Dr. P wedged her trowel between the coffin’s lid and one of its walls. She pried on the lid and it gave way easily. Her movements suggested she had done this many times before, which was strange to consider. The coffin’s hardware left bright orange stains in the earth. The color gave the soil a sick radioactive look. I smelled the harsh acid of iron in the air. Some of the coffin’s wood crumbled underneath Dr. P’s trowel. She pried the entire lid off and we all peered in. The coffin was clogged with mud, but a glint of fabric shone through. Dr. P had gloves on. She lifted thick layer upon thick layer of fabric. Someone had buried ten or twelve evening gowns inside the coffin. I heard Wolski make a choking noise. The sniffer dog barked loudly.
“Is she in there?” Wolski asked for us.
Dr. P lifted up the heavy layers of fabric—they were muddy and moldy and crumbling in her gloved hands, but I could make out the glint of glitter, sequins, sheer fabric in all colors, pale blue, yellow, emerald green. I had an image again of swaths of fancy dresses, some with the tags on, hanging in Dee’s dorm room closet at Mount Mary.
“I . . . I don’t know what to make of this,” Dr. P said.
“I might have something,” one of the archaeologists said. He was screening all the dirt they had pulled out of the pit. He held up a tiny fragment. “Looks cranial. I can’t be sure it’s human, though.” He handed it to Dr. P, and she placed it gingerly in a paper bag. I stared at those dresses packed tightly inside their grave. The sniffer dog continued to pull against his leash. He whined and whined. What did the dog want? What was he trying to say?
The archaeologists began to pull more fragments from their screens—finger bones, and toes, and maybe pieces of ribs, I heard them say. Small bones.
“It could be her, right?” Pete asked Dr. P.
“It could be,” she said, though her voice suggested she didn’t think there was much chance. “They’re very fragmented, though, and they look quite old.”
“Can I see one?” Pete asked. The younger archaeologists looked ready to refuse him, but Dr. P nodded. A young man handed Pete a few crumbling pieces of bone. He rubbed them between his thumb and forefinger. I imagined the oil in his skin shining the mud away. He looked up at me and gestured toward the field outside the woods. I followed him to where Ma was wilting in her wheelchair.
“There was a dog,” Pete told Ma. She nodded like she’d known. Thomas Alexander’s eyebrows went up just slightly. “And a coffin with dresses. And they’re finding some bone fragments.” He knelt down and handed Ma three pieces of bone. She took the fragments in her hand. They were so deteriorated, I worried they might crumble into her lap. She looked up at the sky.
“Thank you, God,” she said. “Thank you for bringing her home. For putting us back together.” She clutched the muddy fragments to her chest. Dirt rolled down her dress.
“Mama,” Pete said. “We still can’t be sure—”
“Hush. Hush. Come here, now,” she said. “Both of you.” I went to her and knelt next to Pete in front of the wheelchair. The day was warm, and the clouds moved over us like lush cotton in the sky. I often forgot how beautiful Wisconsin could be. Ma put the fragments in her lap and reached for our hands. Someone in Thomas Alexander’s crew snapped a photo of us: heads bent like we were praying together, and maybe in a way we were. I kept my eyes open. I tried not to stare at the muddy bones. I knew they were Dee’s.
Ma asked if she could bring the bones back to the Lutheran Home with her, and that’s where Dr. P drew the line. Legally, she said, that wasn’t possible. The archaeologists would take the fragments back to the lab for analysis. I saw her speaking with Wolski as we loaded Ma back into the van. Thomas Alexander stayed behind, trying to get some action shots with the archaeologists who had the unfortunate job of reburying the dead dog.
I rode back to the Lutheran Home with Ma, Peter, and Suze. Maybe Ma’s hope had spread among us: a wildfire we hadn’t bothered to fight. Did it matter? Back at the cemetery, Ma had rubbed her face with her dirty hands, so her cheekbones were streaked with mud. Suze tried to rub them clean with a wet wipe, but Ma shrugged her off. She smiled a half smile at her sister with her good side. “Suze,” Ma said.
“Hmmm?” My aunt was watching the city rush by. I remembered that as a small child, Dana had been very afraid of freeways. She would complain when we began to accelerate too quickly.
“I want you to call Forest Home and start making the preparations.”
“Okay,” Suze said.
Pete frowned. “Should we wait to be sure?” he asked Ma.
Half her body began to shake convulsively. “I have waited,” she said. “Now you want me to wait longer?”
“No, Mama,” he said. “I just thought . . . I don’t know.”
There was a bout of silence in the car. I felt compelled suddenly to confess something, though I’d never really been able to explain what I felt most guilty about, and I sensed then that even if I had ever been capable of saying it, no one in my family would have understood.
In the end, Ma was forced to wait anyway. Though DNA testing on the fragments could be done in a matter of days, the state crime lab in Madison, which was the only accredited lab in the state, had a backlog of more than eight hundred samples. Most of the samples were from untested rape kits. They said it could take months, even years, for us to get a definitive answer. Pete, Ma, and I sent in our own samples for comparison.