Aggie looked beside and behind her grandmother. No one was there.
Mumsie’s eyes were gentle and warm, and she released a small sigh. “You always were the dreamer.”
“Mumsie?” Aggie regretted calling to her the instant she uttered her name.
A shutter fell over Mumsie’s eyes. She blinked and focused on Aggie instead of whoever it was she’d been seeing or talking to. Now their eyes met in a mutual pain, raw and guarded.
Aggie ignored the hesitation inside that made her want to pull back, retreat, and distance herself with the bitter edges of independent strength. Instead, she padded across the floor and knelt beside Mumsie, reaching out to her grandmother and placing her hand over Mumsie’s. She moved Mumsie’s fingers aside gently, revealing the face of the person in the photograph.
A young woman, no more than twenty, in black-and-white. A vibrant smile, and eyes that seemed to dance, with a crown of black hair set in pretty rolls.
“You?” Aggie ventured with a soft whisper.
Mumsie shook her head. Her index finger traced the woman’s jawline, and she dropped her gaze to watch its path across the photograph. “No. Not me.”
A tear dripped from Mumsie’s face. Aggie caught it in her hand. She closed her fingers around it, knowing. “Hazel?”
Mumsie swallowed and gave a short nod. Her fingers splayed across the glass, and she refused to look up. Her head shook, but it was the shiver of age and nerves that kept Mumsie in movement.
“Who was Hazel Grayson?” Aggie lifted her hand that had caught Mumsie’s tear and rested it on Mumsie’s nightgown-clad shoulder.
They both stared down at the photograph as Mumsie moved her hand away.
“She is my sister,” Mumsie murmured.
“Is?” Aggie found the present tense to be a bit disturbing.
Mumsie’s eyes were confused as she lifted them to look squarely at Aggie. “No. She was. She was my sister.”
A sob caught in Mumsie’s throat. The desperation that filled her face tore into Aggie with the revelation that Mumsie’s agony was not unmatched to her own. Instead of plying Mumsie to answer all the questions swirling in Aggie’s mind, she scooted closer to her grandmother. Reaching around the aged, fragile shoulders, Aggie pulled her near and rested her cheek against Mumsie’s hair.
“This is why I came,” she whispered.
Mumsie sniffed. “Nonsense.” But the quiver in her voice belied her stubbornness.
“It is,” Aggie insisted. She didn’t know of Hazel—Mumsie’s dead sister—she’d never heard of her before. The surname of Grayson? Not even a hint of it. But the pain that laced Mumsie’s voice, the raw grief reflected in her eyes? Yes. Aggie knew that. She understood that.
Grief made its own indelible mark on a person’s soul, and only those who toiled through its muck could understand the exhaustion that came with it. Of the final never seeming final. Of the proverbial strain of one’s hand as they reached into the darkness to somehow touch for just one last time, the person who had left before anyone was ready to say farewell.
There was never a good time for Death to visit.
There was never a time that Grief would leave.
CHAPTER 17
Neither of them said much. Aggie made the coffee while Mumsie shuffled to the front door and retrieved her morning paper. Aggie preferred to read it online or just skim the national headlines, but Mumsie might be one of the few remaining people on earth who still snapped open the black-and-white newsprint every morning over breakfast.
“Do you want cream in your coffee?” Aggie heard Mumsie shuffle back into the room and asked without looking up. When there was no answer, she lifted her head to glance over her shoulder.
Mumsie stood by the table, the newspaper discarded, and a padded envelope in her hand. “This was on the porch for you.”
Aggie put the coffeepot back on its warmer and frowned. “For me?” She wiped her hands on a towel, damp from the steam that had drifted from the pot. Reaching out, she wasn’t quite sure what to make of Mumsie’s drawn brows. Of course, the morning hadn’t been conducive to rest and relaxation, so it was no wonder that stress showed on Mumsie’s face. She must know that Aggie had a litany of questions just waiting to cascade out.
Hazel Grayson—the roses saying “not over”—why?
And being buried in Fifteen Puzzle Row?
Aggie stuffed the questions to the back of her mind for the moment and took the brown envelope from Mumsie’s hand. It wasn’t large, but she felt the bubble padding between her fingers as she ripped the top off. She reached inside, fumbling for paper or whatever object made the envelope puff out. Her fingers came out empty.
She pursed her lips and caught Mumsie’s curious look. “Must be small.” Crossing the kitchen, she held the opened envelope over the table and tipped it upside down.
“Holy Joe!” Mumsie’s exclamation filled the room, her hand clamped over her mouth.
Aggie dropped the envelope as if it were laced with poison. “What is that?” She eyed the pile of debris that littered the tabletop. It appeared to be a cream ceramic substance turned brown with time. But the variance of color in its minuscule edges made Aggie curl her lip in horrified worry.
“It’s bone,” Mumsie stated matter-of-factly, but the shake of her hand as she reached for the edge of the table reminded Aggie to care for her grandmother first. She made fast work of pulling out a chair for the elderly woman.
“Sit, Mumsie.”
“Of course I’ll sit. You sit. Let’s all just sit.” It was nervous chatter coming from her now. She tapped the Formica table with her index finger just shy of the supposed bone fragments. “I am not amused by this.”
“If that’s what it is,” Aggie inserted quickly. Heck, the first day she’d arrived here, there’d been a fake skeleton tossed into the backyard. Who was to say this wasn’t fake also? She voiced her suspicions.
Mumsie’s lips thinned as she considered it. “Who is it?” There was a tinge of fascination in Mumsie’s voice that surprised Aggie and made her shoot a quick look of shock in her grandmother’s direction.
“Don’t touch it!” Aggie half shouted as Mumsie reached for a piece.
“Why not?” Mumsie lifted it.
Aggie snatched it from Mumsie’s hand and dropped it back on its small pile of bony friends. “Because it could be evidence!”
“Evidence of what?” Mumsie’s expression was innocent enough, yet the sharpness in her eyes made Aggie narrow her own as she realized Mumsie seemed less flustered by this than she did.
“I-I don’t know.”
“Call your young man,” Mumsie said.
“He’s not my young man,” Aggie muttered as she fumbled in the pocket of her flannel pajama pants for her phone. “And I’m calling the police is what I’m doing.”
Mumsie tossed her hand in a flimsy wave. “Oh yes. Because we must file this as another prank.”
Aggie tended to agree, but she wasn’t about to exclude the cops from this any more than she was intending to exclude the bone master himself. It shouldn’t have surprised her then when Collin answered the phone. She’d intended to call the police first and had misdialed by subconscious instinct.
“I need you,” she rasped, staring at the bones.
“Ahhh, turnabout’s fair play, I’d say.” Collin’s teasing lilt brought little comfort to Aggie’s jagged nerves. “I do pray no one has taken a shovel to you.”
“Worse!” Aggie hissed.
“Worse?” Collin’s teasing drained from his voice.
“Someone sent me bones!” Aggie stared at the pile as if they might come alive.
“Bones.” It was more a statement of disbelief.
“Yes.” Aggie gripped her phone tighter while eyeing Mumsie, who had once again lifted a fragment and was holding it up to the window as though lifting a diamond to judge its clarity.
“Well, isn’t that a fine kettle?”
“Get over here now.” Aggie wasn’t on
e to mince words. She caught Mumsie’s wobbly smirk. The old woman was reviving from the morning’s emotion and regaining her spit and vinegar. Well, Aggie certainly wasn’t! “I need you, Collin, please.”
She wasn’t clear why she all but whimpered and completely shamed herself and those of her sex by begging Collin to race to her rescue. But she had no desire to figure this out on her own. Not with a picture of Mumsie’s dead sister still lying on the floor upstairs, and the words Not over replaying in her mind like a broken record.
“On my way, Love.”
She didn’t even bother to tell him not to call her that. Now wasn’t the time, and for some reason it made her feel a little better.
It was definitely bone, Collin confirmed. The police had scooped all the evidence off the table in CSI style while Aggie bristled in the corner of the kitchen, cupping her mug of coffee like a lifeline.
“We won’t know if it’s human,” Collin whispered in her ear, “until a lab looks at it.”
Aggie glowered at him. “Is that supposed to comfort me?”
Collin raised ginger brows. “I suppose it might, especially if it turns out to be pig bone.”
Aggie grimaced. “Something still had to die.”
“Ahhh,” Collin nodded. “Isn’t that the way of things, eh?”
“Aren’t you supposed to know what kind of bone it is? You’re an archaeologist, for pity’s sake.” Aggie heard the annoyance in her voice, though it didn’t seem to bother Collin one bit. He had to understand it was her nerves. And nerves made her brittle, sometimes snappy.
“Well”—his breath at her ear moved a few strands of her black hair and tickled her neck—“you haven’t exactly provided me with a full skeleton like before. Fragments are hard to identify. And I’m an archaeologist, not a forensic anthropologist.”
“What’s the difference?” Aggie didn’t really care, but her nerves were making her chatty.
“Archaeology is a part of anthropology, but I’m afraid I make more of a study of the people, the culture, and the time periods than I do the scientific analysis of the bone itself.”
“Then why did you want samples from the two unknown graves at the cemetery?”
Collin grimaced as though he knew he wasn’t explaining it in a way she could comprehend. Especially considering that the detective was dropping the padded envelope in which the bone fragments had been delivered into a plastic evidence bag and had pretty much snagged her full focus.
“It’s my business to discover the graves, their origin, the people, the story per se. And it’s a forensic anthropologist’s business to identify, classify, and often date the remains. While I have some experience in it, I would need to collect the samples and send them to a laboratory to be analyzed. I can made educated guesses, but without a macroscopic analysis, perhaps a CT analysis—”
“Fine. Fine.” Aggie waved off the impending science behind the explanation. “So you’re Indiana Jones, not a lab tech. Got it.”
“Hardly a fair comparison and on multiple levels.” Collin’s glib response was lost on Aggie as her eyes connected with a slip of paper under the table. Maybe a receipt. Aggie moved toward it mindlessly. Something to do. Pick up the clutter. She wove between the police, ignoring Collin, who was calling her name. Bending, she reached under the table and pulled the paper out, glancing down at it.
It was not a receipt.
She didn’t deserve death. He didn’t deserve life.
“What is this?” Aggie’s hand shook as she lifted the paper toward an officer.
The detective reached for it, his hand encased in a glove. He gave Aggie a discriminating look. “You shouldn’t be handling things, ma’am.”
“I-I saw it under the table.”
“Was this in the package?” he asked.
Aggie shrugged. She really had no clue. She hadn’t seen a note—unless Mumsie had—and her grandmother had taken to her recliner and the morning news in order to avoid the chaos. “I don’t know. It must have been,” she finally answered.
“Any idea what it means?” the detective inquired.
“None. Nor do I have any concept as to why someone would send me bones.” Irritation crowded Aggie’s throat. “Heck, it wasn’t even mailed. It was set on my grandmother’s front porch with her newspaper! How hard can this be to figure out? It is not a teenage prank.” Her last comment was delivered with a scowl.
Collin’s breath was in her ear. “Shhh, Love, you’re going to need the law on your side.”
Aggie gave him a withering glare, but the look Collin returned was innocently blank of emotion.
The detective offered an empathetic smile. “I understand this is all a bit weird.” He shot a glance at Collin’s stitched head. “And that.”
“And the break-in at the cemetery, and the skeleton dummy in my grandmother’s backyard . . .” Aggie chugged her coffee now.
“Ma’am—”
“Miss,” Aggie corrected.
The detective stifled a sigh, and she could see him run his tongue along the inside of his cheek as if to squelch his impatience with her. She needed to temper her emotions—or rather temper her temper.
“Miss,” the detective tried again, “we are taking all of it seriously. A thorough investigation will be made.”
“And you’ll be as slow about it as molasses on a cold winter’s day.” Mumsie’s aged voice filled the room. She tapped her walker forward as she moved into her kitchen. “Just like always.”
“Excuse me?” The detective didn’t appear amused to be sandwiched between the older smarty-pants version of Aggie.
Collin, however, appeared to see the humor. The dimple in his cheek deepened.
Aggie opened her mouth to speak. She really needed to smooth the situation over. Collin was right. No need to sour the police against them.
But Mumsie was ahead of Aggie and wasn’t shy about it either. Having walked up to the detective, Mumsie tilted her head to the side as if assessing him. Her cap of gray curls made her green eyes sharper, but her wrinkles softened them—a curiously cute and stubborn contrast at the same time.
“Mill Creek doesn’t have a grand record of solving crimes.” Mumsie tapped the detective’s chest, her finger bouncing off the button on his uniform.
Aggie bit the inside of her cheek.
“But you do your darndest, Detective. And I’ll do mine.”
Apparently, Mumsie was going to pull her own Miss Marple on the police force of Mill Creek.
CHAPTER 18
Imogene
There were good outcomes and bad ones when frightening circumstances struck. Imogene was trying desperately to focus on the good—one being positioned against Ollie on her right while jostling against Sam Pickett on her left as he transported her home in his truck. But the bad was so difficult to ignore as they passed another car with a concerned driver apparent behind the wheel.
“How many were hurt?” She couldn’t ask how many were killed. The idea of the post office exploding into smithereens was awful, but made horrifying when considering potential loss of life.
Sam shot her a glance. She noticed his knuckles whitening on the steering wheel as he gripped it tighter. “I’m not sure. Hopefully no one.”
Ollie shifted, and it caused Imogene to lean further into him. He’d removed his soiled shirt at some point, and now his overalls were rolled down to his waist, and his white T-shirt was all that was between Imogene and his skin. While her head was pounding, she wasn’t going to show squeamishness even if she was aching to crawl into bed and sleep off the headache.
“Reminds me of . . .” Sam’s mouth tightened, and he didn’t finish his sentence.
Silence filled the truck’s cab as cornfields whisked by on either side. The window was down on Sam’s side, and Imogene drew in a deep breath of warm country air, touched with hints of manure and cornstalks.
“The war?” Imogene finished for Sam.
His fingers adjusted on the steering wheel. She sensed Ollie stiffe
n.
“Aw, shucks,” she mumbled. “I’m sorry.” Imogene knew Ollie never spoke of his experiences overseas. Having just met Sam, she couldn’t decipher whether he was one who would revel in the retelling of stories or turn into himself. But today it’d be poor taste to find any glory in war. Not when the explosion of the post office was a grim reminder of what the boys had faced every day for years.
“Who would do such a thing?” Sam craned his neck to see the road and steer around a pothole.
“Blow up the post office?” Imogene inserted.
Sam nodded.
Ollie braced his elbow on the open window and rubbed his nose as he looked at the passing fields. But Imogene also noted with vague and painful curiosity that his left arm had wrapped around her body, holding her more firmly. It felt better. Her head hurt so badly, and the stabilization made a difference. She ignored propriety or appearances and allowed herself to rest her head against his shoulder. Though Ollie didn’t acknowledge her, she noticed Sam’s sideways glance.
“Some meatball, I’m sure,” Sam offered. It was his explanation as to who the culprit might be.
“Sure, but why?” Imogene was always asking why lately. Disorder had followed the boys home from the war. Whoever thought they could all move on with their lives needed to take a trip to the loony bin.
“Your brother will figure it out.” Ollie’s voice silenced Sam’s. Imogene felt the bony thinness of Ollie’s shoulder. He’d lost a lot of weight overseas.
“Chet?” Imogene mumbled against Ollie’s shirt. A light-headed feeling washed over her, and she closed her eyes. “Chet’s got other things to do.”
“He’s gonna be busy now, though.” Ollie’s observation knifed into Imogene. She tried to lift her woozy head and glare daggers at Ollie, but it didn’t work.
“Nothing’s more important than Hazel.” Her words were muffled by Ollie’s shirt.
“You’re right,” Sam reassured her. His statement held an indefinable edge to it, and if her eyes weren’t closed, Imogene wondered if Sam was shooting Ollie warning glances to shut it.
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