The dirt was soft and the work went quickly—“summertime, and the diggin’ is easy,” I heard myself singing—and before long I felt the tip of the trowel contact something hard. Probing gently for the object’s boundaries, I found that it was large and round, and a few minutes later, I was looking at the top of a cranial vault, stained a dull grayish brown from two centuries in the prairie soil. I used the trowel to lift powdery triangles of soil from around the skull, and then switched to an artist’s brush to dust the skull itself.
The skull was that of a young adult male, large and robust, with a heavy brow ridge and prominent muscle markings. The left side of the skull had been crushed. By what, I wondered: a horse’s hoof? a cavalry soldier’s rifle butt? a Sioux war club? Reaching down, I touched the skull gently, tracing the edges of the gaping hole, brushing the intact bone surrounding it. As my fingers grazed the forehead, they encountered an unexpected roughness in what should have been smooth bone. Brushing away more dirt, I leaned down to inspect the forehead. In a crude arc from one side to the other, the forehead bore the jagged, ragged cut marks of a hasty scalping. A foe, probably a Sioux warrior, had sliced through the front of the scalp and then given the hair a hard yank, peeling the hair and skin backward, off the top of the head, and all the way down to the back of the neck. If the Sioux brave had survived the battle, he would have displayed the scalp triumphantly, boasting of his prowess, when it came time to count coup and tally the number of Arikara they’d killed.
In my mind’s eye, I pictured the triumphant Sioux warrior, and then, in my imagination, I became the triumphant Sioux warrior. And at that moment—when the boundary between past and present, between South Dakota and north Florida, between reality and magic, turned shimmery and elusive and impossible to pin down—sleep finally caught up with me.
Or so I assume, because the next thing I knew, my cell phone was warbling to tell me that it was 5:30 A.M., and the rattling, musty air conditioner was reminding me emphatically that I was in bungalow number three at the Twilight Motor Court. And the Twilight was neither dream nor vision.
Chapter 22
Day was breaking—oozing up out of the steamy ground of the panhandle, more like it—as we approached the turnoff to the reform school. The eastern sky was turning a watery gray, and by that hint of light, I saw the hulking yellow shape beside the highway. “Looks like maybe somebody up there likes us,” I said. Pulling ahead of the gear-laden trailer, we led the way down the blacktop to the school.
Then, as we neared the faint turnoff of the dirt road that led past the cemetery and beyond, to the unmarked graves, I saw the strobing blue lights of a Miccosukee County sheriff’s car blocking the lane. “Somebody up there might like us,” muttered Vickery, “but somebody down here definitely doesn’t.”
Angie pulled alongside the cruiser, and Vickery got out to confer with the deputy. He returned a moment later, his cell phone at his ear. “There’s good news and bad news,” he reported as he snapped the phone closed.
“What’s the good news?” asked Angie.
“The good news is, Sheriff Judson is on his way out here.”
She made a face. “That’s the good news? What the hell is the bad news?”
“The bad news is, I might have to arrest him.”
“Ouch,” said Angie. “That could be ugly.”
“Maybe I won’t have to. Riordan’s on his way out here, too.”
The sheriff arrived first, parking his truck behind us with his strobes and his spotlights on us full force, as if we were suspects. He got out and approached the Suburban, his silhouette casting an immense shadow. Vickery drew a deep breath. “Showtime. Or showdown, more like. Y’all mind coming with me for moral support? Or to witness my demise? You can tell people I died bravely.” Our doors opened in unison; they closed in unison.
“Morning, Sheriff,” said Vickery. The sheriff made no answer, so Vickery went on. “We’re anxious to get back to our crime-scene search, since you’d like us to complete it today. Any particular reason your deputy is blocking the access road?”
“Doesn’t look like you’re here to search a crime scene,” said the sheriff. He pointed at the flatbed trailer and the massive machine it carried. “Looks like you’re here to build a damn highway.”
Just then the silver Lexus arrived, and Riordan joined our conclave. He wasted no time with pleasantries. “What’s the problem, Sheriff?”
“Problem is, I say you can have a day to dig up a few old bones, and you-all want to come in here and start cutting roads. That’s not the deal we had.”
“We’re not cutting roads, Sheriff.”
“Then why you bringing in the goddamn road-cutting machinery?”
Riordan turned to me. “Dr. Brockton, would you explain why we need the equipment?”
“Of course. Sheriff, the problem is, we’ve got an area half the size of a football field to search for more graves. We could probe and excavate the whole area by hand, but that would take days, maybe even weeks. Using this road scraper, we can peel back the vegetation and the top layer of soil, so we can see areas underneath where the ground’s been disturbed. When we find those, we know where to check for more bones.”
The sheriff stared at me, then at Riordan. Finally he shook his head. “No.”