that coursed through the garden.
The security staff, Carter knew, had code-named him Geronimo.
When Miranda breezed in, twenty minutes late, Carter quickly escorted her down into the bowels of the museum, where few ever went. Down here were long, linoleum-floored corridors, with endless rows of numbered metal cabinets, each one divided up into a dozen separate drawers containing different plant and animal fossils from the region. Excavation had been going on since the turn of the twentieth century, and with such success that the area had actually lent its name to an age — the Late Pleistocene time in America, when man first appeared in the New World, had been officially designated the Rancholabrean Land Mammal Age.
Miranda wasn’t really dressed for this excursion; the air down here was kept cool and dry, and she was wearing a light cotton blouse and a pair of culottes. Carter should have warned her in advance to wear a long- sleeved shirt, or even a sweater.
“Spooky down here, isn’t it?” she said, as their footsteps echoed in the empty hall.
“Why would you say that?” Carter replied facetiously. “Underground, almost alone, surrounded by thousands — millions — of bones, from ancient animals that once hunted humans for lunch.” A fluorescent tube hissed and flickered overhead. “And don’t forget the state-of-the-art technology.”
At the end of the corridor, Carter stopped at a cabinet like all the others, bent down, and slid out a wide, shallow drawer. In it, Miranda could see a collection of artifacts, all of them looking, even to her less practiced eye, man-made.
Carter slid the drawer entirely clear and carried it to a steel-gray examination table. There were several stools, and Miranda perched herself atop one of them.
“Who made these?” Miranda asked, just to prove she knew that much already.
“La Brea Woman,” Carter said, “the one and only human so far found in the La Brea Tar Pits. And she was found in 1915. Now you may have come upon the second.”
“That’s not really true,” Miranda said, though she couldn’t restrain a bashful smile. “I only said there was something there. You’re the one who found it — and knew what it was.”
“We’ll share the record books,” Carter said, “and only after we do know what we’ve got.”
He lifted one of the items, a rough-hewn stone, from the tray. “Ever seen one of these?”
Miranda had, but only in a slide from one of her UCLA lectures. “It looks like some kind of grinding stone.”
“Very good,” Carter said. “It’s called a mano. But do you notice anything else about it?”
He handed it to her, and Miranda examined it more closely. The stone was chipped and scratched. “It’s in pretty bad shape?” she guessed.
“You’ve just won the washing machine,” Carter said. “It’s been deliberately defaced.”
“Not by a staff member, I hope.”
Carter smiled. “No, the damage was done thousands of years ago, by one of the original aboriginal people. We think that it was part of their burial practices.”
He put the mano back, and gave her a broken basalt stone the size of a brick. “See that kind of notch in the stone?”
She did.
“This is called a cogged stone. It might have been used for weighting down fishing nets, or it could have been used with digging sticks; we really don’t know.”
“It looks kind of ornamental to me.”
“Say, anybody ever tell you that you could be an anthropologist? There’s a theory that cogged stones were used for some kind of ceremonial or symbolic purpose.”
Miranda was very pleased with herself, and she glanced up at Carter.
“One more,” he said, “before we move on to the main attraction.”
He held up an abalone shell and said, “This might have been part of La Brea Woman’s business.”
“She sold seashells?”
“Not exactly, but she might have traded to get them.”
“For jewelry?”
“Nope, this was a practical woman. She used shells like these for scooping up the hot tar and transporting it.”
“What’d they use it for?”
“All sorts of stuff. It made a good adhesive, and we’ve also found it on the remnants of early canoes; tar was good for waterproofing.”
Carter pushed the tray to one side of the table, then retrieved another, equally wide but deeper.
Deep enough to house the skull of the woman herself.
Miranda, he could tell, was impressed. And that was a good sign. If you were going to work in anthropology or paleontology, it was good to have a sense of wonder; most of the scientists he knew had never really lost it. No matter how many digs they went on, and how many bones or fossils they recovered, there was always something miraculous and breathtaking about it. Especially when the bones were those of an early hominid.
The skull of the La Brea Woman was small — she’d been diminutive by modern-day standards, standing well under five feet tall — and osteologic studies, based on the skull and the dozen or so other skeletal fragments that had been recovered, had revealed not much more about her. The pelvic bones did suggest she’d already given birth. But there was one thing that was not in any dispute.
“How come there’s a different-colored patch here?” Miranda asked, indicating a section on top.
“Because her skull had been crushed,” Carter replied.
Miranda paused, and brushed a wisp of blonde hair out of her eyes. “Do we know how?”
“It’s possible it happened during the excavation; the left side of the lower jaw is also broken.”
Miranda, hearing something in Carter’s voice, said, “But you don’t think so.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You think she was… murdered?” It was odd, but Miranda had to wonder for a second if a person could be murdered long before that crime might have technically existed. Was there some anthropological term for the killing of a prehistoric human?
“I think she was struck with a heavy, blunt object,” Carter said. “The discolored patch on top is plaster; it was used to fill in the missing portion of her skull.”
He looked steadily into the empty eye sockets and the gaping jaws. In today’s world she’d been only a teenager, but in the ancient and dangerous world in which she lived and died — was she a sacrifice of some kind, or a casualty of war? — the La Brea Woman was well along in life. A natural life that was, in the famous formula of Thomas Hobbes, nasty, brutish, and short.
Little different, Carter thought, from the life led by La Brea Man, who’d stretched out a poor, solitary hand to him from the depths of Pit 91.
“I’m getting kind of cold down here,” Miranda said, with a visible shiver.
And Carter nodded; she wasn’t reacting to the temperature alone, he knew. He put the specimens away and said, “Let’s go back up into the sunlight, shall we?”
Miranda nodded eagerly and clung like a puppy to Carter’s side until they were once again in the atrium garden, with nothing but blue sky and palm fronds overhead.
CHAPTER NINE
Turnlng up the long private drive to Summit View, Beth’s heart lifted; in just a few minutes, she knew, she was going to have her baby, Joey, in her arms again.
When she’d taken the job at the Getty, she’d made it clear that she could not work a full weekly schedule, that she expected to have a lot of flexibility and to be able, once or twice a week, to work from home. But so far it hadn’t worked out that way. Mrs. Cabot expected her to be at the Getty Center nearly all the time, and whenever Beth was plainly not there — when she had to field a call from her house, for example — Mrs. Cabot sounded distinctly displeased about it.
