Dead Secret

said Lydia. “My great-granny said Grandma worked at the diner and took in laundry and sewing to give Daddy a better life. Great-granny never believed she’d run off and left him.”
    “Sit right here. I’ll be back,” said Diane. She stopped at the door. “Sewing? Did you have a relative in the military—a quartermaster?”
    They looked at her, puzzled. “Her daddy was a quartermaster in the army,” said Earl Southwell.
    “Thank you,” said Diane, smiling. “Please wait here. This won’t take long.”
    Diane almost skipped her way to the crime lab. David, Jin and Neva were there packing up the evidence to move it to the vault in the archives to keep it out of harm’s way.
    “We may have someone who knows Plymouth Doe.”
    “Already?” said David.
    Diane showed them the photograph of Jewel Southwell.
    “Wow, Neva, you nailed it,” said Jin.
    “I looked at her dress,” said Neva. “The way it was sewn, where the darts were. It was hand-stitched and made to fit real well. I thought she might be someone who would look right into a camera and smile at whoever was looking.”
    “That’s good, Neva,” said Diane. “Very intuitive.”
    Neva had taken to heart the lessons on facial reconstruction Diane had given her.
    “David,” she said, “Did we do an X-ray of Plymouth Doe’s skull?”
    “Yes. I took all the skeletal remains to Korey and he X-rayed everyone.” David went to the filing cabinets, pulled open a drawer and found a file with the X-ray, which he gave to Diane.
    She carried the X-ray to the copy machine. She measured the head of the woman in the photograph between two craniometric points—the nasion, where the nose met the forehead, and the gnathion, the tip of the chin. She made the same measurements on the X-ray of Plymouth Doe’s skull and calculated the percent difference between the photograph and the skull. She put the photo on the copier and increased the size by a small amount and measured the result at the same points.
    When she had the heights of the faces the same on the measurement points, she took the X-ray and the copy of the photo to the light table and laid one on top of the other.
    “I thought you did that with a projection screen so you could fiddle with it,” said David.
    “I do, but right now this is quicker, and if it’s the same person, it should fit dead on.”
    It did. Plymouth Doe was Jewel Southwell.
    Just to make sure, Diane used a loupe and examined Jewel Southwell’s teeth in her portrait. Plymouth Doe had an overlapping upper incisor. Jewel Southwell’s portrait showed the same overlap, one incisor slightly forward, casting a shadow on the incisor next to it. To compute how far forward, Diane used one of David’s esoteric photography databases to provide some of the numbers she needed, based on the shadow length in the photo. She retrieved Plymouth Doe’s skull from the vault and took a few tooth measurements. It wouldn’t be exact, but the measurements from the offset teeth in the skull should be very close to the computed value from the photograph. Again, dead-on.
    She took two DNA sampling kits from the supply cabinet and walked back to the father and daughter waiting in her office.
    “Could I ask each of you to give me a DNA sample for comparison with DNA we took from the remains? It’s nothing invasive. I just need to take a swab from inside your cheek.”
    As Diane talked, she opened the DNA test kits and showed them a swab. Earl and his daughter Lydia both opened their mouths. Diane took the samples and sealed the swabs in their envelopes and labeled them. She sat down across the table from the two and looked into their eyes. Their faces showed a cross between expectation and dread.
    “I can tell you that the photograph is a match with the remains. It’s her, almost beyond a doubt. The DNA results will give us the final confirmation.”
    “It is Grandma then?” asked Lydia.
    “Yes.” Diane nodded. “It is Jewel Southwell.”
    Earl Southwell began sobbing. “All these years, the things we all thought about her, and she was at the bottom of that quarry. I swam there when I was a kid, and my mother was down there.” His shoulders shook with his sobs.
    Diane noticed that his daughter didn’t reach over to comfort him.
    “How did she die?” he asked when his sobs subsided.
    “From a blow to the head.”
    “You mean, like deliberate, or an accident?” asked Lydia.
    “It appears to have been deliberate,” said