Free Elaine Orr - Jolie Gentil 02 - Rekindling Motives by Elaine Orr Page A

Scoobie.
    “I am, actually.” He glanced towards Aunt Madge. “Learning a couple things, too. Did you know that the guy who invented Lionel trains tried to make the first one with a steam engine? It blew up.”
    “Nope. No brothers.”
    Aunt Madge made a harrumphing noise. “You don’t have to be a boy to like trains.” She had found a small pair of pliers and was walking back to sit on the floor next to Scoobie.
    “True, but can you imagine my mother buying Renée or me something with tires other than a baby buggy?” My mother wanted her girls to be girls, as she put it. My sister is trying my mother’s patience by letting her girls play soccer.
    “Good point,” she said, and began to show Scoobie which part of the piece of track needed to be gently straightened.
    I decided to wait to ask her about the youngest Tillotsons – she would only accuse me of trying to find more people to bother, and she would be right – and went instead to the stack of four old-fashioned leather books.
    Just as I was trying to decipher the titles at the top of the columns on the first page Aunt Madge shouted, “Annie Milner. I knew I’d remember it.”
    “You mean the girl from our graduating class?” Scoobie asked.
    “I most certainly do,” Aunt Madge said.
    I remembered Annie not from high school but because she worked in the county prosecuting attorney’s office and had interviewe d me when the windbag attorney was planning his case against yet another classmate. During the probable cause hearing she handed the prosecuting attorney notes a couple of times, leading me to think she was the one with the brains.
    Scoobie said, “She got one of the mock awards that Jennifer passed out during the reunion, but I don’t remember what for.” He continued, looking at me. “She didn’t come until the end of junior year. Really quiet, too. You wouldn’t have known her.”
    “So, what about her?” I asked.
    “She’s Mary Doris Milner’s grand niece.” Aunt Madge looked as proud as if she’d finished replacing a board on the front porch.
     

CHAPTER SIX
     
    I WAS HAVING A HARD TIME not calling Annie Milner. It made no sense to talk to her until we knew if the skeleton belonged to Richard Tillotson. I decided to annoy Sergeant Morehouse instead.
    He made me wait twenty minutes before he came to the reception area to get me. “Thought maybe you’d get tired of waiting,” he said as he keyed digits into the security pad and opened the entry to the bull-pen of officers’ desks and the tiny cubbyholes – they hardly qualified as offices – for sergeants and lieutenants.
    “But you knew I’d be back, so why bother putting me off today?” I smiled at him and was half surprised when he smiled back.
    He gestured to the one guest chair in his small, crowded office and plopped himself in his own. Sgt. Morehouse is about 40, and if he didn’t wear polyester pants and inexpensive looking sports coats you might not think of him as a cop. Though he can be quite curt when he wants to be rid of me, his usual expression is halfway friendly.
    “I told you we wouldn’t get DNA evidence too quickly,” he said.
    I nodded. “I thought of a couple of other things, though.” At his raised eyebrow, I continued, “Did you notice if the skeleton was dirty, or if there were specks of dirt on the wardrobe floor?”
    “I’ll tell you, Jolie, I don’t know the criteria for a clean skeleton, and the floor of the wardrobe was damn dirty after who knows how many years. Why?”
    “Because I wondered if it had been buried and dug up. I thought it might have soil on it.” I met his eye as he gazed at me, unblinking.
    He sighed. “It was dusty, mostly. But, the coroner’s office did find some white powder in the back of the shoulder socket. Someone – whether it was a murderer or someone who had a deceased person exhumed for some other damn reason – did a good job cleaning the skeleton.” He raised a finger to shake at me, “Like I