from the privy.”
John was fibbing; we hadn’t excavated a privy at the Chandler house. “So how’d it taste?”
He shrugged. “Oh, fine. No worse than that piece of sewer pipe I tested yesterday.”
Twenty years old, and you still can’t break them of an oral fixation, I thought. “Fine, good. Don’t actually eat anything, will you?”
“Not intentionally. Say, Professor Fielding…we need some more storage boxes.”
I eyed them suspiciously. “Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes. We need them for the stuff we finished processing.”
I glanced down the long table covered with cleaned and labeled artifacts; they’d made good progress, for all their fooling. “Okay, you can make two each.”
“Three,” John said quickly; he caught my eye and backed down.
I glared at them both. “You can make two each. No more. And I’ll count.”
They exchanged sheepish grins. “Okay. Thanks.”
I walked to the back of the lab where a young woman was reading an osteology text. While she read, she took notes, and with her other hand, rolled a tennis ball down the table. She caught it when it hit the wall and gently rolled back. That was one way to keep from chewing fingernails, I thought. Her lowered head was bobbing, as if to music I couldn’t hear. A thin white wire snaking through her thick dark hair told the story; she had earbuds in, listening to her iPod. Made sense, given the racket my two reprobate students were making.
I waved my hand, trying to get her attention. No luck. “Ms. Shepherd? Phoebe?”
She looked up, and pulled her earbuds out as soon as she saw me. She had a foxy, pointed face, and eyes that were so deep, and bewitching that I’d actually caught Brian staring into them when he met Phoebe at the last departmental party. “Sorry, Professor Fielding. I was just trying to—” She waved her hand at the guys.
“I understand. I don’t know how you manage to get any work done. You can tell them to keep it down, you know.”
“Oh, they’re okay. But…you know that they were putting things in their mouths? Won’t they get a disease or something?”
“Probably,” I said. “But not from that. It’s okay, it’s a porosity test. Generally speaking, if it sticks to your tongue, it’s probably earthenware, low fired, porous. If it doesn’t, it’s probably stoneware or porcelain, which are higher fired, harder, less porous.”
“Right, I hoped that was the case, but with them, you never know.” Phoebe was relieved. “And…I don’t want to say anything, but…they’re making boxes again.”
“It’s okay. I gave them permission.”
Phoebe’s concern was well-founded. The acid-free artifact storage boxes came flat, ready to be folded into shape. They were an elegant design and, well, really fun to make. Nick and John had discovered this one day, and decided to get a head start on the busy field season with a “box-off.” They’d constructed twenty of the boxes before anyone caught them. Twenty boxes for which there was yet no storage space in our increasingly small lab space, most of which had to be unmade later.
I handed her the bag of bones from the site. “I have a puzzle for you.”
She stuck the tennis ball between two books and her eyes lit up. “Cool. Lay it on me.”
“Any idea where these might have come from? And how they might have gotten out to the Point?” I told her the story, and her look of disbelief grew as I finished.
“Wow. Human hand phalanges. Strange.” She shook the bones out of the bag and picked up one of them, searching for the number. “These are from an older collection. Not one of Professor LaBrot’s.”
Professor LaBrot had replaced Tony when he’d vanished. A physical anthropologist, he taught the prehistoric archaeology classes, including the Maya, and science, while I covered the historic ones and theory. Phoebe was his TA.
“Let’s have a look.” She pushed back from the desk. I noticed she wore a black T-shirt with a crude cartoon picture, half dragon, half man on it, labeled TROGDOR. I’d have to ask Brian what that was about. Phoebe was rubbing her hands and muttering something in a singsong voice as she turned to the cabinets where the faunal collections were kept.
“I didn’t catch that,” I said.
Phoebe turned and giggled. “Oh, just silliness. I said, ‘bring out your dead.’ You know from Monty Python?”
I nodded; I might not know who Trodgor was, but I wasn’t so irredeemably unhip that I didn’t know Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
“Over here. The human remains are kept locked up.” She unlocked the