Garden of Bone: Book 6, page 24
There were things she'd made sure she wasn't carrying—her purse, all the extras she usually walked around with, full wallet, credit cards—and still several things she made sure she had on her. Her Glock was primary, and her state-issued ID. She'd reminded Donovan to bring his FBI badge, and she had hers. God forbid they get caught actually grave-robbing in the middle of the night without some kind of federal identification. They would definitely be arrested.
According to Grandmère, no one was going to see them. Or they might, but their brains wouldn’t process the sight. This had something to do with the spell they'd cast the other night. Eleri thought back to the number of times people had walked by on the street that morning but had not noticed the two of them poking at the dirt and digging. She would have expected someone to call out to them, or at least report them to the police, but it never happened. While their seeming invisibility wasn't definitive proof, it was possible Grandmère was right.
She and Donovan had gone back to the home store and bought those nerdy-looking headlamp lights that came on an elastic strap. They'd found some with a low-level red light that would be less noticeable at night while providing them with enough light to work by.
Eleri was concerned the red light would mask the natural colors she'd want to see, should she find any bones. Her other concern was that she and Donovan were becoming regulars at the home supply stores. She did not want to be recognized anywhere in this city. They’d run out of hardware shops and would have to become repeat customers in at least one of them, should they need anything else. With food, it was easy to eat each meal at a different location. But for the supplies she needed? Not so much.
They walked between the graves now, using the tall ones as concealment. They noted the names they had marked on their last visit, each of which was an older, in-ground grave. It was only in the newer century that the residents had figured out to bury the dead above the ground. A cemetery like this involved a mix of above and below-ground graves. Some of the older graves had floated up and were replaced with waist-height tombs. Others had—for whatever reason—managed to stay in the dirt.
Nelly McKenzie Burke’s grave was one of those, and it was there that Eleri and Donovan started digging.
On her hands and knees, Eleri paused a moment. She did not have her full kit with her, and she wondered why she hadn't brought it to town. What had she thought would happen? Honestly, she’d been hopeful she would simply come and identify the original bones as Emmaline's. Then, she would do research, maybe walk around town. She’d thought she might interview people who had known her sister when she lived here. It occurred to Eleri that Emmaline had lived here, away from her home, for longer than she’d been with her own family. It was a sobering thought.
Still, it hadn’t occurred to her that she might need to dig her sister’s remains out of the soil with her own hands.
They started now at the small hole she’d begun at their last visit. Using the trowel tilted on its side, she lightly scraped back layers of grass, widening her test hole to the full grave size. Donovan helped by grabbing the tufts of green and tugging on them, and letting her remove the soil underneath, almost as though they were lifting sod. They carefully set several chunks aside, thinking they might do the same as the original grave-robbers had and put the grass back so that in the morning, no one would notice. Given that no one was even locking the cemetery at night, Eleri thought it was highly possible the excavations might be missed.
Slowly, they worked their way down through the earth. It was a good foot before they hit anything, but as Eleri pointed out, someone had already re-dug this hole. Though it had been some time since that person had been here, the dirt was still noticeably looser. This was much easier than digging one of the other old graves, where the dirt had settled for decades or centuries.
She continued using the trowel sideways, scraping off one fine layer of dirt at a time, slim enough that even something like a small finger bone would show up, rather than getting scooped and tossed to the side. Normally, she would have a sifter to push all the dirt through, so that anything big enough to get caught would remain behind. The problem wasn't just the bones. It was that bones aged. The soil leeched nutrients, and they got brittle as they sat in the dirt for a decade or more. If a finger bone had been there, she might find only a chip of it. The tip of the pinky toe was one of the smallest bones, and it was often lost in these situations. When she added in that the pieces she found would be covered with the same dirt they were hiding in, it might be extremely difficult to locate a bone—even in a gravesite.
Eleri was hoping to find what she could. She troweled up layers of dirt and handed them off to Donovan to mash against his own fingertips. Without a sifting pan, that would have to do.
Almost an hour later, she found the first bone, much to her surprise. She'd truly thought she would end up robbing a grave. She would get to the top of the casket or burial tomb and have to pry it open. But that was apparently not the case—not if this one bone could lead them to others. She frowned and held it up.
"Rock?" Donovan asked, and then he looked more closely.
He should have known better, she thought. The ME should absolutely be able to identify wrist bones on sight. Then again, she thought, maybe he didn't. Maybe he was so used to working with bodies that were still intact that her holding up a single, small, oddly shaped bone wasn't quite enough—certainly not in the red light. She shook her head and named it for him.
“It’s a scaphoid. Left side, I think," she said, and set it aside.
Another inch or two down, she came to the next bone—except it wasn't a bone. It was three bones, located toward the foot of the grave site.
"Tarsals and a metatarsal," Eleri said as she handed the oddly shaped pieces over to Donovan to bag and label.
The bones were intact. She thought that was rather odd. For starters, this body was not inside a tomb or a casket of any kind. It wasn’t even wrapped in a tarp or cloth, or encased in anything that might slow down the decomposition. The red light made it difficult to inspect the soil thoroughly, but she thought, Maybe the whole body was buried directly here. But the dirt wasn’t sunken enough for that.
“Donovan.” She waved a hand to get his attention. “Whoever did this either returned later to fill in the dirt as the grave sank, or they'd mounded it up enough to begin with, which would indicate they knew what they were doing. It’s difficult to get a grave flat after a body decays.”
“It was only relatively flat,” he commented. “The ones we marked are a little more sunken than the others.”
She nodded, thinking he was right and thinking that the graves seemed to shift and flatten at different rates. She sat back on her knees and looked around. This cemetery was old enough that most of the burial sites had flattened out through weather and time.
Donovan pointed to the one next to them, where marble, brick-shaped markers that had been used to delineate the edges of the gravesite. It was something she saw here in Louisiana in much greater proportions than she did at cemeteries in other parts of the world. “It’s harder to tell if it’s sunken or mounded with the markers around it. If it isn’t a lot, it’s difficult to measure.”
She nodded, agreeing, and aimed her view back into the grave she was digging. The red light made it hard for Eleri to get a good estimate of how long the body had been here, but given the weather, it could have fully skeletonized in as little as a year.
"When we get to the next grave," she said to Donovan, "we need to see if dirt layers were added to the top." She explained her concern about the soil sinking. “We’ll need it as evidence.”
He only nodded and looked over their little stash of four bones. Neither of them asked the question. Neither of them had to. The bones they had discovered were clearly human. Eleri kept digging.
"Aha," she said, noting she had found something that wasn't budging. Slowly, and using the brush from her dustpan set, she moved the dirt away.
"Water bottle," she said, holding her hand out, and Donovan handed it over. She drank a swig, and then poured about a third of it onto the knob of the bone, using the brush to create mud, which more easily moved away from the piece she was trying to look at. She tried using the trowel around it ever so slightly but wound up going back with the three-pronged rake. She only needed to loosen the dirt. If she dug in with the trowel, she was likely to nick a bone.
It was still possible this was just a pile of bones thrown in the dirt. But the few parts she’d found indicated the body was originally laid into the grave site, head on one end and feet on the other, and that meant she was very likely to jam her trowel into another bone and possibly damage her evidence.
Her heart stopped for a moment, and she sat back on her heels again, wondering if she was doing the right thing. Best to ask Donovan, she thought.
"Hey," she said. "We have human bones. This is evidence. Did we just walk outside the jurisdiction of my own case?"
He looked at her, his brows pulling together and his face concerned. "Probably, but what happens if we quit?"
Shit, Eleri thought. It was the middle of the night. The graveyard wasn't locked. They'd come in through one gate, but she'd seen at least two others. There was probably one more on the fourth side of the rectangle that enclosed the space. If they quit now, anyone else could come in and finish the job. Anyone who was visiting would see what they had done. Even if they filled the dirt back in—probably the safest option, but still not smart, evidence-wise—then someone was bound to notice. They had dug so much that they were going to leave an obvious depression behind, even though the original gravediggers had not.
She was no longer thinking of herself and Donovan as robbers. In fact, she was beginning to believe that Nelly McKenzie Burke had stayed in her original resting place, undisturbed—and that perhaps a new body had been buried on top of her. It was a simple and ingenious trick, she thought. If something smelled, no one would think much of it. They were in a cemetery after all. Between the humidity and the heat down here, as well as the fact that they were standing in a graveyard, no one would question a mound of freshly turned earth. They might, if they knew the graveyard well—but the unkempt state of the place made it seem like nobody did.
Eleri looked at Donovan and then went back to the grave, her decision made. She kept digging.
49
Donovan watched as Eleri leaned over the third grave. They'd been digging all night. No one had bothered them—despite the stupid red headlamps they wore and despite the fact that they'd been in a graveyard well after normal hours, when it should have been locked. No one had even looked through the spikes of the wrought iron fence to see what they were doing. But, as Eleri had said earlier, it seemed nobody was in charge of watching over this cemetery, and that's why none of the gates had been locked in the first place.
After they'd found what they were looking for in the first grave—human bones that Eleri had painstakingly extracted from the soil—Donovan had gone around to each of the gates and fashioned a makeshift lock. It wouldn't really keep anyone out, but it would make enough noise that they would get a warning before anyone came in. It would give them a chance to cover their work, or at least disappear.
Still, if they were found, it wouldn't look good. They'd now dug up three whole sections of earth directly on top of existing graves. On the last one, Eleri had commented the grave had been so old, it had been sunk into the earth the way many had been before the people of the area learned not to bury their dead underground.
"Look, Donovan," she'd said, thunking her trowel on the top of the concrete box that housed the casket. "It's floating."
"What? Floating? Like, currently rising to the surface?"
She'd nodded. "It takes decades, but it happens. It's why all the new graves are above ground."
"How do you know it's floating? How do you know that wasn't where it was buried?"
"The hole is far too shallow," Eleri said. "Given the date on the headstone, it should have been buried about two or three feet deeper. They knew better by then."
Interesting, Donovan thought. Though her degree wasn't in anthropology, she knew many historical facts about graves. Maybe because she'd spent so much of her time digging them up.
Still, he'd watched as she bent over the task again, slowly dragging her brush and her three-fingered rake across the ground. She delicately disturbed more and more dirt, gradually bringing up more and more bones. After they'd dug the first test spots over the three graves, Eleri had decided to do it right.
It was part of why they’d left and come back tonight. She'd brought a camera. She'd brought string and stakes, this time. If he’d thought her pockets had been full the first time, he'd been mistaken. His pockets were now a full backup system for everything Eleri needed. Small air bubble levels hung along the string. Compasses sat next to them, to help them make sure the staked lines oriented North-South, so that anyone looking at the pictures would know where the bones had originally been placed.
Eleri also had begun hanging measuring tapes—although she didn’t have access to her usual, professional ones. She’d spent a while at Grandmere’s earlier showing Donovan how to mark the inches, half inches, quarter inches, and eighths in different colored dots on the brightly colored twine that she was now hanging from the crosshairs she'd made.
Everything had to be photographed and labeled. She knew what she was doing, and the pictures confirmed that. Because of the meticulous labeling, anyone else who looked at this would know how the bones had come up. They would have evidence in case this was ever prosecuted as a crime.
But the fact that she knew to do all this—along with the FBI badge in her pocket—indicated that she also knew she shouldn't be doing it.
The night had been long, and she spent most of it on her hands and knees, hunched over gaping holes she was carving into the earth. She reached down in repeatedly, in what must have been an uncomfortable position. Donovan did some of the digging, too, but mostly he was the assistant and the work was hers. He could only begin to imagine how her back felt, and he could only wonder if—before she'd come to Nightshade, before she'd been in the FBI in this capacity—she'd done this for hours on end as a student. She looked disturbingly comfortable pulling human bones out of the dirt.
Or so he'd thought for the first two graves. On the third, he noticed she was silently dripping tears into the hole as she dug. It had prompted him, after an hour of such silent work, and four more bones pulled up, to ask her, "Do you think that this is Emmaline?"
She shook her head, "It's not."
She sounded so confident, despite the tears.
"This is a boy," Eleri said. "He was somewhere between ten and fifteen years old." She was unable to offer a better age range than that, and Donovan understood. Bones didn't grow the same in everyone. They didn’t grow at the same time, the same rate, or even always have the same changes. So from the bones alone, chronological age was hard to tell.
Eleri checked the teeth when she could, and that helped narrow down the age estimate, but not by much. She didn't have a skull for this boy yet. But the changes she saw in the clavicles and scapula, while laying out the pieces from his upper thorax, told her that this skeleton was male, and not merely a tall, immature female.
Donovan hadn't asked it before, but now that he'd broached the topic, he thought it was time. "Was one of the others Emmaline, do you think?"
Eleri shook her head again. "The first was too young—not even old enough for me to determine the gender. Emmaline was eight when she left. But I'm confident that she lived for a full decade after that.”
So that couldn’t have been Emmaline, Donovan thought. “What about the other?”
“A female of the right age.” Eleri spoke in short non-sentences, indicating she was more tired, or at least weary, than she appeared. With the back of her hand, she wiped at the tears on her face, and Donovan didn't comment when she left a streak of dirt. It only joined others she’d already put there. Her work was more important.
The way she looked wouldn't matter until they got back in the car and were driving down the street, he thought. If an officer stopped them, they would have mud on their faces and knees, and human bones in the trunk. None of that would look good.
They already had six different cloth bags that Grandmere had provided. Inside were various-sized paper bags, stapled shut and labeled carefully with Sharpies. Eleri had insisted, and Donovan had thought it a solid, make-due idea. Of course, he'd seen excavations in action before, but it wasn't his job. So he'd merely done as she told him.
It was his handwriting on all the bags. His job tonight was to do everything he could to keep her aimed in the right direction.
Sitting up, he looked around, as he did approximately every five minutes. He scoured their surroundings not only with his eyes, but also with his ears and nose. What he wouldn't have given to be able to change and run along the borders of the cemetery, checking for interlopers. But he knew that was impossible. And, to be fair, Eleri was using the heck out of him. Despite the fact that he wasn't hunched over the grave site, he was not sitting idle.
“The teeth on the second one were wrong for Emmaline. She was the right age,” Eleri added, “but the shape of the skull and the indentation on the back of the teeth indicated someone of Asian, perhaps, or Native American ancestry.”
Donovan figured, given the case they were on, Native American made more sense. But what did he know?
When the first rays of sun broke through at the horizon, Eleri decided it was time to quit. She hadn’t retrieved a single whole skeleton, and that bothered her. It bothered Donovan as well. But it seemed unlikely that their perpetrators had buried only body parts here, and he said so.
She shook her head. "I couldn't find them. I mean, we could have stayed at the first site, and dug out all the corners, and looked for every last piece of the skeleton. But things here drift. The water tables shift. It's why the graves are rising. So it's conceivable—more than conceivable, actually—that the bones also moved away as the body decomposed … but ... wait."
