Bodies and Sole (15 page)

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Look what we found.”

Gus smiled at the familiar words. Eight kids living by the shore were always finding something and bringing it home. The boys would leave their finds out in the yard, on the picnic table, around the well house, and forget about them. Dot would bring them in. Shells, rocks, wounded birds. Once the boys had dragged the corpse of a sea cow up to the house.

But the catch of today was not a sea cow.

It was Roger Murray.

“Plain as day,” as Gus said the moment she saw him. Some of him.

Finn kicked off his shoes and came into the room, holding the skull high.

“Well, I'll be.” Gus put down her knitting and leaned forward. “If it isn't Roger Murray.”

“You know him?”

Gus nodded her head.

“Been waitin' for him to show up.”

Vera watched in silence as Hy reluctantly spooned Jello into her mouth. Hy loved lime. As a child, like Moira, she had loved lime Jello best, but all she could think of now was that somehow she was eating poison. She could hardly swallow. She could hardly stop herself from spitting it up.

When she had finished, Vera instructed Hy to feed Cyril his Jello. She didn't want to. It might make her an accessory to murder. But more unsettling than that was the pathetic, pleading look in Cyril's eyes.

Hy had no choice, because Vera stood at her elbow, supervising.

Her hand trembled as she guided the spoon to Cyril's mouth. He was trembling, too. So was the Jello. A lump of it jiggled with thin green drool down the side of his mouth onto the pillowcase. Then the lump flopped off the bed and onto the floor.

“Clumsy woman. Clean that up.”

Hy grabbed a paper towel from the roll on the bedside table and ducked under the bed. She scooped some of the Jello into her apron pocket, and brought the rest up in the paper towel. She threw it into the garbage can.

Vera watched with disapproval, and Hy hurried to leave before the Jello could soak through her pocket.

“What's that?”

It had.

“Oh, it fell on my apron before I got it in the garbage. Just a stain.”

A feeling of nausea was overwhelming Hy. She began to back out of the room, hand over her mouth. She couldn't speak, couldn't make her apologies, she just kept the hand clamped over her mouth and raced down the hallway.

The oriental runner flew up from underneath her, and she pitched forward, hand no longer on her mouth, but shoved forward to break her fall.

Thump!

She came down with a thud, and, for a moment, thought she had broken her wrist, the pain was so severe.

The soft sound of fabric hitting the floor broke through the pain. She turned her head. Vera Gloom was standing at the end of the runner, with that twisted smile on her face.

“Just straightening it.” She didn't even try to look sincere.

Hy glared at her. She pushed herself to her feet, wincing at the pressure on her wrist. Not broken. Cracked maybe? She stepped onto the wood floor.

She was dizzy. And still nauseous. The fall was the final trigger.

She leaned forward and puked.

Lime Jello.

Little clumps of it, the rest a liquid green. Nothing else in her stomach, but she retched and retched, dry heaves.

Vera didn't move. She stood at the other end of the hallway, smirking, a tight unpleasant smirk.

Normally Hy, embarrassed, would have cleaned up after herself, but she didn't even offer. She glared again at Vera, and left by the front door. After she closed it, she wiped a hand across her mouth, to get rid of the taste of Jello and of Vera.

Lime Jello. Did it mean anything? Was there anything to it? In it?

She plunged a hand into her pocket. Kleenex. She spat out whatever remained in her mouth into it. She would ask Finn if he could analyze it.

She stuffed the Kleenex into her pocket and hurried up the path and out onto the road. Behind her, Vera fished the lime Jello out of the garbage, grabbed the bowl containing the rest, and poured it into a hole in the garden. She threw in Hy's cell phone and stuffed a shrub into it.

The shrub wilted almost immediately and was dead the next morning.

Hy was worried about Cyril. What the gelatin might be doing to him. Might have done to the other husbands. Jello as a murder weapon? Jamieson would never swallow it. Hy needed evidence.

She went straight down to see Finn, where she knew he'd be – at Gus's. She felt as if she'd been given a macabre preview of Bachelor Number One, Bachelor Number Two and Bachelor Number Three. Except they were husbands. Ex-husbands. Late husbands.

Or the Lion, the Tin Man and the Scarecrow? Not quite, but nearly – with the exposed heart, brain and muscles for courage.

“You know him?” Dot repeated her question to Gus and extended her hands. Finn popped the skull into them. His eyes lit up in amusement.

“Yes and I do. I'd know him anywhere. Been waiting for him to show up.”

“Waiting?” Dot set the skull down on the table in front of the picture window.

“He disappeared fifty year ago. I remember the day. Him and Orwell Crane, went out on a boat together in a storm. Only Orwell came back. Said Roger had gone over the side in a big swell. He couldn't swim. Neither could Orwell. So Roger drownded, so he said. No one could say different.”

“There's a hole in the skull,” said Dot. “A bullet hole?”

Finn shrugged. “Hard to say.”

“Ain't you studied all that? And you can't say?”

Finn picked up the skull and sat down with it, examining it closely.

“It's small, but it's male.”

Gus nodded. “Roger was a small man.”

Just then Hy burst into the house.

“You look a fright,” said Dot. Where have you been?”

Hy caught sight of the skull in Finn's hands.

“I might ask you the same.”

“I asked first,” said Dot, noticing the apron – Hy in an apron? – and the green stain on the pocket. Hy pulled out the hair from the other pocket, and told them what she'd seen and done at Sullivan house. Then she asked if Finn could do any forensic work on the hair and the Jello.

“I don't know about the Jello – or even the hair. I don't have a lab, any way of telling…”

He was feeling the texture of the hair. Watching him made Hy shiver.

“I could… I could send it to a friend of mine. Went through the forensics course with him. He's working in the field. Might do me a favour and have a look at this.”

“Good.”

“It might take weeks, though. Those labs get more work than they can handle, and he'd be doing it on the side.”

“Understood. Now what about this skull?”

“Found it on the shore.”

Hy was glad that for once it wasn't she who'd stumbled across human remains.

“And, as I was saying, it's male.”

“How do you know it's male?”

“The male brow ridge is more rounded and bonier between the eyebrows and the nose.” As he spoke, Finn traced the parts of the skull he was describing. “Here, the mastoid area behind the ear is larger. The jaw is more squared, and see how the forehead slants backward. The nasal cavity's longer and narrower. No doubt it's a male.”

Hy sat down beside Finn and peered at the skull with Dot.

“Any way to tell if it's an adult male?” Dot asked. “You said the skull is small.”

“Oh, it's an adult all right.”

“And you know that because?”

“We're born with skulls made up of smaller bits of bone, but as we grow older, the bones fuse together. By about the age of thirty, the process is complete. It is in this skull, so it's a male older than thirty.”

“Roger Murray was thirty-three.” Gus's tone said Finn had proved her point.

“You can set age by teeth, too, can't you?” Hy peered closely at the skull's grinning mouth.

“Yes, by the wear on them. Normal wear. These are well-worn.”

“Crackin' open shellfish.” Gus broke a thread in her teeth. “He were a great one for that.”

Hy had often been tempted to crack open a lobster claw with her teeth. An instinctive move, but not a wise one. She winced at the thought.

“Is that how he lost that one?”

“Which one?”

Hy pointed to the prominent gap where a front tooth was missing.

“The missing tooth. What about that?”

“Gold,” said Gus. “It were gold.”

“We better call Jamieson.” Hy, a bit lost without her cellphone, went to the landline in the dining room.

Jamieson wasn't there, or wasn't answering. Hy left a message on her voicemail.

“Got a body part here. You might be interested.”

She returned, grinning, to the kitchen.

“Well, it's been fifty year, hasn't it now…”

Gus was talking to the skull.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Hy's FB Status: There's a diamond made from a strand of Ludwig Van Beethoven's hair. It's valued at a million dollars.
Likes: 7
Comments: Music to my ears.
I'm deaf to the idea.

Hy's dreams – often active – were peppered that night with skulls, bodies like large preying insects, body parts exposed and plasticized, and diamonds.

Diamonds.
Blue diamonds flashed through her consciousness – until she was actually conscious, sitting up in bed.

Blue diamonds. Of course.

Her laptop was lying on the bed beside her. She snatched it up and Googled corpses turned into diamonds. She'd come across the site before and found it fascinating, but thought it was irrelevant to her interest in Vera Gloom. Until she got a good look at those rings, glittering on Vera's hands.

Blue diamonds. Made so by boron traces in the human body. It took six to nine months to make a diamond from a person. Similar to the time it took to make a baby.

Blue diamonds. Vera had at least two.

So there were maybe two other husbands – on ice.

Jamieson had never seen a lace doily used for this purpose before. Not even a plastic one. Finn had set the skull down on the table under the picture window. Resting atop the doily, it grinned into the room. It looked quite out of place beside the porcelain teacup with the pretty forget-me-not pattern.

“There's the problem of identification,” said Jamieson.

“No problem,” said Gus. “I'd know him anywhere.”

Jamieson turned around sharply from her study of the skull.

“How?”

“That front tooth there. That tooth.”

Jamieson turned back to the skull, puzzled. There was nothing remarkable about the front tooth. Just a tooth. No particular marks of decay.

“What is it about the tooth?”

“It's missin'.”

“Oh, the one that isn't there.”
Gus could be exasperating. What could she possibly mean?
“If it isn't there, how could you know it?”

“It was gold. I bet that's why it's missin'.”

What Gus was saying still didn't make a lot of sense to Jamieson, but her police instincts alerted to the word gold.
A gold tooth. Something of value. Taken? Or lost?

Jamieson moved closer to the table. Scanned the skull, without touching it, though Lord knows it had certainly been bashed about a lot since the man had died.

Died – how?

“Roger Murray. He'll have been kilt. Shot dead by Orwell Crane as I allus expected. For the tooth.”

Killed – for a tooth? Even a gold one?

It was as if Gus could read Jamieson's mind. She kept answering her mental questions.

“I should say it wasn't all the tooth. Bad blood between those families for generations. Fights about land, about women, about fishing territory. And about the tooth. The tooth did belong to Orwell in the first place.”

“What?” Jamieson turned from the skull to stare at Gus in disbelief.

Gus rocked and nodded. It was as if she were saying: “I know.”

“That tooth was in Orwell's mouth first. Then he lost it in a bet to Roger. Dentist took it out of Orwell, re-shaped it, then stuck it in Roger's mouth. Any time those two was together Orwell couldn't take his eye off that tooth. Sometimes you thought he was going to rip it right out of Roger's mouth.” Gus had been concentrating on knitting the heel of the sock. Now she looked up.

“Reckon he did, in the end. That day they went out together in the storm. Never could figure why they did that – if one didn't force the other.” She shook her head and looked at the skull.

“Orwell came back. Roger didn't. Don't think Orwell ended up with the tooth. We never saw it on him after.”

“Is this Orwell still alive?” Jamieson's policing instincts were on alert.

Gus let out a big guffaw and slapped her thigh, sending the knitting that was resting there onto the floor.

“Oh, no,” she said when she finally straightened up. “Gone within the month after Roger. Abscessed tooth. Went rotten on him. Got an infection. Died. What do they call that?”

Jamieson raised an eyebrow.

“Irony?”

“Yeah, that'll be it. Fittin' anyroad.”

Gus rocked her chair a couple of times, contemplating.

“You want to take a look through his things, see if you can find that tooth, Wally Fraser's got all Orwell's stuff in his shed. They were cousins. I 'spec Frasers had a good look through it for anything valuable, but I think they thought like we all did, that Roger had gone down with his tooth.”

“There's no telling what happened with the tooth,” Finn finally spoke up.

“And you are?” There was a note of disdain in Jamieson's tone and look.

“Finn Finnegan. Hy's half-brother. I'm a forensic anthropologist.”

The disdainful look was replaced by one approaching respect. Confusion, too. McAllister had a brother?

“Can you date this skull?”

“Not to a year. And not to a ballpark without the proper equipment, but I can tell you it's modern rather than ancient.”

“How?”

“Fillings, for one thing. Silver amalgam.”

“Anything else?”

“Well, he didn't die yesterday. There's wear and tear on the skull.”

“Could it be Roger Murray as Gus claims?”

“Don't see why not. Fifty years old is not inconceivable for this artifact.”

“Any way of knowing for sure?”

“No.”

“None?”

“Short of DNA profiling, and I doubt you'd convince the brass to go for it in a case this old, none. We forensic people tend to specialize in casting doubt rather than affirming absolutely, I'm sorry to say.”

“If we found the gold tooth?”

“Well, if the tooth fit…” Finn grinned. Jamieson did not smile back.

“And the hole in the head?”

Finn stuck his finger right into it. Jamieson opened her mouth, ready to object, then thought better of it when she saw he was examining it. He was a professional, after all, as near to one as they'd get at The Shores.

“Happened too long ago to really tell anything. This could be a bullet hole.” His finger circled the inside of the hole. “But it's too smooth to say, possibly worn and made larger by the water, the waves, the sand, all the stuff it's come in contact with.” He pulled his finger out of the hole.

“If it is a bullet hole, there are signs that this is where it entered. The skull has two tables. When a bullet enters the skull it creates a ‘punched-out' hole in the outer table, with sharp edges. You can see a suggestion of that here. Hard to see the inner table, but close examination might find the beveled look of the exit wound.”

“Might?”

Finn nodded. “There's not much to go on. No soft tissue to tell us anything. No suspect. No crime scene. No fingermarks.”

“No DNA?”

“Problematical with bone, and for what? What police department or forensic lab would touch this? It's not just a cold case, it's freezing, if this is the guy you think it is. And I can tell you that skull's been floating around the shore for decades. This happened long ago, to people who would be dead now if they weren't already.” He grinned at the idiocy of what he'd just said. “You've got yourself a heritage murder. Motives and modus operandi buried in the past. So what's the point?”

“Justice is the point,” said Jamieson stiffly. “Justice should be served.”

“Don't see how it can be. But if you want to pursue it, I say you've got to I.D. the fellow first.”

“I already told her who it is.” There was an edge of irritation, annoyance in Gus's tone. She leaned forward and pointed at the skull. “Roger Murray. Know him anywhere. Even sitting on my doily without his gold tooth.”

Jamieson sighed. It was hard enough keeping track of modern murders at The Shores. She certainly didn't need a heritage murder.

But it appears that's what she had got.

In the form of a skull on Gus Mack's table.

Grinning at her from the past.

“Just been checking out Vera's contribution to our heritage celebrations.”

Hy had not bothered to knock on Jamieson's door. She'd waltzed right in and plunked herself down in a hard chair beside Jamieson's desk. Jamieson was writing her weekly report for headquarters. She had to produce hard copy because the Internet connection was iffy and insecure. At one time, suspecting no one ever read her reports, Jamieson had been sending in blank papers, until she got found out. Now, dutifully, she submitted the boring details of everyday crime in the village. Boys caught peeing on the hall steps. Ninety-eight-year-old Willard Cole caught driving without a license – he wasn't allowed one anymore. Olive MacLean reporting the theft of ice cream from her freezer.

Sometimes Jamieson longed for a good murder.

“What?”

“Vera's contribution to the 200th.”

“Yes?”

“Two hundred years of husband.”

Jamieson wrinkled her brow.

“I've seen them.”

“You've told me that before.”

“No, I mean really seen them. Up close and plastic.”

“Plastic?”

“Yes, human bodies plasticized. Her husbands.”

Jamieson put down her pen and pushed her chair out from the desk. Hy had her attention.

“Her husbands?”

“Well, three of them anyway. The plasticized ones.” Hy's tone became more serious. “And then there's the live one. Cyril. At least I think he's still alive. “ She leaned forward, urgent. “I think she's killing him.”

Jamieson let out a heavy sigh.

“I think he's dying.”

“I understand he's an old man. Not well.”

“Well, yes, but…” Hy didn't want to say anything about the lime Jello. Or the diamonds. Keep these in her back pocket until proven. Jamieson would never believe her if she brought them up now.

“And how did you manage to see them? Did Mrs. Gloom show them to you?”

“Yes…actually.”

Jamieson raised an eyebrow. There was something in Hy's tone. Something lacking the ring of truth.

“She did?”

“Yes. The second time. I've seen them twice,” Hy said stubbornly. “So I know what I've seen.”

“The second time? When was the first?”

Hy said nothing.

“You were in her house?”

Hy nodded.

“Without her knowledge?”

Hy nodded again. Then opened her mouth to speak.

Jamieson held up a hand.

“Don't say anything. I really would have to charge you if I knew about this.” Jamieson was constantly threatening to charge Hy, but never had yet.

“What were you doing there, anyway?” It was really a rhetorical question, laced with disbelief and exasperation. “No, don't answer,” she said quickly. “I don't want to know.”

“I had to see them. Had to. And I was right…”

“The means justify the end?”

“Yes. I had to know.”

“Good. Excellent. There's a firm foundation for an investigation.”

Jamieson picked up her pen.

“She's not an artist, you know. I've Googled her. There's nothing.”

Hy wrinkled her brow. What could she say to convince Jamieson to do something, anything?

“You could ask to see her artwork.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because it's not art. It's bodies. Don't you think you should be on top of any bodies floating around the neighbourhood?”

“I hope not on top of them.”

“Jamieson, please. Do this for me. I'm not steering you wrong. Have I ever?”

“A bit askew at times.”

“Just speak to the woman, that's all I ask.”

Silence. Then it came to Hy.

“Speak to Moira. Ask her what she's seen.”