“Pru, what do you say?” he murmured. “Could you show me around the site a little?”
“You mean right now, this minute?” she asked. “Please” – she inclined her head toward Adrian, who showed no sign of approaching this close, and cathedraled her fingers in front of her chest – “say yes.”
“Yes,” Gideon said, smiling. “Adrian’s not going to notice.”
“That’s for sure. Julie, you want to come too?”
“What? No, I think I’ll give it a skip. Actually, I find what he’s saying pretty interesting.”
“That’s because you’re the only one here who hasn’t heard it before. ”
Corbin, protected from the sun by a floppy, broad-brimmed hat that was tied under his chin, was standing nearby. She tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, Corb, I’m going to show Gideon around the site down there. Wanna come?”
He turned. “What is there to see? It’s not there anymore.”
“Well, you know, just give him some idea of where stuff was, that kind of thing. Come on, you were the assistant director, you should be the one to give the tour.”
Corbin’s lips pursed. “What I was, was the chief deputy director.”
“Whatever. Come on already, you’ve heard this crap from Adrian a million times.”
“Adrian is a very great archaeologist,” Corbin said reprovingly. “He’s always worth listening to.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Pru. “Come on, Chief Deputy Director, let’s get a move on.”
Corbin glanced with something like amused resignation at Gideon – What can you do with a woman like this? – and said, “Very well,” with a put-upon but amicable sigh, and led the way.
Julie touched Gideon’s arm as he followed. “Be careful,” she whispered. “Watch your step. Pay attention when you’re climbing around. Don’t stargaze.”
“How can I? No stars.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes, I know what you mean. Don’t worry, I’ll be careful. I promise not to fall off.”
“Now where have I heard that before?”
With the path to the cave blocked by debris from the most recent landslide, getting to it required slipping under a “Danger – Do Not Cross” ribbon, clambering over some broken stone walls, and negotiating the rough earthen fill, most of which was covered with a slippery, uneven mat of ground cover. Pru, in jeans and wearing cowboy boots with heels that dug in, managed it easily, but Gideon, in Rock-port joggers, and Corbin, wearing brown oxfords, had to slip-slide their way down to the relatively level ledgelike area that was almost at the bottom. Once there, Gideon could see the cave, which had been invisible from above; a cavern perhaps fifty feet wide and, in the parts that hadn’t been obstructed by the recent landslide, about twenty feet deep.
“So this is it,” he said with the near-mystical pleasure he always felt at times like this: Here, where I stand right now, on this rocky ledge, on this very spot, Neanderthal creatures – almost but not quite humans – once worked, and played, and went about their lives. On the cave ceiling, toward the rear, he could make out the sooty smudges from their fires, still plainly visible after 24,000 years.
“What’s left of it,” Corbin said. “Well, let me give you the two-bit tour.” He walked them up and down the ledge, explaining the excavation strategies they’d resorted to (rock shelters were trickier than ordinary digs on open land), what kind of grid system they’d used, where they’d found various materials: a firepot over here, a couple of Mousterian tools over there.
“Where was the First Family burial?” Gideon asked. Corbin, dyed-in-the-wool archaeologist that he was, was deep in his analysis of the stone tool technology, and it looked as if it might be a while before he got around to the human remains.
“Unfortunately, you can’t see it anymore,” said Pru. “It was in a crevice about a foot off the floor of the cave, over there, under all that mess.” She pointed at an area to the right, where the overhang had come down altogether, so that it was no longer a rock shelter at all.
“We lost about half the cave in the landslide,” Corbin said. “There was another fifteen meters of it right there, but that’s where the worst of it hit. Unfortunately, it was where most of the important finds were made. What a shame to see it covered over like that; such an important site.”
“Well, I gather they’re planning to dig it out again for visitors,” Pru said.
“Good luck,” Gideon murmured, looking at the mass of earth in front of him. “That’s a lot of dirt.” It was as if one of those monstrous, three-story-tall earth-moving machines had been excavating some vast crater somewhere up above, and had dumped its huge bucket down here time after time, with the express purpose of burying the rock shelter. The enormous pile of soil, now pocked with struggling vegetation, completely plugged up any access to this part of the cave.
“What are those, do you know?” he asked, pointing at an unlikely row of a half dozen evenly spaced holes dug into the base of the pile. Five were deep but relatively small; about four feet in diameter. The fifth, the last one in the row, was big, a good ten feet in diameter and ten feet deep. All had been made some time ago, their margins no longer sharp-edged. And all had been dug with tools, not naturally formed; the piles of backfill lay all around them.
Before the question was out of his mouth, he realized what they were. “Is this where they dug Sheila Chan out?”
Pru responded with a somber nod. “Yes.”
“Interestingly,” said Corbin, “they do it the way we might do test-trenching. The smaller holes, those were a uniformly spaced series of exploratory probes. The deep one-”
“Is where they found her,” Gideon said.
“Yes,” Pru said again. “I was here. Well, not down here, but up above, with some of the others. I stayed the whole dreary, cold, rainy miserable day. You were there most of the time too, weren’t you, Corb?”
“I was. I felt as if it was my… responsibility, as if I owed it to her somehow. I suppose I hoped, in some obscure way, that, by being there, by simply assuming they would find her, that somehow-” He finished with a shrug.
“You understand, Gideon,” Pru said, “at that point we thought – we hoped – she still might be alive.”
“Ah,” said Gideon. He had gone up to the largest hole and was fingering its weathered margins. He picked up a chunk of backfill from it and broke it easily apart with his hands. A mixture of claylike earth with a little humus and some gravelly rock fragments mixed in. Pretty ordinary soil, in other words. But something about it had started the gears of his mind turning. Something gnawed at him, just out of reach…
“But of course, she wasn’t,” Corbin said gravely. “She was buried so very deeply. In fact, they were about to go on to dig the next probe when someone spotted her outstretched fingertips just coming through the dirt, way down in the hole.”
“Me,” Pru said. “I spotted her.”
“How deep in the hole?” Gideon asked. Why he wanted to know he wasn’t sure, but there was something… something…
“Pretty deep,” Pru said, “and even then it was only her fingers we could see. The rest of her was much deeper, probably eight or ten feet down, so of course there was no chance.”
Gideon rubbed his palms together to get the dirt off them. A gritty residue remained. “Do you happen to know what the cause of death was?”
Pru looked strangely at him. “Offhand, I’d say that having had a hundred tons of dirt come down on her might have had something to do with it.”
“No, I mean the actual cause of death, the immediate cause. Asphyxiation? Brain injury? Crushing chest injuries?”