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caretaking the boys these days, but she didn’t have to worry that his parents were out pacing the streets of Virginia searching for their oldest son.
    It didn’t take Molly much to transfer her anger from her hapless nephew to the real culprits of the piece.
    â€œWe set to get on with this bone business?” Dee asked, his police pad open, his posture almost as impatient as Patrick’s.
    Molly fought the urge to clean the red-tile counters, rearrange the African violets that slept on her windowsill. Knit an afghan. Instead she nodded and sat down at her kitchen table.
    â€œMight as well.”
    â€œYou think this has anything to do with the notes you gettin’?” Dee asked as he seated himself across from her. Patrick, left uncertainly on his feet, claimed the third chair.
    Molly gave an elaborate shrug. “Your very own department considered those notes harmless, Dee. Who am I to argue?”
    Dee cocked his head. “Bones change things, don’t ya think?”
    Molly wanted to walk again. She was a trauma nurse. She did her best thinking walking. It was also the best way to run far and fast. But Dee wasn’t going to let her, and she wasn’t ready to let anybody else know how unnerved those damn notes were making her.
    Not to mention a bone with her name on it.
    So she threw Dee another shrug. “I don’t know. To be perfectly frank, I haven’t really paid much attention to the notes.”
    He obviously didn’t see her nose growing. “You called us.”
    â€œOnly because I’m a public official. It’s kind of office policy, ya know?”
    Dee didn’t bother to comment. “You still have ’em?”
    â€œOf course I do.”
    â€œFour notes, right?”
    She sighed, resettled herself, fought against a fresh surge of nausea. “Five. I got another one today.”
    Dee perked right up. “Same as the others?” he asked, scribbling on a crumpled, coffee-stained page.

    â€œSame as the others. ‘Die, bitch,’ or variations thereof. Delivered to the house, mailed in St. Louis.”
    â€œWow,” Patrick breathed. “Don’t they scare you?”
    Molly managed another shrug. “Occupational hazard.”
    Dee focused on his notebook. “And now that bone.”
    That bone, which was still sitting not two feet from Molly’s elbow. She fought the urge to open the box again, just to check and see if it was still there. Make it somehow less weird. Maybe magically turn it into real flowers from a secret admirer.
    That just gave her the shivers all over again.
    â€œI’m telling you,” Molly protested, rubbing at the area directly under her sternum that churned from chronic abuse, “it’s going to be a mistake. Somebody’s idea of a joke. The wrong yard. Something.”
    Dee looked at the box, too. He nodded without noticeable conviction. “Uh-huh.”
    â€œ I’d be scared,” Patrick said to himself.
    â€œCan you get me the notes?” Dee asked.
    Molly creaked to her feet. “Sure.”
    The latest note she just handed over. The rest were in her room, tucked into her bottom drawer in evidence envelopes into which long training and habit had compelled her to stash them. Four notes, the first showing up in her mail not four weeks before. Addressed with a heavy hand on plain white bond paper in plain white envelopes, the real messages saved for inside. On the surface unimpressive, each and every one. Just die . Fuck you . You’ll scream . And for a little poetic license, Bitch witch . All now residing beneath her carefully folded sweaters like old love letters.
    The notes bore no identification, no indication of why or where or when. Molly had just assumed they were from either a dissatisfied customer, or a customer’s dissatisfied family. It only made sense, since she happened to practice two professions that produced the highest incidence of stressedout