the rest of the skeleton, had been found.
She pressed the shutter release again.
Click!
Another whir, another painful adjustment in her position.
Another photograph.
Another document to prove eventually that despite the fact that what she was uncovering made no sense, it had, in fact, been found in exactly this position, at exactly this location.
She’d been laboring on the excavation for two days now, carefully scraping away the deposits to expose the remains, with no sense yet of when the body had been buried. From what she’d seen so far, it could have been a year or a decade or a century.
A thousand years? Four thousand years? Certainly no more than that, for man hadn’t been on Maui — or anywhere else in Hawaii — any longer than that, and no animal except man built fire pits.
Undoubtedly the site was much younger than a thousand years — probably only a few hundred, given how shallow it was.
She’d refused to let Rob’s crew help with the excavation of the skeleton, assigning them to the area around the rudimentary fire circle. The contents of the circle itself were still undisturbed. Having decided to work on the skeleton first, Katharine immediately ordered the fire pit covered and declared it off limits. Once she’d exposed every one of the bones, photographing them at every stage of their excavation until she was satisfied that she had a complete record of their recovery and would feel comfortable about moving them to a lab, she’d turn her attention to the fire pit.
“I want every layer kept separate,” she’d explained to Rob. “Even if I have to peel it down a millimeter at a time.”
“What is it you think you’ve got here?” Rob asked, realizing she was dead serious about doing all the excavation herself.
When he first asked the question, she had no answer for him. She’d been acting purely on instinct — that intuition born of experience that told her that she’d never seen a site quite like this one.
As she began exposing the skull, though, her motives for not telling Rob what she was thinking had changed.
The fact was, what she was thinking made no sense.
As she’d first begun uncovering the skull, it had been clear that it was some sort of primate. That alone was strange enough, because she was well aware that there were no primates native to Hawaii.
In addition, the positioning was problematic: you wouldn’t find a chimpanzee or gorilla — or any species of primate, for that matter — next to a fire circle. Not unless someone had killed the animal and left it there.
A scenario, she knew, that was possible, but unlikely, given the location.
But as she kept digging, patiently cleaning the skull with dental tools and brushes, she began to realize that it didn’t look like a primate at all.
What it most closely resembled, in fact, was some of the early hominids.
That, of course, was impossible.
First, early man hadn’t existed in Hawaii.
Second, this particular site hadn’t existed at the time of early man.
Therefore, the skull had to be something else. Whatever it turned out to be, she was determined to have a perfect scientific record to back up the assertions she would eventually make.
She took one more photograph, and as the camera began rewinding, she stood, stretched, and took a deep breath, wincing as her nostrils filled with the sulfurous odor that seemed to be hanging over the site more strongly than usual today. She was reloading the camera when she heard Rob’s voice.
“Kath? Got a visitor who wants to meet you!” Looking up, Katharine saw Rob step into the clearing. Behind him was a second man the same age as Rob. “This is Phil Howell. He’s the head stargazer up at the top of the mountain. Phil, this is Katharine Sundquist.”
Phil Howell stepped forward, extended his hand, then lifted his brows as he got a whiff of the scent of rotting eggs. “My God! What are you excavating with, sulfuric acid?”
Katharine shook her head. “Just deposits around an old vent. But it seems to be worse today.”
The astronomer frowned. “Are you sure?”
Something in his tone set off an alarm in Katharine’s head. “I think so,” she said. “I assume it has to do with the rain we had this morning.”
“Or maybe the earthquakes opened up a pocket of gas,” Howell replied.
Katharine’s gaze shifted worriedly to Rob. “Earthquakes?” she repeated. “What’s he talking about?”
“The volcano,” Phil Howell said before Rob could speak. “Looks like it’s getting ready to kick up again.”
Katharine’s heart skipped a beat and she looked at Rob again. “You said it was extinct!”
“It is,” Rob assured her. “He’s talking about Kilauea on the Big Island.” He could tell by the look on her face that Katharine wasn’t convinced. “Tell her, Phil. She obviously doesn’t believe me.”
Katharine listened silently as Phil Howell explained the volcanic movement under the Big Island. “It’s not just the earthquakes,” he finished. “If it really gets going, it spews so much dust into the air you can’t see anything even if the scopes are holding still.” He paused. “Makes you wonder if mountaintops are really the best places for observatories, doesn’t it?”
Katharine made no reply, but as she began showing the site to the astronomer, she found herself glancing toward the hole in the side of the ravine that marked the ancient volcanic vent. All but lost in the tangled vegetation of the rain forest, it certainly looked harmless enough.
As she tried to concentrate on what she was saying, she kept thinking that the smell of sulfur was growing stronger.
Should she mention it to Rob and Phil? But no, they seemed unconcerned.
It must be her imagination.
It had to be.
The hostility from the two guys on the bus followed Michael around all day long. Wherever he was, they seemed to be there, always together, always watching him. During the break between his last two classes, they’d shoved him up against a locker.
“Another hour,” the bigger one had growled. “Then you’re dead meat, haole.” So far, though, they hadn’t actually tried anything, and if they were planning to wait for him after school, they were going to have to wait a long time, for today Michael was going to do something he’d never done before. Today, for the first time in his life, he was actually going to go out for a team.
He made up his mind during gym class. He’d been checking his breathing all day, and there hadn’t been any problems. In fact, he felt better than ever. “Just wait,” Josh Malani told him as they’d jogged around the track. “Sometimes the trades die down, and they start burnin’ the cane fields, and the mountain on the Big Island goes off. Man, you could choke to death around here!”
But his breathing had been deep and easy, and even after he’d finished three laps, he barely felt it. So when he’d seen the track team practice schedule posted on the bulletin board in the locker room, he decided. Today was the day.
Now, as the final bell sounded and he left his last class, instead of heading out to the side of the school where the buses — and the two guys — would be waiting, Michael went the other way, toward the locker room.
Stripping off his clothes, he put on his gym shorts, still damp from P.E. class that morning. He laced up his shoes carefully, making sure they weren’t so tight his feet would start swelling before he even got warmed up, then left the locker room and trotted out to the field, where the track team was already starting their warm-up calisthenics.
Should he go over and join them, or warm up by himself?
What if he went over just like he was one of them, and then didn’t make the team when he tried out? Better just to take a couple of laps around the track.
He finished the first lap and was a hundred feet into the second when he felt a sharp elbow dig into the ribs on his right side.
“What do you think you’re doin’, jerk?” a familiar voice said.
