One Grave Too Many

about the provenience of the arrowhead, she was heading back to the hospital. Vanessa Van Ross smiled at her as she continued to fan herself with the budget figures.

    Diane got the room across from Frank again. She didn’t think she’d ever be glad to be in the hospital, but the bed felt good, and all she wanted to do was sleep. Even though Jonas hadn’t yet received the fax about the sites where the arrowhead may have come from, she felt optimistic. The last thing she did before getting Laura to take her back to the hospital was to fax the sheriff all the information she had on the skeleton. Surely, someone somewhere would recognize the description.
    Getting Grayson off her back and rooting out the vipers among her board members was a major relief. And although Jonas didn’t know it, she was going to beat him at chess with her queen sacrifice. Adding to all of that, Frank was much improved—and it was only five thirty. Now all she had to do was wait for the sleeping pill to kick in. She didn’t even know it when she fell asleep.
    She dreamed of snakes. Black snakes crawling across the table in the boardroom. The boardroom was ankle-deep in them, with no place to step. Diane jerked awake. She hated snakes.
    The hospital was quiet. She looked at the clock next to her bed. Three thirty-two in the morning. That was a long sleep, and her bladder was full. She went to the bathroom. When she came out, she felt like she needed to walk. She put on her robe and walked out into the dimly lit hallway. At the far end of the corridor two nurses were chatting at the nurses’ station. She walked across the hall and peeked in Frank’s room.
    Henry was dozing in a chair. Frank was asleep. Her presence roused Henry, and he came out to talk to her.
    “How are you feeling?” he said.
    “Better. Restless. I imagine you and your brother are pretty restless yourselves.”
    “We’re doing OK. Actually, it’s hard to get Linc to take a vacation. He tends to be a workaholic. Now he has nothing to do but rest. His wife told me to keep him here for as long as I can.” He and Diane laughed together.
    “I haven’t seen your sister lately.”
    “She went home to see Mom and Dad.”
    Diane shook her head. “All this must be really strange to you and your brother.”
    “Well, yeah, it is. I feel like I got dropped into a Sam Spade movie.”
    Diane and Henry talked a while. She enjoyed getting to know Frank’s family. She’d have liked to get to know his sister too.
    “You look like you need to get back to bed,” said Henry after a while.
    “You’re right. Thanks for the company.” She walked back into her room and climbed in bed and went to sleep. She could see Henry standing outside Frank’s door. For the first time in a long while, she felt safe.
    Diane dozed for a while and then jerked awake. She wished she had another sleeping pill. An uneasy feeling that there was something she should know stood on the edge of her dreams like an apparition shaking her awake every time she slipped into comfortable sleep.
    The clock in her room said it was five twenty. She tried to go back to sleep, but it was no use. She got out of bed and went to Frank’s room. Henry was sound asleep; so was Frank. She picked up the computer by Henry’s chair and went back to her room. There was a chair in the corner of the room near a phone jack. She pulled another wooden chair up and sat the computer on it as if it were a desk. She plugged in the computer, booted it up and connected the phone cord to the jack. She’d remembered that missing persons for each state are posted on the Internet. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? She could look herself. But instead of going to the missing persons site, she went to the Google Internet search engine and typed in the words missing, male, hockey, spring break, 1998.
    It occurred to Diane that people oftentimes put up Web pages seeking help in finding a loved one—a way of tacking up missing persons posters across the world.
    She got 1753 hits on the first search. Too many. Glancing down the list, she saw that one hit was about a missing male cat whose owner played field hockey. She needed to tweak her search parameters. It was amazing how many hits she got with what she thought was an unusual selection of key words. She got short stories and lots of hockey sites. On her third tweak of the parameters, she realized she should put quotations around “spring break” so that it would be read as a