by Ellen Crosby
Dr. Turnbull turned his gaze on Quinn, Antonio, Jesús, and me. His eyes fell on my cane, which I use because of a car accident ten years ago. In spite of three surgeries and a lot of physical therapy my left foot is still partially deformed. The doctors said I’d never walk again. I don’t think of my cane as a sign of disability. I think of it as a symbol of victory because they were wrong. I’d bet good money the man standing in front of me had seen a lot of young people with canes or in wheelchairs or worse—limbless—in Iraq.
“I’m Dr. Winston Turnbull,” he said, zeroing in on me. “Everybody calls me Win. And who are all of you?”
We introduced ourselves and after I said my name, he said, “You make mighty fine wine, Ms. Montgomery.”
“Thank you. And it’s Lucie.” I hesitated and then said, “Will you be able to tell us anything about who this is? Male? Female? How long he or she has been here?”
“Let me take a look first. I’m just a country doctor,” he said, which sounded like a whopper of an understatement after what we’d just heard about him. “First, I need to be sure that these are human remains.”
“They are,” Biggie said. “I guarantee it.”
Win nodded like he agreed, though he seemed like a trust-but-verify kind of doctor, so he went on. “Well, then, the next thing to determine is how long they’ve been here. If they’re old—decades, maybe older—then a forensic anthropologist ought to take over and handle the excavation. Or a taphonomist. In other words, if I determine that it’s not a criminal investigation that involves law enforcement, you need expertise beyond mine.”
The explanation went completely over Jesús’ head and even Antonio looked baffled. “Why would you need someone who stuffs dead animals?” Antonio asked.
Win Turnbull smiled. “Sorry, I guess I wasn’t very clear. I’m talking about a taphonomist, not a taxidermist. An individual who studies human remains from the time of death until the time they are discovered—what just happened today, for example. A taphonomist focuses on what impact the environment had on the body—the soil, the interaction of the remains with plants, insects, or other natural causes that could result in decomposition. He or she decodes how the remains came to be where they are, what happened, hopefully in order to identify who this person was, if that’s possible,” he said. “Families wait in hope forever if they never see a loved one who has mysteriously disappeared, if they don’t have a body to bury and grieve for. Sometimes you can finally give closure to a nightmare that has lasted years. Decades. Not a happy ending, but at least an ending.”
“How do you figure out all this stuff?” Antonio asked. “From just a bunch of old bones.”
“Bones talk,” Win said, with a somber smile. “That is, if you know the right questions to ask, what to look for. Come here, I’ll show you.”
Biggie looked like he wanted to object to us tramping over the area surrounding the grave, but Win gave him a long stare and said, “Their footprints are already all over the place anyway. It would be better if they understand this. Trust me.”
Biggie pursed his lips and nodded, but he still didn’t seem happy. He followed the rest of us over to the newly unearthed grave site. Win went down on one knee and the rest of us formed a semicircle around him.
“Well,” he said, after a moment, “this is definitely a human skull.”
“What else can you tell about it?” I asked.
Win knelt on both knees and bent over so he could study the skull more closely. Then he straightened up and twisted around so he could look up at us. “Probably in her late teens, maybe early twenties.”
Someone young, a girl, who should have had her life ahead of her. I caught my breath and Win’s eyes met mine once again. He had just transformed this vacant-eyed skull into a person, giving her a history.
“Of course I can’t tell you the cause of death,” he said. “There’s no corpse to examine—no tissue, no organs.”
“How do you know how old it … I mean, she … was?” Quinn asked.
“Because of the number of bones. An adult human has two hundred and six bones. A child has significantly more.”
“Why?” Jesús asked.
“Because a child’s bones haven’t fused together yet. It’s a process known as ossification, which develops gradually from childhood until adulthood,” Win said. “Look here.”
He pointed to the skull and everyone, including Biggie, leaned in to see what he was indicating. “In a young human skull, there are a series of zigzag lines that separate the various plates that protect and encase our brains. These lines are called sutures and as we get older, the sutures disappear as the plates fuse together. Hence, fewer bones.”
Win began sketching imaginary lines on the skull with an index finger. “Across the top of the head we have the sagittal suture. From the back of the head to the temple is the coronal suture. The squamosal suture more or less follows the shape of the ear where the temporal plate is located. There are others, but you get the idea.”
“Since you can’t see any sutures,” Quinn said, “is that how you knew her age?”
“As I said, it’s just a rough guess. I’d have to examine the skull more closely. Don’t forget the bones have decomposed while they were in the soil. But I do think she had outgrown puberty. I also believe she was probably Caucasian, based on the eye orbits and the nasal cavity.”
“You can tell it’s female?” I asked. “Just like that?”
“The clearest indication would be to see the pelvic bones,” he said. “Obviously. Which may or may not still be here.”
My eyes strayed to a patch of earth below the skull where more bones might still lay under the soil. It was still within the perimeter of the shed. Was the rest of the skeleton intact? Had the shed served as protection for a body?
“However,” Win went on, “it’s still possible to make some determination of sex from the skull. Males, for example, have larger, squarer, and more pronounced jaws than females. They also have a more prominent supraorbital ridge—in other words, the brow.” He traced a finger where the forehead would have been and then sketched in the eyes over two black, sightless holes. “Males also have more rectangular eye sockets. In general, their bones are more robust than the delicate bones of a female.”
“You’re pretty sure about this?” It was the first time Biggie had spoken in a while. “It’s a young female? I mean, she.”
“I’d want to do a more in-depth examination to confirm it, but yes, I’m reasonably certain.”
There was more silence while we absorbed that information. Young. A woman, just barely. Buried outside the walls of my family’s cemetery in an old shed. Deliberately? To hide her? My stomach churned. For some reason it seemed more disturbing, more … shocking … to know the remains were female, not male.
“Can you tell how long she’s been here?” I asked.
“I’m afraid not,” he said. “Determining time of death—especially when you’re talking about years, or in this case, I would venture to say decades—is a lot more complicated.”
“What about DNA?” I asked. “Is there any way to collect it from bones that are this old, when there’s no hair or skin left?”
I tried to keep my tone nonchalant, asking as a matter of curiosity. Quinn cast a quizzical glance in my direction but I pretended not to see it.
Win began to get to his feet. Quinn put out a hand and pulled him up. “Thanks.” Win brushed the dirt off the knees of his khakis. “You can obtain DNA from teeth, Lucie. This young woman has a very good set of them left. You’d be surprised what we learn.”
“So you might even be able to identify her?”
“If you’re wondering if she’s related to you, my dear, we can swab your DNA and see if we get a match,” he said in a kind voice. “If she’s not, then it depends whether any of her relatives are in our DNA database. Sometimes we get lucky. Other times not.”
Quinn shot me another puzzled look and said to Win, “So what happens now?”
“Right now,” Biggie said, interrupting the conversation, “we’ve got a storm coming and I need to put yellow tape around what’s left of this shed. Until we know more, this is a crime scene. That means everyone needs to keep away. No trespassing. Let Doc Turnbull do his work until we get some more answers about who we’ve got here.”
A clap of thunder boomed directly above us, as if Biggie had planned it to go with his voice-of-God “keep out” edict. I looked up at the sky. Angry black-and-gray clouds swirled like a boiling cauldron clear to the Blue Ridge. The mountains themselves were partially swallowed up by the menacing darkness. The wind picked up and everyone began to move.
“Let’s get this grave covered up so nothing washes away before the storm hits,” Win said, his voice rising to be heard above the wind.
The first fat drops of rain started to fall. “Come on,” Biggie shouted as a devil’s pitchfork of lightning lit up the sky over the Blue Ridge. “We’ve got to get her covered up and get out of here.”
Her.
I wondered who she was.
* * *
UNFORTUNATELY NEITHER QUINN NOR I had put the roofs back on the ATVs so we were both soaking wet and chilled by the time we pulled in to the old dairy barn where we kept the equipment. We drove back to the house in my Jeep looking like something someone forgot to shoot, showered together, and changed into dry clothes. The storm passed almost as swiftly as it had come, leaving behind a cloudless sky, clean, fresh, cool, air, and a Technicolor late-summer sunset that turned golden yellow, then vivid orange, and finally a fierce red over the Blue Ridge. Tonight Hurricane Lolita seemed impossibly far away.
We ate dinner outside on the veranda so we could watch the sun go down. In a few weeks it would be too cool to do this, but for now I reveled in these Indian summer evenings before autumn and chillier nights arrived for good. Persia Fleming, our housekeeper, had left us dinner—Southern fried chicken, homemade potato salad, and green beans picked earlier today from the garden tossed with crunchy slivered almonds sautéed with butter. Apple pie à la mode for dessert. Also homemade.
“I never get tired of this view,” I said as the mountains slowly changed to the color of an old bruise and the sky faded to a deep violet. A few stars winked like tiny lights that had just been turned on. When I was little my mother used to tell me that the Eskimos believed the stars were really openings to heaven that allowed the love of those we’d lost to pour through, shining down to let us know they were happy. After she died, I often looked up and wondered which star—which opening in heaven—she had chosen to send her love back to me.
“Me, neither.” Quinn settled back in his chair, resting his wineglass on his chest. “Want to do some stargazing tonight? We could dry off the Adirondack chairs and finish the bottle of wine at the summerhouse. It’s so clear we’ll be able to see the Milky Way since the moon doesn’t rise until after midnight. Plus it’s probably one of the last opportunities for seeing the summer triangle.”
Of all the unexpected things I discovered about my fiancé, the biggest surprise was his passion for astronomy, along with a far-reaching and eclectic knowledge of outer space, stars, planets, meteors, comets—actually, any phenomenon that occurred in the night sky. He was especially fascinated by the Messier Objects, a collection of 110 astronomical objects consisting of star clusters, nebula, and galaxies. The original list, compiled in 1771 by a French astronomer named Charles Messier, had consisted of forty-five items. Over the years, however, astronomers continued adding to it until what had become the most famous list in astronomy totaled 110 items. Every year on a designated night between mid-March and mid-April—when the entire collection of Messier Objects was visible in the night sky—Quinn took part in the “Messier Marathon,” a competition organized among amateur astronomers to locate as many items on the list as possible that one night.
The first year Quinn moved to Virginia from California my father had let him set up his telescope at our summerhouse, which was on the other side of my mother’s rose garden. There he had an unencumbered view of the night sky that stretched above an expanse of farmland, pastures, and rolling hills bounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains. It had grown to be one of our habits to sit out there at night in a pair of Adirondack chairs with a glass of wine or an after-dinner drink as Quinn would teach me about the constellations and planets, show me long-tailed comets or a flurry of meteor showers, a galaxy I’d never seen, the beauty of the Milky Way—until I learned the cycle of what was visible in the northern hemisphere at different times of year.
A few days ago while we were cleaning wine barrels on the crush pad he told me about the recent discovery of a planet that apparently had water and an atmosphere similar to Earth’s.
“It’s only thirty-nine light years away.” He’d sounded as excited as if he’d made the discovery himself. He was keen on space travel, too, following the developments of commercial projects that would someday let regular folks take a trip to the moon and back. If he ever won the lottery I knew he’d use the money for a round-trip ticket in a heartbeat. Sign me up. Fly me to the moon.
“Does that mean it’s pretty close to Earth?” I’d asked.
“Relatively speaking, it is,” he’d said. “There are a little over ten thousand earth years in a light year.”
“That’s three hundred and ninety thousand years. I guess it wouldn’t be the next stop after a moon visit.”
He’d grinned. “Not for you or me.”
“Lucie?” Quinn said just now, bringing me back to the present. “Earth to Lucie. Anybody home?”
I looked up from my wineglass. He was staring at me, a puzzled expression on his face.
“What?”
“I asked if you wanted to do some stargazing. Are you all right? You seem like you’re in another world tonight.”
“I’m sorry. Yes, of course, I’d love to. I just can’t stop thinking about that girl.”
“The skull?”
I nodded.
“Want to talk about it?” he asked. “Today when we were with Win Turnbull, I could tell there was something on your mind.”
My older brother, Eli, always says I can’t lie for beans. My face gives me away. Just now I was glad for the darkness and the flickering light of the two pillar candles that burned in hurricane lamps on the table. Hopefully the dancing shadows wouldn’t betray me because I didn’t want to tell Quinn the truth. At least not yet.
“Don’t worry, I’m okay. I just wonder who she is,” I said. “And whether she’s related to me.”
* * *
WE WALKED OVER TO the summerhouse together. In the darkness I brushed against my mother’s David Austin roses, releasing a fragrant scent that drifted into the night air. Quinn set up his telescope while I dried off the chairs, still wet from the afternoon downpour.
“The sky’s so clear you can already see a lot of stars and planets without the telescope,” he said.
By now I knew where to look. One of the first things Quinn had taught me was how to locate the five bright planets—Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, and Venus—all of which could be seen, depending on the time of year, just by looking up at the sky. I spotted Mars, Saturn, and Venus right away, along with Altair, Vega, and Deneb, the three stars of the summer triangle.
“Come and take a look at Mars through the telescope,” he said. “It’s really beautiful tonight. Reminds me of a campfire in the distance.”
I went over and peered through the eyepiece. “I see it,” I said and there was Mars, pale red, a strong steady light that didn’t twinkle like the surrounding stars.
“Now find Saturn,” he said, “and you should also should be able to see Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon. Look about four ring-lengths to the east of the planet. It’s sort of orange and looks like it’s surrounded by smog.”
After a moment I said, “I found them.”
“Okay, look below Saturn and you should see Antares,” he said, “in the constellation Scorpius. It’s the brightest star
near the head of the scorpion. This is probably one of the last nights you’ll be able to see it forming a triangle with Mars and Saturn. It only happens in summer. Pretty soon Mars will start to fade and the other two will disappear below the horizon.”
“What’s so special about Antares?” I asked. “It’s not a planet like Mars or Saturn.”
“No, but it’s an important star, a supergiant nearing the end of its life,” he said. “Once it has no more fuel left to burn, it’s going to collapse and explode into a supernova. Some astrophysicists say it will be brighter than the entire rest of our galaxy put together.”
I straightened up and imagined a scene from an end-of-the-world movie. Earth would be scorched by the explosion he’d described and enveloped in a filmy cloud, except for the few brave souls who managed to survive. “I hope it isn’t going to happen anytime soon,” I said.
“Time is relative when it comes to outer space.” He moved behind me and wrapped his arms around my waist, kissing my neck. “You’ve got to wonder how anyone can look at a night sky like this one and say the earth is flat.”
“People still believe that?”
“Sure. They’re some of the same folks who swear the moon landing was faked,” he said. “You know what I want to know?”
“What?”
“If they’re right, where is the edge?”
I started to laugh and he said, “No, I’m serious. If the earth is flat there’s got to be an edge, so why don’t those guys know where it is? Advertise, even. ‘Visit the edge of the earth.’ Hell, I’d sign up in a heartbeat. The first thing I’d do is hang over and see what was underneath.”
I laughed again. “You’re crazy,” I said and shivered.
“And you’re cold. We should have brought sweaters. It’s getting chilly.”
“I know.” I leaned into his body for warmth. “I think I left my grandmother’s quilt in the summerhouse.”
“You did. I saw it on the rocking chair.”
I let the screen door bang behind me and a moment later returned with the scrappy bright-colored nine-patch quilt my grandmother—my father’s mother—had made. I’d been visiting her for a few weeks the summer she’d put it together, a curious nine-year-old fascinated by the vast collection of colorful fabrics heaped as if they were snowdrifts on every flat surface of her sewing room. Once she realized my interest she’d let me pick out the fabrics for this quilt, teaching me about value and color and even sneaking in a few sewing lessons. Ever since then I’d loved quilts; someone’s labor of love, the colorful fabrics and hundreds of patterns and blocks to choose from, stitched together in a unique creation that was a work of art.