One Grave Less

edges from frequent use.
    It was early, too early for visitors, so she and Gregory had the Pleistocene Room to themselves. Gregory smiled and put his arm around her shoulders when she sat down beside him.
    “I love your museum. What an utterly calm environment. Even when you have all the noisy schoolchildren it is a calm place. I love the tiny unicorns in the dinosaur paintings. Quite intriguing.��
    The huge murals of dinosaurs, painted at a time when everyone thought dinosaurs dragged their tails on the ground behind them, were treasures uncovered during the renovation of the museum. The artist had put tiny unicorns in his artwork here and there to the delight of everyone who looked at the paintings.
    “Life is good here,” she said.
    “I thought I might be moving here, you know, but it turns out that Marguerite and I are having a girl. So I can go home.” He smiled.
    Diane put a hand on his arm. “Congratulations,” she said.
    “After the boys, it will be quite a different experience having a girl. Marguerite is pleased. She’s given up on trying to make the boys wear dresses on special occasions. Now I may have to install concertina wire on top of the wall around the house. I understand girls can be quite tough on parents.”
    “I’m sure the two of you will manage very well,” said Diane.
    “I heard you are canceling your wedding,” Gregory said.
    “I told Frank I’d wait to make a decision and we would talk. But you’ve seen firsthand what I bring to the marriage.”
    “You’re telling me you invited those maniacs? That seems unlike you,” he said. He went back to looking at his postcards. “I read where paintings of milkmaids in their day were considered sexual. I have to say, I see a serene woman pouring milk. I’m afraid I would make a terrible art critic. I don’t seem to have the knack for all the underlying symbolism that other people see.”
    “I might as well have invited them,” said Diane. “They were after me.”
    “Seems as though you will have to quit working here too,” he said. “Wouldn’t do to expose the museum visitors to deadly criminals.”
    “Frank went through all that—Am I going to move to a deserted island to live out my days, etcetera,” she said.
    “He has a point,” Gregory said, looking at The Girl with a Wine Glass . “Now, she looks like she is about to make some poor decisions. You could, of course, join your CIA or some such group where your ability to draw out bad guys would be welcome.”
    Diane smiled. “That’s a thought. The problem is, I love my life here. I love Frank. I just don’t want to see him or Star hurt.”
    “None of us like to see the people we love hurt.” He put the postcards back in his jacket pocket. “What is so odd about this is it shouldn’t be happening. You should be safe here in your museum—safe even in your crime lab, with its connection to criminals and their doings. I haven’t been able to get a handle on this. I realize now that there was some criminal activity going on at the mission in Brazil that I missed utterly and completely. I’ve accepted that. I believe you are right, that it had to do with smuggling endangered animals and their various parts and selling humans into slavery. But I have no idea who was behind it. I’m completely stumped. Simone must have found more damning evidence than the bag of feathers and bones to have generated this kind of extreme response. I’ve made calls to some environmental policing groups, trying to get a handle on who’s who in that world. No luck so far. Just a lot of information about things we already know, such as how lucrative it is. They gave me a few names, but I didn’t know any of them. David asked for the names so I gave them to him.”
    “I’m going to contact my post office and see if perhaps they lost a package that was supposed to come to me.” Diane shrugged. “David suggested that perhaps Simone set up several post office boxes and has the package being forwarded from post office to post office—letting the U.S. Postal Service keep it in their custody for a while. That’s the kind of thing he might do.”
    “That could be it. She also could have left it with a lawyer to be forwarded to you or to the authorities in the event of her death. Unfortunately, she appears not to have made provisions for a coma,” said Gregory.
    “I don’t suppose Simone’s family received anything,” said Diane. “Would any of them have told