Free Riptide by Catherine Coulter Page B

thirteen?”
    â€œNo, his golden retriever, Miranda. She just up and died. Old Jacob was never the same after that. Losing someone you love, so I hear, can be real hard on a man. My Maude promised me a long time ago that she’d outlive me, so maybe I’d never have to know what it’s like.”
    Becca followed the sheriff back up the basement stairs. She looked back once at the ghastly pile of white bones wearing Calvin Klein jeans and a sexy pink tank top. Poor girl. She thought of the Edgar Allan Poe tale The Cask of Amontillado and prayed that this girl had been dead before she was stuffed in that wall.
    Sheriff Gaffney had laid the skull on top of the skeleton’s chest.
    An hour and a half later, Tyler stood next to her, off to the side of the front porch. Dr. Baines, shorter than Becca, whiplash thin, big glasses, came out nearly at a run, followed by two young men in white coats carrying the skeleton carefully on a gurney.
    â€œI never thought Mr. Marley could murder anyone,” Dr. Baines said, his voice fast and low. “Funny how things happen, isn’t it? All this time, no one knew, no one even guessed.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose, nodded to Becca and to Tyler, then spoke briefly to the men as they gently lifted the gurney into the back of the van.
    The unmarked white van pulled away, followed by Dr. Baines’s car. “Dr. Baines is our local physician. He got on the phone to the medical examiner in Augusta after I called him about the skeleton. The ME told him what to do, which is kind of dumb, since he’s a doctor and I’m an officer of the law, and of course I’d be really careful around the skeleton and take pictures from all angles and be careful not to mess up the crime scene.”
    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. Just 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 just 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?”
    â€œNo, 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.
    â€œNow, 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, vicious, 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?”
    â€œCalvin 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.