One Grave Less

said he asked nothing about the events that happened here in the museum last evening?”
    “He didn’t. I thought that was odd,” Martin said.
    He stood there awkwardly, as if searching for something else to say, shifting slightly from one foot to the other. He was going through, Diane guessed, what people often go through when confronted with an accusation about someone they know. Not believing it but, at the same time, entertaining the notion that it might be true.
    Hell. What some people will say .
    “Thank you, Martin,” she said. “I’ll find out what this is about.”
    He nodded, gave her a lopsided self-conscious smile, and made his exit—a little quickly, thought Diane.
    She turned off the lights, closed and locked the door to the boardroom. Outside the door in the hallway she smelled the familiar odor of the treacly perfume Madge Stewart wore. Diane was thinking that the scent certainly had staying power.
    As she walked past the door to the storage closet adjoining the boardroom, she heard a faint noise from inside. She stopped, opened the closet door, and found herself confronting a wide-eyed and very much surprised Madge Stewart.
    “Are you lost?” said Diane.
    Madge smoothed her frizzy hair with a hand.
    “Lost? I, uh, I guess I am.” She attempted to regain her composure, smoothing her frizzy hair again. “I wasn’t watching where I was going.”
    She fled the closet, her shoes clicking on the granite floor of the museum as she hurried down the hallway.
    “This is just great,” Diane whispered to herself.
    In the back of the closet was a door that opened into the boardroom. Madge obviously had been listening to Diane’s conversation with Thormond. That was all that was needed to make a bad situation worse. Madge would spread the rumor of Diane’s involvement with drug smugglers to everyone she knew.
    Diane’s own heels clicked on the floor as she made her way to her osteology office. She had two offices, one for each hat she wore—museum director and crime lab director. Her museum office was decorated with Escher prints, photographs of her caving, paintings, and a desk fountain. And it had an attached lounge with a full bathroom.
    Her osteology office, by contrast, was small with pale walls and comfortable no-frills furniture. There was adequate space, but no more. On the wall opposite her desk hung a watercolor of a lone wolf hunting. Perhaps that was symbolic, she thought, as she sat down at her desk and reached for the phone.
    Diane called the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper and asked for Brian Mathews.
    “I have a note on my desk saying he wanted to speak with me,” she said.
    It was almost true. She did have a note on her desk. And no doubt, at some point he probably would want to speak with her.
    “Oh, really? Let me see.” The woman answering the phone sounded confused. “Well, you are a museum, right?”
    “Yes,” Diane confirmed. She probably read the caller ID .
    “It must have been about Machu Picchu. That’s where he is. Are you following his blog?”
    Blog?
    “No,” Diane said. “He has a blog?”
    Diane searched for his name on the AJC Web site using her computer while she was talking. She found quickly that Brian Mathews was a travel reporter currently on vacation, going to major archaeological sites in Mexico and Central and South America. He was recording his trip on a blog at the AJC Web site.
    Odd , thought Diane.
    “I’ll wait until he contacts the museum again,” she said, thanking the woman.
    Machu Picchu. That’s in Peru .
    Diane sat for a moment, questions running through her mind about Mathews’ call to Martin Thormond. Did Mathews call from Peru? Had he been talking to someone who wished her harm? Someone who thought telling a reporter lies was a way to hurt her? Was it really Mathews . . . or someone pretending to be a reporter?
    Damn . As if she didn’t have enough problems at the moment. She stood up and smoothed her blazer. One problem at a time .
    Her office was adjacent to her osteology lab, which connected to the crime lab. She left her office intending to pass through her bone lab . . . stopping abruptly when she saw a box on the metal table. It was one of the crime lab boxes used to store bones and other evidence.
    The bone from the backpack , she thought.
    She looked in the box. It was there, lying softly but securely on brown paper over batting—the small upper arm bone of a child. It was a sad little bone. Bones of