Jim moved farther on the aerial map, and he and Lynne slowly took the neighborhood apart piece by piece, sharing memories and landmarks. They finished the first column of photos and moved closer to the college with the next column.
“Lynne, show me your sketch again,” Jim said. She laid it on the table, and he nodded and put his finger on a spot. “The way these two lines intersect, they’ve got a defined corner. That can’t be a natural feature; it has to be something man-made. You need a square corner and a big bowl.”
“I know where this is!” Lynne said, excited, picking up the sketch. She grabbed Jim’s hand and tugged. “Come on.”
He laughed and resisted. “Where, Lynne?”
“Four squares twister—it’s the spinner.”
Jim pulled over another copy of the sketch Lynne had, put his finger on the intersecting lines, studied the sketch around his finger. “She’s right.”
Evie heard it in his voice, saw it in his face. He was seeing a place and its geography was matching up with the sketch.
“Let’s go,” Lynne said, tugging again.
Jim grabbed his coat with one hand, pointed Lynne toward hers. “We’re coming.”
“Is it far?” Evie asked, wondering if it made sense to drive.
“Blocks rather than miles, south of the quad past the arts building,” Jim replied. “We can walk it.”
“I’ll have coffee ready when you get back,” Nancy said, wrapping a scarf around Lynne’s neck, then kissing her cheek. “You did good, my girl.”
Evie made a call as they headed out. “David, Lynne and Jim think they have figured out one of the maps. Come join us at the college if you like.”
Evie answered David’s call sixteen minutes later.
“I’m in the parking lot, south side of the quad. Where are you?” David asked.
Evie looked around for the tallest object she could describe. “Look north. See a tall, white marble column, kind of like a steeple?”
“Got it.”
“I’m in its shadow.”
“Be with you in a minute.”
It was a rather serene place, still on campus and part of an outdoor art display of sculptures, memorial walls, plaques commemorating various events and graduating classes. It began where the quad ended and stretched about twenty feet wide along two blocks until it came to the cemetery behind one of the oldest churches in the neighborhood.
Lynne had stopped at a place midpoint, at an earthen sculpture meant to be experienced in a tangible way rather than just looked at. As kids, they had made up a game of twister in the bowl of earth, the four marble slabs of the monument providing reasonable distances to attempt to reach, while the sloped earth created a natural gravity well that made it impossible to play more than a move or two without falling over. The record, according to Lynne, was six moves, and she still held it.
The wind had cleared snow from the top of the sculpture, and Jim pushed the small drift inside away with the side of his boot. Evie saw with fascination that the four marble slabs had been etched with short music riffs, country and jazz, classic and rock.
Jim began sorting out the finer details of the sketch now that the reference point was set. Lynne paced off steps at his direction, carefully moved up the slope and back down, confirming the way the sketch had been drawn.
Jim nodded and made a final mark on the copy he held. “The unit of distance in this sketch is right at twenty inches. It holds no matter which direction you move away from the corner of that oblique.”
“So where does that say Jenna should be found?” Lynne asked, spinning around in a circle while studying the ground.
David joined them as Jim reached out and quietly took Lynne’s hand to stop her from getting dizzy.
“She’s in the monument.”
“What?” Lynne jumped sideways, away from the marble stones.
“There’s no X to mark where the body is, just a bunch of contour lines to confirm you have the location, with the one man-made feature and a unit of distance you can use to calculate the rest. I don’t think he buried her; I think he hid her.” Jim pointed. “In there.”
Evie looked at the solid bench sitting adjacent to the four marble slabs set in the bowl of earth. The bench sat on a solid base. Jim walked over to the bench and put his weight against it, tipped it.
A bone tumbled out.
“Oh, put it back!” Lynne spun away with an anxious step as Jim eased the bench back down. A solid bench, hollow inside, keeping watch over an earthen bowl with four flat marble slabs marking the four directions. The plaque on the bench read, Sit and overlook an eternal sea of music.
Evie carefully rolled up the hand-drawn street maps of the area around Jenna’s apartment building and returned them to the map tube. She took down the photos from the whiteboard, restored them to their original pages in Jenna’s albums and scrapbooks, and stacked them all in a box to be returned to the family. She put the reports she had read back into order and stored them in another box, added the data sets of names she’d sourced and printed out while working the case. Her desk cleared rather swiftly when the decision was simply which folder to store the material in. She reluctantly dropped the last of her flowers, now wilted, into the trash.