Dust to Dust

samples,” said Diane. “Thank you.”
    “By the way,” said Jin, “I’ve done some analysis on our evidence. That large stain on the floor near the table was a combination of urine and feces, just as you said. Probably the spot where she died.”
    Diane nodded. “Thanks, Jin.”
    She left them and rode the elevator up to the third floor and walked over to the crime lab.
    Neva, David, and Izzy were there. They were getting a lecture on handwriting analysis from a member of the museum archives staff. The sample under discussion was the writing on the back of Marcella’s desk drawer.

Chapter 19
    “I personally think that you can’t tell much about what slant means in the young,” Lawrence Michaels, one of the museum’s archivists and their only handwriting expert, was saying when Diane walked into the dimly lit lab. “Children, especially early teenage girls, experiment with different handwriting on a whim—for fun. However, in the adult . . . Ah, Dr. Fallon. Good to see you. I was just explaining that I get a bit of mixed messages from the handwriting on the desk drawer.”
    Michaels was a middle-aged man with striking silver hair. He always dressed in a suit and tie, clothes he apparently found comfortable. Occasionally he wore a bow tie, which Diane thought gave him an entirely different persona. Today he had on a dark brown suit, a light pink shirt with a tie that was a dark shade of pink decorated with small brown fleurs de lis. Diane pulled up a chair and sat down beside David.
    “This is a woman’s hand,” Michaels continued. “She is intelligent and creative—as suggested by the rounded w and the one u . These coiled shapes and counterstrokes that curve in what we might call the wrong way, suggest a self centeredness. The closed a ’s and o ’s suggest that she is hiding something.”
    He indicated each of the characteristics with a laser pointer that jumped quickly from character to character, making lightning zigzags of neon red on the dry-erase board where he had projected the image of the note.
    “The characters are largest in the middle zone—the ascenders and descenders don’t go much above or below the baseline. This suggests immaturity—could be young at heart. Immaturity doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. The way the letters slant in different directions is a little disturbing. Bottom line, I’m not really sure what you have here. Perhaps an intelligent, creative, selfish, and childishly disturbed woman with something to hide. Or maybe not. This isn’t an exact science. I hope this helps.” He grinned at his audience.
    “No offense,” said Izzy, “but I could have gotten most of that from the words she wrote. What adult, but a disturbed one, writes a message like that on the bottom of a drawer? Who did she expect would find it?”
    Michaels shrugged. “The handwriting is consistent with the message. I can say that,” he said.
    “Thank you, Dr. Michaels,” said Diane. “Quite possibly, it does help. What would really help,” Diane said to all of them, “is if we could get an approximate date for when the message was written.”
    “Okay,” said Michaels. “There is one other thing. See the double s in the word missing —how the first s is like an f , only backward? That’s the way kids were taught to write about a hundred years or so ago. That’s called a leading s because it is the first s in the sequence.”
    “Now, see,” said Izzy. “That’s helpful. You should have said that right off.”
    “Sorry,” Michaels said, grinning. He dusted off his hands as if he had been using chalk instead of a laser pointer.
    “Well, I think it’s neat,” said Neva. “Thanks, Dr. Michaels.”
    Neva escorted Lawrence Michaels to the door that was the threshold between the dark side, the crime lab, and the museum proper.
    “I couldn’t help but notice,” David said to Diane when Neva returned, “that you said that quite possibly it does help. What is it you know?”
    The others looked at David in surprise. Apparently they hadn’t taken note of what Diane said.
    Diane explained about the phone call from the lab in Arizona and what they had discovered about the sherds Marcella sent them. “I don’t know that those were sherds she found in her yard, but for now, let’s suppose they were.”
    “Okay,” said Izzy. “That’s a sign of a disturbed person. Crushing up human bones to make pots? It’s downright spooky. Maybe the handwriting guy had something