"Bloodstream" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gerritsen Tess)

8

Doreen tries,” said Lincoln, his gaze fixed on the road. “She really does. But it’s not easy for her.”

“Or for you either, I imagine,” said Claire.

“No, it’s been hard all around. It has been for years.”

It had been raining when they left Tranquility. Now the rain was thickening to sleet, and they heard it tick-ticking against the windshield. The road had turned treacherous as the temperature dropped to that dangerous transition between freeze and thaw, the blacktop collecting a frosting of watery ice. She was glad Lincoln was behind the wheel, not her. A man who has lived forty-five winters in this climate knows enough to respect its perils.

He reached down to turn up the defroster and streaks of condensation began to clear from the glass.

“We’ve been separated two years,” he said. “The problem is, she just Can’t let go. And I don’t have the heart to force it.”

They both tensed as the car ahead suddenly braked and began to fishtail, sliding from one side of the road to the other. It barely pulled Out of its skid in time to avoid an oncoming truck.

Claire sat back, her heart pounding. “Jesus.”

“Everyone’s driving too damn fast.”

“Do you think we should turn around and go home?”

“We’re more than halfway there. Might as well keep going. Or do you want to call it off?”

She swallowed. “I’m okay with this if you are.”

“We’ll just take our time. It means we’ll probably be home late.” He glanced at her. “What about Noah?”

“He’s pretty self-sufficient these days. I’m sure he’ll be fine.”

Lincoln nodded. “He seems like a great kid.”

“Yes he is,” she said. And amended her answer with a rueful smile. “Most of the time.”

“Guess it’s not as easy as it looks,” said Lincoln. “I hear that all the time from parents. That raising a kid is the hardest job in the world.”

“And it’s a hundred times harder when you’re doing it alone.”

“So where’s Noah’s dad?”

Claire paused. The answer to that question almost had to be forced out. “He died. Two years ago.” She barely registered his murmured response of, “I’m sorry.” For a moment, the only sound was the windshield wiper scraping sleet from the glass. Two years, and she still had trouble talking about it. She still couldn’t bring herself to use the word widow. Women should not be made widows at the age of thirty-eight.

And laughing, loving, thirty-nine-year-old men should not die of lymphoma.

Through the freezing mist, she saw emergency lights flashing ahead. An accident.

Yet she felt strangely safe riding in this man’s car. Protected and insulated from harm. They inched past a string of emergency vehicles: two police cruisers, a tow truck, and an ambulance. A Ford Bronco had slid off the road and now lay on its side, glistening with rime. They drove past it in silence, both of them sobered by that stark reminder of how quickly life can be altered. Ended. It was one more gloomy note to an already depressing day.

Lucy Overlock arrived late to her own class. Fifteen minutes after her two graduate and ten undergraduate students stood assembled in the university museum’s basement lab, Lucy herself strode in, her slicker dripping. “With this weather, I probably should have canceled,” she said I m glad you all made it anyway She hung up her ram gear, under which she wore her usual jeans and flannel shirt, practical attire considering their surroundings. The museum basement was both dank and dusty, a cluttered cavern that smelled like the artifacts it contained. Along both walls were shelves lined with hundreds of wooden boxes, contents labeled in faded typescript: “Stonington #11: shell implements, arrowheads, miscellaneous.”

“Pittsfield #32: partial skeletal remains, adult male.”

At the center of the room, on a broad work table draped with a plastic tarpaulin, lay the new additions to this neatly catalogued charnel house.

Lucy flicked on a wall switch. Fluorescent lamps hummed on, their unnatural glare illuminating the table. Claire and Lincoln joined the circle of students.

The lights were unforgiving, casting the faces around the table in harsh relief.

Lucy removed the tarp.

The skeletal remains of the two children had been laid out side by side, the bones placed in their approximate anatomical positions. One skeleton was missing its rib cage, one lower leg, and the right upper extremity. The other skeleton appeared to be largely intact except for the missing small bones of the hands.

Lucy took her position at the head of the table, near the skulls. “What we have here is a sampled assemblage of human remains from dig number seventy-two at the southern end of Locust Lake. The dig was completed yesterday. For reference purposes, I’ve tacked the site map over there, on the wall. As you can see, the site is located right on the edge of the Meegawki Stream. That area had heavy rains and flooding this past spring, which is probably the reason this gravesite became exposed.” She looked down at the table. “So, let’s begin. First, I Want all of you to examine the remains. Feel free to pick them up, look them over carefully. Ask any questions you have about the site. Then let’s hear your conclusions as to age, race, and length of burial. Those of YOU who took part in the dig-please hold your tongues. Let’s see What the others can deduce on their own.”

One of the students reached for a skull.

Lucy stepped back and quietly circled the table, sometimes glancing over her students’ shoulders to watch them work. This assembly made Claire think of some grotesque dining ritual: the remains laid out like a feast on the table, all those eager hands reaching for the bones, turning them under the light, passing them to other hands. At first there was no conversation, the silence broken only by the occasional whisk of a tape measure being extended, retracted.

One of the skulls, missing its mandible, was handed to Claire.

The last time she’d held a human skull was in medical school. She rotated it beneath the light. Once she could name every foramen, every protuberance, but like so many other facts crammed into her memory during four years of training, those anatomical names had been forgotten, displaced by more practical data like billing codes and hospital phone numbers. She turned the skull upside down and saw that the upper teeth were still in place. The third molars had not yet erupted. A child’s mouth.

Gently she set down the skull, shaken by the reality of what she’d just cradled in her hands. She thought of Noah at age nine, his hair a whorl of dark curls, his face silky smooth against hers, and she stared at that skull of a child whose flesh had long since rotted away She was suddenly aware of Lincoln’s hand, resting on her shoulder. “You all right?” he asked, and she nodded. His gaze was sad, almost mournful under the harsh lights. Are we the only ones haunted by this child’s life? she wondered.

The only ones who see more than an empty shell of calcium and phosphate?

One of the female students, a younger, slimmer version of Lucy, asked the first question. “Was this a coffin burial? And was the terrain field or woods?”

“The terrain was moderately wooded, all new growth,” answered Lucy. “We did find iron nails and fragments of the coffin, but the wood was mostly rotted away”

“And the soil?” a male student asked.

“Clay, moderately saturated. Why do you ask?”

“A high clay content helps preserve remains.”

“Correct. What other factors affect the preservation of remains?" Lucy glanced around the table. Her students responded with an eager ness that struck Claire as almost unseemly. They were so focused on mineralized remains, they had forgotten what these bones represented. Living, laughing children.

“Soil compaction-moisture-” “Ambient temperature.”

“Carnivores.”

“Depth of burial. Whether it’s exposed to sunlight.”

“The age at time of death.”

Lucy’s gaze shot to the student who’d spoken. It was the young Lucy clone, also dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt. “How does the deceased’s age affect the bony remains?”

“The skulls of young adults remain intact longer than skulls of elderly people, perhaps because of heavier mineralization.”

“That doesn’t tell me how long these particular skeletons have been lying in the ground. When did these individuals die?”

There was silence.

Lucy did not seem disappointed by their lack of response. “The correct answer,” she said, “is: We can’t tell. After a hundred years, some skeletons may crumble to dust, while others will show almost no weathering. But we can still draw a number of conclusions.” She reached across the table and picked up a tibia.

“Note the flaking and peeling in some of the long bones, where circumferential lamellar bone has natural cleavage lines. What does this indicate to you?”

“Changing wet and dry periods,” said the Lucy clone.

“Right. These remains were temporarily protected by the coffin. But then the coffin rotted, and the bones were exposed to water, especially near that streambed.” She glanced at a young man Claire recognized as one of the grad students who’d helped excavate the site. With his long blond hair tied back in a ponytail, and three gold earrings in one ear, he could easily have passed for a rogue sailor in an earlier century. The one incongruous note to his appearance was his scholarly wire-rim spectacles. “Vince,” said Lucy, “tell us about the flood data for that area.”

“I’ve searched back as far as the records go, to the 1920s,” said Vince. “There were two episodes of catastrophic flooding: in the spring of 1946, and then again, this past spring, when the Locust River overflowed its banks. I assume that’s how this burial site became exposed.

Erosion of the Meegawki streambed due to heavy rain.”

“So we have two recorded periods of site saturation, followed by drier years, which have caused this flaking and peeling of cortical bone.” Lucy set down the tibia and picked up the femur. “And now for the most interesting finding of all.

I’m referring to this gash here, on the back of the femoral shaft. It looks like a cut mark, but the bone is so badly weathered, the gash has lost its definition. So we can’t tell if there’s been a green bone response.” She noticed Lincoln’s questioning look. “A green bone response is what happens when living bone bends or twists while being stabbed. It tells you whether the bone was cut postmortem or antemortem.”

“And you can’t tell from this bone?”

“No. It’s been exposed too long to the elements.”

“So how can you determine if this was a homicide?”

“We have to turn our attention to the other bones. And here we’ll find your answer.” She reached for a small paper bag. Tipping it sideways, she emptied the contents on the table.

Small bones clattered out like gray dice.

“The carpals,” she said. “These are from the right hand. Carpals are quite dense-they don’t disintegrate as quickly as other bones. These were found buried deep and packed in a dense clump of clay, which further preserved them.” She began to shuffle through the carpals like a seamstress searching for just the right button. “Here,” she said, choosing one pebble and holding it up to the light.

The gash was immediately apparent, and so deep it had nearly cleaved the bone in two.

“This is a defense injury,” said Lucy. “This child-let’s call her a girl-raised her arms to defend herself against her attacker. The blade stabbed her in the hand-deeply enough to almost split the carpal bone. The girl is only eight or nine and rather small in stature, so she can hardly fight back. And whoever plunged that knife in is quite strong-strong enough to stab right through her hand.

“The girl turns. Maybe the blade is still lodged in her flesh, or maybe the attacker has pulled it out and is preparing to stab again. The girl would try to run away, but she is pursued. Then she stumbles, or brings her down, and she falls to the ground, prone. I assume it’s prone, because there are cut marks on the thoracic vertebrae, a broad blade, possibly a hatchet, sinking in from behind. There is also the cut mark in the femur-a blow to the back of the thigh, which means she’s lying on the ground now. None of these injuries are necessarily fatal. If she is still alive, she’s bleeding heavily. What happens next, we don’t know, because the bones don’t tell us. What we do know is that she is lying face down on the ground and she can’t run, she can’t defend herself. And someone has just sunk a hatchet or an ax into her thigh.” Gently she placed the carpal bone on the table. It was only the size of a pebble, the broken remnant of a terrible death. “That’s what these bones tell me.”

For a moment no one spoke. Then Claire said, softly: “What happened to the other child?”

Lucy seemed to rouse herself from a trance, and she looked at the second skull.

“This was a child of similar age. Many of its bones are missing, and those we do have are severely weathered, but I can tell you this much: he-or she-suffered a crushing and probably fatal blow to the skull. These two children were buried together, in the same coffin. I suspect they died during the same attack.”

“There must be records of it,” said Lincoln. “Some old news account of who these children were.”

“As a matter of fact, we do know their names.” It was Vince talking, the ponytailed grad student. “Because of the date on a coin found in the same soil stratum, we knew their deaths occurred sometime after 1885. I searched the county deed records and learned that a family by the name of Gow owned that entire tract of land extending along the southern curve of Locust Lake. These bones are the mortal remains of Joseph and Jennie Gow, siblings, ages eight and ten.” Vince gave a sheepish grin. “It seems that what we’ve dug up here, folks, is the Gow family cemetery.”

This revelation did not strike Claire as a particularly humorous revelation, and she was disturbed by the fact several of the students laughed.

“Because it was a coffin burial,” explained Lucy, “we suspected this might be a family cemetery. I’m afraid we’ve disturbed their final resting place.”

“Then you know how these children died?” asked Claire. “News accounts are hard to come by, because that particular area was sparsely populated at the time,” said Vince. “What we do have available are the county death records. The Gow children’s deaths were both recorded on the same day: November fifteenth, 1887. Along with the deaths of three other members of their family”

There was a moment of horrified silence.

“Are you saying all five people died on the same day?” asked Claire. Vince nodded. “It appears this family was massacred.”