Mr. Howard wrung his hands. “Bodies everywhere. Not what I wanted. Not what I wanted at all.” He whipped out his phone and smashed some numbers. “Eh, Harry? Quentin Howard here. Need you to run the digger back out to Arrowtown Cemetery.”
Alexa scanned the graveyard as Mr. Howard finished his call. Shadows stretched like fingers from the tombstones, greedy for the night. The mountain was a shaded beast. A solitary bird sang frantically.
“Harry is on his way,” Mr. Howard said. “He’ll take the topsoil right off.”
“All good,” Ana said. “It will be dark soon. I’ll get the portable lights ready.”
Mr. Howard watched Ana walk off and then turned to Alexa. He was an inch or two shorter than she was. “Can’t stay. Can’t stay. The missus has pickleball. Just me and the boys tonight. Do you have children, Miss Clock?”
“Glock.” Alexa hated the “children” question. “I have two nephews.”
“Never too early to think of the future, eh? Especially when you don’t have children. Never too early to plan your service, pick out a casket, prepay. Are you interested in a DIY coffin kit? Fine, affordable underground furniture, we call it.”
“No thanks.” Alexa crossed the grass to Olivia who still stared at the GPR screen.
“I did another sweep to guesstimate the dimension of the disturbance,” she said. “It corresponds with the shape of a grave. Let’s measure the outline before the digger gets here. You can hold the pigs.”
Kiwis had a way with short e vowels. “Pigs” was “pegs,” “six” was “sex.” Both had stumped Alexa a few times. She stuck a peg in the ground each time Olivia indicated until they had a four-by-eight foot rectangle. Then Olivia handed her a bottle of spray paint. “Outline it while I put the GPR in the van. Then you can pull the pigs.”
Alexa shook the can. The dark red paint that dribbled on her hand looked like blood.
Harry removed eight inches of topsoil and dumped it six feet to the side. The freshly turned soil smelled of minerals and tannin and decay. Secrets, too, Alexa thought. After Harry drove off, they erected a new tent around the hole.
Olivia made another trip to the van and returned with a folding table. Ana positioned the lights and fastened the tent flaps open.
Alexa fetched her crime kit from the other tent and cast a quick look at S1. We haven’t forgotten you. On her way to the new tent, she stopped and surveyed the graveyard. She had a feeling that she was being watched. Why not? Tents, diggers, skeletons. Townspeople were probably curious.
Olivia and Ana arranged tools in a certain order. Ana opened a new case file on her tablet. Alexa felt in the way and knocked over a bucket.
“I need to call Mum,” Ana said. “Tell her we’ll be late for dinner.” She stepped out, but immediately returned. “Mr. Sun and another man are on their way. I’ll give them an update.”
“It’s good someone is here to watch over the bones,” Olivia said. She unrolled a tarp. “This is for fill dirt. Everything will need to be sieved. We’re going to dig a thirty-centimeter-deep perimeter.” She gave Alexa a shovel and grabbed another.
Olivia bore down with her boot, wedged the shovel head back and forth, scooped dirt, and emptied it onto the tarp. Alexa copied her from the opposite side; the exertion felt good. Bruce popped into her head. She yearned to call him and describe the situation, the mystery of it, her role with the digging and the teeth. Ana walked in as they finished.
“There’s no sign of a coffin,” Olivia said.
Ana was quiet for a moment. “Just like S1. Very odd. Mr. Sun and another man have set up their vigil in front of the other tent. I told them we might have another skeleton. Mr. Sun said he wasn’t surprised. That there’s a disturbance in the air. He’ll calm the spirits with incense.”
Olivia nodded. “I feel it too.”
Alexa looked into the four corners of the tent as if spirits lurked. Science, not superstition, she reminded herself.
Olivia took a bamboo pole and moved to the top left corner of the possible grave. She poked it down into the soil, plucked it out like a toothpick from cake, looked up when Ana took a photo, and repeated the probe every three inches. When she completed one path, she moved three inches down and repeated, leaving a trail of holes. On her third go, near the center, her face broke into awe. “Resistance. Half a meter down.”
The three of them dug from the sides, deepening the hole and closing in on the object. They switched to trowels and then spoons. Abertay University, Bruce, even her empty stomach receded as Alexa scooped and dumped. She thought of S1 and its pointing finger. She mapped its direction in her head; it seemed to point right at this tent. Her greenstone pendant pulsed against her sternum. She unearthed a tawny bulge. “Here’s something!”
Olivia stopped digging and grabbed a whisk broom.
“Move,” Ana said.
Alexa scuttled back, happy to relinquish her spot. She didn’t want to damage bone—if that’s what it was. She watched, engrossed, as a rounded object—roughly three feet deep—was exposed. Between each of Ana’s spoonfuls, Olivia whisked aside dirt.
“It’s a cranium,” Ana said.
Alexa, knees numb, hobbled to the other side and peered down, expecting a sloping forehead and dirt-filled eye orbits. Where were the jaw and the teeth? The term blank-face popped into her head—as if someone erased the eyes, nose, and mouth. Confusion muddied her brain. When she figured out what she was looking at, her heart pounded.
The skull was facedown.
She leaned closer and made out the faint Y-shaped sutures that connected the posterior bones of the skull.
Ana reached for her camera. “I’ve seen a few sets of remains on their sides like S1, but I’ve never seen a face down.”
“Someone must have hated him,” Alexa blurted. She fought the urge to lift the skull and flip it.
“I took a mortuary customs class.” Olivia took off her beanie and swiped the hair out of her eyes. “There’s a Bronze Age burial ground on a Swedish island where fifty prone burials were discovered. They were mixed in with regular graves.”
Did Bronze Age or Iron Age come first? Alexa wondered.
Olivia’s eyes gleamed. “They thought prone burials prevented the dead from coming back to haunt the living.”
“Prone burials are sometimes referred to as deviant burials.” Ana turned off her camera and set it aside. “You might find evidence of torture or even decapitations.”
Alexa scanned the cranium to see if it was attached to a neck. Dirt hid the answer.
“But not always.” Ana picked up her trowel. “In medieval times the prone position was believed to be a gesture of humility toward God. Right now? Let’s focus. I want to move slowly and document S2 carefully. Facedown and a shallow grave might mean it was clandestine.”
The word clandestine made Alexa uneasy.
Olivia pulled her beanie back on and tucked her bangs away. “Sometimes prone burials occur in a double grave.”
Alexa looked at her feet. Was she standing on another set of bones? “Side-by-side?”
“Stacked. One body is supine, and the other is placed prone on top of it.”
Nose to nose for eternity.
“I don’t see evidence of that,” Ana said. “Olivia, take the upper leg area. I’ll dig for the ribs. Alexa, take the neck area.”
As they dug, Olivia hummed something catchy that Alexa couldn’t identify. Alexa was careful not to dig too deep or fast; neck bones were tiny and fragile. She looked up when Olivia stopped humming. “I see femur.”
The strongest bone in the body, Alexa thought, and critical to standing and moving.
Ana took photos as Olivia exposed the upper left and right leg bones. She set the camera aside and grabbed a tape measure. “What’s the formula to predict how tall the deceased was?”
Olivia closed her eyes: “For a male, femur times 2.23 plus 69.08.” She took the tape and measured. She used her phone to multiply. “One hundred and fifty-five centimeters. A tad over five feet tall. He’s short, possibly because of poor nutrition.”
“Maybe,” Ana said.
The way Ana said “maybe” made Alexa wonder if S2 was female. But that didn’t make sense. The Chinese miners had been male.
Alexa tunneled closer, visualizing the seven stacked bones of the neck. She alternated between gently scooping with a spoon and brushing aside soil with a whisk. And there it was: the topmost vertebra, the atlas. “No beheading,” she said. “The skull is connected to the neck.”
“All good,” Ana said. “I didn’t want a decapitation situation.”
“Like Marie Antoinette,” Olivia said.
“Or Mary, Queen of Scots,” Ana said. “It took two blows to behead poor Mary.”
Olivia stopped troweling and hoisted an imaginary head. “When the executioner lifted her head, it rolled away because her wig came off.”
Alexa listened to the morbid banter. She liked working with these women. She scraped away more soil, exposing the second cervical vertebra. She marveled at how neatly it stacked against C1. She twisted her own head, left, right, surprised her neck was stiff. Then her stomach growled so loudly that Ana laughed. “Mum has made beef stew. You’ll come over, right Olivia?”
“Ta, but I need to get back to Queenstown.”
Alexa salivated at the thought of stew. Chuck roast, onion, carrots maybe, potatoes, herbs. All a guess because she’d never made a stew. The next two vertebra looked out of alignment. She brushed away a dust of dirt. Instead of stacked snugly like it should be, C3 was a half inch to the right of C4. “Maligned” popped into her head. Wasn’t that another word for evil? A spinal injury like this was severe. Maybe fatal. “Look at this.” Her voice was hoarse.
Olivia scrabbled over and leaned in. “The neck is broken. Ow.”
After a minute of silence, Ana said, “We’re done for now. I’ll ask the forensic pathologist back out to take a look, and I’ll need you to do the tooth tests, Alexa. S2 might be Mrs. Wong’s ancestor. The whole area will need to be scanned. Who knows how many more graves there are.”