my polite pleas, murmured something about bones and then gingerly closed his evergreen door like it was a friend of his. As many would, I deduced from the pleasant interaction that he would be tossing a bone to the basset hound to quiet it as soon as I walked away. However, in retrospect, it was naïve of me; out of the dozens of times I had dropped by since he moved in a year ago, that dog never stopped wailing because I asked nicely.

So, perhaps it was my own fault for expecting anything different. Fifteen minutes passed, and my Monday evening was still being invaded by the sound of deep howls like a mother weeping. Feeling duped, I tugged my slippers back onto my feet and stomped outside, decidedly weary from the recent nights I’d had no rest, but also fueled by three cups of black coffee. Humphrey was not going to do this to me again; I’d make sure of it.

His backyard was predominantly covered in the shadow of a large willow tree, despite the spotlights of neighboring houses tickling its edges. I crept up on the left side of the wooden fence and peeked over without pretense. Immediately below me, the hound was howling, a lost spirit in a storm at my fence. I wanted to squeeze his lungs through his nostrils.

But I didn’t. Instead, I brought out the turkey bone I had dug out of my garbage can and held it over the fence, a few feet above his reverberating skull. The cries continued underneath me, until I banged the bone against the cedar like a dinner bell. With this, he acknowledged me, snatching the bone from my grip and lying down where he was to chomp silently. I smiled, and dumped several more scraps from dinner beside him to keep him occupied long enough for me to fall asleep. I paused only to observe the dozens of bones that were left scattered and unchewed about Humphrey’s yard. I thought it was strange, but then again, Humphrey and his dog were not normal.

Returning to my home, I went right to bed. I thought no more of Humphrey, his hound, or the bone graveyard, falling asleep as soon as I lied down to rest. However, sometime an hour later, the dog must have finished his meal, because the wails began once again shriller and (if I was not mistaken) angrier than earlier. I screamed into my pillow like a lunatic and trekked back outside without shoes on my feet.

The hound was howling back at the bottom of my fence, the remnants of the leftovers I gave him strewn on the moist grass. I couldn’t tell for sure, but they seemed unfinished. Empty-handed and desperate for a conclusion, I rapped on the inside of the fence again, hoping to draw his attention. He turned to look up at me, his mouth closed and quiet.

And the howls continued. From under where I was standing.

I ran then. Not because I was a coward, but because, to put it plainly, I thought I might be hallucinating. It was easier to blame the nights of sleeplessness than to believe a person was truly imprisoned underneath my feet. Nonetheless, I had every intention of returning and getting the police examine the spot in the ground eventually. First, however, I just needed to get away from there.

I sprinted and then walked for several miles, until halting at a twenty-four hour diner where I ordered more coffee and a plate of banana chocolate chip pancakes. By the time I finished, the sun had risen, and the morning rush was arriving. With a belly full of nerve, I decided to trudge back to my house and reexamine the patch of dirt by my fence, possibly to alert the authorities if needed. Yet, the earth was silent, so I decided I must have been delirious, and walked into my home to prepare for another workday.

Twelve minutes after five p.m. I pulled back into my driveway, the memory of the night before truly feeling like a dream. However, as soon as I saw the police outside Humphrey’s house, dragging him out in handcuffs, I remembered. A team of white jumpsuits scurried through his backyard, clustered near the back right of the dirt-covered yard around a dilapidated shed I barely noticed. I rubbed my eyes as they appeared to disappear into a doorway in the soil underneath it.

I ambled past the neighbors gathered around on the sidewalk and parts of my front lawn like flies, whispering their speculations and a few buzzing in my ear. I shooed them away, leaving them to their shock and confusion, and for the rest of the evening I sat on my side stoop watching the investigation. A few of the white spacemen put some of the hound’s bones in evidence bags, chatting (rather loudly) about how the man’s shallow basement made it so the bones could not be buried. Eventually, I also started hearing thumping from under my fence, presumably when the spacemen walked far enough into Humphrey’s hidden basement.

The thumps continued further than I expected, however, leading right beside me beneath my humble garden of zucchinis and sunflowers. I shivered, realizing in that moment why the howls of Humphrey’s ‘dog’ always seemed so deafening to me.

As the dusk embraced the sky above the neighborhood, Humphrey’s yard was lit for the first time in the darkness by portable lamps the police had arranged around the perimeter. A detective came to visit me around then and asked me a handful of generic questions. I told him who I was, and I told him it was all quite surprising. And when asked if I knew anything about the woman, the one Humphrey had been holding for weeks underneath my fence, I shook my head grimly and solemnly.

The following morning, instead of rushing out the door to my job, I lingered in my kitchen scanning the news on my cellphone. It didn’t take long to find the headline about the quiet man and the six women he had taken since his wife died last winter, yet there was only one woman I cared about: Lina Tafani. She was his final victim, dying just a few hours before the police raided his home. No family was left behind, but a photo has been used of her smiling with a young man looking happy. The police say she likely fought Humphrey and almost escaped, judging by the fresh scratches on Humphrey’s skin and the lump on his forehead.

However, they are not certain, because the struggle probably would have made quite a racket, and apparently, no one heard a thing that evening.