“Yes,” he said. “I know all about that.”
“How?”
“It’s not important right now. Believe me.”
She didn’t, of course, but she was willing to put it on hold for the moment because she said then, “I saw a really old snapshot of him. He looked so young, so happy. He was very handsome, so tall and straight.” She paused a moment, and he heard the hitch in her voice. “I was too young to remember him when he died, but my mom said he’d seen me born, held me and loved me. And then he left and didn’t come back.”
“I know.”
She cocked her head to one side, and again she let it go, saying, “When I first saw you in Food Fort, I thought you looked hard, like you didn’t smile very often, like you ate nails and hot salsa for snacks. I thought you could be mean if you had to, maybe even cruel. You still look mean. I can sense that you’re dangerous; actually, I just know it, so don’t even bother trying to deny it. Who are you, really?”
“I’m Adam Carruthers. I told you that at Food Fort. That really is my name. Now, take me to your house and I’ll get on the phone. We won’t find out who the skeleton is, but we’ll find out at least how long she was in that wall. They’ll have to do DNA tests; that takes a while. First things first.”
He watched her pick up her Coonan and stuff the bullets in her jeans pocket. He picked up her kitchen knife and followed her back to Jacob Marley’s house.
It took him eleven minutes and two phone calls. When he laid down the phone the second time, he looked over at her and smiled. “It shouldn’t take long.” In no more than three seconds, the phone rang. He motioned her away and picked it up. “Carruthers here.”
He listened, wrote something down on a sheet of paper. “Thanks a lot, Jarvis, I owe you. Yeah, yeah, you know I always pay up. It just might not be tomorrow. You know how to reach me. Okay, thanks. Bye.”
He carefully laid the phone back into the cradle. “It isn’t Ann McBride, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“No, of course it’s not Tyler’s missing wife. I never thought it was. I’ve known him since I was eighteen. I’ve never met a more decent man. Really.” But she was nearly shaking with relief, and he saw it. However, it was his turn to let it go.
But then she said, “I couldn’t have stood it if Tyler had been a monster instead of a really nice guy. I guess I would have just hung it up.”
“Yeah, your boyfriend is off the hook. The skeleton was buried inside that wall for at least ten years, possibly more. She was probably in her late teens when she was killed by a hard blow right in the face, the forehead actually. Whoever did it was really pissed, enraged, totally out of control. Jarvis said it was a vicious blow, killed her instantly.”
“It looks like Jacob Marley really might have killed her, then.”
He shrugged. “Who knows? It’s not our problem, thank God.”
“It’s certainly mine, since she tumbled out of the wall onto my basement floor. I can’t believe anyone would kill a teenager for wandering across his yard, and with such viciousness.”
A second later the phone rang. It was Bernie Bradstreet, owner of The Riptide Independent, wanting to know what she could tell him. “I know the sheriff wants to keep a lid on this, but—”
She told him everything, omitting only what Adam Carruthers had just found out from the medical examiner’s office. She didn’t think the sheriff would like to be cut out of that particular loop. Then Bernie Bradstreet asked her to dinner, with his wife, he hastened to add when she didn’t say anything. She put him off. When she hung up the phone, Adam said, “Newspaper? You handled it well. Now you need to call the sheriff. Don’t tell him you already know the answers, just encourage him to call the medical examiner’s office. Jarvis told me they’re not ready to release the information yet, but if the sheriff calls, he might be able to pry it out of them. Oh, yeah, when the sheriff comes, tell him I’m your cousin from Baltimore here to visit. Okay?”
“Cousins? We don’t look anything alike.”
He gave her a crooked grin.“Thank heaven for that.”
Sheriff Gaffney didn’t like the news from Augusta. He liked tidy conclusions, puzzles where all the pieces finally locked cleanly into place, not this: an old skeleton, identity unknown, that had been bricked inside Jacob Marley’s basement wall after her gruesome murder. He didn’t really want Ann McBride to be dead, but it would have made things so much cleaner, so nice and straightforward. He glanced at Tyler McBride. The guy looked calm, but relieved? He just couldn’t tell. Tyler had always managed to keep what he was feeling close to his vest. He was good at poker, nobody liked to play against him. Funny thing, though, the sheriff would have sworn that Tyler had killed his wife. He still kept his eye on Tyler, hoping to see him do something strange, like visit an unmarked grave or something. Well, he’d been wrong before. He guessed maybe he was wrong again. He hated it, it wasn’t pleasant, but sometimes it happened, even to a man like him.