Free A Bone to Pick by Charlaine Harris Page A

lawyer?”
“No.”
“Let’s just hope he meant it when he said he knew ~ 80 ~
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Jane was in her right mind when she made her will.” On that happy note we told each other good-bye. I returned to my chair and tried to pick up the thread of my reasoning. Soon I realized I’d gone as far as I could go.
It seemed to me that if I could find out who the skull had belonged to, I’d have a clearer course to fol- low. I could start by finding out how long the skull had been in the window seat. If Jane had kept the bill from the carpet layers, that would give me a definite date, because the skull had for sure been in the win- dow seat when the carpet was installed over it. And it hadn’t been disturbed since.
That meant I had to go back to Jane’s house. I sighed deeply.
I might as well have some lunch, collect some boxes, and go to work at the house this afternoon as I’d planned originally.
This time yesterday I’d been a woman with a happy future; now I was a woman with a secret, and it was such a strange, macabre secret that I felt I had guilty knowledge written on my forehead. The unloading across the street was still going on. I saw a large carton labeled with a picture of a ~ 81 ~
    ~ Charlaine Harris ~
baby crib being carried in, and almost wept. But I had other things to do today than beat myself over the head with losing Arthur. That grief had a stale, preoc- cupied feel to it.
The disorder in Jane’s bedroom had to be cleared away before I could think about finding her papers. I carried in my boxes, found the coffeepot, and started the coffee (which I’d brought back, since I had car- ried it away in the morning) to perking. The house was so cool and so quiet that it almost made me drowsy. I turned on Jane’s bedside radio; yuck, it was on the easy listening station. I found the public radio station after a second’s search, and began to pack clothes to Beethoven. I searched each garment as I packed, just on the off chance I would find something that would explain the hidden skull. I just could not believe Jane would leave me this problem with no ex- planation.
Maybe she’d thought I’d never find it?
No, Jane had thought I’d find it sooner or later. Maybe not this soon. But sometime. Perhaps, if it hadn’t been for the break-in and the holes in the backyard (and here I reminded myself again to check them), I wouldn’t have worried about a thing, no mat- ter how mysterious some of Bubba Sewell’s state- ments had been.
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    ~ A Bone to Pick ~
Suddenly I thought of the old saw “You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” I recalled the skull’s grin all too clearly, and I began laughing.
I had to laugh at something.
It didn’t take quite as long as I expected to pack Jane’s clothes. If something had struck my fancy, it wouldn’t have bothered me to keep it; Jane had been a down-to-earth woman, and in some ways I sup- posed I was, too. But I saw nothing I wanted to keep except a cardigan or two, so anonymous that I wouldn’t be constantly thinking, I am wearing Jane’s clothes. So all the dresses and blouses, coats and shoes and skirts that had been in the closet were neatly boxed and ready to go to the Goodwill, with the vex- ing exception of a robe that slipped from its hanger to the floor. Every box was full to the brim, so I just left it where it fell. I loaded the boxes into my car trunk, then decided to take a break by strolling into the backyard and seeing what damage had been done there.
Jane’s backyard was laid out neatly. There were two concrete benches, too hot to sit on in the June sun, placed on either side of a concrete birdbath sur- rounded by monkey grass. The monkey grass was get- ting out of hand, I noticed. Someone else had thought so, too; a big chunk of it had been uprooted. I’d dealt ~ 83 ~
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with monkey grass before and admired the unknown gardener’s persistence. Then it came to me that this was one of the “dug up” spots