One Grave Too Many

my ears.”
    “What do you mean, no ?”
    “No, I don’t do that anymore.”
    “Don’t do what?”
    “Forensic work. I don’t do it anymore.”
    There was such a long stretch of silence on the phone that Diane thought he might have hung up. “You still there?”
    “But that’s what you do,” he said.
    “Not anymore.”
    “Look, this is off the record. It’s only one bone.”
    “I don’t care. There are other bone experts you can take it to. Get them . . . One bone? You have only one damn bone? There’s probably nothing I could do with that anyway.”
    “It’s half a bone, really. You can tell me if it’s human.”
    “If that’s all you want to know, any decent osteology student can tell you that.” If you can find one, she thought, watching hers fumble with the sloth. “But I can’t do it.”
    “It may belong to someone I know. I play poker with the missing girl’s father. He’s been my best friend since we were kids, and his daughter baby-sat Kevin. The police are treating this as a runaway, but the girl’s parents are afraid her boyfriend has done something to her. Her brother found the bone in the woods behind her boyfriend’s parents’ home.”
    In the woods, Diane thought. “No.”
    “Diane . . .”
    “I have to go, Frank. I’m working with some students, and if they see me talking on the phone, they’ll want to do it too. It’s good to hear your voice again. It really is. Come by sometime.” She hung up.
    Diane stood still for a moment. Hearing Frank’s voice was good. The tenor of it brought back past feelings—of warmth and passion. Why did he have to be talking about bones? She filled her lungs with air to clear her head, exhaled and went back to her students.

    It was almost ten o’clock before the last person left. Diane was alone in the museum—but not completely alone. Jake Houser and Leonard Starns, the two night security guards, were making their rounds. And somewhere in the three-story structure the cleaning crew was hard at work.
    Everything was almost ready for the reception the next evening—just a few odds and ends left. Diane walked among the exhibits representing North America in the Pleistocene. The skeleton of a huge Bison antiquus stood, as if on the ancient tundra, against the background of a restored mural of a grazing herd, oblivious to the Paleo-Indians hiding in the tall grass with their Clovis point-tipped spears.
    The giant sloth turned out not to be the disaster she had feared. It stood majestic among prehistoric flora, head on straight, looking out at the skeleton of Mammothus columbi several feet in front of it. Something in the mammoth exhibit caught her eye. Archaeopteris leaves sprouting around the mammoth’s feet. Donald, damn him, had put the wrong vegetation in anyway. He was such a willful . . . She stepped over the barrier rope carefully and took up the plants. A loud knock on the front doors brought her head up with a start.
    She leaned over to look through the double doorway into the museum lobby. Jake appeared from the direction of the primate room.
    “I’ll get it, Dr. Fallon,” he called out as he pressed the intercom button. “The museum is closed,” he said into the speaker.
    “Hey, Jake, it’s Frank.”
    Frank Duncan. So he wasn’t giving up. Diane heard the clank of keys in the door and their voices.
    “Frank, what the hell you doing around here this late?”
    “Checking up on your moonlighting. Might try it myself. You get to sleep a lot, I hear.”
    She heard them both laugh.
    “How’s that boy of yours?” asked Frank. “In an Ivy League school, isn’t he?”
    She still couldn’t see Frank, but Jake had turned so she could see his face. He was a lean-looking man, at home with a scowl, but a large grin pushed his deep frown lines upward.
    “Dylan’s great. You know he graduated? With honors. I have this cousin who’s always bragging about his boys being first in our family to get a college education.” Jake laughed. “The twins went to community college. Dylan went to Harvard.”
    Diane listened as Jake and Frank talked about Jake’s son. She liked the normalcy of their conversation—so far removed from recent events in her life. Coming here to the museum was the right decision.
    “What’s he going to do now he’s graduated?” asked Frank.
    “Looks like he’s going to be accepted to Harvard Business School. They don’t just take everybody right out of college, you know. Most of the time they