“Make you want to have one?”
She looked at me sharply. “Good God, no,” she said. “Made me want to babble for an hour or two a week, though. I made them promise to let me baby-sit every Thursday night.” She straightened the stack of brochures. “You weren’t over in North Hills last night by any chance, were you?”
“Me? What would I be doing in North Hills?” My question wasn’t a lie, exactly, but it sure wasn’t the truth.
“I don’t know. I just wondered.” Did Miranda have ESP? Was she that attuned to me? “I went out to pick some mint for the tea, and I heard a car start up. Then a truck like yours did a U-turn and drove past.”
“Huh,” I said as casually as I could. “Lot of trucks like mine in Knoxville.”
“Guess so. I called your name—I was going to invite you to come in and join us. You’d have enjoyed it.”
“Maybe we can all get together sometime,” I told her. Serves you right, I told myself. “Listen,” I said, retreating to a safer ground, “I could use your computer-research skills on something.”
“Shoot.”
“I’m trying to get in touch with the Trinity Crematorium, which is somewhere near Rock Spring, in northwest Georgia. It’s the place where Burt DeVriess’s aunt was sent to be cremated.”
“Did you call 411?”
“I did. There’s no listing for them.”
“Hmm. That seems odd, unless they’re trying to run themselves out of business.”
“It gets odder. Guy who runs it is named Littlejohn.” I’d gotten the name from Helen Taylor, who’d all but spit when she said it.
“Little John? Like Robin Hood’s sidekick?”
“That’s his last name, not two names. First name is Delbert.”
“Delbert—that’s odd, all right.”
“Let me finish,” I said, relieved that she was back in bantering mode. “Delbert Littlejohn has an unlisted number.”
“Ooh, I like this,” she said. “It smacks of skullduggery.”
“What is skullduggery anyhow? I’ve heard the word tossed around,” I said, “but I’ve never been sure what it means. Something to do with digging up skulls, I reckon, but what? And how come it’s ‘duggery,’ not ‘diggery,’ or even ‘digging’?”
“What do I look like,” she said, “The Oxford English Dictionary?” She swiveled her chair around to face the desk, and her fingers played a fast sonata on the computer’s keyboard. “Hmm,” she said. “Bizarrely, it has nothing to do with either skulls or digging. According to Dictionary.com, the word comes from an obscure Scottish obscenity meaning ‘fornication,’ and it means ‘trickery’ or ‘deception.’ Both of which, I suppose, are often involved in fornication.”
“So young, and yet so cynical,” I said.
“I’ve always been precocious.”
“Anyway,” I said, “back to the question at hand. You reckon you could bang around on those keys some more and find out how I could reach this mysterious Mr. Littlejohn, so I can ask him a few questions about Aunt Jean?”
“Shucks, I reckon,” she mocked. “I’ll call you when I get something. Or when I strike out.”
“You never strike out,” I said. By the time the door whammed shut behind me, the keys were already clattering.
MY OFFICE phone rang an hour later. Miranda had dug deep into her bag of Google tricks without finding any trace of Trinity Crematorium. She’d also tried AnyWho.com and MapQuest, she said, in a vain effort to track down an address or phone number. “And I’m sure you’ll be shocked, shocked, to know that Rock Spring, Georgia, doesn’t have an online database of property-tax records.” She’d hit a stone wall with the records clerk in the county courthouse but finally hit pay dirt by calling the post office and pretending to be a UPS driver in need of help finding the Littlejohn house. “And,” she announced triumphantly, “I got a phone number.”
“Miranda,” I said, “you are a Jedi master of skullduggery.”
But if I thought my quest was over, I was wrong. When I dialed the number she gave me, a machine answered. There was no greeting or announcement, just a beep. I hadn’t mentally prepared a message, so I hung up. After collecting my thoughts, I called back, ready to say who I was and simply ask for a return call. Once again I was taken by surprise. “Hello,” said a flat, guarded male voice.
“Oh, hello,” I said. “Is this Delbert Littlejohn?”
There was a pause. “He’s not available right now. Who’s this?”
“My name is Dr. Bill Brockton,” I began. “I’m a forensic anthropologist at the University of Tennessee. I’ve been asked to take a look at some cremains that came from your crematorium—a Tennessee woman named Jean DeVriess. I’m hoping—”