Dust to Dust

by Beverly Connor

  “Jonas is pretty tough,” said David. “You know that.”

  “In academics,” said Diane.

  “In city council meetings. Hell, you know they are all scared of him.”

  Diane laughed. “You’re right. All this is just speculation anyway. I have no idea whom she was planning to have dinner with.”

  “Speaking of food, maybe we can have some breakfast after this,” David said.

  “Good idea—Waffle House?”

  Neva was nodding. She loved their pecan waffles.

  Diane called the hospital to check on the condition of Marcella Payden. She got only the words “critical but stable” from them because she was not on the list of people authorized to receive information about the patient. But that didn’t matter. Diane was just looking for the word alive, and she got that.

  Diane went up the stairs to look over the rest of the house. The first room she entered was the bedroom. It was a simple bedroom with a double bed made from cherry wood and covered with a plain tan chenille bedspread. A dresser stood on one wall. It held a comb, brush, perfume, and lotion. A chest of drawers opposite the bed had a large-screen TV on top. A stuffed chair sat by the window with a floor lamp beside it. Marcella’s nightstand had a picture of a young family. She had a married daughter. Diane guessed it was a picture of the daughter and her family.

  The bedroom was neat and uncluttered. The adjacent room was a different matter. It was a study in clutter. Long library tables flanked by bookcases lined three of the walls. Additional bookcases stood on each side of the door. All were overflowing with books, journals, and papers. More books were stacked on the floor, in corners, and on chairs.

  On the table to her left sat a computer, printer, and scanner—probably the one David installed. Scattered across the table near the computer were printouts of potsherds she had scanned, many annotated in her own handwriting.

  The wall above the table and every available wall space were covered in an amazing collection of maps: satellite maps of canyons, deserts, and terrains with oxbow rivers, topographical maps, road maps, and maps of archaeological sites showing postholes and other ground features. Many of the maps had numerous red dots scattered across them in clusters. After a moment Diane realized each dot probably represented a location where a potsherd had been found. As in crime scene investigation, the location of items reveals much.

  The table on the opposite wall had several reconstructed pots and boxes of sherds. One box looked as if it might be part of the reference collection Marcella was creating for the museum. At one end of the table, relatively clear of clutter, were a microscope and a box of slides.

  But the star of the room was on the center table. In a box of sand stood a face being reconstructed from broken pieces of ceramic pottery. Diane walked over to it. The piece appeared ancient to her eyes. It had the look of tempered American Indian ceramic. Its dark tan surface was sprinkled with white inclusions of the tempering material. But Diane had never seen any Indian artifact like this—a mask, not stylized, but with refined, realistic features. It was quite beautiful.

  It was a reconstruction in progress, a broken three-dimensional puzzle being reassembled. The sand allowed the pieces to stand on edge as Marcella worked with them. Several sherds lay on the table waiting to find their place in the emerging form. So far almost half the face had been reconstructed—most of the chin, the nose, one cheek, an eye, half a forehead. In the sand behind the larger piece was a smaller reconstruction. It looked as if it was going to be the ear and the other cheek. Several sherds were glued together in clusters but still lacked the links that connected them to the main piece.

  Beside the box of sand were drawings of the face. One was an extrapolation of the finished work. Diane wondered where the mask was from. She was lost in thought when Marcella’s phone rang.

  It startled her for a moment—a phone ringing in a house whose owner was gone. Diane walked over to the computer table and answered it with a simple “Hello.”

  “Who is this, please?” It was a female voice, possibly young. Sometimes it was hard to tell. The accent seemed Midwestern, but Diane wasn’t good with accents.

  “Whom are you trying to reach?” Diane asked.

  “Someone in my mother’s house . . . I mean, are you a detective? I’m Paloma Tsosie. Marcella Payden is my mother.”

  “Mrs. Tsosie,” said Diane, “I’m very sorry about what happened to your mother. I’m Diane Fallon. I’m with the police looking over the house.” Diane didn’t like to say “crime scene” to relatives. It was too harsh, too scary.

  “Are you one of the crime scene people?” Marcella’s daughter asked.

  “Yes.”

  Paloma Tsosie paused a moment. “That’s a coincidence,” she said almost absently. “Mother does contract work for a museum director named Dr. Diane Fallon.”

  “Same person,” said Diane. “I have several jobs.”

  “How odd,” she said.

  “It is, a little. How can I help you?” asked Diane.

  “My husband and I are flying out to Georgia. We’re in Arizona now.” She paused. “We would like to stay at the house. Is that possible?”

  Diane thought of the blood on the floor. Marcella’s daughter couldn’t see that.

  “We have a lot of fingerprint powder, equipment, and lights all over the house,” said Diane. “But I think I can have it cleaned up for you by this evening. I’ll have to ask the lead detective, of course.” Then, as an afterthought, she added, “The museum can put you up in a hotel in Rosewood. It would be closer to the hospital.”

  “Oh, that would be very kind. Thank you,” said Paloma, clearly liking the idea.

  “Do you have someone to pick you up at the airport?” asked Diane.

  “Jonas Briggs. He’s a family friend. He’s going to meet us,” she said.

  “Fine. I’ll let him know your hotel,” said Diane.

  “This is very kind of you,” she said.

  “I wish you were visiting under better circumstances,” Diane said. She paused a moment. “I’m in your mother’s workroom. She has a lot of work in progress and the house just had a break-in,” said Diane.

  “A break-in? You mean after Mother was attacked? No.”

  “Yes, several hours after. I don’t know what they took. But they didn’t get her computer equipment. I was wondering if you would allow me to take her work and her computer to her office at the museum?”

  “That would be good. Mother’s work is really important to her, and I know she has a lot of it on the computer. She does all kinds of three-dimensional scans of her pottery sherds. She would want it kept safe.”

  “Good. I’ll give you an inventory of what we take,” she said.

  “She just bought a big-screen TV that she loves. Did they get it?” asked Paloma.

  “No. It’s in her bedroom,” said Diane.

  “That’s a relief. Could you take that to her office as well?” she asked.

  “Certainly,” said Diane. “I’ll see if the police will keep an eye on the house too.”

  “Thank you—for everything,” said Paloma.

  Diane stood for a moment after the call and looked at the computer equipment, then at the television in the bedroom. None of this was taken. Did they not have time? They seemed to have cleaned out only a hutch and an old desk in the living room. That was odd.

  “Diane,” called Neva from the lower floor, “can you come down here? I’ve found something strange.”

  Chapter 6

  Downstairs in Marcella’s living room Neva was standing over the desk with a magnifying glass in her hand. She had removed the middle drawer and set it upside down on the top of the desk.

  “What you got?” asked Diane.

  “I’m not sure,” said Neva. “The drawer doesn’t have a handle or knob, so I thought there might be prints under the bottom rim where you have to grab to pull the drawer out, and, well, what I found is just really weird. I don’t think it’s important—I mea
n, it’s old. It looks old. It’s just really strange.”

  Diane looked down at the desk to see what had Neva all tongue-tied. The back of the desk drawer was raw unvarnished wood discolored with age. Nothing noteworthy about it except there was small handwriting in one of the corners.

  Neva gave her the magnifying glass and Diane moved the desk lamp to view the writing. It was in a small, clear hand, a combination of cursive and printing, composed into simple declarative sentences and phrases. It was odd, poignant, and a little chilling.

  They want to make me disappear. I don’t know what to do. There is no one I can trust, no one to call for help. If I disappear, they have taken me. To where, I don’t know. I’m afraid. Please look for me if I disappear. Please. MAG

  “Well,” said Diane, straightening up. “What do you make of that?”

  “I have no idea,” said Neva. “Is it a joke? Is it Marcella’s handwriting?”

  “No,” said Diane. “I’ve seen hers, and it’s nothing like this.”

  “Then what? Where did the desk come from, I wonder? Did she buy it in some antiques shop, get it at Goodwill, a family heirloom?” asked Neva.

  “That’s something we can ask when we can talk with Marcella,” said Diane.

  “I wonder how old the message is?” said Neva. “Is someone in trouble? I suppose if they are, it’s too late to help them now. It looks to me like it was written a long time ago.”

  “It does to me too, but we’ll let David take a look at it. I’ll get Korey to have a look too.”

  Korey Jordan was Diane’s head conservator at the museum. She frequently called upon him for various jobs where his expertise would be useful.

  “Questioned Documents might have some insight,” said Neva. “Couldn’t they?”

  “Yes,” said Diane, “but I doubt this has anything to do with what happened to Marcella. It looks too old—a kid may have done this years ago as some kind of play. We can’t devote many resources to it.”

  “I know, but, well, it’s spooky,” said Neva.

  “It is. How about the other drawers?” she asked. “Anything on them?”

  Neva shook her head. “I don’t know yet. I’ll let you know.”

  “You might want to look at the back of the desk too,” said Diane. “Maybe something is written there. People often tape notes on the back of furniture.”

  “I will. Maybe Jonas knows were the desk came from. It’s kind of shabby compared to the rest of her furniture. Maybe it is some childhood piece she’s never been able to part with—you know, fond memories. But that message is not quite the stuff fond memories are made of,” observed Neva.

  “Could’ve just been a game,” said Diane. “I used to stuff secret spy messages in my dolls that some people might have found creepy if they read them.”

  “I heard about that,” said Neva, smiling.

  Diane smiled back at her. “Marcella’s daughter called. Her name’s Paloma Tsosie. She’s coming in from Arizona. She may know something about the desk.”

  “Tsosie?” said Neva. “I’ve never heard of that name before. What is it, do you think?”

  “I’m not sure. There’s a picture of her and her family upstairs. Her husband looks American Indian. Could be a Navajo or Zuni name, maybe. Anyway, I’m going to put them up in a hotel, but she’s going to want to see the house. I’d like there not to be a bloodstain on the floor. Call the cleaners when you finish.”

  “Sure,” said Neva.

  “Mrs. Tsosie is allowing me to take Marcella’s work to her museum office, so I’m going to pack it up. Do we have boxes in the van or do I need to go get some?”

  “We have a few in the van. They need to be put together,” said Neva.

  “I’ll pack up her work . . . ,” began Diane.

  “Not her whole office?” exclaimed Neva. She had seen the overflowing shelves.

  “No. Just her computer and the pottery she was working on. I don’t think I could tackle all those books.”

  Diane left Neva with the enigmatic desk and went out to the van to find the packing boxes and foam peanuts they kept for occasions when they needed to transport fragile objects. She carried them up to Marcella’s workroom and surveyed the task. Even without packing all the books and journals, the job looked daunting.

  A little searching in the office revealed more boxes of various sizes stored under the tables. She located a linen closet outside the bathroom and took several pillowcases and towels.

  Diane carefully packed many of the loose sherds in the various smaller boxes and labeled them. There were seven whole pots, some reconstructed from sherds and some never broken. She wrapped them in towels and packed each in a separate box.

  She gathered only the paperwork on the tables, ignoring all the papers stuffed in the bookcases, and packed it in a single box. She started to leave the microscope because it would be more easily replaced, but it was small, so she packed it and the slides amid a cushion of towels.

  Then there was the mask. It would be harder to pack. She experimented first by gently testing to see if the pieces were glued fast. They were. Diane wrapped the larger reconstructed piece in a pillowcase and packed it in the middle of the peanuts. She did the same to the smaller section of glued-together sherds.

  The single sherds, presumably more pieces to the puzzle yet to be fitted together, lay on the table next to the mask. They presented a bit of a challenge because she thought she might need to keep the integrity of their position in respect to one another. When she began to pick them up, she discovered that each one was outlined on the paper underneath. She put the paper with the pottery pieces in place in a box and filled the box with folded towels over the sherds. There were four boxes she had to pack this way to accommodate all the single sherds in this set. It was in one of the transfers that she noticed another page under the paper holding the sherds. It contained drawings Marcella had made of the mask. From the drawings it appeared not to be a mask at all, but the front of a pitcher of some kind. An odd pitcher. Water, or whatever liquid it might have held, would have been poured out through the eyes. Not practical. It must have been simply an art piece, or as archaeologists often categorized puzzling things, a vessel meant for religious ritual. Interesting. Diane had never seen anything like it.

  She was taping the last box closed when David and Izzy came in. David Goldstein was a good friend of Diane’s. She had known and worked with him for many years and they shared a common tragedy. While they were working as human rights investigators in South America, many of their friends were massacred. It had made her and David close. Other than Frank, the man Diane lived with, David was the man she trusted most. He was in his forties, balding except for a fringe of dark hair around his head. He had dark eyes and an interesting, paranoid view of the world.

  Izzy Wallace had been a policeman on the Rosewood police force and a good friend of Frank’s. He hadn’t liked Diane much at first, but with the unexpected death of his son came a change in his priorities. Observing how Diane and her team collected evidence that actually put criminals behind bars, he decided he wanted to join their team. Neva said he was learning forensics very quickly. Diane noticed he did seem, if not happier, more involved and satisfied with life.

  “What are you doing?” David asked.

  “I’m taking Marcella Payden’s work to her office in the museum. David, I need you to pack up her computer equipment. And, Izzy, would you mind figuring out a way to pack up her television?”

  “Her TV?” said Izzy. “You’re taking her TV? Can you do that?”

  “Sure,” said David. “Diane’s powers would let her come into your house and take things away if she wished. Besides, the crime lab could use a large-screen, high-definition television.”

  “Seriously,” said Izzy, frowning at David.

  “I spoke with her daughter,” said Diane. “She asked that we take Marcella’s work, her computer, and the TV to her office in the museum for safekeeping because of the break-in.”

 
; “Just checking,” said Izzy.

  “What have you found?” Diane asked them, making a fruitless effort to dust off particles of Styrofoam peanuts that clung to her clothes.

  “I found several bullet casings,” said David. “The road in back of the house is paved, even though it’s a pretty old road—no tire marks. I did trace their getaway through the woods and collected some fiber evidence. That’s about it. One odd thing. I found two broken pottery sherds on the road. Looked kind of archaeological. I collected them. I don’t know if they’re connected to our suspects, but since Marcella is an archaeologist . . .” He shrugged. “Who knows?”

  Diane raised her eyebrows. “I wonder if they were looking for Indian artifacts? If they were, I don’t think they made it to this room.”

  David shrugged again. “Maybe that was what they were after, but . . . I don’t know. It doesn’t feel right. That many guys for some Indian pottery? Is it that valuable?”

  “I don’t know either,” said Diane. “Some is, I think. But you’re right. It doesn’t feel quite right. What about you, Izzy? Find anything?”

  “I took a couple of casts of shoe prints outside in the dirt. Like David, I found fibers where they rolled around on the ground. I found lots of sequins.” He grinned. “You must have rolled all the way down to the bottom of the bank.”

  Diane smiled. “I did. Good work. What’s your sense of what’s going on?” she asked Izzy. “Do you think the attack on Marcella and the break-in early this morning are two separate events or part of the same crime?”

  “I don’t know,” said Izzy. “Like David said, it feels strange, but hell, guys will break in to steal just about anything these days. I’m thinking they would’ve been interested in the electronics up here. But maybe they didn’t get this far. I’m with you on the problem of how they knew the house would be empty—maybe they didn’t care. Maybe they knew that just one little old lady lived here. Maybe they saw activity here earlier and her being carried away.” Izzy shrugged. “There’s also the problem of there being no sign of forced entry. Did she leave her doors unlocked? Did she let the attacker in and he left without locking the door behind him? I know some people leave their doors unlocked, but usually not older women living alone away from neighbors, like this house is.”