“What,” I scoffed, “you’re gonna meditate him into submission?” Tyler was a recent and enthusiastic convert to yoga, for reasons I didn’t fully grasp. “Weren’t you an athlete—a real athlete—once upon a time? Weight lifting or shot putting or some such? One of those manly sports dominated by hulking women from East Germany?”
“Hammer throw,” he said. “The ultimate test of strength and coordination. But by the way, there is no East Germany. The wall came down three years ago, in ’89, remember? ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall?’ Ronald Reagan’s finest moment. You’re showing your age, Dr. B.”
Summoning up my reediest old-man voice, I piped, “Back when I was a boy . . .”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “Save it for the undergrads, Gramps.”
Was he just kidding, or was there a slight edge in his voice? Worse, was there a kernel of truth in his jab? Was I fossilizing even before I turned forty?
Time was much on my mind these days. Time since death was foremost in my thoughts. But time before death—my time; my sense of urgency about creating a research program to fill the gaps in my knowledge—that, too, was tugging at the sleeve of my mind.
“HANG ON A SECOND, Doc, I’m fixin’ to put you on speakerphone,” drawled Sheriff Cotterell. I had swum back across the sweltering sea of asphalt to the stadium just in time to catch the call. “Bubba Hardknot’s a-settin’ right here with me, and I know he’ll want to hear whatever you got to say.”
I heard a click, then a hollow, echoing sound, as if the phone had been lowered down a well. “Hey, Doc,” Meffert’s voice boomed, from deep in the depths. “Whatcha got for us?”
“Not much, I’m afraid,” I admitted. “I’ll send you both a written report in the next couple days, but here’s the bottom line. No skeletal trauma, so the bones can’t tell us how she died. All they can tell us is a little about who she was. White female; stature between five foot one and five foot three; age thirteen to fifteen. I estimated the age by looking at the pelvis, the teeth, the epiphyses of the long bones and clavicles, the—”
“Excuse me, Doc,” Meffert interrupted, “the what-ih-sees?”
“Epiphyses,” I repeated. “The ends of the bones. In subadults—children and adolescents—the ends of the long bones haven’t yet fused to the shafts; they’re connected by cartilage, at what’s called the growth plates. That’s how the arms and legs can grow so much when kids hit puberty. Toward the end of puberty, the epiphyses fuse, and the long bones don’t get any longer; you don’t get any taller. This girl’s epiphyses weren’t fully fused yet, so she hadn’t quite finished growing. She had her second molars—her twelve-year molars—so she was probably at least that old. And her pelvic structure had started getting wider, so we know she’d entered puberty. But her hips were still getting wider, so she wasn’t out of it yet.”
“How can you tell that?” asked Cotterell.
“Good question, Sheriff. There’s actually an epiphysis on the outer edge of each hip bone, too—it’s called the iliac crest, and all through puberty, the iliac crest is connected to the ilium—the wide bone of the hip—by cartilage. It’s another growth plate. Somewhere around age sixteen or eighteen, the iliac crest fuses. After that, the hips don’t get any wider.”
I heard a rumbling growl, which even over the speakerphone I recognized as Sheriff Cotterell’s laugh. “Doc,” he chuckled, “you ain’t never seen my wife.”
“Let me rephrase that,” I said. “After that, the bones of the hips don’t get any wider.”
“What else you got?” said Meffert. “You hear back from your buddy in Forestry?”
“I did. That little black locust seedling was two years old. So she’s been dead at least that long.”
“And no more’n how long?” asked the sheriff.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Nothing in the bones to tell us. When did that wildcat mine shut down?”
“Twenty-two years ago,” said Meffert. “In 1970.”
“Then she died somewhere between two years ago and twenty-two years ago,” I said.
“Twenty years? That’s as close as we can nail it?” The frustration in the sheriff’s voice was crystal clear, even though he was forty miles away.
“I’m afraid so, Sheriff. I wish I had more for you, but I don’t. We need better tools and techniques for determining time since death.”
“Got that right,” he said. I was glad he and Meffert weren’t there to see my face redden once more.
CHAPTER 4
Satterfield