Bones Behind the Wheel Read online

  “But Josh is helping Paul,” Liss protested.

  “Josh is an adult and he doesn’t have to listen to me,” I told her.

  “You’re his wife.”

  “Yeah. He should listen to me, but he doesn’t have to. You do because even though you’re a genius …”

  “I’m not a genius.” She brushed her hair back from her face. It’s a mechanism of embarrassment. I was being an effective mother.

  “Okay, even though you’re really smart, you’re still only thirteen years old and you really don’t have a complete working knowledge of the world. You have to listen to me because I’m your best bet to get decent information on life. And no, it’s not Maxie. You understand?”

  Melissa toggled her mouth back and forth. If this were a sixties sitcom she probably would have counted that as a nose twitch and an elephant or something would appear in my den. Luckily, this was not a sixties sitcom. “I understand,” she said. “But I don’t like it.”

  “I can live with that.”

  The flashlight started moving in larger circles and seemed to be getting closer. Josh was coming inside. Which, I’ll admit, caused me to exhale just a little. He may be a lunatic, but he’s my lunatic and I want to keep him.

  Being a gentleman and a good husband, he did in fact wipe his shoes on the mat outside before coming in. I didn’t even have to tell him the first time; he just did it. I don’t know why it took me so long to marry him.

  I opened the French doors and Josh came inside, trying very hard not to show that he was legitimately cold. It’s some man thing, I guess. All I know is it was thirty-eight degrees outside without the wind chill and he was wearing a light jacket. “Did you find anything?” I asked him. You have to show some interest in your spouse’s hobbies.

  “I’m not sure,” Josh said.

  I waited for extra words to come out of his mouth but they were not forthcoming. “What do you mean, you’re not sure?” I asked.

  “We didn’t find any teeth.” That sentence came almost simultaneously from Josh and Paul, who had phased through the wall and was now floating to my husband’s right.

  “That’s a plus,” I told him/them.

  “But you did find something?” Melissa asked.

  “I can’t imagine there’s anything of significance in that car that the police haven’t already seen,” Paul said.

  “I found something,” Josh told me. “I texted Paul but he hasn’t answered. Was he out there with me?”

  Paul regarded me with a look. “I didn’t want to dampen his enthusiasm, but I don’t think his find is of any importance.”

  “He was there,” I told Josh. “What did you find?”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out something I couldn’t immediately see. “This. See what you can make of it.” Josh opened his hand and showed me a small shiny plastic object that was probably clear when it started out. “Phyllis told us to look for plastic,” he reminded me.

  “What is it?” I asked. It was half-moon shaped and covered more in dust than dirt.

  “It’s part of a contact lens,” Melissa said. “And I don’t think it’s forty years old.”

  “The police are looking for a missing person in the wrong decade,” Josh said, the excitement rising in his voice. “We’re the only ones who know it.”

  “It’s a small plastic disc,” Paul scoffed. “It is in a car that has been in the ground for decades, then removed and returned. It might have come from one of the crime scene technicians for all we know.”

  “Should we call the lieutenant?” Josh asked. He looked like he wanted to. And that was what did it for me. I’d been waiting for him to lose interest, but he wasn’t going to. And even though my experience didn’t amount to much, it was wrong for me to let him do this without me. A marriage is a team. You’re either in it together or you’re not.

  “Definitely not,” Paul sniffed. “It would be a waste of her time.”

  “Maybe not tonight,” I said. “But we’ll talk to her tomorrow.”

  “We?” Melissa asked.

  I nodded, giving in to the inevitable. “I think we have to attack this together.”

  Chapter 19

  The Lincoln Continental, thank goodness, left my property (legitimately) at ten the next morning, exactly at the time we had scheduled a spook show for the library, which has windows that look out on the very spot. All three guests had decided to attend this performance. But despite Paul’s best attempts to attract their attention by swinging the light fixture hung from the ceiling (which raised my concern level even higher than usual) and despite Maxie stealing a comb from Katrina’s hair and a handkerchief from Adam’s pocket, they were mostly occupied with the spectacle taking place outside involving a tow truck and half the Harbor Haven police force. Okay, two members of the Harbor Haven police force, but McElone had chosen to come out and not just send an emissary.

  She and I hadn’t had a chance to talk yet. I was busy overseeing the overlooked goings-on in my library and she was, for reasons I couldn’t begin to understand, watching a tow truck take a Carter-era sedan off the beach. How that was going to help solve crimes was a mystery in itself.

  Paul picked up a trumpet I’d found in an “antiques” shop on the boardwalk and pretended to play it. He doesn’t have any actual breath to blow into the valve (which was just as well because it had been in the shop for quite some time) so he just swung it around like what a Canadian Englishman thinks a jazz player moves like.

  “How does this look?” he asked.

  I shrugged. It was hard for me to picture without the ghost behind it but for a second Steve looked up, noticed the movement and smiled. Then he went back to watching the tow truck. Because, you know, tow truck. Paul noticed the moment and smiled just a little.

  Maxie put an end to the show—her favorite part of the festivities—by rustling Katrina’s collar to get her attention and then opening and closing the blinds on the window they were all watching. It was a new move in the show, and I’m not certain it wasn’t Maxie simply acting out because she hadn’t been properly respected despite what I’m sure she considered her best efforts.

  I announced the end of the morning’s program because the ghosts couldn’t effectively. The “crowd” applauded dutifully and then rose to head out of the room, and I assumed to the beach where they could see the spectacle of the tow truck better. Katrina hesitated and stopped at the doorway. She waited for Adam and Steve to exit on their way to the French doors (still the only effective route to the backyard without walking all the way around the house) and approached me when I headed in that direction myself.

  Behind me I heard Paul say, “Maxie. A moment of your time, please.”

  Maxie knew what that meant: He was going to ask her to help by doing some internet research on his case. She let out what would have been a long breath in a breathing person. “I’m working,” she said with more than a little testiness in her voice.

  “This will take only a minute, I promise.” Paul’s tone was so gentle I was afraid it would put Maxie to sleep. If Maxie could sleep.

  “Oh, fine!” The two of them vanished into the ceiling, no doubt in search of Maxie’s laptop computer which she kept in Melissa’s room but sometimes left on a fairly secure area of the roof. Maxie likes to sit “on” the roof and watch the area from there.

  “Can I do something for you, Katrina?” I asked this largely based on the fact that Katrina had purposely blocked the library door so I figured she needed me for something.

  “I wanted to … thank you,” she said. That was unexpected; guests usually wait until they were about to go home before thanking me for their stay. Of course, some of them were more apt to berate me about something they’d been keeping to themselves that I could have fixed if only they’d … but that’s another topic entirely.

  “Well, you’re certainly welcome,” I said. “For what?”

  “For introducing me to Bill,” Katrina said, indicating that I should have known w
hat she’d meant. “We went out to dinner last night and it was very special.”

  After four years in the vacation business I have come to recognize the romantic nature of being away from the daily routine that many of my guests feel when they’re in my house. It’s gratifying, really. My job is to provide them an experience that takes them away from whatever troubles they might be experiencing in their usual lives and create a place that seems removed from all that. It’s like Disney World but without people wearing giant heads and billions of dollars.

  The people aren’t wearing the billions of dollars. It’s about the huge amounts spent to create a theme park. You get the idea.

  But I also have to make sure the guest’s expectations aren’t so heightened as to be unrealistic or impossible to fulfill. For one thing, the guest will be disappointed. For another, she’ll usually blame that disappointment on me.

  “Well I’m glad you had a nice evening,” I told Katrina. “That’s what vacations are for.” See, that was a subtle attempt at reminding her she wasn’t living her real life right now.

  “Oh, I think it might be more than that,” she said. “We really hit it off.”

  That could be dangerous. If Bill Harrelson didn’t share Katrina’s assessment of their one evening out there could be choppy waters ahead, Captain. This was tightrope walking at its most dangerous: I’d have to reinforce the idea that things were great to avoid bursting Katrina’s bubble while gently suggesting that the great things were simply a temporary function of her being on vacation. And I was working without a net.

  “That’s very nice,” I said. “It’s good to be able to spend some time with someone you just met.”

  Katrina looked at me with the most innocent eyes I’d seen since Melissa was five. “What we have is much more important than simply spending a little time together,” she said. “This might be the man I’ve been waiting for.”

  There was no point in arguing with her. I’d voiced my view and she’d told me what she thought. With a guest, I back off. If someone I knew in my real life suggested they’d met The One after going to dinner for a first date, I might not give up quite so easily.

  Except of course when Jeannie had met Tony, because I’d fixed them up. But that was a marriage and two children ago. I retired with a 1.000 batting average in fix-ups.

  “I hope so, Katrina.” Before she could offer more evidence I nodded toward the door and Katrina stopped blocking my way. I walked out and got to the kitchen door, where I could hear Tony and Vic placing the steel beam in my ceiling. “You guys need any help?” I called through the plastic sheeting (and the door).

  “We’re doing okay,” Vic called back. “The beam will be in by this afternoon.” I could do the drywall work myself and then Maxie would do her thing, which made me shudder. I’d have to demand new blueprints from her before she started moving my stove into the den because she wanted a more open look, or something.

  Of course, he didn’t know my father was in there, having been dropped off by Mom this morning because he couldn’t bear to stay away. He had not once come out to tell me how the Mandorisis were messing up, which could only mean their work was impeccable.

  “Cool,” I said. “I’ll be outside.”

  I didn’t wait for Vic to answer and walked through the French doors to the backyard. I put on a sweater I kept on a coat rack right by the beach doors because, you know, it was November.

  McElone was alone on the beach. In the distance I could see the tow truck heading for the street with the Continental hanging from its claw. Adam and Steve must have decided the show was over because there wasn’t a trace of either of them.

  All that was left out here was the great big hole and the yellow crime scene tape on wire posts stuck into the sand. And the lieutenant.

  She walked over to me carrying a tablet computer, on which I assumed she had immortalized the exciting action of taking the Continental away—again—and preserved it for future viewing when there was nothing good on TV. “We got your car out of here,” she said, exhibiting a grasp for the incredibly obvious I did not think suited her.

  “Not my car,” I told her. “What happens now?”

  McElone gave me a look I’m sure she meant would chill my blood. The wind was doing a good job of that, but I’d seen the look before and it wasn’t having much effect. “Now you go back to running a hotel and let us do our job.”

  She knew me well enough to have expected the word hotel would irritate me just a bit. I used that for subtext. “I have never stopped you from doing your job,” I pointed out.

  “Stopped, no. Slowed down, certainly.”

  This hilarious banter might have continued for hours but Paul appeared seemingly out of nowhere. With the bright sunlight reflected off the sand sometimes it’s hard to see the ghosts on the beach so I hadn’t noticed him approaching from the house, or he’d tunneled under the sand and rose up for effect, which did not seem likely.

  “We know who the person in the car was,” he said, his voice sounding breathless despite the fact that it was. “Maxie and I have managed to track him down. Tell the lieutenant.”

  Right on the heels of McElone telling me I was an impediment to her work I did not feel especially empowered to solve a major part of her case for her. So I assiduously avoided looking directly at Paul but managed through peripheral vision to see he was holding the piece of contact lens, which also glinted, albeit through some grime, in the sunlight.

  “Lieutenant, we found something in the car last night,” I began, figuring Paul was featuring the lens because it had some significance. I reminded myself that he had dismissed Josh’s discovery the night before as an unimportant piece of plastic.

  McElone’s eyebrows dropped a couple of feet. “What do you mean, ‘we found?’ You went past the crime scene tape and looked in the car? You touched things? What are you doing contaminating my evidence?”

  This was not going quite as well as I might have hoped, especially since I might now be facing charges. And I wasn’t really open to explaining that I hadn’t actually done any of that but my husband had. We had only been married a few months, after all.

  “Never mind how. Nobody touched anything without wearing gloves.” That was true; Josh had worn a pair of batting gloves he’d found in a drawer that he’d worn in a softball league six years before. Men keep everything, especially if it’s sports-related. “The important thing is that we found a contact lens.”

  “Yes,” Paul said in an encouraging tone. “It’s the lens that made the difference. Because they weren’t in wide circulation at the time, extended use contact lenses actually had markings that indicated the manufacturer and lot number, which could be traced.”

  I told none of that to McElone. “A contact lens? From nineteen seventy-seven?” she asked. “You sure it’s not from one of the techs or somebody who helped move this car the other night?”

  “Definitely,” Paul said to me. I started parroting back everything he said as he said it, so I wasn’t listening so much as taking dictation. “This kind of lens is not the sort of thing you’d find in an ophthalmologist’s office today. The materials are different and the markings would no longer be found on the lens. It’s a certainty this is not a contemporary lens.”

  “Markings?” McElone said, ignoring the fact that I don’t actually talk like that. “Let me see that lens.”

  I put my hands behind my back. Paul floated around me and placed the small piece of contact lens, which he handled very gently because it was brittle, into my right hand. I made sure to close my hand without putting any pressure on the lens. “Here it is,” Paul said. Because apparently he didn’t think I knew the plastic disc in my hand had come from him.

  With McElone watching I made a show of reaching into the pocket of my jeans—the left hand pocket because the other was holding the lens—and then “transferring” it into my right hand. I carefully held it out to her. The lieutenant had already put on a pair of latex gloves and opened a small e
vidence bag. She used a pair of tweezers she must have had in her pocket (McElone is the ultimate scout, always prepared) to daintily move the lens into the bag without cracking it. She sealed the bag and looked at me.

  “Tell her that Maxie and I have identified the victim,” Paul whispered. Paul whispers like there’s a chance he might be heard by someone other than me.

  “It’s possible that the lens can help name the person whose bones were in the car,” I told McElone because I actually do talk like that.

  The lieutenant looked up from the evidence bag and into my eyes. “You think so, huh?” That’s McElone being inscrutable.

  I thought I could scrute her, though, and that is almost always a mistake. “There appear to be markings on the lens that indicate the manufacturer and the date they were made,” I echoed Paul. “Tracing those records of the time to the person who wore the lenses isn’t very difficult because they were a kind of beta testing project.” I threw that last bit in on my own because Paul had said the lenses were “prototypes of a kind that were contemporaneously being tested on human subjects.” I thought my way was better.

  I thought I saw a tiny glint of amusement in McElone’s eyes. Uh-oh. “No kidding. In the seventies?”

  “No,” Paul told me to say. “I believe it would have been approximately nineteen eighty-three. The car would have been six years old.”

  “You’re wrong,” the detective countered. “It was eighty-two. The car was only five.”

  That’s where the uncharacteristic humor in her eyes came from. “You’ve found all this already,” I said.

  “We’ve identified the victim through ophthalmology records, yes. Only we did it through a pair of prescription sunglasses that were in the glove compartment.” McElone put the evidence into a pouch on her belt. I wondered if it would join the small cloth pouch Paul had seen her withhold from the crime scene team when the car was first discovered. But that didn’t make sense. The lieutenant was a frighteningly honest cop.

  Paul sputtered behind me. “She did?”