Free Skeleton Key by Jane Haddam Page A

Henry said. “What is it if it isn’t an accident?”
    Martin went up to the Jeep. “There’s no ditch here. There’s just an incline.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œSo what would you have to do, to tip a Jeep over like this, with no incline and those wheels? You’d have to push it.”
    â€œPush it.”
    â€œYeah. You’d get it up on that little ridge there and wait till it was leaning, and then you’d push it.”
    â€œChrist on a crutch,” Henry said. “What for? And if it was leaning, it could have fallen over.”
    â€œIt wouldn’t have been leaning enough.”
    â€œJesus.”
    â€œAnd if it had fallen, there would still be people in it They would be all caught up in their seat belts. We’d be able to talk to them.”
    â€œI think they got out of their seat belts and out of the Jeep and took off. I think they didn’t want to get into any more trouble than they had to get into. That’s what I think.”
    â€œMaybe Miss Dallmer did it herself,” Martin said. “Maybe she drove out here and tipped the Jeep over, and then went back to her house to call the police.”
    Henry made a snort and stomped off. He was looking through the weeds for footprints or other signs of someone running—although there couldn’t be much in the way of footprints out here. Martin walked around and around the Jeep, shining his flashlight at it. It looked the way it always looked when Faye Dallmer drove it in and parked it next to the house where Martin and Henry lived. One of the things Faye Dallmer liked to do was to take rubbings of gravestones. It had always seemed like something worse than a stupid idea to Martin. Maybe it really meant something, all those herbs and crystals she used. Maybe she was worshiping the dead.
    Henry came back around the other side of the car. “We’d better go back to the house,” he said. “We don’t want thecops showing up and nobody being there. They’d mark us down for being drunk and forget all about us.”
    â€œUh huh,” Martin said.
    Henry was moving very quickly. Martin looked up at the moon for a minute—it was coming out of the clouds now, looking full and bright—and followed. Henry’s wife had been a nurse. When she left him, she told him that he had been more dangerous to her health than any of the infectious patients she cared for, even the one who had cholera. Martin had never been able to understand it, since Henry had never been a very physical man.
    â€œChrist on a crutch,” Henry said, coming to a full stop.
    Martin came to a stop just behind him, and then moved around to his side so that he could see what Henry could see. He still had the flashlight on, but he didn’t need it. The moon was full out now. The backyard was as lit up as it would have been on a fairly cloudy day. Martin aimed the flashlight at the back porch anyway, because it seemed to be the thing he was supposed to do.
    â€œChrist on a crutch,” Henry said again.
    Martin felt himself backing up, automatically. He didn’t remember deciding to move.
    â€œHenry?” he said.
    â€œWhen I get hold of Jackey screwing Hargrove, I’m going to kill him,” Henry said.
    â€œSkeet,” Martin said, just as automatically as he had moved backward. The muscles in his arms and legs were twitching. He was clamping his jaw so hard, it hurt.
    Lying across the porch steps in front of him was a skeleton, and there was no way of mistaking it for anything but the real thing. It wasn’t strung together in a whole the way fake skeletons and medical school models were. It was just lose bones, pushed here and there along the steps, barely held together at all. And the bones were dirty, not polished white. They looked wet and cold and gray, as if they were oozing slime.
    â€œChrist on a screaming, frigging crutch,” Henry said.
    And then Martin started to laugh,