Dust to Dust

the well. On the surface, the crew used wooden posts and beams to build a hand-operated winch above the well. They wrapped Diane’s rescue rope around the hoist and attached a five-gallon bucket to the end of the rope for lifting debris out of the well.
    Paloma said her mother was greatly frustrated not to be there. An excavation in her own backyard and she, an archaeologist, was stuck in the hospital. Andie came up with the idea of using a webcam down in the well. Marcella could watch the excavation, the crew at the top of the well could keep track of what was going on down below, and Andie herself could watch from her office. Andie saw it as an opportunity to conduct research for the webcam project she was working on with the curators. Diane thought it was a great idea. She got permission from Chief Garnett. David helped with the technical part. The webcams were attached to the wire liner near the work lights that illuminated the bottom of the pit.
    “I love it,” Mike said with obvious pride, looking down into the well at the finished construction. “I would trust my life with that, Boss.” He grinned at Diane.
    “Well, that’s certainly reassuring,” she said. She looked into the lighted well. “I’ll have to give you credit. It does look safe and functional.” But what she was thinking was how foreboding it was. She had the feeling she was looking into the mouth of something very dark and evil. She put on her caving hard hat with a light on it and lowered herself down the ladder.
    Before she started excavating the bones, Diane had to clean out a lot of debris—pieces of the rotted wooden well cap, rocks, leaves, and surface vegetation that had fallen in with Hector. She filled the bucket time and again and the top crew hoisted the bucket loads out of the well using the winch. It didn’t take as long as she feared to clear the bottom of the well. But it was tiring.
    So now Diane was at the bottom of the well, kneeling over her real work. Marcella, Andie, Garnett back in his office, and her crime scene support up top were watching via Web video as Diane’s hands brushed debris off the dome of a skull.
    The rule of excavating is to work from the known to the unknown—start with bone you can see and follow it into the debris, inch by inch. Diane’s tools were a trowel, a brush, and wooden tongue depressors so as not to harm the bone. It was slow work, but the ground was relatively soft clay, silt, and sandy soil. Fortunately, it was a dry well and had been for many years. Otherwise, they would be dealing with a whole other problem—a body that had decomposed in waterlogged soil. If she were dealing with a body that had become adipocere rather than skeletonized, it would be another whole level of unpleasantness.
    The bones were a gray-brown color—the same as the surrounding soil. They stood out in relief like a piece of artwork. She brushed off a last clump of dirt and took a photograph. Diane moved to the edge of the well where she knelt and took several more photographs of the bones.
    She asked for the basket, which David immediately lowered down to her on the end of the rope. She removed the skull first. She turned it over and brushed the dirt off it. What caught her eye at once was the cut in the back of the skull. There was little doubt in her mind that it would fit the pottery cast. Diane set the skull on batting in the basket and signaled for David to pull it up.
    The vertebrae snaked from where the skull had been lying on its side, curving before terminating at the sacrum. When they winched the basket back down, she picked up the vertebrae one at a time and put them in the basket in order, along with the pelvis. It was a female pelvis, from a teen. She signaled David to hoist them up. Next she sent the ribs.
    The rest of the bones were in disarray. Diane stopped and sat back on her haunches. The angular rocks behind the wire bit into her back. She folded her arms and sat for several moments, glad the webcams weren’t aimed at her face. She took several deep breaths.
    When she worked as a human rights investigator in South America, there was a nun in the mission where they were housed who was forever giving them advice that sounded like Zen koans. Once when Diane and her crew became disturbed over a mass grave, she said, “In order to get close to them, you must get far away from them.” It was a concept they all knew and relied upon, but when Sister Margaret said it, it took on a more