The Ragman's Memory Read Free

to Tyler, “I guess we got our marching orders. Better ask everyone we interview if we can poke around their properties, as well.”
    They left to coordinate the small army of officers we’d summoned for the neighborhood canvass. Christine Evans pushed out her lips pensively and added an afterthought. “Until the snow melts, you might have to be happy with what you’ve already got.”
    · · ·
    We didn’t find much. The interviews were a bust. Like Norah and her mother, nobody on the street had seen, heard, or smelled anything amiss during the previous summer. No one had gone missing, no one with purple hair had been seen hanging around, and no one had made a discovery similar to Norah’s. At the last house on the block, however, nearest to where the field met the woods, we did find a man who’d lost his dog to a hit-and-run the previous August, and whose abandoned doghouse contained a small collection of fragmented, gnawed-upon shards with an ominous bony look to them.
    Not that we were immediately impressed, including Tyler, much to his later discomfort. Finding bones in a doghouse, after all, was not unheard of, and this owner admitted that bones were a treat he’d regularly supplied his pet. It was more in the interest of thoroughness, therefore, that we asked Christine Evans to give us her educated opinion.
    She’d been in Norah’s house throughout most of the search, keeping the Fletchers company while remaining available to us. As a result, she brought them both with her to check out what we’d found, her benignly domineering style reminding me of a Scout leader conducting a nature trip. Still, despite Ann Fletcher’s apparent tacit approval, I wondered about prolonging Norah’s exposure to what she herself had set in motion.
    Evans, however, obviously believed otherwise. Arriving at the doghouse, she gathered Norah next to her before its arched doorway and played the beam of an officer’s borrowed flashlight onto the pale ivory gleam of the scattered fragments, starkly revealed amid the otherwise pitch-black shelter.
    It took her about thirty seconds to reach a conclusion. “Most of those are animal bones, but that small piece in the far corner is part of a human zygomatic arch, where the mandible hinges to the rest of the skull.” She touched Norah’s cheek to demonstrate.
    “Wow,” Norah murmured, easing my concern.
    “Can we get a closer look?” Evans asked, shoving her head deeper into the opening.
    I threw a questioning glance at Tyler.
    “We’re all set—photographs and measurements are done.”
    Behind him, the late dog’s owner, an older, bare-headed man with a red nose and a frost-dusted mustache, added, “It doesn’t have a floor. You can tilt it back.”
    “Good,” Evans laughed. “I was wondering how I could squeeze in there.”
    Four of us followed the owner’s advice and tilted the doghouse back, exposing its littered dirt floor like the innards of some large, wooden clam.
    The light had dulled, the sun fading early in the winter months, so the contents of the small dwelling, now surrounded by four snowbanks instead of the walls that had once protected it, were suddenly illuminated by a half-dozen flashlights, whose bright, hovering disks swept across the hard-packed surface like theatrical spotlights.
    “How big was your dog?” Evans asked the homeowner.
    He held his hand out just below his waist. “Big—he was a mastiff. Really powerful.”
    She looked at the rest of us. “Domesticated dogs especially tend to go after the skulls—they remind them of balls.”
    Tyler, his embarrassment at missing the identification washed away by her enthusiasm, crouched by her other side and leaned over the exposed site, adding, “He probably buried what he didn’t crush up. You can see how the earth is disturbed near the back.”
    Side by side in the snow, Evans and Tyler began conferring like old colleagues, pawing at the frozen earth like hampered archaeologists trying to piece