They came to the Terrapin Scratch School site Sunday morning at 1:00 a.m. because they believe there could be valuable artifacts left at the old school, which was built in the late 1800s. When they saw the glint of gold in their flashlight, they thought they had struck the mother lode. But when they saw brown bone and a nasal opening, they realized the gold was a crowned tooth in a skull. Fearing the deceased might haunt them, they decided to replace the skull and find a county constable who was untrained and wouldn't ask too many questions about being on private land hunting for treasure. They didn't know Constable Thomas Jefferson Davis McCall, whose first question was, "You boys ain't treasurer hunters, are you?" Finding a skull that had lain under a hundred-year-old school house proved difficult to identify and even harder to find a viable suspect. Time degrades memories and evidence, and McCall, known to everyone in Fordham as JD, had to use all his 35 years of experience to chase the investigation from Grant County, Mississippi, to halfway across Georgia and back before he was able to find the murderer. In the process, he had to fight the local sheriff and turn to unlikely associates for help before he could solve the mystery.