Buttons and Bones (25 page)

“This is really interesting,” said Betsy. “It looks like a real person.”

“As drawn by an amateur,” said Peg.

“Well, not all that amateur, and it looks more as if it were drawn from life than from measurements taken from a skull.”

“Thank you,” said Peg, wriggling just a little with pleasure. “My professor thought it adequate and accurate.”

Betsy could not take her eyes off the face.
Who are you?
she thought. The eyes looked back at her, but enigmatically. She reached for the full-front photograph of the skull, and managed to shift her attention to it for a few moments. Nothing about it, to her, suggested the face in the drawing.

“How sure are you that what you’ve done really represents the person who used to occupy this skull?” she asked Peg.

“There’s been a lot of research done on this,” Peg replied. “There are rules about the placement of the eyes, the shape of the nose, the width of the mouth, and the thickness of the flesh on the bone that apply to every human, so once you know them, you can get a good estimate of the basic shape of any face. Of course, if a person is thin or fat, that will affect that shape, and age brings about changes, too. You told Da that Major Farmer was years older than his wife, that he’d been married before and had a son old enough to join the Army, so I made him middle-aged.”

Betsy stared at her. “I didn’t say I thought the skull belonged to Major Farmer!”

Peg said, dismayed, “No? Oh, no! But—but who else could it be?”

“I don’t know, not for sure. But it’s not the major. I’ve got two separate reports that Helga was seen at the train station saying good-bye to her husband as he left for California. I do have reason to believe the skeleton was put down there by the next owners of the cabin, Marsha and Arnold Nowicki. And that the person in the cellar is their sixteen-year-old son, Jerry.”

“I don’t understand. What makes you think that?”

“I got a threat, warning me to stop investigating, and the only person who would send it is Robert Nowicki.” Betsy explained about the interview with Robert.

“Well, now, isn’t that interesting,” Peg said.

“Yes, so I’m pretty sure it’s the missing boy.”

Peg reached out, took back her drawing, and looked at it again. “And I was so sure I had it right. Do you want me to redo the sketch?”

Betsy looked at the drawing. Was it what Jerry would have looked like in middle age, had he survived? Maybe she should ask Peg to redo the drawing, making the face that of a very young man. Even so, just getting this glimpse of the face made her wish all the harder to put the final pieces of the puzzle together.

 

 

 

ON Monday at two, the Monday Bunch came into session. A group of mostly senior women stitchers, they met one afternoon a week to do needlework and gossip. Emily was one exception to the group’s demographic—she was not yet thirty—and Phil was the other. He was a retired railroad engineer. All of the Bunch were avid supporters of Betsy’s efforts in the field of sleuthing.

So Betsy felt free to show them the pencil sketch Peg had done, putting a face on the skull found in the root cellar.

Godwin, who had seen it earlier, said, “I think he looks like a nice man.”

“I think he looks kind but bossy,” said Patricia.

“Let me see,” said Emily, putting down her knitting. She took the sketch and looked at it, holding it first close up, then at arm’s length. “I agree with Goddy, he looks like a nice man.”

But when Phil looked at the sketch, he merely shook his head. “He looks like one of those mealy-mouthed college professors to me.”

“You think so?” said Betsy, surprised.

“Or an office manager, a paper pusher,” said Phil, nodding, and he handed the sketch to his wife, Doris, an attractive woman in her sixties, with curly hair dyed a cheerful red.

She studied the drawing briefly then said, “I think that in real life he was sexy.” She handed the sheet to Alice, a tall, strongly built woman with a chin not to be trifled with.

“His mouth is all wrong,” she pronounced. “Who drew this?”

“Connor’s daughter Peg,” said Betsy. “She’s a forensic anthropologist, not an artist.”

“I can tell she’s no artist. Still ...” She tilted the sketch from side to side. “I can tell he was a handsome man, with a good sense of humor, but there was something wrong with him in his . . . manliness.”

Betsy was amazed at what the Bunch was reading into an amateur pencil sketch.

Bershada was last to look at the sketch.

“Nice looking,” she said at first. “But weak.” She glanced at Alice. “Not womanly, and not a crook, but weak as a man.”

Alice nodded, and Betsy said, “I am surprised you are able to decipher this man’s personality just by looking at a drawing of his face.”

“Oh, come on!” said Godwin. “We all do that all the time. We look at someone’s face and decide right away if we should stay or walk away—or run.”

“All right, I understand that, but we make those decisions based on what years of living have done to the muscles and skin of the person. This is a reconstruction of a face based just on his skull. We have no idea what living did to the muscles.”

“Bad to the bone,” said Bershada with a little laugh.

“No, I think he was nice,” said Godwin. “I’d’ve liked to be friends with him.”

“So would I,” said Betsy.

“Have you gotten any more threatening notes?” asked Phil.

“No,” said Betsy. “But Jill has.”

That created an unhappy sensation around the table.

“I think you should drop this,” said Alice.

“Jill doesn’t want to,” said Betsy. “But she has sent the children away until the person who mailed the notes is discovered and arrested.”

“Good idea,” said Phil, and the others nodded.

“We know who sent them,” said Godwin, “but we can’t prove it. He’s very clever and left no fingerprints and he wrote with block letters, which you can’t compare to his usual handwriting.”

“So who did send them?” asked Bershada.

Betsy replied, “Right now, I suspect a member of the Nowicki family. Marsha and Arnold Nowicki were the next owners of the cabin after Helga and Matthew Farmer. It’s possible the skeleton belongs to their teenaged son, Jerry.”

That created another, very satisfactory sensation. Godwin nodded. “It’s possible this is Jerry Nowicki, as he would look if he’d lived to middle age instead of dying when he was only sixteen.”

“So why did the Farmers run away?” asked Alice.

“That’s a good question,” said Betsy. “I’m thinking now that the rumors about the two of them from back in the 1940s might be true. Major Farmer got orders for overseas duty and deserted in the face of those orders, and then, when he got established somewhere new, with a new identity, he sent for her.”

“So they’re still alive?” asked Emily.

“Probably not. Major Farmer was a lot older than his wife, so he’s likely deceased. And we know Helga Farmer died of a stroke some years back. Seven years after he disappeared, a judge declared him dead, and sometime after that she met and married Peter Ball, and they ended up living in New Ulm. Then fifteen years ago she died of a stroke.”

“Could this Peter Ball really be Major Farmer?” asked Phil.

“No,” said Betsy. “He’s in his eighties, but very spry. Major Farmer would be over a hundred years old. For another, he’s not an American, he was born in England ...” She paused, frowning.

“What?” asked Godwin.

“Something . . . I don’t know.” She smiled. “He’s not like you, Phil. He can crochet circles around many of us, but he’s ashamed to admit he can do it at all.”

“Nothing wrong with crochet!” said Phil, lifting the cup cover he was working on. “If it wasn’t for needlework, I wouldn’t have met and married Doris.” He gave her a fond smile, and she smiled back at him.

Nice, thought Betsy, that some people find happiness in each other. She thought of Connor, and her smile was not dissimilar to Doris and Phil’s.

The door sounded its two notes and a woman in late middle age came in. Her hair was brown streaked with blond. She was dressed all in gray with touches of red: a long gray skirt with a red flower embroidered on the hem, a gray sleeveless blouse with red piping, gray sneakers with red shoelaces, and a red cardigan. She was carrying a gray string purse with a red lining showing through. After a moment, Betsy said, “Hello, Molly. What brings you out?”

“You do.” She looked at the people sitting at the table and Betsy said, “Come with me,” and led her into the back of the shop. “Would you care to sit down? I can bring you a cup of tea.”

“No, I’m not staying long. Betsy, have you learned anything at all?”

Betsy first offered an apology for the real problem. “I’m sorry I haven’t contacted you. It’s just that we don’t seem to be making any progress. Everything is still just questions, and more questions, and all I learn leads to still more questions. Except we know that the skeleton isn’t that of Dieter Keitel but someone who was killed after your father and stepmother moved away. But we don’t know who it belongs to.” Betsy made a gesture of frustration. “Everything is fragments and speculation! I wish there was a chain of evidence going from the start right through to today! But there isn’t. I’m really sorry, I’m starting to think we’ll never solve this.”

Molly turned away and put her face in her hands. “This isn’t fair,” she murmured, and Betsy came to rest her hands on the woman’s shoulders.

“I know, I know. I
wish
there were something else concrete I could tell you. Well, wait, there’s one thing, but it’s just another fragment. We got hold of some photographs of the skull and I have a contact in a forensic anthropology class at the university. She put a face on the skull—but it’s not right, it should be a young face, and she put an older man’s face on it. It’s out on the table, if you want to take a look.”

“Thank you,” said Molly without enthusiasm, but she turned and went out into the front area.

“Here it is,” said Betsy, picking up the pencil sketch and handing it to her.

Molly took it, gave a little scream, and fell to the floor.

They soon had Molly sitting in a chair with her head down between her knees. She began murmuring something and Betsy knelt down to hear what it was.

“Please let me up,” was what she was saying. “Please let me up, I’m all right now.”

So Betsy lifted her upright. Her head lolled and she was so pale that her makeup—which hadn’t even been visible when she came in—now looked almost clownish. But she repeated, “I’m all right, really, I’m all right.”

“Would you like something to drink?” asked Godwin.

“I’d really like . . . Just some water, please.”

He hurried off to the back room.

“What happened?” asked Betsy. “You didn’t look ill when you came in.”

“It’s that drawing,” said Molly. “It’s my father’s face.”

“What?”
Betsy turned and picked it up off the carpet where Molly had dropped it. “Your father? Are you sure?”

Molly smiled a strange smile and nodded. “He had one of those very thin mustaches, they’re called ‘pencil mustaches’ because they look like they’re drawn on with an eyebrow pencil, but otherwise it looks just like him.”

“Strewth!” exclaimed Godwin, coming back with a bottle of chilled water. “Your
father
? But I thought we had eyewitnesses to him getting on the train! Helga was crying in the snow and everything because he was going away to war!” He unscrewed the cap and handed the bottled water to her. He said to Betsy, “This changes everything, doesn’t it?”

Betsy felt a wan smile pull at her mouth. “Again. Yes, it does.” She looked at the pencil drawing in her hand. “Peg said she made the man middle aged because she thought I’d said it might be Matthew Farmer.”

Godwin stared at her then gave a dramatic shudder. “Oh, wow, that is just too strange, too, too strange!” He came to look around Betsy’s shoulder at the drawing. “That’s what Major Matthew Farmer looked like? So who was Helga seeing off on the train?”

Twenty-one

“So then that means . . .” said Jill a couple of hours later. She and the children were sitting in the dining nook in Betsy’s apartment. The puppy she had promised the children was ready for pickup, so she had “borrowed” them back from their grandparents for the afternoon. The initial squealing, hugging, chasing, and other means of getting acquainted were over, and everyone could draw a calming breath for at least a little while. Airey was eating Cheerios, O by O, from a little bowl; Emma Beth was drawing with crayons on a sheet of typing paper.

On the floor under the table was a black dog about the size of an adult cocker spaniel, but without the big, pendulous ears and with a long, thick tail and enormous feet. It was busy eating the Cheerios that Airey had dropped, moving with the eager clumsiness that marked it as a puppy. Sophie had withdrawn to her basket in the living room from whence she could keep an appalled and wary eye on the intruder.