“You can’t prove anything,” said Marina.
“This is the same caliber gun that killed the woman hiker,” said the sheriff. “What’re you willing to bet the bullet that killed her matches this gun?”
“Damn you, Marina,” said Barrel.
“Don’t say anything. That’s what the Miranda warning is about. What you say can be used against you. Just pretend you have lockjaw. They have to have proof beyond reasonable doubt, or they can’t even go to court.”
“Little lady, you’re dreaming if you think I don’t have enough to take you to court. Miss Tidwell didn’t die of natural causes, for starters.”
“You can’t connect me with that.” Marina looked defiantly at the sheriff.
“We can connect you with Dr. Chamberlain’s attack, for another thing.”
“How?”
“The photograph of you and Mike, the one you changed to put Dr. Chamberlain’s face on your body to fool her into leaving the hospital with Mike.”
Lindsay could see the faces of the crew wide-eyed with disbelief.
“You just have her word that there was such a picture, and I understand she has no memory of the time she had amnesia.”
“You’re wrong there, missy,” said the sheriff. “We have Mary Carp’s testimony. The sheriff in Mac’s Crossing convinced her to tell the truth. Besides that, every FBI agent on Dr. Chamberlain’s mailing list has a copy of the pictures, along with the UGA faculty, I understand.”
Marina opened her mouth and shut it. “You’re lying,” she whispered.
“She told me in the woods she emailed it. I didn’t believe her. You should have destroyed the thing,” said Mike. “Sheriff, I’m really hurting. I need to go to the hospital.”
“Mike, will you and Barrel please keep your mouths shut? Anybody could have doctored those pictures.”
“Which leads us to you,” said the sheriff. “Let’s leave off for the moment that we have Lindsay’s testimony against all of you.” The sheriff placed the bagged contents from Mike’s jacket pocket on the table. He picked up the baggie containing the coin. “This is Miss Tidwell’s.”
“You can’t prove it.”
“Is that some kind of—what you call it—a mantra?” said the sheriff. “You can’t prove it? You think saying it over and over’ll make it true? I damn well can prove it.” He put a piece of paper on the table. “This here’s a rubbing Mrs. Laurens did of Miss Tidwell’s coin in 1952 or thereabouts. I believe it’s the same coin.”
“I don’t believe you . . . Is that proof?”
“Damn near it.” The sheriff picked up the bagged tooth and handed it to Lindsay. “Why don’t you tell him about this?”
“You like gold, don’t you, Mike?” she said. “This “is a temporary cap for a molar. It’s gold. Not particularly valuable, but gold nonetheless. I’ll bet when you hit the hiker in the back of the head, you saw it pop out of his mouth and just couldn’t help yourself. He had a temporary cap put on just before he went hiking. Nigel discovered the cap missing and used dental records of some missing persons to identify the body.”
“That’s my cap. You can’t prove it’s not.”
“Mikey, Mikey, Mikey,” said the sheriff. “The woman is a forensic anthropologist. Listen to her.”
“When a dentist makes a temporary cap for a person, he makes it fit the tooth like a glove. This cap will only fit the person for whom the dentist made it, no one else. It’s like a fingerprint. When Nigel puts this cap on the hiker’s tooth, he’s going to know it’s his cap, without a doubt. And the jury’s going to know the sheriff found it in your pocket.”
Mike’s frown looked comical with his swollen nose and black eyes.
“We’re getting close, aren’t we?” The sheriff leaned forward with his hand on the table. “Barrel, we going to be able to match that gun to the bullet in that woman hiker? I’ll have to tell you, son, we already matched the bullet that came out of the hiker with the bullet that came out of Claire Burke.” Barrel put his head down and mumbled something. “That’s okay, boy. We can wait for the results.”
“You don’t have anything on me,” said Marina. “Just because that photograph is of me doesn’t mean I altered it.”
“No, you’re right about that. It doesn’t. However, we have these boys’ testimony. We got them, and they’re going to be looking for a deal. Chances are, they aren’t going to be that loyal to you. Put their testimony with the photograph, and all the little circumstantial evidence that keeps adding up. With Dr. Chamberlain’s testimony to boot, I know the D.A. and he’s going to be as happy with this case as he can be.”
“It’s not proof.”
“Miss,” said the sheriff, “we have enough proof to send you away. You can be as stubborn as you like, but your partners in crime are going to turn on you. Drew and her husband have already taken steps to distance themselves from this whole mess and lay the blame on you. They’ve sent Miss Tidwell’s documents back with a letter saying when they bought them from you, they didn’t know they were stolen, that you told them they had been obtained legally.”
That got Marina’s attention. “Drew, she killed Miss Tidwell, and her husband told her to do it. I heard him. I saw her crush the poison leaves and make the tea and put it in the Thermos to give to her. I’ll testify to that.”
* * *
The sheriff had been gone with his prisoners for about thirty minutes when the phone rang. Lindsay was in the living room, looking at Elaine McBride’s photo album of the cabin. She picked up the phone.
“Lindsay, it’s John. Lewis and I got tied up and are running late. I didn’t want you to worry.”
“I’m not worried at all.”
“Everything okay there?”
“Sure. Everything’s fine.”
“We’ll be there in less than an hour.”
“No problem.”
“Stay in the house and don’t do anything dangerous.”
“I won’t. I’ll stay right here on the couch. See you in a while.” She hung up the phone and went back to the album. “Adam,” she called into the dining room. “I have an idea.”
* * *
It took a little bit to get Lewis to do it, especially without telling him why. But Adam had agreed, so Lewis signed off on excavating the well. This was not normal excavation procedure, and she and Adam gave it much discussion, pro and con, before deciding to do it. They excavated down to ten feet, a layer at a time, photographing a profile and sifting the dirt. At the ten-foot level, Lewis was growing uneasy.
“I think that’s as deep as we should go,” he said.
“Give me the rod,” Powell called up from the bottom.
He was handed down a four-foot steel rod with a handle at the top that is used to probe beneath the surface of soil.
“No more than that,” said Lewis, squatting beside the hole.
John had agreed to stay and help with the safety of digging a deep hole. Lindsay actually thought they would have to go deeper. He looked at her quizzically and stroked her bruised face, just as Powell said he had found something.
In less than an hour, Powell uncovered part of a tiny coffin.
“What?” said Lewis. “Another one? How did you know?”
“The loft poems,” said Lindsay. “I looked at the photograph of the floor scratchings again and decided that the one that said, ‘Not my sin, the hell he’s in’ actually read, ‘Not my sin, the well he’s in.’ That particular poem was printed, and the capital W looks like a capital H. I think that Sheldon Warfield was given the impression, just before the baby was to be buried beside his son, that it was not his son’s baby, but the surveyor’s. In his anger, Warfield had it thrown, coffin and all, down the well. Another thing that Faith hadn’t meant to happen and felt guilty about.”
“But there had to be something else to make you think it was there,” said Lewis.
“The Gallowses’ bad luck. Their infant mortality, the baby who lived for a while only to die when he came
back home, the miscarriages, Mr. Gallows’s gout, both their heart conditions, Rosellen’s hallucinations and paranoia—they are all symptoms of lead poisoning. Rosellen didn’t kill her babies, she had a poisoned well.”
About the Author
Beverly Connor is the author of the Diane Fallon Forensic Investigation series, the Lindsay Chamberlain archaeology mystery series, and co-authors the Frank Hayes Mystery series (Murder In Macon, 2013) with her husband Charles. She holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in archaeology, anthropology, sociology, and geology. Before she began her writing career, Beverly worked as an archaeologist in the southeastern United States, specializing in bone identification and analysis of stone tool debitage. Originally from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, she weaves her professional experiences from archaeology and her knowledge of the South into interlinked stories of the past and present. Beverly’s books have been translated into German, Dutch, and Czech and are available in standard and large print in the UK, and in ebook format worldwide. Please visit her at beverlyconnor.net
Bibliography
Archaeology
Barber, Russell J. Doing Historical Archaeology: Exercises Using Documentary, Oral, and Material Evidence. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994. Print.
Deetz, James. In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life. New York : Toronto: Anchor /Doubleday ; Random House, 1996. Print.
Groover, Mark D. The Archaeology of North American Farmsteads. Gainesville: University of Florida, 2008. Print.
Orser, Charles E., and Brian Fagan M. Historical Archaeology. New York: HarperCollins College, 1995. Print.
Schiffer, Michael Brian. Archaeological Method and Theory. Tucson: University of Arizona, 1992. Print.
Schiffer, Michael B., Kacy Hollenback L., James Skibo M., and William Walker H. Behavioral Archaeology: Principles and Practice. London: Equinox Pub., 2010. Print.
Schiffer, Michael Brian. Formation Processes of the Archaeological Record. Salt Lake City: University of Utah, 1996. Print.
South, Stanley A. Method and Theory in Historical Archeology. New York: Academic, 1977. Print.
South, Stanley A. Research Strategies in Historical Archeology. New York: Academic, 1977. Print.
Cades Cove
Dunn, Durwood. The Life and Death of a Southern Appalachian Community, 1818-1937. Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1989. Print.
Cades Cove — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cades Cove
Forgery
Nickell, Joe. Detecting Forgery: Forensic Investigation of Documents. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky, 1996. Print.
Rendell, Kenneth W. Forging History: The Detection of Fake Letters & Documents. Norman: University of Oklahoma, 1994. Print.
Lead Coffin Project - Extracting Antique Air
Historic St. MaryS Lead Coffin Project — https://www.stmaryscity.org/Lead%20Coffins/project_lead_coffins.htm
Extracting ancient air samples from ablating glacial ice — http://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/xmlui/handle/1957/27344
Log Cabins of the Smokies
Log Cabins of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Belcher, KY: Belcher Foundation, 2005. Print.
Log Cabins: History —
http://architecture.about.com/od/periodsstyles/a/logcabins.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_cabin
Smoky Mountains
Cotham, Steve. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Pub., 2006. Print.
Smoky Mountains: Park Service — http://www.nps.gov/grsm/index.htm
National Park Service: Smoky Mountain Archaeology — http://www.nps.gov/grsm/naturescience/dff609-archeology.htm
Smoky Mountains: Wikipedia — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Smoky_Mountains
Alexis de Tocqueville
Tocqueville, Alexis De, Gerald Bevan E., and Isaac Kramnick. Democracy in America. London: Penguin, 2003. Print.
Table of Contents
Copyright
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Book Reviews
Books by Beverly Connor
Acknowledgments
Gallows Farmstead Site
Gallows House
Dedication
PART I APRIL 2
Chapter 1: A Stranger In The Mirror
Chapter 2: Make A Pretty Face
Chapter 3: Footsteps Of A Man
Chapter 4: Moon Pies And Dr Pepper
Chapter 5: The Black Stallion
PART II JULY 5
Chapter 6: That Bitch Stole My Truck
Chapter 7: An Air Of Unease
Chapter 8: The Repo Man
Chapter 9: Drew Van Horne
Chapter 10: A Dinner Of Strained Nerves
Chapter 11: A Ghost Of A Girl
Chapter 12: Something In The Trench
Chapter 13: NASA And Old Air
Chapter 14: Lovely, Dark And Deep
Chapter 15: At The Sheriff’s Office
Chapter 16: Eda Mae Gone All Day
Chapter 17: Calling Dr. Boyd
Chapter 18: Tighty Whiteys
Chapter 19: A Little Poe
Chapter 20: Pig Teeth
Chapter 21: Witches And Old Letters
Chapter 22: Lewis’ History Lesson
Chapter 23: You Digging Up Bodies?
Chapter 24: A Fire And A Warning
Chapter 25: Elder Timon Moore
Chapter 26: Two Ghosts
Chapter 27: The Cat’s Meow
Chapter 28: Buried With The Trash
Chapter 29: Planting Pennies
Chapter 30: A Flat Tire
Chapter 31: The Grave Digger
Chapter 32: Is It Human?
Chapter 33: Cherry Belle
Chapter 34: The Guy Likes Gold
Chapter 35: Argon Is Good
Chapter 36: Shot Him Dead
Chapter 37: Alex Wrote A Letter
Chapter 38: Young Love
Chapter 39: Pieces Of Eight
Chapter 40: If Ghosts Could Talk
Chapter 41: Can’t Argue With Logic
Chapter 42: A Barrel Of Laughs
About the Author
Bibliography
Airtight Case Page 41
