LC 02 - Questionable Remains (4 page)

"Hi," said Lindsay.

The girl grinned and waved a hand at Lindsay.

"Marilee, does your mama know you're here?" asked the
deputy.

Marilee nodded emphatically twice. "She said for you to
come in for tea and sandwiches."

"That sounds mighty good," said Mike. "How 'bout it,
Dr. Chamberlain?"

Lindsay dusted her hands. "Maybe you and Marilee
could bring me a sandwich and something to drink. I think
I'd like to continue working."

"I found one just like that." Marilee pointed to the
ground.

"What?" asked Mike.

Lindsay's gaze followed the direction of Marilee's finger.
Lindsay saw it immediately. She took a tongue depressor and gently shaved the dirt away from the object, then dusted it with a soft paintbrush. After more shaving she was
able to lift it from its place in the ground.

"What is it?" asked Mike.

"A copper earspool," said Lindsay.

"An earspool?" Marilee sounded incredulous. "What's
that?"

"It's like a pierced earring, but the hole in the ear is
stretched over this part. See how it kind of looks like a spool
of thread?"

"Well, what kind of person wears something like that?"
asked Mike.

"Indians of a certain time period wore them," answered
Lindsay. "Where did you find the other one like it?" she
asked Marilee.

The little girl looked around the field as if gathering her
bearings. She pointed toward the middle.

"Do you come out and collect stuff after it rains?" asked
Lindsay.

Marilee nodded that she did.

"I'll bet you find a lot of good stuff. Could I see it?" she
asked.

A worried look came over the little girl's face, and
Lindsay remembered how tightly she had protected the
Clovis point she found when she was Marilee's age, how
she hung on to it still, keeping it safe in her desk.

"I won't take it," said Lindsay. "I just want to look at it."

Marilee smiled and said, "Okay."

"Well, I guess that tells us who the bones belong to," said
Mike, rising and mopping his brow with a large blue bandanna.

"Looks like it "

Lindsay took the brush and dusted the skull. It had been
partially flattened from years of decay, heavy topsoil, and,
Lindsay supposed, farm equipment running over it, but certain features caught her eye. First, the very narrow nasal passage, then the slightly rectangular eye sockets: telltale
signs of a Caucasian skull. She looked closely at the teeth,
which she believed had overbite instead of the usual evenedged occlusion of people of Asian ancestry. Lindsay
touched the zygomatic arch with her finger. She would have
to wait until the skull was out of the ground, but she was
relatively sure that these were not the forward-projecting
cheekbones of an Indian skull, but the more recessed ones of
a European.

"This is interesting," she said aloud.

"Found something else?" asked Mike.

Marilee squatted by the grave and looked at the bones.

"His facial characteristics are not those of an Indian, but
of a European," she said.

"What does that mean, exactly?" asked Mike. "We got us
some guy from Europe wearing spools in his ears getting
hisself buried here in this field? Maybe it's some hippie, you
know, from the '60s, and the bones are not as old as they
look. You said fertilizer and stuff make a difference."

"These are authentic Mississippian earspools, and the
bones are definitely over a hundred."

"He from Mississippi?" asked Marilee. "My kindergarten
teacher's from there."

Lindsay grinned at the little girl. "How old are you?" she
asked.

Marilee held up five fingers.

"You sure are smart for five."

Marilee grinned.

"But no, Mississippian is the name of," Lindsay hesitated,
searching for an explanation that Marilee would understand, "a big tribe of Indians that lived about five hundred
years ago."

"Wow," Marilee whispered.

Marilee's mother, Grace Lambert, made tuna sandwiches,
chocolate cake, and tea for Lindsay and Mike. They were sitting cross-legged in the grass at the edge of the plowed
field eating when they heard the screen door of the house
slam and turned to see Marilee running across the grass
holding a cigar box.

"These are the things I found out here," she said, handing
the box to Lindsay.

Lindsay set her plate down and opened the box. Marilee
scooted close, guarding her treasure, Lindsay thought. The
green copper earspool lay on a wadding of cotton. The
design cut into the copper, as far as Lindsay could determine, was similar to the one with the skeleton. In the box
with the earspool were two arrowheads, a bottle cap, half a
horseshoe, and a rusty bolt.

"Nice collection," Lindsay told her. "It looks like this earspool is the mate to the one we found today." Marilee
looked troubled again, and Lindsay handed the box to her
and she set it on her lap.

"Mama and Daddy told me I have to give it to you,"
Marilee said quietly.

"No. You can keep it. But maybe sometime I can borrow
it and give you a paper that says that it is yours and I must
give it back. Would that be all right?" Marilee nodded her
head. "I don't need to borrow it now," Lindsay continued,
"so you keep it safe."

Marilee smiled. "Will you tell Mama and Daddy that?"

"Sure," said Lindsay. "Are these all the things you found?"

"Yes. I look all the time."

"Let's look in the field now, while Mike finishes his
lunch."

"I can go back to work now if you need. .. ," he said, with
a mouth full of chocolate cake.

"I want to do a little surface collecting. Take your time."

Lindsay and Marilee walked in the fine, dark brown dirt
of the field. Lindsay's practiced gaze swept the ground with
each step, but she found nothing.

"If you come back after a rain," suggested Marilee.

"Sometimes, if you don't find anything, it's still like finding something," said Lindsay, and Marilee gave her a sideways glance filled with such skepticism that Lindsay
repressed a laugh. "You see, when you find a burial that
looks like an Indian burial, it's usually near a village. If it's
near a village, you'll find a whole lot of pieces of broken
pottery and arrowheads. But there's nothing here."

"Maybe Mr. Moore got it all," offered Marilee.

"Who is he?" asked Lindsay.

"He lived here 'fore we did."

"No, probably not. Most people don't recognize pieces of
clay pottery. It looks just like dirt sometimes. I think this
means that there is no village here and this is a lone burial.
Which is interesting." Lindsay was mostly talking to herself;
she doubted Marilee understood what she was talking about.

"They got no trash here," said Marilee, and Lindsay
glanced at her.

"That's right. That is very smart of you."

Marilee grinned.

They did not finish unearthing the Lamberts' unexpected
tenant that day, so Lindsay covered the bones with a sheet
of plastic and went home after asking the Lamberts to not
allow the dog to run free until the bones had been removed.
When she arrived back at her house, she told Susan to
ignore her, that she was not really there, and she slept in her
own guest room.

Lindsay returned to the Lambert farm at sunrise and had
been working two hours when Mike arrived. They finished
about four o'clock that afternoon. Lindsay swept the bones
clean, and Mike took photographs. He was slow but thorough, taking shots of the full skeleton and close-ups of the
skull, hands, feet, and torso.

The skeleton was extended, arms lying out to the side. It
looked embossed into the ground. The Lamberts had come
out to look at the finished work.

"I called our pastor," said Grace Lambert, a gracious
woman who fit her name and who, Lindsay noticed, had
the bone structure of a Native American. "If you rebury
him, he said we could do it in the church cemetery. Poor fellow can't stay out in the field."

"There's other Indians buried in the cemetery," offered
Joshua. "A lot of people around here are part Indian."

"Mike said that the fellow was wearing earrings," said
Miles Lambert. "Are you sure it's a guy?"

"Yes," said Lindsay, and she pointed out some of the features: the coarse brow ridge, square jaw, the shape of the
pelvis. "What is interesting," she said, "is his race. I think he
is European. I'll know more when I measure the bones."

Something on the edge of Lindsay's mind had been nagging her about the skeleton. She stared at it as she talked to
the Lamberts. It was the right hand. The middle and distal
phalanxes were under the proximal ones, and they were
reversed so that their distal ends were now facing the proximal direction. The hand had been curled into a fist when
the man was buried.

Lindsay took a tongue depressor, knelt down beside the
skeleton, and began digging around the bones of the hand.

"Hand me that dental pick," she said to Mike.

"Found something else?" asked Mike.

"I don't know." Lindsay worked as the others peered
over her shoulder. "Would someone give me a tissue?"

A white tissue appeared over her shoulder and Lindsay
spread it on the ground. After some meticulous work with
the burial tools she lifted an encrusted object from the
ground and laid it on the tissue.

"What is it?" they asked.

"It's green," said Mike. "More copper?"

"Yes," Lindsay answered, staring hard at the piece, teasing it with the pick. "And it has something attached to it
that has been preserved by the oxidized metal."

The object was mainly a mass of green oxidized copper with four thin extensions at ninety degrees to one another.
It was attached to what looked like wood carved into small
spheres or beads.

"A rosary," Lindsay said with surprise. "I think it's a rosary."

"My goodness," said Grace Lambert. "The fellow was a
Christian."

"What do you reckon he was doing in them earrings?"
asked twelve-year-old Joshua Lambert.

Roberto Raphael Lacayo squinted as he looked out over the ocean
at the speck he had been observing for the last two days, wondering if he was hallucinating or if it could be a ship. Oddly, he felt
the taste of red wine in his mouth; odd because he had not tasted
wine for how long? Twenty years? Twenty-five years? Who knew
anymore? He unconsciously fingered the copper ornaments in his
earlobes and looked down at his deerhide clothing and tattooed
arms. Only his hirsute appearance gave a clue that his origin was
not here in this alien wilderness, but across the ocean. Roberto
remembered the day he had left Spain: Cristina crying and laughing at the same time. His mouth twitched into a slight smile. She
was an adventurer, too, and she would have come with him if she
had been allowed. His mouth turned down again. She had probably married. Her children would be grown now. Cristina would
have grandchildren. Roberto couldn't imagine it; she was still so
young in his mind-young, but faceless. He couldn't remember
what she looked like. He had expected to go home rich, marry
Cristina, and be a powerful man. But instead.... He sighed and
dug in his doeskin pouch. He pulled out his prayer beads and
began to whisper as the salt water lapped at his feet. "Ave Marie,
gratia plena, Dominus tecum . . . "

The ship-Roberto now could see that it was a ship-was heading along the coast, northward. Estupido, estupido, he thought.
No hay oro aqui. He could tell them, "There is no gold here," but
they would not believe him. They could take him home. He felt his ears again; the lobes were permanently stretched. So much about him was
different. But he still wanted to go home. He began walking northward.
There were only a few safe harbors where a ship could anchor.

Lindsay packed the bones and gave them to Mike with directions
as to where at the University of Georgia to deliver them for further
analysis. Now she would drive home, get a good night's sleep, and
make another start tomorrow on her vacation. She was getting into
her Land Rover when the Lamberts approached.