Birthright

always reminded Callie of the way a corgi moved—rapid, stubby legs racing too fast forthe rest of the body. At five-four, he was an inch shorter than Callie herself and had a sleeked-back mane of walnut-brown hair, which he unashamedly dyed. His face was weathered, sun-beaten and narrow with his brown eyes in a permanent squint behind square, rimless glasses.
    He wore, as he did habitually, baggy brown pants and a shirt of wrinkled cotton. Papers leaked out of every pocket.
    He walked straight up to Callie and kissed her—and was the only man of her acquaintance not related to her who was permitted to do so.
    “Looking good, Blondie.”
    “You’re not looking so bad yourself.”
    “How was the drive?”
    “Vicious. Make it worth my while, Leo.”
    “Oh, I think I will. How’s the family?” he asked as he led her back the way he’d come.
    “Great. Mom and Dad got out of Dodge for a couple weeks. Beating the heat up in Maine. How’s Clara?”
    Leo shook his head at the thought of his wife. “She’s taken up pottery. Expect a very ugly vase for Christmas.”
    “And the kids?”
    “Ben’s playing with stocks and bonds, Melissa’s juggling motherhood and dentistry. How did an old digger like me raise such normal kids?”
    “Clara,” Callie told him as he opened a door and gestured her in.
    Though she’d expected him to take her to one of the labs, she looked around his sunny, well-appointed office. “I’d forgotten what a slick setup you’ve got here, Leo. No burning desire to go back out and dig?”
    “Oh, it comes over me now and again. Usually I just take a nap and it goes away. But this time . . . Take a look at this.”
    He walked behind his desk, unlocked a drawer. He drew out a bone fragment in a sealed bag.
    Callie took the bag and, hooking her glasses in the V of her shirt, examined the bone within. “Looks like part of a tibia. Given the size and fusion, probably from a young female. Very well preserved.”
    “Best guess of age from visual study?”
    “This is from western Maryland, right? Near a running creek. I don’t like best guess. You got soil samples, stratigraphic report?”
    “Ballpark. Come on, Blondie, play.”
    “Jeez.” Her brow knitted as she turned the bag over in her hand. She wanted her fingers on bone. Her foot began to tap to her own inner rhythm. “I don’t know the ground. Visual study, without benefit of testing, I’d make it three to five hundred years old. Could be somewhat older, depending on the silt deposits, the floodplain.”
    She turned the bone over again, and her instincts began to quiver. “That’s Civil War country, isn’t it? This predates that. It’s not from a Rebel soldier boy.”
    “It predates the Civil War,” Leo agreed. “By about five thousand years.”
    When Callie’s head came up, he grinned at her like a lunatic. “Radiocarbon-dating report,” he said, and handed her a file.
    Callie scanned the pages, noted that Leo had run the test twice, on three different samples taken from the site.
    When she looked up again, she had the same maniacal grin as he. “Hot dog,” she said.

Two
    C allie got lost on the way to Woodsboro. She’d taken directions from Leo, but when studying the map had noted a shortcut. It should have been a shortcut. Any logical person would have deemed it a shortcut—which was, in her opinion, exactly what the cartographer figured.
    She had a long-standing feud with mapmakers.
    She didn’t mind being lost. She never stayed that way, after all. And the detour gave her a feel for the area.
    Rugged, rolling hills riotously green with summer spilled into wide fields thick with row crops. Outcroppings of silver rock bumped through the green like gnarled knuckles and rippling finger bones.
    It made her think of those ancient farmers, carving their rows with primitive tools, hacking into that rocky ground to grow their food. To make their place.
    The man who rode his John Deere over those fields owed them a debt.
    He wouldn’t think of it as he plowed and planted and harvested. So she, and those like her, would think of it for him.
    It was a good place, she decided, to work.
    The higher hills were upholstered with forest thatclimbed up toward a sky of glassy blue. Ridge tumbled into valley; valley rose toward ridge, giving the land texture and shadows and scope.
    The sun sheened over the hip-high corn and gave it a wash of gold over green and gave a young chestnut gelding a bright playground for