THE AROMA OF ROASTING coffee hung heavy and pleasant in the air, like wood smoke on a winter’s day, as I parked my truck and stepped out onto the treacherous footing of Jackson Avenue. The street was brick, and the bricks were chipped, cracked, and in places altogether missing, thanks to a century of heavy traffic and chronic neglect. That was finally changing—the gritty warehouse district known as the Old City was finally, in the last decade of the twentieth century, being gentrified with bars and boutiques and loft apartments—but the change was slow and uneven. Especially underfoot.
The coffee aroma permeating the Old City came from the JFG Coffee Company, whose headquarters and roasting plant occupied most of a five-story building on Jackson Avenue. The building’s ground floor had been rented out to newer, hipper tenants. One of these was the design agency where Jenny was interning; the other was the JFG Coffeehouse, where she’d suggested we meet.
Joe Hollingsworth had described her as tall, blond, and rangy; he’d also described her as perpetually shoeless. I didn’t spot any bare feet in the café, but I did spot a young woman who was tall and blond, leaning over a sketch pad, finishing a pastel sketch of the JFG Coffee Building. The sketch portrayed the old building honestly: A couple of windows in the fa?ade had been boarded up, and vestiges of an adjoining building remained, in the form of bricked-up openings and cut-off staircase supports that no longer supported anything. But the building’s age and imperfections were offset by the youth and vitality of the people she’d shown enjoying themselves at café tables out front. I leaned in for a closer look at the faces, and even though the figures were small, their features were detailed and lifelike.
“Professor Hollingsworth—Joe—said you were good with faces,” I told her. “I agree. And like I said on the phone, I need a good face.” I’d set a hatbox on our table. Now I removed the lid, then reached in and lifted out the skull, which was resting upside down on a doughnut-shaped cushion, surrounded by Bubble Wrap. I righted the skull, rotating it toward her.
“Oh, my,” she whispered. She inclined her head this way and that, studying the skull from multiple angles. “She looks so young. And so . . . vulnerable. What else can you tell me about her?”
“Not much, unfortunately. All we have is the bone, and there’s a limit to what it tells us. She’s been dead for at least two years, maybe more.”
“How do you know?”
“Because when we found her, she had a two-year-old black locust growing in her left eye orbit.”
“What?”
“Eye orbit. Eye socket, most people call it.”
“No, I mean, what did you say was growing there? A locust?”
“A black locust. A tree, not a bug.” I turned the skull toward the ceiling of the coffeehouse. “See what a nice little planter that makes? Just add a seed, a little dust, a little rain, and voilà.” I shifted the skull so she had a better view into the eye orbit. “See that slot, way in the back?” She nodded. “That’s where the optic nerve runs from the eyeball to the brain. The roots grew through that opening into the cranial vault.”
“Wow.”
“But wait, there’s more. We also found a wasp nest in there, inside the cranium. Her skull was becoming its own little ecosystem.”
“Amazing. That’s beautiful. But heartbreaking, too. You said she was, what, fourteen?”
“Fourteen, thirteen, fifteen—one of those, almost certainly. White. Right-handed. No dental work, so the family was probably poor. Her bones are slight and the muscle markings aren’t prominent, so I expect she was thin. Maybe even malnourished. She . . .” I hesitated.
She turned and looked at me. “She what?”
“I suspect she’d been abused.”
Her eyes narrowed, and she searched my face. “Sexually abused? How can you tell?”
“I meant physically. Wouldn’t surprise me if she was sexually abused, too, though. Her left arm was broken at some point, and it wasn’t set properly, so it healed with a little kink in it. Maybe they just didn’t have money for a doctor, but maybe they didn’t want anybody to know about the injury. Lots of boys break their arms, but not many girls. She had a couple broken ribs, too. More recently than the arm, but still a good while before she died.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because all the fractures had healed, and the bone had remodeled.”
“Remodeled?”
“It means the repair job has blended in, recontoured over time. Like the rough edges have been filled in with putty and sanded smooth. Lots of recontouring in the girl’s arm, not as much in the ribs. Just guessing, I’d say she was six or eight when her arm was broken, nine or ten when her ribs were busted.”