One Grave Too Many

Star’s fragile emotional state could collapse again.
    With that taken care of, Diane changed into jeans, a tee shirt and sneakers.
    “You’re not going out to the site, are you?” said Andie, looking at Diane going out the door.
    “Yes. Call me on my cell if anything comes up. And tell the herpetologist to find that snake!”

    “Should you be out here?” Jonas stared at Diane when she emerged from the woods. He was at the tent, taking a break with a few of the crew.
    Diane was getting a little tired of people telling her to rest. Yes, she needed to rest, but there wasn’t time.
    “No,” she said, trying hard not to sound snappy and ungrateful. “What kind of trouble did you have here last night?”
    “We had some visitors. I guess they must have thought no one was here. They started digging around the pit. One of the deputies yelled at them and they took off.”
    “Did they do much damage?”
    “No. They’d just gotten started.”
    “They?”
    “There were two of them that we saw.”
    “We?”
    “I stayed with some of the guys last night. Thought it might be fun.”
    “Could anyone get a description?”
    “No. It was too dark and their flashlights didn’t illuminate them at all.”
    “I’m glad no one was hurt.”
    “Andie told me about Frank Duncan. We’re all sorry to hear about that. How’s he doing?”
    “Good. The doctors think he’ll pull through.”
    “That’s a relief. What happened? Andie said something about a robbery?”
    Diane told them what happened, and like everyone else, they marveled at both of them getting attacked not one day apart.
    “We’ve got something to show you.”
    “You found something?” she asked, but got no answer.
    She followed Jonas and the crew to the site, where a couple of the women were working. They had gotten an extraordinary amount of work done. One entire layer was excavated and they had started down into another.
    “We’ve already taken up the first layer of animal bones. Sylvia came out to help us late yesterday and identified the animals. It was pretty straightforward. No surprises. Deer, fox, racoon, duck. We got a complete list of the ones she identified here. She said that may change when she gets back to look at them more thoroughly.”
    “Find anything in the screens?” asked Diane.
    “A quarter, bone fragments. Mostly just rocks. But this is what we wanted to show you.” Jonas led her to the other side of the pit where the two women, Miriam and Ellen, were working.
    Diane stooped down and examined the excavation. “Well, finally, there it is.”

Chapter 33
    Standing out in bold relief, covering two grid units, was a member of the Canidae family. Diane guessed a wolf, judging from the size and low slope of the forehead. And there, peeking through a thin layer of soil underlying the thorax of the wolf, were the ribs and vertebrae of a human. What was so clear about the juxtaposition was the difference between the large arc of the quadrupedal wolf ribs and tightly arced bipedal human ribs—the difference of carrying organs in a horizontal as opposed to a vertical position. But the extraordinary thing was the roots of the sapling that wove down through the wolf and human ribs, supplying at least one end of a time frame.
    Someone had dumped the body and covered it with a thin layer of dirt. The Abercrombies tossed the wolf carcass on top of that soon afterward. Sometime later, the seedling began to grow up through the human and wolf bones. Age the tree and they would know the minimum amount of time the bones had been there. Maybe the information would be corroborated by Abercrombie’s records.
    “Aren’t we lucky?” said Diane. “We know the skeletons have been here at least as long as the sapling. Let’s put some more excavators here, and I’ll want a cross-section of the tree trunk.”
    She looked for any signs of the skull but saw none. Sometimes skulls are a problem. Being essentially round, they have a tendency to roll away from the torso when the last vestige of flesh lets go. If the body had been buried haphazardly or had been laid over a pile of other carcasses, the skull could have rolled to another location or even dropped to a deeper layer down through cavities made as the carcasses decomposed.
    “Very well done,” she told them.
    “We thought you’d be pleased,” said Jonas.
    “Have you seen any signs of buttons, zippers, shoe grommets, leather, rubber, textiles—anything?”
    “No,” answered Ellen.