Birthright

a bone?” Ty asked in what he thought was a whisper as Leo carried him off.
    Lana shook her head, then skirted mounds and buckets on her way toward the square hole where Callie worked.
    “Hey, pretty lady.” Digger stopped work to give her a wink. “Anything you want to know, you just ask me.”
    He was standing in another square, but leaped out nimbly to catch her attention. He smelled, Lana noted, of peppermint and sweat and looked a bit like an animated mole.
    “All right. What is it you’re doing here with . . .” She leaned over to look in the hole, noted it was dug in geometric levels. “Are those bones?”
    “Yep. Not human though. What we’ve got here’s the kitchen midden. Animal bones. Got us some deer remains. See the different colors of the dirt?”
    “I guess.”
    “You got your winter clay, your summer silt. Flooding, get me? The way the bones are layered shows us we had us a settlement here, long-term. Gives us hunting patterns. Got some cow in there. Domesticated. Had us some farmers.”
    “You can tell all that from dirt and bone?”
    He tapped the side of his nose. “I got a sense for these things. I’ve got a lot of interesting artifacts in my trailer over there. You wanna come by tonight, I’ll show you.”
    “Ah . . .”
    “Digger, stop hitting on my lawyer,” Callie called out. “Lana, get away from him. He’s contagious.”
    “Aw, I’m harmless as a baby.”
    “Baby shark,” Callie called back.
    “Don’t you be jealous, Callie sugar. You know you’re my one true love.” He blew her a noisy kiss, gave Lana another wink, then dropped back down in his hole.
    “He offered to show me his artifacts,” Lana told Callie when she reached her section. “Is that an archaeologist’s version of the old-etchings ploy?”
    “Digger’ll flash his artifacts at the least provocation.He’s a walking boner. And for reasons I’ve yet to fathom, he bags women with amazing regularity.”
    “Well, he’s cute.”
    “Christ, he’s ugly as the ass end of a mule.”
    “Yes, that’s why he’s cute.” She looked down at Callie’s work. “What happened to your Land Rover?”
    “Apparently somebody thought it would be entertaining to decorate it with a variety of crude remarks and suggestions. I figure one of Dolan’s men.” She shrugged. “I let him know it this morning.”
    “You’ve spoken to him about it.”
    Callie smiled. She thought Lana looked as fresh and pretty as a high school senior out on a summer picnic. “You could call it speaking.”
    Lana angled her head. “Need a lawyer?”
    “Not yet. The county sheriff’s looking into it.”
    “Hewitt? More tortoise than hare, but very thorough. He won’t blow it off.”
    “No, I got the impression he’d cross all the T ’s. I know he was going to speak to Dolan.”
    “However sincerely sorry I am about your car, the more complications for Ron Dolan right now, the better I like it.”
    “Glad I could help. Since you’re here, I’ve got a question. Why do people iron jeans?”
    Lana glanced down at the carefully pressed Levi’s she wore. “To show respect for the hard work of the manufacturer. And because they show off my ass better when they’re pressed.”
    “Good to know. I see Leo’s dragooned Ty-Rex.”
    “It was instant attraction, on both sides.” She looked at Callie’s work. Suppressed a shudder. “Those aren’t animal bones.”
    “No, human.” Callie reached for her jug, poured iced tea into a plastic glass. “Male in his sixties. Almost crippled with arthritis, poor bastard.”
    She offered the tea, chugging it down herself when Lana shook her head. “We’re getting some intermingling with this area. See this.” Callie tapped a long bone with herdental pick. “That’s female, about the same age though. And this one’s male, but he was in his teens.”
    “They buried them all together?”
    “I don’t think so. I think we’re getting scattering and intermingling here due to changes in water level, in climate. Flooding. I think when we get deeper in this section, likely next season, we’ll find more articulated remains. Hey, Leo’s got Ty digging.”
    Lana straightened and glanced over to where Tyler was happily digging in a small pile of dirt with Leo beside him. “He’s in heaven.”
    “That pile’s been sieved,” Callie told her. “Twenty bucks says Leo plants some stone or a fossil he has in his pocket so the kid finds it.”
    “He’s a nice