The Blessed Bones

by Kathryn Casey

  “Your oldest. The one who is twenty-two now?”

  Clyde picked up my dollar and put it into the register. I noticed that he didn’t ring it up. Since I’m a police chief, not an internal revenue agent, I didn’t really care, but I kept my eyes on him.

  The interesting thing? He didn’t answer my question. “Well, gotta get to work on that car. The guy’s expecting it later today. Like I said: always good to see you, Chief.”

  “Same to you,” I said, as I turned to leave. “See you when the tank nears empty.”

  Clyde sniggered a bit and waved me off, and I walked outside crunching my candy bar. As soon as I climbed into the Suburban, I put in a call to Stef. As I drove off, the gas station disappeared in the rearview mirror.

  “Yeah, Chief,” Stef said. “What have you got for me?”

  “Clyde Benson tells me that his older kids, which should include Lynlee, went to the public school in town. But you said that you checked those records?”

  “I called and asked them to look Danny and Lynlee up. The secretary said she did and didn’t find anything on the computer.”

  “Okay, well, Danny they might not have. What I’m hearing is that Clyde Benson told folks that Lynlee took Danny and ran away when he was still young. I’m thinking not long after she filed that report.”

  “But Lynlee was just a kid, too,” Stef said.

  “Yeah, she was. And something’s not right here. Clyde has family photos in the station. Based on the ages of the kids, I’m pretty sure I pointed at a photo of Lynlee and he claimed it was a different daughter.”

  “So you confronted him?”

  “No. I wasn’t there to do that. Not yet. I dropped in on him to worm some information out of him. Based on what he told me, I want you to go to the school and ask to see the physical records for that time period. Look up Lynlee. If you find anything, make copies and bring it back to the station. I’m heading to the morgue for a consult with Doc. I’ll check in with you when I’m done.”

  “Got it. But, Chief?”

  “Yes, Stef. What?”

  “When we arrest Clyde, I want to put the cuffs on.”

  I sucked in a sigh. “Just get those records.”

  Max was already at the morgue hobnobbing with Doc when I showed up, but Ash Crawford hadn’t yet arrived. “Did our ex-marshal get bored and take off to solve another case?” I heard the sarcasm in my voice.

  “He’ll be here in a few minutes. I told him not to rush,” Doc said with a grimace.

  “Good for you.”

  “Clara, quit goading me,” Doc warned.

  Max stood far enough behind Doc that the old man couldn’t see him, and I could tell he was loving that Doc and I were sparring. Just then, a gravelly voice boomed from behind me: “Glad you waited for me. But we can get busy now.”

  Height-wise with the hat on, Crawford filled up a good bit of the doorway and had a look on his face like he’d caught me at an awkward moment. Too bad for him—I wasn’t embarrassed.

  Doc shook his head and sighed, while Max jumped in and changed the subject: “Ash is right. Where’s the body?”

  “This way,” Doc said, shooting me a disappointed glance.

  Crawford stewed, a frown on his face, as we followed Doc to the far autopsy table, the one near the back windows, frosted to keep anyone from seeing in. He’d cleaned the bones, scraped off the remaining muscle and tissue and sent samples to the state lab’s toxicology department for analysis. The bones were then washed in a solution of hot water and detergent and arranged as they were inside the body, the result resembling a skeleton nearly clean and complete enough to hang in a doctor’s office. Beside the mother, Doc had laid out the baby’s tiny bones.

  “On the off-chance that the girl’s not from around here, I’m having a test done that can peg environmental influences on the body, to test for elements prevalent in people who live in different parts of the country, the Midwest, the East or West Coasts.”

  “They can do that?” Crawford asked, sounding impressed.

  “Yes, your friend at the lab can do that,” Doc said as we spread out around the stainless-steel table. “It’ll take a while, though. I hope we have her identified before then.”

  “What did you find to suggest cause of death?” I asked. “Anything?”

  Crawford crouched down and scanned the bones. “Bullet holes? Scrapes from a knife?”

  “No sign of damage from a bullet,” Doc said. “And no knicks or cuts in the bones that would indicate that a sharp weapon had been used.”

  “Fractures?” I asked. “Besides the damage to the skull done by the construction crew?”

  “No fractures,” Doc said. “I don’t see any evidence of blunt-force trauma.”

  “So we don’t know any more than when I left here this morning after the CT scan, I guess?” Crawford looked disappointed, maybe more than that. Perhaps a touch angry.

  “Actually, we know a lot more,” I countered. He grimaced, then shook his head.

  “Clara means that we know what didn’t happen to her,” Max said to the ex-marshal.

  “Yes. We know she probably wasn’t shot or knifed, or bludgeoned to death,” Doc said. “Other forms of homicide leave more subtle clues, I’m afraid. So I think this is one that’s going to take some time. We’ll have to hope toxicology shows something.”

  “Or that we get that facial reconstruction back and identify her. That might give us clues on how she died.” Turning to our interloper, I asked, “When can we expect that the reconstruction will be done?”

  “Not exactly sure when, but later today,” Crawford answered.

  I was surprised, and I had to fight the urge to compliment him. A same-day turnaround on a facial reconstruction sounded nearly impossible. Clearly, as much as I hated to admit it, Crawford did have valuable connections.

  “Right now they’re inputting the images from the CT scan into the computer,” he explained. “Once that’s done, the program will calculate skin depth and draw the face.”

  Doc took off his glasses and grinned so wide his ears notched up half an inch. “Technology is incredible. It can do in an hour what it takes a human days or more to accomplish.” Then he turned and looked directly at me. “And we should be glad we have it, or a case like this might never be solved.”

  “I’ll get a rush on that tox screen, too,” Crawford said. Doc nodded, and the retired marshal took his leave.

  After Crawford left, I walked Max to the morgue door, and he leaned close and whispered, “I’m expecting a phone call from you tonight. One missed night, okay to skip our call, but not two. Okay?”

  I considered how we had two lives: our work and our personal relationship. So far, we’d been able to keep those separate, but Max ran his hand down my arm before he walked out the door. I turned and saw Doc watching, a keen interest in his expression.

  “So, you and Max Anderson, huh?” He seemed to ponder that for a moment. “I thought earlier that I was picking up on chemistry between the two of you.”

  “We’re just really good friends.”

  Doc scrunched his nose. “Didn’t look that way.”

  Eager to change the subject, I asked, “Any more information about my mother?”

  Doc released an “Oh!”

  “There is, I guess.”

  “Yes, I meant to tell you. The neurologist and I had a phone consult while I waited for you to arrive. He suspects your mother has done this to herself.”

  I thought of Mother and what Sariah and Naomi had said, how she’d been troubled by the family finances. “Stress?”

  “No. Not that. At least, not exactly, although that may have been one factor.” Doc shook his head. “I know that your mother is an herbalist, that she makes and sells potions, poultices, and the like to folks throughout the area. I’ve heard stories that she’s quite good at it.”

  I envisioned my mother’s kitchen: buckets filled with herbs suspended in various solutions that she funneled into small bottles with
eyedroppers. Handwritten labels for her sleep potion; headache relief; indigestion; toothache; hair growth; skin disorders. From the ceiling she hung herbs and flowers to dry, and she bought cheesecloth by the bolt to wrap her poultices. “Yes, she is, Doc. Mother treats nearly every illness with some kind of a mixture of herbs and flowers, weeds she pulls out of the ground in the woods. Why is this important?”

  “Does she treat herself?”

  I thought back to my childhood, working in the kitchen with Mother, how she bent over the stove breathing in herbs to treat her coughs, the time she cut herself while chopping carrots and had me tie a poultice on her wound. “Yes, she does.”

  “The neurologist thought so.”

  “Explain what you’re getting at,” I prodded, losing patience. “Did Mother poison herself?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. Well, maybe in a sense. He thinks she overmedicated herself. His theory is that your mother has been ingesting some form of willow. That arch in her back suggests that she’s suffering with arthritis throughout her body. A condition like hers can be very painful, so it’s not surprising that she tried to find something to relieve it.”

  “Willow?” I remembered going out to the forest with Mother, afternoons spent in the rich air, surrounded by green, breathing in the fresh breeze as we scrounged on the ground and pulled up herbs, the times mother stopped at a white willow tree along the river and scraped the bark. “As in willow bark tea?”

  “Yes, that would have done it.”

  “Done what?”

  “Well, the Ancient Egyptians first used willow bark to treat aches and pains, headaches, backaches and such,” Doc explained. “The bark has salicin in it, a type of painkiller that predates aspirin. Salicin is the basis for salicylic acid, which reacts in a similar way to aspirin in the body.”

  “So this salicin got into Mother’s brain and caused the stroke?”

  “Not exactly. The neurologist is speculating that your mother took heavy doses to treat her back pain. Like aspirin, salicin also acts as a blood thinner. He’s determined that your mother suffered a hemorrhagic stroke. We believe she probably has a tumor in her brain, and that since her blood is dangerously thin, it caused a bleed.”

  I took in a deep breath. I thought about Mother, so dead set against Gentile doctors, mainstream medicine. She’d always been smug, bragging that she knew more than any doctor who’d gone through medical school. As a child, I had helped her concoct her potions and listened to her murmur about the wisdom of the ages. “These recipes came down from my great-grandmother,” she’d cooed. “They are the backbone of our knowledge on medicine.”

  “Doc, Mother always talked about how her herbs were nature’s gift. How they were so much healthier than prescription medicines.”

  “Many people think that because something is natural it can’t hurt them,” he replied. “That isn’t always true.”

  “So what’s next?”

  “The neurologist is running a scan this afternoon to take a better look at that tumor. We need to find out if it’s cancer.”

  Alarmed, I repeated, “Cancer?”

  Doc’s voice grew cautioning: “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Clara. Maybe it’s not that at all.”

  I had to get back to work, but I took the elevator upstairs and stood beside Mother’s hospital bed. In the hallway outside the open door, nurses buzzed past rushing to the rooms of other patients. The oxygen still flowed; the machines still beeped. When I took her hand, Mother stirred but didn’t wake. I didn’t know if I wanted her to or not. I hoped that if she did, she’d be happy to see me, but I doubted she’d react that way. More likely? She’d send me packing.

  Doc had said the swelling had begun to subside and that they would awaken Mother the next day, by weaning her off the medicines. Before that happened, I wanted this time alone with her. How sad that this was the only way we could be together, with her unable to open her eyes and see me, talk to me, hear me. I traced her profile with my right hand, while I did the same with my left on my own face. Even through touch, we were a match, so very much alike, and yet worlds apart.

  Fifteen

  A man with an overflowing cart pulled up to the checkout at the Pine City Walmart. The cashier in lane eleven, Edie McPherson, had worked at the store next to the highway for twenty-four years. She’d started as a bagger, worked in electronics for ten years, then moved to the cash registers after she had a run-in with the manager. The guy blamed her when someone stole a digital tape recorder. He thought Edie should have been watching the racks at the same time she was busy helping customers. It had happened on Black Friday, when the store was packed. The whole thing struck her as ludicrous.

  Mostly, Edie liked to work at the registers because she could talk to folks as they went through her line. That and she took an interest in what they were buying. Sometimes the items matched the person, other times not so much. What she noticed about the man unloading on the belt was that most of what he’d bought looked like baby supplies, for a newborn.

  “Your wife having a baby?” she asked, as she scanned a six-pack of onesies and flopped them into one of the plastic bags on the carousel. “These are super cute. My kids wore onesies all the time. They really come in handy.”

  “Yeah.” The man looked at his watch and frowned at her.

  No reason for that, Edie thought, but she wanted him to be happy. The customer was always right, after all. “I’m one of the fastest cashiers in the store. I’ll get you out of here quick, no worries.”

  “Thanks. That would help.” The guy shot her a grin, but what he said next didn’t sound particularly friendly. “That and less conversation.”

  Edie molded her lips into a straight line, trying not to frown, and kept silent. That only lasted long enough to scan a shaker of baby powder and a pump bottle of lotion. “I guess you don’t know what it is, huh?”

  The guy gave her a strange look.

  “The baby,” Edie clarified. “All the onesies you’re buying are yellow, white or green. No pink or blue. Usually when folks know the sex, they buy the really cute pink ones with flowers for the girls and the blue giraffes and trucks for the boys.”

  The guy didn’t appear amused. “No. I don’t know. As long as it’s healthy, like they say, it doesn’t matter.”

  “That’s the important thing. Absolutely.”

  Edie kept working, scanning the newborn-size disposable diapers, a pacifier. Next came a case of infant formula and plastic bottles.

  “Not nursing, I guess,” she said. The man shot her an impatient glance. “Not saying your wife needs to, just that most moms do.”

  The guy grunted but didn’t answer.

  As the cart emptied, the items at its base came into view. Instead of more baby supplies, the man had jugs of lye drain cleaner along with a case of large black plastic bags, bleach and jumbo-size rolls of paper towels.

  Something about it struck Edie as funny. An aficionado of true crime television shows, she laughed and said, “Looks like you’ve got everything you’d need to get rid of a body except the handsaw.”

  The guy blinked hard. He gaped at her as if she’d said something wrong. To clear up any misunderstanding, she explained: “On the shows I watch, you’d be pegged right away for a killer. The lye to dissolve the body and the bags to put the bones in to cart them away. Bleach and paper towels to clean up. But the bad guys usually cut the corpse up first, so you’d need a saw.”

  The man continued to stare at her, his face devoid of expression. His teeth clenched, he ordered, “Just finish this up.”

  The way he said it sent a shiver through Edie as she hit the total on the machine. It was her biggest sale of the day. “That’ll be three-hundred-seventy-six dollars and fifty-seven cents.”

  Usually, especially for an order that expensive, folks paid with credit cards, but this guy pulled out his wallet and handed her four hundred-dollar bills. While she counted out his change, he loaded the bulging bags into the cart.


  Trying not to let her eyes meet his, Edie did her best to smile and said, “Thank you, come again.” He didn’t respond.

  As soon as he turned to leave, Edie nervously began to scan the items from the next cart, but as he shuffled off, she glanced over to watch the man make his way to the doors.

  Sixteen

  Leaving the hospital, I considered what to do while we waited for the facial reconstruction to come in. It could be hours. We’d be lucky to get preliminary results on the lab work the next day. And the DNA? Days, maybe a full week.

  Cases like this, ones where a crime took place months or years earlier, weren’t usually sprints but marathons. While we waited on more evidence, Max was back at his office working on another case. No telling where Ash Crawford went when he left the morgue. I could have put the case away for the day, but I kept seeing the woman’s body before Doc cleaned the bones, the mummified tissue stretched across her swollen abdomen and the baby’s skull visible. Something wrong had happened. People didn’t bury pregnant women who died of natural causes in unmarked graves.

  Thanks to Doc’s autopsy, I did have more information—approximate age and height, a guess on when she died. So, I decided to head back to the station and scout around NCIC again on my computer. Not long after, I was at my desk doing just that, scrolling through the FBI’s database. I’d expanded the geographical area to include Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona and other neighboring states. The results were depressing: forty missing teenage girls in the past two years. Then I considered what Doc had said, that our Jane Doe may have been in the ground up to five years. When I went back that far, I had sixty-two.

  I narrowed down the height parameters to between five feet and five feet four, giving Doc’s assessment a wider range, just in case he was off a bit. Nothing, of course, was rock certain. I read the case files, abandoned those that didn’t fit, and kept honing down the prospects.

  I ended up with four girls who looked to be possible matches. I ran off their photos and the brief summaries of their cases.