again vowing to find a better storage location than my purse. It took a moment for the voice to register.
“Anne?”
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Finalizing world peace. I just got off the phone with Kofi Annan.”
“Where are you?”
“Montreal.”
“Why the hell are you back in Canada?”
I told her about Bertrand.
“Is that why you sound so bummed?”
“Partly. Are you in Charlotte? How was London?”
“What does that mean? Partly?”
“You don't want to know.”
“Of course I do. What's wrong?”
I unloaded. My friend listened. Twenty minutes later I took a breath, not weeping but close.
“So the Arthur property and unidentified foot issue are separate from the crash complaint issue?”
“Sort of. I don't think the foot came from anyone on the flight. I have to prove that.”
“You think it's this Mitchell character who's been missing since February?”
“Yes.”
“And the NTSB still doesn't know what took that plane out?”
“No.”
“And all you know about this property is that some guy named Livingstone gave it as a wedding gift to some guy named Arthur who sold it to some guy named Dashwood.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But the deed is in the name of an investment group, not Dashwood.”
“H&F. In Delaware.”
“And some of the officers' names match up to the names of people who died right before local seniors went missing.”
“You're good.”
“I took notes.”
“Sounds ridiculous.”
“Yes. And you have no idea why Davenport is on a tear for you?”
“No.”
Silence hummed across two countries.
“We heard about some lord in England named Dashwood. A friend of Benjamin Franklin's, I think.”
“That should crack this wide open. How
“Great. But too much the ABC tour.”
“ABC tour?”
“‘Another bloody cathedral.’ Ted likes history. He even dragged me through a bunch of caves. When will you be back in Charlotte?”
“Thursday.”
“Where are we going for Thanksgiving?”
Anne and I met when we were young and pregnant, I with Katy, she with her son, Brad. That first summer we'd all packed up and taken the babies to the ocean for a week. We'd been going to one beach or another every summer and Thanksgiving ever since.
“The kids like Myrtle. I like Holden.”
“I want to try Pawleys Island. Let's have lunch. We'll discuss it and I'll tell you all about my trip. Tempe, things will get back to normal. You'll see.”
I fell asleep listening to sleet, thinking of sand and palmetto, and wondering if I had any chance at all of having a normal life again.
The Laboratoire de Sciences Judiciaires et de Medecine Legale is the central medico-legal and crime laboratory for the province of Quebec. It is located on the top two floors of the Edifice Wilfrid-Derome, known to locals as the Surete du Quebec, or SQ building.
By nine-thirty Monday morning I was in the anthropology-odontology lab, having already attended the morning staff meeting, and collected my
I arranged the bones in anatomical order on my worktable, did a skeletal inventory, then checked indicators of
