was. Which meant I’d better get back to searching, and planning what to do if digging continued to make things worse instead of better.
• • •
I was running out of time, at least for that day. Phin and I both had chores back at the ranch. Spectral obligation or not, the goats had to be fed and the plants had to be watered. And we still hadn’t found anything.
Phin’s square and mine were a knight’s move down from Lucas and Emery on the chessboard of the Site B section. “Maybe we picked the wrong place,” I said. “We seem to be well below the feet, going by where they found the tibiae and leather fragments.”
“You’re welcome to move if you want,” said Phin, digging into her next layer. “What does your gut tell you to do?”
My gut—and her tone—told me not to imply a lack of faith in her methods. I knelt back down, groaning just a little, and returned to work.
21
my faith was rewarded in less than an hour. Phin and I had both moved to lie on our stomachs, and I saw her hands still before she reached to trade her spade for her brush.
“Hey, Mark!” I called. “I think Phin found something.”
He stepped carefully over the grid of twine to look, then called for Dr. Douglas. The other students crowded around, too, as the professor arrived and instructed with subdued excitement, “This hand is obviously undisturbed. See how all those small bones are in place? Use the brush carefully, Phin. Where’s Jennie? We need pictures.”
What emerged from the dirt was a delicate mosaic of earth-stained bone. Jennie snapped photographs as Phin worked to expose as much as possible without shifting anything.
“It’s a right hand,” said Mark. “Do we have one of those yet?”
Caitlin had joined us on the B site after lunch, and she checked the notes before answering, “We have metacarpals and carpals in two different locations. This is a third hand.”
Phin had found a third set of remains. The crew didn’t quite cheer—surely there was some etiquette about cheering over dead bodies. But I was focused on the tiny spheres barely visible beside the bones under her brush.
Stretching out, I fanned my own brush across the shapes, worried they might disintegrate. The next pass of my brush lifted the veil of dirt from a spill of beads and a small cross, lying as if the fingers had opened in death and let them fall.
“A necklace?” suggested Caitlin.
Mark shook his head. “A rosary.”
Jennie lowered her camera and exchanged a look with Dwayne. “The Mad Monk!”
“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” said Dr. Douglas.
“There’s something else.” Lucas pointed to something flat, dark, and leathery emerging as Phin worked her brush outward from the hand.
Emery speculated, “Another sandal?”
I bent over the trench. “It looks like a satchel. Some kind of bag?” I pointed to what appeared to be a rough, fist-sized rock. “Phin, brush that off.”
She did. The sweep of the brush burnished it in the sunlight.
The stillness of a held breath hovered over the trench. My own felt lodged in my chest as, for an unscientific moment, I wondered if this confirmed the rumors of the Mad Monk. First the rosary and then this? Could it be so simple?
“Is that … ?” Dwayne started, speaking for all of us.
Dr. Douglas, refreshingly pragmatic, pulled the rock out of the dirt, crumbling off the soil that clung to the underside. “If you mean ‘Is that a chunk of gold ore?’ then yes. It is.”
She started the rock around the circle so everyone could examine it. Jennie turned it over in her hands. “That doesn’t look like something Yosemite Sam would dig up with his pickax.”
“It’s unrefined,” said Mark, taking it from her and pointing to the metallic yellow sheen. “It has to be processed before it looks like a gold nugget.”
Jennie took it back, laughing. “Do you think you could get a ring out of that? Maybe there’s a diamond to go with it.”
“Maybe if you had about nine more of them, as long as you have a tiny finger,” he said.
Dwayne looked at the nugget in disappointment. “Not much of a treasure, then.”
“The treasure,” said Dr. Douglas, in a drolly academic tone, “is in the discovery and the search for knowledge.”
The ore made it around to Lucas, who held it like Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull. “Search for knowledge. Like, why did our guy have this?”
“Obviously,” said Caitlin, “he never made it to the refinery.”
“But why just