“Souvenir,” I said.
The edge of what had once been the crater in the ground—the border between “hole” and “not hole”—wasn’t at the surface, so I used a shovel to remove a thin layer of topsoil, beginning within the slight depression and skimming outward, beyond the rim. The shovel slid easily at first, which told me that the soil here was loose; after about a foot, though, I encountered more resistance: the resistance of packed, undisturbed earth. I lifted the shovel and looked at the swath I’d just sliced. Sure enough, closer to me, the soil appeared lighter, fluffier, and more crumbly; then—across a faint and irregular but unmistakable line—the soil was denser and darker, infused with rocks and clay that appeared to have lain undisturbed since the dawn of time.
“Okay,” I said to Miranda, “here’s the rim. How about we excavate about halfway around the circumference, then work in from the edge?”
“Whatever you say, Kemo Sabe,” she said.
“Excuse me, Dr. Kemo Sabe,” said Thornton. “Can I ask a dumb question?”
“No such thing as a dumb question,” I said.
“That’s not what the instructors at the Academy used to tell me,” he said. “Why start excavating at the edge? Why not just aim right for the bull’s-eye, which seems to be somewhere around that stump you just made?”
“If we dig straight down and there is something there, we’ll keep knocking dirt down onto it,” I said. “The sides of the hole will keep collapsing. Plus we’d be on top of the bones; we might end up breaking some of them. Coming in from the side means a little more digging—but a lot more control.”
“Ah,” he said. “Anything we can do to help you?”
“Sure,” I said. “If you don’t mind lifting buckets of dirt, you guys could haul out dirt as we excavate.”
“Sounds like something we might be able to handle,” he said.
“Arpad,” I said, “how long since you’ve used a trowel?”
“To dig up bones, or to plant tulips?”
“To dig up bones.”
“Not so long ago that I’ve forgotten the backaches,” he said. “Ten, twelve years, maybe.”
“About time you brushed up,” I said, handing him a trowel.
I was about two feet in from the rim of the crater, and about eighteen inches below the level of the leaves and twigs Miranda and I had raked off the surface, when my trowel hit something hard. Using its triangular tip, I flicked at the soil underneath what I’d hit, and as the dirt fell away from the object, I gradually made out the distal end—the elbow end—of a humerus, an upper arm bone. “Eureka!” I said, echoing Arpad’s earlier exclamation. Burrowing a bit farther, I unearthed the medial ends of the radius and ulna, the bones of the forearm. From the angle at the elbow, I could tell the arm was slightly flexed, with the hand probably somewhere in the vicinity of the hip. “This is the right arm,” I said. “He’s lying facedown. Assuming it’s a male.” I troweled away more soil, exposing the distal end of the forearm, the loose, pebbly bones of the wrist, and the carpals and metacarpals of the hand.
Emert leaned in and squinted at the stained bones. “You’re sure it’s human,” he said, “not a bear? I saw the bones of a bear’s paw once, and I’d have sworn it was a hand or a foot.”
“Well, unless these Oak Ridge bears are smart enough to tell time, I’m pretty sure it’s human,” I said, “because it’s wearing a man’s wristwatch.” With the tip of my trowel, I pointed to a disk of corroded metal hidden beneath the wrist.
“Eureka indeed,” said Thornton.
Before I even had a chance to ask her, Miranda left the spot where she’d been working and came to kneel beside me. We’d done this so many times, our teamwork was seamless, wordless, and almost telepathic. I shifted to the upper arm and began excavating toward the shoulder and head; Miranda began working her way along the hand and then down the right leg.
As I troweled my way along the shoulder and toward the area of the head, the dirt began to drop away, revealing the rounded surface of a skull. Working with only the tip of the trowel, I started teasing the soil free. Occasionally I was forced to trade the trowel for small gardening shears, so I could snip away roots that clutched at the bones.