door, so if you need me, come on over. My little girl is away at summer camp till this weekend, so I’m all on my own.” “Thanks so much, I may be taking you up on that,” I said, trying to beam goodwill and neighborliness ~ 64 ~
~ A Bone to Pick ~
enough to soften the fact that I did not want a pro- longed conversation and I wanted her gone, things I was afraid I’d made offensively obvious. My sigh of relief was so loud after I’d shut and locked the door behind her that I hoped she wouldn’t hear it.
I sank down into the chair again and covered my face with my hands, preparing to think. Sweet, fragile, silver-haired Jane Engle, school li- brarian and churchgoer, had murdered someone and put the victim’s skull in her window seat. Then she’d had the window seat carpeted over so no one would think to look there for anything. The carpet was in ex- cellent condition, but not new. Jane had lived in that house with a skull in her living room for some years. That alone would take some hard getting used to. I should call the police. My hand actually picked up the receiver before I remembered that the phone was disconnected and that I owed Jane Engle. I owed her big-time.
Jane had left me the house and the money and the skull.
I could not call the police and expose Jane to the world as a murderess. She had counted on that. Drawn irresistibly, I went to the window seat and opened it again.
~ 65 ~
~ Charlaine Harris ~
“Who the hell are you?” I asked the skull. With considerable squeamishness, I lifted it out with both hands. It wasn’t white like bones looked in the movies, but brownish. I didn’t know if it was a man’s or a woman’s skull, but the cause of death seemed appar- ent; there was a hole in the back of the skull, a hole with jagged edges.
How on earth had elderly Jane managed to deliver such a blow? Who could this be? Perhaps a visitor had fallen and bashed the back of his head on something, and Jane had been afraid she’d be accused of killing the person? That was a familiar and almost comfort- ing plot to a regular mystery reader. Then I thought in a muddled way of Arsenic and Old Lace . Perhaps this was a homeless person, or a solitary old man with no family? But Lawrenceton was not large enough for a missing person to go unnoticed, I thought. At least I couldn’t recall such a case for years.
Not since Carey Osland’s husband had left to pick up diapers and had never returned.
I almost dropped the skull. Oh my Lord! Was this Mike Osland? I put the skull down on Jane’s coffee table carefully, as if I might hurt it if I wasn’t gentle. And what would I do with it now? I couldn’t put it back in the window seat, now that I’d loosened the carpet and made the place conspicuous, and there was ~ 66 ~
~ A Bone to Pick ~
no way I could get the carpet to look as smooth as it had been. Maybe now that the house had been bur- gled, I could hide the skull in one of the places the searcher had already looked?
That raised a whole new slew of questions. Was this skull the thing the searcher had been looking for? If Jane had killed someone, how did anyone else know about it? Why come looking now? Why not just go to the police and say, “Jane Engle has a skull in her house somewhere, I’m certain.” No matter how crazy they’d sound, that was what most people would do. Why had this person done otherwise?
This added up to more questions than I answered at the library in a month. Plus, those questions were a lot easier to answer. “Can you recommend a good mys- tery without any, you know, sex, for my mother?” was a lot easier to answer than “Whose skull is sitting on my coffee table?”
Okay, first things first. Hide the skull. I felt remov- ing it from the house would be safest. (I say “felt” be- cause I was pretty much beyond reasoning.) I got a brown Kroger bag from the kitchen and eased the skull into it. I put a can of coffee in another bag, figuring two bags were less conspicuous than one.
~ A Bone to Pick ~
enough to soften the fact that I did not want a pro- longed conversation and I wanted her gone, things I was afraid I’d made offensively obvious. My sigh of relief was so loud after I’d shut and locked the door behind her that I hoped she wouldn’t hear it.
I sank down into the chair again and covered my face with my hands, preparing to think. Sweet, fragile, silver-haired Jane Engle, school li- brarian and churchgoer, had murdered someone and put the victim’s skull in her window seat. Then she’d had the window seat carpeted over so no one would think to look there for anything. The carpet was in ex- cellent condition, but not new. Jane had lived in that house with a skull in her living room for some years. That alone would take some hard getting used to. I should call the police. My hand actually picked up the receiver before I remembered that the phone was disconnected and that I owed Jane Engle. I owed her big-time.
Jane had left me the house and the money and the skull.
I could not call the police and expose Jane to the world as a murderess. She had counted on that. Drawn irresistibly, I went to the window seat and opened it again.
~ 65 ~
~ Charlaine Harris ~
“Who the hell are you?” I asked the skull. With considerable squeamishness, I lifted it out with both hands. It wasn’t white like bones looked in the movies, but brownish. I didn’t know if it was a man’s or a woman’s skull, but the cause of death seemed appar- ent; there was a hole in the back of the skull, a hole with jagged edges.
How on earth had elderly Jane managed to deliver such a blow? Who could this be? Perhaps a visitor had fallen and bashed the back of his head on something, and Jane had been afraid she’d be accused of killing the person? That was a familiar and almost comfort- ing plot to a regular mystery reader. Then I thought in a muddled way of Arsenic and Old Lace . Perhaps this was a homeless person, or a solitary old man with no family? But Lawrenceton was not large enough for a missing person to go unnoticed, I thought. At least I couldn’t recall such a case for years.
Not since Carey Osland’s husband had left to pick up diapers and had never returned.
I almost dropped the skull. Oh my Lord! Was this Mike Osland? I put the skull down on Jane’s coffee table carefully, as if I might hurt it if I wasn’t gentle. And what would I do with it now? I couldn’t put it back in the window seat, now that I’d loosened the carpet and made the place conspicuous, and there was ~ 66 ~
~ A Bone to Pick ~
no way I could get the carpet to look as smooth as it had been. Maybe now that the house had been bur- gled, I could hide the skull in one of the places the searcher had already looked?
That raised a whole new slew of questions. Was this skull the thing the searcher had been looking for? If Jane had killed someone, how did anyone else know about it? Why come looking now? Why not just go to the police and say, “Jane Engle has a skull in her house somewhere, I’m certain.” No matter how crazy they’d sound, that was what most people would do. Why had this person done otherwise?
This added up to more questions than I answered at the library in a month. Plus, those questions were a lot easier to answer. “Can you recommend a good mys- tery without any, you know, sex, for my mother?” was a lot easier to answer than “Whose skull is sitting on my coffee table?”
Okay, first things first. Hide the skull. I felt remov- ing it from the house would be safest. (I say “felt” be- cause I was pretty much beyond reasoning.) I got a brown Kroger bag from the kitchen and eased the skull into it. I put a can of coffee in another bag, figuring two bags were less conspicuous than one.
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