by Tina Whittle
***
Two hours later, I had everything sorted and checked off on the inventory sheet. Every gun, knife, button, blade, canteen, and kepi hat. The next order of business was dragging Dexter’s eleven boxes of memorabilia back into the storage room. I started by placing my spanking new first aid kit on the top shelf. Then I shoved in the plastic crate filled with old promotional geegaws, pushing it hard with my foot.
It kept going right through the wall.
I stood there for a minute, completely flabbergasted. I pulled the box out and crouched to examine the wall behind the shelving, expecting to find crumbling plaster. Instead, I found a piece of plywood lying flat on the floor inside the wall, and an empty space beyond it. No water-stained crumbly drywall, no inelegant fixes with duct tape. This was a neatly cut hole, disguised by a plywood rectangle that fit into it as precisely as a puzzle piece.
A hiding spot.
I fetched my flashlight and sent a beam skittering into the darkness. It caught a dusty lump in its glare. I lay on my chest and shoved my arm inside as far as it would go, gritting my teeth against the spiderwebs tangling in my eyelashes, the crunch of insect carapaces under my chest. I closed my eyes, sneezed, and stretched my fingers.
They connected with a cold bundle, gritty with dirt. Fabric, heavy-duty nylon. I dragged it toward me into room, then sat up and gave it a good look. The fluorescents revealed a dust-covered backpack, dark blue with black straps.
What in the blazes had Dexter stuck back here? And why? No wonder his inventory never added up. I opened the backpack and peered inside. It contained a dozen or so individual items, wrapped in old cotton fabric, threadbare and stained. I picked up a bundle as big as my fist and unwrapped it.
A silver locket fell into my palm. It was oval, about two inches high, and although its surface was tarnished and grubby, the intricately filigreed decoration revealed its workmanship. I slid my thumbnail between the edges and pried it open carefully. The left side was glassed, filled with mud that covered whatever had been preserved there, but the right held an engraved message:
Sophia Luckie
Not Lost But Gone Before
1802-1862.
I got a jolt of excitement. Thanks to hours spent browsing my Civil War authentication manuals, I was pretty sure I knew what I was holding—mourning jewelry, one of the more peculiar Victorian fads. I also knew that if the piece was authentic, it could be worth thousands.
I retrieved another wad of cloth from the backpack. This one was about the size of a football, wrapped in the same dingy fabric, and I unwrapped it with a reckless fervor of the relic hunter.
And then I saw what it was. And then I put it down very carefully, still half-swaddled.
“Trey?” I called.
No answer. I took a couple of deep breaths to steady myself. Then I put down the backpack—gently, very gently—and stood. I went back into the main room, directly to the sink in the corner, where I plugged in the new electric tea kettle. While it heated, I took down the box of oolong and spooned loose tea into the filter basket, which I then nestled into the glass teapot. When the water was almost boiling, I poured it over the tea, letting the leaves swish and swirl for exactly two minutes. Then I poured a mug three-quarters full of the golden-brown liquid.
I carried this behind the counter and sat cross-legged near Trey’s head, moving his gun out of reach. I balanced the mug on my knee with one hand, ran my fingers through his hair with the other.
His eyes fluttered open, blinking me into focus. “Where am I?”
“At the shop. On the floor behind the counter.”
“Oh. Right.” He dragged himself to sitting, squinting into the gray light. “What time is it?”
“Almost ten.” I handed him the tea. “Here. Drink this.”
He held the mug between his hands and breathed in the steam. This was his morning ritual, a mug of hot tea between his hands. Three years ago, he’d been brought back from the dead one sense at a time, and his senses brought him back from slumber the same way.
He blew gently on the tea, regarding me over the edge of the mug. “Tai?”
“Yes?”
“Has something happened? You seem…something.”
“Finish your tea first.” I lay my hand on his knee and squeezed. “And maybe pop a couple of Gabriella’s herbal thingies. You’re gonna need all the mellowness you can muster for this.”
Chapter Forty
He sat cross-legged on the linoleum floor of the storage room, as did I, the backpack between us. He had one elbow to one knee, chin in hand. The other hand held his tea, cooling now.
“Bones,” he said.
“Uh huh.”
“Human?”
“Looks like it.” I pulled the flap of the backpack open. “Nothing else has a skull quite like homo sapiens. See for yourself.”
He peered inside without touching the backpack. The skull rested on top of the other objects, still half-wrapped. But it was not an ordinary ivory skull—this skull was stained the deep rust of red clay, mottled with lighter brown blotches. Just like one might expect from bones buried for one hundred and fifty years in the striated clay of the Amberdecker back forty. Just like the ones in the program brochure from the History Center.
“Braxton Amberdecker’s bones,” I said.
Trey nodded. “A valid theory.”
“There’s one thing that doesn’t make any sense, though.” I held out the square of cloth that contained the locket, then opened it for him to see. “This. I didn’t know it was evidence until I’d unwrapped it.”
Trey peered closer. “What is it?”
“A Victorian mourning pendant.”
“A what?”
“A piece of jewelry designed to commemorate a loved one’s death. In this case, Sophia Luckie. Sometimes they held photographs, sometimes a lock of hair.” I bit my lip. “None of the family talked about burying Braxton with a locket, or about him carrying one into battle. And it wasn’t on the list of burial items that Dexter made either. And I have no idea who Sophia Luckie is.”
Trey raised his eyes to mine. “I assume from your description that you touched the locket.”
“Yes. Before I thought about it. I assumed it was inventory, but then I saw the skull, which I did not finish unwrapping, by the way, once I realized what it was.”
To my surprise, he didn’t lecture me. “They’ll take your prints for exclusion. But you can’t touch anything else. There could be fingerprint evidence there, and you could destroy it, especially on a porous surface like bone.”
“I know.”
“And such evidence could exonerate your uncle.”
“Yes. Or—as you have been continuously pointing out—convict him.”
“Or that.” Trey’s voice softened. “Which do you think it will be?”
I shook my head. “Dexter didn’t do this. I know he was there the night before Amberdecker burial. But he wasn’t a grave robber, or a thief, or a seller of black-market body parts. Lucius was, no doubt, and I am one hundred percent convinced this is his doing. He’s the one who installed these shelves, remember? Dexter paid him seventy-five dollars. But Dexter didn’t know about this.”
Trey considered. Eventually he shook his head. “I don’t think so either. But we still have to call the police.”
“I know.”
“Because someone did take those bones from Lucius and hide them here. And that person is very likely his murderer.”
“I know. Just let me sit here a little while longer. At least until my head stops pounding.”
Trey put his tea down and examined me. He knew headaches, every genus and species. After a minute, he unfolded himself and slid across the floor to sit behind me, his legs alongside mine, knees bent. Soon I felt his warm fingertips at my temples, firm and gentle.
I leaned back a
gainst his chest and closed my eyes. “I know why I think Dexter’s innocent, but why do you?”
Trey moved his hands to the back of my neck and dug his thumbs in hard at the base of my skull. The throbbing intensified, then dulled to a diffuse ache. When he returned his fingers to my temples, the effect was narcotic, as if a floodgate of endorphins had opened into my bloodstream.
“Because you believe he’s innocent,” he said. “I’m learning to trust your intuition about such things.”
“But Lucius couldn’t have put them here. He died in that chapel. Which means there’s somebody else on the loose, someone who was working with Lucius.” I opened my eyes. “Everybody I’ve talked to has mentioned some shadowy dealer-type he met online. The big question is—if our Internet criminal took these bones from Lucius and hid them here, why hasn’t said criminal come back for them?”
Trey moved his fingertips to my hairline. “I don’t know. Perhaps said criminal tried to do that last night.”
“But why wait until last night? Those bones have been here for over a year.”
“I don’t know. Perhaps whoever put them there was unable to come back and get them until last night.”
I didn’t let my brain go to the obvious answer, that Dexter had put them there after taking delivery from Lucius, and that he himself had died before he could find a buyer. The reburial had been in the fall, and Dexter had passed away the winter right after, only a few months later.
I shook off the suspicion. Too many questions, not enough answers, and I had work to do, so much freaking work. I uncrossed my legs and pushed myself up. “Okay, I’m ready.”
“For what?”
“To go downtown.”
“Technically, the authorities should come here.”
“I know. But I can’t watch any more official uniformed people pawing through my life, I can’t—”
“Tai?” Trey’s voice was gentle and unswerving. “They’ll come anyway.”
I knew he was right. I couldn’t shake the feeling of violation, however. First the vandalizing, then the shooting, and then cops plowing through my things, through Dexter’s things. I stared into the bag and shivered. At least my bones hadn’t been dug up and shoved into a crawl space.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll call. But I need to do something first.”
I pulled my cell phone from my pocket, swiped it to get the camera started. Trey looked at me, then at the phone. He opened his mouth to object, but I held up my hand.
“I will not unwrap another thing in that bag. And I will not lay a finger on anything I’ve already unwrapped, I promise.”
“But—”
“No buts. If I can be all good citizen and call the police, you can look the other way while I take a few innocent photographs of that locket.”
Trey looked at the backpack. Then he looked at me. This was not procedure. This was as gray as gray could be. He made his decision quickly, though, nodding once as he gathered himself and stood.
“I’m going to make more tea. In the next room. It should take me exactly fifteen minutes.” He fixed me with a steely blue gaze. “No more. No less.”
Chapter Forty-one
When I’d told her what I’d found, Detective Perez had been unamused. “Really? Just stuck behind a piece of plywood that you’d never noticed before?”
“Just like that.”
“Any other suspicious hiding places I need to know about?”
“No. You’re welcome to look, if you want.”
She’d wanted. She’d waved a hand, and her tech team had swarmed all over my shop like uniformed bees. The ME had arrived not long after, the same doctor from the tornado-strewn cemetery, only now he sported a tuxedo. He’d been surprisingly jovial, slipping on the blue latex gloves and heading toward the back, humming to himself. Trey had made more tea and watched the proceedings from behind the counter.
The whole time, Perez frowned and grumped and barked terse orders. She wore a beige blazer over her chunky red sweater, but she had glitter in her hair and a woodblock bracelet on one wrist that spelled out “HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOMMY.” She was also smoking with resentment. I had the feeling that on this Saturday afternoon, the very last place on Earth she wanted to be was in my gun shop, yet again.
She planted herself right in front of me. “I am having a hard time with this, Ms. Randolph. It’s too easy, too convenient.”
“Easy? Convenient? My life is ass over teakettle trying to do this good-citizen thing, and you come in here and blah blah blah about easy and convenient? Shoving the damn box back into the dark would have been easy and convenient. But I didn’t. So cut me some slack.”
“You get slack when you stop finding body parts.”
I humphed, but didn’t argue. Perez had all the patience of a scalded cat, and I wasn’t about to push her into marching me down to the station. Trey watched and listened, stirring his tea, the silver sound of a spoon going round and round. Then he stopped, cocked his head.
“You have a visitor,” he said.
I heard tires on gravel, a door opening and closing, footsteps. Perez angled her body to face the door as Trey put down his mug, the better to keep his hands unencumbered.
Evie pushed open the door. Her finely cut charcoal suit was covered in a fine pelt of rain, her shoes and pantyhose spattered with mud. “Where are they?”
Perez stepped in her path. “Dr. Amberdecker—”
“This is my case, it has been from the beginning, ever since we found those bones. Why wasn’t I called?”
“We have yet to definitively establish—”
“Don’t pretend you don’t have them. My mother heard it on the police scanner.”
“This is Dr. Phillip’s case.”
Evie sent a scathing glance toward the back. “Why? Those bones are obviously antiquities—”
“That’s the ME’s decision—not yours, not mine—and he’s gonna make that decision in the lab this time, not in the field.”
“The first time—”
“—was an archaeological matter. This is a criminal one. Those remains are evidence in a murder investigation, a murder that occurred on your land, and they’re going to the crime lab.”
Evie pulled out her phone. “I’m calling the chief of police. We’ll see how this shakes out with your boss breathing down your neck and reporters outside.”
A voice from the back room interrupted her tirade. “No need to call anybody. Those bones aren’t Braxton Amberdecker’s.”
The entire room turned as one to stare at Dr. Phillips, who stood politely in the doorway, blue gloves still on his hands. Perez was the first to speak.
“What are you talking about?”
“Those bones belong to a female, probably fifteen to seventeen years old based on the unfused growth plates in the arms and legs. So not your remains.”
Evie marched up to him. “What about the burial goods?”
He shook his head. “I have the list, but none of those items were with these bones.”
“But—”
“If we find anything, it will be returned to you. But I can tell you right now those are not the bones of a twenty-one-year-old white male. Therefore, they are not Braxton Amberdecker’s. There’s other stuff that will have to wait for lab verification, but that part is definite.”
Evie whirled on me. “You know something about this.”
I shook my head. I wasn’t about to tell her about the locket. Neither was the ME, and neither was Perez. This was an ace in the hole, and they both knew it, and I had no desire to piss them off further.
Evie remained furious. “Your uncle is behind this, I know he is! I wouldn’t be surprised to find several of my family’s heirlooms on the shelves with price tags stuck to them!” Her face was a mask of helpless anger and thwarted power. She turned to Perez. “I want her records coll
ected, all of them.”
“Done,” she said dryly. “The ATF had them delivered yesterday. And if I saw anything in them that I could use to shut this shop down, I would. But I didn’t.”
Trey tapped his spoon on the side of the saucer and retrieved his mug. “And you won’t. Everything was in order.”
He came around the counter. He kept his tone deferential, and his expression remained as placid as always. Not an ounce of aggression, but not an ounce of submission either. He was toeing a line in the sand, and everyone, including Perez, was suddenly aware of where they stood in relation to it.
As was I. I folded my arms as he moved to stand beside me.
He held his tea in both hands. “Tai has acquiesced with every official request that has come her way, whether on the local, state, or federal level. She has completed her final inspection by the ATF, opened her records, filed the appropriate paperwork, and in short, done everything required of her in terms of rules and procedures and protocol.” He looked at the back room, then back at Evie. “The remains belong to the ME’s office now. And the shop is closed. So it’s best you return to the History Center, Dr. Amberdecker, and attend to your opening. There’s nothing for you to do here.”
Evie knew she couldn’t win this particular battle, but she was far from abandoning the war. She turned on her heel and stomped out the front door, the bells jingling merrily behind her. Perez pulled out her phone and stepped onto the front stoop into the misting rain, her phone in hand. A private call, not on the scanner.
The ME stood next to me. I could smell cigar smoke on him, and his face bore the flush of a man who’d been enjoying a tipple or two before he’d been yanked into service.
I dropped my voice. “Are you sure those bones aren’t Braxton Amberdecker’s?”
He laughed. “Unless our boy Braxton had child-bearing hips, yes, I’m sure. And by childbearing, I mean postpartum. This is the skeleton of a woman who’d given birth at least once.”