Dead Secret

Diane and her team were packing up the evidence, the recovery team got to work. Diane heard them calling orders to one another in the background. A large tow truck sat near the edge of the water. Men wearing life jackets stood in the water on the underwater shelf near where Jake Stanley was found. The shelf was about six feet wide and four feet deep. After that, there was a dropoff all the way to the bottom of the lake. The salvagers were letting orange material down into the water, readying the lift bags for the divers to take down to the car.
    The museum crew stayed well away from the operation, unlike an Atlanta news crew, who were taking pictures up close. Korey and Jin got on top of the museum van to observe the process. Diane sat in the van and studied Jin’s map of the underwater crime scene. After several minutes she put it away to watch with the others.
    At the moment there was nothing much to see. The boat that anchored the descent line that Jin and his people used was gone, and the lake was calm and empty. Then, like a whale surfacing and spouting water, the car suddenly surfaced surrounded by orange lift bags, and everybody clapped. That must be one of those things, Diane thought, that you never got tired of seeing if you did this kind of work—large objects suddenly popping up out of the water. She grinned as if she’d just seen a circus act.
    The divers tied a line to the car, and the men on the bank began winching it in. Jin got off the top of the van and retrieved his camera to take more photographs. At the depth the car was submerged, they had been unable to see true colors. Diane could see that the dark gray car had maroon seats. When the recovery team had the car secure on shore, Jin took a picture of the dark gray humpbacked Plymouth that was in remarkably good condition. Diane heard one of the men say he thought it was a 1938. For Diane, looking at the old car brought up from the depth of the lake was like looking back in time.

    Plymouth Doe, as Jin had christened their newest skeleton, lay on the table in Diane’s osteology lab. The next day Diane had come in early to get started on the skeleton. The bones were wet and shining like pearls that had been molded into the shape of a skeleton. Korey had told Diane to keep the bones wet as she worked, so she had a spray bottle for that purpose. Korey had mixed a bath of fifty percent alcohol and fifty percent distilled water that the bones would be submerged in after Diane’s examination of them.
    Plymouth Doe was female. Her pelvis was clear on that. It was broad and shallow like a cradle—and it had held at least one infant in her lifetime. Her wisdom teeth were just starting to erupt. The medial end of the clavicle was just beginning to unite with its epiphysis. There was no complete epiphyseal union on her femora or her humeri. Plymouth Doe was young—between sixteen and twenty-two, Diane guessed. Too young to die.
    The newest magazine found in the car with her was dated 1942. If, for sake of argument, they could say that was the date Plymouth Doe died, she would now have been around eighty. Plymouth Doe could still be alive had someone not cracked her skull. Diane examined the rod-shaped fracture with a hand lens. The edges were smooth except for one nick in the bone. It looked like whatever object made the fracture had some small protrusion on it, like a burr or imperfection on whatever weapon was used.
    There were no healed fractures on any of her bones. One curious characteristic Diane discovered when she was looking for evidence of right- or left-handedness—the beveling on her right glenoid fossa, the right shoulder socket of the scapula, was greater than on her left. This usually indicated that there had been more rotation in the right shoulder socket—a common sign of right-handedness. Greater beveling usually went hand in hand with larger muscle attachments on the dominant arm and shoulder. But Plymouth Doe’s left muscle attachments on her arm and shoulder were larger than her right. Her glenoid fossa said she was right-handed, but her muscle attachments said she was left-handed.
    One occupation Diane had read about that could cause this was waitressing. Having to balance a heavy tray with the less-dominant hand left the dominant hand free. A right-handed waitress balanced a tray on her left hand. Had Plymouth Doe been a waitress in her relatively short life? She thought about the white apron found with her clothes.
    Diane