Twice Dead - Catherine Coulter [24]
“I appreciate that, Mrs. Ella. I’m not really hysterical, at least not yet, but how could the sheriff have possibly known that I was wavering on the edge? I never said a word to him.”
“Edgar just knows these things,” Mrs. Ella said comfortably. “He’s very intuitive, now isn’t he? That’s why I’ll keep talking to you until he gets there, Miss Powell. I’m to help you keep your wits together.”
Becca didn’t mind a bit. For the next ten minutes, she heard how Ann McBride disappeared between one day and the next, no explanation at all, just as Tyler had told her. She learned that Tyler wasn’t Sam’s father but his stepfather. Sam’s real father had just up and disappeared from one day to the next, too. Odd, now wasn’t it, the both of them, just up and out of here? Of course, Sam’s father had been a rotter, whining and bitching about how hard life was, and he didn’t want to stay here, so his leaving made some sense, now didn’t it? But not Ann’s, no, she couldn’t have just up and left, not without Sam.
Then Mrs. Ella began with all her pets, and there were a bunch of them since she was sixty-five years old. Finally, Becca heard a car pull up.
“The sheriff just arrived, Mrs. Ella. I promise I won’t fall apart.” She hung up the phone before Mrs. Ella could give her own mother’s tried-and-true recipe for stretched nerves. And she wouldn’t fall apart, either, because by Mrs. Ella’s fifth dog, a terrier named Butch, there were no more tears in her eyes and the bubbling, liquid laughter was long dried up.
Sheriff Gaffney had seen the Powell girl around town, but he hadn’t met her. She looked harmless enough, he thought, remembering how she was squeezing a cantaloupe in the produce department at Food Fort when he first saw her. She was pretty enough, but right then, she was as white as his shirtfront last night before he’d eaten spaghetti. She’d opened the front door of the old Marley place and stood there staring at him.
“I’m the law,” he said, and took his sheriff’s hat off. There was something odd about her, something that wasn’t quite right, and it wasn’t her too-pale face. Well, finding a skeleton could put a person off in a whole lot of ways. He wished she’d stop gaping at him like she didn’t have a brain or, God forbid, was hysterical. He was afraid she would burst into tears and he was ready to do about anything to prevent that. He threw back his shoulders and stuck out a huge hand. “Sheriff Gaffney, ma’am. What’s this about a skeleton in your basement?”
“It’s a woman, Sheriff.”
He shook her hand, pleased and relieved that now she appeared reasonably under control and her lower lip wasn’t trembling. Her eyes looked perfectly dry to him, from what he could tell through her glasses. “Show me this skeleton who you believe with your untrained eye is a woman, ma’am,” he said, “and we’ll see if you’re guessing right.”
I’m in never-never land, Becca thought as she showed Sheriff Gaffney down to Jacob Marley’s basement.
She walked behind him. He was nearing sixty years old, and was a walking heart attack. He was a good thirty pounds overweight, the buttons of his sheriff shirt gaping over his belly. The wide black leather belt tight beneath his belly carried a gun holster and a billy club, and nearly disappeared in the front because his stomach was so big. He had a circle of gray hair around his head and very light gray eyes. She nearly ran into him when he suddenly stopped on the bottom step, stood there, and sniffed.
“That’s good, Ms. Powell. No smell. Gotta be old.”
She nearly gagged.
She kept back when he went down on his knees to examine the bones.
“I thought it was a woman, maybe even a girl, since she’s wearing a pink tank top.”
“A good deduction, ma’am. Yep, the remains look pretty old, or maybe not. I read that a dead person can become a skeleton in as little as two weeks or it can take as long as ten years depending on where the body’s put.