that this disease spread eventual y to al the children in the town. There were deadly fights. The parents somehow couldn't even get to the fishing boats in which they might have escaped the island."
Elena - I know. At least Fell's Church isn't on an island.
"And then there's what we found at the town shrine. I can show you that - it's what Ronald Argyl died for."
They both got up and went farther into the building until Celia stopped beside two large urns on pedestals with a hideous thing in between them. It looked like a dress, weathered until it was almost pure white, but sticking through holes in the clothing were bones. Most horribly, one bleached and fleshless bone hung down from the top of one of the urns.
"This is what Ronald was working on in the field before al this rain came,"Celia explained. "It was probably the last death of the original inhabitants and it was suicide."
"How can you possibly know that?"
"Let's see if I can get this right from Ronald's notes. The priestess here doesn't have any other damage than that which caused her death. The shrine was a stone building -
once. When we got here we found only a floor, with al the stone steps tumbled apart every which way. Hence Ronald's use of the ladder. It gets quite technical, but Ronald Argyl was a great forensic pathologist and I trust his reading of the story."
"Which is?"Alaric was taking in the jars and the bones with his camcorder.
"Someone - we don't know who - smashed a hole in each of the jars. This is before the chaos started. The town records make note of it as an act of vandalism, a prank done by a child. But long after that the hole was sealed and the jars made almost airtight again, except where the priestess had her hands plunged in the top up to the wrist."
With infinite care, Celia lifted the top off the jar that did not have a bone hanging from it - to reveal another pair of longish bones, slightly less bleached, and with strips of what must have been clothing on it. Tiny finger bones lay inside the jar.
"What Ronald thought was that this poor woman died as she performed a last desperate act. Clever, too, if you see it from their perspective. She cut her wrists - you can see how the tendon is shriveled in the better-preserved arm - and then she let the entire contents of her bloodstream flow into the urns. We do know that the urns show a heavy precipitation of blood on the bottom. She was trying to lure something in - or perhaps something back in. And she died trying, and the clay that she had probably hoped to use in her last conscious moments held her bones to the jars."
"Whew!"Alaric ran a hand over his forehead, but shivered at the same time.
Take pictures! Elena was mental y commanding him, using al her wil power to transmit the order. She could see that Bonnie was doing the same, eyes shut, fists clenched.
As if in obedience to their commands, Alaric was taking pictures as fast as he could.
Final y, he was done. But Elena knew that without some outside impetus there was no way that he was going to get those pictures to Fel 's Church until he himself came to town - and even Meredith didn't know when that would be.
So what do we do? Bonnie asked Elena, looking anguished.
Well...my tears were real when Stefan was in prison.
You want us to cry on him?
No, Elena said, not quite patiently. But we look like ghosts -
let's act like them. Try blowing on the back of his neck.
Bonnie did, and they both watched Alaric shiver, look around him, draw his windbreaker closer.
"And what about the other deaths in your own expedition?"he asked, huddling, looking around apparently aimlessly.
Celia began speaking but neither Elena nor Bonnie was listening. Bonnie kept blowing on Alaric from different directions, herding him to the single window in the building that wasn't shattered. There Elena had written with her finger on the darkened cold glass. Once she knew that Alaric was looking that way she blew her breath across the sentence: send all pix of jars 2 meredith now! Every time Alaric approached the window she breathed on it to refresh the words.
And at last he saw it.
He jumped backward nearly two feet. Then he slowly crept back to the window. Elena