He watched her pick up her Coonan and stuff the bullets in her jeans pocket. He picked up her kitchen knife and followed her back to Jacob Marley’s house.
It took him eleven minutes and two phone calls. When he laid down the phone the second time, he looked over at her and smiled. “It shouldn’t take long.” In no more than three seconds, the phone rang. He motioned her away and picked it up. “Carruthers here.”
He listened, wrote something down on a sheet of paper. “Thanks a lot, Jarvis, I owe you. Yeah, yeah, you know I always pay up. It just might not be tomorrow. You know how to reach me. Okay, thanks. Bye.”
He carefully laid the phone back into the cradle. “It isn’t Ann McBride, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“No, of course it’s not Tyler’s missing wife. I never thought it was. I’ve known him since I was eighteen. I’ve never met a more decent man. Really.” But she was nearly shaking with relief, and he saw it. However, it was his turn to let it go.
But then she said, “I couldn’t have stood it if Tyler had been a monster instead of a really nice guy. I guess I would have just hung it up.”
“Yeah, your boyfriend is off the hook. The skeleton was buried inside that wall for at least ten years, possibly more. She was probably in her late teens when she was killed by a hard blow right in the face, the forehead actually. Whoever did it was really pissed, enraged, totally out of control. Jarvis said it was a vicious blow, killed her instantly.”
“It looks like Jacob Marley really might have killed her, then.”
He shrugged. “Who knows? It’s not our problem, thank God.”
“It’s certainly mine, since she tumbled out of the wall onto my basement floor. I can’t believe anyone would kill a teenager for wandering across his yard, and with such viciousness.”
A second later the phone rang. It was Bernie Bradstreet, owner of The Riptide Independent, wanting to know what she could tell him. “I know the sheriff wants to keep a lid on this, but-”
She told him everything, omitting only what Adam Carruthers had just found out from the medical examiner’s office. She didn’t think the sheriff would like to be cut out of that particular loop. Then Bernie Bradstreet asked her to dinner, with his wife, he hastened to add when she didn’t say anything. She put him off. When she hung up the phone, Adam said, “Newspaper? You handled it well. Now you need to call the sheriff. Don’t tell him you already know the answers, just encourage him to call the medical examiner’s office. Jarvis told me they’re not ready to release the information yet, but if the sheriff calls, he might be able to pry it out of them. Oh, yeah, when the sheriff comes, tell him I’m your cousin from Baltimore here to visit. Okay?”
“Cousins? We don’t look anything alike.”
He gave her a crooked grin.“Thank heaven for that.”
Sheriff Gaffney didn’t like the news from Augusta. He liked tidy conclusions, puzzles where all the pieces finally locked cleanly into place, not this: an old skeleton, identity unknown, that had been bricked inside Jacob Marley’s basement wall after her gruesome murder. He didn’t really want Ann McBride to be dead, but it would have made things so much cleaner, so nice and straightforward. He glanced at Tyler McBride. The guy looked calm, but relieved? He just couldn’t tell. Tyler had always managed to keep what he was feeling close to his vest. He was good at poker, nobody liked to play against him. Funny thing, though, the sheriff would have sworn that Tyler had killed his wife. He still kept his eye on Tyler, hoping to see him do something strange, like visit an unmarked grave or something. Well, he’d been wrong before. He guessed maybe he was wrong again. He hated it, it wasn’t pleasant, but sometimes it happened, even to a man like him.
Sheriff Gaffney looked over at Ms. Powell’s cousin, a big, tough-looking guy who looked like he could take care of himself. His body was hard and in good shape, but he seemed like a man who could be patient, as if he was used to waiting in the shadows, like a predator stalking its prey. Gaffney shook his head. He had to stop reading those suspense novels he liked so much.
He looked over at Becca Powell, a nice young woman who wasn’t, thank God, so pale now, or on the verge of hysteria. Hopefully her cousin would keep her that way. After finding that skeleton, just maybe she would be glad to have him around for a while. He found himself studying Carruthers again. The guy was dark, from his black hair-too long, in the sheriff’s opinion-to his eyes, nearly black in the dim late-afternoon light in Jacob Marley’s living room. He had big feet in scuffed black boots, soft-looking boots that looked like he’d worn them for a good long time and waited in the shadows with those boots on his feet, not making a whisper of a sound. He wondered what the hell the man did for a living. Nothing normal and expected, he’d bet his next meal on that. Just maybe he didn’t want to know.
The sheriff looked around the living room. Jesus, the place looked like a museum or a tomb. It felt old and musty, although it smelled like lemons, just like at home.
He knew, of course, that everyone was looking at him, waiting. He liked that. It built suspense. He was holding them in the palm of his hand. Only thing was, they didn’t look all that scared or worried or ready to gnaw off their fingernails. A real cool bunch.
Becca said finally, “Sheriff, won’t you be seated? Now, you have news for us?”
He took the old chair she was waving at, eased down slowly, then cleared his throat. He was ready to make his big announcement. “Well now, it does appear that this skeleton isn’t your wife, Tyler.”
There was a sharp moment of silence, but not the surprise he’d expected, that he’d wanted, truth be told.
“Thank you for telling me so quickly, Sheriff. I’m pleased that it wasn’t, because that would have meant that someone had killed her and it wasn’t me. I hope that wherever Ann is, she’s very much alive and well and happy.”
But Tyler hadn’t acted surprised. He acted like he already knew. Well, damn, if Tyler hadn’t killed Ann, then he would certainly know that the skeleton wasn’t her, or if it was, then someone else had put her there. That logic made the sheriff’s head ache. “Humph, I wouldn’t know about that. I’ve contacted all the local authorities and they’re going to check on runaways from between ten and fifteen years ago. There’s a good chance we’ll find out who she is. She was young, probably late teens. That makes it even more likely that she was a runaway. She was murdered, though. Now, that makes it a big problem, my big problem.”
“It’s not possible that it’s a local teenager, Sheriff?” Becca asked.
The sheriff shook his head. “Nobody just up and disappeared in the town’s memory, Ms. Powell. Something like that, folk just wouldn’t forget. Nope, it’s got to be a runaway.”
Adam Carruthers sat forward, his hands clasped between his knees. “You think this old man, Jacob Marley, did it?” He was sitting in a deep leather chair that old Jacob had liked. He looked like he was the one in charge and that burned the sheriff a bit. Fellow was too young to be in charge, not too much beyond thirty, about the same age as Maude’s nephew, Frank, who was currently in prison out in Folsom, California, for writing bad checks. Frank had always had soggy morals, even as a boy. Maybe the fellow was shiftless, like Frank. But hell, the last thing this guy looked was shiftless.
“Sheriff?”
“Yeah? Oh, it’s possible. Like I told Ms. Powell here, old Jacob didn’t like people poking around. He had a mean streak in him and no patience to speak of. He could have bashed her.”
Adam said, a dark eyebrow raised a bit, “Mean streak or not, you believe he actually bashed a young girl in the face with a blunt instrument and walled her in his basement because he was pissed to see her trotting across his backyard?”