His mother shook her head. “None of my friends finds it funny. They all think it’s a prelude to a burglary. I must say they have me quite worried about leaving home.”
“Nonsense!” said Cameron. “We’ve enlisted the entire neighborhood to watch the house. It will be perfectly all right to go.”
“It’s a pity we can’t contact the gnome and tell him that we’ll be leaving home shortly,” Margaret Dawson mused. “Suppose he writes us while we’re off in America.”
“Then Dr. Grant will keep the card for us until we get back, just as he’s doing with the rest of the mail,” said Ian reasonably. “Honestly, you act as if it’s a lost dog we’re talking about.”
“Well, it does seem quite alive now that it’s corresponding with us, doesn’t it?” She looked thoughtful. “Although it never says anything personal, does it? It never addresses us by name on the cards, or says anything about seals or estate agents, or anything that would indicate that he knows much about us.”
“It’s hard to eavesdrop when you’re stuck out under a forsythia bush in the garden,” Ian pointed out.
“No, I see what she means,” said Cameron. “We can’t tell from the postcards whether the people who took the gnome are personally acquainted with us or not.”
“I think they must be,” said Margaret Dawson. “But I can’t imagine who it is.”
“A salesman, perhaps?” suggested Ian. “Someone who travels frequently on business? Maybe someone in the North Sea oil industry? An RAF pilot? Do any of us know someone like that?”
They all shook their heads. No one of their acquaintance fit such a description.
“Well,” said Margaret Dawson, collecting the empty soup bowls, “we’re off to America next week. I wonder where our garden gnome will be going next?”
When Elizabeth opened the front door, she found Sheriff Wesley Rountree standing on the porch, wearing his khaki uniform and dress Stetson. He was holding a large blue cloisonné vase.
“Come in!” cried Elizabeth, ushering him into the hall. “It is so nice to see you again, Sheriff. I haven’t seen you since…” She faltered. The mention of one cousin’s murder and another cousin’s guilt would be inappropriate on a social occasion, she thought. “Well, I had no idea you’d remember me after all this time,” she went on happily. “But this is so nice of you. You really shouldn’t have!”
“Uh… well, ma’am… I mean…”
The sheriff seemed at a loss for words, but Elizabeth, who wasn’t, took no notice of his reply. “This is such a lovely vase!” she cried. “I’ll just put it on the table with the rest of the wedding gifts. Really, this is so sweet of you, Sheriff. You shouldn’t have!”
Wesley cleared his throat loudly. “The fact is, ma’am, I didn’t!” he called to her as she hurried away with the vase.
Elizabeth turned in midstride, her smile still plastered in place. “Beg your pardon?”
“About that vase,” said Wesley, who had just remembered to take his hat off. “I apologize for the misunderstanding and I just feel like a hill of beans about it. But what with you being a bride and all, I can certainly understand how you’d come to the conclusion you did.” Wesley had a theory that apologies sounded more sincere in Southern dialect and he always adjusted his accent accordingly.
Elizabeth looked down at the blue vase and then back at the sheriff, still confused about the purpose of the visit.
“It isn’t a wedding present at all,” Wesley explained. “And I’m sure you won’t want it when I tell you what it is.”
Elizabeth contemplated the blue enamel jar, which-she now noticed-had a lid and felt too heavy to be empty. “Oh shit,” she whispered, setting the object on the coffee table.
Wesley looked at her sadly. “I see you figured it out, ma’am.”
“Call me Elizabeth,” she said. “Now sit down here and tell me what you’re doing wandering around Chandler Grove with a funeral urn.”
Wesley settled in on the sofa and explained about Emmet Mason’s encore performance as a traffic fatality, which had naturally led to curiosity on the part of his widow as to just who had been sitting in the middle of her mantelpiece in a blue metal urn for the last five years. “And when I read the announcement about your engagement in the local paper-for which congratulations, by the way-I couldn’t help noticing that you were a forensic anthropologist. So I said to myself, Now there’s the person I need to talk to about this!” Wesley beamed at the clarity of his explanation.
Elizabeth blinked. “You want to consult me on a case?”
“I do. You are the one who’s studying forensic anthropology, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve had some experience analyzing human remains and so on?”
“A couple of years, yes.”
“Then I sure would appreciate it if you could give me some expert opinions here.”
Elizabeth raised her eyebrows. “Surely the state of Georgia has people who do this.”
“Whole crowds of them, I expect,” said Wesley amiably. “But they don’t hang out around these parts. So if I wanted to consult one of them, I’d have to take a day off from regular duties, which would play hell with the patrol schedules, and the county would probably have to pay them a consulting fee, which I expect I would hear about from the board of commissioners.”
Elizabeth nodded. “Go on.”
“Now I wouldn’t mind the consulting fee if there was a crime involved, but I can’t be sure of that. Why, for all I know that could be pig’s knuckles stuck in that jar. Besides that, going off to hunt up a consultant in Atlanta would take up time, and out of consideration for that poor Mrs. Mason-she’s the widow-I wanted to get some answers to this just as quick as I could. She’s mighty upset, as I’m sure you can understand. So I thought that the fastest and easiest recourse would be to drive over here and ask you two questions.”
“What two questions?”
Wesley’s face took on a solemn expression, which meant that having charmed his way into a free consultation with a medical expert, he was ready to talk business-and to learn something. “Can you tell anything from cremated remains?”
“Yes.”
“What can you tell?”
Elizabeth’s lips twitched in the briefest of smiles. “Is that your second question?”
“No. Rephrasing of the first. Could you elaborate on that first answer, please?”
“Okay. Most people think that the ashes of a cremated person will look like the residue you find in a wood-burning fireplace: fine, papery ash. But that is not the case. Human remains can be made to look that way, if they are milled after the cremation process is complete, but unless the family requests that, it usually isn’t done. The general rule is: if you tell the mortuary that the ashes are going to be scattered, they will be more likely to mill them, but if you plan to just keep the ashes in an urn in a vault, or”-she shrugged-“on a mantelpiece, then they’ll just put them in the container the way they look when they come out of the furnace.”
Wesley grimaced. “Not a pleasant topic of conversation, is it?”
“Not one I expected to be having this week,” admitted the bride-to-be.
“Well, I understand all that you’ve said so far,” said Wesley. “You go right on explaining.”
“If the remains in this urn have been milled, there may not be much I can learn from them. I’d advise you to start hunting up experts with hightech labs in that case, and maybe even they-”
“They didn’t look milled to me,” Wesley remarked. Blushing a little, he added, “I’ve looked.”
“Okay, well, let me see what we’ve got. Could you hand me a newspaper from that basket by the fireplace?”
The sheriff looked startled. “Don’t you want to take this to the hospital or something?”