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?”
“Calvin Klein jeans have been popular since the early to mid-eighties.
That means that she wasn’t murdered and sealed behind
that wall before 1980.”
Sheriff Gaffney carefully wrote that down. He hummed softly
while he wrote. He looked up then and stared at her. “You sure do
look familiar, Ms. Powell.”
“Maybe you saw me in a fashion magazine, Sheriff. No, don’t
even consider that, I’m just joking with you. I’m not a model. I’m
sure I would have remembered you, sir, if I’d ever met you before.”
“Well, that’s likely enough,” he said, nodding. “Tyler, you got any
thoughts about this?”
Tyler shook his head.
Sheriff Gaffney looked as if he would say something else, then
he shut his mouth. However, he gave Tyler another long look. “I’ll
be in touch,” he said, snapped out a sharp salute, and walked to his
car, a brown Ford with a light bar over the top. At the last moment,
he looked back at them, and he was frowning. Then he managed to
squeeze his bulk into the driver’s side. He hadn’t been interested in
her background, a blessing. Evidently, he realized that she could
have had nothing to do with this and so who she was, where she
was from, and what she did for a living simply did not matter.
“He’s amazing,” Becca said as he drove away. “Too bad he didn’t
have a daughter to go with all those dirty boys.”
She looked to see that Tyler was staring down at his feet. She
lightly touched her fingers to his arm. “What’s wrong?You’re afraid
I really am going to be hysterical about finding that poor girl?”
“No, it’s not that. You saw the sheriff. Even though he didn’t
really say anything, it was clear enough what he was thinking.”
“I don’t know what you mean. What’s wrong,Tyler?”
“I realize it occurred to him, just before he got into his car, that
the skeleton might well be Ann.”
Becca looked at him blankly, slowly shaking her head back and
forth.
“My wife. She wore Calvin Klein jeans.”
Chapter 8
Becca walked into the Riptide Pharmacy in the middle of Foxglove
Avenue the next morning and found, to her horror, that she
was the center of attention. For someone who wanted to fade into
the woodwork, she wasn’t doing it very well. Everywhere she
went, she was stared at, questioned, introduced to relatives. She was
the girl who’d found the skeleton. She was even given special treatment
at the Union 76 gas station at the end of Poison Oak Circle.
The Food Fort manager, Mrs. Dobbs, wanted her autograph. Three
people told her she looked familiar.
It was too late to dye her hair black. She went home and stayed
there. She got at least twenty phone calls that day. She didn’t see
Tyler, but he’d been right about what the sheriff had thought, because
everybody else was thinking it, too, and was talking about it
over coffee, to their neighbors, and not all that quietly. Tyler knew
it, too, of course, but he didn’t say anything when he came over
later that evening. He looked stoic. She had wanted to yell at
everyone that they were wrong, that Tyler was an excellent man,
that no way could he have hurt anyone, much less his wife, but she