Jennie Bentley - Spackled and Spooked

“Are you sure?” I probed. “You don’t sound like you’re OK. What happened?”

“Nothing happened. Not to me. But we have to call Wayne.”

Chief of Police Wayne Rasmussen? “Why?”

“Because I found a human bone,” Derek said.

“Oh, my God. Are you sure?”

“Left ulna,” Derek said. “Elbow bone. Medial lower arm.”

I did a mental duh ! Of course he was sure. He was a doctor. He probably knew the name of every single bone in the human body and could identify them all by smell. Still, I felt I had to try one more time. “Are you sure it isn’t just the… um… femur of a dead dog or something?”

Derek looked upset. “Yeah. I wish that was the case. But it’s definitely human.”

I gave up. “Fine. I’ll take your word for it. Where did you find it? Under the house?”

“Yeah. I drilled a hole, looked down into it to make sure it was deep enough, and found the bone. The hole digger must have cut it in two.”

“Are there more?” I asked.

“It’s not as if someone could lose an ulna and not notice. It isn’t something you can take off and leave laying around, like that earring you picked up the other day. I didn’t see any more, but if there’s one human bone down there, they’re all there, believe me. The whole kit and caboodle. Now do you see why we need Wayne?”

I nodded. I saw.

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Wayne made good time. No more than ten minutes could have passed before a black and white cruiser pulled up outside the house. Wayne extricated his lanky length from behind the wheel and came toward us.

The chief of the Waterfield PD cuts an impressive figure. At an easy six four or so, he has dark, curly hair just starting to turn distinguished at the temples, coupled with a strong jaw, and steady, dark eyes.

“What have you got?” Wayne asked when he was close enough not to have to raise his voice. Derek didn’t bother to answer, just waved for the chief of police to follow him. The two of them walked away, around the corner of the house to the backyard.

I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do. I was curious, yes, but the idea of descending into the crawlspace with them, and with the spiders and snakes and other creepy critters-and that was before I knew there were human bones down there!-wasn’t appealing. I stood where I was, chewing my bottom lip and looking around. Things had been moving kind of fast up until this point, so I hadn’t really had a chance to reflect on Derek’s discovery. Now I realized I was not only shocked and creeped out and overwhelmed and slightly nauseous, I was also intrigued in spite of myself.

What was a human arm bone-OK, an ulna-doing buried under our house? There had been no time for cutting up corpses after Mr. Murphy shot his wife and her parents. And I doubted the police had been neglectful enough to overlook any body parts. So how had one of the arm bones made it into the crawlspace? It wasn’t like it could move from the bedroom to the crawlspace on its own or bury itself without help.

Maybe Mr. Murphy had killed someone else, too? If he’d murdered his wife and her family, it wasn’t outrageous to speculate that he might have done away with someone else, as well, at some earlier point. Maybe I should stop by the Clarion office this afternoon-the Waterfield Clarion is one of the local newspapers-and see if I could dig up any missing person reports during the time the Murphys had lived here in Waterfield.

Maybe the ulna belonged to Peggy Murphy’s supposed lover. Maybe Brian Murphy had discovered that his wife was unfaithful, and he had murdered the man she was seeing. And then he murdered her. And for good measure, he’d murdered her parents, too.

Or maybe the corpse in the crawlspace was someone else, someone that Brian had murdered, and when Peggy Murphy discovered that the body was there, Brian had had to kill her so she wouldn’t call the cops on him.

Next door, a curtain twitched, and Miss Venetia Rudolph’s face appeared in the window. I waved. She withdrew, looking put out. I figured I’d rubbed her the wrong way by letting her know that I’d noticed her nosiness, but then the front door opened, and she headed for me, her large tennis shoes squashing blades of grass as she went.

“Miss Baker.”

“Miss Rudolph?”

“What is the meaning of this?”

“The meaning of what?” I said. She gestured toward the police car. “Oh. Right. The chief of police stopped by.”

“Why?”

I hesitated. Wayne probably wouldn’t be happy if I told her what we’d found, but on the other hand, it wasn’t like he could keep it a secret for long. Especially if there turned out to be a whole skeleton down there, and there probably would turn out to be.

“My boyfriend was drilling some holes underneath the foundation,” I said eventually. “To pour concrete for supports. The floors have settled.”

“And?”

“And he found a bone. It could be an animal bone-maybe a dog or a raccoon got into the crawlspace at one time and died-but we thought we’d better call the police just in case.” I smiled innocently.

“Isn’t your boyfriend Dr. Ellis’s son?” Venetia asked. “Didn’t he go to medical school? He should know a human bone when he sees one, shouldn’t he?”

I sighed. “He should, yes. Nevertheless, I think we should wait for official word from the police before we start spreading rumors that someone has found a skeleton under the haunted house on Becklea.”

“A skeleton?” Venetia repeated, her bushy eyebrows practically disappearing beneath her shaggy gray bangs. “I thought you said a bone. Singular.”

I gave myself a hard mental kick. Stupid, stupid, stupid. “He only found one bone. But since bones aren’t something you misplace easily, there may be more down there.”

“Harrumph!” Venetia said, but before she could continue, another voice entered the conversation.

“What’s going on?”

I swung on my heel and came face-to-face-or nose to Adam’s apple-with Lionel Kenefick. The young electrician must have noticed the police car and walked up from his own house to investigate. Now he was standing a few inches away, looking down into what I fondly refer to as my cleavage.

I took a step back and went through my story again, downplaying the discovery as much as I could. Lionel looked, for lack of a better word, nervy. His eyes were showing whites all the way around, like a skittish horse, and that prominent Adam’s apple kept jumping as he swallowed agitatedly. Not that I could blame him. The idea that I’d been walking around upstairs for several days, while all along a body had been moldering in the crawlspace, was totally creepy. Lionel was probably thinking about all the years he’d been living just down the street, while a body was rotting up here.

I forced a smile. “I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough what’s going on. The chief of police is down there, looking around. As a matter of fact,” I turned as I heard voices from behind the house, “here they are now.”

A moment later, Derek and Wayne came around the corner, deep in conversation. I couldn’t hear much of what they were saying, but a few words floated over to me.

“… crew,” Wayne said.

“… going to take?” Derek answered. “Gotta…”

Wayne shrugged. “… choice. Sorry, Derek. You know how it is.” He struck out for the police cruiser.

“Yeah, yeah.” Derek made a face at his retreating back and came over to me. “Hiya, Tink. Miss Rudolph. Lionel.” He nodded to the other two and put his arm around my shoulders.

“What’s going on?” I asked, glancing up at him. He looked resigned and not very happy.