They thanked her and walked out of the station. “You were acting a bit strange,” Kelsey murmured to Jane. “As if you didn’t want Betty to know exactly what you’re doing.”
“Betty certainly seems helpful and legitimate,” Jane said. “But Sloan’s been more communicative with Newsome than his own deputies about all this. I’m not sure it’s a matter of mistrust so much as a certain wariness, since everyone in this town talks to everyone else. Or maybe it’s because we know that Brendan Fogerty—who came out of the whole gold heist all those years ago looking like a hero—was probably behind the whole thing.”
“Hmm. So what’s our plan?”
“I figure we’ll get back into town, see what’s up at the Old Jail, maybe get something to eat there,” Jane told her.
When they arrived, Mike was at the desk. He gave Jane an angry glare when she arrived.
“You looking for Sloan? Well, he just left. Ripped up my room—and took off.”
“Oh,” Jane said, disappointed. “Did he leave me a message?”
Mike nodded, not at all happy. “He said for you to keep looking.” He glared at Kelsey in turn. “He said between the locals and the feds, they’d get my place back in shape. He promised!”
“Mr. Addison, I know we’ll see that your place is better than ever,” Kelsey told him.
Mike sniffed. “You like throwing those tax dollars around, do you?”
“We can do a lot of the work ourselves,” Kelsey said. “Honestly.”
“Mike, I’m going to see what he was up to, okay?” Jane asked.
Mike frowned. “He told me not to let anyone back there. But I guess he didn’t mean you. Go on. You’ll see what he’s done!”
Jane made her way through the door to the cells and then down the hall, Kelsey right behind her. They entered the Trey Hardy cell.
“Well,” Kelsey said. “I can see why Mike was so upset.”
The plaster in the bathroom looked as if it had been attacked with a sledgehammer—which it clearly had.
Jane bit her lower lip, smiling. “I’m pretty sure this is my fault,” she told Kelsey. “Trey Hardy keeps banging on this wall, so...”
“Do you think he found anything?” Kelsey asked.
“I don’t think he had a chance to get very far,” Jane said, brushing at the wall, knocking away first the new plaster and then the old plaster to get down to the wooden beams beneath. Those beams had once been strong and sturdy; when the jail was restored, thinner plywood had been used along with the plaster. She tried poking her fingers through to see if she could find anything.
“I’ll call and ask him what’s going on.” Kelsey pulled out her phone.
Jane thought she knew how Sloan had felt while digging. The more she worked, the more she wanted to get done. She tried to imagine the jail as it had been with no nice modern bath built into the side. She’d already guessed that the barred window would have been just about where the mirror was now, and Trey Hardy might have leaned against the wall right here, staring out at the world. He might’ve been doing that when the door to his cell burst open—and Aaron Munson had walked in, guns blazing.
“They’re at the mine,” Kelsey said to Jane. “He’ll call us back later.”
Just then, Jane’s fingers touched something. She wiggled them deeper between the boards. What she touched felt like metal.
“Need help?” Kelsey asked.
“I got it, I got it!”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know, but...” She managed to extract a little metal tube. It might have been the muzzle of an old gun, sawed or cut off to create a cylinder. Or perhaps it had been fashioned from the leg of an old bed. It seemed as encrusted as something taken from a shipwreck.
And inside, rolled up, was a piece of paper. It was old, fragile, but the metal tubing had done its work.
Jane looked at Kelsey and carefully unrolled it.
*
The bones were in the mine wall.
They’d been undetected for over a hundred and forty years because they’d been shored up against the stone of the mine wall when work was done to support the structure to protect the miners from cave-ins.
“We found them,” Newsome told Sloan and Logan, “because one member of our crime-scene unit noted a little crevice in the rocks in the second set of openings. If she hadn’t seen that crack and been determined to go farther...”
There was something infinitely sad about the bones in the wall. They were attached to bits and pieces of fabric; time and heat had worn away the tissue and flesh, and they were heaped in a confusing pile. It appeared that the stagecoach robbers had brought them here, dug out the support structure, covered them with dirt and rock, then built up new “support beams” and a new wall around them.
The robbers—the killers—must have moved quickly, at night, because miners were working there at the time.
In fact, miners had come to work for years. Maybe, especially in the months afterward, they’d wondered at the smell.