“Doo wah doo wah,” he sang, louder now that he decided that he had a pretty great singing voice. “Doo wah doo wee wee weeh…”
On the other side of the door, Vesta was watching a YouTube video on her phone. There were no patients in the waiting room, and no patients in with Tex either, so she had all the time in the world. But this video was something else. And as she watched, suddenly a horrible noise intruded on her viewing pleasure. It sounded like a cross between the howl of a wolf and the yowl of a cat in heat. It took her a while to trace the source of the sound, and when she had, she got up and marched over to the door.
Without knocking, she opened it and stuck her head in.
“Tex? Are you all right?” she asked, showing a solicitude she rarely displayed when dealing with her son-in-law.
“I’m fine,” said Tex, looking up from watering his plant. “Why?”
She shook her head. “The weirdest thing. I thought I heard someone being mangled by a timber wolf but now it stopped.”
“You’re imagining things, Vesta, cause I heard nothing.”
“Yeah, that must be it,” she murmured, then made to close the door, only to push it open again. “Say, have you ever considered we may be about to be annihilated, Tex?”
“Mh?” he said, looking up from plucking something from his precious plant.
“The coming apocalypse,” she explained. “I was just watching a great video about the coming apocalypse and what we should do to get ready for when it comes.”
“What apocalypse?” he asked, getting up and staring at whatever he’d plucked from his plant.
“The one that’s about to start. There’s a nuclear holocaust about to happen, Tex, or hadn’t you noticed?”
“No, actually I hadn’t. What nuclear holocaust?”
“Well, it only stands to reason that with so many nuclear weapons in the world someone is gonna launch one any second now, and that someone may be a rogue agent, or it may be a rogue nation, or it may be a rogue organization. Something rogue at any rate. And then there’s the tsunamis that are about to rock our world, not to mention the volcanoes that are about to go active, and the rising oceans. We need to get ready, Tex. It’s imperative we build ourselves a bunker and store it with enough food to survive this thing.”
He gave her a strange look. “Vesta, there’s not going to be a nuclear holocaust. The people in charge will never let that happen. And as far as those oceans and those volcanoes are concerned, I’m sure it will all be fine.”
“All be fine! You sound like those animals that stick their heads in the sand! Kangaroos? No, ostriches.” She pointed a finger at him. “You, Tex, are an ostrich, and it’s because of ostriches that things are quickly going to hell in a handbasket.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, not sounding all that interested. “What do you think these are?” he asked, staring at his own finger like the ding-dong he was. “Is that a bug, you think, or a fungus?”
“Oh, you’re a fungus, Tex,” she said, and slammed the door shut.
It didn’t matter. Even though Tex was a lost cause, that didn’t mean she couldn’t take matters into her own hands. Wasn’t that always the case, though? Didn’t it always come down to simple, honest, hard-working women to get the job done?
So she got behind her desk, took pen and paper in hand, and started scribbling down a list of things she needed to get cracking on to survive this coming nuclear winter.
“It’s been in there an awfully long time,” said Uncle Alec, staring at the skeleton.
“And how long is an awfully long time?” asked Odelia. “In your expert opinion?”
“Heck, honey, I’m just a cop, not a coroner. So I have absolutely no idea.”
“I’ll bet it’s been in there a thousand years,” said Marge. “Look at the state it’s in.”
“I doubt it’s been a thousand years, though, Marge,” said Chase. “This house isn’t a thousand years old.”
“So what? It could have been there from way before this house was ever built.”
“Impossible, mom,” said Odelia. “It’s in the wall, so it was put there after the house was built.”
“Oh,” said Marge. “You think?”
“I’m not an expert either, but yeah, that’s what I think.”
“Abe should be here any minute now,” said Alec, checking his watch. “We’ll know more when he arrives.”
Abe Cornwall was the county coroner, and as such more qualified than any of the small band of onlookers who now stood gathered around the skeleton, staring at it as if hoping it would magically reveal its secrets somehow.
“I still don’t have water,” Marge pointed out. Her initial shock had worn off.
Odelia placed a hand on her mother’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, mom. As soon as the body is taken out, I’m sure the plumber will be able to get the water running again.”
“Yeah, but the laundry still needs to be done, and I need to cook, and I wanted to mop the floors—though now with all these people running in and out of the basement I guess it’s not much use anyway.”
“If you want you and Dad and Gran can eat at ours tonight.”
“Thanks,” said Marge. “But what about showers tomorrow morning?”
“You can take a shower at ours, as well.”
“Thanks, sweetie,” said Marge, biting her lip nervously.
“So Gwayn took a whack at this wall and this skeleton popped up,” said Alec, jotting down a couple of notes.
“Yeah, Gwayn figured there was an issue with the connection to the water main—a leak maybe—so he wanted to take a closer look before he called in the people from the water company. And that’s when this old skeleton suddenly popped up,” said Marge.
Gwayn Partington had gone home already. Or, as was more likely, to his favorite bar.
“Clothes are mostly gone, too,” said Alec. “Though they look like a man’s clothes to me.”
The skeleton had a few rags draped around itself. It was hard to see what they’d been, though, in spite of what Odelia’s uncle said. Everything looked old and ragged.
“Look, just get it out of here, will you?” said Marge. “So I can call Gwayn and he can fix my plumbing and I have water again.” And with these words she moved up the stairs.
“So how long do you really think it’s been there, Uncle Alec?” asked Odelia.
“Hard to say, sweetie. These houses were built in the fifties, so it has to be less than that, and bodies take a little while to turn into skeletons, so it can’t be recent, either. But like I said, it’s up to the experts to tell us the age of the body, or how it died.”
“And how it got stuck inside this wall,” Chase added.
“But it didn’t get stuck inside the wall, did it?” said Odelia. “Someone put it there.”
Alec moved a little closer and stuck his head in to look up. “Yeah, doesn’t look like a chimney or anything, so it’s definitely not some wannabe Santa who got stuck.”
“Ha ha,” said Odelia. “Very funny.”
“No, it happens,” said Alec, retracting his head. “I once heard about a case where a guy went missing. Years later a house in the same neighborhood was sold and when the builders came in to do some remodeling they found a body stuck inside the old chimney. Turns out he’d been burgling the house and had gotten stuck and died.”
“You know what this means, right?” said Odelia.
“What?”
“This is a murder case.”
“A murder case!” said Alec.
“Of course. What else could it be?”
“Anything! A very elaborate suicide. An accident. Um…”
“It’s murder, and whoever put this poor person in there managed to get away with it for all this time.”
“Oh, don’t tell me you think we should…” Alec began.
“Investigate who killed him or her? Of course. It doesn’t matter if it happened yesterday or fifty years ago, we need to get to the bottom of this.”
“But—”
“There’s people out there who lost a brother, a sister or a mother or a father. And who never had closure. People who want to know what happened, and who deserve answers, and to see justice done. And the murderer is probably still out there, happy they got away with it. Well, I would like you to promise me you’re not going to let that happen. That you’re going to do whatever it takes to bring this person to justice.”