Jemmy spoke again, a whiny note in his voice. Maine coon cats, for all their imposing size, have rather soft, kittenish voices. I reached out and carefully stroked his head. When he didn’t object, I ran my hand down his back and under his belly, to scoop him up. He stiffened for a moment and then allowed me to tuck him under my arm and carry him away from the enticing catnip.
The bright light of morning did nothing to shed more light on the problem of the scream. Derek went over the door, the jamb, and the surrounding area with meticulous attention-if he’d been in possession of a magnifying glass, I don’t doubt he’d have whipped it out-but without finding anything that didn’t belong there. No unexplained wires, no switches, no hidden speakers. He was grumbling angrily when he gathered up his heavy-duty gloves and his rented hole digger, which looked like a giant corkscrew with a handle, and headed for the crawlspace.
I got busy in the bathroom. While we worked on Aunt Inga’s house together, the structural improvements had been Derek’s domain, while the design was mine. Naturally I’d taken a hand in tearing out or painting or spackling or anything else he let me do, and he helped implement the cosmetic touches I wanted, but since I’m the one with the design background while he’s the one with the hands-on experience, the division of labor made sense. While he crawled under the house, digging holes and pouring concrete, I got busy planning what to do with the main bathroom.
As blank canvases go, it wasn’t bad at all. When we started out, there’d been a molded plastic tub on one wall, a toilet and sink base on the other. The tub had been torn out yesterday and was currently reposing in the Dumpster, but we had left the toilet and sink intact for now. The sink base was your basic fake oak with two doors that didn’t quite meet in the middle, under a top of molded white plastic. The toilet was a toilet: also basic white, with the wood-grained seat and lid that were so popular in the ’80s. The floor had been covered by sheet vinyl, black and white, but now only the subfloor was left, and the shredded vinyl was with the tub, in the Dumpster. The floor around the toilet was rotted, and Derek would have to replace it before I could start doing any serious decorating. Still, I could take measurements and plan what I wanted to do.
I was thinking of doing something retro and funky, and I hoped to figure out a way to incorporate those Mary Quant daisies I’d thought about the other day. Gluing them, three feet tall, to the wall in the hallway might be a little too mod for most people, but I could still use them, scaled down. A house with three bedrooms would likely appeal to families with children, and this bathroom would be the kids’ bath, seeing as the master bedroom had its own attached bath with a tiled shower. So this hall bathroom was the perfect place to add some funky touches. I had visions of bubblegum pink, but I supposed I could use banana yellow or pale green instead-something that would appeal to boys as well as girls, and to older children and adults, too. The rest of the bathroom would be bland to the point of being boring: plain white tile on the floor and around the tub to go with any color we decided to paint the walls. The fixtures would also be gleaming white, with bright chrome faucets and handles, and we’d install a slender pedestal sink instead of the clunky cabinet that was there now. Or maybe one of those vessel sinks that looks like a salad bowl. If they weren’t too expensive. If they were-and I thought they might be-maybe I’d just use a salad bowl instead…
I’d been at it for maybe forty-five minutes when I noticed, almost subconsciously, that the constant humming of the hole digger had ceased. No sooner had I realized this, than the back door opened.
“Avery?” Derek’s voice called. It sounded strained. My heart jumped in my chest, and I scrambled out into the hallway.
“What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
He was standing inside the back door, jeans and boots dirty. And he shook his head in response to my worried question, but of course he’d do that anyway, even if he had cut off a limb. It’s the manly thing to do.
“Are you sure?” I probed. “You don’t sound like you’re OK. What happened?”
“Nothing happened. Not to me. But we have to call Wayne.”
Chief of Police Wayne Rasmussen? “Why?”
“Because I found a human bone,” Derek said.
“Oh, my God. Are you sure?”
“Left ulna,” Derek said. “Elbow bone. Medial lower arm.”
I did a mental duh! Of course he was sure. He was a doctor. He probably knew the name of every single bone in the human body and could identify them all by smell. Still, I felt I had to try one more time. “Are you sure it isn’t just the… um… femur of a dead dog or something?”
Derek looked upset. “Yeah. I wish that was the case. But it’s definitely human.”
I gave up. “Fine. I’ll take your word for it. Where did you find it? Under the house?”
“Yeah. I drilled a hole, looked down into it to make sure it was deep enough, and found the bone. The hole digger must have cut it in two.”
“Are there more?” I asked.
“It’s not as if someone could lose an ulna and not notice. It isn’t something you can take off and leave laying around, like that earring you picked up the other day. I didn’t see any more, but if there’s one human bone down there, they’re all there, believe me. The whole kit and caboodle. Now do you see why we need Wayne?”
I nodded. I saw.
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6
Wayne made good time. No more than ten minutes could have passed before a black and white cruiser pulled up outside the house. Wayne extricated his lanky length from behind the wheel and came toward us.
The chief of the Waterfield PD cuts an impressive figure. At an easy six four or so, he has dark, curly hair just starting to turn distinguished at the temples, coupled with a strong jaw, and steady, dark eyes.
“What have you got?” Wayne asked when he was close enough not to have to raise his voice. Derek didn’t bother to answer, just waved for the chief of police to follow him. The two of them walked away, around the corner of the house to the backyard.
I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do. I was curious, yes, but the idea of descending into the crawlspace with them, and with the spiders and snakes and other creepy critters-and that was before I knew there were human bones down there!-wasn’t appealing. I stood where I was, chewing my bottom lip and looking around. Things had been moving kind of fast up until this point, so I hadn’t really had a chance to reflect on Derek’s discovery. Now I realized I was not only shocked and creeped out and overwhelmed and slightly nauseous, I was also intrigued in spite of myself.
What was a human arm bone-OK, an ulna-doing buried under our house? There had been no time for cutting up corpses after Mr. Murphy shot his wife and her parents. And I doubted the police had been neglectful enough to overlook any body parts. So how had one of the arm bones made it into the crawlspace? It wasn’t like it could move from the bedroom to the crawlspace on its own or bury itself without help.
Maybe Mr. Murphy had killed someone else, too? If he’d murdered his wife and her family, it wasn’t outrageous to speculate that he might have done away with someone else, as well, at some earlier point. Maybe I should stop by the Clarion office this afternoon-the Waterfield Clarion is one of the local newspapers-and see if I could dig up any missing person reports during the time the Murphys had lived here in Waterfield.
Maybe the ulna belonged to Peggy Murphy’s supposed lover. Maybe Brian Murphy had discovered that his wife was unfaithful, and he had murdered the man she was seeing. And then he murdered her. And for good measure, he’d murdered her parents, too.