Dressed to Die: A Lindsay Chamberlain Novel (7 page)

Sinjin looked over the jigsaw puzzle of sherds lying on
the white paper. "Do you have to find a special kind of
person to do this?"

"Yeah," said one of the students who was gluing the
pieces together. "A half-wit."

Lindsay smiled and led her brother to a room at the end
of the laboratory. "This is our faunal reference collection."
The room was furnished with rows of metal shelves containing hundreds of identical shoeboxes. Sally sat at a
corner desk reading a stack of papers.

"Each box contains bones of some animal," said Lindsay. She pulled down a box and opened it, revealing the
white paper-thin bones of a bird. "We try to get an adult
male and female as well as several sub-adults of the same
species. We use them to compare with animal bones recovered from a dig, to be sure of our identification."

"You must be right at home among all these bones," he
said, looking at the many boxes. "Where do you get them?"

"Oh, some are from zoos when an animal dies. Many are
roadkill." She replaced the box on the shelf.

Sinjin looked at Lindsay. "My sister collects roadkill?"

"Only if it's not been too flattened," Lindsay replied.
Sinjin laughed out loud and Lindsay grinned at him. "Yeah,
well, you got to do what you got to do."

"How do you ..." Sinjin searched for the right word.
"You know, extract the bones?"

"We skin the animal and put it in a garbage can with a
collection of very efficient dermestid beetles. The bones
are pretty clean after a few days. We clean them up further
with chemicals."

"Nice work," he said as they left the room.

"It's easier than jumping into fires."

"I try to avoid jumping into fires."

Lindsay laughed. "I'm glad you're here. It's nice to see
you looking so well," she said. She frowned suddenly.
"Dad's all right, isn't he?"

"Perfectly healthy as far as I know."

"And you-you're okay, aren't you?"

"I see I should come more often. I'm fine. This is just a
visit. How about I take you to dinner? Is there a good place
to eat in this town?"

"Sure, but why don't I-"

Out of the corner of her eye Lindsay saw one of the students point her out to a well-dressed couple.

"Excuse me a moment," she said, and walked over to
them. "Can I help you?"

The couple looked to be in their sixties. The woman had
beautiful, silver coiffured hair. Her hand was tucked in the
crook of the man's arm. The two of them, she in a blue silk
dress and he in an expensive suit, stood out like peacocks in
the dusty archaeology lab.

"I am Stewart Pryor and this is my wife, Evelyn. We would
like to speak with you privately about our daughter, Shirley."

Oh, no, thought Lindsay. They want me to investigate
their daughter's death.

Stewart Pryor took a manila envelope from his breast
pocket. "You have to change your report" he said. "It's
wrong."

"Report?"

"You did, did you not, examine our daughter's remains?"

"Yes, but-"

"Then we must talk to you." His jaw was firm and his
mouth set in a way that indicated to Lindsay he intended
that she would cooperate.

"You have an office near here?" asked his wife, looking
around at the students and unconsciously brushing the skirt
of her dress.

"This way, please." Lindsay led them to her office and
seated them in front of her desk, then took her place
behind it. Mr. Pryor laid the envelope between them. "I
don't understand-"

"We will explain it to you," said Evelyn Pryor. "You
say in here"-she leaned over and tapped the report with her finger-"that our daughter had no children. She did. A
lovely daughter, Monica, and a precious son, Jeffery."

"I didn't say that she had no children. I said her bones
show no indication of her having borne children."

"Monica and Jeffery are not adopted," said Stewart
Pryor in a way that said the matter was closed.

"What is it you want me to do, exactly?" asked Lindsay.

"Shirley's mother and I want you to change the report.
We don't want her children to ever see it," Mr. Pryor said.

"Autopsy reports rarely make it into the papers. In fact, I
just finished it. How did you get it so soon?" Lindsay
opened the envelope and examined the pages that were
obviously photocopies of the originals.

"That's not your concern," said Pryor, sitting rigidly in
his chair.

His wife dug in her purse and pulled out a snapshot that
she handed to Lindsay. "What, then, do you make of this?"

Lindsay examined the picture and wrinkled her brow. The
snapshot was of Tom and Shirley Foster. Tom had his arm
around Shirley's shoulder. Both were smiling. Shirley was
obviously very pregnant. The analysis of Shirley Foster's
skeleton had been thorough. There had been absolutely no
scars of parturition anywhere in her pelvic area. Her bones
showed no evidence that she had borne even one child, much
less two, yet here she was, very pregnant.

"What are you going to do about that?" Evelyn said.

"Mr. and Mrs. Pryor, this doesn't alter what I observed
on her bones, and it was my observations that I reported.
Understand, my analysis is only one part of a larger report
on her."

They gave her a look that indicated they thought her to
be stubborn beyond reason. Mrs. Pryor sighed and turned
to her husband. "There's the other thing."

"You say here that we starved Shirley when she was a
young girl, and that she might have had some mental dis ease. Shirley was a talented girl, a smart girl. She was a
straight-A student. She graduated from high school when
she was sixteen. She worked hard." His lips quivered as he
spoke about his daughter. "Shirley never gave her mother
and me a minute's trouble. She was a good girl."

"We didn't starve her," said Mrs. Pryor. "You make us
sound like bad parents."

"I didn't say you starved her. I-"

"You as much as did," said Evelyn.

"I said there were signs that she did not receive the
amount of nourishment she needed for proper bone growth.
This could have been due to some condition that caused her
not to absorb nutrients, or from not eating proper food, or
any number of things. I said as much in my report. I also
noted that all her teeth were capped. I simply stated that
there is a possibility that she was bulimic."

"You are saying Shirley had some mental disorder," said
her father.

"No, I-"

"There was nothing wrong with her, nothing. She
worked hard, always did. There is nothing wrong with that."

"There is an attachment from her dentist with the original report. He put in her records that he capped her teeth
because of substantive erosion of the enamel. He recorded
that the erosion was consistent with the presence of stomach acid associated with frequent vomiting."

"She capped her teeth because she was thinking of
becoming a ballerina," said her mother. "She was a wonderful dancer. You can't fault her wanting to look her best."

"I don't fault her. Mr. and Mrs. Pryor, you must know
that I can't change my report because you ask. I have to
report what I observed."

"You were wrong about Monica and Jeffery."

"I know this must be hard for you-"

"You don't know anything." Evelyn Pryor's words came out in a hiss. She leaned toward Lindsay, her dark eyes glittering. "Our daughter was a perfect child. She always did
what Stewart and I wanted and never disappointed us once."
She relaxed back in her chair. "Our mistake was insisting
she marry Tom Foster, and I will regret that until the day I
die. We thought he was a good man. He owned a good business; he came from a family with roots here. His grandmother and my mother were at Winthrop together. We were
wrong about Tom, and now she's dead." She took a lacetrimmed handkerchief from her purse and dabbed her eyes.

"We are grateful to you for finding her so that we can
bury her, but you have to change that report. I don't want
people talking about Shirley like she was crazy," Stewart
Pryor said, taking his wife's hand.

"I'm sorry, I really am, but there's nothing more that I
can do for you," said Lindsay.

"We'll see about that," said Pryor. They both stood, gave
Lindsay a curt nod, and left.

Sally was entertaining Sinjin with tales from their digs
when Lindsay came out of her office.

"That looked serious. They don't want you to be a detective, do they?" Sally asked.

"No, I think they are just working through their grief."
She looked at Sinjin sitting on the corner of one of the mysterious crates waiting to be unpacked. "I don't suppose Dad
gave you any of Papaw's papers to go with this cargo?"

"Nope."

Sally was grinning like she had news she was dying to
tell. "I just figured out that OOF might be Ocmulgee Old
Fields. And 6/35 might be June 1935. Your grandfather did
work in Macon in the thirties, didn't he?"

"Yes, very clever, Sally," Lindsay said. "In the morning, we'll open the crates and see what's in them. How
about getting some of the honors students to help unpack
and catalog."

"Sure. Where are we going to put them?"

Lindsay looked around the lab. That was a good question. Space was at a premium, and there were several
administrators on North Campus, home to a bastion of
bureaucrats, who believed a university is no place to house
"dirt and old garbage," as one of them put it.

"Clear a space in the storage room and put up those
metal shelves stacked in the corner. We'll shelve them temporarily until we can catalog them. If the contents turn out
to be from Ocmulgee, I'll contact them and maybe they'll
have a place to store them. I hope there's some indication
somewhere of what sites they're from."

"I'll get on it right away." Sally turned to Sinjin. "It was
really nice meeting you. I hope you hang around a while."
She gave him a dazzling smile and left to tend to the storage room.

"Nice kid," muttered Sinjin as Lindsay locked up her
office.

"Yes, she is. Look, I've got some steaks in the freezer that I
marinated in Jack Daniel's before I froze them. Why don't we
have a cookout at my place? You'll love it out in the woods."

"Sounds good. I'd like that better than a restaurant.
While I'm thinking of it, do you have a map of Atlanta?
I've got some business there tomorrow."

"Sure." She wanted to ask him what it was; she wanted
to ask him to stay longer. Instead, she walked out with him,
climbed into his Jeep, and let him drive her to her Rover. As
they pulled out of the drive, the police were taking measurements at the corner of Jackson and Baldwin.

THE AROMA OF mesquite from the grilled steaks still
filled the air as Lindsay and Sinjin sat on the porch steps of
her log cabin, drinking cold bottles of beer and looking out
over the pasture where Mandrake grazed. It was a warm
night and the light was fading. An occasional lightning bug
blinked its yellow light.

"You still dance?" he asked.

"Not as much. Both Derrick and I are too busy these
days to practice. We haven't entered a contest"-Lindsay
paused, wrinkling her brow-"in about four years, I suppose. I miss it."

"Weren't you dating him?"

"Yes."

"You still dating?"

"No."

"I kind of liked him the time we met at Mom and Dad's
a few years ago," Sinjin said, taking a swig of his beer.

"He's a nice guy."

"Something happen? Ellen had the idea that the two of
you were pretty serious for a while."

Lindsay thought for a second. She didn't remember ever
talking to her mother about herself and Derrick. "We were,
but we kind of broke it off. He broke it off. He doesn't like
the detective work I do occasionally. He thinks I'm addicted to danger."

Sinjin looked over at her and swallowed a drink of beer.
"Are you?"

"You say that as if you're asking me if I'm an alcoholic."

"I, of all people, know how addictive an adrenaline rush
can be."

Lindsay closed her eyes, trying to imagine her brother
jumping out of an airplane, parachuting into a forest fire.
She couldn't. "Why do you do it?"

"What?" he asked. "Smokejumping?"

"Yes, when-" She didn't finish, but Sinjin did.

"You're asking why I'm a fireman when I could get a
better job. A little snobbish, aren't we?"

"I didn't mean that."

"Well, you come by it honestly. Dad wonders the same
thing."

"That's not fair. I meant when you could do something safer."

"Safer, like being an archaeologist?"

Lindsay reached over and gave him a gentle shove.
"Like being a forester. That's what your degree's in."

"I am a forester. You never answered my question. Are
you addicted to danger?"

"I just like solving puzzles. I don't like the danger."

"Are you sure?"

"Do you think I get a kick out of being kidnapped, shot,
and thrown in a cave and left to die?"

Sinjin stopped, his bottle halfway to his mouth, and
looked at her. "What?"

"I thought you knew."

"I knew about your getting shot in the leg. Dad and
Ellen called when that happened. They told me you were
fine, but I haven't heard about the other stuff."

Lindsay gave him a brief summary of her adventures,
glossing over the dangerous parts. Sinjin listened openmouthed.

"Are you sure Derrick isn't right?"

"Derrick used to help me solve crimes. I don't know
why he's so uptight about me doing it now. Besides, none
of that stuff that happened was my fault."

"No, but when you go after criminals, they are apt to
retaliate. You know that."

"Are you about to lecture me?"

"Maybe. What about this thing you're involved in now,
about those people who showed up today? You aren't
investigating something for them, are you?"

"No. I was called to look for a body and I assisted with
the autopsy. It's my job."