The Bone Bed

tucked under three pillows. The one nearest the bedside table where the phone is plugged in has been plumped but is wrinkled, the way pillows look when they’ve been slept on.
    “But they’ve also found this same soaplike condition when bodies have been sealed in watertight coffins and vaults, isn’t that correct?” Burke isn’t going to quit, and she should. “Bodies forming adipocere when there’s no water.”
    “
Watertight
isn’t always as advertised,” I reply.
    “You seem to believe you’re infallible.”
    “Nobody is infallible. But a lot of people are misinformed.”
    I pull back the duvet, and the sheets and pillows underneath are perfectly smooth on one side of the bed and wrinkled on the side near the phone. I notice cat fur that looks short and grayish-white.
    “The linens weren’t changed after whoever slept in here last.” I continue taking photographs of everything I look at. “Someone slept or lay down on the right side of the bed next to the phone. It appears the cat was in the bed at some point. I’d like to check the bedside drawer.”
    A night guard in a blue plastic container is labeled with the name and address of the West Palm Beach dentist who caused Peggy Stanton so much damage and unnecessary expense. I set two prescription bottles on the table and photograph them, then place them in separate plastic evidence bags.
    “Muscle relaxers prescribed by her dentist, Dr. Pulling,” I let Burke know. “Any meds should go in to the labs. And I’d like to collect the night guards. Dr. Adams might want to take a look at them.”
    “What I’m getting at, Kay, and what I need you to objectively comment on—” she starts to say, and I cut her off.
    “Why would you assume I might be anything other than objective?” I open the closet door.
    “I’m sure you can imagine why I might be concerned.” Her tone is no longer accusing or hostile, but sympathetic, as if she can well understand why I would cover for Marino, why I might slant or even falsify autopsy findings for him.
    I run my gloved hands through the clothing on hangers, a lot of pantsuits and slacks and blouses that are prim and old-fashioned, with hanging cedar planks spaced along the rod. I don’t see a dress or a skirt, and no blazers or jackets have antique military buttons or even distinctive ones.
    “You care about him,” Burke says, as if it’s a good thing.
    Peggy Stanton lost her family and never moved beyond it, everything old and the same, the future she looked forward to crashing with that plane. Her existence was rigidly maintained and obsessively protected, and it’s hard for me to imagine she was on Twitter.
    “I’m wondering if you’ve come across a computer?” I ask.
    “Not yet.”
    Photographs displayed on tables and dressers are of an era when Peggy Stanton had people in her life she loved, her husband a pleasant-looking man with mischievous dark eyes and a lock of dark hair falling over his brow, the two girls into horses and swimming, one of them into airplanes. None of the photographs is recent. Peggy Stanton isn’t in any of them.
    “If she has no computer, how was she on Twitter?” I ask.
    “Maybe a laptop she took with her. Maybe her phone, her iPad, whatever she had with her when she left here.”
    “I see nothing to suggest she was interested in technology,” I reply. “In fact, quite to the contrary, if you look at the old TV in here, at the princess phone.”
    I open another closet, where button-up sweaters are folded on shelves with cedar blocks tucked between them, and shoes arranged on a rack on the floor are crepe-soled and low-heeled, made for comfort, not style. I’m not surprised that Peggy Stanton’s hair was prematurely white and that she didn’t bother to dye or style it or that her nail polish was an understated pale pink, almost flesh-colored. I see nothing to indicate she made any effort to be alluring or attractive beyond what the dentist did to her, and I suspect she was talked into those procedures.
    “No Tulle or Audrey Marybeth or Peruvian Connection, not a single label like that.” I look at a men’s outback hat box, thick with dust, on the closet floor, PHOTOGRAPHS printed in neat block letters on the lid. “Most of her clothing is size eight or ten, not size six. I’d like to open this.”
    Inside are framed photographs that I look through, all of them of her, a pretty woman with jet-black hair and dark sparkling eyes, vibrant and not at all the