Murder Bone by Bone (17 page)

I was admiring the rusty red pomegranates on the tree in Bridget’s front yard when I noticed something moving behind the chain-link fence at the excavation site. A figure on its hands and knees had folded back the tarp and was quietly doing something in the dirt there. I couldn’t make out who it was until the figure straightened and the sun glinted on glasses and shaggy dark hair.

Nelson. He glanced furtively up and down the street, but he didn’t notice me on the other side.

Ready to give him a piece of my mind, I began to lead Barker across the street. A car careened around the corner, and I jumped back on the curb.

The car pulled up in front of Bridget’s with a screech of brakes, running over some of the caution tape in the process. Nelson clambered to his feet, shoving his glasses up on his nose. Dinah Blakely jumped out of the car.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” She bellowed really well for such a ladylike woman.

Nelson shuffled his feet. I couldn’t hear his reply over the construction noise. Curious, I took Barker a little way farther up the sidewalk and then crossed the street to come up behind the contestants.

Dinah was busy tearing a strip off Nelson. “You’re not authorized to come here alone and mess up the dig. I saw your stupid gum wrapper. I know you’ve been careless. Don’t you even have the basics of excavation down? We don’t leave so much as a speck of our debris in the dig, not even a hair—”

“Not even a dead body?” Nelson’s voice was soft, but now I could hear it. He was fidgeting, but he didn’t look particularly cowed.

Dinah stopped in mid-tirade. I couldn’t see her face, but her shoulders were held rigidly. “What dead body? There hasn’t been a dead body here for at least fifteen years by my reckoning.”

“Dr. Grolen was almost dead.” Nelson smiled. It wasn’t a particularly nice smile. “If you hadn’t come along, he would have been dead in twenty minutes. I heard the detectives say so. What happened? Did you change your mind?”

Dinah shook her head, slowly. “You’re nuts,” she said with conviction. “Implying that—just nuts.”

Nelson looked past her, seeing me. His face changed, became meek again. “Oh, hello, Ms.—Um.” He shrugged. “We were just—just—”

Dinah swung around. “Oh, it’s you." Her tone was dismissive.

“How is Dr. Grolen today? I haven’t heard.”

Dinah’s face closed. “He’s still unconscious.” Her hands clenched. “If I ever find out who did that to him—” She turned back to Nelson. “Was it you, you little creep?”

Nelson blinked, but the accusation didn’t seem to faze him. “Why would I conk him over the head? I had nothing to gain.” He glanced at her, his expression sly. “Not like some people. With a department chair in the balance—”

“You—you wretched—” Dinah no longer looked like the proper young woman. With her lips curled back in a snarl she more closely resembled a harpy than a preppy.

Barker didn’t like it. He growled, his fur bristling. I yanked the leash and spoke to him sharply, and Dinah seemed to come back to herself. She stepped away from Nelson.

“You are off the crew as of now,” she said frostily. “And I’m removing you from the lab. If I were you, I’d think seriously about transferring into another discipline—or another university.”

Nelson didn’t look too worried. “I’m Dr. Grolen’s student, not yours,” he pointed out. “He’s my advisor.”

“All his students have been transferred to me for the time being.” Dinah sounded triumphant. “And I’m taking over his lab class as well. He won’t be back in the classroom until next quarter, if then.” A shadow crossed her face.

Nelson took off his glasses to clean them on his grubby shirttail. Both of them seemed to have forgotten me, and I found their conversation too interesting to interrupt.

“So you’ve gotten what you wanted,” he said, his eyes no longer vague without the glasses masking them. “You’ve stepped into his shoes, and you’re in line for that chair if he should take a while recovering. Or maybe he won’t recover. Maybe he’ll have a relapse—”

Dinah stepped toward him again. “I’m tired of your insinuations, jerk. Get out of here!”

“This isn’t your private domain, Dr. Blakely. I have just as much right to be here as you do.”

Both of them remembered me then, turning like a vaudeville team to face me, ready to claim their positions on the site. I held up my hand, the power of the moment going to my head.

“I imagine the police wouldn’t see any reason for either of you to be here, especially if you’re interfering with their crime scene.” I nodded to the chain-link fence, pried open by Nelson, the laid-back tarp. “What were you doing, anyway?”

He put his glasses on and backed a little way toward the curb, a wary eye on Dinah Blakely’s angry face. “I was just—checking a theory.” Before our eyes, he turned back into the diffident student. “I’ll go now.”

“What theory?” Dinah yelled the question at him, but Nelson didn’t seem to hear. He pulled a bike out of the shrubbery on the far side of the excavation and pedaled off, his pudgy legs really moving.

“He’s too much of an idiot to have a theory,” Dinah muttered, going toward the fence.

I stepped in front of her. “Good idea. Let’s just fasten this up again, shall we? I’ll let Drake know, and he’ll probably post an officer here so it doesn't happen again.”

Dinah threw me a disgruntled look. “I should just—”

“Best to leave it.” I pulled the gap in the fence together and turned to face her. "The police know how they left it this morning. if something’s different now, it’s on Nelson’s head, not yours.”

Dinah looked thoughtful. "That’s true.” She hugged her elbows, tapping her fingers impatiently on her arms. “This is all a horror show. Why should that mouthy little jerk be here, messing around? Why should Richard be damaged like this? I’m just—finding it all very difficult.” Her voice broke.

I was sorry for her, but I wanted her to leave, so I could start my appointed rounds. “Why don’t you try to get some rest? Sounds like you’re going to be busy.”

Her shoulders straightened. “Right. Thanks.” She offered me a tentative smile, the first directed wholly at me. “I appreciate it.”

Nevertheless, she lingered a moment more, staring through the chain-link, and I knew if I hadn’t been standing there she would have opened the fence to find out what Nelson had been doing.

As it was, she got into her car and drove away, and I went into the house to call Drake. For once he was in his office.

“Don’t talk to the reporters,” he said when he heard my voice. “Say, ‘No comment.’ That’s the only safe thing.”

“They’re not here anymore. But Nelson was.” I described the little scene I’d just witnessed.

“Nothing in this case is uncontaminated,” he snarled through the phone line. “Now I’ll have to pull Rucker off of questioning the neighbors and looking for your odoriferous buddy to go and stand by the fence doing nothing.” His voice turned speculative. “Don’t suppose you could—”

“I’ve got to go haul a million children around. And you told me to stay out of it, if you’ll recall.”

“Obviously I didn’t know what I was saying.” Drake sighed. “Can you stick around until the uniform gets there?”

“Not really.” I looked at the clock. School would be out in three minutes. “I have to get moving.”

“Well, thanks for telling me. I guess.” Drake sighed again.

“Why don’t you just haul everything out of there, anyway? Then we wouldn’t have to have a chain-link fence bringing down the tone of our neighborhood.”

“I’m working on it.” He sounded harassed. “We’re still understaffed here.”

“Too bad. I have to go.”

“Thanks for nothing. I’ll see you this evening. What are you having for dinner?”

“Whatever I can find.” I hung up before he could deafen me with his sighs.

Barker jumped into the Suburban and settled into the front seat. I revved up the big engine, backed carefully down the drive, and inched through the maze of heavy machinery, thunking over the plates they used to cover their trenches. Stewart waved as if he wanted me to pull over, but I pretended it was social and waved back cheerily before accelerating. I had no time for all this complicated human nature. I just wanted to keep Bridget’s children safe for a few more days before crawling back to my own peaceful existence.

Chapter 20

I parked the Suburban in Melanie’s driveway and helped my charges down. Corky didn’t want to go in, but Susana, a ruffled, dimpled dictator, insisted.

Melanie answered the door with a finger to her lips. “Moira is still asleep,” she said, shooing the children toward the family room. “She’s having a nice nap.”

Melanie’s house was the antithesis of Bridget’s. The living mom was sleek, dusted, undisturbed by signs of human life. In the kitchen, vast expanses of granite countertops glistened, punctuated here and there by glass jars and wooden bowls of oranges and lemons. The family room adjoined it, with French doors standing open onto a patio. The boys immediately commandeered a fleet of vehicles sized for riding on—scooters, cars, even a small bulldozer—and began driving around the room, out the doors, around the patio, back in the room.

Melanie leaned against the breakfast bar that separated the kitchen from the family room. “You want something to drink? Moira will wake up soon.”

“I could just take her now.” I shifted from foot to foot, uncomfortable in that beautiful, sunlight-flooded room. In spite of the children’s drawings posted on the refrigerator and an Oscar the Grouch sticker on one of the cabinets, it wasn’t the kind of kitchen that invited lingering.

“You can’t wake her from her nap yet.” Melanie sounded shocked. “She’ll be cranky all afternoon. Moira is one of those children who need their full sleep.”

Perhaps that was what was wrong between Moira and myself. Perhaps both of us just needed more sleep. I perched uneasily on one of the tall chairs pushed up to the breakfast bar.

“I was just looking at my old albums.” Melanie turned back to the breakfast bar, indicating a stack of leather-bound scrapbooks I had thought were some kind of decorator accent. “We all look so young—so stupid,” she added bitterly.

“Are these from when you knew Richard before?”

“Yes. From my other life.” Melanie sighed over the pages of photos.

“Have you heard how he is today? I know he was still unconscious this morning.” At least, he had been according to Dinah Blakely.

Melanie pulled a tissue out of her pocket and pressed it to her eyes. “He’s holding his own,” she said, sounding muffled. “That’s all they’ll say when I call the hospital. Holding his own.”

“Well, that’s good. At least he’s not worse.” I inched a little closer to the edge of my tall stool. I wanted to look at those pictures. “So many people have been telling me about Palo Alto in the sixties and seventies. Was it so different?”

“I don’t know if it was, really.” For once Melanie spoke without the sharp tone she usually employs around me. “That’s what I was wondering about. It’s why I got out the albums. Maybe we were just so different from how we are now.”

Corky uttered a cry of victory as he gained control of the bulldozer from Sam, who dove for the scooter. Melanie glanced into the family room, but if she didn’t think it was worth interrupting the traffic free-for-all, I certainly wouldn’t.

“You were going to Stanford, right? That doesn’t sound stupid.”

She shrugged. “We were stupid about life, anyway. But we did have a lot of good times.” She turned a page in one of the albums and pushed it toward me. “See?”

I looked at the enlargement that took up most of the page. A motley collection of young people stood on the steps of a house, grinning into the camera. They wore scruffy jeans and, for the girls, long skirts; most of them had long hair and, for the guys, beards. A few of them looked familiar.

“Hey, that’s Bridget’s house!” I recognized the pillars on either side of the steps. “But the front steps aren’t so cracked as they are now.”

“Right. Bridget’s house. It was a group house then, owned by the parents of one of my friends. We got reduced rent because of that.” Melanie shook her head. “When I think of what we did to that place! We had Day-Glo paint on the walls and ceiling, stripes and paisley. SueAnne, the girl whose parents owned it, even painted all the wood trim different colors—purple in the living room, orange in the bedroom.”

“You mean she painted over the wood trim?”

“Yes, if you can believe it.” Melanie giggled. "Her mom was furious. We almost got kicked out over that. That window seat in the dining room—she had painted all the panels different colors and even put op art patterns on a couple of them.” She sobered. “Of course, it was a sacrilege—all that nice fir trim and paneling. SueAnne was tripping at the time.”

“You mean—”

“You know what I mean.” The sharp tone was back. “Don’t act so goody-goody, Liz. You must have seen your share of drugs on the street.”

“I saw them, yes.”

“But you were too pure to do any, no doubt.” Melanie caught herself up short. “I’m not myself today, truly. That was inexcusably rude.” She threw me a look, half apology, half resentment. “I don’t know why you rub me the wrong way, Liz. You’re a nice person, I’m sure, and Bridget likes you. You can’t help it that you just set my teeth on edge.”

“Do I really?” I had to smile. “Well, you do the same thing to me, so maybe we can just agree to dislike each other.”

“Okay,” she said. “That sounds doable.”

We looked at each other for a moment, then both of us started laughing.

Melanie was the first to stop. “Well, I mustn’t get hysterical. God knows it wouldn’t take much.”

“Richard means a lot to you.”

“You could say that.” She rubbed the crease between her eyebrows. “He’s my ex-husband, after all.”

I stared at her, unable to think of anything to say. She looked defiant. “Your policeman, Drake, will probably tell you anyway. I told Bruno Morales, and he probably passed it along to everybody. Richard and I were married at Tahoe three months before I graduated from Stanford. He was going off on a dig with a bunch of other people from the anthropology department, and I was afraid of losing him to this woman—Aimee DiCarlo. Justly, as it turned out.” She looked down at the picture again, putting her finger on the face of one of the men. The jutting chin and pale, straight hair marked out Richard Grolen.