“It is not my brother!” As soon as the words were past her lips, Emma pressed her hand to her mouth. She must really be tired to snap at him like that. None of this was his fault. She dropped her shoulders and sighed. “Of course I will, if nothing more than to prove it isn’t Ryan. But we have to finish excavating the site first. Maybe we’ll find something that will identify the remains.” And point them away from Ryan.
“Would a billfold still be intact if the body had been buried in the past twenty years?”
At least he didn’t say ten years. “Possibly. But don’t you think our thief would have seen a billfold and taken it with him?”
“Yeah,” he said reluctantly.
Emma finished the rest of her sandwich in silence as a nagging thought kept intruding. What if it were Ryan’s bones? She’d never let herself dwell on the possibility he was dead, always finding a reason why he hadn’t contacted them. The main one being he was afraid of being framed for Mary Jo’s murder. Was she ready to deal with that possibility? But she and her twin had been so close. She’d been told they’d even had their own language as babies . . . wouldn’t she have known if her brother was dead?
Regardless of whether it was Ryan or not, the person’s family deserved closure. And justice. She slipped two Tylenol from her pocket and downed them before Sam noticed. If he thought she was in pain, he’d insist on taking over, and Emma wanted to finish the job she’d started. She wadded up the sandwich wrapping. “Ready?”
“Sure. But let me dig a while.”
“Not yet.” When he started to object, she added, “Please.”
“Your hand is bound to be hurting.”
“Nothing I can’t handle.”
“Why is this so important for you to do?”
She didn’t know, just that it was. “After someone tried to run me off Thursday night, I have a personal stake in this.” Then she shrugged. “Or maybe it’s because I’m stubborn.”
He laughed with her. “I’ll go with the second.”
Emma grabbed the brush and a dental pick. Once back in the pit, she scraped layer after layer of dirt, looking for more small bones. Forty minutes into her promised hour, none had materialized.
If the person had been buried with their shoes on, could the shoes still be intact? If they were leather, possibly. Had the thief dropped the phalange when he moved the body? If so, the bone would have been on top of the ground, not buried. She looked at the bone again. Was it possible their thief pressed it into the dirt when he was trying to cover up the other indentations? So many questions and so few answers.
A shadow crossed where she worked, and Emma sat back on her heels and looked up. Nate had joined them.
“How’s it coming?”
“Okay. I’m thinking about moving my search toward the other end of the pit, where the skull should be.”
“Makes sense,” Nate said.
Sam picked up a trowel. “I keep trying to convince her to let me help.”
“You’ll get your clothes dirty.”
“I can change.”
Nate scratched his chin. “Looks to me like there’s room for both of you if you’re working at different ends. It would cut our time in half, so let’s try it.”
She’d been able to block Sam from her mind with him standing on the ground above her. If he was in the pit, it would be impossible to be unaware of his presence, but it didn’t look like she had much choice.
Emma quickly moved her tools to the other end of the grave while Sam went to change. When he returned, he dropped down into the hole. His musky aftershave brought the memory of how electricity had arced between them last night. She hadn’t admitted it to herself then, but she was disappointed he hadn’t kissed her.
She shook the thoughts off and concentrated on the dirt she scraped away. Emma had thought she’d removed all the loose dirt earlier, but she’d been wrong. The dirt she was scraping now wasn’t compact and dense, at least not like the other end. She went a little deeper with her trowel, then repeated the action. Maybe she should move over a little and go to work closer to the top of the wall. Her heart stilled when she hit solid ground, and she quickly exchanged the trowel for a brush.