Ashes and Bones (10 page)

“Look, I can tell you the other stuff if you want, Em, but really? You don’t need it.”

I didn’t need it: I was already hosed. “Okay, gotcha. Thanks for your help, Rob.”

He laughed, and in other times it was a noise that would have brought a smile to my face, too. “You make a shitty criminal, Em. But if you ever stopped thinking so damn much, that would be different.”

“Yeah, yeah, rub it in, why don’t you?”

Maybe he could hear the frustration in my voice; it had nothing to do with my lack of criminal genius. “I’ll email you, if I think of anything that will help you, okay?”

“Thanks, Rob, I mean it. Catch you later.” I hung up and rubbed my head. I guess if it ached, it was from running headlong into so many dead ends.

W
ITH ARCHAEOLOGY, YOU
’
D THINK THINGS WOULD
be straight forward, but they never are. Read the books, dig the site, wash the stuff, write up the report, reap fortune and glory. And while that is essentially correct, it leaves out the details of schedules, paperwork, personnel, budgets, meetings, PMS, home life, and homicidal maniacs. So it was a relief to be able to actually get out into the field the next two days to do some testing out at Penitence Point.

There wasn’t a lot to be done, and so it worked out to be just Meg and me, again, out at the Point. Neal had gotten his doctorate in the spring and was trying to set up his own company, and so didn’t have the time, even if he could have used the money; Dian was gone, out of the picture, having been offered a job as an office manager that was going to keep her a lot more secure than any job in archaeology would. It was a little sad, too, to think this might be one of the last summers that Meg and I would work in the field together, as she was working full-time on her dissertation and would be gone, probably, in a year or two.

There were lots of emotions that I was trying to clear out of my head so I could concentrate on the work. A nice collection of one-by-ones, all along the western boundary of the site, near the line of silver birches that led down to the edge of the bluff and the river. Meg looked a lot happier than she did in my office; now she was more surely in her element.

“Did I remember to mention in my email yesterday?” Meg said. “I asked Katie Bell if she wanted to join us, just for the experience. She was back for a visit, before she goes off into the wide world of graduate school next year. Told her we’d be dropping some phone booths and maybe some TPs, and did she want to come along?”

“Let me guess,” I said. “She had no idea that you were talking about.”

“Right. I mean, she knew TP was ‘test pit.’ But it wasn’t just that she didn’t know that I meant square-meter units, she didn’t know what an actual phone booth was.”

“Surely she must have seen them in movies,” I said. “How old is she? Twenty-one, twenty-two?”

Meg nodded. “She finally did remember having seen them in movies, but that was her only reference point. I bet she doesn’t know what a vinyl album is, either, or that you can make tea without a microwave, or that floppy disks used to be floppy.”

“She’s a smart kid, but a very new soul,” I agreed. “Ah, well, now she has a bit of dated jargon, which she will probably think of as ‘lore.’”

The fact that it was just the two of us had struck me from the moment our plans were set. Meg and I had been alone on the Point before, and bad things had happened. Good things too, but the stuff that was on my mind was directly rooted in our first experience there, and a particular night that had involved gunplay, a death, and Neal being wounded—by Tony Markham.

If Meg was bothered, then she didn’t show it; as far as I knew, she still thought the mention of Billy at the conference had been a parting jab from Duncan. For my part, after the
flowers, mysterious deliveries, and fire, every noise that might have been a footstep, or might have been nothing at all, caught my attention. Finally, it was only the physical labor itself and the concentration that digging a neat square hole in the ground required that diverted me. The fact that Tony had used fire to destroy the house that had once stood on this site, and conceal the murder of my friend, just gave me an even worse case of the jumps.

I finished the balk drawings that were left over from yesterday and Meg had just finished sifting and sorting the artifacts into carefully marked bags. As I gazed across the site, I realized something wasn’t right.

Even as I felt myself frown, Meg asked: “Emma, how many meter squares did we do yesterday?”

“I thought you and I each did one—it’s pretty shallow around here—and we did two more today. Four”

“That’s what I thought. I remember because I emailed you to bring more string for today.”

We both counted again, and finally Meg asked, “So why is there an extra test pit?”

I shook my head, unable to figure it out. I flipped through the notes, and checked. Sure enough, our memories matched the notes. There was a unit that wasn’t here yesterday.

“Do you think it’s looters?” Meg asked.

“I don’t know. Was someone camping here? It looks awfully regular, though.”

“It is.”

We walked over to the hole that we didn’t remember digging. It was in fact, just as square and regular as the rest of our units, but smaller, and to my all-too-practiced eye this one looked to be exactly fifty centimeters square, each side roughly the width of two shovel blades. Every profession has their own informal metrics.

The walls were straight and clean; I would have praised the student who showed me such work. The location of the unit also puzzled me; it was exactly where I would have placed
another unit, had we the time to spend on moving out from the core of the area I was most interested in.

“We didn’t dig this,” Meg said.

“No.”

“But it looks…real.”

“Like we did it,” I agreed. “But we didn’t.”

“No.”

A cloud passed from over the sun. Something was at the bottom of the unit.

“Hang on a second,” Meg said, and she knelt down to get a better look.

“Meg, wait,” I said. “This is bothering me.”

She smirked. “What, are you afraid that there’s a land mine or something down at the bottom?”

“You can laugh if you want, but…yes. Something like that.”

She shook her head, serious now. “I won’t touch anything, I’m just going to get a better look.”

She leaned over, and as she set one hand down on the opposite side, she suddenly jerked up. “Shit!”

I stepped toward her. “What is it?”

“Ah, nothing. You got my nerves going, that’s all. I put my hand down on a rock and it bit me.” She looked at her hand, saw nothing, and leaned over again.

And jerked back much more quickly. “Ouch—goddamn it!”

She held up her hand and this time blood was running down the palm of her hand. “There must be a piece of glass or something over there. Hold on.”

“Meg, don’t,” I said. “Get out of there, please. Now.”

She looked at me suddenly; it must have been the urgency in my voice. “Okay.”

I did not move for a moment, just studied the ground before us. The grass around two edges of the pit was untrampled and most of the ejecta—the soil dug from the hole—was piled tidily not too far away in the familiar inverted cone. No
doubt about it, someone had taken a good deal of care in excavating this unit. Call it, rather, the very square hole someone else had dug on our site. A spark of indignation began to burn: it wasn’t a unit unless
I
said it was.

The ejecta. The edge of the pit. Finally, I figured out what was wrong.

The hole had been dug to look like an archaeological test pit, but that’s as far as it went. The cone of excavated soil should have been sifted, if we’d been doing the work, with all of the rocks dumped on the top of the sifted dirt. So what I should have seen as the result of proper archaeological work would have been a cone with nicely sorted, fine soil on top, with the rocks and roots having rolled to the bottom of the pile. Different color soils would have been visible, separated out.

This was just a pile of dirt, uniform color, no sorting whatsoever. That told me to reexamine the edge of the unit again. If it had been genuine archaeology, there would have been more trampling of the yellowed grass, where the excavator had squatted or kneeled or rested her hands or, heaven forbid, sat at the edge of the unit. I saw no knee prints, hand prints, or butt prints on the grass on two sides of the pit. So, it only
looked
like professional work.

It was in staring at the untrodden grass, remembering how Meg had leaned on the edge, when I found what I was looking for. A glint in the grass, as the sun came out from behind clouds again, and I saw the pattern. Making sure that I had seen all of it, I gingerly got to my knees and carefully moved the taller grass stalks aside so Meg could see, too.

Someone had stuck nails into the ground, points up, in an irregular pattern, around most of the square. Anyone kneeling or leaning within six inches of those edges would put her full weight on them; Meg’s quick reflexes—and a dash of luck in kneeling on the side where it was too trampled to hide the nails—had saved her from worse injury. And if Meg’s “joke” turned out to be no joke—if there
was
a land mine at the bottom—the nails would make excellent shrapnel.

I stood up, brushing the dirt and grass off my hands. “My guess is that whoever it was cut the heads off, then stuck them in: points on both ends.”

“Whoever it was also knew that we’d be on the ground, checking this out in no time,” Meg agreed. “Knew that we’d crawl all over the place near a unit. Knew we’re not afraid of getting dirty.”

“Still want to see what that is down the bottom of the pit?”

“I’m not that curious,” she replied. “But how—”

“Let’s call the cops.”

“Why, Em? I’m not hurt that bad.” She held up her hand, to show me that the flow of blood had slowed. “It could still just be someone else’s idea of a sick joke, it might not have anything to do with Tony.” She knew my fears, even if she didn’t think they were anything more than a parting blow from an angry ex-boyfriend.

“I’m not much for coincidences right now,” I said. “I think someone is watching us closely, someone who knows how we work and move. I don’t want anyone else to get hurt, if possible.” I was thinking of Bucky’s clinic.

“And you think, whoever it is, might be thinking about other people associated with the site, in this area,” Meg said.

“Yes. Let’s see if Sheriff Stannard is in today.”

About forty minutes later, Dave Stannard was standing beside us, looking down at the nails with an unreadable expression. He shifted his gaze to the water for a moment, then looked back at the ground.

“Deliberate. Nasty.” Dave paused, then glanced at me. “For you.”

I nodded, my stomach roiling. “I’m wondering how they knew we’d be out here. It’s not a state secret or anything, but…it’s not like there’s any cover for someone to hide out and watch.”

“Hmmm. Might want to check with the Anthropology Department.” He turned to Meg. “How’s that hand of yours?”

She held it up for him to see. “It’s fine. I cleaned it out real good, bandaged it up. It’s no big deal. I’ve got my shots, and it’s already stopped—”

“Do me a favor?” I was surprised: Dave Stannard rarely interrupted people. “Keep an eye on it. Just in case.”

“Just in case…there was something on the nails?” I said.

He shrugged. “You never know. You might just stop by the hospital on the way out, make sure.” The sheriff kneeled down, pulled some latex gloves out of his pocket, and put them on. He took a few of the nails and put them into a plastic bag. “You never know.”

I couldn’t respond. As bad as I’d thought the situation, he was able to imagine it so much worse. I wasn’t used to thinking like this.

“We took some photos of the site,” Meg said. “If you like, we could send you some.”

“Thanks—do that. Em, any ideas about what that is down at the bottom of the pit? Did either of you touch it?”

“No,” Meg and I answered simultaneously. I added, “It was deeper than ours, maybe arm’s reach. I didn’t dare touch it.”

He nodded. “I’m willing to. I think that after the nails, it would be silly to put the real danger down the bottom of the hole. I mean, who’d be stupid enough to warn you away from it with the nails?”

“I don’t know what this is about,” I said. “I only know that I don’t want anyone getting hurt.”

He shrugged. “It isn’t your call.” But he had us stand back and he probed the bottom of the pit with a long stick before he knelt on the safe side of the hole. He reached in. I tensed.

Dave pulled out a crumpled and dirty brown paper lunch bag. Maybe it was the bag that once held the nails, I thought; it looks like the sort you could get from the hardware store. He slowly uncurled the top of it, crumpled and dirty and damp from having spent the night in the bottom of the pit, and looked inside.

“I think we’ve got trouble here,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Bones.” He shrugged. “I’m not an expert, but they look human to me.”

“Human bones?” Meg looked more curious than scared or ill, which is more than I could say for myself. “What sort?”

“Little ones.” Stannard smiled, a little sick, pale under his summer work tan, and shrugged. “I said I wasn’t an expert.”

“Can we—?” I asked.

“Just don’t touch them.” He shook a few of them onto a large plastic artifact bag that Meg whipped out of her backpack and spread out on the ground.

“Shit,” she said. Something like awe was in her voice. “They do look human to me. Emma?”

She knew that osteology wasn’t technically part of my specialty—colonial archaeology—but that I had been reading a lot on human remains lately, with an eye to expanding my professional horizons.

I leaned over the bones. “Sometimes, if they’re in rough shape, the bones can be misidentified as some other carnivore—bear, maybe even a wildcat.” Sure enough, they were about the right size, certainly the right shape for human, but there was something distinctly odd about them, considering what I was expecting to see and where I was seeing them. “Yes, human—but holy cow! They’ve been prepared!”

“Prepared?” Stannard looked queasy.

“You know, someone cleaned them up, boiled or bleached them clean. Like they were being used for a study collection. It was strange; at first, I was just assuming the bones were something found here by whoever dug this hole. But there are no stains and they’re not weathered—they’ve not been in the ground at all, as far as I can see—and there’s no sign that they…” I stopped myself, trying to find the best way to phrase my grisly thought.

“No sign, what?” Meg asked.

“No sign that they…recently came off someone alive. There’s no tissue, no, uh, bloodstains. The thing that tripped me up was that they look exactly like the ones we have back in the faunal lab, the skeletons and bones that are known examples, to be used to compare with what you find in the field. I’m so used to seeing them there, that it didn’t register with me for a moment.”