One Grave Less

by Beverly Connor

  “Is that where she is? In Georgia?” asked Rosetta.

  “She’s the director of a museum in Georgia,” said Maria.

  “She said she was going to work in a museum and take me there.”

  The little girl’s voice shook. Maria thought she might cry.

  “You’ll be there in a few days,” said Maria. She reached over and squeezed her hand.

  “We need to warn Mama—in case somebody goes looking for her. I wish those men had one of those phones Julio has,” Rosetta said.

  “Our problems would be over,” agreed Maria. “Perhaps we will acquire one along the way.”

  She glanced at Rosetta. She sat on the seat with her legs straight out, the backpack between her feet. She was wearing fairly new jeans with the cuffs stuffed in equally new lace-up boots that were slightly large for her.

  “Nice clothes,” said Maria.

  “I stole them from Jopito. He’s mean to me. But he has nice clothes.” She paused for several moments. “I didn’t steal them to get even. I stole them because I needed them.”

  “I’ll get you home. I’ll get us both home.”

  “That was pretty good back there—the way you used the stick on those guys,” said Rosetta. “How’d you learn to do that?”

  “I’m a Wii champion in sword fighting,” said Maria.

  Rosetta looked over at her. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a game. You can move around pretending you are sword fighting, or playing golf, or whatever, and your movements show up in your character on a television screen. Your mother will have to get you one.”

  Maria glanced at Rosetta and saw the quiver of a smile, as if she dared entertain the thought that they would really get home.

  Maria didn’t say anything for a long while, letting Rosetta bask in the feeling of hope. Daylight was coming. She could see glimmers of light occasionally through the branches, but not a lot of it would reach through the canopy.

  “How long before they wake up—Julio and the others back at the village?” asked Maria. She didn’t quite believe that Rosetta drugged the lot of them and she was worried they would be followed. She couldn’t imagine how a little kid could manage something like that.

  “I’m not sure. I gave them a mixture of herbs I got from Uruma when I stayed with her tribe. They’ll sleep for a long time, I think. If they have worms, it will get rid of them too.”

  Maria laughed out loud and it made her throat hurt.

  “How did you get them to take the drug?” she whispered.

  “I cook the food a lot of the time. I put it in the food. It was easy,” she said. “I work hard and don’t make many mistakes. The families I worked for put me in charge of cooking and storing supplies. That gives me power.”

  Maria raised an eyebrow. Rosetta was a very practical kid.

  “Your English is very good,” she whispered.

  “Mama said I am gifted in languages. I know several languages here. I can speak for us and you can pretend you can’t say anything. That’ll be easy.”

  They rode in silence for a while. Maria concentrated on the road. Sometimes it would disappear completely and she would have to look at the compass to figure out the direction to go. Rosetta watched her closely.

  “Can you find the way?” she asked after the third stop and consultation with the compass.

  “Of course. I just look at the map and the direction we need to be going and make sure we are on track with the compass,” she said. “Good thing they had one in the glove compartment. I thought I would have to use the stars, and that meant I would have to climb one of those kapok trees.”

  “I’m lucky I found you,” the little girl said. “I kept looking for someone who could help me. Everywhere I worked, I would store some supplies together so that if I had to leave suddenly, it wouldn’t take me long to pack. I was afraid to have a stash somewhere. If they found it, they wouldn’t trust me no more.”

  “Is that what you did tonight? Collect your supplies from the people you worked for?” asked Maria.

  Rosetta nodded. “I was about to think I would never find anybody who could help me. Then they brought you and said you were a forensic anthropologist from Georgia. I thought maybe you might be my mama. You weren’t, but you could help me. Mama talked about Georgia. I thought maybe you knew her.”

  “We met a few times at conferences,” said Maria. “I don’t know her well.” But everyone knew Diane Fallon’s story. How she had lost her daughter to a massacre and nearly went crazy.

  “If I can’t find anyone I know at one of the dig sites, and we can make it to a big city, we can go to an American embassy and get help.”

  “No!” yelled Rosetta.

  Maria jumped. “What?” she croaked.

  “We can’t go to an embassy, we can’t!” She was almost in tears. “It was one of them that grabbed me away from Mama.”

  Chapter 12

  Diane stared at Frank for a long moment, stunned.

  “Entertaining men? Here? While you are gone? I guess you got me,” she said. “I’ve always hired professionals to clean up the mess so you wouldn’t know, but I forgot about nosy neighbors.” She paused a beat, studying his face. “You weren’t concerned, were you?”

  They stood close together, facing each other in front of the wood-mantled fireplace in the living room. It was a cozy room with an Oriental rug, overstuffed sofas and chairs, and oak and walnut furniture.

  He smiled, as if considering the prospect and finding it amusing. Then he frowned. “Only about the caller. The call was traced to a throwaway cell. That seems a little too deliberate for a run-of-the-mill prankster. And the phrase—‘entertaining men’—seemed off. I thought you ought to know in case you’ve attracted some kind of stalker variant.”

  “I wonder if it’s related to the phone call Martin Thormond received,” she whispered, almost to herself, looking over at the fireplace screen with the bronze tree of life design.

  “You’ve had other harassing phone calls?”

  “Not harassing.” Diane repeated what Martin’s caller had said about her dealing drugs in South America. “I called the reporter, but he’s in Peru—as in South America. Rather disturbing. I have no idea what it was about.”

  Frank narrowed his eyes. “It may be just someone’s idea of a joke,” he said, and pulled her close, holding for a moment. “But it bears watching.”

  It did indeed bear watching. Rumor and gossip are potent weapons, thought Diane. She wondered who was aiming them in her direction.

  Frank gave her a kiss on the forehead. “Let’s eat, and afterward you can tell me about your last couple of days. Scuttlebutt tells me that it was exciting.”

  It felt good to have Frank back in town. He and his partner were good at their jobs. Their success rate was so high that they consulted frequently with other computer fraud units across the country. He had been away for several days this trip. She’d missed him.

  They sat across from each other at one end of the large rectangular table in the dining room, another cozy room with its own fireplace and comfortable furniture. August was too warm for a fire, but Frank’s beautiful fireplace screens were almost as good.

  She and Frank had made a pact not to talk about work at the dinner table unless it was about an interesting museum exhibit. The food tasted better that way. So Diane picked another topic. The rituals surrounding their upcoming wedding, though to her it was just as unnerving as talk of murder. She had wanted to go to a judge for a quiet ceremony. Dress in a nice traveling suit. Nothing fussy . . . no flowers . . . no music. Few people . . . maybe just a witness.

  Vanessa, Laura, and half of Diane’s staff wouldn’t hear of it. Vanessa insisted that the ceremony take place in the Pleistocene Room of the museum. Diane refused to take part in planning a wedding, especially her own. “Fine,” Vanessa had said. “We’ll do it.” And so they were.

  Diane twined the spaghetti around her fork. “I had lunch with Vanessa and Laura today,” she said
.

  “How did that go?” asked Frank.

  “I’m a little nervous about what they’re planning for me to wear, but at least I might get a gold coronet. I can see myself coming down the aisle with a crown.”

  Frank smiled. “So fitting, too,” he said. “I haven’t seen it, but I hear Star picked out your dress.”

  Diane looked horrified. “Star? The girl with the fuchsia hair?”

  Frank adopted Star when her parents, his best friends, were murdered. At the time she was a troubled teen with hot-pink hair and an attitude to match.

  “It hasn’t been fuchsia in a long time.” Frank grinned at Diane. “Besides, since you bought her the new wardrobe in Paris, her tastes in clothing have undergone a radical change for the better.”

  “I’m glad she decided she liked school,” said Diane.

  Frank put his hand over hers. “I wasn’t making any headway trying to convince her to go to the university. If you hadn’t made your astounding offer to buy her a Paris wardrobe if she tried school out, she’d be working flipping burgers, and not in prelaw. Thank you for that.”

  “I’ve discovered that bribery often works very well,” said Diane. “Anyway, she had such strong feelings when she was wrongly accused of her parents’ murders that I think she would have eventually found her way to law school or some justice-oriented program.”

  “I’m not so sure. Doing it right now was important for her,” he said, “before bills, babies, and bad boyfriends.”

  “So this is how she repays me, going in with them to plan our wedding,” said Diane.

  Frank smiled and rubbed the top of her hand with his thumb. “Just think how much you will like it when it’s over. Besides, ceremonies are important to people.”

  It was important to Frank. She could see it in the way he acted. He was a traditional guy. He always had been. Sometimes she didn’t know what he saw in her, they were so different on many things. On the other hand, it was easy to see what she saw in him. If she had to make a list, the words intelligent , kind, rational would be at the top. She was doing the right thing by getting married. She believed that, she did, but she still felt edgy about it, like she had forgotten something. Except that she hadn’t forgotten. It was Ariel. Ariel should be here with her, but Diane had lost her and it still hurt.

  “I will make it though the ceremony,” she said.

  “I have no doubt. Everyone involved has good taste, so don’t worry,” he said, eating the last of his spaghetti. “How about coffee in the living room and you can tell me about the drama at the museum? Someone said there was a fire?”

  Diane had told him little over the phone about the break-in. Only that there was one and she would fill him in later. It was now later.

  Diane sat cross-legged on the sofa. She took several sips of the hot coffee he handed to her before she started.

  “Are you bolstering your courage,” he said, “or trying to scorch your throat so you won’t have to talk about it?”

  Frank was sitting on a stuffed chair opposite her. They had a coffee table between them.

  “Neither,” she said. “Just savoring your good coffee.” She set the hot cup down on a coaster that looked like a disk of polished wood.

  She started not to tell him why she was at the exhibit at that particular time. Saying that she was trying to get over her dread of the new exhibit would sound foolish. But she blurted it out—the way the look of the exhibit reminded her of the ancient ruin and how she had searched there in vain for Ariel.

  “I needed to be able to feel comfortable around the exhibit. It’s silly, I know.”

  “Not silly. You’ve been thinking a lot about Ariel lately, haven’t you?”

  “Yes. But it’s not thoughts of her I want to get rid of. It’s the . . .” Diane trailed off, unable to explain. She felt hot, as if the tree of life design on the fireplace were a flame. She was afraid tears would well up in her eyes.

  “I know,” he said.

  “I was sitting looking up at the facade when I heard a groan.” Diane went on to tell him the whole story of the body on the floor, the false paramedics, and the fire. “I should have been suspicious when I didn’t recognize the second security guard. But we have a couple of new hires I hadn’t yet seen in person.”

  “Don’t beat yourself up over that,” he said, sipping his coffee.

  “This went down literally under my nose,” she said. “It’s my job to protect the museum. Now one of our major exhibits has been seriously damaged. I don’t know if Mexico will still loan us the artifacts. All the advertisements are in place. It’s a disaster.”

  “Do you know what it was about, what your friend was doing there? Has she talked?” asked Frank.

  Diane was glad he hadn’t patted her head and said, ‘It’s not your fault, no one will blame you, it will all work out.’ He had gone straight into detective mode.

  The phone rang and Diane unfolded herself and scooted down the sofa to the table that held the phone. It was Jin, the director of her DNA lab.

  “Boss,” he said, “sorry to call you at home, but I thought you would want to hear the preliminary report from the analyses.”

  “Yes, Jin, I do,” she said.

  “We got good samples to analyze. The blood they tried to burn away still left some traces and we have been able to piece together what might have happened. We’re not finished, but a pretty good picture is beginning to come out of it,” he said.

  “Good. Tell me what you have.” Diane gripped the receiver tight. Frank had mainly old-fashioned landlines in his house. Great for when the electricity went off.

  “Looks like the guy was stabbed about where he lay. There was a struggle and some of the woman’s blood was in the exhibit room too. The blood leading from the exhibit room belonged to her. Right now it looks like she may have stabbed him, tried to get away through the lab room, and collapsed. David said she has a blow to her head that she may have gotten during the fight. But that didn’t take her down until later. Like I said, it’s all preliminary.”

  “That’s good, Jin. Did you do the stable isotope analysis on the bone?”

  “I was getting to that. Scott did the analysis. The ratios look like the bone came from someone who was raised in the Amazon rain forest. Does that help?”

  “It’s another piece of the puz—”

  She stopped . . . gripped the phone. . . . She couldn’t breathe.

  Oh God.

  “Boss? You there?”

  Jin’s words were faint in her ears.

  “She’ll call you back.” It was Frank talking to Jin.

  She heard the sound of the phone receiver being put back on the cradle.

  “What’s wrong?” Frank sat down beside her. “Diane, are you ill?”

  “Simone. What if Simone was bringing me . . . what if that was . . . Oh, dear God. What if it was Ariel, my little Ariel? What if that was her little bone I was cutting?”

  Tears flowed from her eyes as she bent over, choking on her grief.

  Chapter 13

  If Frank hadn’t been holding her, Diane would have fallen to the floor. All this time she had told herself, made herself believe, that Ariel had somehow gotten away during the massacre. That somehow she had hidden in the jungle she knew so well, had saved herself from the slaughter. She had wanted to believe that somewhere Ariel was alive, was well, was happy. That someday she would grow up to be old enough . . . old enough to travel, and perhaps she would make her way to America . . . to Georgia . . . back to Diane. And all that time there was also the dark fear that this moment would come.

  “If it was your Ariel,” Frank whispered in her ear, “and I’m not saying that it was—but if it was her, she was in the best, most loving hands.”

  Diane leaned against Frank for a long time. When finally she pulled away she was feeling . . . she didn’t know what to feel, or believe. She balled her hands into fists so she wouldn’t shake.

  “Why else would Simone come to see me . . . carry
ing a child’s bone? She found where Ivan Santos buried the dead from the mission. She found . . .” Diane’s lower lip trembled and she bit it to stop the quivering. “She found Ariel’s grave.”

  “What do the other things mean?” said Frank. “The feathers and the animal parts?”

  “I don’t know. Simone hasn’t been able to talk,” said Diane. She sat down on the sofa, suddenly tired. “I asked Garnett to find out how she is doing. I didn’t think the hospital would give me the information. He said she was still unconscious with a severe concussion. They don’t know if she’ll recover. On the other hand, they said she might wake up at any time. You know how those injuries are.”

  “Does her employer know what she was working on?” asked Frank.

  “I don’t know. Garnett is handling everything. Since I know her, I have to at least act like I’m steering clear of the investigation.”

  But she wasn’t going to. Except for tonight.

  She and Frank spent the rest of the evening trying to talk about the wedding, about Star, music . . . anything except his work, the museum, and Ariel.

  The morning brought no less pain than the evening before had. Diane was haunted by the thought that the little bone might belong to Ariel. Instead of cradling it, she had cut into it, thin-sectioned it, cut off a part and sent it downstairs to be crushed for analysis.

  She knew her thoughts were irrational. Frank was right—as she did with all bones, she gave it the best of care, allowing it to tell whatever story it had to tell.

  She was up earlier than Frank and she made breakfast for the two of them. It was Frank who always insisted on breakfast. Diane supposed it was a good thing. If it were only her, she’d probably sleep in and have a protein drink on the way to work. Today she and Frank had pancakes, scrambled eggs, and orange juice. A good, nourishing breakfast, but it did not sit well in her stomach.