Dead Secret

brought one of her favorite meals—Chinese. And he had made her laugh. She touched the locket around her neck, pushing the heart shape into her chest, feeling the metal, remembering that Ariel had touched it. Yes, a swim right now would be good.
    She was brought out of her reverie by a splash and voices. She opened her eyes. Jin was back up, bags and camera tied to his body. One after another, minutes apart, divers popped up after him. Four in all, each carrying bags. Jin was swimming to shore rather than getting in the boat. The second group of divers started putting on their gear. For them it was time for the real show—bringing up the car.
    “Hey, Boss. It’s nice down there. A little chilly, but nice. I got some good pictures and a lot of evidence.” He pointed to the bags hanging from his body weighing him down. “Damn, these weren’t so heavy underwater.” He grinned.
    “It’s an old Plymouth, maybe 1935-ish or something. David will probably know. It’s in pretty good condition, considering. No license plates on it. Too bad. That might have helped.” Diane walked with Jin to the museum van, where he took off his diving gear.
    The van was one the groundskeepers used and had been stripped of carpeting. Korey came trotting over to help transfer the bones Jin had brought up into tubs of distilled water in the van.
    Diane held the dripping skull in her hands. It was almost pearlescent, the way the saturated white bone reflected the sunlight. Right away she knew it would probably be a young female. It was too gracile to be otherwise. The wisdom teeth were just about to erupt. There was nothing on the face that suggested how she died. No broken face bones or broken teeth that suggested a car accident. But at the back of the head there was a depression fracture. She put the skull in the water with the other bones and replaced the cover.
    “You know, Boss,” said Jin, stripping off his wet suit. “When you look at the bones, it doesn’t really matter if they dry out too fast and crack. You’ll just be burying them after you finish.”
    Korey looked scandalized.
    “We don’t know what we’ll find, when we’ll find it or how long it will take to identify her,” Diane said. “We may have to store her for years, and we want her in the best condition possible.”
    “Yeah,” agreed Korey. “Always err on the side of conservation.”
    Jin laughed. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to climb in the van a minute and close the door to change clothes.” He slammed the door shut after he was inside. “We searched the bottom for another diver,” he yelled as he was changing clothes. “Nothing.”
    While he put on dry clothes, Diane looked at the special slates he had used for writing underwater. He had made a grid of the scene and a drawing of where everything was found. What had the scuba diver, Jake Stanley, and Quarry Doe been looking for? she wondered, staring at Jin’s drawing. What besides an ancient skeleton could be in an old car that probably had been at the bottom of the quarry for who knew how long? For that matter, what was the relationship of Quarry Doe to the diver, Jake Stanley?
    Jin had made notes of a few things found outside the car on the quarry bottom: old tires, cans, bottles, several unidentified pieces of metal. Because the time the divers could spend at that depth was limited, he had concentrated most of his time inside the car itself.
    The van door opened and Jin jumped out, dressed in cutoffs and a T-shirt. “You’re not going to believe what we found.”
    “Probably not,” said Diane. She half expected them to come up with something of value—like a suitcase full of money.
    “Vintage men’s magazines.”
    “What?” said Korey.
    “Really. From the thirties and forties. You know, Boss . . .”
    She could see Jin’s mind working. “No, we aren’t going to do a museum display of them.”
    “How did you know that’s what I was going to ask?”
    Diane simply looked at him.
    “The difference between what people thought was beautiful then and now is really interesting. I mean, with all the plastic surgery and exercise and . . .”
    “Jin, move on,” said Diane.
    “We can get some dates off the mags.”
    “Good.”
    The other divers on Jin’s team came to the van with their booty—mostly bones. They also brought clothes—a yellow gingham dress, a white apron, black shoes, and a sweater. Diane and Korey placed all of it in containers of distilled water.
    While