Mountains perched in every direction, and the trees crowding the roadside, tinged with yellow and orange, reminded Alexa of fall in Raleigh, North Carolina—her home prior to moving to New Zealand. She shook her head: autumn in the month of May was topsy-turvy. “The leaves are pretty,” she said.
Ana, at the wheel of the Toyota Highlander, gestured with her hand. “It’s not natural, this color. Comes from non-native trees. European settlers planted them to look like home.”
Alexa was glad Ana returned her hand to the wheel. The road curved, dipped, climbed, and now spanned a foaming emerald-colored river by a narrow bridge. Alexa squinted down—way down. Three red jet boats lined the bank and another took off in a blur. Her new glasses were stowed in the case. She had moderate nearsightedness, which the ophthalmologist said was common with age. Yikes.
She focused on a jagged mountain looming straight ahead. Past tree-height it turned stark and bare. She wondered how the gold miners traversed such a harsh landscape. The thought reminded her of why she was headed to Arrowtown, which Ana had said was only twenty minutes from Queenstown. She opened her mouth to ask Ana how they’d located the skeleton if the grave was unmarked, but the four-year-old singing loudly in the back seat drowned her attempt. Shelby was not the graduate student.
“Daddy shark, daddy shark, doo, doo, doo.”
On repeat. Alexa had forgotten Ana had a daughter.
“Do you like my song?” she screamed from her giant car seat.
Ana, whose thick braid draped over her left shoulder, shot Alexa a look. “I’ve been on travel a lot lately, so I didn’t want to leave Shelby behind.” She had to raise her voice. “I asked Mum if she’d come with and do the child-minding. She’s a freelance reporter and can work anywhere. God bless her. She’s at the rental house. It’s called Prospector’s Cottage.”
Shelby kicked the back of Alexa’s seat. “Nana shark, Nana shark, doo, doo, doo.”
Alexa was more interested in exhuming skeletons than being serenaded by a preschooler, but she was looking forward to working with Ana. They’d met when Alexa had been called in to examine the teeth of nine skeletons unearthed during a road construction project. Well…it turned out to be ten. An infant—whose teeth never had the chance to erupt—had been cradled in one skeleton’s arms. Ana worked for an Auckland archaeology firm that specialized in cultural heritage remains. Alexa had thought at the time, and still did, that Ana could be her sister. They were the same height, five-seven, both had hazel eyes and pale complexions with a dust of freckles. Ana tamed her unruly hair with a braid. Alexa, whose hair was shoulder-length, preferred a ponytail.
And a childless existence.
“I’ll show you downtown before we drop Shelby off. It’s busy with tourists because of the autumn color.”
The road curved past a lake, a golf course, and then a school. A GO FOR GOLD sign adorned the front entrance. The tiny town came into sight. They passed a storybook church and modest homes. Ana stopped at a crossing. “This is Buckingham Street.”
“Sounds British,” Alexa said.
“Sure, most immigrants during the gold rush were English, Irish, and Scottish,” Ana said. “Arrowtown was settled on their backs. The Chinese were recruited once the settlers thought they’d squeezed all the gold out of the river. Turned out the dregs were plentiful.”
The little library on the corner had a sign out front. Alexa squinted to read it: STORY TIME FOR DOGS WED. @ 10:00.
“Stop at the sweet shop!” Shelby shouted.
Alexa decided she liked the kid. “How big is the town?”
“Around three thousand residents. During the gold rush, fifteen thousand people lived around here.”
Buckingham Street was canopied with elms and oaks, their leaves just past peak. Alexa lowered her window and smelled rich decay and a hint of winter. A row of closely spaced bungalows—two-windows-and-a-door-wide—charmed her. She imagined hitching posts out front and horses tethered to them.
Ana waited for two women to cross the street before turning. “Those are original miners’ cottages from the 1870s. European miners, mind you. The Chinese settlement was down at Bush Creek. No cozy cottages for them.”
The business district had one- and two-story buildings with false fronts like a Western movie set, the mountains behind them looming like a fake backdrop. There was a pharmacy, a bakery, and a store called The Wool Press. She blinked. An actual hitching post was out front. The Fork and Tap, across from the library, had a yard filled with picnic tables. People in sweaters sipped beer and laughed. The red-roofed Post and Telegraph had benches on its porch.
Ana parked in front of a gift store. They crossed to the sweet shop. A bell jangled when they entered, and the ceiling was festooned with fairy lights. Alexa inhaled the chocolaty aroma and went straight for fudge. Shelby and Ana created a mix ’n’ match bag from jars of candy. “Pick something special for Nana,” Ana said.
Alexa, who treated, bit into her chocolate sea-salt fudge before they were back in the car.
In three minutes, Ana turned onto a small road lined with purple-leaved trees. “The Chinese planted plum trees,” she said. “They missed trees from home too.”
The miners were gone, but their trees—or the descendants of their trees—lived on. Alexa liked the living connection to the past.
Ana pulled into the driveway of a modest blue house. “It’s a perfect location. Close to the cemetery and town.”
A woman with spiky gray hair came out onto the front porch. Shelby unbuckled herself, opened the door, and ran. The woman scooped her up and kissed her all over her face.
The scene tugged at Alexa’s heart. Her mom had died when she was six; her grandmother when she was sixteen. She gathered her crime kit and suitcase and trudged to the porch.
“Mum, this is Alexa,” Ana said.
“Nice to meet you,” Alexa said.
“Kia ora. Call me Pam.” She was trimmer and shorter than Ana and casual in jeans and a red turtleneck. “You get the room at the top of the stairs. There’s a view of Bush Creek from up there. I’ve left a spare cottage key on the dresser.” She released her granddaughter. “You’ll have to come downstairs to use the loo.”
“No problem. Thank you for making room for me.”
Shelby ran to the door. “I’ll show you.”
The wooden floor was painted light gray, and the ceiling rose to a peak above twin beds. Shelby climbed on one bed and pointed to the other. “Sleep there.” Her golden-brown pigtails went up and down as she bounced on the duvet. The knees of her jeans were dirty. Alexa set her suitcase at the foot of the bed and pulled back the gauzy curtain of the single window. Water glistened through the trees. The segment of creek she could see was maybe ten feet across and strewn with boulders.
Shelby stopped bouncing. “That’s where Nana and I hunt for gold.”
Alexa turned. The child’s brown eyes glittered. “Have you struck it rich?”
Quick as a rabbit, Shelby hopped off, calling, “I need my pan.” Alexa guessed it was a panning-for-gold pan. She might like to try that so she could tell her brother, Charlie. He was a geoengineer and loved all things rock. She grabbed her jacket and followed the kid downstairs. When Ana said she and Alexa had to go to work, Shelby’s face screwed up. Alexa braced herself.
“Your candy is in the kitchen,” Ana said. “You can have one more before tea.”
Shelby skipped off. “Dodged that one,” Ana said. “Come on, let’s walk. Exercise will be good. We’ve a bit of daylight left.”
Alexa zipped her “puffer,” eager to view the bones. “Should I bring my kit?”
“Wait until morning. We’ll just see what my graduate assistant has been up to.” She glanced after Shelby. “And stop at the pub. Bye, Mum,” she called.
The chilly walk felt good after the confines of the flight, much of which had been bumpy. “Is your grad student staying in the cottage too?”
“Olivia is staying with friends in Queenstown.”
Alexa thought of the skeleton. “You mentioned the grave was unmarked. How did you find the bones?”
Ana bent down and tightened a bootlace. “We knew the general area where the Chinese were once buried. We used ground-penetrating radar.”
Once buried? “I got to try GPR at a body farm when I was in graduate school.”
“Never been to a body farm,” Ana said.
“There’s one in the North Carolina mountains. But we used GPR to locate buried pigs, not people. The more decomposed the carcass was, the harder it was to detect.”
“Historic remains, especially when there’s no coffin, provide weak responses,” Ana said. “We looked for evidence of a grave shaft. The GPR readout indicated the soil had been disturbed.”
After few minutes Alexa spotted a tall obelisk atop a steep hill. “Is that the graveyard?”
“That’s the war memorial. The cemetery is behind it.”
A beautiful rock wall separated the cemetery from the street. Alexa looked left and right. There was no tent in sight; she wondered where the dig was. A mixture of old and new graves sprawled in both directions. The rear border was separated from a mountain flank by a strip of tall grasses dancing in a breeze. The surroundings made Alexa think of Mom again. Ellen Rose Glock’s remains rested in a cemetery along the banks of the French Broad River near Asheville. Alexa had a blurry memory of her father and grandmother throwing handfuls of dirt on top of her coffin.
Mom’s tombstone said BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER and had her birth date and death date. Oh, God. When was Mom’s birthday?
Dammit.
Alexa shook her head. It was April 7th. Solace replaced her momentary panic.
A red van was parked behind a Honda in the lot. Preserving Heritage was scripted on the side. Ana pointed to it. “Olivia drove from Auckland so we’d have our equipment. I never minded a road trip when I was her age.”
‘Driving from Auckland’ meant taking a car ferry across Cook Strait. The waters separating the North and South Islands could be wicked.
“Olivia is excited about your expertise in teeth.”
Alexa liked a groupie. “Where is she?”
Ana pointed right. A hill dipped to a copse of trees and a grassy expanse. Beyond the trees and another rock wall, she spotted the top of a large tent.
“So you found actual bones? They hadn’t disintegrated?” Bones could last thousands of years—under certain conditions—but the average life span of buried bone was one hundred years.
Overripe fruit littered the grass below a nearby apple tree, and Ana kicked one off the path. “The soil, drainage, and temperatures worked in our favor,” she said. “From what I can tell in situ, the skeletal remains are intact.”
Alexa was used to how Kiwis pronounced “skeletal” now. Skel- lee-tal. They watched a large rabbit hop across a grave.
“That’s another thing the settlers brought from home: Rabbits,” Ana said. “Now they’re a huge pest.”
“Did you find artifacts with the bones?” Alexa asked.
“A thin chain, I think gold. I’ve dropped it off at The Gold Shoppe to learn more about it. We also found some buttons and a pair of boots. The boots were beside the remains instead of on its feet.” Ana stopped. “Would you want to be buried in your shoes?”
Alexa looked down at her blue Keds fondly and nodded. She followed Ana, weaving through headstones, some so eroded that the names and dates were obscured, and others toppled or split in two. This appeared to be the older section of the cemetery. One faded inscription caught Alexa’s eye. She dug out her glasses and made out the words.
IN MEMORY OF
ROBERT BRODIE
B. AT STRONSAY, ORKNEY, SCOTLAND 14 DEC 1847
D. 22 OCT 1885
He died the same age she was now, far from home. She shivered at the thought. Next to Robert’s grave, she read the words etched on a stone below a white cross:
SACRED TO THE MEMORY
OF WILLIAM DANFORTH,
NATIVE OF ARBROATH, SCOTLAND,
DROWNED IN BUSH CREEK 11 FEB 1865
AGD 34 YEARS
The same creek as the one she saw from the cottage window. She imagined it morphing into a torrent, like the river on the hiking vacation she had taken with Charlie a couple months ago. It had pulled him in and twirled him like a rag doll.
He’s okay, she reminded herself. She stepped forward, felt the ground dip, and froze. She was atop a grave. Her grandmother had always said that when a person shivered, someone was walking across their grave.
Alexa stepped delicately to the side and apologized to the deceased.
Daylight was fading. She caught up with Ana, who had climbed to the other side of the rock wall and walked past a small grove of four trees toward the tent. Alexa scrambled over, the rocks cold and rough against her hands. There were no grave markers on this side of the wall—just uneven ground and stubby grass.
Alexa, suddenly spooked, hurried to catch up. A white-haired man of Chinese descent sat in a camp chair outside the tent, cap clutched in his hands, a satchel at his feet. A scent, like funeral lilies, wafted in the air. He stood stiffly as they approached.
At the same time, a young woman slipped between the tent flaps. She wore a knit beanie. Messy blond bangs covered her eyebrows. “Dr. Luckenbaugh, this is Mr. Sun.”
He bowed. “Sun Shing. I am here to watch over the bones, even though Ms. Forester wouldn’t let me pay my respects in person.” He spoke with a Kiwi accent and gestured to a glowing joss cone. “It is customary to burn incense to honor the deceased. If his soul is wandering, the smell will lure him back.”
Alexa studied his lined face. He was serious.
Ana introduced Alexa and then asked, “How did you hear about our project?”
“I’m a representative from the NZ Chinese Association. Your benefactor Mrs. Corrie Wong contacted us.” He handed her a business card. “She wants the bones looked after.”
Ana studied the card.
His face was grave in the dying light. “Please work in haste. Our ancestor has been hungry too long.”