by R. Jean Reid
“Perfectly reasonable,” Ina Claire said, not commenting on it being a significant change. She moved away from the door just as both Dolan and Pam came through it, the doughnut hastily wrapped in a napkin and stuffed in her purse.
Nell started to retreat to her office but decided to tell her staff about Josh. She wanted her outrage shared, but also to warn them. Someone might attack the paper.
“I have some disturbing news to report,” she said, wishing she didn’t sound so stiff. “Last evening someone threw a broom handle into the spokes of Josh’s bicycle, causing him to wreck. They shouted that it was a message for me. I suspect the Jones brothers are behind it, but it could be related to the story about the skeletons in the woods.”
For a moment, there was silence. Then Dolan said, as if he were the group’s voice, “Attacked Josh? That’s outrageous! Is he okay?”
“He’s okay, a bit bruised and scraped up, but okay,” Nell answered.
“You think they might come here?” Dolan asked, clearly seeing where Nell’s thoughts were going.
“It’s possible,” Nell said. “But they might be too cowardly to do anything during the day and when they don’t vastly outnumber their target.”
“I swear I’m going to bring my daddy’s ten gauge and keep it at my desk,” Pam muttered.
Dolan managed to say “Only if you promise not to shoot any of us with it” before Nell launched into a serious no guns speech. Thom would have easily understood that Pam wasn’t really going to bring a shotgun to the office; why couldn’t she? Because we don’t know each other well enough, Nell realized. I’m still Thom’s wife, they’re still Thom’s employees, and we haven’t gotten to Nell McGraw and her employees.
“Well, then Ina Claire is going to have to give me one of her wicked hat pins,” Pam said.
“I’ll even give Dolan one, if he wants,” Ina Claire rejoined.
“I know it’s hard to think something might happen in this perfect little town,” Nell said, “but until this settles down, if you’re here alone, lock the front door. Don’t go by yourself to the parking lot, go in pairs. They were driving a red, dusty truck, so be on the lookout for that.” She wondered if she should mention that the law might not be on their side. But she didn’t know how to say it and make it credible.
“You’ve told the sheriff?” Ina Claire asked.
Nell noticed that she didn’t mention Whiz Brown. “No, not yet. I did report it at the police station. One of the young officers said he would look into it.”
There seemed to be an unspoken agreement the chief was useless. Nell wondered if it was just his well-known general lassitude or if there was some undercurrent she didn’t know about.
Jacko came in then. “I’ve got a great tip from someone I know at the morgue! Those three skeletons from the woods? Every one of them was murdered.”
Nell recognized the excitement in his voice. It was the lure of the story, although it could easily be seen as excitement at the mayhem and misfortune of others.
“Good work. How’d you get that?” Nell asked. “Anything on the record?”
“Just a friend of a friend,” Jacko said. “Doesn’t want her name out. Not on the record yet. But the sheriff should have something late this afternoon. Right after deadline,” he added.
“Damn,” Nell said softly, although it wasn’t surprising. She wondered if it was just the sheriff’s usual “don’t upset the people” mode or if there was more in his burying the story after her deadline and into the weekend. “I can get something from the site people; there were enough grad students around there that someone can talk. Okay, do a quick outline of the stuff from the morgue, use it to call the sheriff’s office and ask some questions. I’ve got a rough of the story and I’ll incorporate whatever you can add to it. I’ll query the people who were working the site. Jacko, do a quick and dirty, because I need you to make a photo list from the pictures I took at the site.”
“On my way,” he said as he spun into his desk and grabbed the phone.
To the rest of the office, Nell said, “We’re going to put the story of the skeletons on the front page. It may ruffle a few feathers. These people were murdered. Their bodies were hidden on land that belonged to Hubert Pickings’ family at the time they were killed.”
“A few feathers?” Dolan said. “Kill the whole damn bird.” But he had a grin on his face, as if saying full speed ahead. “Ina, give me your cooking column to look over, so our Editor-in-Chief can do the big story.”
Nell nodded thanks and went back to her office. Ina Claire was a great cook but couldn’t write her way out of a mixing bowl. She seemed to feel no umbrage at how rewritten she always was, took it as one of the rhythms of the paper. The task usually fell to Nell, including translating Ina Claire’s dollops and dashes into useful measurements. It was very kind of Dolan, who tended to hold to traditional male spheres, to take on that task. Perhaps he also knew a paper without Ina Claire’s cooking column would get more that its usual share of phone calls.
She now judged it late enough in the morning to call Kate Ryan. “Kate, this is Nell McGraw,” she said as the phone was picked up on the first ring.
“Nell. How’s Josh? Is he okay?”
Nell felt a prick of guilt. She hadn’t really thought of Josh since dropping him off safely at school this morning. She’d left Kate worried at the dig. Nell veered close to venal sin in thinking she could have called Kate at the crack of dawn on the pretext of telling her Josh was okay. “Nothing was broken, thank goodness. Some ugly scrapes and bruises. But he insisted on going off to school today. So, all’s well that ends well.”
“If it’s ended,” Kate said.
Nell was both grateful and annoyed that Kate went beyond the polite veneer. “I don’t like people attacking my children,” she said, a hard rage suddenly in her voice. “He’s okay now. I need to keep him okay.”
“Any leads on who did it?”
“Probably the Jones boys to protest J.J. being in jail. Fucking assholes.” She was finally able to put those words to use.
“Fucking slimeball assholes,” Kate seconded. “Any chance it has something to do with what we pulled out of the ground?”
“Maybe,” Nell admitted uneasily. “But why me? I’m not the expert who proves these people were murdered.”
“But you’re the one who will report it. Ellen is essentially working for the sheriff’s department. She writes a report and gives it to them. They can bury it, if they choose. The only person who can put it on the front page is you.”
“Maybe. But I can only put it on the front page of the Pelican Bay Crier. It won’t take much for a story like this to break big. One leak from one grad student and it’s all over the wire. They’d need to shut up a lot more people than me.”
“True. But they may not be smart enough to think of that.”
“That’s a pleasant thought,” Nell said.
“I’ll help look after Josh. He can always hang out at the bike shop.”
“Thanks, Kate. I do appreciate it. Be warned I’ll probably take you up on that. And I might have to include Lizzie.”
“The offer stands.”
“What can you tell me about the bones? I’ll quote you only as a source close to the investigation and not use your name,” Nell said.
“I’ll be glad to answer questions, but Ellen is here and she might do a better job,” Kate said. Then, as if she needed to explain: “Most of the students drove back, but the morgue let us have a space to work, so Ellen spent the night here.” Kate added, “On the couch.”
As Kate went to get her, Nell considered how Ellen had struck her as a no-nonsense, practical woman; no makeup, her hair short. She was either the working mother of three children or a lesbian. Nell wondered if Kate’s last remark was aimed at the latter supposition. Then she wondered if she was overanalyzing.
; “So I get to be the anonymous source?” Ellen came on the phone.
Nell stopped wondering about Ellen’s sexuality. For the questions she wanted answered, it didn’t matter. “Unless you’d like to go on the record.”
“Let me hide behind the cloak of anonymity. They’ll know you talked to me, but I’d prefer to be able to act like I played by the rules.”
“We go to press this afternoon,” Nell explained. “The paper will be on everyone’s doorstep tomorrow morning. I plan to make this the front page story.”
“Okay, here’s your scoop. There were three bodies, buried on top of each other, so whoever did this only had to dig one grave. Lazy bastards, but it made our work easier.”
“How sure can you be that it was the only grave?” Nell cut in.
“Did we stumble onto a killing field? I doubt it. I had the grad students check out the area for other possible burials. Without burial vaults or coffins, the ground will usually sink in as the body decomposes. Especially three bodies. The tree probably covered up the resulting depression. I didn’t see anything that made me suspect others had been buried there, but that’s at best an educated guess. They were in the ground a long time and that obscures things.”
“Okay, so tell me what you did find.”
“Three bodies, all likely murdered. One was male, two were female. The male was the one with chains on his wrists and he was shot in the base of the skull. We found a bullet; it was a .22. They often don’t have the velocity to exit the skull. That’s probably what killed him, although it may have taken awhile. Both his legs were also broken.”
“Damn,” Nell muttered.
“Yeah, damn,” Ellen echoed. “Usually a bullet to the back of the head is about as kind and gentle a murder as you can get, but I think we can rule that out. One of the women was strangled; we managed to find the fractured hyoid bone, which is a small bone in the throat that’s usually the tell-tale sign of strangulation. The other woman … ”
She paused long enough for Nell to prompt her. “The other woman?”
“Not quite sure how she died. Her pelvis was fractured. That sometimes happens in cases of violent sexual assault. But … by this point there’s not enough evidence to prove that one way or another. Just a guess, a feeling, really on my part.”
“What’s your feeling from?”
“The other two were African-American. She was Caucasian. A lot of this is just … well, instinct, or my bias or whatever. Clearly these three people were together and forty years ago, white women didn’t go anywhere with black men. They killed him. And punished her.”
“By violently raping her.”
“Or assaulting her in the groin area, maybe repeated kicking, a baseball bat.”
“Gang rape,” Nell said. “You think there was more than one murderer?”
“Again, just guessing. But yes, probably a lynch mob.”
“And no one talked,” Nell said harshly.
“Oh, I’m sure they talked, just not to anyone who would have or could have done anything about it. They may well have parties where they bragged about what they did. Like those men who bombed the church in Birmingham. That was some of the strongest evidence against them, the people they bragged to.”
They were both silent, and then Ellen continued. “They were all fairly young, early to mid-twenties at most. Between the coins found in the site, the age of the tree, and the characteristics of the bones, I’d say they were killed about forty to sixty years ago, call it fifty. But like most things, that’s just an educated guess. For this climate and soil conditions, they had to be in the ground at least ten years.”
“Any clue who they were?”
“Three people who died at an early age. Other than that, no, not a clue. Someone had to miss them.”
“It’ll take research to find out. Going through paper archives can be time-consuming work. And after fifty years, even those might be hard to find,” Nell said. “It’s possible they were brought here from somewhere else. That whatever dusty file holds the key to their identity is hundreds or even thousands of miles from here.”
“Think we’ll find out who they are?”
“I’ll do my damnedest,” Nell replied. “People leave trails. Three young people didn’t just disappear. Someone reported them missing. Perhaps someone still misses them.”
“I’m going to be doing more peering and poking stuff, checking all the tables to make sure I can dot the i’s and cross the t’s about sex and race. Then I’ll write a report for the authorities. It’s just possible one of my many, many grad assistants would assume it should be forwarded to the newspaper.”
Nell had to smile at her offer. “I’d appreciate any assistance your grad students could give me. For this first story, though, I’ll be pretty bare bones—sorry, pun not intended. I won’t go into your speculation about the cause of death for the second woman. Something along the lines of three skeletons, evidence points to homicide. I’ll have a week to see if I can discover their identities. That might go a long way to proving or disproving your theories.”
“You’re right. The more evidence you have the better. This one could buzz louder than a rattlesnake in a hornet’s nest. I’ll be here playing on the computer most of the day. Call if you have any other questions.”
“Thanks for all your help,” Nell said. She thought about asking to speak to Kate again but couldn’t think of anything to add, or any polite phone conversation way to say please help keep my son safe.
After hanging up, she turned back to her computer screen and incorporated what she’d learned from Ellen into her story. Jacko came in, only long enough to leave a sheet of paper on her desk and grab the camera. The information he got from the morgue told her nothing that Ellen hadn’t already given her, but still Nell recognized Jacko had done an intrepid job of finding a good source. She had to remember to compliment him on it.
The sheriff’s office had responded only that they would release a report in the afternoon and would take any questions then. The spokeswoman added that they would be limited in what they could answer, as the investigation was ongoing.
Nell suddenly thought of someone else that she should call. She hastily looked through the campaign literature and found a phone number for Marcus Fletcher.
“Good morning,” he answered. Even on their short acquaintance, Nell was able to recognize his deep voice.
“Good morning, Mr. Fletcher. This is Nell McGraw from the Pelican Bay Crier.” She again cursed herself for being so formal, but that had been her role; Thom was the informal one.
“Mrs. McGraw, how pleasant to hear from you.”
“I’m afraid my call doesn’t have a pleasant purpose. I’m sorry to tell you that you were right. There were three bodies. I was wondering if you had anything else you’d like to add, or if you’d like to make a comment.”
“Nothing on the record. At least not yet. Being a newspaper woman yourself, I’m sure you’ll understand how reluctant I am to interject myself in the story.”
“At least not yet,” Nell echoed. “Would you be interested in hearing what I’ve written so far?”
“Most interested. Can you email me the story? Just because I’m an old man doesn’t mean I haven’t entered the modern age. ”
“Of course. But I’m on deadline, so if you have anything to add, it’ll have to be soon.” She took down his email address.
“I’ll look forward to reading it.” Then he added, “Even without a byline, I can usually tell which ones are yours.”
“That could be a good thing or a bad thing,” Nell replied.
“Very true. But in this case, a good thing. You’re a talented writer, Mrs. McGraw. I can tell they’re yours when I find very little to edit.” He added a goodbye and rang off.
Flattery or the truth? Or a bit of both? She again admired him for how much he’d gotten out of
her and how little he’d given in return. She emailed him the story. He was playing her, but she didn’t think it was simply because he liked pulling strings; rather, he was letting her prove she deserved his trust.
Her phone buzzed and Pam said into the intercom, “Nell, there’s someone here to see you.” Pam’s desk wasn’t really far enough away to need an intercom; a projected voice could do as well, but a few years ago, Thom had decided they should be beyond yelling through the newsroom.
Before she had a chance to ask who it was, that who was at her door.
“Mrs. McGraw,” Aaron Dupree said to her. “I hope you don’t mind my dropping in. I was in the neighborhood.”
She quelled the schoolgirl response of “you can come by anytime” and settled for a more professional “Not at all, Mr. Dupree. A newsmaker like yourself is always welcome in our office. Is there something I can do for you? Or did you just want to scope out the media?”
“A little bit of both. I’ve come up with some thirty-day, six-
month, and one-year goals if I’m elected mayor. I thought I’d give the mighty media a chance to incorporate them into stories. Even if the stories shoot them down,” he added with a self-deprecating smile.
Nell took a moment to note again how he was a handsome man, and a handsome man who had come to see her. Part of her hoped his attention was just a political ploy and he wouldn’t become a complication in her life. Another part of her wished quite the opposite, that his coming by just used the election angle as a way to see her.
“Good, I’ve just loaded all the guns this morning,” she answered.
“I am yours to take aim at, ma’am,” he replied.
Nell didn’t miss the possible double meaning in his words. Nor did she respond to it, save with a slight smile. Even if she knew she wanted to, and she was far from that, she was not about to openly flirt with a candidate for mayor in her workplace.
“How about a tour?” he continued. “I know this is one of the historical buildings in Pelican Bay, and it’s been a long time since I’ve been here.”