Claire paused. The answer to that question almost had to be forced out. “He died. Two years ago.” She barely registered his murmured response of, “I’m sorry.” For a moment, the only sound was the windshield wiper scraping sleet from the glass. Two years, and she still had trouble talking about it. She still couldn’t bring herself to use the word widow. Women should not be made widows at the age of thirty-eight.
And laughing, loving, thirty-nine-year-old men should not die of lymphoma.
Through the freezing mist, she saw emergency lights flashing ahead. An accident.
Yet she felt strangely safe riding in this man’s car. Protected and insulated from harm. They inched past a string of emergency vehicles: two police cruisers, a tow truck, and an ambulance. A Ford Bronco had slid off the road and now lay on its side, glistening with rime. They drove past it in silence, both of them sobered by that stark reminder of how quickly life can be altered. Ended. It was one more gloomy note to an already depressing day.
Lucy Overlock arrived late to her own class. Fifteen minutes after her two graduate and ten undergraduate students stood assembled in the university museum’s basement lab, Lucy herself strode in, her slicker dripping. “With this weather, I probably should have canceled,” she said I m glad you all made it anyway She hung up her ram gear, under which she wore her usual jeans and flannel shirt, practical attire considering their surroundings. The museum basement was both dank and dusty, a cluttered cavern that smelled like the artifacts it contained. Along both walls were shelves lined with hundreds of wooden boxes, contents labeled in faded typescript: “Stonington #11: shell implements, arrowheads, miscellaneous.”
“Pittsfield #32: partial skeletal remains, adult male.”
At the center of the room, on a broad work table draped with a plastic tarpaulin, lay the new additions to this neatly catalogued charnel house.
Lucy flicked on a wall switch. Fluorescent lamps hummed on, their unnatural glare illuminating the table. Claire and Lincoln joined the circle of students.
The lights were unforgiving, casting the faces around the table in harsh relief.
Lucy removed the tarp.
The skeletal remains of the two children had been laid out side by side, the bones placed in their approximate anatomical positions. One skeleton was missing its rib cage, one lower leg, and the right upper extremity. The other skeleton appeared to be largely intact except for the missing small bones of the hands.
Lucy took her position at the head of the table, near the skulls. “What we have here is a sampled assemblage of human remains from dig number seventy-two at the southern end of Locust Lake. The dig was completed yesterday. For reference purposes, I’ve tacked the site map over there, on the wall. As you can see, the site is located right on the edge of the Meegawki Stream. That area had heavy rains and flooding this past spring, which is probably the reason this gravesite became exposed.” She looked down at the table. “So, let’s begin. First, I Want all of you to examine the remains. Feel free to pick them up, look them over carefully. Ask any questions you have about the site. Then let’s hear your conclusions as to age, race, and length of burial. Those of YOU who took part in the dig-please hold your tongues. Let’s see What the others can deduce on their own.”
One of the students reached for a skull.
Lucy stepped back and quietly circled the table, sometimes glancing over her students’ shoulders to watch them work. This assembly made Claire think of some grotesque dining ritual: the remains laid out like a feast on the table, all those eager hands reaching for the bones, turning them under the light, passing them to other hands. At first there was no conversation, the silence broken only by the occasional whisk of a tape measure being extended, retracted.
One of the skulls, missing its mandible, was handed to Claire.
The last time she’d held a human skull was in medical school. She rotated it beneath the light. Once she could name every foramen, every protuberance, but like so many other facts crammed into her memory during four years of training, those anatomical names had been forgotten, displaced by more practical data like billing codes and hospital phone numbers. She turned the skull upside down and saw that the upper teeth were still in place. The third molars had not yet erupted. A child’s mouth.
Gently she set down the skull, shaken by the reality of what she’d just cradled in her hands. She thought of Noah at age nine, his hair a whorl of dark curls, his face silky smooth against hers, and she stared at that skull of a child whose flesh had long since rotted away She was suddenly aware of Lincoln’s hand, resting on her shoulder. “You all right?” he asked, and she nodded. His gaze was sad, almost mournful under the harsh lights. Are we the only ones haunted by this child’s life? she wondered.
The only ones who see more than an empty shell of calcium and phosphate?
One of the female students, a younger, slimmer version of Lucy, asked the first question. “Was this a coffin burial? And was the terrain field or woods?”
“The terrain was moderately wooded, all new growth,” answered Lucy. “We did find iron nails and fragments of the coffin, but the wood was mostly rotted away”
“And the soil?” a male student asked.
“Clay, moderately saturated. Why do you ask?”
“A high clay content helps preserve remains.”
“Correct. What other factors affect the preservation of remains?' Lucy glanced around the table. Her students responded with an eager ness that struck Claire as almost unseemly. They were so focused on mineralized remains, they had forgotten what these bones represented. Living, laughing children.
“Soil compaction-moisture-” “Ambient temperature.”
“Carnivores.”
“Depth of burial. Whether it’s exposed to sunlight.”
“The age at time of death.”
Lucy’s gaze shot to the student who’d spoken. It was the young Lucy clone, also dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt. “How does the deceased’s age affect the bony remains?”
“The skulls of young adults remain intact longer than skulls of elderly people, perhaps because of heavier mineralization.”
“That doesn’t tell me how long these particular skeletons have been lying in the ground. When did these individuals die?”
There was silence.
Lucy did not seem disappointed by their lack of response. “The correct answer,” she said, “is: We can’t tell. After a hundred years, some skeletons may crumble to dust, while others will show almost no weathering. But we can still draw a number of conclusions.” She reached across the table and picked up a tibia.
“Note the flaking and peeling in some of the long bones, where circumferential lamellar bone has natural cleavage lines. What does this indicate to you?”
“Changing wet and dry periods,” said the Lucy clone.
“Right. These remains were temporarily protected by the coffin. But then the coffin rotted, and the bones were exposed to water, especially near that streambed.” She glanced at a young man Claire recognized as one of the grad students who’d helped excavate the site. With his long blond hair tied back in a ponytail, and three gold earrings in one ear, he could easily have passed for a rogue sailor in an earlier century. The one incongruous note to his appearance was his scholarly wire-rim spectacles. “Vince,” said Lucy, “tell us about the flood data for that area.”
“I’ve searched back as far as the records go, to the 1920s,” said Vince. “There were two episodes of catastrophic flooding: in the spring of 1946, and then again, this past spring, when the Locust River overflowed its banks. I assume that’s how this burial site became exposed.
Erosion of the Meegawki streambed due to heavy rain.”
“So we have two recorded periods of site saturation, followed by drier years, which have caused this flaking and peeling of cortical bone.” Lucy set down the tibia and picked up the femur. “And now for the most interesting finding of all.
I’m referring to this gash here, on the back of the femoral shaft. It looks like a cut mark, but the bone is so badly weathered, the gash has lost its definition. So we can’t tell if there’s been a green bone response.” She noticed Lincoln’s questioning look. “A green bone response is what happens when living bone bends or twists while being stabbed. It tells you whether the bone was cut postmortem or antemortem.”
“And you can’t tell from this bone?”
