Twice Dead - Catherine Coulter [26]
Becca remembered him carefully setting the skull on the skeleton’s chest. But he was right, with a skeleton, who cared?
Sheriff Gaffney said on a shrug, “In any case, Dr. Baines will take the skeleton into Augusta to the medical examiner and then we’ll see.”
Sheriff Gaffney looked out at the two dozen people who were hovering about and shook his head and waved them away. Of course no one moved. They continued talking, pointing at the house, maybe even at her.
Sheriff Gaffney said, “They’ll go on home in a bit. Natural human curiosity, that’s all. Now, Ms. Powell, I know you’re upset and all, being a female with fine sensibilities, just like my Maude, but I ask that you keep yourself calm for a while longer.”
He had to be about the same age as her father would have been had he lived, Becca thought, and smiled at him then, because he meant well. “I’ll try, Sheriff. You don’t have any daughters, do you?”
“No, ma’am, just a bunch of boys, all hard-noses, always back-talking me, and covered with mud and sweat half the time. Not at all the same thing for little girls. My Maude would have given anything for a little girl, but God didn’t send us one, just all them dirty boys.
“Now, Ms. Powell, Dr. Baines will be talking to the folk in the medical examiner’s office in Augusta—that’s our capital, you know—once he gets there. They’ll do an autopsy, or whatever it is they do on a mess of bones. The folk up there have lots of formal training, so they’ll know what they’re doing. Like I told you, they’ll document that old Jacob or somebody hit her right in the forehead, smashed her head in. They’ll determine that it was real mean, that blow. In the meantime we gotta find out who she is. There wasn’t any ID on her. You got any more ideas about it?”
“Calvin Klein jeans have been popular since the early to mid-eighties. That means that she wasn’t murdered and sealed behind that wall before 1980.”
Sheriff Gaffney carefully wrote that down. He hummed softly while he wrote. He looked up then and stared at her. “You sure do look familiar, Ms. Powell.”
“Maybe you saw me in a fashion magazine, Sheriff. No, don’t even consider that, I’m joking with you. I’m not a model. I’m sure I would have remembered you, sir, if I’d ever met you before.”
“Well, that’s likely enough,” he said, nodding. “Tyler, you got any thoughts about this?”
Tyler shook his head.
Sheriff Gaffney looked as if he would say something else, then he shut his mouth. However, he gave Tyler another long look. “I’ll be in touch,” he said, snapped out a sharp salute, and walked to his car, a brown Ford with a light bar over the top. At the last moment, he looked back at them, and he was frowning. Then he managed to squeeze his bulk into the driver’s side. He hadn’t been interested in her background, a blessing. Evidently, he realized that she could have had nothing to do with this and so who she was, where she was from, and what she did for a living simply did not matter.
“He’s amazing,” Becca said as he drove away. “Too bad he didn’t have a daughter to go with all those dirty boys.”
She looked to see that Tyler was staring down at his feet. She lightly touched her fingers to his arm. “What’s wrong? You’re afraid I really am going to be hysterical about finding that poor girl?”
“No, it’s not that. You saw the sheriff. Even though he didn’t really say anything, it was clear enough what he was thinking.”
“I don’t know what you mean. What’s wrong, Tyler?”
“I realize it occurred to him that the skeleton might well be Ann.”
Becca looked at him blankly, slowly shaking her head back and forth.
“My wife. She wore Calvin Klein jeans.”
EIGHT
Becca walked into the Riptide Pharmacy in the middle of Foxglove Avenue the next morning and found, to her horror, that she was the center of attention. For someone who wanted