Dry Bones

by Carole Morden

  “Thanks, everyone,” I said, clapping my hands in a let’s-get-going gesture. “We’ll run through the four suspects in the original murder first and see if anything pops up. After that, we’ll run our get-together like a regular Cliffhangers meeting. Agreed?”

  Everyone nodded.

  “Shawn, you’re on the list of suspects in the Stewart murder. How did that happen?” Billy asked.

  “I know I didn’t do it,” the US ambassador to Israel replied, “but I do know why they questioned me. On the Friday before Ms. Stewart disappeared, she had recorded all our grades in her grade book. All that was left was the final the following week, and it would be figured in. I had a 56 percent. An F. I went to her Friday night and asked if there was anything I could do to make up the grade. I needed the English requirements, or I wouldn’t be able to graduate. She told me it was too late to do anything about it. Said I should have come to her earlier. I begged, but she was firm, and I stomped out of class yelling that she would regret it as long as she lived.”

  “Appropriate.” Billy laughed.

  “I was just a young punk then—about as irresponsible as you can get. Anyway, Mr. House heard me yelling at her and later gave my name to the investigators working her case. I don’t think it would have been such a big deal, except for the fact that when grades came out after the final, which I did well on, I got an A. Not a C minus or a D plus, but an A. It looked like I had done away with Stewart and doctored the numbers. Fortunately for me it was all circumstantial evidence, and they gave up. To this day, I have no idea how the grade got changed. I’ve often wondered if someone tried to frame me for her death, but I didn’t murder Ms. Stewart or Tim.”

  “You never told us any of this back in the day when we were trying to figure it out,” I said.

  “I couldn’t afford to. The grade was great, and my parents were so proud. I kept it to myself. We were trying to find her killer, and I knew it wasn’t me, so I didn’t think it was relevant. Besides, how many of you would have believed me then?”

  Rachel raised her hand. “Trust me, guys, he didn’t do it. I changed his grade. I was working in the office, helping get Ms. Stewart’s grades registered in the new school computer. Actually, I helped a lot of teachers register their student data. Computers were so new that I thought even if someone caught the mistake, they would just assume it was a keyboarding error. It was easy, and I thought, who’s it going to hurt? All the rest of us were graduating, and I didn’t want Shawn left behind.”

  “Thanks, Rache, you’re all heart. Being questioned in a missing person’s case—and later a murder investigation—is so much better than flunking a class,” Shawn groused.

  The group laughed.

  “Don’t complain. You’re the ambassador to Israel,” Rachel reminded him.

  “There is that,” he said.

  “Craig, you’re on the list.” I turned the focus back to the matter at hand.

  “Yeah, I know. But I loved Dacia, and I didn’t kill her. Tim and I were friends, and I didn’t kill him. You’re welcome to look into my background, my finances, anything.”

  Rachel spoke up. “I’ve already done that, and you’re as clean as Shawn. I did have some trouble locating your family though. Adoptions were still very closed in those days. I’m sorry about your family. I can’t imagine losing two sets of parents.” Her work was thorough.

  “I don’t remember much about my birth parents. I was four when they died. My adoptive parents died the day of my college graduation. They were driving up to IU from Crane. Their car was found in a ditch, badly damaged from an outside source. Probably a hit-and-run drunk driver, but no arrest was ever made. After I walked for my diploma, two police were waiting for me. They gave me the news. It was a horrible day.”

  I smiled at him. “I think we can safely say you’re not our suspect. If Tim trusted you, so can we.”

  “Next up is James Blevins,” Scott said. “The police questioned him twice. He was in our class, but I don’t really remember him. The original investigation found he’d been sending love letters to Ms. Stewart. The kid was totally infatuated with her. The police even caught him sneaking around outside her window late one night a month before she disappeared. A peeping tom, apparently. She didn’t press charges, but the administration removed him from her English class. The day she disappeared, he didn’t show up for school. His parents said he had the flu and stayed home. The problem was that both parents worked, and department records show the investigating team couldn’t confirm that he stayed home. The interesting thing about James is that he’s a multimillionaire televangelist. If he did kill Ms. Stewart, he would have the means and the motive for silencing Tim.”

  I shook my head. “Not all of us Christians are kooks, you know. He could have made a real life change. When I’ve seen him on TV, which isn’t often, he seems sincere. I think it’s too easy and too pat to blame him. I do know that TV preachers don’t have a great track record on the moral side of life, but I also know a lot of preachers who are genuine, honest, hardworking people who have truly made a difference in peoples’ lives.”

  Billy looked me in the eye. “So you’re saying that if he made a life change he shouldn’t be held accountable for murder? Must be a nice world you live in, Jamie.”

  I was angry now. “I’m not saying that at all. Obviously, if he murdered someone, I want him to pay. But a teenage kid could peek through a window, write sappy love letters, and later become a true Christian. Evil isn’t lurking behind every bush. Maybe you’ve been an investigative reporter too long. Your cynical nature isn’t all that attractive.”

  “Don’t be so sensitive, Jamie,” Scott said. “We’re getting to the person you want to hang. Let’s at least try to be open-minded about this.”

  “Ooh, the good Christian lady wants someone to hang? I gotta hear this.” Billy looked amused.

  Actually, the good Christian lady would like to knock the grin off your face.

  Instead, with stern help from my pastor’s wife conscience, I said, “I don’t think there’s a single doubt that it was Phillip House. He was in the park on the day Dacia Stewart disappeared. I also know that he’s a child molester, and my guess is Ms. Stewart found out. Maybe she confronted him and he couldn’t risk losing his job as a teacher if the truth came out. He had political ambitions even then. Tim found out, and now the stakes are even higher. His job as Speaker of the House, his family, his financial empire, and his reputation would come crashing down around his ears. He’d killed before. Why not kill again? Only this time he probably had it done. Scott? Didn’t the police rule it a professional hit?”

  Scott nodded.

  I opened my fortune cookie not to read a fortune, but a bit of homespun advice which wasn’t necessarily true. Smile and the world smiles with you. The back listed my winning lottery numbers. I wadded up the slip of paper and made a perfect swish into the garbage can in the corner. “Ta-da! Three points.”

  The group ignored my LeBron skills and chewed on the House theory until Scott’s cell phone rang. He talked quietly into the phone and then returned to the table discussion.

  “I may have to agree with Jamie,” he said. “There was a $56,000 withdrawal from House’s savings account on May 11, two weeks before Tim was killed. It sounds like blood money to me. I just sent two men over to his house to interview him. If he has nothing to hide, he should be able to tell us where the money went.”

  “How far back did your guys look?” Rachel asked.

  “Just this year. Why?”

  “I’ve done some research myself this afternoon,” Rachel said. “That $56,000 is not the first big withdrawal he’s made from his savings account. He made several other large withdrawals starting sixteen years ago. It started out at $40,000 and went up by a thousand every year.”

  Scott looked puzzled. “That sounds more like blackmail than murder-for-hire.”

  “Another thing,” Rachel added. “Every withdrawal was made on the Friday before Mother’s Da
y.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  This last bit of information startled the group—me included. I don’t know what made a bigger impression on me, that Rachel’s skills provided such in-depth info, or that anyone would have that much in a savings account to disperse on an annual basis. It was beyond my scope of experience. Comments and ideas flew around the table.

  I got up to throw the empty Chinese food cartons in the garbage, and said, “We’ll talk about this in a minute, but I need to know if you all feel good about Craig being here. Tim trusted him, and so do I. I think he should stay.”

  Almost everyone nodded agreement. Rachel didn’t.

  “I’m sorry, but I can’t go along with it,” she said. “Maybe you are a good guy, Craig, and just have rotten luck. I don’t know. But I do know that death seems to occur at a regular frequency around you. Two sets of parents—both dead. Your fiancé is dead. Tim, your friend of two years, is dead. And there’s one other bit of background information I picked up that you didn’t bother to share with us. Five years after Ms. Stewart was killed, you got married. You and your wife Angela were expecting your first child when she developed a bad cough.”

  Craig’s face drained of all color. He looked as if he had just been sucker punched. I kept my eyes on his face as Rachel continued.

  “She went into the hospital and died the next day. The baby also died. An autopsy showed she had contracted an unknown virus. The information, medical records, and lab reports were sent to Atlanta to the CDC. Four years later in the spring of 1993, there was an outbreak of the Hantavirus. Although these were the first known cases in the United States, there were thirty-two identified victims. The CDC determined Angela and the baby were two of them.”

  There was total silence in the room as we processed the bombshell.

  Rachel went on. “Too many deaths, guys. All outward signs point to the fact that you couldn’t have been involved with any of them.”

  She hooked his eyes with hers and finished. “But to be on the safe side, I am not sure you should be allowed to know everything we do.”

  I swallowed. I was honestly too surprised to say anything.

  Craig stood up. “She’s right, you know. Everyone I’ve loved has died. I can’t deny that. But remember this one thing . . . Tim called the night before he died and said we were looking in all the wrong places. He even had a suspicion that he might know who it was. So you talked about four suspects, but there are really five.”

  I didn’t know what to do. Kick him out, or let him stay. Before I could say anything, he took the decision away from me.

  He did a one-eighty and hightailed it out of the front door.

  I turned to Rachel. “Why didn’t you say something earlier? I thought you said his background came out clean.” I could hear the accusation in my voice.

  “It did. He hasn’t even gotten so much as a parking ticket in the last thirty years. He wasn’t implicated in any of the deaths. It’s just that something about it makes me nervous. How can one person lose that many people?”

  “I don’t know, Rache, but he left, so I guess that’s that,” I said.

  Before the meeting, Todd had set up a lightweight, hardwood easel with a large, thick, white pad on it. He had positioned colored markers on the tray. He got up, and taking the black marker, he wrote the word “Assumptions” and underlined it.

  “Okay kids,” he said. “Let’s go. You give me what you assume about Tim’s death, and I’ll write it down. You all know that I have never come up with any ideas on my own, so fire away and I’ll be the secretary.”

  “Tim was killed by the same person who killed Dacia Stewart,” Shawn offered.

  Todd threw out his own guess. “Neither Jamie or Shawn killed Tim.”

  “Tim was killed because of what he found out about the Stewart murder.” Billy liked clear motives.

  “The killer is smart,” Scott said. “The police can’t even find any clues.”

  “Tim had some information that nobody else had,” Billy said.

  The dining room was spacious and comfortable, and Todd had prepared for an all-out Cliffhanger session. In one corner were stacks of pictures in frames that must have previously hung on the walls. The top picture was of an older woman with her head bowed, eyes closed, and a loaf of bread in front of her. The walnut frame matched the dining room table, hutch, and buffet. The walls were sponge painted with light yellows and creams. About twelve inches from the ceiling a wallpaper border revealing antique trucks—not restored—graced the parking lot of a rural general store. You could see windmills and silos in the background—very nostalgic.

  Thrust into another corner of the room was a huge vase filled with golden wheat stalks. I imagine Sheila cringed as Todd removed all the wall hangings and shoved furniture aside to make room for our meeting. From the looks of what I’d seen so far, I would say she was endowed with the decorator gene.

  Todd scribbled down the assumptions as fast as we yelled them out. He flipped a page and in large letters wrote “Suspects.” He numbered them from one to six and wrote out the names that had just been discussed, adding my name and a blank spot. Then he crossed through Shawn Norman, Jamie Storm, and Craig Haskell. He stared at Craig’s name, meaning that not everyone in the group had cleared him. Then he put a question mark at the end of it.

  Billy grinned. “Remember the case of the missing page 187?”

  “Ms. Alexander’s class. Junior year. The first day of school and every Algebra II book was missing page 187,” Shawn said.

  “That’s right,” I said, laughing. “And we did the same thing. Wrote our list of suspects down and started nosing around into everyone’s business. Our list of suspects was long. Remember how we listed everyone in the senior class?”

  “And we found out who did it purely by accident,” Todd said. “Not much in the way of detective skills there.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Rachel said. “Tim’s brilliant mind led him straight to the culprit.”

  “Oops, my bad. It does take a lot of skill to spend the night with a fellow football player and notice his ceiling and walls are completely covered with the infamous page 187.” Todd laughed and shook his head.

  “I still remember why the kid did it,” Shawn said. “Kind of a quiet guy Tad was. Tough linebacker on the field though.”

  “Don’t keep us in suspense. Why?” Scott asked.

  “He found out the answer key in the back of the book was wrong on one of the math problems on page 187. He went to Ms. Alexander, pointed it out, but she wouldn’t listen. She told him to take his seat. Then 4.0 Jim called her attention to it later when he couldn’t figure it out, and she took the time to run the problem. Sure enough, it was a typo and all the books were wrong. She told Jim how she appreciated his keen mind for catching the mistake. Tad didn’t say a word. But with the help of a razor blade and a lot of patience, he systematically removed page 187 from every book—a few at a time—whenever Ms. Alexander left the room.”

  “Smart guy. Revenge without suspicion. Still, seems excessive for the slight,” Billy said.

  “Not when you’re in high school. Seems brilliant,” I said.

  “Did we ever tell Ms. Alexander?” Billy asked.

  “You kidding? You can’t break the we-are-always-against-the-teachers code. Wouldn’t be student-like.” Scott laughed.

  “It’d be nice if we could solve Tim’s murder as easily,” I said. “Maybe he slighted someone too.”

  “Big slight,” Shawn said.

  Todd stuck the “Assumptions” and “Suspects” pages on the dining room wall. Ripping five more blank pages off, he and Billy taped them to the wall. Handing a marker to everyone, he said, “Okay, you know the drill. You’ll fire off questions. I’ll write one question per sheet of paper, and then as we think of plausible answers, I’ll record them under the appropriate question. We’ll time this exercise for twenty minutes because we don’t want anyone to second-guess his or her answers. Then for the followin
g twenty minutes we’ll discuss anything that jumps out at us from the list. And the questions are?”

  “Could Tim have been killed for an unrelated reason? If so what?” Scott’s detective mind searched out all possibilities.

  I added, “What does the Friday before Mother’s Day symbolize in Phillip House’s life?”

  “Did Dacia Stewart and Tim Manter have anything in common?” Shawn said.

  When the questions were written down on the large, hanging Post-its, Todd set up a sheet labeled “Facts.” While most of us in the group were writing down thoughts that might answer the questions, he wrote down all known information on Tim’s death.

  Date of Death—last Sunday

  Time—between 7 and 8:30 a.m.

  Place—church parking lot, 510 College Place

  Cause—single .22 bullet to the back of the head

  Details—Instantaneous, close range, execution style

  Suspects—police have no viable leads

  Murder weapon—not recovered

  Jamie Storm—sole beneficiary

  The six of us settled back in our chairs when the timer went off. The discussion centered on Phillip House and the withdrawals of money.

  Billy started. “Is his mother still living? Nursing homes cost a huge amount of money per year. Or what about his daughter? She graduates this year. Does she have an illness that requires medical attention? Is he divorced from his daughter’s mother? Maybe it’s yearly child support.” More questions.

  Scott added his ideas. “I think its blackmail, but for what? Did someone see him kill Stewart? If so, why did the blackmail just start sixteen years ago? Why the increase of a thousand dollars a year. Blackmailers need a cost of living raise? When, by the way, did he become Speaker of the House?”

  “I think,” I said, “that the Friday before Mother’s Day must be significant. We need to check out if his mother is still living. Possibly he has a child out there somewhere that no one knows about, and he’s trying to keep the mother of that child quiet. Maybe he has more than one child graduating, one with his name, and one without.”