“Hey, take a look at this rare and ancient artifact!”
There was an initial stir of excitement until people saw he was laughing, an old brass bullet casing between his fingers.
Nora took it from him. It was a deeply tarnished Remington .45 ACP that had been fired. Odd, she thought, to find it in a layer a foot down. But then she considered there was a lot of wind and sand in the area: stuff could get buried pretty quickly.
She handed it back to Skip.
“What should I do with it?” he asked.
“Trash.”
She continued digging until she reached the three-foot marker. She paused and, taking a slender bamboo probe, poked it into the sand. Sure enough, there was something a few inches deeper, the right size and shape to be a cranium.
She proceeded now with palette knife and paintbrush. She could feel everyone above her, hovering, looking down. It was irritating—she didn’t like being watched while she worked—but she knew from prior experience they eventually lost interest and went away. Archaeology was deadly boring 95 percent of the time, an endless moving of small piles of dirt from one place to another. Rarely was anything of note found.
She slowly deepened the layer, brushing the sand to one side and scooping it into the bucket, whisked away by Skip with less frequency now.
She paused again and probed with the bamboo. The object was now just below the surface.
A few more swipes of the brush revealed a wrinkled surface the color and texture of a morel mushroom. This was odd—prehistoric burials were normally fully skeletonized, but this looked desiccated, mummified. More brushing revealed what appeared to be a dome-like forehead. The color turned out to be from dried skin, partially covering the skull. And where there was no skin, the skull itself looked oddly smooth, with what appeared to be faintly etched, regular grooves…as if it had been polished on a grindstone with a burr on it. This was strange, like nothing she’d ever seen before—not even the desiccated body she’d found six months ago in the Jornada del Muerto. She could feel the pressure of the eyes above as she worked.
More brushing revealed the edge of an eye socket. She uncovered it, whisking away the sand with short, quick strokes. She could hear a murmur rising in the peanut gallery as the head came into view.
Just get it over with, she told herself, working the brush around the sides and uncovering more bizarre brown skin, pitted and scaly like some ancient reptile’s. At least, she thought—hoped—it was skin. One more sweep of the brush brought both eye sockets into full view, yawning, unexpectedly huge—and Nora stopped, rearing back in surprise at the sight.
“What the hell?” somebody cried out in a choked voice.
Nothing else was said. A silence of pure astonishment fell over the group, and only the wind could be heard, rustling through the prairie grass.
8
NORA STARED AT what the last few brushstrokes had uncovered: a large, domed head covered in lizard-like skin; two eye sockets that gaped like hollow caves; two holes for a nose; wrinkled stubs for ears; and thin, dry lips drawn back in a snarl from white teeth. A murmur of incomprehension drifted down into the shallow hole from the crowd above.
As alien as the head had looked at first glance, Nora began to realize it was simply too human in aggregate to be anything but a person. What was throwing her and everyone else off was the scaly skin texture; the smoothed-out—almost dissolved—facial features; and the eye cavities, whose shadowy depths made them look much larger than they actually were.
It was human—but it was certainly no Native American burial. Spanish, perhaps?
Ignoring the buzz of talk from above, she resumed brushing away the sand in larger strokes and quickly uncovered the neck area—along with the rotting collar of a modern checked shirt and a thin gold necklace with a Catholic medallion of Saint Christopher. Another hush fell as she cleared more sand away from the posterior part of the head, revealing the cause of death: an obvious bullet hole in the left temple, behind the ear, which had exited the right, taking much of the rear section of the skull with it.
She stopped and stood up, brushing sand from her clothes, then climbed out of the hole. Tappan’s face had gone white. She spoke to him in a calm voice. “It’s not, obviously, a prehistoric burial,” she said. “I think what we have here is a murder victim.” Taking a deep breath, she turned toward her brother. “Skip, I guess you’d better retrieve that shell casing from the trash. Don’t touch it with your fingers this time—it’s evidence. Use tweezers and place it in one of my artifact bags. It seems we’re dealing with a burial and a crime scene.”