“The terrain was moderately wooded, all new growth,” answered Lucy. “We did find iron nails and fragments of the coffin, but the wood was mostly rotted away”

“And the soil?” a male student asked.

“Clay, moderately saturated. Why do you ask?”

“A high clay content helps preserve remains.”

“Correct. What other factors affect the preservation of remains?" Lucy glanced around the table. Her students responded with an eager ness that struck Claire as almost unseemly. They were so focused on mineralized remains, they had forgotten what these bones represented. Living, laughing children.

“Soil compaction-moisture-” “Ambient temperature.”

“Carnivores.”

“Depth of burial. Whether it’s exposed to sunlight.”

“The age at time of death.”

Lucy’s gaze shot to the student who’d spoken. It was the young Lucy clone, also dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt. “How does the deceased’s age affect the bony remains?”

“The skulls of young adults remain intact longer than skulls of elderly people, perhaps because of heavier mineralization.”

“That doesn’t tell me how long these particular skeletons have been lying in the ground. When did these individuals die?”

There was silence.

Lucy did not seem disappointed by their lack of response. “The correct answer,” she said, “is: We can’t tell. After a hundred years, some skeletons may crumble to dust, while others will show almost no weathering. But we can still draw a number of conclusions.” She reached across the table and picked up a tibia.

“Note the flaking and peeling in some of the long bones, where circumferential lamellar bone has natural cleavage lines. What does this indicate to you?”

“Changing wet and dry periods,” said the Lucy clone.

“Right. These remains were temporarily protected by the coffin. But then the coffin rotted, and the bones were exposed to water, especially near that streambed.” She glanced at a young man Claire recognized as one of the grad students who’d helped excavate the site. With his long blond hair tied back in a ponytail, and three gold earrings in one ear, he could easily have passed for a rogue sailor in an earlier century. The one incongruous note to his appearance was his scholarly wire-rim spectacles. “Vince,” said Lucy, “tell us about the flood data for that area.”

“I’ve searched back as far as the records go, to the 1920s,” said Vince. “There were two episodes of catastrophic flooding: in the spring of 1946, and then again, this past spring, when the Locust River overflowed its banks. I assume that’s how this burial site became exposed.

Erosion of the Meegawki streambed due to heavy rain.”

“So we have two recorded periods of site saturation, followed by drier years, which have caused this flaking and peeling of cortical bone.” Lucy set down the tibia and picked up the femur. “And now for the most interesting finding of all.

I’m referring to this gash here, on the back of the femoral shaft. It looks like a cut mark, but the bone is so badly weathered, the gash has lost its definition. So we can’t tell if there’s been a green bone response.” She noticed Lincoln’s questioning look. “A green bone response is what happens when living bone bends or twists while being stabbed. It tells you whether the bone was cut postmortem or antemortem.”

“And you can’t tell from this bone?”

“No. It’s been exposed too long to the elements.”

“So how can you determine if this was a homicide?”

“We have to turn our attention to the other bones. And here we’ll find your answer.” She reached for a small paper bag. Tipping it sideways, she emptied the contents on the table.

Small bones clattered out like gray dice.

“The carpals,” she said. “These are from the right hand. Carpals are quite dense-they don’t disintegrate as quickly as other bones. These were found buried deep and packed in a dense clump of clay, which further preserved them.” She began to shuffle through the carpals like a seamstress searching for just the right button. “Here,” she said, choosing one pebble and holding it up to the light.

The gash was immediately apparent, and so deep it had nearly cleaved the bone in two.

“This is a defense injury,” said Lucy. “This child-let’s call her a girl-raised her arms to defend herself against her attacker. The blade stabbed her in the hand-deeply enough to almost split the carpal bone. The girl is only eight or nine and rather small in stature, so she can hardly fight back. And whoever plunged that knife in is quite strong-strong enough to stab right through her hand.

“The girl turns. Maybe the blade is still lodged in her flesh, or maybe the attacker has pulled it out and is preparing to stab again. The girl would try to run away, but she is pursued. Then she stumbles, or brings her down, and she falls to the ground, prone. I assume it’s prone, because there are cut marks on the thoracic vertebrae, a broad blade, possibly a hatchet, sinking in from behind. There is also the cut mark in the femur-a blow to the back of the thigh, which means she’s lying on the ground now. None of these injuries are necessarily fatal. If she is still alive, she’s bleeding heavily. What happens next, we don’t know, because the bones don’t tell us. What we do know is that she is lying face down on the ground and she can’t run, she can’t defend herself. And someone has just sunk a hatchet or an ax into her thigh.” Gently she placed the carpal bone on the table. It was only the size of a pebble, the broken remnant of a terrible death. “That’s what these bones tell me.”

For a moment no one spoke. Then Claire said, softly: “What happened to the other child?”

Lucy seemed to rouse herself from a trance, and she looked at the second skull.

“This was a child of similar age. Many of its bones are missing, and those we do have are severely weathered, but I can tell you this much: he-or she-suffered a crushing and probably fatal blow to the skull. These two children were buried together, in the same coffin. I suspect they died during the same attack.”

“There must be records of it,” said Lincoln. “Some old news account of who these children were.”

“As a matter of fact, we do know their names.” It was Vince talking, the ponytailed grad student. “Because of the date on a coin found in the same soil stratum, we knew their deaths occurred sometime after 1885. I searched the county deed records and learned that a family by the name of Gow owned that entire tract of land extending along the southern curve of Locust Lake. These bones are the mortal remains of Joseph and Jennie Gow, siblings, ages eight and ten.” Vince gave a sheepish grin. “It seems that what we’ve dug up here, folks, is the Gow family cemetery.”

This revelation did not strike Claire as a particularly humorous revelation, and she was disturbed by the fact several of the students laughed.

“Because it was a coffin burial,” explained Lucy, “we suspected this might be a family cemetery. I’m afraid we’ve disturbed their final resting place.”

“Then you know how these children died?” asked Claire. “News accounts are hard to come by, because that particular area was sparsely populated at the time,” said Vince. “What we do have available are the county death records. The Gow children’s deaths were both recorded on the same day: November fifteenth, 1887. Along with the deaths of three other members of their family”

There was a moment of horrified silence.

“Are you saying all five people died on the same day?” asked Claire. Vince nodded. “It appears this family was massacred.”