lab. It was barely daylight and Violet had gone to bed as soon as we got to the house, but I had downed two mugs of my grandmother’s “stand-alone” coffee and was good for another hour or so at least. Besides, I wanted to know just what Uncle Ernest had in mind when he told the police he had something more to show them.
“If this is as important as you seem to think it is, I want to have a look at it myself,” Sheriff Yeager told my uncle. He was a stocky, balding man who looked to be in his fifties. I had seen him the day after Ella’s fall and again with the searchers when Burdette and the others led us out of the woods. This morning his khaki uniform was neatly pressed, his black shoes gleamed and he smelled of woodsy aftershave. I marveled at how quickly he had managed to look regulation spiffy at such short notice.
Aunt Leona was still asleep, and I doubted if we’d see Violet all day, but Grady, Ma Maggie, Uncle Lum and I followed the two men outside where Uncle Ernest unlocked the trunk of his ten-year-old Chevrolet that looked every bit as new as the day he bought it. Expecting to be shooed away at any minute, I stayed in the background as he carried a large cardboard box to the porch and set it down.
“What in the world is that?” my grandmother asked as her brother opened the box.
The sheriff carefully lifted out something wrapped in shredded black plastic that fell apart in minute tatters to reveal what looked to have once been a canvas backpack, black with dirt and decay. “Where’d you find this?” he said.
“Under a rose bush in the garden,” my uncle said.
“You mean somebody buried it there?” Sheriff Yeager peered closer. “Do you know who it belonged to?” he said, speaking in my uncle’s ear.
Uncle Ernest looked at the rest of us like he wished we’d go away, but it was too late. Unless threatened with dire punishment—like having to iron while watching table tennis—I was there for the duration. “Do you remember reading about the hippie couple who disappeared on the river back in the sixties?” he asked the sheriff. “I believe this belonged to the man—Shamrock, I think he called himself—and I’d be very much surprised if that skeleton they found in Remeth-churchyard wasn’t his, too.”
“Have you looked inside the pack?” the sheriff wanted to know, but my uncle shook his head. “Thought it best to wait, I was afraid I might destroy something.”
The rest of us stood restlessly while the sheriff went to his car for gloves. “You couldn’t pay me to touch that nasty thing,” Ma Maggie said. I felt the same.
From the expression on his face, I don’t think Sheriff Yeager relished the idea, either, but he lifted the flap after the buckle fell away in his hands, and reached inside.
I don’t know what I expected him to find, but I found myself backing away as if something grisly might jump out at me. Instead he drew out what was left of a pair of moccasins, rotted remnants of what could have been clothing, a rusty key chain with a shamrock enclosed in plastic and a tarnished, waterstained wristwatch with the crystal miraculously unbroken.
The sheriff held the watch to the light and squinted at something on the back. “Still a little too dark to see out here,” he said. “Let’s take it inside. Looks like some kind of engraving.”
Uncle Ernest switched on a lamp in the living room and the sheriff held the watch under the light. “Q.E.P., 1962,” Grady read aloud, since he obviously had the best vision in the bunch.
Uncle Ernest ran his fingers over the engraving. “Quincy Puckett—don’t know what his middle name was, but I’ll bet this watch was a high school graduation gift.”
Sheriff Yeager looked up. “If all this is true, who do you suppose put him over there in Remeth Cemetery?”
My uncle’s face was solemn—more than solemn—his expression made me want to throw my arms around him and protect him from all this. Uncle Ernest was such a good man, and innocent in so many ways. How could this be happening to him?
“I don’t suppose,” he said. “Quincy Puckett was buried over there by Rose Dutton, otherwise known as Casey Grindle.” He paused and looked at Ma Maggie. “And earlier, Waning Crescent.”
Valerie Rose Dutton had been eighteen and beautiful when Uncle Ernest discovered her