Jane had no idea where Tim kept the registration and was about to go fishing in her bag for both her cell phone to call him and her driver’s license when the policeman stood in front of her window.
“License and registration, please,” he said, looking into the car.
“I am so sorry,” said Jane. She stopped digging in her purse for a moment and looked him in the eye. He looked to be about a year older than Nick. “I have no excuse here. I am just so hungry that all I was thinking of was a root beer and a … you know,” she said, looking up and hoping she sounded apologetic and dangerously hungry, “from the drive-through up ahead.”
“Well, Mrs. Schaefer, you’re right. That’s not such a good excuse. On your lunch hour?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Jane, wondering if answering his question without correcting his assumption about her name would compound her speeding ticket. “I am on my lunch hour.”
“My mom works at the hospital. She’s an ER nurse.”
“What’s her name?” asked Jane, wanting for some reason to prolong this conversation with such an obviously doting son. No matter that it wasn’t Jane’s doting son, and that there was no chance at all that she would know his mother.
“Phyllis Brenner.”
“I know your mom,” said Jane, her relief making her sound absolutely joyous. “She was a few years ahead of me in high school. President of the French Club her senior year,” said Jane. “I didn’t even know she worked at the hospital.” She smiled as she realized she had completed two truthful statements in a row.
“Well,” he said, sighing, “I guess you’d better go get your lunch.” He looked pleased with himself. “I’ll tell my mom I met you, Mrs.—”
“I’ll bet she’s proud of you,” Jane said, interrupting him before he could repeat that name again. Could she lay it on any thicker? If she didn’t pull away quickly, he might have to write her up a warning for excessive bullshit.
Jane read over Roger’s files in the car, eating her sandwich and drinking a giant mug of root beer. She had fished two fat manila envelopes out of the box of old papers and notebooks—one was labeled SENIORS/COPY and the other, AIRPORT/COPY. They had been at the bottom of a box that had held old notebooks and paper clips, pens, COMPLIMENTS OF K3 REALTORS calendar datebooks from five years ago. Jane hadn’t looked at the inside of the house very thoroughly, but when she did her normal house-sale scan, she noticed that the tenants were using a folding card table with a laptop on it for a desk. Niece Groveland must have sold her uncle’s desk at the estate sale, which was why its contents had been dumped into the boxes that were now just sitting open in the garage.
Jane patted her smock. Two families, two sales. Two nieces disposing of households for their relatives, but with a major difference. Suzanne Blum was falling in love with her aunt’s life and learning from her history, and Niece Groveland was all business and fast turnaround.
The envelope marked SENIORS was stuffed with photocopies of newspaper articles, membership lists of every seniors’ organization in town, lists of names from churches and groups who received Meals On Wheels, and home visits from nurses. How had Roger accumulated so much private information? Jane stopped herself from pursuing that line of thought—hadn’t she just lifted these files from a dead man’s closed-for-business garage sale?
The AIRPORT envelope had copies of newspaper articles and various proposals for sites for the new Chicago-area airport. Jane had read a few of these pieces already, the ones that carried Johnny Sullivan’s byline. A quick scan reminded her that Johnny always slanted the pieces just a bit in favor of the airport. It wasn’t that overt, but the people he quoted were usually upbeat on the proposal, and the facts and figures he cited were geared toward the economic advantages of the plan. Jane skimmed the rest of the articles and noticed that some of the documents had been printed from Internet sources. Twelve pages were stapled together, the cover sheet titled Planning for Projects Involving Historic Resources, and it detailed two Illinois laws. One, the Archaeological and Paleontological Resources Protection Act, covered the sanctions and fines imposed for disturbing burial mounds, human remains, shipwrecks, or other archaeological resources on public lands.
The second law outlined in the pages was the Human Grave Protection Act. Jane had heard Charley quote this law, chapter and verse, many times. Most recently, she had heard him talk about it to Munson. Someone—Jane presumed Roger Groveland—had underlined the words “private property” and had highlighted in yellow marker “… makes it unlawful for anyone to disturb skeletal remains, artifacts, and grave markers …”
Jane pulled out the paper that had fallen out of the box Hoover had hoisted into his trunk. GRS. It was a handwritten receipt. She put it away for the moment in favor of a newspaper article photocopied from the Chicago Tribune where the phrase “Human Skeletal Remains Protection Act” was highlighted. The story itself concerned a real estate developer in the Chicago suburbs who’d bought an old farmstead at a foreclosure sale and had planned to fix up the house that was there and build two new houses, selling them for a profit. All work was halted, however, when a construction crew began digging and found bones buried near the original house. When the bones were found to be Native American remains over one hundred years old, all work was stopped. The developer now had the burden of having an archaeological survey done, and he had to assume all cost for the research.
Jane skipped to the end of the piece and read that many such “finds” are relocated and buried. However, all construction on the original site is completely stopped while the property is researched and the artifacts are being catalogued and assessed.
“Poor guy thinks he’s getting a good deal, then ends up tying all his money up with specialists and lawyers,” Jane said aloud, reading the last paragraph of the piece. The property owner was quoted as saying, “I own all the headaches and expenses and trouble of the property, but the land itself is not really mine to build on, live on, or sell.”
The lament sounded familiar. It had been Fuzzy’s battle cry since she and Charley and Nick had arrived at the farm. All Fuzzy had wanted to do was sell some topsoil to someone who had admired his vegetable garden. Once he turned over the dirt, and someone had reported his “find”—bones that looked like they belonged to a small animal and did not look to be very old, even to an untrained eye like Jane’s—Fuzzy’s claim to be lord of his own manor was completely ignored.
Jane believed from the beginning that whoever had reported those bones to the police and to the state might be someone who wanted to take over the manor for himself. Those official-looking contracts to buy the Neilson and the Sullivan farms? It looked like Hometown USA—Dempsey and Hoover—were poised to be the new owners of Fuzzy’s land, topsoil, bones, and all.
At the EZ Way Inn, listening to Dempsey describe his fantasyland for Don and Nellie, Jane had been suspicious. If he and Hoover were running a con, it was reasonable to believe that a journalist like Johnny Sullivan might be getting ready to expose them. She had been ready to call the police then and there but had held back. Why? Because she watched Hoover eat a cupcake and decided that they didn’t seem like a murderous pair?
Johnny was writing articles about the airport, nosing around the town, and stirring up excitement among the property owners. If people believed they were going to be able to sell their land to developers who were banking on the airport, why should they let it go to Dempsey and Hoover—unless they believed no developer would come near it because of the Human Skeletal Remains Protection Act? And maybe some of the farmers thought they could unload the land and the headaches of hiring a geology crew and get Hometown to absorb the “relocation costs” of any artifacts. Then, after Hometown bought the property, all of the “remains” would be dismissed as unimportant, and the roller-coasters and fishing ponds could be built. Or, as Jane was beginning to suspect … the runways and terminals. Of course, in order to really stop development of the land around Kankakee, they’d have to do better than Ott
o the cat. It didn’t take a genius to …
Jane took a deep breath and tried to still the ricocheting thoughts. If Johnny Sullivan knew about Otto, all he had to do was write a story and expose the hoax. But it looked like Johnny was taking the bones the night he was killed. Did he want them for a photo or some kind of proof?
He had been at the farm earlier—Jane thought she had seen him during the picnic. Charley had been introduced all around as the expert, the one who was going to get to the bottom of whatever it was Fuzzy had found that the government might have a say-so over. And it was that night that Johnny had shown up to steal the bones. Interesting timing.
Jane put all the papers back into the envelopes and wiped her hands on the wad of napkins she had been given with her drive-through lunch. Unfortunately, no matter how many napkins they gave you it was never enough. She tried to clean up the sauce that in her excitement she had spilled all over Tim’s immaculate front seat and realized that it was a lost cause. Tim would have her head if she didn’t get this mopped up.
Jane put the envelopes on the floor, gathered up the garbage, talking to herself the whole time about how foolish she was to eat a sauce bun in Tim’s car. Tim never allowed food in his car, particularly not Root Beer Stand food. She dropped the napkins and wrappers in the garbage and went inside the drive-in where there were tables, a waitress who had been there since Jane was in high school, and a bar for condiments. She helped herself to about thirty napkins and checked out the bulletin board. Teenage girls still posted their numbers for babysitting, townspeople still advertised free kittens, and local businesses still stuck up their cards. Jane wondered if any potential client had ever chosen an insurance agent based on the fact that they ate the same fast food for lunch.
Hello. This was a familiar handout. HOMETOWN USA. Jane unpinned the card and held it at a better reading angle. This one had Michael Hoover’s name at the bottom instead of Dempsey’s, but it was the same business card. Pretty flimsy. It was the kind of business card anyone could get made up in a hurry at the local copy shop.
“You know that bum?” Lucille, the waitress, asked.
“I’ve met him,” said Jane.
“You can tell him I’m gunning for him,” said Lucille, with a grim smile. “And it ain’t going to be pretty.”
Jane shook her head and smiled her best Olivia Schaefer, hospital-worker-at-large smile. “I guess I don’t know him as well as you do.”
“Him and that loser, Johnny Sullivan, were in here Saturday night, drunk as skunks. I must have brought them about ten sandwiches apiece. They were so obnoxious that everyone else cleared out,” said Lucille, narrowing her eyes. “And when the place was empty, they dumped out a sack of rocks or something. Dirt and shit all over the table. Made a total mess.”
“Why? What did they say they were doing?” asked Jane.
“Hoover asked me if I’d ever heard of grave robbers. Tells me they’re grave planters. Then that Sullivan, who is a sloppy ass drunk, says, no, we’re grave traders, and gets all weepy about a cat and says he’s taking him home with him and Hoover can put in anything he wants.
“So I says, ‘Get them cat bones off the table.’ I mean this place serves food, you know? And Hoover starts laughing and says that these bones aren’t a cat and that they were worth more than my old bones and I told them to get the hell out.”
“What time was this?”
“We’re open real late on weekends now. Boss is in some kind of pissing match with Pink and wants us to take some of his crowd of drunks, I guess. Must have been around three or three-thirty,” said Lucille.
“Do you work that late and then work days, too?” asked Jane, momentarily off the case and stunned by Lucille’s apparent schedule. She had to be nearly sixty-five years old. What was it with Kankakee women? Were they putting something in the water here?
“Got nothing better to do. When I’m off, I’m taking care of my mother, so I figure I might as well be working here. But not Saturday all-nighters anymore. Not if the drunks can’t tip better than they’ve been doing.”
“Hoover didn’t tip well?” asked Jane.
“Bastard left me this,” said Lucille, pulling out a tiny bone fragment. “I was going to throw it away, now I’m glad I didn’t. I think I’ll put it in his sandwich today. Maybe he’ll break his damn tooth.”
Jane took the piece of bone and tried to remember what she had heard Charley say about bones. This was hollow, like a bird’s, which meant something. Then she realized what Lucille had just said.
“How do you know he’s coming in today?”
“He’s here. I just saw him duck into the can.”
Jane grabbed more napkins and walked around the corner to the restrooms. The door to the unisex was closed. She knocked, knowing what she’d hear from the other side of the door.
“Ocupado.”
Jane wet some napkins in the drinking fountain to bring out to clean Tim’s front seat and hung back by the jukebox, waiting for Hoover to come out. When he did, he was talking on his cell phone.
“One with cheese and one with onions, right? Oh yeah, forgot you were the ladies’ man. No onions,” Hoover said, laughing.
“Joe, let it go. They arrested the old man, didn’t they? He can’t hurt anybody. I’ll be fine. I can plant the duckbill today or I’ve got some nice arrowheads. Hey, it wasn’t our fault. Yeah, I know. Nobody’s ever supposed to get hurt.”
Jane waited until Hoover went around the corner to brave Lucille’s wrath and place his take-out order. She went back out to Tim’s car and reparked it so she could watch the door. She dumped the napkins on the sauce stain spreading on the upholstery and went back into the folder she had taken from Groveland’s garage. Where was that receipt? GRS. She smoothed it out and read that an order had been overnighted to Roger Groveland at his Kankakee home address two weeks after Roger had died. The company’s full name was Rapid City GRS. That name had sounded vaguely familiar and now, reading the small print under the initials, she knew why. Geological Research and Supply. Charley had an account there. A reputable South Dakota business—some amateur paleontologists who supplied museum-quality specimens, led collecting tours, and supervised educational digs. Rapid City GRS had sold the late Roger Groveland quite an assortment of bones, arrowheads, and plant fossils, including the partial remains of a duck-billed dinosaur.
Hoover came out with a bag of food and let himself into his car a few rows ahead of Jane. She pulled out after him, easing onto the street, careful to stay at least one car length behind. She made a mental note to always drive a less noticeable car. If someone was being followed by a red Mustang, he or she would probably notice. It was a remarkable car. Right now it was a remarkable car that reeked of Root Beer Stand special sauce and she rolled her window all the way down, hoping that the air would help.
Jane glanced down at the passenger seat where the napkins started blowing around. She slammed her hand down on the pile, but they were already flying. Distracted for just an instant, she allowed Hoover to pull through a yellow light and found herself stuck at the intersection as he disappeared into traffic.
All the way to Fuzzy’s she swore at herself for losing him, sure that she could have caught him red-handed planting fossils and bones and God knows what all on the land of some unsuspecting old farmer.
When she had exhausted her last string of swear words—and she knew a lot, since the EZ Way Inn had been great training ground for learning to wash glasses until they sparkled, playing sharp gutsy euchre, and learning how to swear like a drunken sailor—she was almost at the farm. That was Fuzzy’s cornfield that bordered the side of the highway. And there, pulled over on the side of the highway, was Hoover’s sedan, dented hood and all. More precisely, dented hood and none, since no one was in the car.
“Why’d you stop at the Root Beer Stand.?” asked Nellie, looking her daughter up and down. “Lula’s got a wagonload of sandwiches in there that she’s been force-feeding everybody who gets within holleri
ng distance.”
Jane almost asked how her mother knew where she had been, but she stopped herself in time. Where did Jane think her masterful detection skills had come from any way? Besides, it probably did not take a Marple, a Drew, or a Bond to link the bright orange sauce stain on her smock to the only place in town that managed to make food that color. Mother shad been trying to get it out of their teenagers’ clothes for the fifty years the place had been in business. The secret in their sauce? Probably permanent dye.
Jane was unhappy that one of her new lucky smocks had been stained, but she at least rested easy knowing she had the rest of the collection. One more detail of Nellie’s odd workings—she noted and discussed what Jane had likely eaten for lunch, but seemed curiously uncurious about why Jane might be wearing a work uniform of a total stranger.
Jane stopped herself from tumbling into Nellie World and getting lost in that maze of funhouse mirrors by seeking out Charley, who said he had spent the morning going back and forth between Munson and Alan Bishop, who wanted to represent Fuzzy but was already having trouble getting information from Lula about Fuzzy’s recent medical history.
He did want to know why she was now a cafeteria employee at the hospital, so she took off the smock and shared her morning adventures. She had been so invigorated by working this case—and didn’t she love that term, “working the case”—that she told the story with abandon, totally forgetting that Charley might not be as energized by her near miss in Roger Groveland’s garage.
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