Dust to Dust dffi-7

by Beverly Connor

  “I came in through the window upstairs to get some of my things. I was trying to do it without your knowing. Then I heard some crazy stuff down here, so I crept down with my guitar. Good thing.”

  Diane heard the police sirens. It was a happy song. She and Kingsley gladly gave long statements to the police that went well into the afternoon. It was dinnertime before she and Kingsley went to their vehicles.

  “We’ve got to quit meeting like this,” said Kingsley.

  Diane put a hand on the handle of her car door. “I’m giving up private work. Don’t call unless you want a tour of the museum. By the way, that was quite a lecture you gave the Carruthers.”

  “They needed it. It really pissed me off when he decided to do some man stuff after his daughter did all the rescue work,” said Kingsley.

  “Are they going to be all right?” asked Diane.

  Kingsley shrugged. “Samantha will be. I don’t know about her parents. Who knows? Sometimes near-death experiences can change people. Want to meet at the Olive Garden on the way out of town? I’m famished.”

  Epilogue

  Diane wrote up the final report on all the crime scenes her crime lab team was involved in relating to Everett and Tyler Walters. The police turned up more evidence than they needed executing the search warrants. Everett Walters thought he was being so clever not leaving any evidence. He never checked his feet. They found two more pottery pieces and two burgundy sequins under the floor mat of his truck. Part of the rope he used to truss up Stacy Dance was in the pickup toolbox. His boots were in his office closet at one of his places of business.

  Marcella Payden recovered and went back to Arizona for an extended visit with her daughter and son-in-law. She and Jonas Briggs were writing a paper on serendipitous archaeology. Marcella kept her house, even though David, Scott, and Hector turned up remains of nine more bodies. Marcella wasn’t scared away. It was a home with history and she was an archaeologist. As far as she was concerned, it was the house and property that outed the villains.

  Jin had gotten DNA samples from all the skeletons recovered-mostly from the roots of teeth, but some from inside the bones. Neva reconstructed all their faces. So far, they hadn’t gotten any hits on who the victims might be. They had been dead well over sixty years. Diane didn’t hold out much hope they would be identified.

  Kingsley and his bosses went with Harmon Dance to take his son home from prison-and had a press conference there in the parking lot. Kingsley told Diane that Darley, Dunn, and Upshaw wanted to hire her. She said no.

  Maybelle Agnes Gauthier celebrated her ninety-eighth birthday at her retirement home. The authorities were still trying to figure out what to do with her. They no longer considered her a threat, but Diane told Hanks she was not so sure. He agreed.

  Kathy Nicholson moved with her son to California. She wrote Diane that Colton was considering transferring to the University of Hawaii and they might move there. Diane guessed that the coast wasn’t far enough away from their bad memories in Georgia. Kathy Nicholson had to come to terms with the fact that she had not seen Ryan Dance drive by, but her own neighbor, Tyler Walters. Tyler told the police in his statement that he and his grandfather knew Kathy would be working in her garden and all Tyler had to do was be in Ryan’s car, wearing Ryan’s hat, and hanging his arm out the window for her to see the fake tattoo-and never turn his face to her.

  Tyler Walters recovered and was tried and convicted for raping Ellie Rose Carruthers, murdering Stacy Dance, which he finally admitted to, kidnapping Diane and the others, and conspiring with his grandfather to kill Mary Lassiter and Marcella Payden, and framing Ryan Dance. He received life in prison, and was given the possibility of parole after twenty-five years because he testified against his grandfather. Tyler’s father decided not to run for office. Jonas Briggs said it was a good thing. With the potential candidate’s father, son, and late wife-not to mention his aunt-in his bio, no one but Jeffrey Dahmer would vote for him, and he was dead.

  Everett Walters went to prison for life without possibility of parole for killing Ellie Rose Carruthers, Mary Phyllis Lassiter, Ray-Ray Dildy, Stacy Dance, and Wendy Walters, and for framing Ryan Dance, and kidnapping Diane and the others, and trying to assassinate Diane. He confessed to none of it. Tyler said his grandfather shot Ray-Ray to tie up a loose end and liked the idea of using a policeman’s gun to do it. Ray-Ray was a day worker at one of Everett Walters’ businesses. Everett learned about his cousin, Emory, from him. Tyler said that Ray-Ray and Emory were the only two people his grandfather had hired to help with the dirty work and that he had planned to kill Emory after he’d killed Diane in the home invasion.

  The authorities were still uncertain whom to charge with killing the eleven people from sixty years ago. The resolution was still undergoing legal wrangling. Everett Walters’ lawyers were saying that because his fingerprints were only on sculpting tools and clay, the state had no basis on which to charge him. His lawyers also claimed that his sister’s testimony was unreliable, since she had been diagnosed on several occasions as being of unsound mind.

  Oran Doppelmeyer, Gainesville’s medical examiner, was let go by the city, much to Lynn Webber’s delight. Diane suspected that if Lynn had the opportunity in the future, she would mess with his life again.

  Diane didn’t know what Samuel and Marsha Carruthers were up to or how they were coping. But she and Frank went to hear Samantha and the band one evening. They weren’t too bad and Samantha seemed to be doing well. She was still in school and she had dyed all of her hair pink. Kingsley had bought her a new guitar. Frank told Diane it was a very expensive guitar.

  Diane sat in her office going over the budget reports when the phone rang.

  “Diane Fallon,” she said.

  “Dr. Fallon. My name is Clara Chandler. I hope I have the right place. I copied the number off the TV screen and, well, my eyesight’s not too good anymore.”

  “What can I do for you?” said Diane.

  “My sister, Patsy Chandler, went missing fifty-six years ago and she looked just like the picture I saw on the news of a girl you found down in a well. You said her name might be Patsy. I hope it’s her. I’d like to take her home. We thought our daddy kilt her and buried her somewheres. He was mean like that.”

  “Would you come in and give us a DNA sample?” asked Diane.

  “What do I have to do?” she asked.

  “Let us take a cotton swab and rub inside your cheek,” she said.

  “Oh, like they do on those crime shows?” she said.

  “Yes,” said Diane.

  “I can do that. My son can bring me down there right now. That would be wonderful if it’s my Patsy. We were twins and I have missed her all these years.”

  “I hope she is your sister too,” said Diane. “I would like to see her claimed by her family.”

  Diane hung up the phone and looked at the mask of Patsy Doe, as they had called her, that Marcella had completed. It sat on a shelf and stared into infinity with empty eyes. Diane was uncertain what to do with it. Marcella said to have it buried with Patsy’s remains-after all, it was made with dust of her bones. Maybe Marcella was right: remains resting, reunited, in peace. Dust to dust.

  Turn the page for an excerpt from

  the next Diane Fallon Forensic Investigation,

  coming soon from Obsidian.

  The gray sky grew darker as Diane watched. The storm was coming fast. She tried not to show her unease as she listened to Roy Barre going on about his grandfather’s collection of Indian arrowheads that he was loaning to the museum. The two of them stood beside the museum’s SUV, the four-wheel-drive vehicle she had driven to his mountain home. Diane had the driver’s-side door open, key in hand, ready to get in when he wound down, or at least paused in his narrative.

  “So, you going to put a plaque up on the wall with Granddaddy’s name?” Barre said. “He’d like that. He picked up arrowheads from the time he was a little boy. Found a lot of them in the creek bed. T
hat big pretty one I showed you of red flint-he was crossing the creek, looked down, and there it was, big as life right there with the river rocks.”

  Diane had heard the story several times already.

  “Yes,” she said, “there will be a plaque. Our archaeologist, Jonas Briggs, will oversee the display.”

  Roy Barre was a tall, rounded, cheerful man in his mid-fifties, with a ruddy face, graying beard, and brown hair down to his collar. In his overalls and plaid shirt, he didn’t look as though he owned most of the mountain and the one next to it. Even with the oncoming storm, had she consented, he would at this moment be showing her the property and the crisscross of creeks where his grandfather had found his arrowheads.

  “Granddaddy didn’t dig for them, even when he was a little boy-he knowed that was wrong. You know, some people look for Indian burials and dig up the bones looking for pottery and nice arrowheads. Granddaddy didn’t do that. No, he didn’t bother anybody’s resting place. He just picked up arrowheads he found on the ground or in the creek. A lot of them was in the creek, washed from somewhere. He never knew from where. He just eyed the creek bottom and, sure enough, he’d always find something. He sure found some pretty ones. Yes, he did.”

  The trees whipped back and forth and the wind picked up with a roar.

  “Roy, you let that woman go. I swear, you’ve told her the same stories three times already. A storm’s coming and she needs to get off the mountain.”

  Holding her sweater close around her, Ozella Barre, Roy’s wife, came down the long set of concrete steps leading from her house on the side of the hill.

  “Listen to that wind,” she said. “Lord, it sounds like a train, don’t it?”

  “Mama’s right, Miss Fallon, you need to be getting down the mountain before the rain comes. The roads can get pretty bad up here.”

  “Thank you for your hospitality and the loan of your grandfather’s collection,” said Diane. “I’m sure our archaeologist will be calling to ask you to tell him your stories again. I hope you don’t mind.”

  Mrs. Barre laughed out loud and leaned against her husband. “How many times would he like to hear them?”

  “You know how to get back to the main road?” asked Roy.

  “I believe so,” said Diane, smiling. She got in the car before Roy commenced another story and started the engine. She waved good-bye to them and eased down the long, winding gravel drive just as the first drops of rain started.

  Diane was the director of the RiverTrail Museum of Natural History, a small, well-respected museum in Rosewood, Georgia. She was also director of Rosewood’s crime lab, housed in the museum, and a forensic anthropologist. It was in her capacity as museum director that she was in the mountains of North Georgia, arranging the loan of the substantial arrowhead collection. Jonas Briggs, the museum’s archaeologist, was interested in the collection mainly because LeFette Barre, Roy’s grandfather, had kept a diary of sorts describing his hunting trips, including drawings of the arrowheads he had found and where he found them-more or less. Jonas wanted to map the projectile points-as he called them-especially the several Clovis points in the collection. Unfortunately he was away, or it would be he, instead of her, up here in the North Georgia mountains trying to dodge the coming storm.

  The mountain roads weren’t paved, and they were marked by ruts and gullies. She should have left sooner. The storm brought the darkness too soon, and despite what she said, she was just a little uncertain whether she could retrace her steps back to the main road. She looked down at the passenger seat for the directions. They weren’t there. Well hell, she thought. Probably blew out of the vehicle while she had the door open. Just pretend it’s a cave, she told herself.

  The trees looked frenzied, whipping back and forth against the darkening sky. Diane watched the road, looking for familiar landmarks. The rain began to fall harder. Diane turned her wipers up several notches and slowed down. With the heavy rain and fog, it was getting harder to see the road.

  A tire slipped into a rut and spun, and for several moments she thought she was stuck. She pressed the four-wheel-drive button on the gearshift, and suddenly the vehicle lurched forward and was out. Just ahead, she recognized her first turn. That road wasn’t any better. It had heavy gouges and grooves carved into it by years of wheels and weather doing their destructive work. Diane remembered the ruts from when she came up the mountain, but the only annoyance then was a rough ride.

  “Doesn’t anybody fix roads around here?” she grumbled to herself as she hit a deep pothole and again spun her tires.

  So far, she was remembering her way back, but visibility was getting worse. She turned her wipers on the fastest setting. She would have liked to pull off the road and wait for the rain to stop, but she was afraid of getting stuck. She would be on foot if her vehicle became mired in the muddy shoulder of the road, and coming up the mountain, she’d discovered that the area had no cell service.

  Diane hoped she wouldn’t meet anyone trying to get up the mountain as she inched along the narrow road, looking for the next turn. She couldn’t find it. Well, damn, she thought to herself. Did I miss it? There was no turning around. At least if I keep heading down, she thought, I’ll get to a main road sooner or later. She kept going-and looking.

  Then she spotted the road-she just hadn’t gone far enough. She turned onto another dirt road, slipping in the mud as she did. Up ahead she saw a house that she remembered from her trip up. Good. She sighed with relief. She was on the right road.

  The house was dark. Diane didn’t think anybody lived in it. It was run-down and, frankly, looked haunted, with its gray board siding, sagging porch, and strangely twisted trees in the front yard. Boo Radley’s house, she thought to herself as she approached.

  A flash of lightning and a loud crack caused her to jump and slam on the brakes. The cracking sound continued, and with a sudden stab of fear, Diane saw one of the trees in the yard of the house falling toward her. She put the SUV in reverse and spun the wheels. The tree crashed across the front of her vehicle, and in the strobe of lightning flashes, she saw a human skull resting on the hood of her car. A skeletal hand slammed hard against her windshield and broke apart.

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