“ Brandon,” Wayne nodded. “You made good time.”

Brandon flushed, looking sheepish. He’d probably averaged sixty miles per hour the whole way out here. Considering the small one- and two-lane roads surrounding Waterfield, he’d likely broken every traffic law he was sworn to uphold. Avoiding his boss’s eye, he greeted Derek and Lionel. “Hi, Derek. Lionel. Long time no see.”

Derek nodded back, clearly amused that Brandon was so excited by a bunch of old bones. Lionel nodded, too, sullenly. Next to the tall and strapping Brandon, with his gleaming golden hair and broad shoulders, not to mention starched and pressed uniform shirt and spit-shined shoes, Lionel looked even smaller, younger, and scruffier than earlier.

“You two know each other?” I looked from one to the other of them.

“Went to high school together,” Brandon explained, slapping Lionel on the back. Lionel staggered. Turning to Wayne, Brandon asked, “Should I start roping off the crime scene, boss?”

“Crime scene?” Lionel bleated before Wayne had a chance to answer.

I looked from one to the other of them. “Yes, isn’t it a little premature to call it that? We don’t know that the skeleton didn’t die a natural death, and even if it didn’t, we don’t know that it died here. Someone could have killed it somewhere else and just buried it here. Just because it’s in the crawlspace, doesn’t mean it died in the house. Or on the grounds.”

Brandon had to admit, reluctantly, that I was right. “Still,” he insisted, with a glance at Wayne, “we have to rope off the yard. Can’t have civilians wandering around, possibly contaminating the evidence.”

Wayne was grinning. He looked from Brandon to me like a spectator at a tennis match, clearly enjoying the banter, but without showing any inclination to get involved in the conversation.

“What evidence?” I said, hands on my hips. “It’s a skeleton. It must have been in the ground for months, if not years, to turn into nothing but bones. Right?” I looked at Derek, who nodded. “Any evidence would be long gone by now.”

“Not necessarily,” Brandon argued. “The house has been empty. Chances are no one’s been down in the crawlspace for years.”

“There were squatters there a couple of years ago,” Venetia said. “And a few years before that, the neighborhood teens would come over and hang out to prove to their girlfriends how brave they were.” She was making rather a point of not looking at Lionel. He sent her a dirty look anyway.

“I remember that,” Brandon said with a grin. “I even came here once myself, back when I was young and stupid. Or younger and more stupid. With Holly White. Remember her, Lionel? The brunette, with the big…” He remembered that Venetia Rudolph and I were there, and finished, rather lamely, “Feet.”

I rolled my eyes. So did Wayne.

Lionel nodded, his face void of expression.

Brandon added, “She went to Hollywood to be an actress. Or was it Las Vegas to be a showgirl?”

“Big feet are a real asset for a showgirl,” Derek agreed, his face solemn but his eyes dancing.

Brandon grinned but abandoned the subject. “There were squatters here?” he addressed Venetia. She nodded. “When?”

She thought back. “Must be two or three years ago now. The house has been sitting empty since the early ’90s, you know. After the Murphy murders. They stayed for a few days, and then they were gone again.”

“Do you think the body belongs to one of the transients?” I asked.

Brandon opened his mouth to answer, then deferred to Wayne, who said, “Could be. We’ll know more when we’ve gotten it out. You’d better get busy, Brandon.”

Brandon nodded and excused himself. After rooting around in the trunk of his car, he pulled out a roll of yellow crime scene tape and started stringing it around the perimeter of the yard, from tree trunk to tree trunk and bush to bush. It was just a matter of time before our small group was either corralled or asked to leave, so I decided to take matters into my own hands.

“I’m going to take off for a while. If that’s OK with you, Wayne.”

Wayne nodded. “I know where to find you. And I’m not worried that you had anything to do with this body. This poor fella’s been down there longer than you’ve been in town.”

“That’s a relief,” I said, only half kidding. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

“Bring some pizzas,” Derek said.

“Gack!” I answered, as Lionel turned a paler shade of green. “How can you be hungry at a time like this?”

“Digging is hard work. And Brandon ’s still a growing boy.” He bent to kiss me on the cheek. “Drive carefully. And I wasn’t kidding about the pizzas. Three ought to do it. Unless we get company.”

“Better get four,” Wayne said, pulling out his wallet to give me a couple of twenties. I stuck them in my pocket. “We’ll start seeing Josh and his friends in about a half hour, most likely. I really have to get that police band radio away from him. And once Josh knows, then Shannon knows, and then Kate knows, and soon everybody knows.” He shook his head, wandering toward Brandon ’s car, talking to himself.

7

My adopted hometown has two newspapers. There’s the Waterfield Clarion, established in 1915, and the Waterfield Weekly, established in 1912. Because it’s a weekly, the latter isn’t quite as timely when it comes to reporting hard news as the Clarion, but it does a much better job with human interest stories, like reports of the Garden Tour and the school bake sale. The offices of both papers are located on Main Street, each in its own turn-of-the-last-century Victorian commercial building. I started at the Clarion, and if I couldn’t find what I was looking for there, I figured I’d cross the street and try the Weekly instead.

OK, so I know it seems a little odd that I’d shoot off so quickly, leaving Derek to handle the mess back at Becklea, but it’s not like there was anything I could do there, you know. I don’t know anything about working a crime scene, and Wayne wouldn’t let me help even if I did. And I had absolutely no desire to get any more intimately involved with the skeleton than I had been already.

But there was just a chance that I might be able to discover something in one of the papers. If I could put a name to the skeleton, or at least come up with a missing person or two during the time when Brian Murphy had been in residence, maybe that would help…

Derek had showed me how to operate the microfiche machine last time we were here, and it didn’t take me long to get what I needed from the archivist, who remembered me from last time. Derek has a way with middle-aged women, from spinsters to happily married matrons. They all adore him, and I always feel like they’re looking at me askance, trying to determine whether I’m good enough for him. I had that feeling now, as the plump sixty-something behind the counter handed me the boxes for the late ’80s and early ’90s and gave me a thorough once-over.

“Thank you,” I said, smiling my most winning smile.

She nodded but didn’t smile back. “How is Derek?”

“He’s fine. Busy. We’re renovating another house.”

She nodded. “I heard he bought the old Murphy place. That what you’re looking for?”

She glanced at the boxes I was holding. I hesitated, and she added, “Because the tragedy took place here.” She tapped her finger on a box halfway down the stack. “You won’t need the others.” She leaned back on the chair and folded her plump arms across her plump chest.

“I’m going to read about the… um… tragedy,” I admitted, since I was, “but I’m also looking for anything else I can find. Just out of curiosity, you know.”

She didn’t look convinced, and I couldn’t blame her. But since I couldn’t very well tell her about the ulna and the fact that the Waterfield PD was currently digging up the Murphy house crawlspace, I excused myself with another bright smile and scurried off to the microfiche machine, where I muddled my way through the process of getting everything set up.