Free Bone Valley by Claire Matturro

good deal of free-form crowd rant ensued about the destruction and environmental disaster that a phosphate mine by the east fork of the Manatee River would create. I got the point in thirty seconds—the mines would suck up millions of gallons of precious water and leave behind slime ponds of toxic waste—and ducked out to find a bathroom.
    When I came back in, a serious-looking man behind the microphone was droning in way too much detail about how phosphate runoff was killing our streams, bays, and Gulf, destroying marine life, and otherwise becoming the chemical agent of Armageddon. Then he cursed our luck for living on the outer edge of the so-called bone valley region, named after the ancient bones of bygone creatures that time and nature had turned into one of the world’s richest deposits of phosphate ore.
    Truth is, I’m just not much for scientific discourse unless it pertains to one of my own cases. Besides, I already had the big picture—phosphate mining, processing, and use were all bad; green trees and clean streams were all good.
    Edgy now, I bit back a yawn and scanned the crowd, looking for entertainment or information. Naturally I started with the most beautiful person there, that being Miguel, but he was not playing eye contact with me anymore, so I branched out my visual reconnaissance.
    Not halfway through my study of the various people crowded into the meeting room, damned if I didn’t see Mrs. M. David Moody, aka Sherilyn the beauty queen, standing in the back corner. An older man with a strong build was standing nearby, but his head was turned away from me. I couldn’t make out whether he was with Mrs. Moody or not. After a quick glance at his bulked-up body and his thin, gray hair, I dismissed him as a grandpa-weight-lifter-on-steroids, and turned back to Mrs. Moody.
    Something was wrong with her face. Even from across the room, I could see that her complexion looked wounded, like a bad sunburn that had peeled into different layers of skin and colors, but not healed. What in the world had happened to her? Mrs. Moody was known for her beauty and her splendid parties—parties I was never invited to attend but which I read all about in Marjorie North’s column in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune . Okay, I wasn’t necessarily a Sherilyn fan, but, still, to see her looking so unattractive seemed so—so what? Sad wasn’t the right word, not after meeting Bob the doomed baby squirrel and Lenora the saint with a serious disease. Still, I felt myself feeling a little sorry for the woman.
    But before I could think further on Mrs. Moody’s ruined complexion, Detective Josey Something Farmer came into the room, right through the door I was guarding, and she spotted me and stopped to shake hands.
    “Interesting, meeting you here,” she said.
    “I’m here as a citizen with a vital, but routine, interest in learning more about phosphate mining. Why are you here?”
    “Yeah. Me too.”
    “Anything new on M. David?”
    “Yeah. It’ll all be in tomorrow’s newspaper. Sunday paper recap and follow-up story. Lots of pressure on the department on this one, high-profile victim and all, so the sheriff gave an in-depth interview.”
    “Tomorrow, huh? I’m not real good at waiting,” I said, and flashed what I hoped was an endearing girl-bonding grin.
    Josey grinned back. “Yeah, I hate to wait too.”
    “So tell me.” She hesitated, and I said, “Hey, you said it would be in the paper. Not like you’re selling government secrets.”
    “Yeah, right. Autopsy’s not complete yet, but the obvious physical evidence indicates he had been held down in the phosphogypsum pond until he drowned. Bruises on the back of his neck.”
    “Phosphogypsum pond? I thought he drowned in a gyp stack.”
    “Same thing. They take all the processing waste and store it in gyp stacks, or ponds, behind earthen dams. The dams are around seventy feet high, and you can drive or walk around on top of them. If you are on the top of