Riptide

something loose," he said, bending over to examine
    the wall closely. "Looks like old Jacob stuffed her in there
    pretty good. Not such a good job with the concrete and bricks,
    though. It shouldn't have collapsed like that, nothing else in here
    did."
    "Old Jacob was a homicidal maniac?"
    "Eh?" He spun around. "Oh no, Ms. Powell. He just didn't like
    nobody hanging around his place. He was a real loner, once
    Miranda up and died on him."
    "Who was Miranda? His wife?"
    "Oh no. She was his golden retriever. He buried his wife so
    long ago I can't even remember her. Yep, she lived to be thirteen,
    just keeled over one day."
    "His wife was only thirteen?"
    "No, his golden retriever, Miranda. She just up and died. Old
    Jacob was never the same after that. Losing someone you love, so I
    hear, can be real hard on a man. My Maude promised me a long
    time ago that she'd outlive me, so maybe I'd never have to know
    what it's like."
    Becca followed the sheriff back up the basement stairs. She
    looked back once at the ghastly pile of white bones wearing Calvin
    Klein jeans and a sexy pink tank top. Poor girl. She thought of the
    Edgar Allan Poe tale The Telltale Heart and prayed that this girl had
    been dead before she was stuffed in that wall.
    Sheriff Gaffney had laid the skull on top of the skeleton's chest.
    An hour and a half later, Tyler stood next to her, off to the side
    of the front porch. Dr. Baines, shorter than Becca, whiplash thin, big glasses, came out nearly at a run, followed by two young men in white coats carrying the skeleton carefully on a gurney.

"I never thought Mr. Marley could murder anyone," Dr. Baines
    said, his voice fast and low. "Funny how things happen, isn't it? All
    this time, no one knew, no one even guessed." He pushed his glasses
    up on his nose, nodded to Becca and to Tyler, then spoke briefly to
    the men as they gently lifted the gurney into the back of the van.
    The unmarked white van pulled away, followed by Dr. Baines's
    car. "Dr. Baines is our local physician. He got on the phone to the
    medical examiner in Augusta after I called him about the skeleton.
    The ME told him what to do, which is kind of dumb, since he's a
    doctor and I'm an officer of the law, and of course I'd be really
    careful around the skeleton and take pictures from all angles and be
    careful not to mess up the crime scene."
    Becca remembered him carefully setting the skull on the skeleton's
    chest. But he was right, with a skeleton, who cared?
    Sheriff Gaffney said on a shrug, "In any case, Dr. Baines will take
    the skeleton into Augusta to the medical examiner and then we'll see.
    Sheriff Gaffney looked out at the two dozen people who were
    hovering about and shook his head and waved them away. Of
    course no one moved. They continued talking, pointing at the
    house, maybe even at her.
    Sheriff Gaffney said, "They'll go on home in a bit. Just natural
    human curiosity, that's all. Now, Ms. Powell, I know you're upset
    and all, being a female with fine sensibilities, just like my Maude,
    but I ask that you keep yourself calm for just a while longer."
    He had to be about the same age as her father would have been
    had he lived, Becca thought, and smiled at him then, because he
    meant well. "I'll try, Sheriff. You don't have any daughters, do
    you?"
    "No, ma'am, just a bunch of boys, all hard-noses, always back-talking
    me, and covered with mud and sweat half the time. Not at

all the same thing for little girls. My Maude would have given anything
    for a little girl, but God didn't send us one, just all them dirty
    boys.
    "Now, Ms. Powell, Dr. Baines will be talking to the folk in the
    medical examiner's office in Augusta--that's our capital, you
    know--once he gets there. They'll do an autopsy, or whatever it is
    they do on a mess of bones. The folk up there have lots of formal
    training, so they'll know what they're doing. Like I told you, they'll
    document that old Jacob or somebody hit her right in the forehead,
    smashed her head in. They'll determine that it was real mean,
    vicious, that blow. In the meantime we gotta find out who she is.
    There wasn't any ID on her. You got any more ideas about it?"
    "Calvin Klein jeans have been popular since the early to mid-eighties.
    That means that she wasn't murdered and sealed behind
    that wall before 1980."
    Sheriff Gaffney carefully wrote that down. He hummed softly
    while he wrote. He looked up then and stared at her. "You sure do
    look familiar, Ms. Powell."
    "Maybe you