Airtight Case (39 page)

The most interesting part of the book was about detecting forgeries. Intriguing, perhaps because it was more like a model or theoretical construct, concepts she understood. Charles Hamilton, the preeminent detector of forged documents, said a document under examination must pass four tests.

First, a document must have provenance—as in artifacts, you must know where it came from. The document must possess both internal and external evidence of its authenticity—kind of like internal and external validity, thought Lindsay—no historical anachronisms or inaccuracies, or any inconsistencies in paper and ink. Finally, the paleographic evidence must be correct, as was not the case with the more modern writing in the forged Daniel Boone document. The handwriting must match the supposed author of the document.

A document must pass all of these tests. Both the forger and the forgery detector have a hard task. Lindsay could imagine the satisfaction a forger gets from trying to produce such a document. She could also identify with the document detective.

But then, what did any of this have to do with what happened to Mary Susan Tidwell? The only reason to be suspicious that there was a connection was because of the missing printing paper from her house. Slim reasoning. Miss Tidwell herself could have gotten rid of it.

No, the missing paper wasn’t the only reason. There was the stamp impression Lindsay had found in the dirt floor of the farmhouse basement. Too much of a coincidence. Someone could have purchased things from Miss Tidwell and stored them in the basement. No. Why put them in the basement? It was musty and had an earthen floor. If the purchase was legitimate, no reason not to just store the items in the living room or the storeroom.

Lindsay finally drifted off to sleep. She dreamed about Daniel Boone carving messages into wooden floors and was awakened by Lewis banging on her door two minutes before her clock was to go off. Her first thought was to sneak into his room and set his clock back two minutes.

* * *

Lindsay and Phil McBride were outfitted with filter masks hanging around their necks, surgeon’s gloves, and white coats. They stood back while the lid was being pried and hoisted off the trash pit coffin, which still sat on the trolley in the exam trailer. As the men worked on opening the coffin, Lindsay stared at the holes punched in its side. They reminded her of catching lightning bugs in a jar and punching holes in the lid. The thought made her head swim. She shoved it out of her mind, or tried to.

“Why do you think the holes are there?” asked McBride.

Lindsay shrugged.

“Maybe it’s empty,” answered Peter Willis.

He was there to give Lindsay instructions about sampling. He already had given her a long explanation of why he wanted samples from the trash pit coffin, even though they would be getting no antique air from it. For comparison, his long narration had finally come down to. Lindsay understood perfectly and wanted to give him a lecture on what archaeologists do. They don’t simply have Ph.D.s in digging holes. Bone broad indeed. She ought to call him airhead.

The entire crew was there, with the exception of Erin, Kelsey, and Bill, who were excavating the unexpected remains in the trash pit—and with the exception of Drew. Lindsay assumed she was in the other tent watching the tests they were putting the other coffin through. Even Luke was there. So were several members of the science team who weren’t busy with the other coffin. It was a crowd, but the trailer was big.

With a screech, crack, and a pop, the lid came loose and was lifted off with the hoist and gantry. When the heavy lid cleared the coffin, Lindsay got her first look inside a vessel that hadn’t been opened in more than two hundred years. There was a skeleton, small and fragile, in the bottom of its huge lead sarcophagus. It lay face-up. The skull had rolled forward so that it looked as though the chin were resting on the shoulder in sweet repose. The rib cage was collapsed, the sternal ends of the ribs pointing downward. The bones were a mottled palette of color—cream, brown, dark red-orange. There was no sign of a wooden inner coffin that Lindsay would have expected. Odd.

Around the edges, where the holes had been punched, surrounding soil had entered over the years, carried in by water and insect action. Peter Willis, vial in hand, reached in to take a soil sample. Lindsay clasped his wrist in a firm grip. He looked at her, surprised.

At first, Peter had been an enigma. She had observed that most of the time he was a very careful and competent researcher. Then, out of the blue, he would seem to forget methodology altogether. Suddenly, seeing him reach inside the coffin, sample containers ready, Lindsay realized that he simply didn’t care about her research. He was interested only in his own agenda.

“No,” Lindsay said. “It stays untouched until it has been photographed and I have given every inch a visual examination. Mr. Willis, I know very well how to take samples. I understand about contamination, integrity, provenance, chain of custody, and a host of other considerations. Why don’t you go take care of the cemetery coffin? Call me when you get ready to extract the air. I’d like to see it.”

“Sure. Just trying to help.”

She let go of his wrist, and he pulled his hand away.

“I’ll be over in the other tent, if you need me.”

Lindsay asked the photographer in charge of the fancy photography equipment, a small man with hunched shoulders, to take a series of photographs the entire length of the remains in the coffin. The images would be exposed on large plates, and the resulting photographs would be clear, detailed with a depth of field that would make them look almost three-dimensional. Good for teaching, she thought. The camera moved along the track above the coffin, making the remains look as if they were undergoing some kind of medical scan. As she watched the technician control the camera, she thought that his nasal spine must be very long to support such a large nose.

“Elaine has gone to visit her sister,” Phil said. “She lives only about seventy miles from the woman who owns the diaries. She and her sister are driving down to meet her tomorrow.”

“Did Drew speak with you about the value of the diaries?” Lindsay asked.

McBride shook his head. “Was she going to?”

“I asked her to. That’s one of her specialties—appraising historical documents.”

“Really? Did she mention what they might be worth?”

“No. Maybe you can talk to her about it over lunch.”

“All done,” said the photographer, pushing the tracking arm out of the way. “I can have pictures for you this afternoon. Also, if you like, I can stick around, in case you want some close-ups.”

“That would be great.” Lindsay slipped her mask on and bent over the remains, scrutinizing the bones.

“Okay,” said Adam, coming forward to take a look. “You said they would be a young woman. How close are you? We have a pool going.”

Since most of the technicians had gone, there was more room, and before she realized it, the whole crew was peering inside the coffin.

“Take a look, then step back a bit. So, are the odds in my favor?”

“Lewis here’s pretty confident.”

“Somebody pay up. The bones belong to a female.”

“You have to explain how you know. Not that we don’t trust you, you understand, but, well, it’s money.”

“Adam,” said Lindsay, “you mean you bet against me?”

“Why are you and Dr. McBride wearing masks and we aren’t?” asked Sharon.”I mean, should we have them?”

Lindsay pulled down her mask. “Anytime something has been closed up this long, it’s good to wear a filter—for the dust, if nothing else.”

“They wouldn’t have buried them in lead because they were contaminated or something, would they?” asked Sharon.

“No,” said Adam. “I don’t think they had any ideas about contamination back then.”

“This is not an unheard-of burial practice for the time,” said Lindsay. “You don’t see it much, because at that time burials were primarily in cemeteries. We don’t often dig in cemeteries.”

“Why?” asked Luke.

Lindsay met his stare—very similar to John’s when they were discussing the different way that Indian burials are treated by archaeologists, as opposed to non-Indian burials.

“Because they won’t let me,” she said, and he grinned at her.

“Going to tell us about these bones?” asked Byron. “If I’m going to be out some money, I want to know why.” Byron had on his Grateful Dead T-shirt, and Lindsay had a twinge of guilt for rifling through his things. She decided then that she would never write her memoirs—she didn’t want people to know some of the awful stuff she had done.

“Byron . . . you bet against me, too?”

“It seemed like a long shot, and I always play the favorite.”

“Lewis,” said Lindsay, “it looks like you’re going to be raking in the big bucks. Okay, if the remains under examination contain certain critical bones, like the pelvis, sexing is pretty easy. Here we have a very well-preserved pelvis, and it’s very female. Two main things you look at are the subpubic angle and the sciatic notch.”

She pointed them out to the onlookers. “Females are wider in both. Also, look how graceful the skull is,” she said, running her fingers across the forehead of the exposed skull. “Males tend to have more frontal bossing. Byron, feel your forehead, then feel Sharon’s. Guys have squarer jaws as a rule. However, young guys can have very graceful features, so the skull isn’t as reliable an indicator as the pelvis.”

Phil McBride took a pen from his pocket and pointed to a patch of porous bone on the jaw. “It looks as though calcium deposits may have formed on some of her bones.”

“You may be right,” agreed Lindsay.

“What would cause that?” asked Lewis.

Lindsay thought a moment. “Diet, hormones . . . any number of things.”

“What about her age?” asked Adam. “It has to be a young woman to win.”

“Piece of cake,” said Lindsay. “First, her wisdom teeth are just coming in. Look at her . . .” For a moment, Lindsay couldn’t think of the name of the bone. “Humerus . . . ,” she almost shouted. “The head of her humerus . . . you can see that the . . . the epiphysis . . . has only just fused . . . she’s probably . . .”

“It looks like her arms are . . . ,” began McBride.

“Lindsay, are you all right?”

Lewis’s voice was almost like an echo in her head. She could feel her knees giving way as she backed away from the bones and a tidal wave of fear washed over her.

Chapter 33

Cherry Belle

LINDSAY COULD FEEL the dirt being thrown over her . . . shovelful by shovelful. She heard the sound of the shovel hitting and sliding through the soil and the muffled thud as each shovelful dropped over her. She couldn’t move, could barely breathe—she was going to slowly suffocate.

“Lindsay!”

A shout from the end of a cavern. She felt a hand on her arm, a strong grip pulling her from the grave, an Indian pulling her up out of a cavern.

“Lindsay.”

“Luke? Luke. I’m okay.”

She took a deep breath. She was sitting on a metal chair. Luke, Lewis, and Phil McBride were standing over her.

Dammit, they’ve claimed my memories, stalked me, terrorized me, and now I’m afraid of one of the things I love most in the world. I won’t allow it. It stops here.
She put her head down for a moment and felt the blood rushing back and pulsing in her temples.

She sucked in another breath, stood, and pushed her way back to the coffin. She concentrated on her legs to hold her steady and on her hands not to shake. But her heart thumping wildly against her ribs was on its own. She ignored the crew’s puzzled stares.

“You were about to observe, Phil, that her arms are tucked behind her. Not a normal burial position.” She took another breath. “The deposit of calcium on the bones is possibly indicative of slow suffocation.” She heard an intake of breath . . . this time not her own.

“You’re not saying . . . ?” whispered Sharon.

“The holes in the sides of the coffin, the hands behind her back, the calcium deposits, and the lack of an inner wooden coffin, all are very suggestive that she was put in the coffin alive.”

She heard a gasp from one of the onlookers.

“The evidence suggests that she may have been held in the lead coffin for a time before it was buried. Otherwise, the oxygen would have run out sooner and we would not see the buildup of calcium deposits. There would have been enough air getting in through the holes to provide sufficient oxygen to keep her alive, though gradually asphyxiating her, for perhaps a week.”

“Ouch,” said Dillon.
Peter, Peter pumpkin eater, had a wife and couldn’t keep her. Put her in a pumpkin shell, and there he kept her very well.

“You think?” asked Adam.

“‘
Cherry bell, bound to hell.
”’ McBride recited one of the loft poems. “It does seem to fit, doesn’t it?”

“There are other very reasonable explanations. If we’re lucky, we’ll know after I examine the bones . . . Or it will remain a mystery. In the meantime, Lewis, I think you’re due some money.” Ignoring her racing heart, Lindsay took a magnifying glass and started with the skull.

Cherry Redmond, if that was her name, was a delicate woman, possessing a fine forehead, pointed chin, high cheekbones, and a slight overbite. A snowflake design looking almost like a tattoo of fine dark lines on the collarbone caught Lindsay’s eye.

“Here’s something. Have a look at the left clavicle.” She handed McBride the magnifying glass. He leaned into the coffin and examined the one-half-inch-square section of bone Lindsay pointed out to him.

“A pattern?” he asked.

“It looks like it might be the remains of a bit of lace adhered to the bone.” She turned to the photographer. “Could you take a close-up of this, please?”

Lindsay stood back as she watched him line up the shot.
He’ll probably tell the others that I must be an amateur, getting all weak-kneed over a set of bones. Stop being self-conscious, and do your work.

After he took several shots of the design, Lindsay concentrated on the postcranial skeleton. She saw no evidence of breaks or disease. So far, the woman seemed to have died healthy, or if she had a disease, it hadn’t reached her bones.