"The Face With Two Skeletons"
By: Tropicwhale
Disclaimer: Where the wind blows I do not know. Who it blows I do not own….especially if it's Zack, Booth or anything else from the Fox series "Bones".
Author Talk: BAH!! Fox makes me sad. They cancel stuff for no reason other than it's too liberal. If they didn't have shows like House and Bones I'd totally boycott them. Buster-fuster. Why am I so political today? Must have woken up on the judicial side of the bed.
Chapter Twenty Six
Sarah Seville was a stocky older blonde that carried herself like she was a bombshell in her younger years. Booth would have been mildly impressed with her except she continued to smoke a menthol cigarette as Booth and Brennan conducted their interview on the porch of her duplex on the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia. She wore a floral summer dress that seemed a little more than a decade out of date and her hair back in a pony tail. She had a white wicker porch set with green cushions and sat with her legs crossed at the ankles and her ash tray next to her on an end table. She had flowering bushes along the path to the sidewalk and along her side of the porch. On the other side of the duplex there was a bench swing that moves slightly from when her neighbor had walked inside at the appearance of the federal officer and his squint. Booth and Brennan sat on the love seat of the wicker set and kept bumping elbows as they shifted. "No. I didn't know that she was in D.C." The older woman rasped. "I never went looking for either girl. I asked that they never try to find me. I didn't even know their names were Olivia and Anne. My first husband…I was engaged to him and he was running for office when I first got pregnant. In those days an umarried girl did one of two things. They either got shotgunned or went to live with their distant cousins up north. I chose the second."
"Why" Brennan wanted to know. "Would they shoot you with a shotgun?" Booth nearly laughed. It was obvious she was trying to fish for a shotgun link between the biological mother and the twins' death.
"She means shotgun wedding, Bones. Married while she wasn't showing." Brennan looked confused. "The name is taken from angry fathers holding a shotgun to the heads of the young men that deflowered their daughters." Brennan nodded slowly to show she understood. "If she was to get married and then have twins so close to the wedding it would have looked bad for her husband."
"I see." the forensic anthropologist said slowly.
"There was never an attempt from them to find you? Or visa versa?" Booth asked.
"No, sir. At least none I'm aware of. I had approved of both families and frankly…after everything I've gone through in this life….they were better off not having me in their lives. I've been through six husbands, one of which in the early eighties had me into heroin, I've been raped and had three miscarriages. My only wish is that maybe I'll get lucky and get cancer from smoking. What's the interest in the twins anyway?" Booth scratched his nose. "They in trouble or something? They find each other?"
"In a way." Brennan spoke before Booth could stop her. "They both ended up in my lab at the Jeffersonian."
"What is that you do, Dr. Brennan?"
"I'm a forensic anthropologist. I identify skeletal remains." Ms. Seville looked at her askew.
"What are you saying? My girls are both dead?"
"Yes. Within a few months of each other." Brennan confirmed.
"And you can tell this how?" Ms. Seville wanted to know.
"The remains are less than six months old. Anne was last seen earlier this month and Olivia was last seen six months ago."
"How'd they die?"
"Both women died from a gunshot wound to the chest."
"They both…?" Ms. Seville seemed to lose her voice. "Do you know who did it?" She looked genuinely upset. Brennan looked at Booth. Dealing with emotional birth mothers of murder victims was not her forte.
"We're looking into it." Booth assured her.
"And you're here…" Ms. Seville put it together in her head. "Oh god. My girls…" She went to take a drag off her cigarette, realize it went out and jammed it into the ash tray. She picked up the pack and pulled out a thin cylinder with shaking fingers. She lit it with a cheap lighter. She inhaled and closed her eyes. She exhaled and stared right at Booth. "They didn't contact me. I don't know anything."
"We're just trying to rule you out, Ms. Seville." Booth said. She nodded, rapidly, and took a deep breath then a drag off her cigarette. "Can you tell us about how you got in contact with the adopted families? Or why you chose to separate the twins?"
"I didn't but neither family could afford twins. I went to live with Rosie, my second cousin on my mother side in Michigan. She was the one that helped me find the adoption agency and the families. She had three children at the time…" She paused to take a drag off the cigarette. "Sally, Mary-Jane, and Tony Addy."
"Addy?" Brennan's ears perked up.
"Yeah, Rosie's husband was Anthony Addy. AA." she snorts. "I always got a kick out of that. I helped raise them while I was pregnant and Rosie and Anthony both had to work. I think Tony still lives in Michigan….had six kids." She shakes her head. "He was the one that always kicked me in my shins when I told him to take a bath."
"Six kids? Do you remember their names?"
"Yeah…actually got a picture of them somewhere. Hang-on." She stood and went in the screen door of her house, which banged as it closed. Booth looked over at Brennan.
"You don't think…?" Booth asked.
"That Zack's paternal grandmother was the one that Sarah was sent to when she got pregnant? That would be an amazing coincidence."
"Why does this case always seem to lead back to Zack?"
"I don't know." Brennan said. "But it's messing me out."
"Freaking, Bones, you mean freaking you out." Bones just shrugged at the correction. It was normal for Booth to correct her with colliquial speech as she corrected him with scientific and grammar. Ms. Seville came back out and handed a newspaper clipping to Brennan and sat back down.
"Rosie and I stayed in contact over the years. The one grandson was quite the prodigy. She was so proud." Booth looked over Brennan's shoulder. The clipping had an article from about a child prodigy and the picture showed him and his family. In the center of the large family was Zack. "That's her on the side."
"How old where you when you gave birth?" Brennan wanted to know.
"Sixteen. We were engaged until I finished high school and he was twenty-five. Different times. We were only married for three years. He was abusive. My second husband, Charlie, died in Vietnam. married to him for six months…shame. He was a good man. Third husband was the record; five years. He was the heroin husband. Why?" Booth looked at Brennan. She was doing math in her head. She turned to Booth.
"There's no way we got our victims' ages right."
"Why?"
"We have their ages as 28...there is no way they are less forty something."
"Is it possible you have the wrong women?" Ms. Seville asked, a little frantic.
"That would mean both your daughters are missing and dentals match both women." Boot looked at his partner. "Excuse me." Brennan stood and pulled out her cell. "Hello, Hodgins? Can you put Wendell on the phone? Thank you." She walked away.
"Bones is the best, Ms. Seville. She'll figure it out."
"Is it horrible that I hope this is a mistaken identity thing?"
"No, Ms. Seville. It isn't." She nodded and took a drag off her cigarette. Bones came back.
"You smoked when you were pregnant?" She asked.
"A little."
"Your daughters suffered from a type of growth hormone deficiency that resulted in osteopenia, which means their bones weren't as well formed as they should have been. It is them but they both were very frail which stressed Olivia's joints as she was overweight. Anne suffered multiple hairline fractures as a child."
"Bones." Booth said warningly. Ms. Seville looked heartbroken.
"What? It's the truth." Booth took a deep, calming breath.
"I'm a terrible person." Ms. Seville collapsed in on herself.
"No. You tried to do right by your daughters. You tried." Booth tried to undo the damage his partner had unknowingly wrought.
"And, at the time, there wasn't the knowledge there was today about smoking during pregnancy. Unless you had a M.D., there was no way you could have known how that would have affected your daughters' physiology." Brennan added. "Can we keep this?" She held up the picture of Zack's family. "We'll return it when the investigation is over."
"Yes. Of course." Ms. Seville said. "Excuse me, I feel ill….I need to lie down." She put out her cigarette and walked into her house and slammed the front door. Booth grabbed Bones' elbow and led her back to the car.
"What did I say?" Brennan wanted to know.
Author After Talk: I just found out that Zack lived above a twelve car garage that has antique cars and a boat in it. It has a bedroom, a second bedroom, a living room, a kitchen and two bathrooms. He has never been to the main house because it's at the other end of the driveway and he can barely see it because the tennis courts and the pond. I'm sorry I had that wrong….please ignore my screw up, obviously I need to work on the technique I use for research (read watch more "Bones")….I want to see if the pond and the tennis courts can make it in though…who knows maybe I'll correct my mistake later After all I blew up his apartment :P maybe the apartment we saw was a remodel. Hodgins' rich, right? Maybe he got bored. Besides, remodeling his friend's apartment just cause makes him look like philanthropic to Angela which reads as aw, he's sweet and caring…I should do that thing in bed he likes….which suits Hodgins just fine. It's a rich scientist's way of getting some nookie….kinda complicated if you ask me…but you didn't…nevermind. *sigh*
Tropic