Steve paused, and his bushy black brows pulled together. “Then what?”
Sylvia frowned. “What do you mean?”
“After they smear the stones. Then what?”
As his meaning dawned, Sylvia said, “Naw, I don’t think so. I mean, if they do, nobody’s ever recorded it. And somebody would have. Anthropologists are kinky.”
“Yassuh!” Steve raised a fist, then jerked it downwards in approval. “By now they would have been nicknamed Mazola Rocks.”
Maureen made a disgusted sound, jumped down into the room with Dusty, and edged him aside. “If you don’t mind, could I take a look?”
“Why, certainly, Doctor. Besides, you’re already here.” He leaned back against the pit wall.
Maureen’s hair caught the sunlight. He took a moment to admire the way it glistened and wondered what it would be like to touch silky hair like that.
Her brows lowered. “These are virtually identical to the bone bead you showed me in Durango, Stewart, including the ground edges.” She took his paintbrush, bent over the bone beads, and carefully whisked dirt away from the edges. “I’d say the bones were not cooked, though there are distinct cut marks on the larger fragments. I—”
“You don’t have to cook the bones to be a cannibal,” Steve said. “You can crack the skull, shake out the brain, eat it, and toss the bones.”
Dusty nodded. “He’s right.”
“Yes, well, you’ve still got to convince me this is a cannibal act,” Maureen responded. “Even more curious is a cannibal who smashes the skull, grinds fragments into beads, then reassembles them around a large stone.”
Dusty’s smile faded. He dropped to one knee and stared at the bone fragments. “What are you talking about? The circle isn’t in the shape of a skull.”
“He didn’t use all of the pieces, Stewart, just the callot, the upper part of the braincase.” She drew a line across her own eyebrows and then around the back of her skull.
Sylvia’s green eyes widened. “Wow. I wonder what that means? Maybe the stone symbolizes a child in the womb.”
“Or a rock for a brain,” Dusty said.
“I’d guess a penis in a vagina,” Steve suggested.
Sylvia squinted at the rock. “Boy, if so, that guy had real delusions of grandeur.”
Maureen stood up. “I don’t think we have enough information to speculate, folks. We need to finish the excavation. We’ve just uncovered the top.”
“That’s the first sensible thing I’ve heard.” Dusty stuck his thumbs in his back pockets. “This has been here for eight hundred years. It could just be that freeze-thaw cycles moved the bone out from the stone.”
Sylvia rose and dusted her pants off. “Why don’t you let me dig for a while, Dusty? You’ve been pitching rock out of there all day.”
Dusty braced his hands on the wall and climbed out over the unexcavated rubble filling the rest of the room. As he reached for his camo vest, he said, “Just keep in mind that the good doctor is going to be hanging over the pit. If you chip a single bone, I’ll have to shove a stick in her mouth to keep her from biting off her tongue.”
“I’ll be careful.” Sylvia leaped into the pit and pulled her trowel from her back pocket.
Dusty smiled across at Maureen, but she didn’t see him. Two upright lines formed between her brows as she studied the ring of beads.
Dusty turned to Steve. “Hand me that bucket, Steve. Sylvia can trowel the dirt into it and hand the bucket up instead of using the shovel.”
“On my way.”
Steve followed the line of planks to where the bucket sat canted at the edge of the back-dirt pile.
Sylvia spent a few minutes carefully troweling down around the rock inside the bone ring. No one said anything until Sylvia’s trowel struck something beneath the stone.
“Whoa, Sylvia,” Dusty said, kneeling to get a closer look. “What did you hit?”
Sylvia reached for the brush and gently removed the dirt clinging to the object. “Looks like a pot rim to me, boss.”
Steve bent forward and braced his hands on his knees. “The rock is resting on top of a pot?”
Dusty and Maureen exchanged a worried glance, memories of 10K3 resurfacing in their minds.
Maureen said, “You don’t think—”
“I hope not.”
Sylvia looked up. “I’ll bet you five bucks it is.”
“Is what?” Steve asked in confusion.
“Corpse powder,” Sylvia said.
Steve straightened. “You mean, like among the Navajo? The stuff witches use to kill and make people sick? Why would you think that?”
Dusty said, “Remember 10K3? August before last we found a pot in a burial, and it was definitely filled with powdered people. Our local Keres monitor said she thought it was the work of a witch. But”—he pointed a finger at Sylvia—“that’s purely speculation right now, Sylvia. You might just have a rim sherd. Keep working.”
She gave him a military salute and went back to troweling.
“Powdered people? No kidding?” Steve’s ebony face shone with sweat. He wiped his forehead on his sleeve. “None of you died, I notice. Anybody puke their guts out?”
“Nope,” Sylvia called up. “Mrs. Walking Hawk cleansed us in pinyon pine smoke. The evil spirits couldn’t stick to us—” She stopped suddenly. “Hey, folks, I’ve definitely got a pot down here. See this?” She used the tip of her trowel to point to the rounded side of the black-on-white pot. “It’s a little pot. About ten centimeters across.”
Dusty gestured to the tape measure resting to Sylvia’s left. “I’d like something a little more definitive, if it won’t trouble you, Dr. Rhone.”
Sylvia reached for the tape, measured the rim first, then the pot. “Yep! Ten centimeters. Am I a precision instrument or what?”
She set the tape aside, made notes in the unit notebook, and troweled around between the rock and the pot. When she’d moved enough dirt that everyone could clearly see the pot, she said, “I’m not sure, but I think the rock is stuck to the top of the pot.”
“Son of a bitch!” Dusty leaped into the pit with his trowel and said, “Move over, I need some room.”
Sylvia shrank back against the fitted stone wall. “Careful,” she warned. “That looks like pine pitch glue.”
Dusty gently troweled and brushed until he’d exposed the base of the pot. “Come on, people. I need light.” He went through the ritual of recording, then carefully lifted the small round pot out with the rock intact. “Sylvia, bag this,” he said, and handed it to her.
“Gotcha.” Sylvia slipped it into a Ziploc and used a Sharpie pen to write the provenience on the outside of the bag.
Dusty climbed out and took the bag. Everyone around the partially excavated room went quiet, staring at him.
“What do you think it is?” Steve asked.
“I don’t know,” Sylvia said, “but I’m not sure we should open it up out here. You know, without adult supervision. Maybe we should call Magpie and have her bring out an elder—”
“I think we’ll be safe on our own,” Dusty told her. “This is probably a cache of beads or projectile points, something harmless. Until we have evidence that it’s a dangerous artifact, I’m sure we can handle it.”
Sylvia whispered something to Steve from the corner of her mouth, and Steve’s brows went up.
Dusty asked, “What was that, Sylvia?”
“Oh, I was just telling Steve about that time in Wyoming when you said you could handle big Bob Deercapture. Remember? He said he could pee farther than you, and you told him he couldn’t. The problem was, it was fifty-six below zero, and Dusty turned kind of fast before he zipped and accidentally touched the side of the Bronco. I mean, who in the Southwest knows that warm wet parts will stick to metal when it’s that cold?”
Steve shuddered. “Ouch. When I was little, my mother told me not to stick my tongue to ice trays or my head would freeze solid. I bet it’s kind of the same thing.”
“I
don’t
think so,” Dusty said.
Sylvia tucked a tendril of stray brown hair up under her woolen cap. “Actually, it was no big deal. We just heated up a teapot and steamed it off. It would have gone a lot faster if Dusty hadn’t been such a crybaby—”
“Good God, Sylvia,” Dusty said. “Do you really have to go into the details?”
“But people can learn real-life lessons from stuff like this, Dusty. I mean, if your mother had told you about ice trays when you were a child, you’d have one less scar.”
Maureen folded her arms. “A little like the incident in Cortez, eh, Stewart?”
Steve looked inquisitively from one person to the next. “She knows about Muffet?”
“Oh, come on!” Sylvia said. “Everyone in archaeology knows about Muffet.”
Dusty got to his feet. It was the one and only time in his life that he’d danced with a stripper. And the last time he’d touched gin. “It’s quitting time. Tarp the pits. Maureen and I will take the pot back to camp and get dinner started while you two clean up and stow gear.”
Dusty climbed out of the room and stalked toward camp.
Behind him, he heard Steve whisper, then Sylvia said, “Yeah, well, he’s really sensitive about that story. It’s kind of the defining moment of his life.”
A
S EVENING DRAPED THE LAND, THE JUNIPER GROVE BEHIND their field camp went from dark green to black. Maureen sighed as she watched the world change. The long shadows began to disappear, fading into the night. The ancient pueblo became nothing more than a gray mound of rubble dotted with black squares of plastic.
“How are you doing with the lantern?” Dusty asked as he stepped into the trailer.
He had just finished arranging kindling for a fire after dinner. Tall and sun-bronzed, his form filled the doorway.
“I’m working on it, Stewart,” she said as she picked up the matchbook. “Don’t worry. I’ve started a few lanterns in my life.”
“You pumped it up, right?”
“Right,” she answered in irritation, struck a match, and held it below the mantles as she turned up the gas. The mantles caught in a
whoosh
and pulsing white light illuminated the artifacts and bones bagged on the square table. She smiled, suspecting that some of the most precious artifacts in southwestern archaeology had rested on Dale’s little Formica table.
“Thanks,” Dusty said. “You want to get dinner started? Anything you want.”
Maureen’s brows lifted. “Anything I want?”
“Well, anything we have. Your selection is somewhat limited due to the fact that we did most of the shopping in Bloomfield. No caviar or escargots, I’m afraid.”
She propped a hand on the table. “That’s very creative, Stewart. I’ve never heard it pronounced it
es-car-guts.
”
She walked out of the trailer and crossed to the supply tent. Boxes lined the walls. Each brimmed with different shapes and sizes of cans, bottles, bags of chips, and many things she couldn’t make out in the dim light. She opened one of the coolers and peered inside. She found
a package of meat, sniffed it, and cringed. The celery reminded her of Phil—really limp and sort of slimy. Giving it up as a lost cause, she turned to the cardboard boxes.
Stewart looked up when Maureen climbed into the trailer. Lantern light glinted in his beard, accenting his handsome face. “What did you pick?”
“Something called Dinty Moore’s beef stew.”
Stewart shuddered. “No wonder you get along with Sylvia.”
“You don’t like it?” She started to back out of the trailer.
“No, it’s all right. I’ll eat it. My backbone’s rubbing my navel.”
Maureen stopped in front of the stove and set the supplies down. As she removed things from the pot and put them on the vinyl counter, Dusty said: “Isn’t there a package of pork chops out there?”
“Remember the pot of powdered people from 10K3?”
He gave her a suspicious look. “How could I forget it?”
“The contents of that pot were in better shape than the pork chops in the cooler.”
“Ah.” Dusty nodded. “Right. We have to get ice the next time we go into town. Like tomorrow. We can wash our clothes at the same time.” He looked around the trailer. “Let me see, what do we have to go with this stew? Crackers?”
“Not unless you like those awful little cheesy fishies that Sylvia prizes. That’s the closest thing we have to crackers.”
He opened the refrigerator and removed a loaf of dark rye bread. “Then I’m going to eat this.” He set the loaf on top of the counter.
“You can share if you want.”
“Looks good to me.”
Voices drifted in from the darkness as Sylvia and Steve washed off at the water jug outside. Someone smart, probably Steve, had a flashlight. The beam played around the camp.
Maureen used a match to start the stove burner, found a can opener in the drawer, and poured the stew into an aluminum pot that she had rummaged out of a cupboard. “Here come the hungry hordes.”
Stewart nodded. “I see ’em. I’ll bet Sylvia wants a Coors Light.” He reached into the red ice chest and dredged out a dripping can of Coors Light and a draft Guinness. He set the Coors on the table and popped the top on his Guinness. “Ah, the gift of the gods.”
“Canned Guinness, Stewart?” Maureen lifted an eyebrow. “Sacrilege. Your genes should know it even if your tastebuds don’t.”
Dusty slipped into the booth and studied the black-and-white pot, propped so that the rock didn’t overbalance it. He pushed the ratty brown cowboy hat back on his head and said, “Somebody had better get the coffee going.”
Maureen’s brows lowered. “Just who did you think that would be? I made the stew.”
“You did not. Dinty Moore did. You opened cans and poured them into a pot. Besides, you’re the coffee drinker.”
Maureen sighed. “Good point. Okay, where’s the coffee?”
He was staring at the pot, his blue eyes gleaming, but he pointed. “Cupboard to your right. You’ll find everything you need on the bottom shelf.”
She opened it, took out the battered, soot-coated coffeepot and red bag of New Mexico Pinon Nut Coffee. The water came from a six-gallon blue plastic jug on the floor.
Sylvia and Steve opened the flimsy aluminum door and stepped in. “Boy, what a day,” Steve said. He brushed at his brown nylon coat sleeves, and a sparkling fog floated up.
Sylvia coughed and waved at it as she walked through. “God. Quit that. I feel like Lawrence of Arabia.”
“It’s down to forty degrees, Rhone,” Steve said. “I doubt that.”
“Did you get the equipment stowed in the ammo boxes?” Dusty asked.
They used metal ammo boxes to keep most of their equipment safe: the trowels, brushes, dental picks, line levels, compasses, and the camera.
“Yassuh,” Steve said. He sank into the booth and pulled a bottle of Anchor Steam beer out of his pocket. Using his Swiss Army knife, he uncapped it.
Sylvia spied the Coors Light on the table. “A beer! I’m saved. Thanks, Dusty.” She grabbed it and slid in beside Steve. Brown hair had escaped her gray knit cap and framed her face with damp ringlets. It made her pointed nose look long and sharp.
“Hey!” Sylvia blurted. “Where are my cheezy fishes? Aren’t there any in the trailer?”
Dusty called, “Well, I guarantee I’m not the culprit. You’d have to tie me up and poke them down my throat with a stick before I’d eat one of those things.”
A pause, then Sylvia said: “God. You don’t think I ate them all, do
you? There’s nothing better than cheezy fishes in beef stew. You know, yellow and brown.”
Dusty said, “You’re the only woman in the world who evaluates food based on a Munsel color chart.”
Steve smiled and turned to Maureen. “Are we going to open the pot tonight?”
“Ask the P.I.” Maureen poured coffee into the basket, clamped the lid down, and set the pot on the burner.
Sand sprinkled Steve’s neatly trimmed black hair, shimmering in the lantern light. “Massa Principal Investigator, sir?”
Dusty took a swig from his Guinness and said, “I thought once we had dinner going, we’d tend to it.”
Sylvia shivered. “Gonna be a cool one tonight. God, I hate climbing into a freezing sleeping bag. The first few minutes are enough to make me change my major to accounting.”
Maureen stirred the stew and turned from the stove with the wooden spoon in her hand. She aimed it at Dusty. “I don’t understand why we can’t go into town on cold nights like this and rent a hotel room. We’re getting seventy-five dollars a day per diem, for God’s sakes. Wouldn’t anybody else like a real shower?”
Sylvia stopped halfway through chugging her beer. “You mean you’d rather sleep in a stucco box, breathing recycled air, than in a tent where you can smell the cedar fire and sage all night?”
Steve added, “You’d rather wake up to the kids next door screaming than birds singing and coyotes howling?”
Dusty smiled at her, as if in victory. “Yes. Just what sort of uncivilized barbarian are you, Dr. Cole?”
Maureen shook her head. “Never mind.”
She would never understand archaeologists. Oh, she loved nature, too, but not at the expense of frozen body parts. “It just seems silly to me that we—”
As if to mock her, somewhere out in the desert a lone coyote yipped, paused, then yipped again, and down in the river bottom a whole pack broke into song. Their beautiful lilting voices serenaded the night for several minutes, then the soft evening breeze replaced it.
Everybody at the table gazed at Maureen with wide eyes.
“I don’t care,” she said. “I’d still like a shower.” She pulled at her waistband, feeling sand.
Dusty leaned forward. “I’ll make you a deal. We need to pull the
bone bed on the kiva roof. If we can do that, and open the kiva floor by Friday, I’ll rent us luxurious rooms at the Holiday Inn in Farmington. What do you say?”
“I say, hallelujah.”
“I don’t know,” Steve said. “That’s a lot of careful recording to do in three days, boss, and a lot of that bone is burned. Delicate stuff. The old days of chucking bones into paper bags and calling it quits are long gone.”
Dusty leaned back. “Yeah. Thank God. I still cringe when I think about the data they wasted back in the good ol’ days.”
Maureen looked into the pot. “Well, the stew’s boiling. I say we let it simmer for a few minutes, and open that pot.”
Dusty took a long drink of Guinness, set his empty can down, and lurched to his feet. “I will assist you, Dr. Cole.”
Maureen turned to the door. “I have to get my field kit.”
She stepped out into the night and walked to her tent. White lantern light cast by the trailer windows threw beautiful patterns on the brown nylon walls. She knelt, reached through the tent flap, and pulled her black field bag from the corner.
As she stepped back into the trailer, Sylvia said, “If we find dried flakes of humans in there, what are we going to do? Notify the regional tribes, or sew our lips shut?”
“My opinion is that we sew our lips shut and do the necessary scientific work to analyze it,” Maureen said, and set her field bag on the table beside the small black-and-white pot. “This is private land, right? We don’t have to abide by the same insane rules that we would on Crown land.”
“That’s
public
land here, Washais,” Sylvia pointed out.
Dusty made an appeasing gesture with his hands. “Shh. If word ever got out that we’d discovered a pot of corpse powder and didn’t tell anyone, I’d be accused by the traditionals of endangering the life of every person I came in contact with. I’d lose a lot of the trust that I’ve built over the years. People would run when they saw me coming.”
“That happens now, Stewart,” Maureen said.
He continued as if he hadn’t heard: “If we find anything suspicious in that pot, I’m calling Maggie Walking Hawk Taylor.”
Maureen opened her field bag. They’d had this argument before. But there was no sense in getting into a shouting match with him. Better to wait and see what happened.
“What?” Dusty said. “No scorching rebuttal from the physical anthropologist?”
“I’ll fight that battle
if
the time comes, Stewart. For now, I’m more interested in what’s in the pot than arguing with you.”
Maureen pulled a stainless-steel scalpel from her bag. She lowered the sharp tip to the black ring of pitch that sealed the rock to the top of the pot, and the metal flashed in the lantern light. “Could you hold the pot still?”
He wrapped both hands around the pot, steadying it while Maureen scraped at the pitch. Their hands touched. Long hours in the dirt and sun had roughened his skin, but it felt warm against her cold hands. When she’d etched a hole through the pitch, she said, “Curtain time.”
Steve and Sylvia leaned forward. Anticipation turned the very air electric. Sylvia’s green eyes sparkled. Steve looked as if he were holding his breath.
“Well?” Dusty said. “I’m ready for the opening act.”
Maureen wedged her scalpel in the hole and slowly worked around the edge, severing the rock from the pot.
“I could just twist that off, you know,” Dusty informed her.
“I’m sure you could, Stewart.” Very gently, Maureen sawed through the last of the hardened pitch and rested her scalpel on the table. She gripped the big rock with both hands and carefully lifted.
“What is it?” Steve asked, trying to peer inside. “What’s in there?”
Dusty’s blue eyes narrowed as he scrutinized the interior. He lifted the pot, tipped it sideways, then set it down again. “Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?” Sylvia braced her hands on the table and leaned over to look inside.
Maureen frowned at the clay-colored interior. She didn’t even see any residue, though the poor light could be hiding many things from her view. She said, “Who’s the hunched-over character painted on the bottom of the pot?”
Sylvia answered, “Kokopelli, the humpbacked flute player. He’s big in the Southwest, and much older than the katchinas. From about A.D. 200 to 1150, his image was everywhere, etched into rocks, painted on bowls like this one, even carved into kiva floors.”