Dust to Dust

guitar. Frank told Diane it was a very expensive guitar.
    Diane sat in her office going over the budget reports when the phone rang.
    “Diane Fallon,” she said.
    “Dr. Fallon. My name is Clara Chandler. I hope I have the right place. I copied the number off the TV screen and, well, my eyesight’s not too good anymore.”
    “What can I do for you?” said Diane.
    “My sister, Patsy Chandler, went missing fifty-six years ago and she looked just like the picture I saw on the news of a girl you found down in a well. You said her name might be Patsy. I hope it’s her. I’d like to take her home. We thought our daddy kilt her and buried her somewheres. He was mean like that.”
    “Would you come in and give us a DNA sample?” asked Diane.
    “What do I have to do?” she asked.
    “Let us take a cotton swab and rub inside your cheek,” she said.
    “Oh, like they do on those crime shows?” she said.
    “Yes,” said Diane.
    “I can do that. My son can bring me down there right now. That would be wonderful if it’s my Patsy. We were twins and I have missed her all these years.”
    “I hope she is your sister too,” said Diane. “I would like to see her claimed by her family.”
    Diane hung up the phone and looked at the mask of Patsy Doe, as they had called her, that Marcella had completed. It sat on a shelf and stared into infinity with empty eyes. Diane was uncertain what to do with it. Marcella said to have it buried with Patsy’s remains—after all, it was made with dust of her bones. Maybe Marcella was right: remains resting, reunited, in peace. Dust to dust.

Turn the page for an excerpt from
the next Diane Fallon Forensic Investigation,
coming soon from Obsidian.

    The gray sky grew darker as Diane watched. The storm was coming fast. She tried not to show her unease as she listened to Roy Barre going on about his grandfather’s collection of Indian arrowheads that he was loaning to the museum. The two of them stood beside the museum’s SUV, the four-wheel-drive vehicle she had driven to his mountain home. Diane had the driver’s-side door open, key in hand, ready to get in when he wound down, or at least paused in his narrative.
    “So, you going to put a plaque up on the wall with Granddaddy’s name?” Barre said. “He’d like that. He picked up arrowheads from the time he was a little boy. Found a lot of them in the creek bed. That big pretty one I showed you of red flint—he was crossing the creek, looked down, and there it was, big as life right there with the river rocks.”
    Diane had heard the story several times already.
    “Yes,” she said, “there will be a plaque. Our archaeologist, Jonas Briggs, will oversee the display.”
    Roy Barre was a tall, rounded, cheerful man in his mid-fifties, with a ruddy face, graying beard, and brown hair down to his collar. In his overalls and plaid shirt, he didn’t look as though he owned most of the mountain and the one next to it. Even with the oncoming storm, had she consented, he would at this moment be showing her the property and the crisscross of creeks where his grandfather had found his arrowheads.
    “Granddaddy didn’t dig for them, even when he was a little boy—he knowed that was wrong. You know, some people look for Indian burials and dig up the bones looking for pottery and nice arrowheads. Granddaddy didn’t do that. No, he didn’t bother anybody’s resting place. He just picked up arrowheads he found on the ground or in the creek. A lot of them was in the creek, washed from somewhere. He never knew from where. He just eyed the creek bottom and, sure enough, he’d always find something. He sure found some pretty ones. Yes, he did.”
    The trees whipped back and forth and the wind picked up with a roar.
    “Roy, you let that woman go. I swear, you’ve told her the same stories three times already. A storm’s coming and she needs to get off the mountain.”
    Holding her sweater close around her, Ozella Barre, Roy’s wife, came down the long set of concrete steps leading from her house on the side of the hill.
    “Listen to that wind,” she said. “Lord, it sounds like a train, don’t it?”
    “Mama’s right, Miss Fallon, you need to be getting down the mountain before the rain comes. The roads can get pretty bad up here.”
    “Thank you for your hospitality and the loan of your grandfather’s collection,” said Diane. “I’m sure our archaeologist will be calling to ask you to tell him your stories again. I