across its middle, maybe so you could break it in half. That’s not a bad way to do a dog tag; our way, making two of them, means they clattered every time you moved.” Lars, unsurprisingly, was a former Marine.
Betsy, more surprisingly, was a former WAVE. She nodded, remembering how noisy they could be. Less so for the females, who could tuck them into a bra.
“Why two of them anyhow?” asked Jill a little while later, over bacon and eggs scrambled with sweet peppers and onions—plain for the children.
Betsy and Lars looked at each other. “In case you get, um, terminated,” said Lars at last. “Someone, on his way somewhere else, finds you in the field and takes one dog tag as proof you’re, um, and leaves the other one with you for easy identification.”
“Oh,” said Jill, now aware this was not a suitable topic with the little pitchers present. “More coffee?”
“None for me, thanks,” said Emma Beth in a perfect imitation of an adult.
Betsy choked back a laugh. Emma Beth took herself seriously and perhaps it was cruel to show amusement when her dignity was on display.
“Do you think it’s really possible Dieter Keitel was here at the cabin back in the forties?” Jill asked, carefully avoiding saying scary words like “die” and “skeleton.”
“I guess so,” said Lars. “The question is, what was he doing here?”
“Is Dieter a friend of ours?” asked Emma Beth.
“No, darling, he’s someone who may have visited this cabin back before even your father was born.”
Imagining a time that long ago was beyond Emma Beth’s ability, so she returned her attention to her eggs. “’Kay,” she murmured.
“Nice!” announced Airey, waving his spoon.
“What’s nice?” asked Lars.
“Aaaaaae-guh!”
“Well, we’re glad you approve. Now eat it all up.”
“’Kay,” he said, very satisfied to find himself in a place where an echo of his big sister’s reply was appropriate.
“Maybe nobody was home when he got here,” suggested Betsy.
“Then who, um, terminated him? He didn’t hurt himself falling down those stairs, not with wooden steps and a dirt floor at the bottom. There were three fractures, remember.”
“Three?” said Betsy.
“Two on his head and one to his right arm.”
“Wow. All right, he ran into someone here.”
“I runned into Minnie at The Common,” announced Emma Beth, paying attention again.
“Ran into Minnie. Yes, you did, silly girl, not watching where you were going.”
“I fell down and hurt my knee.”
Airey made a sound like a car engine being gunned, his version of scornful laughter, and waved his spoon. “Faw down!”
The adults surrendered and focused on the children and their own breakfasts.
They had barely finished clearing away the breakfast things when there was the sound of a vehicle coming into the clearing. Lars looked out the front window and said, “Uh-oh.”
“Is the sheriff back again?” asked Jill, dismayed.
“No, the media.”
“Oh, no!”
“Not going to talk to them?” asked Betsy, hurrying to the window to peer out.
“Not on your life,” said Jill. “Up here we are private citizens and prefer to remain that way.”
A big white van with a satellite dish on top of it and a television station logo on its side was in the clearing. Men and women had emerged, one with a television camera on his shoulder, another with a furry microphone on a boom, yet another in a close-fitting suit, her perfect hairdo being blown a trifle awry by a vagrant breeze.
After they got set up, the woman stepped in front of the little porch and Betsy could hear her say, “On me in three, two, one . . . This is your KCCT reporter Marla Johnson from the scene where a human skeleton was discovered in a root cellar yesterday. Sheriff Randy Fisher refuses to speculate on the identity of the skeleton or how it came to be under this cabin.” Pause. “Cut.”
The man with the camera let its nose drop toward the ground, and Ms. Johnson