The Devil's Puzzle (4 page)

“A gambler?”

“He could have been.” But Jesse wasn’t interested in the chip anymore. His eyes had moved to the exposed shinbone on the skeleton’s right leg.

“Anybody hurt themselves here yesterday? Maybe one of the men working on the garden.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Anybody move anything after it was covered?” he asked.

“Meaning me?”

He nodded slightly.

“No, Jesse. I left the tarp exactly where your guys put it. And so did Eleanor. And so did Barney, for that matter.”

“So it looks the same as it did when the guys covered it yesterday?”

“Exactly the same. Why?”

He pointed toward a reddish-brown spot on the skeleton’s leg.

“What is that?”

“We’ll have to check it in the lab, but I’d say that’s blood, Nell.”

I leaned over and examined the spot. “It wasn’t there yesterday.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I . . .” I hesitated more because of the teasing I’d face than any fear of Jesse getting mad. “I sort of examined him yesterday.”

He didn’t tease. “And there were no spots like this?” His eyes moved farther down the leg. “Or those?” He pointed to three more drops.

I shook my head. “Skeletons don’t bleed.” It was an obvious point, but under the circumstances I felt the need to say it.

“Something left blood.” Jesse jumped from the hole. “I think while we’re identifying the body, we’ll also have to run labs on the blood, too.”

After the coroner’s office had taken the skeleton and agreed to call with results of the blood test as quickly as possible, Jesse and I went to his office at the police station. I looked through the photos Greg had taken of the skeleton shortly after it had been discovered and just as I’d remembered, there were no spots on the shinbone.

“Maybe an animal got in there,” I suggested.

“But the tarp wasn’t disturbed. You said it yourself.”

Greg was at the door. “I’ll bet it’s some kind of ritual blood.”

“What kind of ritual?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe John Archer’s come back from the grave now that we’re celebrating the anniversary. Plus, if those are his bones and we’ve disturbed them, maybe he would, you know, leave some blood as part of a ghostly spell or something.”

“He’s buried in the cemetery,” Jesse pointed out. “And ghosts don’t bleed any more than skeletons.”

“Well, that’s what the mayor thinks.”

“You talked to the mayor about this?”

“No. It’s on his blog,” Greg said. “He asked me for a photo, so I e-mailed him the one that shows the whole body kind of reaching out from the dirt.”

Jesse clicked the mouse of his computer and sighed. “Wonderful.”

“What?” I leaned over to see his screen and had to stop myself from laughing. The mayor’s blog featured a photo of the skeleton under the headline REVOLUTIONARY WAR HERO? PROHIBITION-ERA GANGSTER? SATANIC SACRIFICE? ARCHERS REST IS THE SITE OF MYSTERIOUS SKELETON, UNCOVERED IN THE GARDEN OF HISTORIC HOME.

Jesse clicked off. “It’s generally considered a bad idea to share evidence with the general public before we even know what we’re dealing with.”

Greg blushed. “The mayor asked for it, and you weren’t here . . .”

I tapped Jesse’s hand playfully. “Satanic sacrifice? Come on, Jesse. That’s hysterical.”

“I think the mayor’s got a point,” Greg said. “It could be anything. We could be onto a hidden part of the town’s history.”

“Or it could be a mundane crime scene,” Jesse said.

Greg shrugged. “Well, the lab is on line two. Maybe they have an idea.”

“You told me the John Archer theory first, before mentioning that actual scientific evidence is waiting for me on hold?” Jesse laughed and picked up the phone. “The whole town is nuts.”

Greg left, but I waited to hear what the lab had to say. The call went on for a while, with Jesse mostly listening, adding in an occasional “okay,” but otherwise giving me no clues as to the results. After several minutes and half a dozen okays, he finally hung up.

“Human blood. Less than twelve hours old.”

“So sometime after midnight.”

“Someone uncovered the tarp, probably looking for something. Whoever it was must have cut himself.”

“Could be the killer.”

“Or a treasure seeker. Or a curious teenager.”

“Or John Archer’s ghost.” I smiled.

Jesse didn’t. “Did you hear anything unusual last night?”

“Nothing, but my room faces the front of the house. Eleanor’s faces the back. And knowing my grandmother, if she had heard noises in the backyard, she’d have gone outside to look.”

“I have a feeling this is one of those cases that’s going to take a lot of time and a lot of effort.” He ran his fingers across my neck and smiled. “You must be excited; it’s just the kind of thing you like.”

I smiled back, but I didn’t say anything. Jesse was half-right. I felt something, but it wasn’t excitement.

CHAPTER 6

“H
e was going to
what
?” Carrie nearly dropped my espresso when I stopped in at Jitters, still feeling the same sense of dull panic I’d had at Jesse’s office.

“Eleanor thinks Jesse is the one planning to propose,” I told her. “Thanks to you.”

She cringed. Carrie was a good friend and would never want to put me in a bad spot. We’d gotten to know each other through quilting, and quickly found it to be one of many common interests, including drinking coffee and meddling in other people’s lives.

Carrie was older—and usually wiser—than me. A forty-something mother of two, married to a local pediatrician, she owned the coffee shop and was also a former New York stockbroker. On occasion, she unearthed financial information for my unofficial investigations. Not that we needed financial information at the moment. We already knew Oliver was a very successful painter. And since we had no idea who had been buried in my grandmother’s backyard, background checks weren’t going to help us there.

Which reminded me. “There was something else that happened yesterday,” I said as I plopped down on the big purple couch that sat near the front of the shop.

Carrie sat next to me. “The skeleton. I read the mayor’s blog this morning.”

“You read that?”

“It’s the best source of gossip in town, apart from the quilt group. How long do you think the skeleton’s been there?”

“Jesse’s looking into missing persons reports.”

“But if someone was missing, we would know, wouldn’t we?”

“Not if it was someone passing through town.”

“Or a hundred years old.”

“I don’t think it’s that old,” I said. “There was rayon or some other man-made fabric in the shirt and pants. I think that’s why the clothes are still partially preserved.”

“How do you know it’s man-made fabric?”

“I touched it.” I could see her cringe. “It’s just a skeleton, Carrie. It’s not like he was going to reach his bony fingers out and grab me.”

“You never know.”

I rolled my eyes and turned my attention back to the investigation. “I do think it’s been there for a while.”

“Since before she moved in?”

“Maybe.”

“And Eleanor bought the house from Grace,” Carrie said.

None of us had ever met Grace Roemer, as she had died more than thirty years before. That didn’t matter, though. She was a large presence in my grandmother’s life, and through Eleanor’s stories, Grace had taken on almost saintlike qualities for everyone in the quilt group. A wealthy widow with two grown children, ill, and in need of help, Grace had hired my grandmother as a live-in helper after my grandfather’s death. The two became close friends, with Grace passing down her love of quilting to my grandmother. When she died, Eleanor bought the house from Grace’s children and kept her memory alive by hanging several of her quilts in the shop and the house.

“Are you thinking Grace put the body there?” I asked. “From everything I’ve heard about her, she was always very frail.”

Carrie was staring off into space. “When did Eleanor’s husband die?”

I sat up. “What are you implying?”

Carrie laughed. “God, not that. I was thinking of the proposal.”

I sat back again. “He died in 1965. And there was a funeral and a body.” Then I added, “I assume.”

“Can you imagine Eleanor killing some unsuspecting man and dumping him in the rose garden?” Carrie giggled.

“Well, if someone suggested Eleanor wasn’t capable of raising her kids and running a business . . .”

“Or criticized her quilting.”

Sitting with Carrie, the skeleton from yesterday was becoming abstract. I could almost hear the talk in town. “You’ll never believe what Eleanor and that granddaughter of hers have gotten themselves into now.” But when I flashed on the empty holes where eyes had once been, the unhinged jaw that had once been capable of smiling, I remembered that this was no game. There had been a real man lying in that ground.

Carrie, who had not seen what I had seen, was excited by the prospect of another puzzle to solve. We’d had several murders since I’d moved to Archers Rest, and while we certainly didn’t enjoy having another murder victim in our midst, we both liked playing a part in solving the crime. “So what’s the plan?” she asked.

I thought about it a minute, surprised by what I was thinking. “There isn’t one. We’re not going to get involved. We’re going to leave the skeleton to Jesse.”

“We’re not going to do anything? Not anything?” Natalie asked about ten minutes later.

Natalie was another member of the quilt group and worked part-time at Someday Quilts. A strikingly pretty blonde a year older than me, she was married to a local mechanic and had a two-year-old, Jeremy. In the short time Natalie had worked at the shop, Jeremy had become an unofficial employee, delighting customers and keeping Barney from sleeping the day away. When Jeremy had enough of being the shop’s greeter, he rested in a crib set up in my grandmother’s office, leaving Natalie free to gossip with me.

Natalie had opened the store and was already unpacking a new box of variegated threads when I came in. I’d brought her over some decaf tea and a muffin from Jitters, and some coffee and croissants for myself. All she wanted, though, was news about the skeleton.

I told her what I knew, what Carrie and I had just discussed, and then added that I was staying out of it. That got an exasperated reply. Natalie was seven months pregnant with her second child and was supposed to avoid stress. Obviously that wasn’t happening.

“Jesse’s the chief of police,” I pointed out. “He doesn’t need our help in solving a homicide.” I could hardly believe the words were coming out of my mouth.

“But we always help,” Natalie protested.

“I don’t think Jesse always sees it as help
.
”

“Is that why? Now that you and Jesse are a couple, you don’t want to ruffle his feathers? I mean, that’s fine for most people, but you, Nell. You always stick your nose in . . .” She stopped. “Well, you know what I mean.”

“I do. But my nose has somewhere else to be right now.”

I had just explained the whole situation to Carrie, about Oliver’s planned proposal and Eleanor’s lack of interest in remarrying, and now I explained it to Natalie.

“If Eleanor doesn’t want to marry Oliver, or doesn’t want to get married again, that’s okay,” I said. “But I think there’s something else. Something she’s not telling me. If she turns Oliver down, it will break his heart, and that will break her heart.”

“And that will break all our hearts.”

“Exactly,” I said. “I know it’s none of my business, but I just have to make sure she’s not about to make a huge mistake. Plus, I have art school, the store, and now that stupid quilt show to plan. You’re about to give birth. Carrie has her kids and Jitters. Maggie is working on the town’s anniversary celebration. We can’t do everything. Something has to give.” As I said the words, the knot in my stomach started to relax and I knew I was making the right decision.