Self-Portrait with Nothing Sneak Peek by Aimee Pokwatka

Author:Aimee Pokwatka
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

2

PEPPER RAFFERTY SAT in her lab—its walls lined floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes containing the skeletal remains of a population who’d died thousands of years earlier—and tried to concentrate. The bones presently in front of her weren’t archaic, and she’d arranged them on the table as the police had found them—the femurs crossed, the skull fragments scattered like a constellation. Pepper had heard the news about Ula Frost’s disappearance on the radio on her way to campus and was having a hard time staying focused. The pelvis was obviously female, which she’d already noted. The partial fusion of the medial clavicular epiphyses and the open sutures in the recovered skull fragments suggested the victim was between eighteen and twenty-five. Someone had loved the owner of these bones. Someone missed her. Someone, somewhere needed Pepper to not screw this up.

There weren’t enough facial bones present to reconstruct a reliable image, but after her next class, she’d have her grad students work on gluing the fragments together and running the image through the reconstruction program anyway. It would be a lesson. A lesson on managing expectations.

This body had been buried shallowly near the pond at the edge of town, early in the unusually hot fall, Pepper suspected, as it would take a combination of temperature and soil acidity to produce the accelerated rate of soft tissue decomposition she now observed. Pepper wasn’t supposed to know about anything else the police had found, but Jamie Marchand liked her and told her anyway over a cup of hot chocolate in the faculty lounge. The department only stocked the powdered kind, but Pepper kept a bag of Hershey’s Kisses on a high shelf in the lounge’s kitchen, which she added to their mugs. Jamie had a sweet tooth.

The body, he’d told her, had been found after a recent three-day storm by an elderly woman who’d been instructed to walk more after a hip replacement. She’d seen the fabric first, shreds of pink sweatshirt, before spotting a rib jutting from the ground. Upon excavation, the police had also found a single earring, silver and spider-shaped. The clothing matched that of a girl who’d gone missing at the beginning of the fall semester, a math major who’d disappeared while walking her calculus professor’s dog. The dog had turned up in the owner’s own yard a week later, missing its tail. Pepper hadn’t known the girl, but she’d attended the candlelight vigil. Jamie told Pepper the boyfriend had been suspected at the time because he’d acted strangely when questioned, compulsively repeating a story about how sometimes she got lost when she took walks, how she had a bad sense of direction. There were gnaw marks on the femurs and one humerus. An animal, likely a rodent, had gotten to the body. The fracture pattern of the skull looked suspicious, but it was impossible to tell the difference between perimortem and postmortem trauma with the remains in this condition.

Pepper went through the bones again systematically, rereading her notes. She worried, more than usual, that she was missing something.

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