A Rumor of Bones: A Lindsay Chamberlain Mystery

by Beverly Connor

  "Jerk!" she muttered to herself as she headed up the road to the site.

  -epitaph on Shakespeare's tomb at Stratford

  Chapter 3

  OH, DAMN," exclaimed Lindsay, sitting back on her haunches and staring down into Burial 23.

  "Oh, no. What'd I do?" asked Jane.

  "I don't believe this."

  "What?"

  "Jane, don't tell anyone about this. Do you understand?"

  "Tell what? What are you talking about?"

  "If anyone comes over here, gently send them away and don't say anything."

  "Don't say what?"

  "I'll be right back"

  Lindsay looked around the site for Frank and finally spotted him in Structure 4, turning a large rock over in his hands. She hurried over to the edge of the structure, leaving Jane staring down into the pit.

  "I need to speak to you"

  He replaced the stone, rose, and, carefully stepping over artifacts, followed her to the edge of the site.

  "This is about Burial 23," she said in a low voice. "It has a gold filling in its lower second molar."

  "Good God, Lindsay! How do you do these things?"

  "Me? It's not my fault."

  "I suppose we can't cover it back up.

  "I think it's classified as a dead body. We have to report it to the sheriff."

  "Good thing you're so friendly with him."

  "I'll help Jane finish and get Derrick to photograph the bones. Derrick and I can take them up, but we'll have to talk to the sheriff and coroner first"

  "How long has it been in the ground? Can you tell?"

  "Not yet. Jane has only uncovered the upper half. I'll have to wait until the bones are out of the ground. When did gold fillings come into dentistry?"

  Frank shrugged. "I don't know. Well, we sure didn't need this. And Ned will pitch a fit when he gets back from whatever thing he had to do today. Damn!" He hesitated a moment, then finally nodded. "Okay, I suppose there's no choice. Go ahead and call the sheriff. We'll get Derrick to take the photographs after everyone has left the site this afternoon. I hope this doesn't get around. We'll have every sightseer and ghoul in the county out here stomping around. Derrick!" he called.

  Derrick left the transit and walked over to them. His hair was damp and pulled back in a pony tail. Sweat made little trails through the dust covering his body, and he wiped it from his brow with his forearm.

  "Damn! It's hot today. We could use a little rain. What's up'?" Frank told him, and he winked at Lindsay. "Way to go."

  "Honestly, you guys, the way you talk you'd think I killed someone, undressed their bones, and buried them. You don't happen to know when gold fillings came into use, do you?" she asked Derrick.

  Derrick thought for a moment, then to Lindsay's surprise said, "The Italians used gold leaf for fillings in the 1400s."

  "You're kidding," Lindsay and Frank exclaimed. "That early?"

  "Amalgams with gold as a component didn't come until much later," Derrick explained. "You don't think the guy's a European, do you? Now that would be interesting."

  "I guess we had better have a look," said Frank.

  The three of them casually walked over to the burial. Jane greeted them with a wide grin.

  "I found what you were talking about"

  "Don't talk too loud," cautioned Frank.

  They stared down into the grave. The bones, similar in color to the soil, stood out in relief. The skeleton lay on its back with its jaws open wide as though the person had gone to the grave screaming in protest.

  Derrick took a dental pick from Jane, lay on his stomach and leaned into the pit. Lindsay lay beside him, took a brush, and cleaned dirt away from the molar. Derrick carefully cleared around the filling with the pick, then gently scraped it.

  Lindsay and Derrick turned their heads toward each other, their faces so close Lindsay could feel his breath as he spoke.

  "We need to find a better place to meet," he said, grinning.

  Lindsay couldn't help but smile at him. "I agree."

  Frank was squatting next to the grave. "What about it?" he asked. "Or are you two going to just stare at each other?"

  Derrick didn't move. "This looks like an amalgam to me. That would make it much more recent," he said.

  "I agree," said Lindsay, who looked at Derrick a moment longer before she turned her attention back to the skeleton. "Here is some residual cartilage on the head of the right humerus," she pointed out. "Can't be too old."

  Both pushed themselves up and dusted themselves off.

  "Keep this quiet, Derrick," said Frank. "You, too, Jane"

  "No problem," Jane replied.

  "I'll get the photographic equipment ready," Derrick said.

  He trotted off to the laboratory tent, and Lindsay walked to the parking area to use the phone in Frank's car. The sheriff drove up just as she arrived.

  "Hello, Sheriff Duggan. I was just about to call you. "

  "I thought I would take you up on that offer of the use of your crew."

  "Okay. I'll take you to Frank, but first I have to tell you something. We came upon a burial that is much more recent than the others. An adult with a gold filling." The sheriff's mouth fell open, and for a minute Lindsay thought he was going to ask her how she got into things like that. She took him over to the grave, and he looked down at the half-buried anachronistic bones Jane was carefully excavating.

  "Why is its mouth opened like that?" asked the sheriff.

  "That's not uncommon," explained Lindsay. "Dirt is very active. It is constantly being moved around by the percolation of water, changing temperatures, the burrowing of insects and small animals. And when the flesh and ligaments are gone, the jaws move freely and the dirt action often forces the jaws apart. It creates the appearance of a scream."

  "Well, it looks rather startling. How old do you think it is?" he asked.

  "I don't know. I can't examine it until it is fully excavated, but I'd guess between 25 and a 100 years" Lindsay explained to him what she wanted to do with it.

  "Sounds fine. If it's that old, there is no hurry. This case with the little Hastings girl is more urgent."

  "Sheriff, would you mind keeping this quiet? We'll get all kinds of curious people out here walking all over the site if news gets around"

  "No, I don't mind. If the papers get ahold of it, they will insist I do something about it, and right now my plate is full."

  Lindsay smiled. "I'll take you to Frank"

  As they walked across the site, Lindsay showed him various stains on the ground she thought were burials.

  "How can you tell?" he asked.

  "The shape and size, mainly. You get accustomed to what to look for."

  "How did you know the Indian village was here?" asked the sheriff.

  "Ned surface collected here for years. That is one way you know there is something under the soil,"

  Lindsay explained. "Debris filters up to the surface."

  The sheriff nodded, and she continued. "Over the years the flooding of the river and runoff from higher ground covered the area. The really heavy work is in removing the dirt overburden to get to the site floor. Once that's done, we shave the area smooth with sharp-edged shovels, which lets us see the markings that reveal where houses, burials, and other kinds of structures were when the village was here."

  "What's this here?"

  He pointed to a fifteen-by-fifteen-foot area bounded by an outline of round stains. It was filled with rocks, broken clay pots, and bones scattered about. Overlying the area was a grid of string supported by wooden stakes a foot apart. Workers were carefully digging out one square at a time, putting the dirt in labeled bags.

  "Structure 4. It was a house"

  "How do you know?"

  "See all those roundish stains about six inches to a foot in diameter? Those are postholes. When a post rots in the ground, it's similar to having been burned and it leaves a dark stain. Sometimes we even find a small core of wood"

&n
bsp; "Don't trees do the same thing?"

  "Yes. That's why we cross-section some of them. The cross-section of a posthole is bullet shaped. The cross-section of a tree shows dark stains of the roots leading from the trunk."

  The sheriff nodded.

  "If you notice. the posthole pattern makes a square with rounded corners"

  "Yeah, I see that."

  "They built the houses in that shape. After putting up the posts, they wove sticks and grass between them and covered it all with clay. We call the process wattle and daub. They usually made a timber and thatched roof. As we excavate, we'll find domestic artifactspotsherds, stone tools, stuff that indicates it was a dwelling."

  Lindsay pointed to an excavation beyond Structure 4. "That structure over there was burned. All that black charcoal-looking stuff on the floor is the remains of the roof timbers. If we're lucky, the house burned accidentally, and all the domestic artifacts are there under the timbers where they were in use. That gives a lot of information."

  "Not too lucky for the people who owned the house. Just who were these people?" the sheriff asked.

  "That's a good question. The site is not far outside the area that archaeologists have defined as the Chiefdom of Coosa, dating to the sixteenth century. We're finding some of the same type of artifacts, and the settlement pattern is the same. But we're finding other types of artifacts, too. Frank thinks this is a different component of the Coosa chiefdom. Ned, however, thinks they are a different group that traded with the chiefdom but were not part of them. He thinks they were part of a more isolated group"

  "I see," said the sheriff, who apparently had been satisfied with simply a name and a date. "That'd be Ned Meyers`?"

  Lindsay nodded.

  "I remember him when he was a little kid. Spent his summers with his grandparents, the Hardwicks. Quiet little kid, always going around looking for arrowheads"

  "Yes, that's him."

  Frank came over and held out his hand, and the sheriff grabbed it. "Lindsay giving you a tour of the site?"

  "Yeah, interesting." They walked away from the crew before the sheriff spoke again. "Lindsay tells me that your crew can make a thorough examination of the place where we found the bones of the little Hastings girl."

  "Yes."

  "How long would it take?"

  "Perhaps a week or two. Probably a little longer."

  "Can they start tomorrow morning?"

  "Sure thing. Did Lindsay tell you about her find?" asked Frank.

  "Yeah. She really has a knack, doesn't she"

  Lindsay opened her mouth to protest, then closed it again.

  That evening, Lindsay visited Derrick's tent across from hers and found him packing his equipment. "I hope you aren't too angry with me," she said.

  Derrick grinned. "I guess you owe me."

  Lindsay grinned back. "I guess I'm in trouble."

  "Actually, I think it'll be interesting."

  "I'm glad you see it that way." She sat down on the end of his bed and watched him pack.

  "Did you seriously think I would be mad at you?" he asked.

  Lindsay looked into Derrick's gentle brown eyes. "Not really. I just hate involving anyone else in this."

  "Maybe it would be easier for you if you had someone else, like me, working with you"

  "You're probably right."

  "Does the sheriff have any idea who the bones in 23 belong to?" Derrick asked.

  "No. He didn't get too excited about it, considering its age. That's good for us. Maybe it won't make the papers," Lindsay replied.

  "You think whoever buried the body knew Indians were buried here and thought a graveyard would be a good place to hide a body, or was it a coincidence?"

  "I don't know. I haven't seen any evidence of grave robbing. I'm not sure anyone knew there were burials here until we arrived."

  "Funny thing, though, isn't it, a recent grave dug right into an ancient burial like that?" Derrick finished packing the smaller equipment and zipped up his bag.

  "I've certainly never seen it before. Derrick, I appreciate your helping with the Hastings child."

  "Well, then," said Derrick, smiling, "I'll have to think how you're going to repay me" Lindsay grabbed up his pillow, throwing it at him as she left his tent.

  She started toward her own tent, but her curiosity about Burial 23 sent her to the laboratory instead. The bones of the anomalous burial were stored inside a cabinet away from other artifacts. Lindsay set the box of bones out on a table. The skull, sitting in a separate smaller box, was wrapped in cotton swathing. She gently picked it up, unwrapped it, and rotated the skull in her hand. An object fell to the table and rolled toward the edge. Lindsay grabbed it before it fell to the floor.

  It was a bullet. She set the skull down and examined the bullet, weighing it in the palm of her hand. It was small, about the size of her fingernail, and the tip was smashed. Lindsay wondered if a ballistics expert could get any information from an examination of it. The gun from which it was fired probably had disappeared long ago, lost the way artifacts are lost, migrating from one place to another, mislaid, destroyed, hidden. She dropped the bullet into a plastic vial, wrote B23 on the lid, and put it in the box with the bones.

  Lindsay picked up the skull again and looked for evidence of where the bullet had entered. A nick in the orbit indicated the bullet had entered the left eye. The skull still contained loose debris from the burial. She gently cleaned it out with a brush and examined the inside of the skull with a small flashlight. The bullet had impacted high on the occipital. Lindsay took a pencil and aligned it with the two marks on the skull left by the bullet. This person was shot straight on in the face by someone approximately the same height. This person ... Lindsay realized that she hadn't even sexed the individual yet.

  She began setting the bones out on the table in their anatomical positions. She noted that the killer had taken the clothes as well, for no scrap of material, button, shoe, or anything had been found in the burial. Perhaps so that if the body was dug up, the clothes wouldn't identify it.

  The yellow-brown bones had no odor except of fresh earth. She picked up a femur. It had been made hard from minerals leaching into the hones. That pushed the age of the bones past 50 years. The hard brown cartilage on several of the joints made it not over a hundred. Lindsay guessed around 60, but she would need to see an analysis of the soil to be sure. A cursory examination of the long bones revealed prominent muscle attachments. The person had been strong, possibly athletic, and had been right handed.

  She picked up the parts of the pelvis. The skeleton was obviously that of a woman. The wide, shallow pelvis girdle had every female indicator. At first the skull had fooled her. The brow ridge and jaw line were a little more prominent than normally found in females.

  Her attention returned to the skull. The extended nasal bones and relatively thin nasal cavity indicated that Burial 23 had a long, slender nose. With her sharp face, prominent features, and high cheekbones, she must have been a striking woman. The skull had a rare prominent metopic suture from the nasal cavity up the frontal bone to the top of the head. This rarity most often occurred in Caucasians. Lindsay turned the skull over. The relatively triangular palate was another indicator that the skeleton was Caucasian.

  Lindsay made a quick measurement of the femur and guessed the woman's height to be about 510". She would do more thorough measurements later. She then examined the long bones to see if the shafts were fused to their epiphysis. The humeri and the femurs were fused. She looked at the clavicle-the proximal end had not yet fused. Nor had the shoulder blade or the pelvis. Okay, she thought, between 18 and 21. She looked at the teeth. The third molars were not yet in, but that only meant that the skeleton was probably not over 25. Lindsay looked at the pubic symphysis. There was no scarring that occurs during childbirth, and the surface was that of someone 18 or 19 years old. She picked up the fourth rib and examined the sternal end, which indicated the age to be between 16 and 19. She's over 17, Lindsay
thought, judging by other indicators. Eighteen or nineteen is the best I can do.

  Lindsay had seen no sign of disease in her examination of any of the bones. Nor did she find any breaks. She perused the smaller bones and stopped short at the fourth metacarpal of the left hand. There was a nick on the surface not unlike the nick in the eye socket. The woman had held her hand, palm outward, in front of her face when she was shot.

  Burial 23 was a healthy white woman, 18 or 19 years old. She stood five feet, ten inches-tall for a woman about 60 years ago-at the time of her death. It had been a crime of hate, so Lindsay imagined. You would have to hate someone to look her in the eye and kill her. The woman had been talking to someone. She had thrown up her left hand in defense as the killer had raised a gun and shot her in the face. She had known her attacker. Lindsay smiled to herself. Frank always told her that even if Homer hadn't written about it, she could have described the Trojan War if anyone had ever uncovered a wooden hoof.

  Lindsay took some graph paper and a pencil and began to draw the skull, but stopped halfway through the drawing. She wanted to reconstruct the face. An examination of the supply cabinet yielded the things she needed to make a mold of the skull. She piled everything on the table and began working.

  When she finished, Lindsay sat back and inspected her work. Facing her was a plaster replica of the skull. Not bad, she thought. She looked at her watch. It was late, 3:00 A.M. She would get only an hour's sleep.