Dead Man's Bones Read online

  Of course, it was this methodical fact-based brainwork that made me a good attorney, and when I was young and foolish, I worked as a criminal defense lawyer in Houston, for a large firm that mostly represented the bigger bad guys, the ones with bucks. Then I grew older and smarter and thoroughly sick of the fast track and the Houston rat pack. I cashed in my retirement, scraped together my savings, and invested everything in the Thyme and Seasons herb shop, at 304 Crockett Street in Pecan Springs. The century-old limestone building houses my shop, Ruby’s Crystal Cave (the only New Age shop in town), and, in the back, our tearoom.

  Two years ago last month, I married Mike McQuaid, a former Houston homicide detective. It was a two-for-one package deal, since McQuaid’s son Brian, now fourteen, was included. The three of us are living happily ever after (well, mostly) in a big white Victorian house on Lime Kiln Road—the one with the rosemary bushes along the fence and the grumpy old basset hound asleep on the porch step.

  There’s a great deal more to tell about both Ruby and me, of course, but that’s enough to get you started. Anyway, Big Mama’s gotten us where we needed to go, and it’s time to unload her.

  The Merrill Obermann Community Theater is located on the outskirts of Pecan Springs, in what used to be a large stone stable at the rear of the old Obermann mansion, a sprawling Victorian, badly maintained and with a sadly overgrown yard and garden. The two-story stable, big enough to house the dozen horses that belonged to the family in the 1920s and ’30s, is a wonderful example of the architectural use of locally quarried limestone, the sort of building you frequently see in Pecan Springs or Fredericksburg or New Braunfels. Last year, the Obermann sisters, the last survivors of a wealthy family of philanthropists, donated the stable, several acres of adjacent property, and the funds for renovation to the Pecan Springs Community Theater Association—a generous gift that created more than a ripple of interest around town.

  The first production in the new theater—A Man for All Reasons, written by the elder Miss Obermann—was scheduled to open a three-weekend run next Friday night, so the landscaping needed to look presentable by that time. Mama was toting five or six dozen pots of perennial herbs: rosemary, cassia, lavender, santolina, various salvias, bee balm, artemisia, and tansy, with thyme, southernwood, and creeping germander for borders and blooming marigolds and chrysanthemums for color. It would have been nice to have gotten the plants established earlier, but in Texas, October planting has a higher success rate. Anyway, nobody thought of it. The Theater Association was too busy managing the renovations and getting the play into production, both of which proved to be almost undoable jobs. Landscaping was a low priority, until somebody noticed how bare the place looked and pushed the panic button.

  “There, that’s done,” Ruby said, as we pulled out the last five-gallon rosemary plant and stashed it with the others, ready for the next day’s garden-planting party. She dusted off her overalls and pushed a floppy red curl out of her eyes. “What’s next?”

  “You have a choice,” I replied, opening Mama’s door. “I can take you home, where you can spend the evening practicing your lines.” Ruby has the female lead in A Man for All Reasons. “Or you can drive out to the Flower Farm with me to pick up Brian and then come home and have dinner with us. McQuaid’s cooking tonight, so I can’t promise anything more exotic than Tex Mex. But it’ll be hot, whatever it is. As in spicy.” McQuaid has asbestos tonsils, and habanero chile powder—produced from the habanero chiles he grows himself—which is his favorite seasoning.

  “I’ll take a rain check,” Ruby said, as she climbed into the van. She grinned. “Nothing against McQuaid’s cooking, though.” The grin got wider, happier. “Colin called just before we left. I’m having dinner with him tonight.”

  I turned on the ignition and started the van. Ruby started seeing a new guy a few weeks ago, and I was glad. She’s an attractive woman with a dynamite personality, a generous helping of brains, and a warmly compassionate nature. Unfortunately, she has been blighted in love. Her erstwhile husband ran off with a young woman half his age, and several men with whom she’s been temporarily enraptured have proved, on closer acquaintance, to be jerks. Somehow, her intuitive self seems to wear a blindfold when it comes to men—well, certain men. The ones she falls in love with.

  Recognizing her perilous propensity for choosing the Wrong Guy, Ruby went into a self-imposed retirement awhile back, to get her act together, as she put it. Colin Fowler is the first guy she’s dated for quite some time. Tall and athletic, with reddish-brown hair and regular features, he’s nice-looking, in a comfortable, Kevin Costner, guy-next-door way. He moved to Pecan Springs a few months ago and opened a new store on the square, Good Earth Goods, which sells environmentally friendly household stuff, pet products, energy-efficient lighting, pest control, that sort of thing. I’ve been in the shop a couple of times and I’ve glimpsed him around town. He’s not a standout—he doesn’t have a memorable face—but he’s definitely attractive. I can see why Ruby is interested.

  “So I have to get home and do my hair and nails.” Ruby regarded her hands disapprovingly. “I chipped one when we were unloading those plants.”

  Since Ruby’s manicured nails, even chipped and broken, are far more sightly than my stubby, grubby ones, I didn’t comment. I shifted into third gear and remarked, “I hope you and Colin have a good time tonight.”

  “So do I,” Ruby said, with a fierce energy I hadn’t heard in a while.

  I turned to look at her. “Already?” I asked, trying not to show my alarm. Ruby has been known to fall in love with passionate abandon at a moment’s notice and with never a backward glance. From the intensity of her voice, I guessed that it was happening again, heaven help us.

  “Already,” she said with a sigh. “Although I don’t hold out much hope.”

  “Why not? Colin’s not married, is he?”

  “Oh, gosh, no,” Ruby said in a shocked tone. “I mean, he’s been married before, of course—everybody has. But they’ve been divorced for eons, and they don’t have any children.” She paused. “I don’t really know much about his past, to tell the truth. And I don’t want to. It’s just that—”

  She didn’t finish her sentence, but she didn’t have to. Both of us knew that her love affairs have mostly been painful ones. Maybe she was measuring the paradise she hoped for against the purgatory she feared, and coming up with a negative number. We pondered this matter in silence for the rest of the drive to her house. As we pulled up in front, I leaned over and patted her hand.

  “You don’t have to go completely overboard, you know, Ruby. You can date this guy without handing him the keys to your heart.”

  Ruby’s mouth looked vulnerable. Her chin was trembling. “Not Colin, I can’t,” she said, and got out of the van. “This is serious, China. Big time, I mean. Major passion.” She raised her hand. “But thanks for the suggestion. I appreciate it.”

  Feeling apprehensive, I watched her as she went up the walk to the porch. Ruby hasn’t fallen in love lately, and she was probably overdue. I don’t know whether it’s chromosomal, or situational, or just Ruby’s thing. But when love comes into her life, it comes on like gangbusters. Caution to the wind, full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes, and every woman for herself.

  I sighed and pushed in Big Mama’s clutch. This was none of my friggin’ bidness, as we say in Texas. If Ruby wants to fall in love, that’s her lookout, and I wouldn’t do anything about it, even if I could. Privacy is and has always been one of my big hot-button issues. I have to admit to a certain queasy ambivalence when it comes to criminal matters, but in general, unless there is an overwhelming reason to suspect that a law has been broken, I believe that governments have no right to pry into the private lives of citizens, and that citizens have no right to intrude on other citizens’ affairs. I resist attempted invasions of my own personal privacy. I wouldn’t invade Ruby’s unless she got herself into some sort of serious trouble and asked for my help.

  Anyway, w
hat was I worried about? What, specifically, was my problem? Was it Ruby’s speckled history, where love was concerned? Or was it Colin Fowler, about whom I knew almost nothing at all?

  I shook my head. I couldn’t answer these questions, and I had no business asking them. It was time to go on to other things.

  I was headed out to the Flower Farm, about fifteen miles south of town, where I was to pick up Brian. His latest passion is archaeology, and he’s been taking part in a cave dig that’s being carried out by the Central Texas State University Anthropology Department at Mistletoe Springs Cave, which is on Flower Farm property.

  Most of the people in my life seem not to change very much, except for my son—McQuaid’s son with his first wife, Sally (from whom Brian hears only in intermittent and incoherently passionate bursts), but now my son, as well. Brian is taller and heavier than he was just six months ago, and his body has a new authority. I can see a more confident set to his shoulders and the shadow of a mustache on his upper lip, and hear a deeper, more manly voice. Sometimes. Some of his sentences start off in that startling new man’s voice, but end in his child’s voice, and I’m reminded that the boy is moving through the between years, when he is still a bit of both.

  Cavers get dirtier than anybody else in the world, but since Brian is well on his way to becoming a scientist of one sort or another, I try not to mind. His passions are worth supporting, even when it comes to washing those unspeakable jeans or ferrying him back and forth to the dig.

  Anyway, I was enjoying the drive. October brings autumn and cooler weather to most parts of the United States, but in the Texas Hill Country, it’s the tail end of summer, no matter what the calendar says. The temperature this afternoon had spiked to a warm eighty-five. The limbs of the pecan trees were sagging under a heavy load of nuts, the prickly pear cactus sported their fruit like plump red fingers on green mittens, and the fields and roadsides blazed with sunflowers, purple asters, and snake-weed. Off to my right rose a high, steep limestone bluff; a little farther on, the same rock had been carved by eons of flashflooding into a broad ravine, shaded by sycamore and cypress. We’d had a couple of substantial tropical rains in late September, and water stood in emerald-green pools in the shade of the trees. Still farther, when I drove over the low-water crossing on Mistletoe Creek just before I reached the farm, water was spilling across the road, bright and clear and sparkling like liquid crystal. Texas Hill Country creeks are here today and gone tomorrow, but when they’re running bank-full, there’s nothing quite as beautiful.

  Mistletoe Creek Flower Farm belongs to a pair of sisters—Donna and Terry Fletcher—and their aunt Velda. Terry is in California right now (actually, she’s serving out a prison term, but that’s another story). Donna and a crew of day-workers produce a glorious three-season harvest of cut flowers—painted daisies, sunflowers, snapdragons, phlox, sweet William, and a great many more—which they sell to the florists in Austin and San Antonio, and at markets and festivals around the Hill Country.

  There’s money to be made in the flower business, even in hard times, and Donna can prove it. However, she and Aunt Velda got a big bonus awhile back, when Aunt Velda got lost and found a treasure trove in a cave on the ridge above Mistletoe Springs—booty from a bank robbery cached by the Newton boys, who made a tidy fortune raiding Texas banks in the 1920s. The gold certificates and other bills in Jess Newton’s leather saddlebags had crumbled to dust, but the gold coins were still as good as the day they were minted. Better, even, when those twenty-dollar double eagles got into the collectors’ market, with a confirmed provenance as genuine pre-Depression bank robbery loot. When all the hoorah was over, Donna and Aunt Velda had ended up with a sizeable profit from this fortunate find—about two hundred thousand dollars, enough, in fact, to fix up the barns, buy equipment, and put in a new irrigation system. Thanks to Aunt Velda, the Flower Farm is turning into a showplace.

  But it was Brian and his passion for archaeology that brought me to the farm this evening. As it happened, gold wasn’t the only thing Aunt Velda discovered in that cave. She had also found a handful of arrowheads and, when she went back later, two old skulls. Very old skulls. When the archaeologists from CTSU began to study these, and the two skeletons that turned up as they searched, they realized that they were dealing with a pair of Paleo-Indians, an adult male and a child who had lived and died on Mistletoe Creek about ten thousand years ago—a very long time, in terms of human history, just after the last major North American ice age. This was obviously a burial site, for with the pair (I can only think of them as father and son) was an array of grave offerings: seashell beads, turtle carapaces, red ocher, and a bone awl. The skeletons and artifacts had gone to CTSU for study, but the archaeological team was still conducting exploratory excavations in the cave, which is far more extensive than anybody had expected. It’s beginning to look like Mistletoe Springs Cave is the largest in the area, and it’s entirely possible that the archaeologists will find other evidence of human occupation.

  As I pulled to a stop and got out of the van, Donna, dressed in cut-offs and a plaid sleeveless blouse, came out of the barn. “Hey, China,” she said. She yanked off her red bandana sweatband and wiped her face with it. “I’m ready for a break. Join me in some iced tea while you’re waiting for Brian to come down from the cave? Aunt Velda will be glad to see you. She’s been to Mars and back since the last time you saw her.”

  I grinned. Aunt Velda is my kind of woman. She was abducted by Klingons a few years ago, and she hasn’t been the same since she got back from her grand tour of the galaxy. She was treated like royalty, she says, with a window seat for the whole trip, champagne and movies and little felt booties to keep her tootsies warm. And no dishes to wash, which is a very big point with her. The money she found in the cave was left there by the Klingons for her to discover, her reward for being such an entertaining passenger. Hey, what do I know? Maybe it’s all true. Aunt Velda is brash. She’s got plenty of chutzpah, and I imagine that the Klingons enjoyed her just as much as I do. I was anxious to hear about her round trip to Mars.

  But I didn’t get the chance. I heard a truck engine and the crunch of tires on loose gravel, and turned to see a dusty pickup lumbering around the curve of the old road. Brian jumped out of the back, gave a wave, and the truck drove off.

  “Hey, Mom,” he yelled, and ran up to us, his caver’s helmet in one hand. His face and arms were generously plastered with gray, gooey mud, and his orange UT Longhorns T-shirt and jeans were grimy. But through the mud, I could see the likeness to his father. He has the same dark hair, the same blue eyes, the same quirky grin. Except that he wasn’t grinning now. He wore a half-scared look, and his boy’s voice was scratchy and high-pitched when he said, “Hey, Mom, guess what?”

  “From the look of you, I’d guess you discovered the biggest underground mud hole in the entire state of Texas,” I replied, in an admiring tone. “Must have been a whopper.”

  “Yeah,” he said soberly. He took a breath. “Hey, listen, Mom, I found something. Something really bad!”

  Living with a teenager teaches you a great deal about the contradictory and often bewildering nuances of the English language. In your dreams, for instance, means never. Bad, I have been instructed, means good, as in cool or awesome.

  “More stone points?” I guessed, thinking about the very good ones he had already found. “A new bat roost?” In Brian’s ordering of the universe, bats rank right up there with tarantulas, lizards, snakes, and girls, and the caves of the Edwards Plateau contain some of the largest maternity roosts for bats—mostly Mexican free-tailed bats—in the entire world. It’s pure heaven for bat lovers.

  “No, really bad,” he said, shaking his head and frowning. “Really, really bad.”

  “I give up,” I said, raising and dropping my hands. “I can’t think of anything badder than bats.”

  “I found more bones,” he said seriously. “Real bones, I mean.”

  “More buffalo bones?” Donna ask
ed. That had been the big archaeological find the week before. Buffalo have been extinct around here since the U.S. Army wiped them out in order to deprive the Indians of their main source of food. But the buffalo bones found in the cave were a good deal older than the U.S. Army. Older than Moses, maybe.

  Brian shook his head again. “Human bones,” he said, even more seriously.

  “Another Indian skeleton?” Donna asked excitedly. “Hey, Brian, that’s fantastic! Aunt Velda will be so excited.”

  Aunt Velda says that the Indian bones are really the bones of Klingons, transported back through time. Watching the expression on Brian’s face, though, I didn’t think he was talking about Klingons, or another historic find. I was right.

  “He’s not an Indian,” Brian said. His mouth tightened. “At least, not an old one, like the others we found. He’s nothing but a skeleton, but he’s wearing clothes. Jeans and a shirt, it looks like.” His eyes darkened and he swallowed, a young boy confronted with the very real, intensely personal mystery of death. “Must’ve been a caver. His skull was . . .” Another swallow, his adolescent Adam’s apple bobbing. “It was smashed.”

  At that moment, another truck came down the road, pulled to a stop, and Alana Montoya, one of the anthropologists on the dig, climbed out. I met her for the first time last week, although she’s been on the CTSU faculty for a year or so. Her primary interest is forensic anthropology, although the program hasn’t gotten under way yet. Alana is an attractive woman, with alert, searching brown eyes and the dark hair and olive-brown skin of her Mexican heritage. She wasn’t quite as muddy as Brian, but almost. It looked like they’d been prospecting the same mud hole.