She took a shower and got into bed. Tomorrow was going to be a big day. She had to excavate a well.
Chapter 38
The well was simply too unstable and dangerous for Diane to work in without structural reinforcements to hold back the crumbling walls. Mike called in an engineering consultant from Bartrum University who designed a liner for the well consisting of ten-foot steel chain-link fencing reinforced by steel posts, straps, and bars. It took two days for Mike to locate a contractor, collect the materials, and get the job done.
Thick cotton batting and wire mesh were laid over the debris in the bottom of the well and a temporary wooden platform was built over that to protect the remains lying beneath the rubble. The entire steel structure was assembled aboveground and lowered with extreme caution into the well by use of a construction crane. Inside the well, the liner was expanded outward against the stone wall and locked in place with reinforcing steel braces. All this was done without ever touching the bottom of the well or the delicate matter that lay there.
Mike attached a ladder to the side of the reinforced well. He and Scott strung the wiring for the work lights and removed the temporary platform, the wire mesh, and cotton batting from the bottom of 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 spiritual essence. Diane often had to stop and find that faraway place to put her emotions.
The remains had been butchered. Of course, she knew they would have been, if, indeed, these were the bones that were ground up for temper. But being confronted with the jumbled, cut bones was far more disconcerting than the intellectual knowledge of what had theoretically happened.
The arm bones were behind the body, upside down, as if someone threw them down the well after the torso was thrown in. They were broken-some from the falling rock, or the falling Hector, and some from the butchering. The shoulder blades were nothing more than spines of bone. The bodies of the scapulae were gone; only jagged edges remained. Scapulae were relatively thin. Probably they were easier to grind down than the heavier bones. She took several more photographs.
She picked up one of the long bones of the arm to place it in the basket. Under it lay another. That made three humeri. The minimum number of individuals in the well went from one to two. The bones represented at least two bodies. She placed the bones in the basket and watched as they were raised to the top.
“You want to take a break?” David called down.
“Not yet,” she said. “Send down some small boxes.”
She collected the hand bones, tiny pieces that belonged to the wrist and hand. Again there were bones that represented at least two people. She rough-sorted them into left and right and size. One of the individuals was larger than the other. Most of the hand bones were missing. There were not four complete sets. Maybe they were yet to be uncovered. Maybe they too had been ground into temper.
A piece of something caught her eye. It had been under the arm bones, and like the bones, was similar in color to the earth. But this object was not bone. She began gently teasing and sweeping the dirt away. She found the edges. It was something rolled up. She believed it was leather. Once she had outlined it in the soil and excavated a few inches under it, she carefully picked it up. It was surprisingly heavy. Something was wrapped inside it.
As she put it in the basket, the object came apart and two hammers fell out: a large iron mallet and a smaller hammer with a broad face. She paused again and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand.
Up top, Detective Hanks had been watching the computer screen with Mike. It looked as though Mike had been giving him a lecture-probably on soils, or Blue Ridge geology. Neva was wrapping the bones and packing them in boxes. Scott was helping. Topside around the well looked like a scene from
When David helped her off the ladder, he stared at her face. She knew what he noticed. He’d seen it in her many times, as she in him when they were working on mass graves. That forlorn, hopeless look. The knowing that
