“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 saw me in a fashion magazine, Sheriff. No, don’t even consider that, I’m just joking with you. I’m not a model. I’m sure I would have remembered you, sir, if I’d ever met you before.”
“Well, that’s likely enough,” he said, nodding. “Tyler, you got any thoughts about this?”
Tyler shook his head.
Sheriff Gaffney looked as if he would say something else, then he shut his mouth. However, he gave Tyler another long look. “I’ll be in touch,” he said, snapped out a sharp salute, and walked to his car, a brown Ford with a light bar over the top. At the last moment, he looked back at them, and he was frowning. Then he managed to squeeze his bulk into the driver’s side. He hadn’t been interested in her background, a blessing. Evidently, he realized that she could have had nothing to do with this and so who she was, where she was from, and what she did for a living simply did not matter.
“He’s amazing,” Becca said as he drove away. “Too bad he didn’t have a daughter to go with all those dirty boys.”
She looked to see that Tyler was staring down at his feet. She lightly touched her fingers to his arm. “What’s wrong? You’re afraid I really am going to be hysterical about finding that poor girl?”
“No, it’s not that. You saw the sheriff. Even though he didn’t really say anything, it was clear enough what he was thinking.”
“I don’t know what you mean. What’s wrong, Tyler?”
“I realize it occurred to him, just before he got into his car, that the skeleton might well be Ann.”
Becca looked at him blankly, slowly shaking her head back and forth.
“My wife. She wore Calvin Klein jeans.”
8
Becca walked into the Riptide Pharmacy in the middle of Foxglove Avenue the next morning and found, to her horror, that she was the center of attention. For someone who wanted to fade into the woodwork, she wasn’t doing it very well. Everywhere she went, she was stared at, questioned, introduced to relatives. She was the girl who’d found the skeleton. She was even given special treatment at the Union 76 gas station at the end of Poison Oak Circle. The Food Fort manager, Mrs. Dobbs, wanted her autograph. Three people told her she looked familiar.
It was too late to dye her hair black. She went home and stayed there. She got at least twenty phone calls that day. She didn’t see Tyler, but he’d been right about what the sheriff had thought, because everybody else was thinking it, too, and was talking about it over coffee, to their neighbors, and not all that quietly. Tyler knew it, too, of course, but he didn’t say anything when he came over later that evening. He looked stoic. She had wanted to yell at everyone that they were wrong, that Tyler was an excellent man, that no way could he have hurt anyone, much less his wife, but she knew she couldn’t take the chance, couldn’t call attention to herself anymore. It was too dangerous for her, and so she listened to everyone talk about Ann, Tyler’s wife and Sam’s mother, who had supposedly disappeared fifteen months before without a word to anybody, not her husband, not her son. Ann had had a mother until two years before, but Mildred Kendred had died and left Ann all alone with Tyler. She’d had no other relatives to hassle Tyler about where his wife had supposedly gone. And just look at poor little Sam, so quiet, so withdrawn, he’d probably seen something, everyone was sure of that. That he wasn’t at all afraid of his stepfather just meant that the poor little boy had blocked the worst of it out.
Oh, yes, it all made sense now to everyone. Tyler had bashed his wife on the head—she probably wanted to leave him, that was it—and then he’d bricked her in the wall in Jacob Marley’s basement. And little Sam knew something, because he’d changed right after his mother disappeared.
Tyler remained stoic during the following days, saying nothing about all the speculation, ignoring the sidelong looks from people who were supposedly his friends. He went about his business, seemingly oblivious of the stares.
He was in misery, Becca knew that, but there was nothing she could do except say over and over, “Tyler, I know it isn’t Ann. They’ll prove it was someone else, you’ll see.”
“How?”
“If they can’t figure out who she was, then they’ll check for runaways. There are DNA tests. They’ll find out. Then there are going to be a whole lot of folk apologizing to you on their hands and knees.”