“Good morning,” Eileen said cheerfully. Jorie looked away from Beryl and saw them. She looked surprised and annoyed. Her pretty blonde hair was braided down her back and secured with a rubber band. Her face was covered with fine brown dirt and her hands were filthy. She clutched her wicker basket to her side and glared at them.
“We’re fine, go away,” she said. “We don’t need you here.”
“I just wanted to see how you’re doing and to see the dig,” Eileen said mildly.
“Why do you want to see the dig?” Jorie said. “You don’t need to see it.”
“Jorie—” Beryl said with a smile. “Don’t be so rude. Good morning, Eileen. Lucy. Hank.”
“Good morning,” Lucy said with a smile. Hank hid his face in Lucy’s neck. After a moment or two his little hand came from around Lucy’s neck and he waved.
“Is this the main dig?” Eileen said. She moved towards the cut in the ground where Beryl and Jorie had just emerged. Jorie moved to stand in front of Eileen.
“You don’t need to see it,” she repeated, her chin thrust forward.
“What are you hiding?” Lucy asked. Hank wiggled to get off her hip and she let him down into the dirt. He wandered towards the tables under the tent and Beryl’s eyes shifted to Hank. She held out a hand as though she wanted to stop him, her face dismayed.
“Zilla, guard,” Eileen said, and Zilla whisked in front of Hank before he reached the tables or the cut in the earth behind the tents. Hank was delighted; this had become his favorite game. He tried to dodge left, then right, giggling. Zilla intercepted him every time, panting and smiling her doggy smile.
“We’re going to have to show them, Jorie,” Beryl said gently. She moved forward and stood close to Jorie, her hands making soothing gestures.
“Show us what?” Eileen asked.
“The skeleton,” Beryl said.
There was a small, loaded silence. The morning breeze stirred Eileen’s hair and she smelled flowers and pine and freshly dug earth. Eileen looked from Beryl to Jorie and then back again.
“Well, now,” Eileen said.
“But he’s at least five hundred years old, we think,” Jorie said. “He’s not – uh, fresh.”
“This skeleton is a significant find,” Beryl said. “I don’t mind that you see this, but please, please don’t touch anything. You might ruin a priceless clue to this person’s origins.”
“Did you find the skeleton?” Eileen asked. Beryl shook her head, her bright black eyes looking puzzled and frightened.
“I think Jon found it first,” Jorie said. “We only discovered it this morning when we took his tarp off his dig site. We hadn’t touched it before because we thought he might come back and—” She trailed off, her face drooping in lines of loss and pain.
“I’d like to take a look,” Eileen said.
“All right,” Beryl said. She blinked and rubbed a hand across her forehead, leaving a dim clean streak amid the brown dirt. “I’m not thinking very well since I learned about Jon. Please don’t disturb the site.”
“We won’t,” Eileen said.
“I don’t want to bring Hank down there,” Lucy said nervously.
“He’ll be fine,” Beryl said. “Just put him on your hip and don’t let him touch anything. There’s nothing there that will bother him, unless he doesn’t like dirt.”
“Ha, ha,” Lucy said darkly. Hank was two hours out of a clean bed and he was already covered with dirt and grass. Eileen remembered her own childhood and grinned at Lucy. She, too, was always filthy when she was little. Some kids just had a liking for dirt.
“Zilla, guard,” Eileen said, waving her hand in a half-circle around the camp. Lucy picked up Hank. Zilla, after a reproachful look at Eileen, set off on a quick tour of the camp. Eileen knew Zilla wanted to stick close to her new little master.
“The cut isn’t that deep,” Jorie said. “We put a ladder in to help us up and out so we won’t break down the edges.”
Eileen took a deep breath and walked to the cut in the earth that her father had originally made, then widened, with his backhoe. Paul had turned up bones with the dirt and now a murderer had come. Sometime many years ago a thousand buffalo, maybe more, had died in confusion and pain here. And a human, too, if Beryl and Jorie were correct. The ground should be red instead of brown with all the blood spilled here.
Eileen hadn’t told anyone but Lucy and Sheriff Richard King about the back trail of blood. The trail that the dying Jon McBride had left led from the direction of the buffalo jump camp. Whatever happened to Jon McBride had perhaps started at the excavation.
“Follow me,” Jorie said, her blonde hair shining in the sun as she backed down the ladder. She hopped down and turned her face up towards Eileen. The cut was about six feet deep, deep enough to swallow Jorie, and about four feet wide. Eileen turned around and followed Jorie. She looked at Lucy as she started to step downward and saw her friend with a worried, scared look on her face, Hank resting on her hip and clutching a handful of her hair like a little monkey.
Eileen was about to drop Lucy a wink to reassure her when Beryl Penrose turned away to set down her wicker basket and pick up another tool. For the second that Beryl was turned away and Jorie was blocked from Lucy’s view, Lucy changed. She grinned at Eileen and winked, then switched instantly back to a worried looking mom. Eileen almost fell down the rest of the ladder. Damn, Lucy was good. She’d fooled Eileen, who should certainly know better. Lucy was all there, Hank on her hip or no.
“Down this way,” Jorie said, as Eileen stepped to the rough dirt floor. “Watch the bones.”
“What bones – oh,” Eileen said. The bones were dark brown, dirt-colored, except where the backhoe had snapped them in two. The broken bones poked out, jagged white, like reaching teeth. Eileen immediately suppressed an image of the cut in the earth snapping closed on them and then chewing.
“Whoa,” Lucy said behind her. “Hank, don’t touch, honey.”
“Down here,” Jorie said, gesturing. Twenty feet along the cut, Jorie crouched on the dirt floor. Eileen joined her, Lucy and Hank and Beryl following. The cut had been widened there and there was a tarpaulin and some tools propped against one side.
“We reached the bottom of the jump just this past week,” Beryl said quietly.
“The bottom of the jump?” Lucy asked.
“The place where the first of the buffalo hit. That’s where we were hoping to find the Sioux boy, if he missed his perch,” Jorie explained.
“You found him,” Eileen said. “He did miss.”
“That’s the strange part,” Jorie said. Her cheeks were stained bright red with excitement, even in the shadows of the cut. “I don’t think this is our young Lakota warrior at all.”
Beryl reached out and pulled the tarp away from the wall of the cut, moving slowly and taking care not to disturb the earth beneath.
“Would you look at this,” she said in a low voice. Eileen stood speechless. She heard Lucy’s little gasp at her elbow but she couldn’t take her eyes off what she was seeing.
Huddled in the dirt wall was the skeleton of a man. He was curled up, knees and head facing out and slightly down. Buffalo bones were packed on top of him. The remains of some sort of head covering were still apparent, though the skin and cloth had long since rotted away. There was a glint of beadwork and some dim yellowish metal along the top of the skull.
Whatever he’d been curled around was gone. The dirt where his midsection had been was freshly gouged out and some tattered remnants of something that looked like skin or paper dangled in the new hole.
“Something’s been taken from here,” Eileen murmured.
“We’ve looked in Jon’s tent,” Beryl said. “There’s nothing there. Whatever he took is gone. Did you see the top of the skull?”
“That’s gold, isn’t it?”
“I believe so,” Beryl said. Her breath was faint and light, as though she were having trouble breathing. Jorie was red-cheeked with exciteme
nt. She took a paintbrush from her bag and started brushing a round stone that rested close to the crushed remnants of the man’s hand.
“Did the Sioux have gold?” Lucy asked.
“Some, that they mined from the Black Hills,” Beryl said. Hank kicked his legs against Lucy’s sides but showed no desire to get down. He didn’t look scared, Eileen thought, just happy to be with his mom in this strange dirt place. “But this gold, this doesn’t look like Black Hills gold.”
“I’ve seen that color,” Lucy said slowly. “In the Smithsonian. But – that couldn’t be possible.”
“That’s what we’re arguing about,” Jorie said, her hands working busily with the brush. “Oh, jeez, Beryl look at this.”
They all leaned forward as one as Jorie moved her hands aside. There, exposed by her paintbrush, was a circular stone medallion. It was carved strongly and deeply with a fierce looking animal that looked directly out of the medallion. The animal’s tongue hung down to its paws and around the edge of the circle was carved what could only be human skulls, rough-hewn and ugly.
“What is that?” Eileen asked.
“A jaguar,” Beryl whispered.
“A jaguar surrounded by human skulls,” Jorie said.
“Okay,” Lucy said shakily. “What’s the joke?”
“Fill me in, someone,” Eileen said angrily. Her arms were packed with gooseflesh and her scalp was prickling. The eyes of the stone jaguar seemed to glare directly at her. The pupils of the jaguar were a cloudy green color. Jorie brushed gently at the eyes and the green came alive with depth and fire. The fire that only an emerald could bring. The jaguar’s eyes were emeralds.
“The joke is, what is an Aztec warrior doing at the bottom of a buffalo jump in Wyoming?” Jorie asked.
“An Aztec warrior?” Eileen repeated. “Aztec? As in, South America?”
“Central Mexico,” Lucy said. “The Aztec empire was in central Mexico. Why was he here?”
“It’s possible he walked here,” Beryl said. “There’s no reason he couldn’t. The question is, why?”
“He was walking along the bottom of the bluff, maybe,” Lucy said. “And then – pow! – he’s buried in a ton of buffalo.”
“Like being caught in a prehistoric car crash,” Eileen said.
“Maybe whatever is missing will tell us more,” Jorie said. She was clearing the dirt out of the carved skulls of the medallion. Her paintbrush moved with feathery light strokes, coaxing dirt out of the stone.
“Whatever it was, Dr. McBride took it,” Eileen said. “And now Dr. McBride is dead.”
“There’s a lot of questions to be answered,” Beryl said. “All I know is that this could be the find of the century. We have to protect this site. We have to make sure we find out all the answers. This jaguar medallion itself is priceless.”
“Yes,” Eileen said. “I think we’d better make sure word of this doesn’t get out quite yet.”
She suddenly longed to be at the surface, away from the empty hands of the skeleton. The eyeholes, packed with dirt, seemed to look at her mournfully. All these centuries protecting my treasure, the eyeholes said. And now my treasure is gone, my arms are empty.
“I’ll stay down here,” Jorie said. She rummaged through her wicker basket and came up with a sturdy looking digital camera and a metal ruler. She positioned the ruler and started taking pictures of the stone jaguar. Eileen felt another chill pass over her skin as she followed Beryl back to the ladder that led out of the cut. Jorie was oblivious to her surroundings, focused so intently on her find that anyone could sneak up behind her and –
no, wait. The entry wound in Dr. McBride was in the chest, not the back. Whoever had killed him had been facing him.
The sun felt good after the cool earth. Hank wiggled to be down as soon as they were a few steps away from the dig. Beryl, who had accompanied them, sat down in a folding camp chair under the main tent.
“I can’t squat for hours like I used to,” she said, massaging her thigh muscles and grimacing. Hank and Zilla, reunited, were acting as though they hadn’t seen each other in days. Zilla jumped high in the air and did acrobatic spins, landing within inches of Hank but never touching him. Hank giggled and finally managed to throw his chubby arms around the dog’s neck. Zilla stood still, panting, while the little boy hugged her.
“This is so exciting,” Lucy said to Beryl. “Is there a way to prove the man came from the Aztec Empire?”
“Carbon dating his bones will give us his age, and DNA testing could give us his race,” Beryl said. “Best of all are the artifacts he’s carrying, the medallion and the gold work, and anything else that might be in the vicinity of the body.”
“And whatever artifact he was holding in his arms,” Eileen put in.
“That, too,” Beryl said, her eyes darkening.
“So why didn’t the Sioux find him? Why was he left there?” Lucy asked.
“They never saw him,” Beryl said. “When the natives drove a herd over the cliff the most they could skin and butcher before the animals rotted was maybe a dozen.”
“Yeah, once they got as much as they could they’d leave,” Eileen added. “The smell must have been horrific. So much for the old myth about natives never wasting resources.”
“They wouldn’t dig their boy out, if he’d missed the perch?” Lucy asked, looking up at the cliff edge. If there’d been a hole dug in the bluff edge it was long eroded away.
“They’d sing songs about him, Lucy,” Eileen said. “But they wouldn’t waste time actually trying to find him. Sorry.”
“I see,” Lucy said, and brought her attention to the present with an obvious effort. “So what about the object the Aztec was carrying? Was it worth killing someone over?”
“If it was anything like that medallion, I can see why someone would decide to murder Dr. McBride. That medallion alone could get you knifed in any back alley,” Eileen said. “That’s a motive, right there. Treasure. Money.” Far overhead there was a plaintive screech as a hawk circled the bluff. A faint scraping noise came out of the pit where Jorie worked, and Hank and Zilla became fascinated with Eileen’s cottonwood stump that stood in the center of camp.
“I wish Jon were here,” Beryl said dully. “I wish none of this had happened.”
“We all do,” Eileen said gently.
“Hank and I need to get back,” Lucy said. “Can we walk back along the bottom of the bluff? I’d like to see the river bottom today, since the weather is so nice. I’ve never been to Wyoming, before,” she said with a friendly smile to Beryl.
“Sure,” Eileen said. “We might have to switch off carrying Hank, though.”
“No problem, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all,” Eileen said. She turned to Beryl, who sat in her camp chair as though she’d be there all day. “When the sheriff gets here I’m sure he’ll want to see you, so could you and Jorie come up for lunch? We’ll try to keep this as discreet as possible.”
“Thank you,” Beryl said. She looked distracted and exhausted, even though it was still morning.
Lucy picked up Hank and settled him on her hip. Eileen gave a wave and they started south. Zilla trotted with her lopsided gait behind them. As soon as they were beyond the first curve of the river bottom Lucy stopped abruptly.
“You know why the Aztec civilization was so thoroughly destroyed?”
“Why?” Eileen asked. She knew nothing about the Aztecs, but that was going to change as soon as she could get to her parents’ computer and the Web.
“Because they had lots of gold,” Lucy said. “Lots of gold, and lots of jewels. I bet you a fin that when we find our missing stuff it’s going to be treasure, and lots of it.”
“What’s a fin?” Eileen asked, and Lucy looked aghast.
“A fiver. A five-dollar bill, you Western geek. Jeez, you’d think you never watched gangster movies.”
“Never had the taste for them,” Eileen said. “I always liked John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, myself.�
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“Oh, that’s original,” Lucy said, rolling her eyes. Hank wiggled to get down. “Not yet, sweetheart.” She looked at Eileen. “I got what you wanted.”
“You did?” Eileen asked, startled. “When Beryl came up with us I thought we’d lost our chance to get a sock from Dr. McBride’s tent.”
“Not a sock, but something almost as good,” Lucy said. “I picked it up when Beryl was looking at Hank and Zilla.” She produced it from her pocket. It was a worn chisel with a wooden handle, an archeologist’s tool. The handle was stained golden brown by the sweat of a hundred digs and printed along the side were the words that made Eileen crow in delight: Jon McBride.
“Excellent!”
“Thank you, thank you very much,” Lucy said modestly. “Shall we?”
“Zilla, here!” Eileen said. The dog whisked up to Eileen and sat down, an expectant look on her intelligent face.
“Get a good smell, Zilla baby,” Eileen said. “Thank goodness Dad taught you how to track.” The dog sniffed the wooden handle intently, and then sat back down in front of Eileen, panting.
“Wow,” Lucy said. “She’ll really track by scent?”
“That’s how it’s done,” Eileen said. She took a deep breath. “Zilla, track. Zilla, track!”
Zilla took off at a run, back along the bluff towards the camp. Eileen and Lucy exchanged nervous glances and followed. Zilla took them back to the camp and Eileen spent the minutes trying to come up with a story that Beryl Penrose or Jorie would buy. Luckily when they reached the camp Beryl was back in the cut. The sound of Jorie and Beryl’s voices was low but perfectly audible in the still air. Zilla sniffed around the cottonwood stump and then took off in a direct line, straight into the woods, following the curve of the bluff and heading towards the main ranch house.
The Thirteenth Skull Page 6