Catherine Coulter - Riptide

“Old Jacob was a homicidal maniac?”

“Eh?” He spun around. “Oh, no, Ms. Powell. He just didn’t like nobody hanging around his place. He was a real loner, once Miranda up and died on him.”

“Who was Miranda? His wife?”

“Oh, no. She was his golden retriever. He buried his wife so long ago I can’t even remember her. Yep, she lived to be thirteen, just keeled over one day.”

“His wife was only thirteen?”

“No, his golden retriever, Miranda. She just up and died. Old Jacob was never the same after that. Losing someone you love, so I hear, can be real hard on a man. My Maude promised me a long time ago that she’d outlive me, so maybe I’d never have to know what it’s like.”

Becca followed the sheriff back up the basement stairs. She looked back once at the ghastly pile of white bones wearing Calvin Klein jeans and a sexy pink tank top. Poor girl. She thought of the Edgar Allan Poe tale The Cask of Amontillado and prayed that this girl had been dead before she was stuffed in that wall.

Sheriff Gaffney had laid the skull on top of the skeleton’s chest.

An hour and a half later, Tyler stood next to her, off to the side of the front porch. Dr. Baines, shorter than Becca, whiplash thin, big glasses, came out nearly at a run, followed by two young men in white coats carrying the skeleton carefully on a gurney.

“I never thought Mr. Marley could murder anyone,” Dr. Baines said, his voice fast and low. “Funny how things happen, isn’t it? All this time, no one knew, no one even guessed.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose, nodded to Becca and to Tyler, then spoke briefly to the men as they gently lifted the gurney into the back of the van.

The unmarked white van pulled away, followed by Dr. Baines’s car. “Dr. Baines is our local physician. He got on the phone to the medical examiner in Augusta after I called him about the skeleton. The ME told him what to do, which is kind of dumb, since he’s a doctor and I’m an officer of the law, and of course I’d be really careful around the skeleton and take pictures from all angles and be careful not to mess up the crime scene.”

Becca remembered him carefully setting the skull on the skeleton’s chest. But he was right, with a skeleton, who cared?

Sheriff Gaffney said on a shrug, “In any case, Dr. Baines will take the skeleton into Augusta to the medical examiner and then we’ll see.”

Sheriff Gaffney looked out at the two dozen people who were hovering about and shook his head and waved them away. Of course no one moved. They continued talking, pointing at the house, maybe even at her.

Sheriff Gaffney said, “They’ll go on home in a bit. Just natural human curiosity, that’s all. Now, Ms. Powell, I know you’re upset and all, being a female with fine sensibilities, just like my Maude, but I ask that you keep yourself calm for just a while longer.”

He had to be about the same age as her father would have been had he lived, Becca thought, and smiled at him then, because he meant well. “I’ll try, Sheriff. You don’t have any daughters, do you?”

“No, ma’am, just a bunch of boys, all hard-noses, always back-talking me, and covered with mud and sweat half the time. Not at all the same thing for little girls. My Maude would have given anything for a little girl, but God didn’t send us one, just all them dirty boys.

“Now, Ms. Powell, Dr. Baines will be talking to the folk in the medical examiner’s office in Augusta-that’s our capital, you know-once he gets there. They’ll do an autopsy, or whatever it is they do on a mess of bones. The folk up there have lots of formal training, so they’ll know what they’re doing. Like I told you, they’ll document that old Jacob or somebody hit her right in the forehead, smashed her head in. They’ll determine that it was real mean, vicious, that blow. In the meantime we gotta find out who she is. There wasn’t any ID on her. You got any more ideas about it?”

“Calvin Klein jeans have been popular since the early to mid-eighties. That means that she wasn’t murdered and sealed behind that wall before 1980.”

Sheriff Gaffney carefully wrote that down. He hummed softly while he wrote. He looked up then and stared at her. “You sure do look familiar, Ms. Powell.”

“Maybe you saw me in a fashion magazine, Sheriff. No, don’t even consider that, I’m just joking with you. I’m not a model. I’m sure I would have remembered you, sir, if I’d ever met you before.”

“Well, that’s likely enough,” he said, nodding. “Tyler, you got any thoughts about this?”

Tyler shook his head.

Sheriff Gaffney looked as if he would say something else, then he shut his mouth. However, he gave Tyler another long look. “I’ll be in touch,” he said, snapped out a sharp salute, and walked to his car, a brown Ford with a light bar over the top. At the last moment, he looked back at them, and he was frowning. Then he managed to squeeze his bulk into the driver’s side. He hadn’t been interested in her background, a blessing. Evidently, he realized that she could have had nothing to do with this and so who she was, where she was from, and what she did for a living simply did not matter.

“He’s amazing,” Becca said as he drove away. “Too bad he didn’t have a daughter to go with all those dirty boys.”

She looked to see that Tyler was staring down at his feet. She lightly touched her fingers to his arm. “What’s wrong? You’re afraid I really am going to be hysterical about finding that poor girl?”

“No, it’s not that. You saw the sheriff. Even though he didn’t really say anything, it was clear enough what he was thinking.”

“I don’t know what you mean. What’s wrong, Tyler?”

“I realize it occurred to him, just before he got into his car, that the skeleton might well be Ann.”

Becca looked at him blankly, slowly shaking her head back and forth.

“My wife. She wore Calvin Klein jeans.”

Becca walked into the Riptide Pharmacy in the middle of Foxglove Avenue the next morning and found, to her horror, that she was the center of attention. For someone who wanted to fade into the woodwork, she wasn’t doing it very well. Everywhere she went, she was stared at, questioned, introduced to relatives. She was the girl who’d found the skeleton. She was even given special treatment at the Union 76 gas station at the end of Poison Oak Circle. The Food Fort manager, Mrs. Dobbs, wanted her autograph. Three people told her she looked familiar.

It was too late to dye her hair black. She went home and stayed there. She got at least twenty phone calls that day. She didn’t see Tyler, but he’d been right about what the sheriff had thought, because everybody else was thinking it, too, and was talking about it over coffee, to their neighbors, and not all that quietly. Tyler knew it, too, of course, but he didn’t say anything when he came over later that evening. He looked stoic. She had wanted to yell at everyone that they were wrong, that Tyler was an excellent man, that no way could he have hurt anyone, much less his wife, but she knew she couldn’t take the chance, couldn’t call attention to herself anymore. It was too dangerous for her, and so she listened to everyone talk about Ann, Tyler’s wife and Sam’s mother, who had supposedly disappeared fifteen months before without a word to anybody, not her husband, not her son. Ann had had a mother until two years before, but Mildred Kendred had died and left Ann all alone with Tyler. She’d had no other relatives to hassle Tyler about where his wife had supposedly gone. And just look at poor little Sam, so quiet, so withdrawn, he’d probably seen something, everyone was sure of that. That he wasn’t at all afraid of his stepfather just meant that the poor little boy had blocked the worst of it out.