Riptide

“The white jeans are Calvin Klein, Sheriff.”

“You’re saying this is a guy now?”

“No, that’s the designer. The jeans are expensive. I don’t think they’d go real well on a runaway.”

“You know, ma’am, many runaways are middle-class,” Sheriff Gaffney said, and heaved himself to his feet. “Strange how most folk don’t know that. Very few of ’em are poor, you know. Yep, the storm must have knocked something loose,” he said, bending over to examine the wall closely. “Looks like old Jacob stuffed her in there pretty good. Not such a good job with the concrete and bricks, though. It shouldn’t have collapsed like that, nothing else in here did.”

“Old Jacob was a homicidal maniac?”

“Eh?” He spun around. “Oh, no, Ms. Powell. He just didn’t like nobody hanging around his place. He was a real loner, once Miranda up and died on him.”

“Who was Miranda? His wife?”

“Oh, no. She was his golden retriever. He buried his wife so long ago I can’t even remember her. Yep, she lived to be thirteen, just keeled over one day.”

“His wife was only thirteen?”

“No, his golden retriever, Miranda. She just up and died. Old Jacob was never the same after that. Losing someone you love, so I hear, can be real hard on a man. My Maude promised me a long time ago that she’d outlive me, so maybe I’d never have to know what it’s like.”

Becca followed the sheriff back up the basement stairs. She looked back once at the ghastly pile of white bones wearing Calvin Klein jeans and a sexy pink tank top. Poor girl. She thought of the Edgar Allan Poe tale The Cask of Amontillado and prayed that this girl had been dead before she was stuffed in that wall.

Sheriff Gaffney had laid the skull on top of the skeleton’s chest.

An hour and a half later, Tyler stood next to her, off to the side of the front porch. Dr. Baines, shorter than Becca, whiplash thin, big glasses, came out nearly at a run, followed by two young men in white coats carrying the skeleton carefully on a gurney.

“I never thought Mr. Marley could murder anyone,” Dr. Baines said, his voice fast and low. “Funny how things happen, isn’t it? All this time, no one knew, no one even guessed.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose, nodded to Becca and to Tyler, then spoke briefly to the men as they gently lifted the gurney into the back of the van.

The unmarked white van pulled away, followed by Dr. Baines’s car. “Dr. Baines is our local physician. He got on the phone to the medical examiner in Augusta after I called him about the skeleton. The ME told him what to do, which is kind of dumb, since he’s a doctor and I’m an officer of the law, and of course I’d be really careful around the skeleton and take pictures from all angles and be careful not to mess up the crime scene.”

Becca remembered him carefully setting the skull on the skeleton’s chest. But he was right, with a skeleton, who cared?

Sheriff Gaffney said on a shrug, “In any case, Dr. Baines will take the skeleton into Augusta to the medical examiner and then we’ll see.”

Sheriff Gaffney looked out at the two dozen people who were hovering about and shook his head and waved them away. Of course no one moved. They continued talking, pointing at the house, maybe even at her.

Sheriff Gaffney said, “They’ll go on home in a bit. Just natural human curiosity, that’s all. Now, Ms. Powell, I know you’re upset and all, being a female with fine sensibilities, just like my Maude, but I ask that you keep yourself calm for just a while longer.”

He had to be about the same age as her father would have been had he lived, Becca thought, and smiled at him then, because he meant well. “I’ll try, Sheriff. You don’t have any daughters, do you?”

“No, ma’am, just a bunch of boys, all hard-noses, always back-talking me, and covered with mud and sweat half the time. Not at all the same thing for little girls. My Maude would have given anything for a little girl, but God didn’t send us one, just all them dirty boys.

“Now, Ms. Powell, Dr. Baines will be talking to the folk in the medical examiner’s office in Augusta—that’s our capital, you know—once he gets there. They’ll do an autopsy, or whatever it is they do on a mess of bones. The folk up there have lots of formal training, so they’ll know what they’re doing. Like I told you, they’ll document that old Jacob or somebody hit her right in the forehead, smashed her head in. They’ll determine that it was real mean, vicious, that blow. In the meantime we gotta find out who she is. There wasn’t any ID on her. You got any more ideas about it?”