Site Unseen

by Dana Cameron

  My jaw dropped, and I struggled to make sense of what he was saying. “Well, yeah, but he was crazy, he threatened me, he had a gun—”

  “But Mrs. Westlake wasn’t shot, was she?” Stannard said reasonably. “I just think there’s a little more going on here than appears on the surface.”

  Before I could digest that the phone rang, startling us both. The sheriff got up, a little angrily, I thought, and snatched the receiver. “Yes?”

  At the same time the door to his office opened and the gnomic medical examiner stumped into the office. “Ooooh, weee! Boyo, when you bring ’em on, you bring ’em good! If I’da known it would do this much good, I woulda set up complaining long ago.”

  “Thanks for trying, she’s already here,” Stannard said shortly and hung up the phone. “Ever heard of knocking, Dr. Moretti? How about procedure?” His voice was mild but I couldn’t miss the rebuke. Dr. Moretti apparently couldn’t have cared less.

  “I gotta hand it to you, this is a pip! No interesting work since old lady Ballard fell cold off her chair at work last year, then, bang! First Augie and two now suspicious, little ducks all lined up in a row! What a hoot! Next you’ll be handing me the brides in the bath!”

  I watched the sheriff take a deep breath. “Best behavior, Terry, we’ve got company.” He nodded in my direction, and she quieted down. Dr. Moretti regarded me suspiciously after she recognized me.

  “Oh, yeah, you,” she rasped. “You’re the one out at the Point, the archaeology lady.”

  I tried to erase my dislike of her. I’d spent a huge part of my professional life trying to develop a sympathy and respect for the dead, a respect that she clearly didn’t share. Considering her profession, her cavalier attitude exasperated me. But she obviously had information I needed. “No one’s told me how Grahame Tichnor died,” I said.

  The woman seemed delighted to have an audience outside her regulars. “Near as I can tell—” She broke off hurriedly and looked at the sheriff, who shrugged.

  “I’ll start,” he said. “This is what we’ve got: It looks like the victim had just finished clearing up from dinner—all the dishes were washed and in the rack, and there was some fresh garbage in the pail—carrots, potatoes, some small bones, and a beer bottle in with them.” He added wryly, “Not only was the deceased given to violent behavior, but he didn’t recycle either.

  “The deceased was found lying on the floor, and he had convulsed, kicking a chair over.” The sheriff hesitated, considering his evidence before he revealed his hypothesis. “I’m beginning to think it was the potatoes.”

  “What, did he choke?” I asked.

  He turned to me. “No, that much I’m sure of. Some of the skins were a little green. Most people don’t know that green potatoes, or their eyes, can be every bit as deadly as drinking Drano. They’re in the same family as deadly nightshade.” He glanced at the medical examiner for confirmation.

  “Well, it was poisoning,” Dr. Moretti began, “but where the hell are you coming up with deadly potatoes? Belladonna’s a whole ’nother kettle of fish! This is convallatoxin.”

  “How can you be sure?” asked Stannard. His immediate challenge told me that pathology wasn’t any more cut and dried than archaeology.

  “I couldn’t at first.” The medical examiner settled in to her story, now that she had us hooked. “First thing I noticed was his heart looked dicey to me. This stif—deceased had vomited, so I figured, no problem, he was an old coot, maybe it was his ticker. I looked at the crime scene report, and for once they’d checked out the wastebasket and the medicine cabinet—you need to ride those little wieners every minute! But! No heart medicine in the cabinet and based on the trash and the dish rack, it looked like homemade soup for dinner. Next I have a squint at the kidneys: no digitoxin or digoxin, which was what this was looking like to me. Okay, then we have a wee peeksy in the gut, and we find the remains of dindins.”

  Dr. Moretti eyed us sternly. “Always chew your food, children. It makes my job more difficult, but it saves wear and tear on your innards. In this case, Mr. Tichnor did not chew the required forty times per mouthful, nor did he seem to chew any better for lunch, which was a little further down the intestinal tract—”

  “Dr. Moretti, cut to the chase.”

  “Calm your liver, Sheriff, I’m getting to it. Well, I’m taking a tour through dinner and there wasn’t a lot. Bingo, I figure something didn’t agree with him, so I have a closer look at what was going down and I found carrots, potatoes, a little beef, some celery, whatever. Matches what was in the garbage can. Also some chopped-up herbs, but the only one I could clearly recognize was some curly parsley. There’s some other greenage but I’m about to give up when I say to myself, remember, in spite of those washed dishes, there wasn’t really enough for a whole dinner, he didn’t make it all the way through the meal, something’s wrong, keep looking. But how the hell am I going to identify chopped, chewed greens? Not on cell structure, that’s for sure, and the uncooperative son of a bitch hadn’t conveniently ingested any roots or seeds or whole leaves to make my job easier—”

  “Dr. Moretti—” The sheriff was trying hard to keep his patience and was losing. I just kept my mouth shut and watched the exchange with all the fascination of one watching a train wreck.

  She waved him off dismissively. “But then I poke around one last time, before I take a sample to send back to Augusta, and I find this.” She produced a small vial filled with clear liquid. There was something small, round, and orange-brown suspended in it.

  “What is it?” Stannard squinted at the mangled object in the vial. I peered over his shoulder.

  “A berry. From lily of the valley, Convallaria majalis. Toxic as hell, acts a bit like digitoxin, and is occasionally confused by the unlucky and the stupid for wild garlic.” The medical examiner was positively preening now. “I looked it up. Ingesting it will knock your socks off; even the water from the cut flowers ain’t too good for you. A few finely shredded leaves wouldn’t look suspicious and would do the job nicely. I think that it confirms that our dead chum was murdered.”

  “I thought you said it could be confused with wild garlic,” the sheriff said.

  “I did, but not by this guy. For starters, I don’t think anyone would mistake the flowering Convallaria for a wild garlic, even past bloom; it’s just too commonly recognized. For another, from what I’ve seen of this guy’s sheet, he was a survivalist nut and probably wouldn’t have made the mistake in any case; they’re usually up on living off the land. Also, it’s a little too neat that the dishes were all washed up and put away, right? Even if he wasn’t hungry, it seems awful convenient that his convulsions did not preclude doing the dishes. I think that someone poisoned him and was trying to clean up any extraneous evidence.”

  “Any idea of the time of death?” the sheriff wanted to know. I just sat there speechless, torn between my admiration for the way in which these clues were pursued and revulsion at Dr. Moretti’s obvious enjoyment of her work.

  “Well, as it so happens, this time, yes,” the ME said. “Glycosides like the one found in Convallaria act pretty quick, depending on the dose, and the physical condition of the victim, etcetera, etcetera. So based on the blood chemicals, rigor, lack of significant infestation, sanguinary drainage”—she caressed the words, made them sound like blank verse—“I guess that this one deceased late Sunday evening, early Monday morning.”

  I watched Stannard mull this over; my own mind raced to see how this might be tied in with Pauline’s death. “Do you have any idea when Pauline died?” I cleared my throat. “Before you said it was the smoke that did it.”

  After another silent exchange between the sheriff and the medical examiner, Stannard answered.

  “This is what we’ve got so far. Pauline Westlake got home late on Friday afternoon, stopping by the garage because the car was making a knocking noise; I checked it out with Mike at the Texaco, he gave her a lift home, say about four-thirty or so. It was raining st
ill—that didn’t let up until late Sunday.”

  He tapped his pen against his teeth. “I’m no expert, but like I said, it doesn’t seem like a faulty wire would be hot enough or fast enough to get that blaze going; I’m still waiting for a final report from the state Fire Marshal’s Office. The Point’s volunteer firefighters got the call about the fire from a neighbor early Monday morning.”

  I finally dared to engage Dr. Moretti one on one. “I didn’t think it could be an accident on Pauline’s part.” I took another deep breath. “What was the real cause of her death?”

  This time the medical examiner seemed to notice me as a person. It was her turn to cross her arms over her narrow chest, and she looked me up and down. I held my breath the whole time. An idea must have caught her in mid-chew for she scraped her gum off the roof of her mouth slowly, stretching it over her pointy little tongue contemplatively before she sucked it back in and snapped it loudly. She exchanged a look with the sheriff, who shrugged then nodded.

  “When I examined the deceased, I found that there was a fractured skull. The break was very recent and, contrary to our supposition based on the location of the deceased in the kitchen, it wasn’t made by anything sharp like a corner of a table. I haven’t really pinpointed the exact time of death, but I’m going out on a limb and saying that she died close to the time the fire was set. Call it a hunch.” The gum was being worked quickly now, in synch with her reasoning process. “It wasn’t the butcher block, but it is possible she mighta slipped and hit her head on the tub, got up, and then wandered into the kitchen, and then fallen. Ayuh, head wounds, concussions, are tricky things, you know. Makes it hard to tell.”

  “Well, was it the tub?” I was starting to get impatient with the old ghoul’s games myself.

  “No.” Dr. Moretti looked me over appraisingly. “The skull was crushed by something with a broader surface than that,” she said slowly. “It was a blow to the frontal lobe with an instrument of broad facies. Something wide, maybe with an edge.”

  “The side of an ax head,” the sheriff offered. I got the impression that he was used to this game of twenty questions. I thought of Dr. Moretti leaving a trail of clues like bread crumbs, and that brought to mind Hansel and Gretel and their short-term landlady. More witches to compare with Dr. Theresa Moretti.

  “Look, please tell me what you know,” I begged. “Pauline was my friend, I have to know.”

  The medical examiner considered. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that, lady.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “Terry—” Stannard was trying to step in now, but it was too late. The genie was out of the bottle.

  “My best guess, and my guesses are pretty damned good, for your information, is that her head was crushed with a shovel. Boys in blue over here claim they found signs of a struggle outside and that wound had to be made up close.” She snapped her gum loudly again. “Maybe by someone she knew well enough to approach. And there were an awful lot of people running around the Point with shovels lately, weren’t there?”

  For a moment I couldn’t believe what she was suggesting. “You can’t be serious! You don’t know what you are talking about, my crew would never—and neither would I! There’s not one of them I wouldn’t vouch for!”

  “Oh, yeah, the momma fox swearing her babies wouldn’t go near the henhouse,” she answered sarcastically. “And just who are you to be vouching for anyone?” She flipped through her report and then stared at me, gum temporarily silenced. “Wasn’t the first thing out of your mouth, ‘Oh my God, Pauline’? Right off? How could you have known it was her?”

  I looked at Stannard, who said nothing. My mouth opened and shut several times of its own accord. “I just…I just knew. It was just a feeling. I wish to hell I’d been wrong.”

  The sheriff cleared his throat. “Dr. Moretti, I think it’s time for you to leave. This isn’t really your part of the investigation.”

  “And all I’m saying is that I’m always reading how these archaeologists always got their noses into weird things, old things.” She turned from me to the sheriff. “It’s unnatural what they do, digging up old garbage, poking around other people’s business.”

  I could only gape, but Stannard just shrugged. “Not so different from what you and I do, Terry,” he said carefully, “and let’s not forget the small matter of evidence, all right?”

  The medical examiner backed reluctantly toward the door. “I’m telling you, they’re all loopy, probably repressed as hell, hunched over their bits of things.” She didn’t even notice me in the room anymore; I had been downgraded from sparring partner to hypothesis.

  “Out.”

  “I’m going, I’m going.” She reached for the door handle. “Jeez, try to do someone a favor…” She took her gum out and threw it at the sheriff’s wastebasket. It bounced off the edge and onto the floor, and she made no move to recover it.

  “Good-bye, Doctor.”

  I watched as she scuttled, crablike, from the room, jamming that cigarette she had stashed behind her ear into her mouth before the door shut behind her. The sheriff went over and closed the door after her, then with a piece of paper, picked up the gum and deposited it in the trash.

  “She’s the one who examined Pauline?” I couldn’t help asking.

  The sheriff smothered a sigh. “Dr. Moretti is more than competent in the lab. I wouldn’t have her if she wasn’t. But…you could say her people skills aren’t all we’d like.”

  Someone knocked at the door, and the gawky deputy I’d seen before stuck his head through.

  “Sheriff Stannard—?”

  “Yeah, Den?”

  “Time.”

  Stannard looked at his watch, and his shoulders drooped slightly. “I’ve got another appointment I’m already late for. Can we get together tomorrow, say, after the memorial service?”

  I was stunned. “Memorial service?”

  “You didn’t know? Tomorrow, ten A.M., at St. Jude’s.”

  “This is the first I’ve heard anything about it. Who—?”

  “The sister, Claudette Peirce. She’s made all the arrangements. Everyone else in town seems to know.” He frowned. “I’m surprised she didn’t tell you.” He looked at his watch again. “I’ve really got to run.”

  “Fine, I’ll see you tomorrow.” I nodded vigorously, and for a moment wondered if I could stop nodding. “After the service.”

  I walked out, bowed over by the onslaught of unwelcome information. Several things were clear to me. Even if the sheriff wasn’t coming right out and saying it, he didn’t actually believe I’d had anything to do with it. Just as clear was the fact that, for whatever reason, others weren’t so convinced. I also couldn’t believe that I’d found out about Pauline’s memorial service by chance—everyone in town knew about our relationship. I shook my head, trying to clear it. Once Brian got here, he’d help me make sense of all that was happening.

  Chapter 11

  BRIAN DIDN’T MAKE IT.

  He called me from Pittsburgh early Thursday morning, frantic with worry, because against all his good efforts to extricate himself from work, he’d been foiled at the last moment by mechanical failure and the inconveniences of airline schedules. He said that he’d be in late that night and apologized profusely. There was no help for it, but it was just the bad start to an awful day.

  Reverend Dyson made a point of introducing himself to me before the service. Even though we’d never met, he couldn’t have missed me, not with the graduate students crowded around me in the parking lot, and not with the way that almost everyone else clustered in a large group on the other side of the lot. And although he politely made no reference to my many visits to Sheriff Stannard’s office, it was clear that his consideration was specifically because so many others were convinced that I was in some way connected with Pauline’s death. News traveled quickly, rumor even quicker than that, in a community the size of Penitence Point, and even though I knew what I knew about human behavior from years of
study, I still wasn’t quite prepared that so many acquaintances were willing to equate smoke with fire.

  The reverend was a stout man with a cherubic face and kind eyes that even his present sober countenance couldn’t altogether extinguish. I suspected his wife spent most of her time chasing him around, trying to tame his tufts of wavy salt and pepper hair into respectable repose.

  “I’m glad that you came, I knew what good friends the two of you were. I know that Miss Westlake didn’t like fuss of any kind, but I couldn’t let the occasion of her passing go entirely unnoticed, especially with the circumstances surrounding her death.” He coughed delicately. “Better to have a little closure now, and have a quiet burial once the matter is settled.”

  I noticed that he didn’t seem worried about closure in Tichnor’s case. No one seemed to miss him at all.

  The weather had clouded over again and was almost unbearably humid. The skies threatened to open up at any moment. Following the students, I slipped into the end of one of the pews about halfway down the aisle, for once thankful for pantyhose: I always hated when the backs of my legs pulled on the edge of the waxed bench during summer services.

  I found myself falling heedlessly into the rituals of the service, and I was surprised to find that it calmed me. I don’t believe and haven’t spent any regular time in any church since I stopped going precisely twelve years ago, but the rhythms of checking the hymns and pulling out the kneeler, the hushed voices and the creak of the pews were comforting to a startling degree. Although I had been taught that rituals are a solace, I didn’t realize that that rule applied to me too, and I was grateful for it.

  I risked a quick glance at the altar and was pleased to see there were no carnations, a flower I loathe and will always associate with orchestrated emotion—instant nostalgia for St. Patrick’s Day or the school colors for enforced loyalty at a pep rally. But someone in the ladies’ guild, with good taste or good luck, had chosen wildflowers, something I liked and of which Pauline would have approved for simplicity. In the vestibule were tributes from others, including one rather splendid bouquet from Tony Markham. Apparently he’d heard from Rick Crabtree, who’d heard from Alan, but aside from a note from my friend Jenny Alvarez, there was nothing else from the department.