Bloodstream

“I’m not going to turn into some perfect preppie just because you drag me up to the woods,” he said. “I can mess things up just as good right here. So we might as well go back.”

She pulled into their driveway and turned to face him. “Messing up is not going to get you back to Baltimore. Either you get your life together or you don’t.

It’s your choice.”

“When is anything my choice?”

“You have lots of choices. And from now on, I want you to make the right ones.”

“You mean the ones you want.” He jumped out of the truck.

“Noah. Noah!”

“Just leave me alone!” he yelled. He slammed the door shut and stalked off to the house.

She didn’t follow him. She just sat clutching the steering wheel, too tired and upset at that moment to deal with him. Abruptly she shifted into reverse and backed out of the driveway. They both needed time to cool down, to get their emotions under control. She turned onto Toddy Point Road and headed along the shore of Locust Lake. Driving as therapy.

How easy it had all seemed when Peter was alive, when one of his cross-eyed looks was all that was needed to make their son laugh. The days when they were still happy, still whole.

We haven’t been happy since you died, Peter I miss you. I miss you every day, every hour Every minute of my life.

The lights from lakeside cottages shimmered through her tears as she drove. She rounded the curve, drove past the Boulders, and suddenly the lights were no longer white but blue, and they seemed to be dancing among the trees.

It was a police cruiser, and it was parked on Rachel Sorkin’s property.

She pulled to a stop in the driveway. Three vehicles were in the front yard, two police cruisers and a white van. A Maine state trooper was talking to Rachel on the porch. Beneath the trees, flashlight beams zigzagged across the ground.

Claire spotted Lincoln Kelly emerging from the woods. It was his silhouette she recognized as he passed before one of the searchlights. Though not a tall man, Lincoln was straight and solid and he moved with a quiet assuredness that made him seem larger than he was. He stopped to speak to the state trooper, then he noticed Claire and crossed the yard to her truck.

She rolled down the window. “Have you found any more bones?” she asked.

He leaned in, bringing with him the scent of the forest. Pine trees and earth and wood smoke. “Yep. The dogs led us over to the stream-bed,” he said. “That bank eroded pretty badly this spring, after all those floods. That’s what uncovered the bones. But I’m afraid wild animals have already scattered most of them in the woods.”

“Does the ME think it’s a homicide?”

“It’s no longer an ME’s case. The bones are too old. There’s a forensic anthropologist in charge now, if you’d like to talk to her. Name’s Dr.

Overlock.”

He opened the truck door and Claire climbed out. Together they walked into the gloom of the woods. Dusk had rapidly thickened to night. The ground was uneven, layered with dead leaves, and she found herself stumbling in the underbrush.

Lincoln reached out to steady her. He seemed to have no trouble navigating in the darkness, his heavy boots co

Lights were shining among the trees, and Claire heard voices and the sound of trickling water. She and Lincoln emerged from the woods, onto the stream bank. A section of the eroded bank had been cordoned off by police tape strung between stakes, and on a tarp lay the mud-encrusted bones that had already been unearthed. Claire recognized a tibia and what looked like fragments of a pelvis.

Two men wearing waders and headlamps stood knee-deep in the stream, gingerly excavating the side of the bank.

Lucy Overlock was standing among the trees talking on a cell phone. She was like a tree herself, tall and strapping, dressed in a woodsman’s wardrobe of jeans and work boots. Her hair, almost entirely gray, was tied back in a tight, no-nonsense ponytail. She saw Lincoln, gave a harassed wave, and continued with her phone conversation. no artifacts yet, just the skeletal remains. But I assure you, this burial doesn’t fall under NAGPRA. The skull looks Caucasoid to me, not Indian. What do you mean, how can I tell? It’s obvious! The brain-case is too narrow, and the facial breadth just isn’t wide enough. No, of course it’s not absolute. But the site is on Locust Lake, and there’s never been a Penobscot settlement here. The tribe wouldn’t even fish in this lake, it’s such a taboo place.” She looked up at the sky and shook her head. “Certainly, you can examine the bones for yourself. But we have to excavate this site now, before the animals do any more damage, or we’ll lose the whole thing.” She hung up and looked at Lincoln in frustration. “Custody battle.”

“Over bones?”

“It’s that NAGPRA law. Indian graves protection. Every time we find remains, the tribes demand one hundred percent confirmation it’s not one of theirs.

Ninety-five percent isn’t good enough for them.” Her gaze turned to Claire, who’d stepped forward to introduce herself.

“Lucy Overlock,” said Lincoln. “And this is Claire Elliot. The doctor who found the thigh bone.”

The two women shook hands, the no-nonsense greeting of two medical professionals meeting over a grim business.

“We’re lucky you’re the one who spotted the bone,” said Lucy. “Anyone else might not have realized it was human.”

“To be honest, I wasn’t entirely sure,” said Claire. “I’m glad I didn’t drag everyone out here for a cow bone.”

“It’s definitely not a cow”

One of the diggers called out from the streambed: “We found something else.”

Lucy dropped knee-deep into the stream and aimed a flashlight at the exposed bank.

“There,” said the digger, gently prodding the soil with a trowel. “Looks like it might be another skull.”

Lucy snapped on gloves. “Okay, let’s ease it out.”

He slid the tip of his trowel deeper into the bank and gingerly pried away caked mud. The object dropped into Lucy’s gloved hands. She scrambled out of the water and up onto the bank. Kneeling down, she surveyed her treasure over the tarp.

It was indeed a second skull. Under the floodlight, Lucy carefully turned it over and examined the teeth.

“Another juvenile. No wisdom teeth,” Lucy noted. “I see decayed molars here and here, but no fillings.”

“Meaning no dental work,” said Claire.

“Yes, these are old bones. A good thing for you, Lincoln. Otherwise, this would be an active homicide case.”

“Why do you say that?”

She rotated the skull, and the light fell on the crown, where fracture lines radiated out from a central depression, the way a soft-boiled egg cracks when it is struck with the back of a spoon.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt,” she said. “This child died a violent death.”

The chirp of a beeper cut through the silence, startling them all. In the stillness of those woods, that electronic sound was strangely foreign.

Disconcerting. Both Claire and Lincoln automatically reached for their respective pagers.

“It’s mine,” said Lincoln, glancing at his readout. Without another word, he took off through the woods toward his cruiser. Seconds later, Claire saw the dome light flashing through the trees as his vehicle streaked away.

“Must be an emergency,” said Lucy.

Officer Pete Sparks was already at the scene, trying to talk old Vein Fuller into putting down his shotgun. Night had fallen, and Lincoln’s first glimpse of the situation was of two wildly gesturing silhouettes intermittently backlit by the flashing dome light of Pete’s cruiser. Lin coin pulled to a stop in Vern’s driveway and cautiously stepped out of his vehicle. He heard bleating sheep, the restless clucking of chickens. The sounds of a working farm.

“You don’t need the gun,” Pete was saying. “Just go back in the house, Vern, and we’ll look into this.”