EXCERPT
ONE
The dark, hollow eyes of a human skull put Sheriff Wesley Grant on the spot. The sockets, though vacant of life, were filled with questions he didn’t have answers for. Unnerved by the skeleton’s perpetual stare, he averted his gaze to the finger bones camouflaged against the gray pebbled sand. The digits protruded up as though the person had clawed their way out from their oceanfront grave. A grave that had no business being on this side of the island.
Wesley had questions of his own. “Who are you, and when did you get here?” The Maine island of Stepping Stones was his jurisdiction, and if this corpse was a recent death, then it was put here on his watch. Recent dumped bodies only meant one thing.
Homicide.
But who? One of his islanders?
The thought of these skeletal remains belonging to one of his charges squeezed his chest in a vise. The weight of that scenario bore down on him like the thick, dark clouds overhead. The April rains offered a reprieve, but the cold wind still whipped at his face. He ignored the chafing on his cheeks for the suffering the guy at his feet had to have experienced.
“Please don’t let it be one of our own. I can’t let these people down. Not when they’ve done so much for me. No, this can’t be one of them.” Wes pushed the horrid idea out of his mind as he pushed his windblown strands of hair out of his eyes. He would know if someone had gone missing. He ran a tight ship here, questioning every happening and every outsider who disembarked the Sunday ferry. This skeleton had to be ancient, put here long ago, before his time. Before his father’s, the previous Sheriff Grant’s, time. Before any of the islanders’ time.
Wesley thought of the history of the island and remembered a couple hundred years ago, pirates used to sail these seas and stop off on the island to count their loot. Yes, that had to be it. He latched on to this theory quickly. This skeleton had to have been buried here by one of the eighteenth-century swashbucklers, killed by a warring foe who broached the shores. Wesley felt sure Dr. Simon Webber, the forensic anthropologist who would be arriving on the island any minute now, would confirm it. But a check of his watch only brought up another question: What was keeping the doctor?
Deputy Derek Vaughn had left over five hours ago to pick up the man the medical examiner was sending out here to assess the situation. Vaughn had been instructed to bring the forensic anthropologist over to this side of the island as soon as they arrived. It was a two-hour trip each way. That made Vaughn an hour late. Nothing new there. The deputy couldn’t follow simple orders on a good day.
Wes thumbed the radio at his shoulder and called his other deputy, Owen Matthews. Maybe he knew what was keeping Vaughn. “Matthews, what’s your location?”
The radio crackled in his ear as Wesley studied the skeleton’s pelvis that lay exposed in the sand at his feet. Most of its ribs couldn’t be seen, just the front of the rib cage protruded out of the earth. Only one hand stuck out, too. Wesley figured the other one was either still buried, or the wildlife had made off with it. Or, because the guy had once been a pirate—Wesley was sticking with this theory for the time being—there was the chance he’d lost it premortem.
The idea made him cringe and he pushed the radio again, a little harder than before. “Matthews or Vaughn, what’s your twenty?”
His radio chirped followed by Deputy Matthews’s voice. “Sorry, Wes. I’m pulling up now. Vaughn brought the doctor to the station instead. A little misunderstanding, I guess.”
Wesley bit the unprofessional comment about Vaughn from his tongue and asked, “Where’s the doctor?”
“She’s sitting right beside me.”
“She?” He spoke louder than he meant to, then remembered the boys who had found the skeleton that morning stood on the other side of the tall sand mound behind him. They didn’t want to be near the “dead guy” as they’d put it. Their older sister, Pat, joined them as the responsible party, so she waited with them on the other side of the mound, too. None of these people needed to hear him lose his cool about an unexpected outsider showing up instead of the expected Dr. Webber.
“Yup. She’s a she,” Owen said. “Go a little easier on her than you did my wife when she showed up in Stepping Stones, would you?” Before the radio chirped out, Owen added, “I’m sure you’ve learned by now that not everyone is like Jenny Carmichael.”
Owen was right. He also knew Wes had a hard time with outsiders. He’d put the last outsider who disembarked the ferry through the ringer. And Miriam Hunter, now Miriam Matthews, hadn’t been guilty of anything but caring about Stepping Stones as much as he did.
Owen proved his point. Not all people who broached his shores were trouble. They weren’t all like his ex-fiancée, Jenny Carmichael. Wesley recoiled at the memory of the destruction Jenny brought to his life five years ago, but that didn’t mean the lady doctor was anything like Jenny.
He hoped she wasn’t, anyway.
The motor of a boat beyond the sand mound signaled Matthews’s arrival. Wes climbed the steep slope and got his first glimpse of the bone doctor sitting beside his deputy.
A pretty face behind dark-rimmed glasses.
So what? A face meant nothing. He knew this from Jenny. And don’t you forget it, Grant, he told himself as he approached the water and watched the brown-haired woman with a tight bun at the nape of her neck stand to her full, tower-like height. A pretty face and the height to go head-to-head with him.
That didn’t necessarily mean trouble, he reasoned as this new outsider was about to broach his shores.
But even as Deputy Matthews slid out the metal gangway, the uncertainty in Wesley’s mind rang louder than the screeching metal against metal.
All he could wonder was if this outsider would be friend or if she would be foe?
* * *
“I’m here to examine the skeleton.” Lydia Muir stepped off the police boat and down the temporary metal dock Deputy Matthews slid out for her exit. She carried her tool kit in her left hand, her SLR digital camera hung from her neck, swaying with each step. She would hold off donning her forensic white coverall clean suit and rubber boots until she had the chance to assess the scene, but deep down under her grayish-blue wool coat and matching pants, Lydia squirmed in anticipation of suiting up. She hoped her excitement didn’t show too much, pretty sure the five islanders standing in front of her wouldn’t appreciate her smiling in their disturbing situation. They wouldn’t understand that forensic anthropology, the study of human remains for evidence, was her life. A dug-up bone to the ordinary person was a treasure to behold for her.
“I’m Sheriff Grant.” A shaggy-haired officer stepped forward. She didn’t know too many officers of the law who kept their hair on the longer side. Most looked like the clean-cut deputy who brought her over to this side of the island, or the balding one who brought her out from Rockland. “I wasn’t expecting you,” the sheriff said in a disgruntled tone that had her putting aside her thoughts on his reclusive hairstyle and focusing on his obvious disappointment at her arrival.
Her excitement fizzled a bit. Apparently, he’d been expecting her boss.
“I’m Dr. Lydia Muir.” She offered her hand to shake,
