“Right,” she said, her amusement tinged with sarcasm now. Joe’s department, I gathered, marched—or boogied?—to a different, hipper drummer than mine.
I backed up to take another run at it. “So. Joe—my main man, Joe—is he around?”
She wasn’t buying. “One moment, Dr. Brockton. I’ll see if Dr. Hollingsworth is available.” Ouch, man, I thought as the receiver clicked me onto hold.
A moment later, it clicked again and the call was transferred. “Hel-lo, this is Joe,” a cheery voice singsonged.
“Good morning,” I said. “This is Dr.—” I halted, my formality sounding stuffy now even to me. “Sorry. Joe, this is Bill Brockton, over in Anthropology?”
“Yessir, Mr. Bill. What can I do you for?”
“I’m looking for somebody who’s good at portraits. Nothing fancy; just a sketch, really. Pencil or pen is okay; color or black and white. What matters is that the artist has a good feel for anatomy, musculature, facial features. I need something realistic, not . . . ,” I hesitated, “not like Picasso, you know?”
“I think I get your drift,” he said. “Thing is, ’bout everybody over here thinks even Picasso is old school, you know what I mean?” I suspected I did; I’d walked through the cavernous atrium of the Art and Architecture building a time or two, and I could make neither heads nor tails of most of the abstract paintings and sculpture on display. “Sounds like what you need,” he went on, “is one of those guys that draws tourists at the beach, you know? Pay him five bucks, and five minutes later, he hands you a pretty decent caricature of yourself.”
“Hmm,” I mused. The nearest beach was eight hours away. “Well, but I don’t want something cartoonish. Like I said, I need something realistic. Serious, too.”
“Let’s back up a little,” he said. “A portrait, you said. Who’s the subject?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come again?”
“I don’t know who it is,” I repeated. “That’s the problem. Here’s the thing, Joe. I’ve got a dead girl’s skull in my lab. Thirteen, fourteen years old. Her bones were found at an old strip mine up near the Kentucky border. She’s been dead a while; we’re talking years, not months. I’d like to find somebody who could look at that girl’s skull—see it through the eyes of an artist—and then sketch what that girl may have looked like when she was alive.”
He was silent for a moment. “Wow,” he said. “Y’all don’t mess around over there in Anthropology, do you?” Another pause. “You know, it’s not exactly Life Drawing—matter of fact, I guess it’s the opposite of Life Drawing—but I had a girl in my class last spring who was damned good at the human figure. Faces, too; especially faces. Most folks just draw what they see on the surface, but her drawings? You could tell what was under the skin, too, you know? I don’t know if she can do it the other way around—start with the inside and add what’s on the outside—but I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“She sounds worth a try. What’s the best way to get in touch with her?”
“Hmm. She wasn’t an art major; come to think of it, I wanna say she was a high-school student. Her name . . . her name . . . oh, hell, I’m blanking on her name. Hang on.” I heard a rustle as he covered the mouthpiece of the phone. “Hey, Rachel,” I heard his muffled voice calling. “What the hell’s the name of that high-school girl that took Life Drawing last spring? Tall. Lanky. Blond. Went barefoot all the time, even in February. Amelia something?” I heard the young woman’s voice in the background, muffled and indistinct. “Ha! That’s why I wanted to call her Amelia.” Another rustle as he unmuffled the mouthpiece. “Her name’s Jenny Earhart. She goes to Laurel High School—you know it?”
“That hippie private school? In the run-down house up on Laurel Avenue? Long-haired stoner kids hanging out on the front porch all the time?”
“Sounds like you know it. If you talk to her, tell her Joe-Joe said hey.” He laughed. “Don’t tell her the old coot forgot her name.”
“LAUREL HIGH. PEACE.” The young man who answered the phone sounded thoroughly sincere. And more than a little stoned.
“Uh . . . peace,” I replied. “I’m trying to get in touch with a student there.”
“Heyyyy, man, I’m a student. Troy.”
“Uh, hi, Troy. Actually, I’m trying to get in touch with another student. A student named Jenny. Jenny Earhart. Is Jenny there?”
“Nah, you’re out of luck, dude. Jenny’s not here. Jenny’s gone.”
Luckily, Jenny hadn’t gone far, according to the sheepish school administrator who took the phone from Troy. “Jenny’s doing an art internship this semester,” the woman told me. “She’s working afternoons at a graphic-design agency in the Old City.” She gave me the agency’s name, and when I phoned, Jenny herself answered the call, sounding perfectly poised and not at all stoned.