Beverly Connor: One Grave Too Many

Getting Grayson off her back and rooting out the vipers among her board members was a major relief. And although Jonas didn’t know it, she was going to beat him at chess with her queen sacrifice. Adding to all of that, Frank was much improved-and it was only five thirty. Now all she had to do was wait for the sleeping pill to kick in. She didn’t even know it when she fell asleep.

She dreamed of snakes. Black snakes crawling across the table in the boardroom. The boardroom was ankle-deep in them, with no place to step. Diane jerked awake. She hated snakes.

The hospital was quiet. She looked at the clock next to her bed. Three thirty-two in the morning. That was a long sleep, and her bladder was full. She went to the bathroom. When she came out, she felt like she needed to walk. She put on her robe and walked out into the dimly lit hallway. At the far end of the corridor two nurses were chatting at the nurses’ station. She walked across the hall and peeked in Frank’s room.

Henry was dozing in a chair. Frank was asleep. Her presence roused Henry, and he came out to talk to her.

“How are you feeling?” he said.

“Better. Restless. I imagine you and your brother are pretty restless yourselves.”

“We’re doing OK. Actually, it’s hard to get Linc to take a vacation. He tends to be a workaholic. Now he has nothing to do but rest. His wife told me to keep him here for as long as I can.” He and Diane laughed together.

“I haven’t seen your sister lately.”

“She went home to see Mom and Dad.”

Diane shook her head. “All this must be really strange to you and your brother.”

“Well, yeah, it is. I feel like I got dropped into a Sam Spade movie.”

Diane and Henry talked a while. She enjoyed getting to know Frank’s family. She’d have liked to get to know his sister too.

“You look like you need to get back to bed,” said Henry after a while.

“You’re right. Thanks for the company.” She walked back into her room and climbed in bed and went to sleep. She could see Henry standing outside Frank’s door. For the first time in a long while, she felt safe.

Diane dozed for a while and then jerked awake. She wished she had another sleeping pill. An uneasy feeling that there was something she should know stood on the edge of her dreams like an apparition shaking her awake every time she slipped into comfortable sleep.

The clock in her room said it was five twenty. She tried to go back to sleep, but it was no use. She got out of bed and went to Frank’s room. Henry was sound asleep; so was Frank. She picked up the computer by Henry’s chair and went back to her room. There was a chair in the corner of the room near a phone jack. She pulled another wooden chair up and sat the computer on it as if it were a desk. She plugged in the computer, booted it up and connected the phone cord to the jack. She’d remembered that missing persons for each state are posted on the Internet. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? She could look herself. But instead of going to the missing persons site, she went to the Google Internet search engine and typed in the words missing, male, hockey, spring break, 1998.

It occurred to Diane that people oftentimes put up Web pages seeking help in finding a loved one-a way of tacking up missing persons posters across the world.

She got 1753 hits on the first search. Too many. Glancing down the list, she saw that one hit was about a missing male cat whose owner played field hockey. She needed to tweak her search parameters. It was amazing how many hits she got with what she thought was an unusual selection of key words. She got short stories and lots of hockey sites. On her third tweak of the parameters, she realized she should put quotations around “spring break” so that it would be read as a phrase by the search engine. That cut the number of hits down to 512. After almost an hour of looking at Web pages, she was about to give up and go through missing persons records, state by state. It would take a while, but the current strategy was apparently turning into a wild goose chase. Before she gave it up, however, she added vegetarian and archaeology to the search criteria. This time there were four hits. The title of the first hit was: “Will you help me find my son?”

Diane’s hands were shaking as she clicked on the link to the site. Immediately, a photograph of a young man, smiling, wearing a blue oxford shirt came up. He had dark hair and eyes, a bright smile and even, white teeth. He looked so young; maybe nineteen. His name was Aidan Kavanagh.

Reading about him was heartbreaking. The site was put up by his parents. They described his physical appearance, his height and weight. They told about his interests, what a good hockey player he was, how he broke his shin but made a winning goal just the same. He was from Washington State, had lots of friends. There was a picture of him with his girlfriend. He was majoring in business at Harvard but flirted briefly with archaeology.

The saddest thing was a message from his father asking that if his son was somewhere reading this to please come home because they loved him. She wondered if there were some issues between him and his parents.

He disappeared after March 28, 1998. His girlfriend had spoken to him on the phone that evening. He had decided to stay at school during spring break and study. After that phone call he wasn’t heard from again. His SUV was in the driveway of the house he shared with three other male students. They had gone to Fort Lauderdale during spring break, leaving him alone. No one saw him leave; no one saw anyone come to the house. He just vanished without a word to anyone, without a trace.

Until George and Jay Boone found his collarbone.

There was a number to call if anyone had any information. The instructions on the answering machine were to leave a message and number where the caller could be reached. Diane imagined they had to put in a special phone line. She wondered how many crank calls they got each month.

She looked at the clock. It was a little after 6:00 A.M. The hospital had been waking up for about half an hour. The hallway had grown steadily noisier as the sounds of the breakfast carts rattled down the hallway.

She dialed the number from the computer screen. One ring, then the answering machine. A voice with the same instructions.

Diane hesitated for a fraction of a second before she introduced herself to the machine.

“Hello, my name is Dr. Diane Fallon. I’m a forensic anthropologist and director-”

There was a sudden click on the other end and a mature male voice spoke. “Did you say you’re a forensic anthropologist?”

“Yes. I got your number from your Web page.”

“Is this about Aidan?”

“Possibly.”

“I’m his father, Declan Kavanagh. Have you found my son?”

“I don’t know for sure. Can I tell you what I’ve found?”

Diane explained only that skeletal remains were found in a remote area of a farm and that she had analyzed them. She told him that analysis of the remains suggested that the bones belonged to a young male, six foot two, who grew up in a cool climate and was basically a vegetarian, but ate fish. She wondered if perhaps he had a childhood allergy to beef. He’d had osteitis pubis, possibly from the side-to-side movement of playing hockey, and he should have had considerable groin pain from it at one time. He had olecranon bursitis that should have given him elbow pain, and a broken left tibia-shin. There was a possible archaeology connection. He disappeared probably between March and June of 1998-about the time of spring break for many schools. The sheriff of the county where the remains were located recently sent out queries across the country. She had plugged key words into an Internet search engine and came up with the Web page.