I, wishing I could hear what the cabal was saying. I gathered from the way the students hung back it was grown-ups only—Ben’s age notwithstanding.
I was so intent on the meeting that I jerked in surprise when a shadow fell across me. I looked up, squinting, and Phin did the same, shading her eyes with her hand.
Mark grinned down at us, the sun behind him. “What are you doing?” He nodded to the writing on Phin’s arm. “Experimenting in tattoo art?”
“Hardly,” she said, and stuck her pen into her ponytail. “Are you done measuring the field like a dressmaker?”
The analogy made him chuckle, and echo, “Hardly.” He joined us on the ground with a little exhale of relief. “Feels good to sit for a minute.”
“So, what happens now?” I asked. “Will you get to dig out the skull today?”
“Probably, so we can preserve it. Then the deputy has to file his report, and hopefully we’ll get to excavate for the rest of the remains tomorrow. It’s pretty obvious this isn’t a recent burial.”
I knew what he meant. Everything about the skull had seemed old and entrenched. “Is it the same age as the other one?”
“We’ll have to get it back to the lab to make sure,” he said. Phin snorted at the predictable answer, and Mark laughed in rueful acknowledgment. “But if they are related, it could be an exciting find. Seriously, we owe you a drink, Amy. You and Phin need to come out with us tonight to celebrate.”
I’d missed the significance of the students’ glee when Dr. Douglas had confirmed I’d uncovered a separate interment. But now, considering what I’d said to Phin about the skeleton-to-square-foot ratio, I thought I understood. “Do you mean there could be more bones and artifacts here?”
“There could be a treasure trove of artifacts here.” He said it with such anticipation, some of my surprise must have shown, because he laughed. “Not literally. That only happens in the movies.”
Phin had to show off a bit. “I heard that fossils and archaeological finds can go for millions of dollars.”
“Yes,” said Mark, “but we’re not talking Australopithecus. This is a modern skull.”
“But—” I started. That couldn’t be right. The bone had felt old. Literally and in some way I couldn’t quite define. “You said it wasn’t recent. And Dr. Douglas said the site by the river had been here maybe a century or two.”
He grinned. “ ‘Modern’ on an evolutionary scale. As in ‘less than half a million years old.’ ”
“Oh,” I said, embarrassed because I should have known that. They did teach evolution in Texas public schools.
“It might still be prehistoric, though,” said Mark. “If this turns out to be a mass burial of some kind, the value will be in information.”
My gaze roamed over the sloped baseball diamond that Mark and his crew had staked out. It looked so normal. Dry, dusty soil. Crispy summer grass. “What do you mean by ‘mass burial’? A graveyard?”
“Maybe,” said Mark. “A Native American site or pioneer cemetery that was washed out at some point. But with the shallow interment, maybe a battle or massacre site.”
Massacre. The word gave me a jolt, and horrible, history-textbook images flooded my mind. “Like some kind of killing field?”
He hurried to reassure me, as if the atrocity I imagined showed on my face. “Very unlikely. More likely an undocumented skirmish during the Texas Revolution, or something earlier, from the colonial days. The Apache and Comanche weren’t entirely keen on being Christianized.”
“You mean by the Spanish missionaries.”
“Well, you know about San Sabá, right?” He nodded vaguely westward, as if we could see that far into the next county. “The mission was attacked by the Native Americans. Possibly egged on by the French, who wanted to expand from Louisiana. Anyway—they destroyed the mission. It was lost for hundreds of years, but a team from Texas Tech excavated the site in the nineties.”
He sounded like a kid talking about Santa Claus, like he was envisioning something like the San Sabá find here. He was all but rubbing his hands together in anticipation.
“Where would you start with an excavation like that?” Phin asked.
Mark’s eyes lit up with expository glee. Phin looked like that whenever she started talking gadgets. Though I was more interested in these details than I was in coronal aural whatsits, the talk of surveying the field, marking out a grid, digging test holes and trenches before a systematic, layer-by-layer dig … it sort of faded out as I warily watched my sister’s