just hanging around his property?”
“I don’t know. Maybe she back-mouthed him. Old Jacob hated
back talk.”
“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 Telltale Heart 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