The Skeleton Crew by Deborah Halber

she was and wherever she had come from, was his future wife.
    Word got around that the new girl had moved to Livingston from northern Kentucky; her name was Lori Ann Riddle, and she was a junior. Todd spent the hours after lunch wondering how to insert himself into Lori’s path. The last period of the day, he walked into study hall and saw her seated there. He gave a slight nod of acknowledgment to some higher being before walking over and sitting down next to her.
    Lori and Todd started dating. If Todd had a premonition about his future father-in-law as he had had about his future wife, he never mentioned it. But his first meeting with Wilbur Riddle would prove as life-changing as his first glimpse of Riddle’s daughter.
    Swapping spooky tales on their first Halloween together, Lori told Todd her best real-life ghost story: the one about her daddy finding a dead body in Kentucky.
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    The day Wilbur Riddle and I made our pilgrimage to the Tent Girl site, Riddle decided we must drop in on his old friend Bobby G. Vance, the former sheriff of Scott County, the man Wilbur had raced to phone when he saw what was encased in the tarp. Sheriff Vance’s office back then was in the imposing nineteenth-century brick courthouse adorned with a nonblindfolded Lady Justice that still stands in the heart of historic downtown Georgetown, a straight shot down Route 25 from Sadieville. Tall, solid, with dark hair, Vance, although still a young man in 1968, had served two four-year terms as deputy sheriff in the three-­person department before being elected to a four-year term as sheriff. Most locals knew Vance by sight. Georgetown was—and is—small-town South, where the sheriff shook his forefinger at rowdy boys and threatened to tell their daddies on them. Vance knew Wilbur Riddle may not have been the straightest arrow, but he wouldn’t joke about a corpse.
    It was around ten in the morning on that day in May when Vance pulled his cruiser in beside Riddle’s truck. The two men hustled down the embankment to the spot by the creek where the bundle lay. They peered at it as if it had fallen to earth from outer space. Vance was wearing a suit, white shirt, and tie. The odor had gotten worse, and as Riddle remembers it, Vance was promptly sick in the bushes.
    â€œWill you open it?” Vance said to Riddle.
    â€œYeah, I’ll open it.”
    Among his many avocations, Riddle traded knives. He typically had one or two new bone-handled Case Canoe penknives in his pocket, but he chose an old, rusty blade; he didn’t want that smell on his knife. He didn’t think it would ever come off. Done, he placed the knife on the ground. Riddle had sliced the fabric at a place that happened to expose the back of a neck.
    The flesh looked petrified, like shoe leather. In a corpse, the intestinal bacteria that help break down food start to produce a foul-smelling gas that flows into the blood vessels and tissues. The gas bloats the body and blackens the skin. Even seasoned coroners can find it harrowing to encounter a neglected body at close range.
    â€œWhat is it?” Vance said, still queasy.
    â€œIt’s a girl.”
    â€œWhite or black?’”
    â€œWhite,” Riddle said.
    At around eleven, Vance phoned Kentucky State Police Post 12 in Frankfort. Detective Edward L. Cornett picked up the phone. The report he typed up a few days later said that Bob Vance, sheriff of Scott County, stated that a body tied up in a tarpaulin had been found in a rural area beside US 25 thirteen miles north of Georgetown by one “Wilburn” Riddle, and Vance had requested that the state police help with the investigation.
    Meanwhile, deputy coroner Kenneth Grant, Deputy Sheriff Jimmy Williams, and a newspaper reporter arrived. A photographer captured the incongruous scenes I later saw of men in black suits and narrow ties kneeling on the brush-covered ground and conferring in groups like accountants lost in