I had planned it carefully — and secretly.
One thing was on our side: we had all the time we needed. We assembled a collection of gear that almost filled the van. A large tent, plastic tarpaulins, leather gloves, pails, flashlights, lanterns, garden trowels, paint brushes, a couple of metal flour sifters. What I couldn’t scrounge, I bought.
I wanted to move the equipment in at night because the plan was illegal. Once we were set up we’d be out of sight and we’d be able to work in daylight. I parked the van off the side of the road by the stone monument. I helped Raphaella struggle into her backpack harness and shouldered my own pack. Moonlight bathed the graveyard, but when we entered the maple forest we had to use our flashlights.
It took us three trips to get all the gear to the clearing. By then it was close to midnight. We left quickly, having no desire to meet Hannah on her nightly walk.
The next day we prepared the site, growing accustomed to the chill as we worked. We cut and raked away the grass and weeds that grew inside the ruins of the cabin. Afterwards, we pitched a family-sized tent over the area. Once we had cut away the nylon floor of the tent, we had a weatherproof area. Setting to work with spades, we skimmed off the turf from the ground, the matted roots fighting us every step of the way, and hauled the chunks of sod outside. After a full afternoon of panting and sweating, we had cleared the floor of the tent — once the floor of Hannah’s cabin — down to black earth.
“Do you think we’ll have to go very deep?” Raphaella asked, wiping her dirt-smudged brow with a hanky. Black soil was caked under her fingernails and ground into the skin of her hands.
“I doubt it.”
“Should we make a grid with string, the way the arch-eologists do?”
“No,” I said, looking around, “not necessary.”
“That was a joke, Garnet. Lighten up.”
Tired and sore, we called it a day.
The next morning, we were back, just after sunup, well supplied with coffee, juice, sandwiches and chocolate bars.
“We don’t want to be in the middle of things when night falls,” I said.
Once inside the tent, with the little portable radio playing, we began. I scratched a line down the center of the dirt floor, and we each worked away from the line to the opposite wall.
Digging with a garden trowel was tedious and exacting. We put the dirt into plastic buckets and emptied them outside the tent. We took a break for lunch, sitting outside in the clear air, glad to see sunlight after hours bent over inside the gloom of the tent, but wearing sweaters because, despite the weather reports on the radio that reminded us it was 28 degrees Celsius that day, the clearing was chilly.
We watched, fascinated, as squirrels and birds would approach the clearing and then, as if they’d hit an invisible force field, veer away. As we ate and talked, clouds moved in from the southwest, and by the time we got back to work, the sun was obscured. Occasionally, the radio crackled. There must have been lightning somewhere.
As the afternoon wore on, the cool air became more humid in the dimly lit tent. We painstakingly dug and scraped, filling buckets, emptying them, filling them once more, over and over, until we fell into a kind of trance.
I was outside, dumping a pail of dirt beside the pile of sod we’d made the day before, stretching the kinks out of my aching back, looking up at a sky that promised rain, when the music coming from the radio inside the tent suddenly stopped.
“Garnet, you’d better come in here,” I heard.
Raphaella was on her knees in the two-foot depression we had dug, brushing at something with a small paintbrush.
“Hold the light closer,” she said. “I think I’ve found something.”
My eyes locked on the curved, brownish-grey shape that winked in and out of sight as Raphaella plied the brush. Carefully scraping away dirt with a kitchen knife, then whisking it aside, scraping again and brushing, she slowly uncovered the round outline of a cranium.
“How can we be sure it’s Hannah?” Raphaella asked.
I realized we were whispering.
“Wait.” Raphaella used the knife again, this time beside the skull, and prised from the dirt a black cameo.
“That’s it,” I blurted. “I saw it in my dream. That’s all the proof we need.”
Both of us were energized by the discovery. Not being an archeologist, I wasn’t sure what the best procedure would be. We had to make sure we got everything; we couldn’t leave a foot bone or a finger end behind. The job had to be complete.
“I think we should uncover all of her, leaving each bone in place, before we move anything. What do you think?” I asked Raphaella.
“That seems best. If we take out one bone at a time we might overlook something.”
“And,” I reminded her, “we have to be done before midnight.”
I could see her throat work when she gulped. She shuddered.
“Right. Why don’t you get started, and I’ll go back to the van. We’re out of juice, and I’m thirsty.”
“Good idea.”
It was a muggy evening, humid and still, and a few mosquitoes hummed their irritating little one-note tune inside the tent. I lit a mosquito coil in one corner and went back to work.
I began to dig with the trowel, feeling like an expert now as I quickly but carefully removed dirt from around the skull, then worked my way down the vertebrae. I had uncovered a shoulder and upper arm when I heard footsteps rapidly nearing the tent. The flaps were swept aside and Raphaella stooped to get inside. She was panting.
“What’s wrong?” I asked her.
She fell to her knees and dropped a plastic supermarket bag beside the dug-out area. I heard cans knock together.
“I think those men are in the woods somewhere.” She picked up her trowel and began to scrape in the dirt.
“Where did you see them?”
“I didn’t. I sensed them.”
“Uh-oh.” A cold blade slid though my ribs.
We pressed on. The excavation wasn’t difficult, because the earth was loamy, but it took time. We could have dug up the area with shovels and sifted the earth, like miners, but that seemed disrespectful.
“Do you feel it, too?” Raphaella said after a while.
“Yeah. They’re out there, all right. But we’re almost done.”
When we had uncovered the entire skeleton, we sat in the dirt for a moment and looked at Hannah’s remains. Her killers had buried her in the fetal position. Her legs were crossed at the ankles, her head rested on one hand. She looked almost peaceful.
But every major bone in her body — arms, legs, skull, four ribs, her pelvis — was broken.
“My god,” Raphaella moaned, “look what they did to her.”