Beverly Connor - One Grave Too Many

The giant sloth turned out not to be the disaster she had feared. It stood majestic among prehistoric flora, head on straight, looking out at the skeleton of Mammothus columbi several feet in front of it. Something in the mammoth exhibit caught her eye. Archaeopteris leaves sprouting around the mammoth’s feet. Donald, damn him, had put the wrong vegetation in anyway. He was such a willful. . She stepped over the barrier rope carefully and took up the plants. A loud knock on the front doors brought her head up with a start.

She leaned over to look through the double doorway into the museum lobby. Jake appeared from the direction of the primate room.

“I’ll get it, Dr. Fallon,” he called out as he pressed the intercom button. “The museum is closed,” he said into the speaker.

“Hey, Jake, it’s Frank.”

Frank Duncan. So he wasn’t giving up. Diane heard the clank of keys in the door and their voices.

“Frank, what the hell you doing around here this late?”

“Checking up on your moonlighting. Might try it myself. You get to sleep a lot, I hear.”

She heard them both laugh.

“How’s that boy of yours?” asked Frank. “In an Ivy League school, isn’t he?”

She still couldn’t see Frank, but Jake had turned so she could see his face. He was a lean-looking man, at home with a scowl, but a large grin pushed his deep frown lines upward.

“Dylan’s great. You know he graduated? With honors. I have this cousin who’s always bragging about his boys being first in our family to get a college education.” Jake laughed. “The twins went to community college. Dylan went to Harvard.”

Diane listened as Jake and Frank talked about Jake’s son. She liked the normalcy of their conversation-so far removed from recent events in her life. Coming here to the museum was the right decision.

“What’s he going to do now he’s graduated?” asked Frank.

“Looks like he’s going to be accepted to Harvard Business School. They don’t just take everybody right out of college, you know. Most of the time they wait till they’ve worked a bit. See who’s rising to the top. I’m real proud of the boy.”

“What I can’t figure,” said Frank, “is where he got his brains.”

“Not from his daddy, that’s for sure. I told Carol it’s a good thing he looks like me, or I’d be suspicious. How’s your Kevin?”

“Growing. He’s in eighth grade now. I’m glad I have a while before I have to start shelling out for college tuition.”

“I hear you there.”

“Diane Fallon here?” asked Frank.

Jake turned and looked in her direction. “Yes, she’s here.”

Diane was still standing underneath the huge tusks of the mammoth. She watched Detective Frank Duncan of the Metro-Atlanta Fraud and Computer Forensics Unit set down a briefcase at the door and cross the wide marble lobby into the Pleistocene room. He had the same handsomeness, the same smile, the same familiar face-perhaps just a little older than the last time she saw him.

“Nice,” he said, reaching up and brushing the tips of his fingers along the bottom of a gigantic curved tusk. It reminded her of that Celine Dion song-“It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.”

“Did these things used to roam the neighborhood?” he asked.

“Up until about ten thousand years ago.”

“Long gone, eh?”

“A mere blink of an eye in the grand scheme of things.”

He stood under the head and tusks of the mammoth with her, his eyes searching her face. “You look good. Damn good.”

Diane brushed a loose strand of hair out of her eyes. “Too much time in the sun. My face is looking like parchment.”

Frank shook his head. “A few lines around the eyes and mouth only give you character. You’re a little thin, maybe. Didn’t they feed you in South America? You’re all right, aren’t you? Didn’t pick up anything?”

“No, Frank, I didn’t pick up anything. I’m fine.”

Frank tilted his head to one side, inspecting her wrist and arm. “A fellow I know came back from the Amazon and he had this insect bite on his arm that wouldn’t go away. Swelled up, started itching and turned black. When he couldn’t stand the itch any longer, he went to the doctor. The doctor thought it was a boil and started to lance it. Just as he touched the skin with his scalpel,” Frank touched his finger gently to her forearm, “the thing burst open and this big, black, ugly fly crawled out of his arm and flew off. Disgusting.” He tickled her skin with the tips of his fingers.

Diane pulled her arm back reflexively, but smiled despite herself. “You haven’t changed. What are you doing at the museum this late?”

His eyes were smiling again, searching her face. “I just got off from work. I was passing this way.”

“Don’t tell me that. You don’t pass this place going anywhere.” She stepped out of the exhibit, still holding the artificial leaves like an odd bouquet.

“It’s been a couple of years. . ” he began.

“Three years.”

“I wanted to see you. How about a late dinner?”

He was wearing jeans and a navy sweater and smelled like aftershave. He hadn’t just stopped off from work. Diane wished she didn’t feel so comforted by that realization. She lay the leaves next to the exhibit and dusted off her hands, aware that she must have the aroma of the day’s accumulation of glue, paint and perspiration. “How about you telling me why you’re really here?”

“I really came to see you. Talking with you got me worried about you. What happened? Why did you give up your career?”

“I changed jobs. People do that.” Diane turned away from his gaze and started toward the Bison antiquus . “I need to check out the exhibits before I leave. We’re having a preopening party for the contributors tomorrow evening.”

“Wait.” Frank put a hand on her arm. “I want to know about you. What do you mean, you aren’t a forensic anthropologist anymore? What happened in South America?”

Diane stopped and looked into Frank’s blue-green eyes. “Just one mass grave too many.”

Diane walked with Frank to pick up his briefcase and led him to her office off a corridor to the right of the museum entrance. She moved a stack of books from a chair, pulled it up to her desk and motioned for Frank to sit down. She tore off a piece of butcher paper from a roll standing in the corner beside a tall oak bookcase and spread it on her desktop. “I’ve been back in town three months.”

“I just found out last week. I saw Andie in the grocery store and she told me. I’ve been on a big computer fraud case for a couple of months and staying in Atlanta, shuttling back and forth to New York. Why didn’t you call?”

“I didn’t know you knew Andie.”

“We met a few months ago in a karaoke bar.”

“Karaoke? There is so much about you that I don’t know.”

“I know, boggles the mind, doesn’t it?”

Diane held out her hand for the bone, half dreading to touch it. “If the parents want to know if it’s their daughter, they might be able to have a DNA test run.” Though when she saw the bone, she doubted that there would be any DNA strands left.

Frank shook his head. “She was adopted.”

Adopted. Diane was unsure if she could go on with the examination. She fingered the bone a moment through the plastic bag before taking it out. Be professional, Diane. This is Frank Duncan asking for your help. Maybe this isn’t her.

“Okay-This is a right clavicle, a collarbone. Been gnawed by rats. See these parallel teeth marks?”

“Rats. Does that mean anything?”

“Just means the body was where animals could get to it. You don’t happen to have X rays of the girl’s shoulder, do you?”