Stuart Woods: Palindrome

"Funny, isn't it," Ramsey said mildly, "when you press the wrist like that the fingers don't work."

"Shit!" Williams said, and it was almost his last word. Ramsey jerked, spun the detective, and got an arm around his neck; he pulled him to the floor, his forearm pressing on the carotid artery. The darkness swam before Williams's eyes.

"Bake," he managed to say as he came close to blacking out. Ramsey lessened the pressure ever so slightly.

"Yeah, Lee? A last request?"

"Bake, the security guard saw you when you came through the main gate. You can't get away with this one."

"Oh," Ramsey said, "I came through the back gate with the pass Mary Alice gave me. Good night, Lee." He cupped Williams's chin in his hand, released the stranglehold, and grasped the back of his head with the other hand. One quick, powerful jerk, and the detective's body relaxed. Williams heard a loud snap, and he began a swift descent into a deeper darkness.

"There, that's better," Ramsey said. Those words were the last sound Williams heard before the darkness overtook him. He saw things, though. He saw his son's face, his wife's profile; he saw himself at four or five, riding in the back of a wagon, lying in hay; he saw his mother's back as she bent over a cast-iron wash pot; he saw a puppy his father gave him, his first. Then he saw nothing.

Dr. Blaylock looked around the Drummond family plot with some satisfaction. He and his crew of students had unearthed the remains of twenty-one Drummonds, and the last two were ready for the trip to the new plot and reburial. In addition to the coffins, he and his students had recovered a hundred and thirty items of some archaeological or anthropological interest, among them, pottery, clay pipes, tools, a pistol, several bone buttons, and a brass box containing three thousand dollars in Confederate one-hundred-dollar bank notes. Their work was finished, now, but for one last item. "All right, young people," he said to his group, "I want two volunteers to dismantle the erstwhile resting place of General Light-Horse Harry Lee and reassemble it in the new plot, in the space designated by Mr. Drummond. I'm afraid there will be no artifacts to find-just the hard work of removing the covering and base." He waited for his volunteers and got none. "All right," he said, "you and you." He pointed to two hefty young men. The boys sighed and took hold of tools. The former grave consisted of a single, large slab of badly weathered marble, resting on a base formed by four smaller slabs, which had been embedded deeply in the earth. The top slab lifted away easily enough and was loaded into the truck with the coffins. The base slabs required digging; one boy manned a pick, the other a shovel. They had dug down a couple of feet when they stopped.

"Dr. Blaylock, come take a look at this," the boy wielding the pick said.

"What have you got?" Blaylock asked.

"A bone, I guess," the boy said. Blaylock took a trowel and began removing small amounts of the sandy earth. The other students gathered around to watch. Three hours later, Blaylock stood back to survey the results of his work.

"Comments?" he asked no one in particular. There was a long silence, then a girl said, "Male, over six feet."

"Good," Blaylock said. "Age?"

"Not terribly old," the same girl said. "He's still got all his teeth."

Blaylock reached down and gently rotated the skull of the skeleton.

"Cause of death?"

"Bullet in the brain," a boy said. "Do you see a bullet in the skull?"

"No, sir," the boy replied. "Do you see an exit wound?"

"No, sir."

"Blow to the back of the head," the girl said.

"Good," Blaylock said. "How long would you say these remains have been in the ground?" The girl frowned, then bent over and plucked at a bit of cloth with a pair of long tweezers. "My guess is twentieth century,"she said.

"Why?" She held up the fragment. "There's a copper rivet in this cloth. Looks like Levi's to me. Levi's go back to the nineteenth century in the West, but I'll bet not here."

"You're very observant," Blaylock said. "Now, what most of all strikes you as unusual about this skeleton?" There was a lot of weight shifting and head scratching.

"Just that it's in awful good shape," the girl said.

"You disappoint me, all of you," Blaylock scolded. "Have you all given up movies and TV?"

"What do you mean, Dr. Blaylock?" a boy asked.

"I mean that it looks very much as though this man was murdered and buried in an empty grave," Blaylock said. "And not too many decades ago."

"Holy shit," the boy said.

"Not a very scientific observation, but an appropriate one," Blaylock said. "You," he said, pointing at a young man, "take the truck to the inn, and ask Germaine Drummond to call the sheriff in St. Marys. And don't mention this to anybody but her."

The sheriff, Dr. Blaylock, and Germaine stood at the graveside and stared down at the skeleton. "Dr. Blaylock," the sheriff said, "you want to hazard a guess as to how long this fellow has been in the ground?"

"It's only a wild guess-you'll need a pathologist for something closer-but I'd say twenty or thirty years."

"Germaine, do you remember anybody disappearing around here? Anything mysterious like that?"

"No, and if someone had, I'd certainly have remembered it."

"Well, I'll get somebody down here from the state crime lab to look at this," the sheriff said, "but I'm damned if I know how they're going to be able to identify it. There's no jewelry or wallet or anything else we can use to establish an identity."

"My guess is that you'll never know," Blaylock said.

"How about the teeth?" Germaine asked. "Isn't that how they identify bodies?"

"Yes," the sheriff replied, "but that only works when you've got some idea of who it is, and you just want a confirmation. You need some dental records for the comparison."

"Well, we've got a bunch of those," Germaine said.

"Dental records?"

"Yep. About two hundred yards over there, in back of the main house, there's a dentist's office. A man used to come from the mainland regularly to treat the islanders, until about ten or twelve years ago, when Grandpapa decided that the cost of putting in up-to-date equipment couldn't be justified by the reduced number of people working on the place. Everybody has gone to Jacksonville or St. Marys since then."

"Was there an X-ray machine?" Blaylock asked.

"Absolutely. Nothing was too good for the island folk, as far as Grandpapa was concerned."

"Sheriff," Blaylock said, "I'll be happy to go through those records and see if I can get a match."

"Go to it, Doc," the sheriff said. "If you can identify him, then I won't need to call in Atlanta."

"I'll get some close-up Polaroid shots of the teeth," Blaylock said, "and then you can take me to your dentist's office."

"I'd like all of you to keep this quiet, until we find out who this is," the sheriff said to the group. He looked at the skies. "We're going to have some rain, this evening, I think."

"In that case," Blaylock said, "I think we had better move this skeleton."

Late in the afternoon, Dr. Blaylock sat hunched over a light box in the dusty dental surgery, a small file drawer on the table beside him. He picked up a magnifying glass and made one more comparison of the radiograph films on the light box with the Polaroid photographs of the skeleton's teeth. He switched off the light box and stood up, massaging the back of his neck.

Then he picked up the film, placed it in an envelope, and put it into his inside coat pocket. He was confused, and when he was confused about a problem, he liked to sleep on it before making a decision. He certainly was going to sleep on this one. He turned off the overhead light and left the room. The sheriff and Germaine were waiting for him under a huge live oak. "Any luck?" the sheriff asked.