Digging Up Bones (Birdwell, Texas Mysteries Book 1)

by Aimee Gilchrist

  "Could we see Dwight Dooley please?" I interrupted her ministrations after we had stood there for at least thirty seconds without garnering even a glance from her.

  With an exaggerated sigh we were most certainly meant to hear, she threw her Q-tip into the garbage and trudged toward an office at the far end of the room. She rapped much harder than necessary on the frosted glass window next to the door. "Dad, you got some folks out here to see you."

  She came back to her seat, completely ignoring our presence, and pulled another Q-tip out of a nicely organized pile in a pencil holder on her desk. She dipped the end in bleach and went back to her keyboard ministrations. Somehow, it didn't surprise me that Dooley's daughter came in and cleaned his office. Although, if she didn't want to be mistaken for the receptionist, she should probably have parked herself somewhere else.

  A moment later, Dooley's door opened, and he came out in full glare mode. "What are you two doing here?" He'd deteriorated since the other day, his hair sticking up and his uniform rumpled.

  "We think that we have some information for you," Aodhagan said, cautiously.

  "Well, I guess you better come on back."

  We followed him slowly, and I noticed that he just slid himself across the ground without ever picking up his feet. He hadn't walked that way on Friday. Maybe his first real case was having an effect on him. In his office, we took seats and watched him pour himself a half a cup of burnt-smelling coffee. Finally, he slumped down in his seat and repeated the question. "What are y'all doin' here?"

  "You know, Penny did have a boyfriend. He's the most likely suspect," Aodhagan offered.

  Dooley stared at us as evenly as he could, considering how much that he blinked. "What do you want then?"

  I raised my eyebrows slightly. "Just to tell you that we know she had a lover."

  "I mean how much do you want to keep quiet?"

  Another cover-up? I had never heard of the police trying to bribe someone. Aodhagan quietly asked, "How long?"

  Completely bemused by their conversation, I looked between them for a moment before the light finally clicked on. Oh, Lord.

  Dooley said, "Three years. Since about a year after my wife died." He began to cry.

  With an uncharacteristic rush of sympathy, I felt tears burn my eyes. I blinked them away and touched Dooley's arm. "I'm so sorry for your loss."

  He took a minute to collect himself. "I didn't kill her."

  Unlike him, I believed his claim of innocence immediately. Though my instincts have never served me altogether too well, I still had faith in them. "I believe you."

  Aodhagan sighed, long and slow. "I believe you too, but now we've got one less lead. If it wasn't you, and it wasn't us, then who was it?"

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Dooley blew his nose loudly on a gray linen handkerchief that looked like it had gotten a lot of use in the past day or two. "The killer didn't leave any fingerprints. He must have been wearing gloves."

  Aodhagan shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "I want to talk to you about something. I'd like to see the files for Norma Jean Fredrick."

  He stared at Aodhagan in between blinks. "Who?"

  "Norma Jean Fredrick. She was murdered in 1969, at the old high school. The case was never solved."

  Dooley squinted at us, "Why do you care about something like that?"

  "Because Penny did. They were best friends in high school. Did she never mention it?"

  "No." The answer was gruff. "We didn't really talk about things like that." I figured they actually couldn't have been talking about much of anything at all, to tear through an economy pack every week.

  "Could we just take a peek at it and see if it gives us any ideas? We believe that Penny might have been killed because she knew who killed Norma Jean." I thought he was going out on a limb admitting our radical theory, but he said it with total confidence. Just the way he did everything.

  Dooley debated it for a very long moment. "I don't know… Oh, why the heck not? Why don't you just go on ahead and read whatever you want, but if you get caught, I don't know nothin' about it."

  "That sounds fair," Aodhagan agreed easily. "After we leave, you should try reading the file over too. You never know, we could be on to something."

  An ancient space with one overhead light flickering wildly, the records room was less than appealing. Six rows of black metal shelves had been lined in groups of four. It smelled surprisingly musty for something that was in the same building with stirrup pants. Each shelf contained lidded brown cardboard boxes with names and dates marked on the front in black marker.

  "They should be in alphabetical order," he told me, digging in.

  I started at one side of the F's, and he started on the other. I found it first. "Here it is. Fredrick, Norma Jean, October 1969."

  It was too high up for me to reach, so he stretched above me and pulled it down, knocking down what looked like four decades of dust. It floated over us like a light gray snow. He shook the box with a frown. "There's nothing in here."

  Disbelieving, I tore the lid off the box, only to be met with hollow cardboard. "What's going on here?"

  He shook his head wordlessly, obviously as confused as I was. "Wait. I see something."

  He had to work to pull a photograph loose from the corner of the box. I looked over his arm as he flipped it over.

  "Oh." I turned my head.

  "What…"

  "Crime scene photo," I mumbled. No matter how many I saw, it never got any easier. Though, I found it easier to look at them in black in white. Maybe that's why I would only do historical cases.

  Carefully, he slid the box back into its slot. "Dooley should know about this."

  Back at Dooley's office, Aodhagan knocked but entered without awaiting a response. "Someone has taken all the information out of Norma Jean Frederick's files."

  "What?"

  "Someone took everything but this." He handed the photo over. "This was the only thing left. It was caught in the corner."

  Dwight took it and stared at it, paling immediately. "I don't believe it."

  I shrugged. "It's not that unbelievable. I mean, your receptionist seems to be missing, and your daughter doesn't really pay that much attention."

  "The scarf."

  I had noticed in my very brief examination at the photo that Norma Jean had been wearing a scarf. A pink chiffon scarf. "You can't mean that's the murder weapon?"

  Aodhagan snapped the picture back. "How did it get off the body? I mean, who took all this stuff, and why would they keep it for almost fifty years?"

  "I don't know why. I moved here in 1981. I don't know how, or why, this happened, but I'm going to find out."

  And I could tell that he meant it. I left the sheriff's office with a lot more respect for Dooley than what I had come in with. I guess I could see why my aunt had loved him, even though he still looked like Boss Hogg and blinked way too much. Although a whole box of condoms every week…

  Outside, Aodhagan absently opened my door before getting in himself. Slightly overwhelmed by the wealth of information we'd gained in the last few hours, I tried desperately to catalog it all. We'd learned a lot and yet nothing really useful or even tangible. "So, what do we do now?"

  "Now we go back to Birdwell and think really hard about what we've learned, and tomorrow we go to Lubbock. Somebody has to know something. If Dennis Strinton and Lloyd Granger can't help us, we'll move on to Kathleen Audbergen, and if she can't help us, we'll find someone else. Eventually, something's got to give."

  We were mostly silent on the way back to town. I assumed that both of us were working through the possible theories in our heads. In forty-five minutes, I didn't come up with one viable theory. In front of the library, I spotted Marian sweeping the sidewalk.

  "We should make sure that Marian returned that microfiche." Aodhagan parked, and I gestured her over to the window.

  "Hey guys, where you headed?" She leaned against the window of the Land Rover.

&nb
sp; "Home from Tallatahola. Did you get those spools returned?"

  She smiled, revealing a mouth of very small teeth with a slight, charming overbite. The doll eyes didn't blink though. "I sure did, and I did just what you asked me to do when the man came by to ask if I had them."

  Aodhagan practically got into my lap in his efforts to see Marian's face. "What man? What did he look like?" I'd been about to ask the same question, before he'd seen fit to press his body almost fully against mine. He radiated with heat, and every inch of him was muscle. Now I couldn't talk at all.

  She concentrated. "He looked like… He looked just like…a man." Aodhagan slumped against me, and I had to restrain myself from touching his hair. Or at the very least smelling it. I might very well have felt his frustration, if I hadn't been so busy feeling something else. "I don't know. I couldn't tell what he looked like. He had a hat on, and it was really hard to pretend I didn't know what he was talking about," Marian whined.

  "Well, what was he wearing?" Aodhagan tried patiently. "Could you see what color hair he had or what race he was? Did he have facial hair?"

  She frowned. "I don't know. You ask too many questions. You didn't tell me that I was supposed to remember what he looked like too."

  "Do you remember anything at all?" I pushed, finally regaining my senses by ignoring Aodhagan.

  "He had on a big black cowboy hat, just like Garth Brooks."

  "That's it?"

  "Well, it was just like the one he wears in 'The Thunder Rolls' video," she told me decisively.

  Aodhagan sighed. "Thanks, Marian. You take care of yourself, okay?" She agreed that she would, and we drove the two minutes to his house in frustrated silence.

  "Now all we have to do is look for a guy in a cowboy hat," he spat out, pacing from one side of his front porch to the other, seemingly forgetting to go inside. "If she'd just paid even a modicum of attention, this could all be over."

  Aodhagan's tension was palpable, and I had to admire him for managing to be polite to Marian and even cautioning her to be careful. In the same position, I probably would have gotten out and beat her ass, just for being dumb as a post.

  He sighed and took off his glasses, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "I need to make some phone calls. We can talk about dinner in a few minutes."

  He'd reminded me that I had a few calls to make as well, so when he disappeared upstairs to use the land line, I went into the living room with his cell and the local phone book. Whoever his carrier was, at least he got service out here. I called the only funeral home in the county, located in Tallatahola, and arranged Penny's funeral to the extent that I could, requesting that they simply prepare to use the best of everything.

  Then I braced myself to make the dreaded call.

  Eventually, my mother picked up. "Helen, dear, where are you? I've been calling."

  "Texas." My voice had gone flat.

  There was a very long pause while my mother digested this information. "Well, what in heaven's name are you there for?"

  "I've decided to become a cowboy."

  "David told me to tell you he hopes you get good reviews on your next book," she trilled, abruptly abandoning all talk of the Lone Star State.

  Here it comes. "Really? Well, you can tell David I hope he gets some terrible degenerative disease."

  There was another moment of silence then, forcefully, "Honestly, Helen, do you always have to be so coarse and difficult?"

  "I don't know, Mother. Do you always have to be so obdurate and unfeeling?"

  I heard the click of her lighter, and she took a long noisy drag on what I knew was one of her signature long thin cigarettes that she kept in a silver holder like she was some 1930s starlet. "Can't you just forgive David for one little mistake?"

  "No, Mother, I can't. Nor can I forgive you for forcing me to get engaged to the man in the first place."

  "I didn't force you to do anything. It was merely gentle persuasion. Parents have to guide their children sometimes."

  "Yeah, and it all worked out so well for me in the end. At any rate, I didn't call to talk about David Ford just one more time, as much as the topic thrills me. I called to talk about Aunt Penny."

  "Whatever for?"

  I leaned back on the couch, pinching closed my eyes. "I thought that you should know she's dead." I worked my shoes off with my toes.

  "Already? I had no idea it would be so quick." She spoke like we were discussing the stock market. Not true, actually. She would have responded to a market discussion with more feeling.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Well, of course I knew that she was ill, but I had no idea she'd go so quick."

  "You knew she was sick?"

  "Well, of course I did, dear."

  "How did you know?" How had I not?

  "Sweetheart, one does hear these things."

  I scrubbed away moisture gathering at the corners of my eyes. My mother often had that effect on me.

  "Well, where should I send the donation? The American Cancer Society, I suppose."

  "Try the Texas State Police. She was murdered."

  Another long silence stretched out between us, filled with the sound of puffs. "That's unusual, isn't it?"

  I blew out a slow breath. "Yes, Mother, thankfully it is. Look, I have to go, okay? I just thought that you should know."

  "Wait, dear. I wanted to talk to you about coming out for Christmas."

  "I have to go." I pressed the end button with an unwarranted amount of violence. No reason to take it out on Aodhagan's cell phone.

  I threw the phone down and closed my eyes again. David Ford, the only fiancé whose motivations I had never understood and with whom I still had unresolved issues. The others were easy to understand. But there was no logic to David's and my story.

  I had met him the summer after Eric and I broke up. My parents introduced us at a country club social. He was running for senator of Rhode Island, where he lived most of the year. I didn't really like him, but my parents were desperately in love with him. My father used generous amounts of the revenue from his family counseling empire to fund David's campaign, and my mother fawned over him like he was royalty.

  I thought David was a little too clingy and a little too desperate to get to the top of the ladder using the influential Harding name as a rung. My parents didn't mind. In fact, they encouraged it. They also encouraged me to accept his little invitations to dinner or a show. Eventually, we settled into a routine of dating. I considered it as a fairly boring but harmless way to pass the summer months until I returned to art school. Apparently he considered it more, because in late July he proposed to me. I refused. I didn't love him and didn't see any good reason to marry him.

  When my parents discovered I'd refused, they tore into me, swearing that they would cease to fund my schooling if I didn't agree to do what they called, "the right thing." David was demure and didn't insist I marry him. But he began an aggressive campaign to win my love.

  By the time the fall semester rolled around, I was totally overwhelmed by David's affections and my parents' demands. Because I was as weak then as I was now, I accepted the proposal. My mother, the planet's most coveted wedding planner to the rich and famous, set out to plan an enormous event with the precision of a military campaign. My only part consisted of showing up and looking pretty, which are the only talents my parents still believe I possess.

  David did not stop overwhelming me with affection when I accepted. If anything, he was worse, sending me roses, writing me love notes, comparing my beauty with who knew what. It was bewildering and suffocating, but I was nineteen years old, clueless about relationships, and being told every day that I was doing the right thing. Eventually, I even started to believe it. I even learned to passively accept the smothering pseudo affection.

  David, who had already been successful in political circles, was confident in his election and started priming me to be a senator's wife. I had already been mostly groomed by my parents and had very little to lear
n. I enrolled in a brush-up class on politics and started taking private tennis lessons. What I couldn't fake was the ease most of the people in my mother's set had been born with. I was awkward. I was too smart. I was not good at being a hostess.

  Then, two weeks before the wedding, after kissing me good-bye in front of the wedding shop where I was preparing to have my very last fitting, he eloped with my tennis instructor, Kimberly. Just two days before running off with her, David had referred to her as an Olympic washout, and I had actually defended her, pointing out her good qualities, that she was better with people than I was, that she definitely knew how to charm. That she had a mean backhand that I couldn't replicate. We agreed to disagree, and two days later, they were on their way to Bermuda.

  I was completely unraveled. I'd been manipulated into the engagement and learned to squash my feelings of discomfort and replace them with feelings of contentment, and it was all ripped away from me right at the point I had been brainwashed into complacency. There might have been a scandal for the newly elected senator Ford, except that my parents set off on an outrageous campaign to smooth the whole thing over. Even to me, their own jilted daughter, they acted like he had committed a little faux pas and nothing about which I should be so upset. Kim's natural charm and minor fame did the rest, until everyone forgot about me.

  To this day, my parents still acted like my relationship with David, such as it was, was exactly the same, sans engagement ring. In fact, in the past few months they had been attempting to nurture some sort of deep and abiding friendship between us, which was simply not going to happen, no matter what they tried to threaten me with this time.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  "Are you okay?" Aodhagan's voice was low and warm.

  I opened my eyes when his weight moved the cushions as he sat down beside me. With dark smudges under his eyes and deep crow's feet in the corners, he looked like someone should ask him the same. What made a ragged man so sexy? And why didn't it have the same effect on women?