One Grave Too Many

by Beverly Connor

  “What did you do?”

  “For a while, nothing. I came back to the United States and hid out in my apartment, taking benzodiazepine to try to deaden the pain, until some of my caving friends talked me into exploring a few caves. Caves are very peaceful places—like being in a womb, I suppose. Caving helped. Milo asked me to come here. I almost said no, but I spent a few months learning about museums in general and RiverTrail in particular.”

  “Why didn’t you call?”

  “I wasn’t really fit company for anyone. I was very bitter, angry at the drop of a hat. I had to work my way through a lot of stuff before I wanted to see anyone.”

  “I would have understood.”

  “I didn’t want anyone’s understanding. I didn’t want to feel good for a long time. I didn’t deserve to feel good.” Diane fought back the tears. She was so tired of crying. Her head hurt and her eyes were sore and swollen.

  “The museum has been good for me,” she said, “even with all its little problems with the board.” The rain increased and lightning streaked across the sky, illuminating the tree line for a second. The crack of thunder rattled the windows. “Ariel wasn’t afraid of the thunder and lightning. She thought it was a great show, and she was really into loud noises. I worried about her little ears. I wouldn’t let her have earphones, no matter how much the nuns begged me.”

  “ ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’ was written on the note you gave me to analyze.”

  “Yes. Someone, I don’t know who, left the note for the musicians to put it on the playlist.”

  Frank pushed away and stared at Diane. “A coincidence?”

  “Perhaps.” Diane told him about her conversations with Gregory and about the possibility of one of Santos’ associates being in the United States.

  “Diane, why didn’t you tell me? This is serious.”

  “It’s also a long shot. He’s run the president out of Barquis. I doubt it’d be worth the effort to come after me. These days the U.S. is in no mood for terrorists. I’m sure Santos is aware of that. I’ve suspected that it has something to do with Mark Grayson trying to get me to sell the museum property.”

  “That would be a cruel thing to have done. Is he that mean?” asked Frank.

  “I believe he, like a lot of dictators, wants what he wants.”

  “Have you confronted him?”

  “I have no proof whatsoever. But I’m getting pressure from all sides.” She told him about the unpleasant visit from the mayor. “So I’ve heard that rumor about me before.”

  “I’ll tell Izzy. He didn’t know. . . .”

  Diane stood up and began gathering the pictures. “He didn’t know. I wonder why, then, he felt justified in relaying the rumor.”

  “He was looking out for me. I’m sure he’ll apologize.”

  “I suggest he doesn’t come around me for a while, or he won’t like the consequences. The mayor didn’t.”

  Diane looked at the clock on the wall. “It’s almost four A.M. Maybe we can get a couple of hours’ sleep before we have to get up. You don’t have to go in to work tomorrow, do you?”

  “No. I’ve had some time coming to me. I’m using it to try to take care of things.” He stood up and gathered the coffee cups and took them into the kitchen. When he came out, he caught Diane going into the bedroom and put his arms around her waist and held her close.

  “Diane, you’ve been a big help to me. I didn’t realize the cost.”

  “I guess I’m just a sucker for hard stories.”

  Chapter 21

  The grounds personnel were hard at work cleaning up the broken limbs and debris when Diane arrived at the museum. Storms are good at cleaning out the dead wood of a forest, and apparently this one went to work along the nature trail and the larger trees around the museum.

  “Much damage?” she asked the head gardener, a small silver-haired man who’d retired from the university grounds department a couple of years ago.

  “Not much. Mostly in the nature trail. We did have a tree limb fall against the west wing, but, fortunately, no windows were broken.”

  As Diane walked up the steps and into the museum she heard voices raised in anger coming from the stairwell.

  It sounded like Melissa Gallagher quarreling with some man.

  “Don’t be like this, Mike. You don’t understand.” Melissa sounded close to tears.

  “No, I don’t, and I really can’t deal with it anymore.” It was Mike Seger, the geology graduate student.

  Diane hurried up the stairs in time to see Mike close his hand around Melissa’s arm.

  “What’s going on?” said Diane.

  “Nothing,” said Melissa.

  “It doesn’t look or sound like nothing.” Diane held Mike in her gaze. “You’re going to bruise her arm, the way you’re holding it.”

  “I’m not holding it that hard,” Mike said. But he let her go.

  “Really, he wasn’t,” said Melissa. Diane thought she saw fear in Melissa’s dark eyes as she glanced from Mike to her.

  “Your argument is spilling from the stairwell out into the museum. It would be better if you take your disagreements off museum grounds.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know. I’m sorry, Dr. Fallon. Really. It won’t happen again.” Melissa hurried up the stairs and out of sight.

  Mike remained, however, and turned to face Diane. He was a few inches taller than she, so she moved up to a higher step to face him.

  “I don’t want anything like what I just saw occurring in the museum.”

  “We were having an argument. That was all. I know we shouldn’t have been arguing here, and we won’t again. But that’s all that was going on.”

  “I’ve noticed Melissa has had bruises in the past few days.”

  “They haven’t come from me. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?”

  “If I find they did, you’re out of here.”

  “Look, Dr. Fallon, I need this job. Assistantships in geology are hard to come by, and this has been a fortunate opening for me. I don’t want to be fired because of something I didn’t do.”

  “Then do we understand each other?”

  “Yes.” He turned and headed up the steps, then stopped and came back down to Diane’s level. “Korey Jordan said he found old maps, rocks and fossil collections in the basement dating from the mid- to late- 1800s?”

  “Yes. This was a museum, then a clinic and now a museum again. There are some exhibits left over from that earlier time.”

  “Were any of the maps geologic maps?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What’s going to happen to them? I mean, is there any chance I can look at them?”

  “Korey will have to assess any damage to the materials and stabilize them first. Perhaps do some repairs, if that’s possible. After that, they can be examined.”

  “I have an interest in old geologic maps. They could make an interesting exhibit, especially if the rock and fossil collections can be matched up with the maps.”

  “I don’t know if we have any provenience on the rock collection. Many of the things Korey is finding in the basement and attic were stored without much thought to organization or archiving.”

  “I’d be glad to take a look at the rock collection. I may be able to determine where they were collected.”

  “I’m not sure if it would be worth the time it would take. We currently have an extensive collection, as I’m sure you’ve seen.”

  “Yes, I know. But I might find something interesting. Sometimes a specific kind of rock can get mined out and disappear. And who knows about the fossils? Sometimes new species have been discovered in museum collections.”

  “By all means. Take a look at them.”

  “Thanks.”

  He disappeared up the stairs. Diane stood for a moment wondering about him and Melissa before she went back down to ground level and to her office. Through the adjoining door of her office, she heard Andie talking to someone.

  “Y
eah, they’d rather chase down somebody trespassing on some taxidermist’s place or some dog peeing on Mrs. Crabtree’s flower bed than investigate anything really illegal,” Andie was saying.

  Diane opened the door between the offices and saw that it was Korey talking to Andie.

  “We didn’t have another break-in, did we?”

  “Oh, hi, Diane,” said Andie.

  “No,” said Korey. “Just telling Andie about the non-action posture the police took. And I was delivering these.” He handed Diane an envelope. “They turned out pretty good.”

  Diane opened the envelope and took out photographs of the fingerprints. “How about your office, Korey? Was anything missing?”

  “It had been searched, but nothing missing. Somebody was looking for something, that’s for sure.”

  “I’ll see if I can get these prints run through the system. Korey, do you know Mike Seger very well?”

  “Just met him. He was looking around in the conservation lab the other day, and I showed him some of the geology stuff we found in the basement.”

  “What kind of guy does he seem to you?”

  Korey shrugged. “He seemed an all right guy. You don’t suspect him of breaking into the lab, do you?”

  Diane was taken aback for a moment. She’d been thinking about Melissa and not the break-in. “No, not at all. There are a lot of new people coming in from the university, and I just wondered what your take on him was.”

  “Fine. I like him. Seems to know his business.”

  “Thanks, Korey. I’ll let you know if I find out anything about the fingerprints.”

  Diane went back to her desk and pulled out her calendar, skimming over today’s schedule. There was no urgent business. Dylan Houser wanted to meet about her computer. She could put that off for another day.

  She called up her E-mail. Jonas Briggs had sent his next chess move, pawn to queen four. Diane thought a moment, visualizing the chessboard in her mind’s eye. The beginning game moves weren’t hard to remember, but before long she would have to go up to the second floor and look at his board before she moved. She E-mailed him to move her knight to the queen’s bishop three position.

  It hit her suddenly. She jumped up from her computer and hurried into Andie’s office.

  “Andie, what were you saying when I came in?”

  “Hi, Diane?”

  “No, before that. When you were speaking with Korey.”

  “Oh, he was telling me how the police weren’t the least interested in finding who broke in to the lab, and I said they were more interested in finding out who peed on Mrs. Crabtree’s flowers—oh, and finding trespassers.”

  “You were more specific than that about the trespassers.”

  “Some taxidermist?”

  “Why did you say that?”

  Andie shrugged and looked wide-eyed. “I don’t know, I was just making conversation.”

  “No, I mean why did you use those examples?”

  “Oh. I like to read the sheriff’s incident report in the paper. Sometimes they’re real funny, like this woman who reported that someone broke into her house, messed up her bed and left an unused condom on her dresser. Why?”

  “Can you tell me more about the taxidermist and the trespassers?”

  “Let me see.” Andie rolled her eyes upward, thinking. “It began as a complaint from a woman. Her neighbor was shooting off a gun. The neighbor—a taxidermist—said he heard someone trespassing. Apparently, they were disturbing the cows in his pasture, or something like that, and he fired a shot in the air. That’s all there was to it.”

  “When did you read this?”

  “Just a few days ago. Why?”

  “Do you know his name?”

  “Something sort of funny.” Andie thought a minute. “Luther, Luther Something? Why are you asking me all this?”

  “Tell you later.” Diane went back to her office, closed the door and dialed Frank’s cell phone number.

  “Diane, how you doing this morning?”

  “I’m fine, really.”

  “That’s good. I was worried.”

  “It was good to share Ariel with someone. She was special.”

  “Yes, I can see that she was.”

  There was a distance in Frank’s voice that puzzled her. If she hadn’t known him better, he sounded like someone who didn’t want to hear from a one-night stand. As she started to speak, she heard a pinging in the background, then an intercom voice calling for a doctor.

  “Frank, where are you? Is everything all right with you? How’s Kevin?”

  “Kevin’s fine. But I’m at the hospital. I got a call when I got home. Star tried to commit suicide this morning. She’s not good.”

  “Oh, Frank.” Diane’s voice trembled. This is not the time to collapse, she scolded herself.

  “I didn’t want to tell you, I mean, after last night, but . . .”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  “It was after they picked up her breakfast. She used a corner of her bed to cut her wrists. God, she had to be desperate to go through that. They said she lost a lot of blood.”

  “An otherwise healthy person can lose up to forty percent of their blood volume before they even require a transfusion.” After she said it, Diane realized that it must have sounded so technical and cold. She wanted to be comforting. “I can come over.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said.

  So much sadness. Diane felt guilty. Last night her story, and now this.

  “Find out who did this to her family. It won’t heal her overnight, but it will help.”

  “I know, but right now, I don’t know what else to do,” he repeated. “We got all this information, but what does it leave us with?”

  “That’s why I called. I think I know where to look for the rest of the skeleton.”

  Chapter 22

  The other end of the phone was silent except for the hospital sounds in the background.

  “The skeleton?” Frank finally said. “You mean the one the collarbone was taken from? You know where it is?”

  “Maybe. I’m not certain, but it’s a good lead. Remember I told you that it might be someplace where animals were processed? Andie told me about an item in the sheriff’s incident report about someone trespassing on land belonging to a taxidermist.”

  Sheriff’s incident report. Diane just realized that probably meant it was in the county and not the city limits—not the jurisdiction of the chief of detectives but in the jurisdiction of the county sheriff. She hoped that boded well for their investigation.

  “I remembered the mounted animal heads in George’s house, and that sounded like a good lead. This was just a few days ago. The trespasser could be someone looking to recover a body he left there several years ago, hoping it would never be discovered.”

  “That does make sense.”

  Diane could hear relief in his voice. Hope is a powerful thing.

  “Do you know the taxidermist’s name?” he asked.

  “It might be Luther.”

  “Luther Abercrombie. He’s mounted a fish or two for me. Did some work for George too. You too, as a matter of fact.”

  “Me?”

  “If I’m not mistaken, Milo Lorenzo bought some stuffed animals from him for the Georgia collection.”

  “Can we make arrangements to go see him?”

  “Yeah. We can do that. I want to visit with Star first, when they let me in.”

  “Would you like me to come to the hospital? Could you use some company?”

  “No, but thanks. I’ll be all right, especially now we have this lead. Maybe I can hold out some hope for her. Look, thanks, Diane. This . . . just, thanks.”

  “So,” said Sheriff Bruce Canfield, “you’re asking me if I can help solve one of the biggest murders here in decades and at the same time make a fool of that new chief of detectives in Rosewood?”

  Sheriff Canfield was a large man in his late fifties. He had a full head of hair the color of br
own that comes from a bottle, and a uniform that looked like it might have shrunk a bit in the wash. He laughed out loud.

  “That’s not exactly the way we’d put it,” said Frank, grinning at the sheriff. “But yes, that’s what we’re asking.”

  “Well, who can pass up a deal like that? Let’s go.” He stood up and guided them out of his office. “How is George’s little girl?”

  “Right now she’s sleeping and sedated.” Frank told him about her trying to kill herself.

  “Poor thing. Maybe we can do something here.”

  Diane and Frank followed the sheriff’s car out to the Abercrombie farm, which consisted of three hundred acres of woodland and pastures, a white farmhouse and a garage with a sign that read ABERCROMBIE’S TAXIDERMY. They parked their cars on a gravel drive and walked up to the gate. The sign on the gate read: I’LL GIVE UP MY GUN WHEN THEY PRY IT FROM MY COLD, DEAD FINGERS.

  The sheriff opened the gate and hollered, “Luther, you got company.”

  A man much younger than Diane had imagined came out of the taxidermy shop wearing a leather apron and wiping his hands on a towel. He pushed his straight black hair from his eyes and smiled. His teeth were white against his neatly trimmed, short black beard.

  “Frank Duncan, what you need with a sheriff’s escort?”

  “Hey, Whit. How you doing? This is Diane Fallon. She’s the new director of the RiverTrail Museum.”

  “Come for more business, I hope.” He grinned.

  “We want to take a look at where your father dumps his carcasses,” said the sheriff.

  “Now, sheriff, you know he disposes of his waste legally—since he had to pay that fine a couple of years ago.”

  “This would be an old dump,” said Frank. “We think there may be a body in it. It could be why your father had a trespasser the other night.”

  Whit gave a long whistle. “This is serious. I guess you need me there too.”

  Diane raised her eyebrows and looked at Frank.

  “Whit’s the county coroner,” said Frank.

  “Well, that makes everything convenient,” said Diane.