Page 32 of The Bone Code

The shouting had stopped, and Anne was clumping up the stairs.

“I’ll watch for your email.”

“Ciao.”

“Ciao.”

“That moron has the brains of a blueberry pancake.” Anne’s hair was in the last hurrah of a hasty updo.

“He’s a yard guy.”

“Exactly. Which means he doesn’t chair the committee on what fauna lives and what dies. Not on my property.”

“Where is the serpent in question?”

“The tree trimmer helped me trap him in a seed bag. Promised to drive him over to the marsh.”

“Can blacksnakes survive in salt water?”

Anne just looked at me. She had a smear of what looked like guacamole on her right cheek.

“I’m sure Señor Snake will prosper in his new home,” I said. “What should we do for dinner?”

“I’m cooking.”

Oh, boy.

I went back to my report.

An hour later, Anne called me inside. She’d made shrimp and pimiento cheese grits, a dish guaranteed to raise my cholesterol level.

“You got a lot done,” I said, adding crustaceans to the orange carbs heaped on my plate.

“Not easy when the help has a collective IQ that suggests they need weekly watering.”

“Were you outside all day?”

“A goodly part. But not all. I did some research. You’re going to light right up when you hear what I found.”

“What kind of research?”

“On death masks.”

I must have looked puzzled.

“Polly Beecroft? The photos?” she prompted.

“Right.”

“Lord a’mighty, Tempe. Did you forget about that sweet old lady?”

“Of course not.” Given the hurricane and the container case, I had.

“Hold on.”

Anne left the table, returned moments later with her laptop. Which she deposited on a rather large glob of grits.

“OK. The practice of preserving faces in wax or plaster, sometimes bronze, began way back in antiquity. You’ve seen pictures of Tutankhamen’s mask, right?”