Skeleton Man

Joanna was sure she could use that combination of his own self-interest and his sympathy for her own plight to persuade him. And probably his mother, too.

Whether Tuve could find the man who supplied him his trouble-making gem seemed less likely, and even if he did, whether that would lead her to her father’s bones was another unanswerable question. But she would recover those bones. And they would prove she was heir to the Clarke fortune and bring Dan Plymale and his phony, greed-driven Eternal Peace Foundation crashing down in bankrupt ruins.

Someone had emerged from the rear of the Tuve house. She shifted to the passenger window, getting a clearer view, and focused on a woman, plump, walking slowly, carrying a basket to a clothesline strung between the storage shed and a nearby tree, hanging out a shirt, a pair of denims, socks, underwear. Probably what Tuve had been wearing when he was taken to jail.

Joanna dropped the binoculars on the seat and squirmed into a more comfortable position. Ready for more waiting, more planning, more remembering. And for reinforcing the absolute confidence she must have to finish this job. She would because she must. Because it was her fate. Fate had been painfully slow, but it had finally led her here, and it would take her to those bones, and they would give her—finally—the peace of knowing she had done her duty. The peace of taking on her own name, of having it legally changed to Joanna Clarke. Having finally revenged her mother. And her father. And herself.

Revenge had been her purpose since she was in high school, living with her mother and her mother’s elderly husband in his lavish summer home in the Montana mountains, and finally learning that Craig was a fiction and that her father was John Clarke.

The elderly husband had been dying of some variation of cancer, probably had been dying when her mother, just thirty at the time, married him, an old gray man with a chauffeur-driven car. Joanna had been a flower girl at the wedding, only nine but old enough even then to wonder why her mother was the bride of a frail-looking grandfather. It wasn’t until her mother’s death the year after she’d graduated from the University of Montana that she knew the rest of the story. Or knew her real name.

Her mother’s lawyer had given her the letter—a thick envelope with a stamped wax seal. On it her mother had written: “To be given to my daughter, Joanna Clarke, in the event of my death.”

A man emerged from the front door of the Tuve house. Joanna refocused the binoculars. Tuve’s uncle, with Tuve standing in the open door saying something to him. Uncle climbed into the pickup, the motor started, the truck backed down the track, turned on to the road, and headed slowly down the way they had come. Billy Tuve disappeared from the doorway, closed the door. Joanna switched her view to the back of the house, located Tuve’s mother at the sheep pen, the gate open now, the sheep emerging. Joanna turned her view to the pickup, disappearing now over the mesa rim. Back to Tuve’s mother. She was following the sheep, presumably to where they would be grazing. The front door was still closed. She would wait about five minutes. Then she would call on Billy Tuve, and persuade him, and take him to the top of the Salt Trail, and down it to realize her destiny.

Destiny, however, did not allow her a full five minutes. Just as she turned the ignition key to start the engine to drive down to Tuve’s house, to complete this phase of her project, another car emerged over the rim, a white sedan moving fast. Joanna decided she would wait another minute to allow it to pass. It didn’t. It slowed, turned down the track to the Tuve house, stopped there. A man emerged, a big man. Billy Tuve appeared at the front door. They met in the doorway and talked. To Joanna, her binoculars focused, they appeared to be arguing. Billy made a negative gesture. The argument resumed. Billy disappeared inside. The man waited on the doorstep. And waited. Joanna glanced at her watch. Two minutes passed. Four minutes. The man leaned against the door frame, shifted his hat to shade his face from the sun.

Joanna suddenly felt sick. She knew who this man must be. He would be a man named Sherman. The man who had been at the Park Service Center just before her, asking questions about where victims of that plane crash were buried, and then asking about who had been handing out the sheets offering a reward for information about them.

“You just missed him,” the clerk had told her. “He was really curious about your reward offer. He said his name was Sherman and he needed to find you. I asked him if he knew anything about the diamonds and he just laughed.”

The name Sherman might be phony, Joanna thought, but whatever it was, it might as well be Plymale. He’d be bought and paid by that lawyer, just one of the tentacles answering to Dan Plymale. Which meant Plymale had got to Billy Tuve before her.

As she thought that, Billy Tuve reappeared in the doorway. He was carrying a zippered bag of blue canvas which seemed fairly heavy as he swung it into the back seat of Sherman’s car. They drove away down the mesa road and over the rim.

Joanna, feeling sick and shaken, followed. Following was easier this time because she was almost sure she knew where they were going and the vehicle was an easy-to-spot white sedan. But what would she have to do when they got there? She pulled her purse over beside her, snapped it open, reached inside, extracted a pistol, and steeled herself for what lay ahead.

The pistol, like most everything she was doing, as well as her fierce malice, her nightmare dreams, dated back to the letter her mother had left her. She could remember it, word for word.

Dearest Joanna:

I have lied to you all these years because I didn’t want you to inherit the pain I have lived through since your father died. But I believe you must know. Lieutenant David Shaw, killed in Vietnam after your conception, was a lie. He didn’t exist. He was my cover story. Your father was John Clarke Jr., killed in that awful airliner collision in Arizona about six months before your birth. He was flying home for our wedding. His father (your grandfather, although he never would have admitted it) was a widower. He had already told John, his only child, that he would not attend the ceremony. He told me in a letter that I was “gold-digging white trash, in no way fit for his family.”

Much of the rest of that first page recounted other such insults. It told how the elder Clarke, already the victim of two heart attacks, had suffered a stroke during those days when the hunt was on for the bodies of airline crash victims. He died without recovering from the coma and his affairs were taken over by his law firm, the Plymale firm, which represented a tax-exempt foundation the old man had started.

The law firm was Plymale, Stevens, Ebersten, and Daly, and one of its junior members was Dan Plymale Jr., son of the senior partner. The firm seemed to have suspected that Joanna’s mother had conceived young Clarke’s child. The senior Plymale contacted her, told her she had no claim to any share of the estate, but offered her ten thousand dollars to sign a legal disclaimer. She had discussed this with Hal Simmons, who told her that the senior Clarke’s will left the bulk of his estate to John, or descendants of John if John preceded him in death. If no such descendants existed, the bulk of the estate went to the foundation he had initiated with the guidance of Dan