Bones and Drones

by K A Goodsell

I saw a guy at Grover’s the day I got home. He had no phone, no laptop, not even a book. He just sat there drinking his coffee like a psychopath. I don’t want that to be me.

  She texted me again:

  What are you doing right now? Can you talk?

  I picked up my phone to answer her.

  Sorry, I can’t right now. Text me later. I’m trying to do more research into the unmarked graves right now.

  As I hit send, feeling slightly guilty, but I need to get this done. I was getting back into fresh research, and it felt good. Not like with John, who now had half a face and felt like a dead end.

  It didn’t last long, though—around eleven minutes.

  I stood up and walked over to my record player, lifting one of my father’s vinyl records that he recorded when he was in high school as part of a project. I didn’t even think he knew that I had this one in my collection. Placing into the turntable and setting it up, I closed my eyes for a moment, listening to the soft music fill my room.

  The thoughts of who John Doe could be just wouldn’t leave my mind. I picked him up and held him in the palms of my hands. For some reason, I loved how skulls felt. You had ultimate power when they were in your hands. Just to think this was someone’s identity was amazing, that this piece of bone protected the entire entity of who that human was. Amazing. That this person looked through these eye sockets and saw things, way different things that I’d seen. And maybe they also saw the oak tree in my backyard. I was lost in the thought process.

  The large whiteboard behind my desk was filled with notes about John Doe. On the sides of the whiteboard were framed photographs from all different eras, all of which were photographs of people in my cemeteries.

  Tintype photographs were made by creating a direct positive on a thin sheet of metal coated with a dark lacquer or enamel and used as the support for photographic emulsion. They were popular until the 1870s, and they are my favorite kinds. Due to the black-and-white nature, if the person was wealthy enough, they could have the photographer paint cheek blush or color onto the image.

  I had a few of these, but they stayed primarily in the darkness of my closet for protection.

  On my wall were cabinet-style photographs, which were widely used for portraiture after 1870. The style comprised a thin photograph mounted on a card. It was kind of like holding a thin piece of cardboard, and most of the photographs were yellowed.

  I switched out of the photographs every couple of weeks to make sure they didn’t get too much sun.

  Nibbling on my bottom lip, I scanned through Gage’s and my notes. Again and again. I swear, I knew them as well as the gravestones outside by now.

  I pulled out the map of Old World Cemetery that I’d had framed on my wall above my bed for nearly five years. On the map, there was a church sitting in the top right corner, right on the ridgeline of the trees towards the older parts of the cemetery.

  I wondered what choices the founders would have made during the time Daniel Lockwood lived. This was right around when there was a boom in population after another group joined them.

  Leaning over, I grabbed an antique map that my ancestor had made when he was the first mortician in Pine Grove. He had mapped out where all the cemeteries were and had lived on the same land that we lived on today, except my grandfather tore the house down and built a new one. Looking at Center Cemetery, I noticed there was a church on that map.

  They wouldn’t normally have had two churches during this time since everyone was the same religion—usually.

  Maybe one of these churches wasn’t really where it was located on the map. The town’s members could have moved it more than once. Anything was possible, and some records at the church at Old World Cemetery had been lost in a fire that occurred right around when Daniel Lockwood died, which was what had led to (what our town believes was) the first move of the church since it was built when the town was first established.

  I put the two cemetery maps side by side on the carpet in front of me. Biting my lip again, I went through everything I’d read in Gage’s family journal, our research and notes from the cemeteries, and my notes from trying to work out where the church would have been. The descriptions of the town weren’t always easy to compare mentally to what they had later become.

  Nat walked into my bedroom while I was tearing through the paperwork. “Still haven’t located him?”

  “Working on it.”

  “Getting any closer?”

  “Who knows?” I shrugged. “All we can really do is keep looking until we can’t look any longer.”

  “Seems like a waste of time.” He sat down next to me, pulling one map closer to him. “Unless the real reason you’re still doing this isn’t the founder. You have been spending an awful lot of time with Gage.”

  “He’s got the drone.” I continued to page through Gage’s notes until it hit me what he said. “Wait. No, no. That’s a nasty accusation. I’m doing this because I need the letter of recommendation—”

  “That drone doesn’t seem to help him, unless he already knows where the founder is and is using all this work as an excuse to spend more time with you.” Nat grinned. “He seems to like you a lot, Pais, and I want to make sure you aren’t going to throw that away.”

  “I highly doubt he would do that.” I shut the notebook with a sigh. I was too flustered to do this and Nat was not helping.

  I stood up and approached my desk. One look at John Doe and I was almost in tears of frustration.

  “What’s this?” Nat picked up the birthday letter signed by the mayor. “Funny how his writing looks different than the one I got a month ago. I wonder if he was hauling ass to get them done or something. Maybe a lot of October babies?”

  I wiped my eyes trying to get rid of the small welling of tears that was creeping up on me. “What do you mean?”

  “Here, let me get mine.” He took the letter out of my room and crossed the hall to his and rummaged around. Then he walked back into my bedroom. “Look, this is the one I got last month on my birthday. It looks completely different.”

  I took hold of the two letters and compared the signatures, and the handwritten note.

  He’s right, they are different.

  “Huh, I think I have last year’s still in my drawer. Hold on.” I scooted around my desk and pulled open my filing cabinet. I kept everything I received in the mail for a year and then shredded it. From the folder labeled “Bull” I pulled out my last birthday letter.

  Putting all three on the table, we compared, and sure enough, this year’s was completely different handwriting.

  “So, he has someone writing his stuff now? He’s not that big a deal, and not that busy,” Nat huffed, but I was too busy staring at the letter I received today. The ends of the writing had a smudge, like someone who was writing lefty would make. I thought back to when he signed off on my father’ clipboard in the morgue when Teddy was there. The mayor was a righty.

  “Wait.”

  I reached over the desk to grab the notebook was with Teddy at the scene and scramble to open the book to its first page. One letter at a time, I compared the designs of each curve of each letter, the swoops, the little dash at the end of the letter D.

  “It’s the same handwriting.”

  My eyes widened, and I grabbed my phone out of my back pocket to search my gallery. I had taken a photograph of the crumpled-up piece of paper we found at the scene.

  The smudge was on the birthday letter matched the small smudge that on the throwaway piece of paper.

  “The person who wrote in the notebook wrote my birthday letter.”

  Raimy, Gage, and Nat were sitting on a beanbag chair, an upside-down milk crate, and the floor as I started a list on my whiteboard. “Okay, so let’s go over what we know.” I nodded toward everyone. “There’s so much going on that we know could be with the case, but I want everyone’s help. Everyone has different viewpoints, so this is the best way to go.”

  “Want to start with suspects?”


  “Let’s do it.” Raimy pulled out her notebook and cleared her throat. “This is what I have. You,” she paused and looked up at me. “But they cleared you with the dash cam.”

  I crossed out my name and rolled my eyes at her. “Thanks.”

  “What? I have to list everyone who was there that night.”

  “Go ahead,” I egged her on.

  “Okay, well, Tag was there because of the noise complaint. Which means whoever was in the noise complaint was there, too.”

  “That would be Rebecca and her friends.”

  “Interesting.” Raimy said, jotting it down.

  “Andre was also there. He said he likes to go down to the lake after working. Yet he wasn’t working Friday. He told me at the drive-in that he was on vacation.”

  I scribbled all the names onto the whiteboard and turned around to look at Gage. “Who else?”

  “I almost want to say Teddy himself.” Gage shrugged. “What if he was drunk or something and just fell into the lake? It happens.”

  “Okay.” I nodded. “That could happen.” I hesitantly wrote Teddy’s name on the board.

  “Well…” Raimy looked around. “We have to talk about the elephant in the room.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Elgort needs to be on that list.”

  I nodded reluctantly and write his name.

  “Okay.” I turned around to face my friends. “As far as we know, that was everyone at the lake Friday night. As far as we know.” I emphasized the ending once again.

  Suspects

  - Me

  - Tag

  - Rebecca and friends

  - Andre

  - Teddy

  - Elgort

  “Well, elaborate and talk about how they could be connected,” Nat said. “We now know that whoever wrote your birthday letter also wrote the note about Daniel Lockwood in the notebook. More so the one that was crumbled up, right, Paislee?”

  “What?” Raimy’s mouth dropped open as I wrote the two connections up onto the whiteboard.

  “We just saw that earlier. That’s why I called this meeting.” I reached over to my desk and handed her my phone with the photo open and also the letter.

  “What about Andre’s hat? He had a knife at the funeral that might match Teddy’s hair. Have we heard anything yet about that?” I looked over at Nat. “Has Dad or Mom said anything?”

  “Nothing.” He shrugged. “Write it on the board.”

  “Throughout the last couple of days, I’ve noticed some odd things when I’ve been talking with people,” I started, but Raimy raised her finger at me.

  “They are called suspects, and you were interviewing them,” she corrected me. “Come on, get into it. You know you’re enjoying the sleuthing!”

  “Okay,” I sighed. “When I was interviewing the potential suspects, I noticed a few things.”

  Everyone nodded in unison.

  “For instance, when I went to see Andre and Velma at the drive-in, there were a pair of boots in the front seat. Andre probably wears them at jobs. And there were boot markings at the scene.”

  I marked down the boots on the whiteboard.

  “At the boathouse, Andre did also say before we left that we shouldn’t leave any rocks unturned. Did anyone else find that a bit creepy?” Gage asked.

  Raimy shot up out of her seat. “Right, and the note we found at the lake was underneath a rock! What if that was a hint to us?”

  I jotted that up on the board. I hadn’t put those pieces together. It was possible it had been a way for him to tell us he knew we found that piece of paper. What if he’s been just watching us all this time?

  Gage cleared his throat. “What about Tag’s body cam we found? It seemed like Andre was pretty heated.”

  “What body cam?” Raimy piped in.

  “In the pine tree right where the funeral was happening, Tag’s body cam was up in the tree. Gage and I found it. We went through the footage and it seemed like Andre was really upset.”

  “But didn’t Tag say that something upset him over Rebecca being pregnant,” Gage recalled.

  “Rebecca is pregnant?” Nat sat up straighter. “Wow.”

  “But he was also upset because neither one of them could find Teddy. That’s also where I think we can rule out the drone photograph of the Inn because Tag told us he was loading tools into the back of his truck to go look for Teddy at the boathouse,” Gage said.

  “True,” I agreed. “I say we rule that out as a clue. It was more just a conversation caught on film.” I scratched my chin and remembered the Inn when I saw Elgort. “I saw Elgort at the Inn and we hugged.” Nat pointed at me, and I cut him off before he could speak. “I know we weren’t supposed to be near each other, but he had a cut on his chin. How’d he get that?”

  “Maybe he fell off the dock?” Raimy shrugged. “Write it down.”

  Clues

  - Daniel Lockwood note in notebook

  - Daniel Lockwood error note

  - Birthday letter (handwriting matches the smudge and writing on both notebook and ripped out piece)

  - Andre’s knife with hair on it

  - Boots in truck—maybe match the boot marks at the scene

  - Andre saying we shouldn’t leave stones unturned

  - Tag’s body cam

  - Photograph of the Inn

  - Elgort’s chin has a scratch on it

  I stepped back and glanced at the list of suspects and the list of clues that we’d all compiled. “Is that all we have?” I felt my voice nearly whining. I’d thought we were on to something here, but maybe we weren’t. I re-read the list and my eyes fell upon the birthday letter and the thrown-out piece of paper. “Wait, so if the mayor isn’t signing his birthday cards, who is?”

  “Does he have a secretary?” Nat asked. “I know many people at his status level have some sort of secretary.”

  “You’ve been watching too much Mad Men, bro.” Gage leaned back and laughed at Nat, who scoffed back. “But he’s actually probably right, though.”

  “He doesn’t have a secretary,” Raimy said. “I went to visit him recently. There’s no one other than him in his office.”

  I looked back at my letter. The sunlight shone through my bedroom window onto the whiteboard. When the rays became stronger as the wind blew some trees outside out of the way, the sunlight pierced through the piece of paper, revealing what looked like another ink stain.

  I unclipped the letter from the magnet on the whiteboard and looked at the back of the paper. Sure enough, there was a light red ink splotch. It looked as if the ink had been on some other material and grazed the piece of paper.

  Velma had switched to red ink recently. When we were at the station, she had signed us out with the guest passes and smudged the ink with her hand, since she was a lefty. I looked back at the photo of the ripped-out piece of paper on my phone. The smudge from her left hand. New ink. She had used a tissue when we were at the office getting our licenses back to wipe the red ink off her hand and dropped it on top of a pile of papers. A pile of papers that happened to be birthday letters for the town. My mind was spinning.

  I closed the gallery and looked at Gage in front of me. “I think I know who it was.” His face lit up, and Raimy’s jaw dropped. I opened the phone and dialed the sheriff’s station. It rang twice before Sheriff O’Moore picked up.

  “Sheriff O’Moore.” I put the call on speakerphone. “I know who may be involved with Teddy’s murder.”

  The interrogation room at the sheriff’s office was freezing, brightly lit to where you felt like you had to blink a bunch of times so your eyes didn’t well up, and also it smelled like cheese. Not sure where that came from. Maybe someone had eaten their lunch in there? The chief had asked us to stay behind the glass in the viewing room as he conducted the two interviews alone. We obliged, and Raimy, Gage, Nat, and I all piled into the room.

  “This is so humiliating that you’d even ask us both to do this,” Velma said and shoo
k her head as the sheriff put two pieces of paper into front of Andre and her as they sat at the metal table in the middle of the room. “Our own son was murdered, and you’re thinking we’re suspects?”

  “This must be a misunderstanding,” Andre said calmly, putting his hand on Velma’s back.

  “He’s not your son, Velma,” Chief O’Moore said bluntly. “Every time I inquired about your niece and nephew, you said they weren’t your kids. So please, don’t.”

  Velma huffed, pulled out a handkerchief from her dress pocket and blew her nose. There weren’t any tears, but she was sure trying to force some.

  The door opened to our viewing room and my father walked in, Tag following close behind . “Did we miss it?”

  “No, just starting.” I nodded toward the chief who was handing Velma and Andre pens.

  The speaker crackled as he spoke again. He pulled out a photocopy of the Daniel Lockwood note was left in the notebook. “Please copy this sentence.”

  “Why?” Andre inquired. “I’m sorry, but Chief, you have the wrong people here.”

  “You’re wasting your time,” Velma huffed again, not touching the pen and folding her arms.

  “Please,” the chief said calmly. “We just need samples from everyone in the town. We’re trying to match the handwriting and rule out whoever we can. We want to solve this case.” He paused, looking over at Velma. The two made eye contact. “This will help us do it faster.”

  Andre nodded and copied the phrase in the photograph.

  Velma didn’t move.

  “Velma,” Andre pleaded quietly. “Just do it.”

  “I want a lawyer.”

  Andre’s eyebrows pursed, and he looked between Velma and the chief, exasperated. “Why would you need a lawyer? Just write it down.”

  “I don’t feel comfortable,” she said. “I don’t understand why you’re targeting us. Is it because we’re family?”

  “No, it’s because we’re asking everyone,” the chief reminded her, then backed up toward the door, pushing a button. A beep sounded in our room. “Tag, will you please come in here and provide your writing sample? You were at the lake that night.”