The Skeleton Crew by Deborah Halber

contents of her stomach that she had had a hamburger and french fries. That means she had recently been in town.
    â€œIt wasn’t evident how she had selected this place to sunbathe. She secreted herself back in there. She was away from where any member of the public could see her. But someone knew she was there, or . . . somebody from one of the shacks stumbled on her . . . Even if there was someone who lived in one of those dune shacks who was offended by that kind of activity and either watched her go in there or stumbled upon her, for them to beat her like that and cut off her hands, why would they do that?
    â€œIf it was a person who was offended by her nude sunbathing or was some kind of sex maniac and they killed her, why would they cut off her hands? It doesn’t make sense.” Hankins’s monologue slowed, as if he’d suddenly become aware that he’d been rambling. He had one last thought. “Whoever killed her knew who she was,” he said, “and killed her for a purpose.”
----
    Several years into the investigation of the Lady of the Dunes murder, all the usual avenues of police and detective work had yielded almost no results, so in a desperate measure, Provincetown selectmen found town money to send Chief Jimmy Meads to New York City to visit a psychic.
    Meads drove six hours, battled Manhattan’s weaving, honking taxis, and made his way to a rather elegant address. A doorman ushered him in and Meads took the elevator to an apartment where he placed on a table a stack of bulging envelopes. Yolana Bard, known as the “queen of psychics,” had for years offered her services to politicians, celebrities, and law enforcement officials. Now she bent over the case materials Meads had placed before her.
    Suddenly she shrieked, “I sense blood!”
    â€œI had a cup of tea on a saucer in my hand and I damn near spilled it,” Meads recalled.
    Yolana had come across a sealed package containing a bloody object from the site where the Lady of the Dunes had been murdered. She then reported a vision of water dripping, indicating a location on the beachwhere she said the victim’s hands had been buried. Meads was elated. The hands would provide a key piece of evidence—especially if they could lift a set of prints. He thanked the genial redhead and sped back to Provincetown.
    Yolana’s unfamiliarity with Provincetown—she had never been to Cape Cod—didn’t seem to impede her ability to weigh in on the case. But she could give Meads only vague directions to a place that he took to be the west end of Commercial Street. This street overflowed in the summer with tourists strolling in and out of waterfront galleries and funky shops, ice cream cones in hand. There was the occasional sighting of Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, Tennessee Williams, celebrated artists, and flamboyantly dressed drag queens working the nightclubs. At home, piecing together the tidbits that Yolana had divulged, Meads went to the phone book. He decided, finally, that the place the psychic had alluded to must be the old Ace of Spades.
    The Ace of Spades was one of P-town’s first lesbian bars, remembered by a patron as small, dark, and cozy, with wooden barrels as bar stools, redolent of stale liquor. During the 1970s, the place had morphed into another gay bar, the Pied Piper, that attracted visitors from as far as Montreal and Kansas City. It was a weathered, gray building on the water’s edge. In those days, drainage from the bar sinks trickled directly through rough wooden floorboards onto the beach below. Dripping water, sand, a location in town—all seemed perfectly aligned with Yolana’s vision. But when Meads got there, it turned out that a basement had been added to the structure two months earlier. What was once accessible space was now a solid block of cement.
----
    On the phone, Jim Hankins and I fell silent for a time. The next time