Beverly Connor - One Grave Too Many

Diane rummaged through her drawers until she found a glass vial for the tiny bone, dropped the bone inside and snapped on the cap. She gathered her bone specimens and her notebook and headed across to the faunal lab, located off the zoological exhibits, where there was a dissecting microscope and a respectable reference collection of numerous species of animal skeletons.

The animal room, as they called it, was a large room that once had rows of iron beds along each side from when it was a hospital. The beds were now replaced by glass enclosed dioramas of animals native to the South-east. A display of two mounted coyotes in their wooded habitat guarded the door leading to the faunal lab.

A slim, athletic woman in her thirties sporting cutoffs and a tee shirt, with her brown hair haphazardly piled and clipped on her head, stood just inside the lab, blocking the entrance. “Excuse me, but do you know who’s in charge here? I need to speak to someone about my office.”

Diane remembered Andie telling her about the various complaints of the new arrivals. “Are you our geologist?”

The woman glanced around the room at the animal skeletons lining the room, waiting to be placed with their stuffed counterparts. “No.”

Not the geologist. Another who was dissatisfied with her office space. Diane paused a moment, eyeing the woman from head to toe. “How do you do? I’m Diane Fallon, the director. You must be Dr. Mercer, the zoologist.”

“Yes. Dr. Sylvia Mercer. What gives? How am I supposed to use an office the size of a shoe box and open to public view?” She pointed to a large window on the left side of the lab that framed one side of her office-ample office space, Diane thought. But then, she was accustomed to having an office in a tent for weeks on end. “Whose office is that?” She pointed to an office across the lab. Also with a picture window, but obviously larger.

“That’s the collection manager’s office. She’s here all day.”

“I really need an office larger than this one.”

“The arrangement I made with your university was to provide office and lab space to supplement what your department provides you. Your office is off this lab and near the zoology exhibits. The lab isn’t open to the public, so you have complete privacy. You’re free to put bookcases or storage here in the lab if you have any spillover from your office. I think you’ll find the convenience outweighs any problem of size. I also understand you will be spending a few hours a week here, and that the bulk of your time will be spent at the university.” Diane kept her voice calm and even. She hoped the smile on her face didn’t look fake.

“That’s just it. Since I was getting an office here, the department head took my office and put me in another broom closet of an office space. Now I have two places to keep my brooms.”

“Oh. That wasn’t supposed to happen. I was hoping to add to what the faculty who come here had, not take away.”

“You’re not familiar with universities, are you?”

“Not since I was a student.” Diane looked around the room, searching for a compromise.

“I’ve got this research I’m working on. I really need more room. I’m sharing space at the university, and they want me to move my research here, but it looks like I’ll be sharing lab space with everyone here too. Taking this position has cut my resources more than in half.”

Diane turned back to her. “No, this is your lab.”

“Mine? This is my lab?”

“And the collection manager’s. He has to use it too. But as curator of animal collection, you’re in charge.”

“What about the geologist?”

“She has her own lab.”

“And the entomologist?”

“All the collections have their own labs.”

Sylvia looked around the room again. “I. . that’s different. I thought I had to share this space with everyone. They said this was a small museum.”

“It is, in terms of the number and variety of collections, but it’s a big building. It was decided that providing lab space would make a smaller museum desirable.”

“Don’t tell my department. They’ll want to send over some of the tenured faculty to replace me.”

“It’ll be our secret.” Diane handed her the vial. “This looks like a fish rib to me. Is it?”

Dr. Mercer took the vial and peered at the thin bone inside. “Yes, it is. I can’t tell you what kind of fish. Ribs are not really distinguishable among fish. Possibly bass or trout. Where did it come from? Sometimes that’s a clue.”

“Inside the marrow cavity of a broken human clavicle.”

Sylvia Mercer glanced at Diane and back at the fish bone. “How odd. Is it some ritualistic burial practice? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“No. This is a modern suspicious death.”

Sylvia silently looked at Diane, her brow creased in deep furrows. Diane felt some explanation was warranted.

“Before I became director of the museum, I was a forensic anthropologist.” Diane took the bag containing the section of clavicle from her blazer pocket. “A detective asked me to look at this bone that was found by someone. The fish bone was inside it.”

“Yes, I think I heard someone say you’re an osteologist. I must say, you were thorough if you found it inside that bone.”

Not thorough enough , thought Diane, or I would have found it the first time around .

“I appreciate the identification. Choose any type of window treatment for your office that will work best for you. Tell my assistant, Andie Layne, and she’ll order it.” Diane stepped past Dr. Mercer and sat down at a dissecting microscope. She removed the broken clavicle from its bag, placed it on the stage and focused on its surface.

“Will you be using the lab for your forensic work?” Sylvia had come up behind Diane and was looking over her shoulder.

“No. This is a onetime thing.”

“Where was it found?”

“That’s a good question. It was given to the detective without provenience.”

“Is there anything you can tell from just that one piece?”

Diane briefly described what she knew about the bone as she examined its surface under the microscope.

Having missed the fish rib the first time stung, and she wasn’t going to miss anything else. But she found nothing on the weathered surface that hadn’t been evident with the hand lens. She tore off a piece of butcher paper from a roll hanging on the wall and gently shook and tapped the bone over it. A few flakes landed on the paper, along with a tiny brown oval that looked like a dark flake of popcorn shell. She put the paper on the microscope stage and examined the objects.

“What is it?” Sylvia leaned over Diane’s shoulder, looking at the microscope stage with interest.

“I’ll have to check with the entomologist, but I believe it’s a cap from a blowfly puparium. Its presence inside the bone cavity is as unusual as the fish rib. At this stage of development, the blowflies have moved away from the carrion and burrowed underground. Because this is a cap, we know that the adult blowfly did emerge.”

Diane looked at her watch. She had a board meeting in just a few minutes.

The faunal lab, like all the labs in the museum, had a specimen photography setup-a maneuverable camera stand with lighting that allowed the object to be photographed from different angles. Before proceeding with her analysis, she placed the bone on the camera stage and snapped pictures of it from several views.

She found another vial in the lab supply cabinet for the new material. After placing the new material in the vials and labeling them, she took the bone saw, put in a new blade and cut a sample of bone that was more than enough for her friend to test.