Sharyn McCrumb - The Windsor Knot

“Yes.”

“What can you tell?”

Elizabeth’s lips twitched in the briefest of smiles. “Is that your second question?”

“No. Rephrasing of the first. Could you elaborate on that first answer, please?”

“Okay. Most people think that the ashes of a cremated person will look like the residue you find in a wood-burning fireplace: fine, papery ash. But that is not the case. Human remains can be made to look that way, if they are milled after the cremation process is complete, but unless the family requests that, it usually isn’t done. The general rule is: if you tell the mortuary that the ashes are going to be scattered, they will be more likely to mill them, but if you plan to just keep the ashes in an urn in a vault, or”-she shrugged-“on a mantelpiece, then they’ll just put them in the container the way they look when they come out of the furnace.”

Wesley grimaced. “Not a pleasant topic of conversation, is it?”

“Not one I expected to be having this week,” admitted the bride-to-be.

“Well, I understand all that you’ve said so far,” said Wesley. “You go right on explaining.”

“If the remains in this urn have been milled, there may not be much I can learn from them. I’d advise you to start hunting up experts with hightech labs in that case, and maybe even they-”

“They didn’t look milled to me,” Wesley remarked. Blushing a little, he added, “I’ve looked.”

“Okay, well, let me see what we’ve got. Could you hand me a newspaper from that basket by the fireplace?”

The sheriff looked startled. “Don’t you want to take this to the hospital or something?”

“No. What for?” Elizabeth smiled. “The evidence isn’t microscopic, Sheriff. I’ll be able to tell you everything I can after a couple of minutes’ examination. And all I have to do is look at it. Of course, there are other tests: cross-sectioning a tooth or-”

“I’ll settle for the general opinion just now,” said Wesley, anticipating another lecture.

“Okay. Let’s just dump it out here on the coffee table. Spread out the newspaper, please.”

Wesley laid out several thicknesses of the Atlanta Constitution on the Chandlers’ marble-topped coffee table. Elizabeth pried the lid loose from the jar and gently sprinkled the contents into a pile in the center of the table.

“Yes,” she said, fingering the mound of charred matter. “This is what unmilled cremated remains looks like. Some ash interspersed with objects that don’t burn at that temperature-bits of bone, tooth, metal tooth fillings, and so on.”

“Are you ready for the second question?” asked Wesley, watching her sort the fragments with a practiced touch.

“Sure. Go ahead.”

“Is this a calf or something?”

Elizabeth looked at him. “You kind of wish it were, don’t you?” she said softly. “You’re afraid somebody got murdered to give Mr. Mason a body to stuff in the urn.”

“That had occurred to me,” Wesley admitted.

“You can get a second opinion on all this, of course. Get somebody who already has a Ph.D. and an official lab to confirm what I tell you. You just want to know if it’s worth it to send it off to be analyzed, right?”

The sheriff nodded. “That was my intention. If you told me it was the contents of a pipe smoker’s ashtray, I wouldn’t bother, but if there’s something potentially criminal here, why, I can justify the expense of having it analyzed. Are you saying you can’t tell what I’ve got here?”

“Oh, I can,” said Elizabeth. “But I’d rather not have the responsibility.” She smiled up at him. “In case you have to go to court with this while I’m on my honeymoon.”

Wesley raised his right hand. “On my honor I won’t call you to testify as an expert witness. Now tell me what that stuff is.”

“I’m afraid that it is human remains,” said Elizabeth softly.

Wesley nodded. “I had a hunch it would be.”

She held up a small bonelike bit. “You see that? It’s a human cuspid. Front tooth. And this little bit here is the metal from a filling. Probably a molar.” She rummaged around the sooty pile for a few moments longer. “This is a bit of vertebra and this splintered bit is part of a long bone. See? There’s quite a bit left.”

“I thought of a third question,” said Wesley.

“I expect you have,” murmured Elizabeth, still examining the contents of the urn. “You want to know if I can give you any particulars about who’s in here, don’t you?”

“Is that possible?”

No answer was forthcoming. The sheriff noticed that the young woman beside him had suddenly tensed up, and her expression had shifted from casual interest to one of alertness. “That’s funny,” she muttered to herself.

Wesley peered at the scraps of bone, but he could see nothing to have quickened her interest. There was no flattened bullet in the ashes; nothing spectacular as far as he could see. Elizabeth seemed to be sifting out tiny brackets of metal, of two different sizes, and collecting them in a pile at the edge of the newspaper.

“What did you find?” he asked.

Elizabeth shook her head. “More than you bargained for, Sheriff.”

Charles Chandler was getting desperate. The wedding was just over a week away, and he wasn’t even engaged. He hadn’t even met anybody. The prospects of inheriting his aunt Augusta’s wealth seemed dimmer all the time. Snow White from the Highlander Magazine had not responded to his letter and he was running out of ideas. Where did one meet marriage-minded women? Where would one find a woman who liked physics?

His own prep-school physics teacher had been a bearded gentleman named Fallowfield; otherwise, Charles might have come up with the idea sooner. As it was, he was actually driving past the grounds of the county high school before it occurred to him that science teachers would understand his work. They might even like him. And a multimillion-dollar estate would make a nice change from living on a teacher’s salary.

On impulse, he turned into the school driveway and pulled into the gravel parking lot for faculty. There was no difficulty in finding a parking place; since it was nearly July, the students were no longer attending school, but the number of cars in the lot indicated that the teachers were still on the premises, finishing up paperwork, perhaps, or getting ready for next year’s classes.

The county high school was a nondescript one-story brick building, built in the early Seventies. Charles, who had been sent away to school by his education-conscious parents, had never been on the premises before, but he didn’t suppose that it could be too difficult to find a science teacher in that sprawling maze of corridors. After all, students manage to get from one class to another in five minutes. A sign beside the front doors said VISITORS REPORT TO MAIN OFFICE. Charles followed the arrows down the hall, wondering what he would say when he got there.

The school secretary, a plump, pleasant-looking woman who resembled the mother character in a Forties movie, motioned him over to the office counter with a friendly smile. “May I help you?”

“Yes,” said Charles. “I’m looking for your physics teacher.” He had decided not to explain unless he had to.

“Physics. That would be Mr. Worthington. Go down the hall-”

“Does he also teach chemistry?” asked Charles, who didn’t want to speak to Mr . Anybody.

“That’s right.”

“How about biology?” asked Charles.

“No. That’s Miss Aynsley.”

Charles breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s the one!” Seeing the puzzled look on the secretary’s face, he hastened to add, “I’m a reporter for Scholastic Science.” He beamed at her, pleased with the name of his newly invented magazine. “I’m doing a feature on science in Georgia schools, and I’m speaking to various teachers.”