few homeless people camping at night in the densest parts,” she said, handing me a pair of work gloves, “so look out for that. We try to leave their stuff where we find it.”
“Okay.”
We started hacking away in separate directions. The dense air around me was soon astringent with the green perfume of sliced grass and the sharp tang of nettle sap.
By the time I’d filled two bags I’d cut into a private lane of tunnel, with no line of sight back to Cate.
My bandanna felt hot and wet against my forehead. I shook off Cate’s heavy gloves so I could flip it over to the dry side, then leaned down to pick up a bent tin can and several brown shards of beer bottle with my bare hands.
From that angle I could just make out the edge of another moss-green headstone through the scrim of leaves.
One machete swipe cleared enough space to crawl forward so I could read the stone’s inscription, but I shoved over hard into the wall of vines beside me when I realized I’d been about to place my hand on the belly of a bloated dead rat.
I twisted my head away from the sight of its greasy fur seething with ants.
That’s when I saw the skull.
6
For just a second I thought I was looking at an ostrich egg, a buttery off-white oval dappled with shifting spangles of green-gold light.
Not egg, bone.
Had someone dug up this forgotten grave? No. The ground was flat, the brown carpet of jungle detritus thick and even beneath the skull.
I crawled in farther, cringing when my hand plunged into something warm and wet—a pocket of rainwater trapped in the folds of a plastic grocery sack.
The rat had given off a whiff of decay but back here the air was sweet with damp earth, an autumnal top note of composting leaves.
From this new angle I could make out the skull’s sharp cheekbone and the hinge of its jaw. I dropped to my elbows, soldier-crawling beneath the thicket’s low edge until I could look at the face straight on.
Its eye sockets were huge as a Disney fawn’s, its seed-pearl teeth tiny and perfect.
A child, then.
In the gloom beneath more tangled foliage, I could make out a delicate birdcage of ribs, smashed in at the solar plexus.
I scrabbled backwards into the hot daylight, yelling for Cate.
* * *
Cate dispatched two kids to go call the police.
She and I edged a few feet away from the group so we could talk without freaking anyone out.
“You’re shaking,” she said.
“I shouldn’t have gone into the bushes that far. What if there was any trace evidence? I wasn’t thinking straight.”
Cate’s voice was gentle. “How could you have known that?”
“Well it’s a graveyard, right? I mean, if you see something that looks like a piece of bone it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility that it might actually be a piece of bone.”
“And you’re sure it was a child?”
I nodded, realizing how little else we could divine from skeletal remains in the absence of a pathologist’s sad wisdom: no name, no race, no gender.
The tiny being in whose flesh those bones once resided had been rendered invisible.
The child wouldn’t have come up higher than my hip standing on tiptoes. Two years old or three or four—entirely too small to be let out of doors alone, much less to have gotten over this spiked iron fence without help, considering Cate’s stout locks on the gate.
What toddler would have braved crawling into the depths of this place, even in the wake of an older sibling?
City kids know that any overgrown lot was guaranteed to be teeming with vermin: feral dogs, rats the size of badgers with bent yellow six-penny nails for teeth.
And any stretch of ground this big was likely to harbor equally feral people. City kids would know that, too.
So how had such tiny bones arrived at the green-black heart of this pocket wilderness?
I wanted to believe the child had been laid to rest here centuries ago, and that everything else had grown up around it the way briars snaked out of the ground to protect Sleeping Beauty and her dreaming courtiers.
But then I thought of those shattered ribs. Murder was a far more likely scenario. Had the child been killed here?
This was an ideal spot for such darkness: far enough away from the crowded local sidewalks for anyone to hear cries of pain or fear. Even those who camped in these very bushes might not hear a