Birthright

movable telescope until she focused on the new position, took the second reading. All the while Bill hovered behind her.
    She could smell his aftershave, the lacing of bug repellant and a whiff of Listerine.
    “I found potsherds yesterday,” he told her. “I got the photographs if you want to see. I took Polaroids for my own records. Dory took the others. Hey, Dory! How’s it going?”
    “Hi, Bill. Any cavities?”
    “Nah. Anyway . . . um, Callie?”
    “Huh?”
    “I wrote up the report last night. They’re really cool—the potsherds. Digger said they were probably from a cooking pot. They were scribed and everything.”
    “That’s good.” She noted down the measurements. “That’s got it, Frannie. Thanks.” She began scribbling thecalculations on her clipboard, and spoke absently to Bill. “Stick with the same location today, see what else you turn up.”
    “I was kind of hoping I could work with you.”
    “Maybe later.”
    “Well, okay. Sure. Anyway, this is all so much cooler than I thought it was going to be. I mean, it takes forever, but then bam! you get something and it’s great. But whenever you need a hand, I could work with you over there.” He gestured toward the area marked off for the cemetery. “With the bones. I figure I can learn more in one day with you than a month with anybody else.”
    She reminded herself she was here to teach as well as dig. Enlightenment was as essential as discovery. “We’ll see about it tomorrow.”
    “Awesome.”
    He jogged off to get his trowel.
    “You know, you can get a rash having your butt kissed that much,” Jake commented.
    “Shut up. He’s just eager. You’re going to want to have one of your beauty-pageant contestants start another triangulation. Sonya, probably. Dory could work with her.”
    “I’ve already set them up.” He gestured to where the two women were working with measuring tapes and a plumb line. “Starting next week, we’re only going to have Sonya on weekends. She starts classes full-time.”
    “What about Dory?”
    “She’s arranging a sabbatical. She doesn’t want to leave the dig. Chuck and Frannie are staying on. Matt, too. For the time being anyway. You couldn’t drag Bill away with a team of mules. We’re going to lose a couple of the itinerants, the undergrads. Leo’s working on replacements.”
    “If we’re going to be shorthanded, let’s keep those hands busy while we’ve got them.”
    They separated, Jake to work on what they’d termed “the hut area,” and Callie back to the cemetery.
    She could work there with the pulse of Digger’s rock music, the chatter of the planning team, the trill of birds in the trees at her back. She could work in her own bubble ofsilence where those sounds simply pressed against the edges of her concentration.
    She had the moist ground under her fingers, and the music of it sliding from her trowel into her spoil bucket. She had the sun on her back and the occasional brush of breeze to cool it.
    She used trowel and brush and probe, painstakingly excavating the distant past, and her mind carefully turned over the known elements of her own.
    William Blakely, Suzanne Cullen’s obstetrician, retired twelve years after delivering her of a healthy baby girl. Seven pounds, one ounce. He died of prostate cancer fourteen years later, survived by his wife, who had been both his office manager and his nurse, and their three children.
    Blakely’s receptionist during the period in question had also retired, but had moved out of the area.
    She intended to visit the widow, find more on the receptionist as soon as possible.
    She’d track down the delivery-room nurse who’d assisted Suzanne through both of her labors. And the roommate she’d had during her hospital stay.
    The pediatrician Suzanne had used continued to practice. She’d be going to see him as well.
    It was a kind of triangulation, she thought. Each one of those names was a kind of point on the feature of her past. She would mark them, measure them, plot them. And somehow, she’d form the grid that began to give her the picture of what lay beneath it all.
    Meticulously, she brushed the soil from the jawbone of a skull. “Who were you?” she wondered aloud.
    She started to reach for her camera, glanced over when it wasn’t there.
    “I’ve got it.” Dory crouched down, framed in the skull. “I’ve been elected to pick up lunch.” She rose, moved to another position to take another series of pictures