Cut to the Bone (Body Farm 8)

“Smart idea,” I said. “So then you put tracing paper on top of these and drew on that?”

She shook her head. “I tried that, but I could see the skull too well through the tracing paper. It was overwhelming, and I couldn’t visualize the face. Then I tried drawing on regular printer paper, but the skull was too faint through that — all I could see were the edges and the eyes. So finally I decided to try working on a light box, illuminating the skull and my drawing paper from underneath.”

“Third time’s the charm,” said Jeff, who was leaning in — more closely than necessary, it seemed to me — from her other side. “Just like with Goldilocks and the three bears. It was just right.” It was the cheesiest flirting I’d ever seen. I looked at Jenny, expecting to see her rolling her eyes in scorn.

Instead, she was beaming.

“Something like that.”

She slid the second skull image aside, and I felt a jolt almost like electricity. Staring up at me from the table was a teenage girl — a skinny, ashen-faced girl who looked as if she hadn’t had a good meal or a glimpse of the sun in months. Her hair hung straight, limp, and greasy looking. Her lips were thin and pursed. But it was the girl’s eyes that gripped me; they locked onto mine, or so it seemed, and wouldn’t let go.

“Wow,” I said. “You’ve put a lot of despair in those eyes.” Jenny looked at me for the first time since she’d slid the papers onto the table, and I saw concern in her eyes. “Don’t worry,” I hurried to assure her. “It’s fine. It’s better than fine; it’s really good. From what I see in the bones — from what I imagine they’re whispering — I’d say she had cause to despair, every day of her life. I’m just surprised you were able to convey that with a pencil and a piece of paper.”

“I can’t really take credit for that,” she said. “I borrowed that.” Seeing my puzzled look, she went on, “I’ve got a big book of photographs by Dorothea Lange. Do you know her work?”

“I do. She took a lot of portraits of hardscrabble folks during the Great Depression, didn’t she?”

She nodded. “Tenant farmers. Migrant workers. Appalachian families. I was looking through that book, and I saw a picture of a farmer’s wife holding their baby. The woman couldn’t have been more than twenty, but she was totally beaten down by life already. You could see it in her eyes.” She paused to clear her throat. “If this girl had made it to twenty and had a baby, I bet she’d have looked like the farmer’s wife in that photo. So I borrowed that woman’s despair. She had plenty to go around.”

She set the frontal sketch aside to show me the next one, a three-quarter profile. It, too, was excellent — the girl’s gauntness was emphasized by the deep hollows in her cheeks, which showed up more prominently in this one. “I really like it,” I said slowly, “but the first one grabs me more. I’m not sure why.”

“It’s the eyes,” Jeff chimed in, surprising me. “In this one, she’s not looking at us.”

“You’re right,” I agreed, impressed that he’d nailed it so fast. I picked up the frontal view for another look. “The way those eyes stare at you? It’s like she’s challenging you, saying, ‘Hey, look at me. Do you know me?’ You can’t ignore that look.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Jenny said. “So next I did this one.” She unveiled another drawing — another three-quarter profile — but in this one, the girl’s gaze was locked on mine once more.

“Wonderful,” I said. “That’s the one to use.”

“If you think so. But there’s one more. I took a little artistic license with it, though. Maybe too much.” She uncovered the final drawing. She’d gone back to the frontal view for this one. The eyes, as I’d come to expect, were arresting and haunting. But underneath one, she’d added a detail — an unexpected bit of shading that hit me like a punch in the gut: She had given the girl a black eye, and in the process, she’d somehow given the girl a story, given her a life. I remembered Jenny’s assessment of the girl’s life, as we’d sat at the table in the coffee shop—“Sounds like a pretty awful life,” she’d said — and somehow she’d captured that in her sketch. As I held the soft nap of the drawing paper in my hand, I found myself staring into that life — even as I felt myself being stared into by the haunted, haunting eyes of the dead girl.

* * *

I could smell onions and potatoes frying even before I got to the top of the basement stairs and opened the kitchen door. “Yum,” I said. “Smells great.”

Kathleen looked over her shoulder, her spatula still stirring the sizzling contents of the cast-iron skillet. “How was your day?”

“Good. Interesting. I’ll tell you about it, but not right now.” I switched on the portable television that we kept on the kitchen counter and switched it to WBIR, the NBC affiliate, which dominated the local news. “I think they’re doing a story about that Morgan County case I’m working. The strip-mine girl.”

The newscast led off with a story about Saturday’s football game between the Vols and the Gators. Even though the Vols’ head coach, Johnny Majors, was still recuperating from a quintuple bypass, the Vols had won their first two games, including an upset win over fourteenth-ranked Georgia. This week, though, the Vols were taking on an even tougher opponent. The Gators were ranked number four in the nation, and they’d beaten UT the year before. Even though UT was a 10-point underdog, the story ended with a string of Vol fans professing their confidence. “Gator season is open!” yelled the final fan, an orange-clad man swaying on the rear deck of a houseboat. Behind him, I saw the familiar shape of Calhoun’s in the distance, and — directly over the man’s shoulder — the inflatable alligator hanging from its noose.

“Authorities in Campbell County are investigating the mysterious death of a teenage girl,” said Bill Williams, WBIR’s longtime news anchor. “The bones of the girl, whose age is estimated at twelve to fifteen years, were found on Labor Day beside an abandoned strip mine. Dr. Bill Brockton, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Tennessee, says the girl’s body was dumped at the mine at least two years ago, possibly longer.”

The camera shifted to Williams’s coanchor, a woman named Edye Ellis. “Investigators today released an artist’s conception of what the girl may have looked like.” The screen filled with two of Jenny’s sketches — the three-quarter profile and the frontal view that included the black eye — while Ellis continued, “Authorities have not been able to determine the cause of death.” Now the image switched to a two-shot, with Ellis turning solemnly to Williams. “And Bill, investigators are treating this case as a homicide.”

Williams nodded gravely. “Anyone with information about the girl’s death or her identity is urged to call the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office or the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.” The sketches flashed on the screen again, this time with phone numbers for the sheriff’s office and the TBI.

The next story was a heartwarming piece about a fuzzy, adoptable puppy at the Humane Society shelter. “Cute dog,” I said.

“Adorable,” Kathleen agreed. “Sad thing is, there’ll be more calls about the puppy than about the girl.”

“Lots more calls,” I agreed, switching off the set. “What’d you think of the sketches?”

“Good,” she said. “Really good. Much better than usual. Those drawings of suspects they put out? Terrible.”

“That’s my doing,” I preened. “The good ones, not the bad ones.”

“Get out of here,” she said. “You couldn’t draw your way out of a paper bag.”

“No, but I found an artist — a good artist — and I loaned her the skull to work from. The chairman of the Art Department recommended her. Cute girl. Amelia somebody; no, wait — Jenny, not Amelia. Earhart. Jenny Earhart. I think maybe Jeff’s gonna ask her out.”

“Jeff? Our Jeff? Ask out a college girl?”

“No, she’s still in high school. She goes to Laurel — you know, that hippie school? She took a drawing class at UT last spring, knocked the socks off the professor.”

“What makes you think Jeff might ask her out?”

“He came by to have lunch with me today, right about the time she showed up with the sketches. So he invited her to Calhoun’s with us. Flirted with her the whole time. I kept expecting to look under the table and see his hand on her thigh.”

“Bill!” She turned and waved the spatula at me reprovingly. “You’re incorrigible.”

“What? I seem to remember putting my hand on your thigh under the table a time or two, back in the day.”

“Back in the day? More like last week, at the provost’s dinner.”

I took a step toward her, pressing against her from behind, and slid my hands down to her thighs, giving them a fond squeeze. She swatted my hands away, but not immediately.

“You don’t want me to burn the potatoes,” she said. “Besides, Jeff will be upstairs any second now.” She leaned back and rubbed her hair against my cheek. “But hold that thought.” So I did.

* * *

I heard the clock striking eleven as Kathleen lay curled against me, her head on my chest. “Bill?” Her voice was low and drowsy.

“Hmm?”

“Wouldn’t it be great if Jeff found some nice girl?”

“He’s got a girl,” I pointed out. “Good old what’s-her-name. Tiffany? Brittany?”

“Madison. Oh, please. That girl has the brains of a Dalmatian.”

“True. But I’ve seen her in a bikini, and that girl has the body of a centerfold.”