“I’ll see them.”
They turned toward her.
“I’m Diane Fallon.”
“I’m Lydia Southwell. This is my father, Earl Southwell,” said the woman. “We think the woman they’re asking about may be my grandmother Jewel Southwell.”
“Come inside, please,” said Diane.
She led them inside to her office lounge and sat them down at the table. She offered coffee, tea or a soda. Each took a Coke. Diane took one as well from the small refrigerator.
“You recognize someone in these drawings?” Diane had copies of the originals lying on the table.
The woman touched the drawing of Plymouth Doe with her fingertips.
“That looks like my mother,” Earl said. “The TV said she worked at Ray’s Diner. My mother worked there a long time ago before she disappeared.”
The woman still held the large brown envelope in her lap. “We have these pictures.” She pulled the photographs out and they spilled over the table.
“Lydia,” said her father sharply, “you didn’t need to bring all our pictures.”
“I didn’t want to take the time to hunt through them.”
Lydia picked out a large portrait of her grandmother. One corner was singed.
“My daddy tried to burn the pictures,” said Earl Southwell, “but my granny-Mama’s mother-pulled them out of the fire.”
“Do you have any dental records or X-rays?”
“No. That was a long time ago,” said Lydia. “I don’t think they had that stuff then.”
Diane looked at the photograph. It was a woman smiling into the camera. She looked very much like Neva’s drawing of Plymouth Doe.
“Can you tell me about her?” said Diane. “What happened to her?”
“We thought she left us,” said Mr. Southwell. “I was just a little bit of a thing, only five years old. My daddy was working in Atlanta, coming home on weekends. Those days it took longer to get from here to there. Mama was a pretty woman and kind of forward, if you know what I mean.”
He paused and took a long drink of Coke. “My daddy was angry. I remember that more than anything. He wanted to burn everything that had anything to do with Mama.”
“Why did he think she left?”
“The story was, she ran off with Dale Wayne Russell,” he said. “That was a cussword at our house. The two of them just up and left. Mama left my daddy and me when I was just a young’un, and Dale left a sweetheart.” Mr. Southwell was quiet for a moment. “You think she’s been dead all these years?”
Tears welled up in Lydia Southwell’s eyes. “Grandpa was a bitter man because of it-so was Daddy.” She looked at her father almost accusingly. She turned back to Diane. “Can you tell us if it’s really her?”
Diane nodded.
“Right now? Can we know right now? Please, we need to know.”
“Come with me.” Diane helped Lydia gather up her photographs and she led them up to her osteology unit office.
As they walked through the museum, Diane got whiffs of an unpleasant odor. It wasn’t strong, like something that had lingered, a little like something rotting, or decaying tissue.
“Grandma was a hard worker,” said Lydia. “My great-granny said Grandma worked at the diner and took in laundry and sewing to give Daddy a better life. Great-granny never believed she’d run off and left him.”
“Sit right here. I’ll be back,” said Diane. She stopped at the door. “Sewing? Did you have a relative in the military-a quartermaster?”
They looked at her, puzzled. “Her daddy was a quartermaster in the army,” said Earl Southwell.
“Thank you,” said Diane, smiling. “Please wait here. This won’t take long.”
Diane almost skipped her way to the crime lab. David, Jin and Neva were there packing up the evidence to move it to the vault in the archives to keep it out of harm’s way.
“We may have someone who knows Plymouth Doe.”
“Already?” said David.
Diane showed them the photograph of Jewel Southwell.
“Wow, Neva, you nailed it,” said Jin.
“I looked at her dress,” said Neva. “The way it was sewn, where the darts were. It was hand-stitched and made to fit real well. I thought she might be someone who would look right into a camera and smile at whoever was looking.”
“That’s good, Neva,” said Diane. “Very intuitive.”
Neva had taken to heart the lessons on facial reconstruction Diane had given her.
“David,” she said, “Did we do an X-ray of Plymouth Doe’s skull?”
“Yes. I took all the skeletal remains to Korey and he X-rayed everyone.” David went to the filing cabinets, pulled open a drawer and found a file with the X-ray, which he gave to Diane.
She carried the X-ray to the copy machine. She measured the head of the woman in the photograph between two craniometric points-the nasion, where the nose met the forehead, and the gnathion, the tip of the chin. She made the same measurements on the X-ray of Plymouth Doe’s skull and calculated the percent difference between the photograph and the skull. She put the photo on the copier and increased the size by a small amount and measured the result at the same points.
When she had the heights of the faces the same on the measurement points, she took the X-ray and the copy of the photo to the light table and laid one on top of the other.
“I thought you did that with a projection screen so you could fiddle with it,” said David.
“I do, but right now this is quicker, and if it’s the same person, it should fit dead on.”
It did. Plymouth Doe was Jewel Southwell.
Just to make sure, Diane used a loupe and examined Jewel Southwell’s teeth in her portrait. Plymouth Doe had an overlapping upper incisor. Jewel Southwell’s portrait showed the same overlap, one incisor slightly forward, casting a shadow on the incisor next to it. To compute how far forward, Diane used one of David’s esoteric photography databases to provide some of the numbers she needed, based on the shadow length in the photo. She retrieved Plymouth Doe’s skull from the vault and took a few tooth measurements. It wouldn’t be exact, but the measurements from the offset teeth in the skull should be very close to the computed value from the photograph. Again, dead-on.
She took two DNA sampling kits from the supply cabinet and walked back to the father and daughter waiting in her office.
“Could I ask each of you to give me a DNA sample for comparison with DNA we took from the remains? It’s nothing invasive. I just need to take a swab from inside your cheek.”
As Diane talked, she opened the DNA test kits and showed them a swab. Earl and his daughter Lydia both opened their mouths. Diane took the samples and sealed the swabs in their envelopes and labeled them. She sat down across the table from the two and looked into their eyes. Their faces showed a cross between expectation and dread.
“I can tell you that the photograph is a match with the remains. It’s her, almost beyond a doubt. The DNA results will give us the final confirmation.”
“It is Grandma then?” asked Lydia.
“Yes.” Diane nodded. “It is Jewel Southwell.”
Earl Southwell began sobbing. “All these years, the things we all thought about her, and she was at the bottom of that quarry. I swam there when I was a kid, and my mother was down there.” His shoulders shook with his sobs.
Diane noticed that his daughter didn’t reach over to comfort him.
“How did she die?” he asked when his sobs subsided.
“From a blow to the head.”
“You mean, like deliberate, or an accident?” asked Lydia.
