Authors: Sharyn McCrumb
Wesley grimaced. “Not a pleasant topic of conversation, is it?”
“Not one I expected to be having this week,” admitted the bride-to-be.
“Well, I understand all that you’ve said so far,” said Wesley. “You go right on explaining.”
“If the remains in this urn have been milled, there may not be much I can learn from them. I’d advise you to start hunting up experts with hightech labs in that case, and maybe even
they—”
“They didn’t look milled to me,” Wesley remarked. Blushing a little, he added, “I’ve looked.”
“Okay, well, let me see what we’ve got. Could you hand me a newspaper from that basket by the fireplace?”
The sheriff looked startled. “Don’t you want to take this to the hospital or something?”
“No. What for?” Elizabeth smiled. “The evidence isn’t microscopic, Sheriff. I’ll be able to tell you everything I can after a couple of minutes’ examination. And all I have to do is look at it. Of course, there
are
other tests: cross-sectioning a tooth or—”
“I’ll settle for the general opinion just now,” said Wesley, anticipating another lecture.
“Okay. Let’s just dump it out here on the coffee table. Spread out the newspaper, please.”
Wesley laid out several thicknesses of the
Atlanta Constitution
on the Chandlers’ marble-topped coffee table. Elizabeth pried the lid loose from the
jar and gently sprinkled the contents into a pile in the center of the table.
“Yes,” she said, fingering the mound of charred matter. “This is what unmilled cremated remains looks like. Some ash interspersed with objects that don’t burn at that temperature—bits of bone, tooth, metal tooth fillings, and so on.”
“Are you ready for the second question?” asked Wesley, watching her sort the fragments with a practiced touch.
“Sure. Go ahead.”
“Is this a calf or something?”
Elizabeth looked at him. “You kind of wish it were, don’t you?” she said softly. “You’re afraid somebody got murdered to give Mr. Mason a body to stuff in the urn.”
“That had occurred to me,” Wesley admitted.
“You can get a second opinion on all this, of course. Get somebody who already has a Ph.D. and an official lab to confirm what I tell you. You just want to know if it’s worth it to send it off to be analyzed, right?”
The sheriff nodded. “That was my intention. If you told me it was the contents of a pipe smoker’s ashtray, I wouldn’t bother, but if there’s something potentially criminal here, why, I can justify the expense of having it analyzed. Are you saying you can’t tell what I’ve got here?”
“Oh, I can,” said Elizabeth. “But I’d rather not have the responsibility.” She smiled up at him. “In case you have to go to court with this while I’m on my honeymoon.”
Wesley raised his right hand. “On my honor I won’t call you to testify as an expert witness. Now tell me what that stuff is.”
“I’m afraid that it is human remains,” said Elizabeth softly.
Wesley nodded. “I had a hunch it would be.”
She held up a small bonelike bit. “You see that? It’s a human cuspid. Front tooth. And this little bit here is the metal from a filling. Probably a molar.” She rummaged around the sooty pile for a few moments longer. “This is a bit of vertebra and this splintered bit is part of a long bone. See? There’s quite a bit left.”
“I thought of a third question,” said Wesley.
“I expect you have,” murmured Elizabeth, still examining the contents of the urn. “You want to know if I can give you any particulars about who’s in here, don’t you?”
“Is that possible?”
No answer was forthcoming. The sheriff noticed that the young woman beside him had suddenly tensed up, and her expression had shifted from casual interest to one of alertness. “That’s funny,” she muttered to herself.
Wesley peered at the scraps of bone, but he could see nothing to have quickened her interest. There was no flattened bullet in the ashes; nothing spectacular as far as
he
could see. Elizabeth seemed to be sifting out tiny brackets of metal, of two different sizes, and collecting them in a pile at the edge of the newspaper.
“What did you find?” he asked.
Elizabeth shook her head. “More than you bargained for, Sheriff.”
Charles Chandler was getting desperate. The wedding was just over a week away, and he wasn’t even engaged. He hadn’t even met anybody. The prospects of inheriting his aunt Augusta’s wealth seemed dimmer all the time. Snow White from the
Highlander Magazine
had not responded to his letter and he was running out of ideas. Where did one
meet marriage-minded women? Where would one find a woman who liked physics?
His own prep-school physics teacher had been a bearded gentleman named Fallowfield; otherwise, Charles might have come up with the idea sooner. As it was, he was actually driving past the grounds of the county high school before it occurred to him that science teachers would understand his work. They might even
like
him. And a multimillion-dollar estate would make a nice change from living on a teacher’s salary.
On impulse, he turned into the school driveway and pulled into the gravel parking lot for faculty. There was no difficulty in finding a parking place; since it was nearly July, the students were no longer attending school, but the number of cars in the lot indicated that the teachers were still on the premises, finishing up paperwork, perhaps, or getting ready for next year’s classes.
The county high school was a nondescript one-story brick building, built in the early Seventies. Charles, who had been sent away to school by his education-conscious parents, had never been on the premises before, but he didn’t suppose that it could be too difficult to find a science teacher in that sprawling maze of corridors. After all, students manage to get from one class to another in five minutes. A sign beside the front doors said
VISITORS REPORT TO MAIN OFFICE
. Charles followed the arrows down the hall, wondering what he would say when he got there.
The school secretary, a plump, pleasant-looking woman who resembled the mother character in a Forties movie, motioned him over to the office counter with a friendly smile. “May I help you?”
“Yes,” said Charles. “I’m looking for your physics
teacher.” He had decided not to explain unless he had to.
“Physics. That would be Mr. Worthington. Go down the hall—”
“Does he also teach chemistry?” asked Charles, who didn’t want to speak to
Mr
. Anybody.
“That’s right.”
“How about biology?” asked Charles.
“No. That’s Miss Aynsley.”
Charles breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s the one!” Seeing the puzzled look on the secretary’s face, he hastened to add, “I’m a reporter for
Scholastic Science.”
He beamed at her, pleased with the name of his newly invented magazine. “I’m doing a feature on science in Georgia schools, and I’m speaking to various teachers.”
The secretary looked doubtful.
Everybody’s suspicious of the media these days
, thought Charles. “Miss Aynsley has been recommended to us as one of the best teachers,” he said heartily.
The woman’s brow cleared. “Well, that’s all right, then,” she said. “You go down the hall—”
Charles followed her directions, hurrying out of embarrassment and anticipation. He noticed that on the cinderblock wall beside each door, a hand-lettered sign identified the teacher within. He found the
MISS AYNSLEY
sign in a matter of minutes, and its decoration of frogs and butterflies told him that indeed she did teach biology.
He wondered what he was going to say to her when he found her. Should he pretend to interview her for a nonexistent magazine, just in case she checked with the secretary? He didn’t have time to consider the question any more, because someone was coming toward him, making it awkward for him to be loitering in the hall. Taking a deep
breath, Charles strolled into the classroom and said, “I’m looking for Miss Aynsley.”
“Yes, young man? What can I do for you?”
She was a hundred if she was a day. She had been weaned on a pickle. She probably
ate
the frogs after the class dissected them. Charles stood frozen in his tracks contemplating the most vinegary old martinet he had ever encountered.
“Yes?” she said again.
“I’m sorry,” said Charles. “I came to ask you what phylum earthworms are in, but I have just remembered.”
The same one
I’m
in, he finished silently, hurrying down the hall toward the exit.
Wesley Rountree couldn’t help thinking how incongruous the setting was. Here they were in a formal Colonial-style living room, with a grand piano and green velvet drapes, and a cream-colored Oriental carpet. Against one wall an oak sideboard held an assortment of silver and crystal ornaments—that must be the wedding-present display, he thought—but here on the marble-topped coffee table was a mound of human remains. He wouldn’t like to have to explain this to the lady of the house. In that event Wesley doubted if he’d get a word in edgewise.
This wasn’t exactly his idea of an expert witness, either: a girl who looked hardly more than a teenager, wearing jeans and an oversized sweatshirt. He had to admit, though, that despite the unusual nature of the surroundings, the information provided had been fast and was confidently given. The sheriff was inclined to trust the opinions offered, but he wasn’t planning to go into detail with anyone about where he had obtained them.
“So these remains are human,” said Wesley,
when Elizabeth had given her verdict. “I was afraid of that. What did you mean, though, that I got more than I bargained for? Who is it?”
Elizabeth sighed and shook her head. “The Mormon Tabernacle Choir?” she suggested.
Wesley blinked. “Come again?”
“I mean, there are traces of more than one body in here, Sheriff.”
“What, that little bit of ash is more than one person? It hardly seems like enough.”
“I don’t think you have the ashes of a complete body here,” Elizabeth told him. “You’re right: there aren’t enough ashes to indicate that multiple bodies were put into the urn. But I don’t think this sampling is
all
of
anybody
. You have bits and pieces of several. Look here: this is a porcelain tooth from a partial plate, and these are fragments of teeth that are badly decayed, and
this
is a baby tooth! Also, this big bit of bone here is the epiphysis of a femur, and there is some indication of arthritis, but
this
bone is from a younger individual. In fact, I’d say this smaller one is from a female.”
Wesley stared at the evidence, trying to make sense of the new information. “Are you sure about this?”
Elizabeth nodded. “Even if I were a complete klutz when it came to bone analysis,
nobody
could be wrong about one particular bit of evidence here. Look at this.” She held out a handful of metal brackets of two different sizes. “What do you make of that?”
“Can’t place them,” said the sheriff. “Not tooth fillings?”
“They’re staples,” said Elizabeth, grinning triumphantly. “You see, there are two basic kinds of cremation. There’s a deluxe plan, in which the deceased is placed in a pine casket to be incinerated,
and then there’s the economy funeral, which uses a container which is more or less … cardboard. Now, these big staples fastened the pine box together and the little ones came from the cardboard casket.”
“So we know that the remains here come from at least two funerals.”
“At least two. Probably more.” Elizabeth looked extremely pleased with herself. “I learned all this from a medical examiner in North Carolina. He came up to the university to talk to us about his cases. One of his strangest tasks was to identify the remains when a funeral home accidentally sent the wrong urns to the families of the deceased and the medical examiner had to sort them out.”
Wesley was still stunned into silence. “This takes some getting used to,” he said at last. “I was prepared for murder, but this—”
“Murder?” Elizabeth’s eyes widened. “Oh, you don’t have to worry about
murder
. Sheriff Rountree. Fraud maybe, but certainly nothing violent.”
“Fraud?”
“Sure. When a body is cremated, not all the ash gets collected and put into an urn. A few stray bits and pieces stay behind in the grate of the incinerator, and after a number of cremations, that grate has to be removed and cleaned out.” She pointed to the pile of ashes on the newspaper. “What I think you have here is—”
Wesley nodded. “Somebody cleaned out the grate and dumped the leftovers into that urn.”
“That’d be my guess,” Elizabeth agreed. “Ship it off to Atlanta to be sure, though.”
“Oh, I will,” Wesley assured her. “First thing tomorrow. So the question now is: where did these remains come from?”
“I can’t help you there.” She picked up the blue
enamel vase and examined it carefully. “I take it you’ve looked at this?”
Wesley nodded. “Sure. Fingerprinted it, too.”
“Usually, funeral homes put serial numbers on their urns, and they have number codes so that they can tell which urns are theirs. This one is blank, though. I suppose there are other places one could obtain one. You say it was mailed to the widow from California?”
“She thought so,” grunted Wesley. “Says she never checked the wrapping to find out.”
“Well, that’s understandable. She was in mourning, after all.”
“She’s over it now from the look of her,” the sheriff remarked. “I’d say if that husband of hers staged a third coming, she’d arrange his next departure personally.”
“There’s no chance of that, is there?”
“No. This time I called California myself, and they faxed me a photo of the deceased. This time around it’s official.”
“Wonder what happened last time,” mused Elizabeth.
“Emmet Mason left home, saying he was going to California.” Wesley ticked off the facts one by one on his fingers. “His wife gets a phone call from somebody saying he’s dead. To corroborate this report of his death, she receives a funeral urn, supposedly containing Emmet, but actually filled with—” Wesley made a face.
“Leftovers,” suggested Elizabeth.