A Passing Curse (2011) (13 page)

Something else slammed the door on Ramon’s theory: both skeletons had been laid out in the sleeping position, European style, head to toe. The California Indians, most Indians, buried their dead in the fetal position, often on top of each other, as if they were being born again, born into the next world. But why would Ramon bother to lie? Who cared about the Indians or trying to preserve the Church’s honor or good intentions? It didn’t matter.

Ramon had not been lying about the skeletons being Native American. She put down her pick and compared a Polaroid of skull number one to the skull in front of her. Both showed Mongoloid traits: both skulls round and compact, flat-faced, the sutures between the cheeks and jaws straight.

She traced the smooth line of the skull’s jaw and then traced the line of her own jaw. She covered the eyes with one palm and stared into the blackness of her other hand.

She imagined a world of domed huts made from marsh reeds, fishermen in long boats lancing green waves, children chasing dogs, the women weaving baskets, tending cooking fires. She saw a princess draped with otter fur and shell necklaces, her black straight hair, her smooth brown skin. A warrior.

A siren in the distance, a plane overhead, a flash of light and the vision was gone. She massaged her brow and rubbed the back of her neck. She did not have time for daydreams.

She gently pried out a rock and touched a braid of dusty black hair, perhaps three inches long, near the back of the jaw. She worked the hairs away from the soil and curled them around her finger like a girlish memento. She caught the smell of jasmine.

Who had last smelled the hair? What lover? Friend? The skull was cocked slightly, looking up at the lowering sun for warmth. Had she once been beautiful? She considered the skull’s high cheekbones, the even teeth, the straight line of the nose. Yes.

She slid the hair into a plastic pouch, ran her fingers along the seal, and set it aside. Finding hair on a skull this old made no sense. Judging by the sandal she’d found with skeleton one, handmade, the distinctive Mission-era bullhide laced with cat gut, she dated the remains at one hundred and fifty years plus. But human hair, in this kind of soil, at least 30 percent clay, decomposed in two to four years.

What about Ramon’s assumption that skeleton number one had been female? He was no archeologist so it must have been a lucky guess. Unless, as he’d first claimed, he’d seen a fairly intact body. And if the first body had been intact and gender recognizable, then why hadn’t skeleton two, except for the braid of hair, also been intact? Was it because skeleton two had spent a day close to the sun and air with only a smattering of dirt over it? Or maybe, as she’d first suspected, Ramon had been lying about finding an intact body and simply made a lucky guess. And why would Ramon lie? It made no sense.

The other argument could be that the second skeleton had been buried much, much later than the first one. But she disregarded that because they looked alike, and they were buried head to toe. It was difficult to bury people that close together in unmarked grave unless you did it at the same time. She wondered if she’d find another skeleton at number two’s feet, or at one’s head. Skeleton one might have not been the first of the group buried, but the first found, and she wondered why she was thinking in groups. Ajax’s vacant lot could be filled with bodies.

When she’d first seen skeleton one this morning, she’d been relatively certain it was female. But her guess had been backed by years of studying the subtle gender indicators: the wider hips, the narrower jaw, the smaller bones.

She slowly pulled a slab of dirt from the side of skull two. She reached her finger inside the bottom of the cranial vault and felt for the bone beneath the ear, the mastoid process, so named because it resembled the female breast. She found it and pressed her finger against the characteristic notch of the female. There were other things: a less prominent temporal ridge, the lower jaw less rounded, the ridge above the eye socket, the supraorbital margin, sharper. She could go on, but for now, was satisfied.

She cleared the clavicles and worked down to the chest, exposing the shell of the ribs and the hammered end of another wooden stake.

It really was ridiculous - bones turning to dust and wooden stakes and disappearing flesh. But there had to be a scientific explanation. She was positive that Ajax was involved.

She worked down the body, uncovering the pelvis and the legs. At the feet she found more wood, but it was not another stake. She quickly brushed off the small brown face.

In ten minutes she’d uncovered a wooden doll, about two feet long, crudely painted. Dark red for the dress, the paint chipped and peeled. Dark blue eyes. The stomach exaggerated to symbolize pregnancy. She carefully put the doll inside her pack.

When she returned, an odd shape near the pelvis caught her eye. A square rock? She brushed off the dirt, revealing a glint of dull yellow. With a grapefruit knife, she worked down the square of gold, her fingers a blur. In five minutes she’d uncovered a solid gold cross. Half a foot long, four inches wide. A handful. It was not typically Spanish, no embroidery or embellishment, no fancy scroll work.

Suddenly, like a wire of melting steel, she felt searing pain below her waist. She sucked in sharply and without thinking or caring about photographs or dig maps or any of it, pulled out the cross.

She crawled out of the hole. Her legs spongy. Slightly dizzy and breathing hard. She balanced the cross in her hand. Heavy and slippery, pure gold, several pounds at least. She turned the cross over looking for a forge or foundry mark. Nothing. She had no way of determining age, unless she sent a sliver to a metallurgist who could date the gold by the mix of chemicals and alloys.

She hefted the cross in her hand and looked around.

She put the cross in her pack next to the doll. She added the sandal and the sample of dust. She saw them driving the stake, pounding the cross home. She saw fully formed hands clenching and releasing against the pain, the head arched and searching the sky. She fought to catch a breath. She steadied herself and walked back to the ditch. Romania had taken more out of her than she’d thought.

Today, the delicate bones of the left hand were flat, palm down at the side of the body, but the right hand was balled up, hiding something…She climbed into the ditch and, using a slender tungsten pick, probed between the wrapped fingers and nicked something hard.

She removed the metacarpals and phalanges of the right three fingers and laid them on the ribs. She sealed three bones of the index finger in a plastic bag and slipped it in her pack, smoothing down the nylon so it didn’t look lumpy.

She kneeled at the hand and eased out a long green cylinder of California jade, perhaps four inches long and two across, oval shaped. She carefully replaced the six finger-bones.

She rinsed the rock under the cooler’s spigot, the jade polishing itself under the clear stream, revealing a charm stone, carved and polished to look like a whale. The mouth was a smile, the eyes pieces of flinty obsidian. The tail was a half moon, the side flippers carved like short wings.

Through the center of the shining whale, along the length, a hole had been drilled. She put her lips to the tail and tasted fresh mint. Had this girl, chewing mint leaves, blown her last breath on the whistle? And why was she grasping it so tightly when she died? Was it a clue, a signpost pointing to who’d killed her? Or a way to handle the pain?

She blew hard, and a plug of dirt popped from the whale’s spout. She blew harder. A lonely keening filled the graveyard. She saw the princess again, closer, speaking to her, the hair sleek and oily, her eyes black and brilliant, now pointing to the house on the hill. The sun beat down, framing the princess’s face in a halo of gold. She tried to breathe and felt herself sinking.

10

She looked up. At least he wasn’t wearing a robe, a uniform, or a suit. He wouldn’t have looked good in any of them. And he looked good in the worn Levi’s and the beat-up hound’s-tooth jacket. His best jacket, no doubt. He was a little over six feet with short sandy hair and a used but good face. He had strong bones, the face of a centurion.

“You look like a cop,” she said. He stopped at the edge of the ditch. He wore old but comfortable-looking running shoes.

“You don’t know the half of it,” he said, careful not to kick rocks into the ditch. She liked that.

She ignored him and brought the pick down hard, splintering a stubborn sandstone ridge. She threw a few shovels of rock over the screen. He stood there looking into the ditch. “Can I help you?” she finally asked. He was nothing if not patient.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” he said. She wedged her hand against the side of the ditch to climb out. He caught her other arm and pulled her out smoothly. The tendons between his knuckles and wrist felt like small ropes. “I’m here to help you.”

She slapped at the dust on her jeans. “I need help?”

“The Chief of Police thinks so.” He walked to the cooler, filled a cup, and brought it to her. His movements had rhythm, like he was a half step ahead of himself, two steps ahead of everyone else.

“You are a policeman,” she said and drank. She was starting to like him. He had an odd charisma, like he just didn’t give a damn, like he really didn’t give a damn.

He reached out to touch her hair. She flinched. He brought his hand back. “Dirt in your hair,” he said.

She finger combed her hair, removing a few clumps of soil. Why was she so jumpy? “You can’t dig without getting dirty.” Who wouldn’t be jumpy after imagining a gold cross inside of you and fainting? After seeing an Indian princess materialize out of thin air? It must have been the sun: she had not summoned a spirit by blowing into a whale shaped whistle. Good. Now she was blaming the sun. “You are a cop.”

“A retired Los Angeles cop,” he said as if he wasn’t particularly proud of it. “I’m here doing the Chief a favor.”

He was a bit young to be retired. Maybe he was a burn-out case. She’d heard Los Angeles cops were mostly derelicts and right-wing hoodlums. He could be a little of both. “Did you bring a restraining order against Ramon?”

“He needs to be restrained?”

“Tied up? Yes. He’d probably enjoy it, but he did take a swing at me.”

His eyes were pale blue with flecks of green, close to the color of the jade whale. His voice had iron in it. “The Chief said you needed talking to.”

“ - and what do you think I need, Mr. Tarrant?”

“I can think of a few things,” he said and actually raised his right eyebrow. At least he hadn’t winked. “The Chief’s worried you might start a riot, screaming about the padres killing a bunch of Indians back in the old days.”

“Oh, really? A riot? That’s absurd. No one cares about Indians. There were more than a hundred thousand Chumash in this area when the Franciscans and Spanish soldiers showed up, an entire culture, and now they’re gone, for over a hundred years, and nobody cares.”

“You care.”

“I’m an archeologist,” she said. To change the subject - she didn’t want to sound like an activist - she explained the fight with Ramon and the suspicious way he’d been acting. She told him about Ramon’s first claim of disappearing flesh, the bones turning to dust, the stakes, and Ramon knocking out the canine teeth. She did not mention the items she’d put in her pack. “I called the cops so they could hear my side of the story and now you show up making it sound like I was hysterical.”

“They did have a small riot not long ago. That’s why the Chief is worried.”

“It was hardly a riot,” she said. “I saw it on CNN. A dozen kids from the university, probably political science students, with signs protesting Serra’s sainthood. Their revolution of the month.” He turned his head and looked into the ditch. It struck her that there were three of them present: herself, him, and the remains of Indian girl, lying there like Christ in cement. She shook her head to clear the vision of the bones crawling out of the hole to stand with them. She had to get hold of herself. He was still looking into the ditch. Would he notice she’d removed artifacts? Would he see things had been tampered with?

“Santa Marina’s tourism isn’t in jeopardy because of a few bones?” he asked and she again noticed how blue his eyes were.

“Hardly.”

“The Chief thinks you have a Shindler’s List infatuation.” He said. “Like you want to rewrite the movie using the Indians and Spanish instead of the Jews and Nazis.”

“That’s very interesting, since I’ve never met the Chief. He sent an officer, some red-haired kid, but I don’t think I gave him the impression I wanted to write a screenplay.”

“The Chief likes to exaggerate,” he said and, without asking, jumped into the ditch and bent over the girl’s bones. She wasn’t sure why she kept thinking of a twenty-year old as a girl, unless it meant she was getting old.

He touched the pelvis where she’d repacked the dirt. He looked at the hand where she’d covered the stolen index finger with dirt so that the hand looked whole. Would he notice? He looked up at her. “Remove anything?”

“Rule number two of archeology,” she said in her teacher’s voice, “is never take anything apart before you know how it goes back together.” He rubbed his upper lip and scratched his nose. He should have asked her permission before jumping in the ditch - it was her site - but he was used to doing what he wanted and getting away with it.

“It’s like a crime scene.”

“Most history is a crime,” she said. “At least the interesting history.”

He touched the skull, as if expecting it to disappear. “What happened to the first skeleton? Doesn’t seem to be anything left.”

“Leeched with mineral salts.” He stood and looked at the imprint of skeleton one. He touched the splintered remains of the first stake. “There was also a reaction to ultraviolet light,” she said and added almost without thinking, “Sunlight turns the bones to dust.”

He scratched his jaw, nodded to himself, and smiled. “Sunlight, is it? Maybe the bones got up and walked away,” he said.

“I’m thinking science is not your long suit.”

“And leeching mineral salts and blaming the sun is science?” He grabbed the bucket of the backhoe and smoothly pulled himself out of the ditch.