08-A Thousand Bones, page 6
He went back to working on the front page. “Beautiful town, lots of money there, but many outsiders. All those Victorian summer homes left over from the old days, with their pretty porches looking down over the harbor. The Chapels had a home like that, way up on the hill.”
“Did you cover Annabelle Chapel’s disappearance?”
“The pretty blond daughter of a rich Chicago family goes missing from a Michigan ski lodge?” He smiled. “I put her picture on my front page.”
“Can I see what you wrote?” Joe asked.
Theo wiped his hands on his apron. “Come with me.”
He led her into a closet-sized room and pulled a large binder off the shelf. He flipped through the pages until he stopped at a Banner front page from February 1969. It was the same photograph Mack had tossed onto the table at their briefing. Again, Joe was struck by Annabelle Chapel’s beauty. She had the eyes of a girl whose only worry was picking out a new winter coat at Marshall Field.
“Theo, could you make me a copy of this?” she asked.
“You want everything we printed?”
“If it’s not too much trouble.” She knew Mack wasn’t going to share whatever he had in his case file.
Theo pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “You seem to have a big interest in these bones.”
“I’m just doing my job,” Joe said.
“Augie thinks you have a special…attachment.”
Joe was silent, miffed that Augie was talking about not just police business but her.
Theo sensed her coolness. “I’m sorry. Augie can be such a yeti sometimes.”
“Yeti?”
Theo frowned. “Yeti. Oh, no, wait. Yeti…that’s like a Big Foot animal.” He smiled. “Yenta, that’s the word I want.”
“Yeah, Augie’s a yenta, all right,” Joe said.
Theo closed the binder. “Come. I need a cigarette, so I will walk you out.”
They paused outside on the sidewalk. It was hot, the sun a smudge high in the hazy white sky. The summer tourists had all gone now, and the leaf peepers had yet to descend. It was so quiet Joe could hear the wheeze of the grocery’s automatic door across the street as someone went in.
She spotted Mack coming out of the Riverside Inn, carrying a Styrofoam takeout carton. Mack had lunch every day at the Riverside, always alone. More than a couple of times, Joe had smelled alcohol on his breath even under the Sen-Sen he popped.
Theo saw Mack, too. “Annabelle Chapel was his case, you know,” he said, pointing his cigarette at Mack.
“That’s what I hear,” Joe said.
“He had a very special…attachment to her.”
Mack disappeared around a corner, heading to the station.
“Some folks say he was obsessed,” Theo said. “And that it cost him his job.”
Joe wanted to hear more. But she knew it wasn’t right to let Theo go on. How much of it was real, and how much of it was just junk that Augie and Theo cooked up?
The sun was beating down on her. She wiped her forehead and put on her cap. “Thanks for your help, Theo,” she said.
“De rien. I will send the copies in with Augie tomorrow morning.” He took another drag on his Camel. “Maybe I will have something else for you, as well.”
“What?” Joe asked.
He smiled. “A little surprise.”
7
Joe hadn’t been ready for Theo’s “little surprise” when it landed on her porch that morning.
Theo had written a second story about the bones. No, not a story, exactly. It was a eulogy for the unknown victim, set off in a black box right on the front page so no one could miss it among the sewer stories and high school football scores.
Joe picked up the copy of the Banner from the desk to read the story again. The headline was just two words: SOMEBODY’S DAUGHTER.
They think she was female. They think she was small. But there is nothing else to be gleaned from the shards of bone found just five miles beyond the edge of our village.
Just a girl.
We all know the woods where the bones were found. We’ve walked there, admiring the autumn colors or gathering firewood. We’ve hunted there, bringing home venison or rabbit for our tables. Our kids have played there, building imaginary houses in the old trees. How could we have known what lay beneath the bed of leaves and needles? How could we have known that our woods had become a cemetery?
We’ve all wondered who she is. But we may never know whose small bones these are.
Just a girl.
Somebody’s girl. Somebody’s daughter.
We should all pray those woods are not her final resting place. Let’s pray our police are able to give her a name and a face. Let’s pray they can take her home to those who are still missing her. And if not, then we must treat her as one of our own.
She is somebody’s daughter.
Maybe our own.
The station door banged open, drawing her attention up. Dried leaves swirled in behind a man wearing a brown uniform. He set a small box on the counter.
“There a Detective Julian Mack here?” he asked.
“He’s out,” Joe said, tossing the newspaper aside. “Can I sign for it?”
The UPS man glanced at her badge and pushed a clipboard at her. “Right there.”
He was gone with another cyclone of leaves. Joe started to take the box over to Mack’s desk and then noticed that the return address was a private crime lab in Lansing. The box was light, and when she shook it, it rattled. She had shaken enough Christmas presents to guess what it was. The jewelry recovered near the bones. She was surprised it had come back so quickly.
She glanced at the door and took the box to her desk. She carefully peeled back the brown paper and eased the flaps open. Inside was a clear plastic bag sealed with evidence tape and inked up with several sets of initials. She turned on the desk lamp and spread the bag flat on the blotter.
The silver was badly tarnished, but the lab had cleaned it so every link was visible. It wasn’t a necklace with a crucifix, as Mack had thought. It was a charm bracelet. Joe brought the gooseneck lamp closer. There were seven charms: a windmill, a Christmas tree, a horse and carriage, a teddy bear, a locomotive engine, a cross, and what looked like a Roman soldier’s head.
Joe started jerking open drawers. She found a magnifying glass and positioned it over each charm, trying to see the details, or a name or a date. There was something engraved on the back of the Roman soldier one, but it was too small and faint to make out.
Footsteps came up behind her, and she smelled Brut cologne.
“Hey, Mike,” she said without looking up. “Heading home for a quick lunch, huh?”
He came around the front of the desk. “How did you know?”
“Just a hunch.”
His eyes dropped to the evidence bag. “Is that the jewelry from the woods?”
She nodded, looking at the Roman soldier charm again with the magnifying glass. “It’s not a crucifix,” she said. “It’s a charm bracelet.”
Mike picked up the UPS box. “You shouldn’t have opened Mack’s box,” he said.
“I’m not doing anything wrong,” she said. “I didn’t take it out of the bag. Besides, it’s not his box. It belongs to the Leelanau County sheriff’s department. I’d get to see it eventually anyway.”
“He’s still going to be pissed.”
“He’s going to be even more pissed when he realizes this is not Annabelle’s necklace.”
Mike bent to look at the bracelet.
“There’s something on the back of this charm, but I can’t read it,” Joe said. She held out the magnifying glass. “See if you can make it out.”
Mike didn’t even have to take the glass before he spoke. “That’s Michigan State,” he said, pointing.
“What?”
“They have a Spartan as their mascot,” he said.
She looked up at him. “Damn, you’re right. And that’s another strike against Annabelle Chapel. She was sixteen and probably going to high school somewhere in Chicago.”
“Well, if our victim went to MSU, maybe we can ID her,” Mike said. “And if we find out something about her, maybe that can help us find out who killed her.”
“My mother said the same thing,” Joe said.
Mike glanced at his watch but didn’t make a move to leave. “You talk about the job with your mother?” he asked.
Joe was studying the charm and didn’t look up. “Sure, she was a cop.”
“No shit? I didn’t know that.”
“She was a cop back in the days when the women wore skirts and wrote parking tickets. She likes to talk to me about my job.”
“She likes you being a cop?”
“I didn’t say that. But she is very proud of me,” Joe said.
“My dad likes that I’m a cop,” Mike said. “But my mom…”
Joe was still studying the MSU Spartan charm and didn’t realize that Mike had fallen quiet. When she finally looked up at him, the sun from the window was full on his face, and he looked every bit of his twenty-nine years. But there was someone else there, too, in his eyes. A boy.
He raked his hair and started toward the door. “Mindy’s waiting. See you after lunch.”
“Right,” Joe said. “Don’t wear yourself out.”
Mike laughed and pushed open the door. Joe picked the lab’s report out of the box and gave it a quick read. The bracelet wasn’t real silver, and there was no mention of any attempt to decipher the engraving on the back of the Spartan charm. There was nothing useful in the report at all. No wonder it had come back so quickly. They had done nothing but clean it up.
Joe turned her attention back to the bracelet. It was just a cheap thing, and it didn’t seem like the kind of jewelry a rich girl like Annabelle Chapel would wear at any age. And the more Joe thought about it, the more it seemed not to be something even a coed would wear. It was the kind of bracelet a younger girl, making the fragile passage to womanhood, would leave home in a jewelry box when she went off to college and a grownup life.
Joe stared at the Spartan charm. Every instinct was telling her that the girl who had worn the charm bracelet hadn’t been old enough to attend college.
Damn. So why was a Michigan State charm on this bracelet?
She glanced up to the clock. Augie would be back from lunch soon. And Mack could walk in any second. She started to put the evidence bag back into the UPS box. Then she paused.
As soon as Mack realized this was not Annabelle Chapel’s crucifix, he would dismiss it and it would be locked up in the evidence room and forgotten.
Her eyes went to the filing cabinet where Augie kept the Polaroid camera. But she quickly discarded that idea. There was no way to raise the detail on the engraving without a close-up lens. And it would have to be done without taking the bracelet out of the plastic bag.
She snatched up the evidence bag, shoved it into her pants pocket and flung the empty UPS box under her desk. It was wrong to do what she about to do, but she knew it wasn’t tampering with evidence or stealing it. She was just going to get it properly photographed. It would be back in its box in thirty minutes, if she was lucky.
Augie came in and looked at her strangely as he took his place back behind his console. “Everything okay, Joe?”
“I’ll be right back,” she said, pushing out the front door.
8
In the dim glow of the infrared light, Joe couldn’t make out Theo’s face. Which meant he couldn’t see her well, either. Still, as she handed him the evidence bag, she was sure he could read the anxiety in her face.
Theo switched on the overhead light and held up the bag, frowning. “I thought it was a necklace you found with the bones,” he said.
When she didn’t reply, he smiled. “Augie told me about it. But don’t worry, Mack was blabbing about it to everyone over at the Riverside last night.”
Joe didn’t want to tell Theo any more than she had to. “I can’t take it out of the bag. Can you get good pictures through the plastic?” she asked.
“Bien sûr,” he said.
She watched as he spread the bag beneath a Leica on a tripod, positioning each charm under a macro lens. The room was quiet except for the click of the camera. He raised an eyebrow when she asked him to take a close-up of the engraving on the back of the Spartan charm but didn’t ask why she wanted it.
“Are you going to tell me why you need this?” Theo asked as he rewound the film and took it out of the camera.
“I can’t yet, Theo,” Joe said.
“Was the dead girl wearing this bracelet?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you found it in the woods?” Theo pressed.
Joe hesitated. “Yes.”
Theo held up the film canister. “This is going to take a while to develop,” he said. “Why don’t you go wait in my office, have a coffee. I will bring the prints out to you.”
Joe slid off the stool, thankful to escape the smell of the chemicals. Out in Theo’s office, she poured herself a cup of coffee. The phone rang and she looked out to see Carrie taking a subscription order, from the sounds of it. Joe knew that the circulation of the Banner increased every fall when the departing summer folks wanted to take a little piece of Leelanau home with them. Theo liked to brag that the circulation of the Banner spread from Saginaw to Saskatchewan. Joe listened to Carrie ask the caller how to spell “Grosse Pointe.”
Joe looked toward the darkroom door. Finally, she began to wander around in Theo’s office, her eyes drifting over the framed Banner front pages he had hung on the walls.
SEGREGATION BANNED. 1954.
U.S. MOURNS DEATH OF
ROBERT KENNEDY. 1968.
FIRST MAN ON THE MOON. 1969.
NIXON QUITS. 1974.
Some of the stories were just flakes of memories from her childhood. Nixon’s resignation was more vivid, mainly because she and Brad had gotten giddy drunk that night and made love to celebrate.
She let out a slow sigh. Damn, they hadn’t made love in a week. They had barely seen each other since the bones had been found, and now Leach had canceled all vacations until further notice.
She stopped at the last newspaper.
LEELANAU HIRES FIRST FEMALE DEPUTY.
APRIL 1, 1975.
She stared at her picture. It was taken at the academy graduation, and she looked scared to death, her uniform gaping around her neck as if it were made for a football player.
She remembered the day she had gone down to Uniforms Unlimited in Traverse City to get fitted. All they had were men’s sizes, so the guy had found a 34 jacket, a man’s 14 shirt, and slacks. She had to pay a fortune to have the waist taken in and the rear let out. It was the only time in her life she was thankful for having small boobs. The hat had worked, but the tie…it was a clip-on made for a six-foot-tall man, and every time she took a pee she had to make sure it wasn’t dangling in the damn toilet.
“Joe,” Theo called.
She hurried back into the darkroom. In the infrared gloom, she could see wet prints hanging on a line, all good, clear close-ups of each charm.
“This is the engraving one,” he said. “Let’s see what comes up.” He poked at a paper in a tray of chemicals, humming softly.
She leaned back against the wall. “I liked the story you wrote,” she said, for something to break her nervousness over his silence. “The one about somebody’s daughter.”
“I got a very good response from it,” Theo said. “Gerry Hathaway over at the post office has started a collection to buy a cemetery plot.”
“They’re getting a little ahead of themselves,” Joe said.
“They feel sorry for her, that’s all.”
“She has family somewhere. We’ll find them.”
“I hope so.” Theo slipped the paper into a second tray. “Ah. Come look.”
Joe came forward and looked down at the paper floating in the tray. First, there was nothing but the shape of the charm. Then, slowly, the details emerged. It looked to be four letters.
Theo pulled the paper from the tray and used two clothespins to hang it on the line. He switched on the light.
Joe blinked and stared up at the paper. The letters were clear: CHHS.
“Chris?” Theo said.
Joe was smiling. “No…CHHS. It’s a high school somewhere. I knew it. Now I just have to find out where. Can I take this, Theo?”
“Not yet. It has to dry.” He saw her impatience and waved toward the door. “Go use my phone. The number for the Traverse City library is right there in the Rolodex. They’ll have a directory of high schools on file. Ask for June. She’s very helpful.”
Joe thanked him and left the darkroom. A few minutes later, she was talking to June. Five minutes after that, she had the names of three high schools in Michigan that began with CH. Calls to the schools revealed that Cadillac Heritage had a Patriot as its mascot; Chippewa Hills in Remus had the Warriors. And Cherry Hill High School in Inkster had a Spartan for a mascot.
She was just hanging up when Theo came out with the photographs. He handed over the prints and the bracelet, still in its bag.
“Thanks, Theo.”
“De rien,” he said.
She hesitated. “No one can know about this yet, not even Augie,” she said. “I need your discretion on this, Theo.”
His eyes were steady on hers. “And you will have it.”
She looked down at the bracelet. From the first moment she had seen it, something told her it was important. Now all she had to do was persuade Leach to let her pursue it.
By the time she got back to the office, Leach had left for the day to go to a dentist’s appointment. Joe went home, eager to share her theories about the bracelet, and over dinner, Brad had listened patiently. Her energy carried over to the bedroom, arcing and burning bright. For once, Brad was the one left depleted on the damp sheets.
