“Wonderful,” I said. “That’s the one to use.”
“If you think so. But there’s one more. I took a little artistic license with it, though. Maybe too much.” She uncovered the final drawing. She’d gone back to the frontal view for this one. The eyes, as I’d come to expect, were arresting and haunting. But underneath one, she’d added a detail—an unexpected bit of shading that hit me like a punch in the gut: She had given the girl a black eye, and in the process, she’d somehow given the girl a story, given her a life. I remembered Jenny’s assessment of the girl’s life, as we’d sat at the table in the coffee shop—“Sounds like a pretty awful life,” she’d said—and somehow she’d captured that in her sketch. As I held the soft nap of the drawing paper in my hand, I found myself staring into that life—even as I felt myself being stared into by the haunted, haunting eyes of the dead girl.
I COULD SMELL ONIONS and potatoes frying even before I got to the top of the basement stairs and opened the kitchen door. “Yum,” I said. “Smells great.”
Kathleen looked over her shoulder, her spatula still stirring the sizzling contents of the cast-iron skillet. “How was your day?”
“Good. Interesting. I’ll tell you about it, but not right now.” I switched on the portable television that we kept on the kitchen counter and switched it to WBIR, the NBC affiliate, which dominated the local news. “I think they’re doing a story about that Morgan County case I’m working. The strip-mine girl.”
The newscast led off with a story about Saturday’s football game between the Vols and the Gators. Even though the Vols’ head coach, Johnny Majors, was still recuperating from a quintuple bypass, the Vols had won their first two games, including an upset win over fourteenth-ranked Georgia. This week, though, the Vols were taking on an even tougher opponent. The Gators were ranked number four in the nation, and they’d beaten UT the year before. Even though UT was a 10-point underdog, the story ended with a string of Vol fans professing their confidence. “Gator season is open!” yelled the final fan, an orange-clad man swaying on the rear deck of a houseboat. Behind him, I saw the familiar shape of Calhoun’s in the distance, and—directly over the man’s shoulder—the inflatable alligator hanging from its noose.
“Authorities in Campbell County are investigating the mysterious death of a teenage girl,” said Bill Williams, WBIR’s longtime news anchor. “The bones of the girl, whose age is estimated at twelve to fifteen years, were found on Labor Day beside an abandoned strip mine. Dr. Bill Brockton, a forensic anthropologist at the University of Tennessee, says the girl’s body was dumped at the mine at least two years ago, possibly longer.”
The camera shifted to Williams’s coanchor, a woman named Edye Ellis. “Investigators today released an artist’s conception of what the girl may have looked like.” The screen filled with two of Jenny’s sketches—the three-quarter profile and the frontal view that included the black eye—while Ellis continued, “Authorities have not been able to determine the cause of death.” Now the image switched to a two-shot, with Ellis turning solemnly to Williams. “And Bill, investigators are treating this case as a homicide.”
Williams nodded gravely. “Anyone with information about the girl’s death or her identity is urged to call the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office or the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation.” The sketches flashed on the screen again, this time with phone numbers for the sheriff’s office and the TBI.
The next story was a heartwarming piece about a fuzzy, adoptable puppy at the Humane Society shelter. “Cute dog,” I said.
“Adorable,” Kathleen agreed. “Sad thing is, there’ll be more calls about the puppy than about the girl.”
“Lots more calls,” I agreed, switching off the set. “What’d you think of the sketches?”
“Good,” she said. “Really good. Much better than usual. Those drawings of suspects they put out? Terrible.”
“That’s my doing,” I preened. “The good ones, not the bad ones.”
“Get out of here,” she said. “You couldn’t draw your way out of a paper bag.”
“No, but I found an artist—a good artist—and I loaned her the skull to work from. The chairman of the Art Department recommended her. Cute girl. Amelia somebody; no, wait—Jenny, not Amelia. Earhart. Jenny Earhart. I think maybe Jeff’s gonna ask her out.”
“Jeff? Our Jeff? Ask out a college girl?”
“No, she’s still in high school. She goes to Laurel—you know, that hippie school? She took a drawing class at UT last spring, knocked the socks off the professor.”
“What makes you think Jeff might ask her out?”