6
The first snowflakes spiraled down through the bare branches and gently dusted the excavation site. Lucy Overlock glanced up at the sky and said, “This snow’s going to stop, isn’t it? It has to stop, or it’ll obscure everything.”
“It’s already melting,” said Lincoln. He sniffed the air and knew, by some instinct developed during a lifetime in these woods, that the Snow would not last long. These flakes were merely a whispered warning, deceptively gentle, of the wintry months to come. He did not mind the snow, did not even resent all the inconveniences that came With it, the shoveling, the plowing out, the nights without power When the lines went down from the weight of it. It was the darkness he disliked. Darkness fell so early these days. Already daylight was fading, and the trees were featureless black slashes against the sky.
“Well, we might as well pack it up for the day,” said Lucy. ‘And hope it’s not buried under a foot of snow by tomorrow.”
Now that the bones were no longer of interest to the police, Lucy and her grad students had assumed the responsibility of protecting the dig. The two students pulled a tarp over the excavation site and staked it in place. It was a futile precaution; a marauding raccoon could rip it away with one slash of its claws.
“When will you finish here?” asked Lincoln.
“I’d like to take several weeks,” said Lucy. “But with the weather turning bad, we’ll have to rush. One hard freeze, and that’s it for the season.”
Headlights flickered through the trees. Lincoln saw that another vehicle had pulled into Rachel Sorkin’s driveway.
He tramped back through the woods, toward the house. In the last few days, the front yard had become a parking lot. Next to Lincoln’s vehicle was Lucy Overlock’s Jeep and a beat-up Honda, which he assumed belonged to her grad student.
At the far end of the driveway, parked under the trees, was yet another vehicle-a dark blue Volvo. He recognized it, and he crossed the yard to the drivers side.
The window hummed open an inch. “Lincoln,” the woman said.
“Evening, Judge Keating.'
“You have time to talk?” He heard the locks click open.
Lincoln circled to the passenger side and slid in, shutting the door. They sat for a moment, cocooned in silence.
“Have they found anything else?” she asked. She didn’t look at him but gazed straight ahead, her eyes focused somewhere among the trees. In the car’s gloom, she seemed younger than her sixty-six years, the lines in her face fading to uniform smoothness. Younger and not so formidable.
“There were only the two skeletons,” said Lincoln.
“Both were children?”
“Yes. Dr. Overlock estimates their ages at around nine or ten years old.”
“Not a natural death?”
“No. Both deaths were violent.”
There was a long pause. “And when did this happen?”
“That’s not so easy to determine. All they have to go on are some artifacts found with the remains. They’ve dug up some buttons, a coffin handle. Dr.
Overlock thinks it’s probably part of a family cemetery.'
She took her time absorbing this information. Her next question came out softly tentative: “So the remains are quite old?”
“A hundred years, more or less.”
She released a deep breath. Was it Lincoln’s imagination or did the tension suddenly melt from her silhouette? She seemed to fail almost limp with relief, her head tilting back against the neck rest. “A hundred years,” she said. “Then it’s nothing to worry about. It’s not from-”
“No. It’s unrelated.”
She gazed ahead, at the congealing darkness. “Still, it’s such a strange coincidence, isn’t it? That very same part of the lake…“ She paused. “I wonder if it happened in the fall.”
“People die every day, Judge Keating. A century’s worth of skeletons-they all have to be buried somewhere.”
“I heard there was a hatchet mark on one of the thigh bones.”
“That’s true.”
“It will have people wondering. Remembering.”
Lincoln heard the woman’s fear, and he wanted to reassure her, but could not bring himself to make physical contact. Iris Keating was not a touchable woman.
Her emotional barrier was so thick, it would not have surprised him to reach out and feel a shell.
He said, “It was a long time ago. No one remembers.”
“This town remembers.“
“Only a few. The older ones. And they don’t want to talk about it any more than you do.”
“Still, it’s a matter of public record. And now all those reporters are in town.
They’ll be asking questions.”
“What happened half a century ago isn’t relevant.”
“Isn’t it?” She looked at him. “This is how it began last time. The killings. It started in the fall.”
“You can’t interpret every violent act as history repeating itself.”
“But history is violence.” Once again, she faced forward, her gaze directed toward the lake. Night had fallen and through the bare trees, the water was only a faint glimmer. “Don’t you feel it, Lincoln?” she asked softly. “There’s something wrong about this place. I don’t know What it is, but I’ve felt it since I was small. I didn’t like living here, even then. And now…“ She reached for the ignition and started the engine.
Lincoln stepped out of the car. “It’s a slippery road tonight. Drive carefully.”
“I will. Oh, and Lincoln?”
“Yes?”
“I’m told there’s a new opening in that alcohol rehab program in Augusta. It might be the place for Doreen. If you can talk her into it.”
“I’ll try. I just keep hoping that one of these days it’ll take.”
He thought he saw pity in her eyes. “I wish you luck. You deserve a lot better, Lincoln.”
“I’m managing all right.”
“Of course you are.” He realized, then, that it wasn’t pity, but admiration he heard in her voice. “You’re one of the few men in this world who would.”
A photo of Mrs. Horatio was propped up on the coffin, a picture of her as a young woman of eighteen, smiling, almost pretty. Noah had never thought of his biology teacher as pretty, nor had he imagined her as ever having been young. In his mind, Dorothy Horatio had sprung up on this earth already middle-aged, and now, in death, she would remain eternally so.
Moving with the long line of students, he shuffled dutifully toward the coffin, past the photo of Mrs. Horatio in her past incarnation as an actual human female. It was a shock to confront that eerily familiar image of Mrs. Horatio before the extra pounds and wrinkles and gray hair. To realize that the photo had been taken when she was not much older than Noah. What happens when we get old? he wondered. Where does the kid part of us go?
He stopped before the coffin. It was closed, which was a mercy; he didn’t think he could handle seeing his dead teacher’s face. It was terrible enough just to imagine how she must look, hidden beneath that mahogany lid. He had not particularly liked Dorothy Horatio. Not at all, in fact. But today he had met her husband and adult
