.
shook her head, sitting in a camp chair while Donovan pulled a bottle of water out of a small cooler. She took a long drink. “This house could be made of gold, and I wouldn’t like it. Until you showed up with your plans and permits, my life was perfect.”
“Perfect? I don’t think anyone’s life is perfect.”
“My life’s not perfect now.”
He decided to give her a break and change the subject. “If you know the exact rodeo, can you find out if someone else finaled, maybe in a different event, and had the same initials?”
“We hope. Sam is checking. I guess they want to authenticate it. See if it’s the knife made for my dad by the Rannik company. Both knives that is.”
“Who did the initials?” Donovan asked.
“They did, at least on Dad’s. He says it’s common for a company to have a booth right at a rodeo event.”
“That’s good. Because it means anyone could have purchased the knife and asked for the same initials. Not just the winners.”
“The difference is Dad’s knife also has the logo of the rodeo branded into the handle.”
“Does the one we found have the logo?” Donovan thought about the mound of dirt no longer cordoned off but still as the medical examiner left it.
Her sudden look made him rethink what he’d said.
We.
It wasn’t the word but how he’d said it. Making them more or less a team.
* * *
“Sam won’t tell us.” For a moment, she thought Donovan was going to scoot his chair closer, reach out for her. That was silly. He was the enemy. If not for this house, there’d be no body and no knife.
She shook her head a little harder than she meant to. Those kinds of thoughts did no good. “Dad having that knife physically in his possession was really...” Her words tapered off. She didn’t know how to finish. Her dad wasn’t under suspicion, not really, especially for a crime where there were no witnesses and the body hadn’t even been identified.
“Amazing,” Donovan said. “And all because the home owner decided he wanted to add a circular driveway.”
Around him the house loomed, like a monster ready to engulf whatever got in its way, whether land or human.
After a moment, when she didn’t respond, he queried, “Museum closed today?”
Emily nodded. “It’s closed every Sunday and Monday. Monday because of numbers and Sunday for a day of rest.”
He arched an eyebrow.
“Do you work on Sunday?” she asked.
“If I need to.”
“Did you work yesterday? I didn’t see you at church.”
He laughed, but she caught something in his eyes, maybe sadness. “You’ve never seen me at church. I don’t attend.”
“Did you ever?” This was not the conversation she meant to have. She was here to look for clues.
He took a long gulp of his water before answering, “Yes, a long time ago I went to church. Why are you asking?”
“It was at church that I found out you were building this house.”
“You mean people were praying for me before I even arrived?”
“No, more like people were talking about you. I heard about it from your mailman.”
“That’s a first. I don’t think I’ve received any mail here.”
“It was added to his route. He mentioned it to me and said he’d driven by this lot after delivering mail nearby. I almost fell out of the pew when he described some builder out at Ancient Trails Road already making decisions about where to put utilities, a septic system and driveway.”
“Still not doing so well with driveways,” Donovan mourned.
“And I am not doing so well in stopping you.” She’d offered God a dozen apologies throughout that day because after what the mailman shared, she’d not heard a word of the sermon.
Emily had lost valuable time. The land had already been sold and paid for, making her protests too little and too late. Donovan Russell had been a brick wall when it came to reason.
She’d always been more of a husky, taking hold and shaking until she got her way. And she hated losing.
“You’ve stopped me now. I still don’t have a full crew and I’ve been advised to leave the area around the grave alone, just in case it’s a crime scene.”
“That’s why I’m here.” She finished her water and stood. “I want to see if there’s anything I missed.”
He stood, too, but didn’t move toward the door. “I don’t think there’s as much as a rock left. They bagged everything.”
“I want to see if I can figure how he got there—”
Donovan finished her sentence. “Vehicle, animal, footprints or shoe marks.”
“Yes,” she said slowly.
“They did all that.”
“What did they decide?”
“That they agreed with your original assessment that the body had been here more than thirty years.”
“I really wish it had been here two hundred and thirty years.”
“Life’s not always fair.”
* * *
Emily wasn’t telling Donovan something he didn’t already know.
He followed her back through the living room and foyer and out to the crime scene. Except for the cordon tape and markers, it was just a hole.
“I’d think it was ready for a hot tub if it wasn’t in the front yard,” Donovan tried to joke.
She, apparently, didn’t think he was funny.
“So, what are we going to do first?” he queried. She didn’t answer, just stood looking down at where the skeleton used to be.
The whole thing spooked Donovan somewhat. He just wished he could, in good conscience, fill the hole back in. Without meaning to, he stepped too close to the edge of the hole so a few kernels of dirt fell back into the grave.
Emily’s eyes grew big.
“What?”
“I can’t help but think of Ecclesiastes and ‘the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.’”
He nodded, thinking she was a whole lot more connected to the earth and to family than he was.
“Just think,” she said softly, “some mother, wife, sister, daughter, might be waiting for the return of a man who no longer lives. He’s been buried in this shallow grave and forgotten.” She never ceased to surprise him. Compassion was a trait he knew he needed to develop.
“The only clue to his identity,” she continued, “a knife that looks identical to one my father owns, down to the initials.”
“A knife your father still has,” Donovan reminded her. It somewhat amazed him that their roles had switched, and now he wanted to stop work and help her. The woman whose job it was to ruin his day, either by producing a five-page petition with the names of Apache Creek residents who didn’t want their view marred by a minimansion, or by going to her knees next to what could have been the ancient bones of a Native American, claiming there might be more and gloating that she’d be here a long time.
He almost wished it had been a Native American skeleton.