As I pulled brick after brick out of the sandy ground, I realized that this time something was different. These were not just a few bricks scattered on my yard’s surface. There seemed to be layers of them and, during the next half hour or so, I dug quite a hole.
Dusk deepened, fireflies started their little light show and a mosquito homed in on my sweaty arm; I swatted it. I straightened up to stretch my aching back and take a look around me, thinking of quitting for the night. It was getting pretty dark, almost too dark to see. But not quite. I noticed something: a curve of chalky white, deep in my excavation.
Curious, I pulled off my work gloves to explore it with my fingers. It felt like bone, interestingly curved. Maybe I could use it as the matrix for a mobile or something. Careful not to break it, I rooted around it until it loosened, then drew it out and held it up. In art school I’d had a lot of anatomy classes …
My eyes widened and I muttered, ‘No way.’
It was getting too dark to really see, I told myself. I couldn’t be sure. Bone in hand, I headed back toward the house. Just outside the kitchen door, I turned on the porch light to have a better look.
‘No way,’ I exclaimed, this time in protest. But nothing I could say was going to change what I held up to the light in both hands.
Gracefully tapered and shaped in a way that is unlike any other bone in any vertebrate I knew of, it was a human collarbone.
Yet it was too small.
Instantly, I rejected the thought that came to mind; instantly, I doubted myself. Who did I think I was? Some kind of expert? It had been a long time since college, and I had to be mistaken, the way my brain had been burping and farting lately. The bone was nothing, just part of a raccoon or something.
But what if it wasn’t?
I made up my mind. In the kitchen on top of the refrigerator was a large flashlight. Casketing the bone in the tin breadbox built into the old countertop, I grabbed the light and headed back out to the darkest place in my backyard.
I managed to illuminate my excavation by angling the flashlight at a downward slant on a stand I shimmed out of the inevitable bricks. Then I got down on my hands and elbows, my butt in the air and my head in the hole, to ease a few more bricks out of there, digging with my fingertips.
Near where the collarbone had been, I found what seemed to be lightweight print fabric, looking gray with dirt in the beam of the flashlight but perhaps formerly yellow or white, and blobbed or dotted with what once might have been printed roses.
Lifting the scrap of fabric, I saw a skeletal rib.
I laid the fabric back down where it was, then let it alone. Didn’t move it. Mosquitoes had gathered around me like clog dancers at a buffet, but I didn’t make a move to drive them away. Let them suck my blood; that would be just fine and dandy under the circumstances. I felt shivery even in the heat, as if I were sunsick, and I wanted to run away someplace and hide, yet even more I wanted to stay and dig up – more. Just more. I could not allow my mind to get very specific about what I might find next.
I put the fabric back in place and started working in the opposite direction, above where the collarbone had been.
After removing a few more bricks, I found what I dreaded and expected.
I uncovered the forehead, the eye sockets and cheekbones. That was all. That was enough. In a way, it was too much. I couldn’t go on. The small skull looked straight up at me like a pale, empty-eyed face from a very dark place, and I stared at it even as I pulled back, got to my feet and stood like a pillar of salt, my heartbeat drumming out the moments it took me to break away, grab the flashlight and run for the house to call 911.
TWO
Nicholas Crickens, at age twenty-three the youngest deputy in the Skink County Sheriff’s Department, found himself the first to arrive at the scene and could not believe his good luck. It was not every day that a call went out for response to a 10-54d – a dead body.
The reporting party had requested 10-40 – no lights and sirens, but he slewed into the unpaved driveway at speed anyhow, throwing up sand and pine straw with his tires. Even if he hadn’t seen the number plain as day on the mailbox, he would have figured he was in the right place, because it looked like every single light in the little ranch house was turned on, which was what people tended to do when there had been trouble in the night.
He parked his cruiser on the scraggly lawn and headed toward the house. The old woman came out to meet him under the porch light. Not old old – not like leaning on a walker or anything – but old as in short and dumpy with jowls and the beginnings of a turkey neck. She was wearing a red waterproof jacket in the ninety-degree heat and she looked shook up – no, 10-22 that, disregard. She wasn’t too shook up to give him a good once-over. As he strode up to her, he got the feeling she was patting him down with her eyes and her mind. Intense eyes and intense mind, studying him as if she were memorizing him.
‘Ma’am, are y’all all right?’ he called as he approached her.
Looking him straight in the face, she raised her eyebrows, or at least she flexed the place on her forehead where eyebrows should have been.
‘Are y’all in danger of any kind?’ Nicholas clarified. ‘I’m supposed to ask when I respond to a call about a dead body.’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake.’ Her voice was soft but not in a Southern way. ‘I told them and told them it’s not a dead body as such. It’s a skeleton.’
The ‘as such,’ plus her Yankee accent, plus the fact that she was wearing shoes and socks instead of flip-flops or cowboy boots, all combined to inform Nicholas that she was not from Skink County or anyplace close by. Therefore, he had no idea whether she might be a Democrat or an Episcopalian or some other frightening sort of mutation. Through her picture window he could see the front-room wall inside her house, and she had it covered with silly pictures of loopy-faced caterpillars, foxes wearing tuxedos, waltzing rabbits and such. Weirdest decor he’d ever seen. Handle with care, he thought. Possible 10-96: mental person.
He said, ‘I ’spect we ain’t got a code for skeletons – least none I can recall. Where’s it at?’
‘Around back. You have a flashlight?’
He did, of course, in his belt, and he held it in his fist beside his head, proper cop-style, as he followed her down the yard to a wheelbarrow piled full of bricks, beyond which he saw more bricks and a shovel strewn around a sizeable hole in the ground.
‘In there,’ she said, pointing.
A person would think the replicas he had seen on twenty-three Halloweens would prepare him to look at a skeleton, Nicholas reasoned with himself, but apparently they did not. The white sheen of the partially exposed skull gave him such a jolt that he blurted, ‘Is it real?’
‘She seems to be distressingly real.’
‘Y’all think that was a girl, ma’am?’ Skeletons weren’t supposed to be little girls. They were supposed to be big and scary, not small and terrifying.
‘Yes, because she appears to be wearing a dress, although, of course, I could be mistaken.’
What now? Follow procedure. Doing that, automatically Nicholas started his report. ‘Um, your name, please, ma’am?’
‘Beverly Vernon.’
Getting out his notebook, Nicholas realized he was rattled, thinking he could write and hold a flashlight at the same time. He had to make a mental note: Beverly Vernon, as he put the notebook away again. Then he couldn’t think what else to do. Get the yellow tape, secure the crime scene, but where exactly might that be? Just around the skeleton or the whole damn backyard? Nicholas had no idea; he was trained to deal with more recently deceased persons.
Headlight beams swept across him, and the Skink County Sheriff’s cruiser, having driven down the yard, pulled to a stop a few feet away, headlights on. Nicholas felt illuminated and relieved. ‘Looks like it was a little girl, Chief,’ he said as the older man of far more girth stepped to the graveside – might as well call it a graveside – with his flashlight raised like a weapon.
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br /> The chief took one look at the bones and one look at Mrs Vernon and barked at her, ‘How’d y’all know to dig here?’
‘Who said I did? I merely wanted to remove these pertinacious bricks from my property.’
Nicholas saw that Mrs Vernon was giving the sheriff the visual pat-down same way she had done to him and figured the chief might not like it. ‘Boss, howsabout if I take Mrs Vernon somewhere else to get her statement?’
‘Y’all just go ahead and do that, Crickens,’ grumbled the sheriff. ‘We ain’t even really identified that these here ain’t animal bones, and I don’t suppose y’all called for the coroner yet?’
‘No, sir.’ Damn, he should have thought of that. ‘Please come with me, Mrs Vernon.’ He led her away as two more vehicles pulled in, one state cop and one from the next county over, as was not unusual when there was nothing better for law enforcement to do. ‘In your house would be best, if that’s OK, ma’am. Next folks to arrive are likely to be reporters.’
She uttered a few expletives he wouldn’t have expected from a lady her age. And when they got inside, he saw not only walls covered with those weird pictures – ducks in dresses, cats having their hair done, like that – but also 3D paper birds and stuff hanging on loops of yarn from the ceiling of the Florida room, and on its table, bowls full of plastic milk carton caps, Mardi Gras beads, pens and pencils, all sorts of inexplicable junk. So when Mrs Vernon sat down with him at the table, Nicholas decided to take it real easy with her. Just in case she really was a 10-96.
He requested and took careful notes of her full name, phone number and address, then ventured in a conversational way, ‘Y’all lived here long, ma’am?’ That was the last question he got to ask for a while; she talked him an earful. No, she’d only moved here a year ago, after her husband had died and she’d decided she wanted to live in Florida, but what she called the real Florida, not tourist-trap Florida. Being self-employed, she could work wherever, although she hadn’t known then they might not want her to work anymore, which made no sense because she painted excellent illustrations, if she did say so herself, not goofy stuff that looked as if it was done with cat snot. Both of her daughters had followed her into the art field, at least at first. Maurie, who was forty-three and married to a lawyer, had started out teaching art at a prep school but now taught history at Cornell and was a published essayist as well. For some reason, Maurie and her husband did not have children, and Cassie, who would be turning forty in a few months, wasn’t even married, except to her business. A true entrepreneur, she had opened an ambitious art gallery in upstate New Jersey, but had been not been able to make it financially, even though she lived over the store, until she turned it into a trendy Wi-Fi, coffee and gluten-free muffins cafe with the work of emergent artists displayed on the walls. The woman said she talked with her daughters once a week, on Sundays usually. She wondered what they would say when they heard about the skeleton in the backyard. It was an hour later where they lived, in the Eastern Time Zone, and she didn’t think either of them would appreciate it if she called and woke them up now to tell them about it.
‘No, I guess not,’ Deputy Nicholas Crickens agreed, even though he didn’t agree. A person should be able to call kin anytime, not just when convenient, and it didn’t take a freaking genius to see that Mrs Vernon was either lonely or upset or half a bubble off plumb – maybe all three, what with that freaky-bright stare of hers plus the compulsive way she had been yakking, although she didn’t seem to want attention from just anyone, especially not the media.
Which made Nick think. ‘It’s a wonder your phone ain’t ringing off the hook by now. I mean, you got a landline?’
‘I do. It’s been here forever. But it’s not listed in my name.’
‘I hope them news buzzards don’t manage to sniff it out anyway.’
Mrs Vernon shrugged, standing with her back to him, looking out a window at the ruckus in the backyard; Nicholas could hear from inside the house the drone of the generator powering several strong lamps lighting the scene bright as day.
‘What a circus! They put a tent over her.’ Mrs Vernon sounded surprised.
The skeleton, she meant. ‘Yes, ma’am, in case it rains.’ Which was a no-brainer; it rained practically every day. ‘It’s going to take a while to exhume her properly.’ Nicholas had decided by now that this woman was nuttier than squirrel turds, but probably not dangerous. ‘Mrs Vernon, would you please explain to me what for y’all were out there digging bricks on such a hot day like today was?’
Turning to face him, she sighed, peering into her empty coffee mug. ‘That’s simple. I was feeling a bit wrought.’
‘A bit what?’
‘Wrought. In a temper. In a state of high dudgeon. I needed to fling bricks around.’
‘You were pissed off?’
She smiled, even laughed a little. ‘Very well put, Deputy. Yes, I was quite pissed off.’
‘How come?’
She sighed, although she still smiled at him wistfully, and she said, ‘For personal reasons I’d rather keep to myself, Deputy. Now, are you sure you won’t have a cup of coffee?’
It looked like it was going to be a long night, so he said yes, he would.
After the nice young policeman left, I locked all the doors, drew all the blinds and turned out all of the lights in the house as a deterrent to reporters. Deputy Crickens had told me that vans and cars full of them were lined up along the easement of the road in front of my house, and that one of his colleagues blocking my driveway was the only thing keeping them away from the crime scene and thus, indirectly, away from me. Once the cops were finished processing my yard, then I would be under siege.
However, it looked as if the cops still had plenty to do. After assessing the muddle of lights, vehicles and people in my backyard, I took a prescription sleeping pill, deployed my earplugs and went straight to bed. I’d had enough.
But despite earplugs and the pill, I woke up at sunrise. Becoming an early bird was apparently one of the many annoying side effects of getting older, along with undependable memory, thinning eyelashes, rosacea pimples on my nose, skin tabs on my neck and athlete’s foot in my armpits, where it didn’t belong, like the hair on my upper lip.
I made a face at myself in the bathroom mirror, got dressed in a fresh T-shirt, green polyester slacks, matching froggy-print socks – I love novelty socks – and my most comfortable Skechers. I managed to locate my glasses without too much difficulty. Then, with stiff, arthritic knees (another annoyance), I limped to the kitchen window to see whether the authorities still occupied my backyard.
Yes, although fewer in number, they did. But at least they were colorful about it, and geometric, working within a square of yellow crime-scene tape secured to T-posts, beneath a bright red pyramid of canvas, in the open space beneath which I could see the hole in the ground as a lozenge of darkness considerably longer than before.
Naturally, I had to check it out. I am, after all, an artist, meaning that my inner child lived on in my aging body, making me prone to depression but also to compulsive curiosity. Heading out into the relative coolness of early morning, I breathed deeply of air no warmer than eighty degrees as I strode down my yard toward the excavating strangers – one of whom stopped me at the yellow tape. ‘Sorry, ma’am, you can’t approach beyond this point.’
‘What?’ Just a bit slow in the morning, as usual, I recognized him as the no-neck sheriff who had taken over the night before. I peered up at his pugnacious face. ‘This is my land,’ I reminded him. ‘I could have you arrest yourself for trespassing.’
As too often happened, my sense of humor failed. The sheriff began to look heated, although not yet by the ambient temperature. ‘You think I want to stand out here all night taking charge of your skeleton?’
My skeleton? That one was arguably still inside my body. But with a skittery lurch of my mind, I recognized that I did, indeed, feel a sense of ownership regarding the one buried in my yard. I demanded, ‘Do you
have any idea yet who she is?’
‘Who she was? Can’t comment on an investigation ain’t barely begun yet.’ He flapped a porky hand toward what he refused to let me see, apparently to point out two young men poking around between twine that had been strung to form a grid covering the grave. My backyard find was being handled like an archaeological dig.
Another person, a woman kneeling by the grave, called across to me, ‘Ma’am, would you happen to know what year this house was built?’
‘1957.’ I peered at her much as I peer at everyone, I suppose, taking her in: brunette, tall, taupe skin not tanned but naturally tending toward olive; some Apalachee heritage, maybe. Her strong-boned face struck me as beautiful because of its faultless symmetry, but she was not young, merely younger than I was.
The sheriff turned around, not to look at her but to glare. She didn’t seem to mind or even notice, continuing her conversation with me.
‘They used bricks for filler back then,’ she told me.
‘No wonder the damn yard is full of bricks!’
‘Yeah, well, they tend to work their way to the surface.’ Her accent, while relaxed, was not drawling Southern. ‘They could have been piled on this body any time since then, but the extent of decay—’
‘Doctor Wengleman,’ interrupted the sheriff with some force, ‘we ain’t discussing this case with Mrs Varner.’
‘Mrs Vernon,’ I corrected him. And then said to her, ‘What about the design on the dress fabric? Can you date that?’
She lifted her eyebrows in approbation. ‘Now, that’s an idea! And the fabric itself—’
‘Don’t need no talking about right here and now!’ interrupted the sheriff with some force, glowering at the woman, then turning on me. ‘Mrs, um, Vernon, if you don’t want me all over you like flies on a rump roast, I suggest you git back into your house and stay there, take your phone off the hook and don’t talk to no reporters when they come knocking neither.’
And here I had been going to offer him a cup of freshly brewed coffee. Screw that. Rolling my eyes, I obeyed him only for reasons of my own. I wanted to write down the tall, tawny woman’s name before I forgot it.
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