A Rumor of Bones: A Lindsay Chamberlain Mystery (6 page)

"You're kidding," Lindsay and Frank exclaimed.
"That early?"

"Amalgams with gold as a component didn't come
until much later," Derrick explained. "You don't think
the guy's a European, do you? Now that would be
interesting."

"I guess we had better have a look," said Frank.

The three of them casually walked over to the
burial. Jane greeted them with a wide grin.

"I found what you were talking about"

"Don't talk too loud," cautioned Frank.

They stared down into the grave. The bones, similar in color to the soil, stood out in relief. The skeleton lay on its back with its jaws open wide as though
the person had gone to the grave screaming in
protest.

Derrick took a dental pick from Jane, lay on his
stomach and leaned into the pit. Lindsay lay beside
him, took a brush, and cleaned dirt away from the
molar. Derrick carefully cleared around the filling
with the pick, then gently scraped it.

Lindsay and Derrick turned their heads toward
each other, their faces so close Lindsay could feel his
breath as he spoke.

"We need to find a better place to meet," he said,
grinning.

Lindsay couldn't help but smile at him. "I agree."

Frank was squatting next to the grave. "What about
it?" he asked. "Or are you two going to just stare at
each other?"

Derrick didn't move. "This looks like an amalgam
to me. That would make it much more recent," he said.

"I agree," said Lindsay, who looked at Derrick a
moment longer before she turned her attention back
to the skeleton. "Here is some residual cartilage on
the head of the right humerus," she pointed out.
"Can't be too old."

Both pushed themselves up and dusted themselves
off.

"Keep this quiet, Derrick," said Frank. "You, too,
Jane"

"No problem," Jane replied.

"I'll get the photographic equipment ready," Derrick said.

He trotted off to the laboratory tent, and Lindsay
walked to the parking area to use the phone in Frank's
car. The sheriff drove up just as she arrived.

"Hello, Sheriff Duggan. I was just about to call
you. "

"I thought I would take you up on that offer of the
use of your crew."

"Okay. I'll take you to Frank, but first I have to tell
you something. We came upon a burial that is much
more recent than the others. An adult with a gold filling." The sheriff's mouth fell open, and for a minute
Lindsay thought he was going to ask her how she got
into things like that. She took him over to the grave,
and he looked down at the half-buried anachronistic
bones Jane was carefully excavating.

"Why is its mouth opened like that?" asked the
sheriff.

"That's not uncommon," explained Lindsay. "Dirt
is very active. It is constantly being moved around by
the percolation of water, changing temperatures, the
burrowing of insects and small animals. And when the
flesh and ligaments are gone, the jaws move freely
and the dirt action often forces the jaws apart. It creates the appearance of a scream."

"Well, it looks rather startling. How old do you
think it is?" he asked.

"I don't know. I can't examine it until it is fully
excavated, but I'd guess between 25 and a 100 years"
Lindsay explained to him what she wanted to do with it.

"Sounds fine. If it's that old, there is no hurry. This
case with the little Hastings girl is more urgent."

"Sheriff, would you mind keeping this quiet? We'll
get all kinds of curious people out here walking all
over the site if news gets around"

"No, I don't mind. If the papers get ahold of it, they
will insist I do something about it, and right now my
plate is full."

Lindsay smiled. "I'll take you to Frank"

As they walked across the site, Lindsay showed
him various stains on the ground she thought were
burials.

"How can you tell?" he asked.

"The shape and size, mainly. You get accustomed
to what to look for."

"How did you know the Indian village was here?"
asked the sheriff.

"Ned surface collected here for years. That is one
way you know there is something under the soil,"

Lindsay explained. "Debris filters up to the surface."

The sheriff nodded, and she continued. "Over the
years the flooding of the river and runoff from
higher ground covered the area. The really heavy
work is in removing the dirt overburden to get to the
site floor. Once that's done, we shave the area
smooth with sharp-edged shovels, which lets us see
the markings that reveal where houses, burials, and
other kinds of structures were when the village was
here."

"What's this here?"

He pointed to a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot area bounded by an outline of round stains. It was filled with
rocks, broken clay pots, and bones scattered about.
Overlying the area was a grid of string supported by
wooden stakes a foot apart. Workers were carefully
digging out one square at a time, putting the dirt in
labeled bags.

"Structure 4. It was a house"

"How do you know?"

"See all those roundish stains about six inches to a
foot in diameter? Those are postholes. When a post
rots in the ground, it's similar to having been burned
and it leaves a dark stain. Sometimes we even find a
small core of wood"

"Don't trees do the same thing?"

"Yes. That's why we cross-section some of them.
The cross-section of a posthole is bullet shaped. The
cross-section of a tree shows dark stains of the roots
leading from the trunk."

The sheriff nodded.

"If you notice. the posthole pattern makes a square
with rounded corners"

"Yeah, I see that."

"They built the houses in that shape. After putting
up the posts, they wove sticks and grass between them
and covered it all with clay. We call the process wattle
and daub. They usually made a timber and thatched
roof. As we excavate, we'll find domestic artifactspotsherds, stone tools, stuff that indicates it was a
dwelling."

Lindsay pointed to an excavation beyond Structure
4. "That structure over there was burned. All that black
charcoal-looking stuff on the floor is the remains of
the roof timbers. If we're lucky, the house burned accidentally, and all the domestic artifacts are there under
the timbers where they were in use. That gives a lot of
information."

"Not too lucky for the people who owned the
house. Just who were these people?" the sheriff asked.

"That's a good question. The site is not far outside
the area that archaeologists have defined as the Chiefdom of Coosa, dating to the sixteenth century. We're
finding some of the same type of artifacts, and the settlement pattern is the same. But we're finding other
types of artifacts, too. Frank thinks this is a different
component of the Coosa chiefdom. Ned, however,
thinks they are a different group that traded with the
chiefdom but were not part of them. He thinks they
were part of a more isolated group"

"I see," said the sheriff, who apparently had been
satisfied with simply a name and a date. "That'd be
Ned Meyers`?"

Lindsay nodded.

"I remember him when he was a little kid. Spent
his summers with his grandparents, the Hardwicks. Quiet little kid, always going around looking for
arrowheads"

"Yes, that's him."

Frank came over and held out his hand, and the
sheriff grabbed it. "Lindsay giving you a tour of the
site?"

"Yeah, interesting." They walked away from the
crew before the sheriff spoke again. "Lindsay tells me
that your crew can make a thorough examination of
the place where we found the bones of the little Hastings girl."

"Yes."

"How long would it take?"

"Perhaps a week or two. Probably a little longer."

"Can they start tomorrow morning?"

"Sure thing. Did Lindsay tell you about her find?"
asked Frank.

"Yeah. She really has a knack, doesn't she"

Lindsay opened her mouth to protest, then closed it
again.

That evening, Lindsay visited Derrick's tent across
from hers and found him packing his equipment. "I
hope you aren't too angry with me," she said.

Derrick grinned. "I guess you owe me."

Lindsay grinned back. "I guess I'm in trouble."

"Actually, I think it'll be interesting."

"I'm glad you see it that way." She sat down on the
end of his bed and watched him pack.

"Did you seriously think I would be mad at you?"
he asked.

Lindsay looked into Derrick's gentle brown eyes.
"Not really. I just hate involving anyone else in this."

"Maybe it would be easier for you if you had
someone else, like me, working with you"

"You're probably right."

"Does the sheriff have any idea who the bones in
23 belong to?" Derrick asked.

"No. He didn't get too excited about it, considering
its age. That's good for us. Maybe it won't make the
papers," Lindsay replied.

"You think whoever buried the body knew Indians
were buried here and thought a graveyard would be a
good place to hide a body, or was it a coincidence?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen any evidence of grave
robbing. I'm not sure anyone knew there were burials
here until we arrived."

"Funny thing, though, isn't it, a recent grave dug
right into an ancient burial like that?" Derrick finished
packing the smaller equipment and zipped up his bag.

"I've certainly never seen it before. Derrick, I
appreciate your helping with the Hastings child."

"Well, then," said Derrick, smiling, "I'll have to
think how you're going to repay me" Lindsay
grabbed up his pillow, throwing it at him as she left
his tent.

She started toward her own tent, but her curiosity
about Burial 23 sent her to the laboratory instead. The
bones of the anomalous burial were stored inside a
cabinet away from other artifacts. Lindsay set the box
of bones out on a table. The skull, sitting in a separate
smaller box, was wrapped in cotton swathing. She
gently picked it up, unwrapped it, and rotated the skull
in her hand. An object fell to the table and rolled
toward the edge. Lindsay grabbed it before it fell to
the floor.

It was a bullet. She set the skull down and examined the bullet, weighing it in the palm of her hand. It
was small, about the size of her fingernail, and the tip
was smashed. Lindsay wondered if a ballistics expert
could get any information from an examination of it.
The gun from which it was fired probably had disappeared long ago, lost the way artifacts are lost,
migrating from one place to another, mislaid,
destroyed, hidden. She dropped the bullet into a plastic vial, wrote B23 on the lid, and put it in the box
with the bones.

Lindsay picked up the skull again and looked for
evidence of where the bullet had entered. A nick in
the orbit indicated the bullet had entered the left eye.
The skull still contained loose debris from the
burial. She gently cleaned it out with a brush and
examined the inside of the skull with a small flashlight. The bullet had impacted high on the occipital.
Lindsay took a pencil and aligned it with the two
marks on the skull left by the bullet. This person was
shot straight on in the face by someone approximately the same height. This person ... Lindsay
realized that she hadn't even sexed the individual
yet.

She began setting the bones out on the table in their
anatomical positions. She noted that the killer had
taken the clothes as well, for no scrap of material,
button, shoe, or anything had been found in the burial.
Perhaps so that if the body was dug up, the clothes
wouldn't identify it.

The yellow-brown bones had no odor except of
fresh earth. She picked up a femur. It had been made
hard from minerals leaching into the hones. That pushed the age of the bones past 50 years. The hard
brown cartilage on several of the joints made it not
over a hundred. Lindsay guessed around 60, but she
would need to see an analysis of the soil to be sure. A
cursory examination of the long bones revealed
prominent muscle attachments. The person had been
strong, possibly athletic, and had been right handed.

She picked up the parts of the pelvis. The skeleton
was obviously that of a woman. The wide, shallow
pelvis girdle had every female indicator. At first the
skull had fooled her. The brow ridge and jaw line
were a little more prominent than normally found in
females.

Her attention returned to the skull. The extended
nasal bones and relatively thin nasal cavity indicated
that Burial 23 had a long, slender nose. With her
sharp face, prominent features, and high cheekbones,
she must have been a striking woman. The skull had a
rare prominent metopic suture from the nasal cavity
up the frontal bone to the top of the head. This rarity
most often occurred in Caucasians. Lindsay turned
the skull over. The relatively triangular palate was
another indicator that the skeleton was Caucasian.

Lindsay made a quick measurement of the femur
and guessed the woman's height to be about 510".
She would do more thorough measurements later.
She then examined the long bones to see if the shafts
were fused to their epiphysis. The humeri and the
femurs were fused. She looked at the clavicle-the
proximal end had not yet fused. Nor had the shoulder
blade or the pelvis. Okay, she thought, between 18
and 21. She looked at the teeth. The third molars were
not yet in, but that only meant that the skeleton was probably not over 25. Lindsay looked at the pubic
symphysis. There was no scarring that occurs during
childbirth, and the surface was that of someone 18 or
19 years old. She picked up the fourth rib and examined the sternal end, which indicated the age to be
between 16 and 19. She's over 17, Lindsay thought,
judging by other indicators. Eighteen or nineteen is
the best I can do.

Lindsay had seen no sign of disease in her examination of any of the bones. Nor did she find any
breaks. She perused the smaller bones and stopped
short at the fourth metacarpal of the left hand. There
was a nick on the surface not unlike the nick in the
eye socket. The woman had held her hand, palm outward, in front of her face when she was shot.