Beverly Connor - Dust to Dust

Diane nodded. “Thanks, Jin.”

She left them and rode the elevator up to the third floor and walked over to the crime lab.

Neva, David, and Izzy were there. They were getting a lecture on handwriting analysis from a member of the museum archives staff. The sample under discussion was the writing on the back of Marcella’s desk drawer.

“I personally think that you can’t tell much about what slant means in the young,” Lawrence Michaels, one of the museum’s archivists and their only handwriting expert, was saying when Diane walked into the dimly lit lab. “Children, especially early teenage girls, experiment with different handwriting on a whim-for fun. However, in the adult… Ah, Dr. Fallon. Good to see you. I was just explaining that I get a bit of mixed messages from the handwriting on the desk drawer.”

Michaels was a middle-aged man with striking silver hair. He always dressed in a suit and tie, clothes he apparently found comfortable. Occasionally he wore a bow tie, which Diane thought gave him an entirely different persona. Today he had on a dark brown suit, a light pink shirt with a tie that was a dark shade of pink decorated with small brown fleurs de lis. Diane pulled up a chair and sat down beside David.

“This is a woman’s hand,” Michaels continued. “She is intelligent and creative-as suggested by the rounded w and the one u . These coiled shapes and counterstrokes that curve in what we might call the wrong way, suggest a self centeredness. The closed a ’s and o ’s suggest that she is hiding something.”

He indicated each of the characteristics with a laser pointer that jumped quickly from character to character, making lightning zigzags of neon red on the dry-erase board where he had projected the image of the note.

“The characters are largest in the middle zone-the ascenders and descenders don’t go much above or below the baseline. This suggests immaturity-could be young at heart. Immaturity doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. The way the letters slant in different directions is a little disturbing. Bottom line, I’m not really sure what you have here. Perhaps an intelligent, creative, selfish, and childishly disturbed woman with something to hide. Or maybe not. This isn’t an exact science. I hope this helps.” He grinned at his audience.

“No offense,” said Izzy, “but I could have gotten most of that from the words she wrote. What adult, but a disturbed one, writes a message like that on the bottom of a drawer? Who did she expect would find it?”

Michaels shrugged. “The handwriting is consistent with the message. I can say that,” he said.

“Thank you, Dr. Michaels,” said Diane. “Quite possibly, it does help. What would really help,” Diane said to all of them, “is if we could get an approximate date for when the message was written.”

“Okay,” said Michaels. “There is one other thing. See the double s in the word missing -how the first s is like an f , only backward? That’s the way kids were taught to write about a hundred years or so ago. That’s called a leading s because it is the first s in the sequence.”

“Now, see,” said Izzy. “That’s helpful. You should have said that right off.”

“Sorry,” Michaels said, grinning. He dusted off his hands as if he had been using chalk instead of a laser pointer.

“Well, I think it’s neat,” said Neva. “Thanks, Dr. Michaels.”

Neva escorted Lawrence Michaels to the door that was the threshold between the dark side, the crime lab, and the museum proper.

“I couldn’t help but notice,” David said to Diane when Neva returned, “that you said that quite possibly it does help. What is it you know?”

The others looked at David in surprise. Apparently they hadn’t taken note of what Diane said.

Diane explained about the phone call from the lab in Arizona and what they had discovered about the sherds Marcella sent them. “I don’t know that those were sherds she found in her yard, but for now, let’s suppose they were.”

“Okay,” said Izzy. “That’s a sign of a disturbed person. Crushing up human bones to make pots? It’s downright spooky. Maybe the handwriting guy had something after all.”

“Yeah,” said Neva. “We have a creatively disturbed, immature woman-writing a secret message on the bottom of drawers doesn’t seem to be a sign of maturity. I think we ought to find out who she is.”

“What we need,” said Diane, “is a list of all the people who ever lived in the house. We can start with ownership records.”

“That ought to be easy,” said Neva. “I’ll go down to the courthouse and do a search.”

“Hanks mentioned that he would do it, but if we do it, it will save him time. I don’t think this is a high priority with him, and it shouldn’t be. It’s unlikely to be related to what happened to Marcella.”

“Except,” said David, “they did steal objets d’art.”

Diane nodded. “The paintings they took were hidden in the wall for no telling how long. Even though the pottery they stole was Marcella’s own work, the thieves may not have known that.”

Neva rubbed her hands together. “I like this.”

David rolled his eyes. “She’s become Nancy Drew. You know we solve crimes all the time, don’t you?”

“I like this old stuff,” she said. “It’s interesting. I can see the attraction to archaeology-lots of old mysteries there.”

“Okay, then,” said David. “Like Diane said, the thing we need to find out is how old the note is, and how old the pottery is.”

“I’ll go down to the courthouse first thing and search the property records,” said Neva.

Izzy stood, hitching up his pants as he stretched and yawned. “Tell you what, Neva, next time you decide to have a speaker, let me know so I can maybe sleep in or go wash my car.”

“You didn’t find that fascinating?” said Neva.

“I think it’s voodoo,” said Izzy. “It’s like them profilers. I don’t buy them either. Have you ever heard them?”

Diane smiled to herself.

“I noticed you didn’t give him a sample of your handwriting,” said Neva.

“Yeah, well, like I was going to let him say a bunch of gobbledygook about me and have you guys never let me live it down. I’m smarter than that.” Izzy grinned at Neva.

Diane noticed that Izzy smiled and even laughed more and more since he had started to work with them. His good friend Frank Duncan had noticed it too. The crime lab had been good for Izzy-oddly enough-even with all the death they dealt with. It was catching the evildoers with proof of their evil deeds that did it for him. Izzy’s son had been killed in a meth lab explosion. Not a meth lab of his making, but he and thirty fellow students died not knowing that someone was cooking meth in the basement of the house they were partying in. It wasn’t fair and it hurt Izzy to the core. Izzy needed to do something that worked, something that he could see would put bad people in prison. He decided that maybe the crime lab would be that place where he could make a difference. So he eased his way in. So far it seemed to be working for him and for the crime lab.

“I’m going home, folks. See you tomorrow,” Izzy said.

“I’m going home too,” said Diane. “You guys do the same.”

It was dark when Diane got in her SUV. She drove home thinking about Harmon Dance. His daughter was exhumed today. She wondered whether it was just more pain, or a relief that he might find out something better than what he had been trying to live with. Lynn Webber would probably carry out the autopsy right away. They might know something tomorrow.