Prologue
Moore Creek Archaeological Site Alexander County, Illinois Freddy Evans gazed at the freshly excavated set of human remains with a peculiar feeling in his stomach. It made him pull on the strap of his denim overalls as he towered over Anchee Chang, the young archaeologist who held her brush beside the bones encased in dirt with the touch of an artist.
“Something wrong?” he asked.
“We shouldn’t move anything until Dr. Moore gets here,” Anchee said, a microphone dangling from her earbud. “Dr. Moore, we need you at quadrant 14.”
The urgency in Anchee’s voice unnerved Freddy. This was his first dig. He ran a hand through his dreadlocks.
Anchee waved a small yellow pickax in the air, motioning for the archaeological site director to come over a small hill. Freddy remained transfixed by the bones. He looked at the intact skeleton sitting atop a lattice of other remains. The skull dominated the shattered ruins, as if it had been rearranged on different terms.
An arena of mud had been excavated from the valley, divided into cross sections, revealing burial mounds, rafts of skeletons, and stacks of crates and equipment. Staircases descended into pits. Ladders scaled down. The flattened quadrants of land stretched like a football field marked by dark pockets, earthen holes, and moving figures.
Everyone had shed their long sleeves with the heat. Anchee, a graduate student researcher at Southern Illinois University, had kept the floppy hat. She focused on the edge of a skull at one end, which looked like it had been cushioned by the other bones. It reminded Anchee of her first dig near her university in western China, when a flood had swept centuries of history into a gorge.
As Dr. Molly Moore trudged within sight of the quadrant, Freddy held out his hand to create a protective border to hold back a small group of curious volunteers. The constant movement at the archaeological site came to a halt.
“We haven’t touched it, Dr. Moore,” Freddy said, his voice shaking. He looked at his site director with a mix of awe and horror.
“Molly, dude, call me Molly,” she said, moving with a clear authority, and then she knelt by Freddy and Anchee. It seemed to Freddy like Molly was leading them in some sort of ritual. Both looked proud but also overwhelmed by their discovery. Crouching down, the site director pulled her reddish-blond hair into a ponytail, a red bandana dangling around her neck. Molly looked younger than her twenty-eight years. She was fit, with a freight-train metabolism that kept her on the move.
As Anchee clicked off a series of photos, Molly pulled out a thin brush from her pocket, and then started to shave away dirt from the skull and a set of teeth.
“Sandeep, we need you down here,” she said into a microphone from her cell phone, which hung from the top button of her blouse. She knew their ground-penetrating radar could examine the level of disturbances to the soil.
Freddy rose, leading the group of volunteers as he stepped away. One of the few locally hired crew—and one of the only Blacks from the nearby historic town of Cairo—he seemed more at ease with the volunteers, despite being in his early twenties.
“I’ll get another sifting screen,” he said to Molly, who nodded without saying a word, and then he walked away, taking lanky strides in his overalls.
Molly put her mouth just above the trace of the skull’s jaw bone, and then blew off a veil of dust. Using a penknife, she cut a line from the teeth across the dirt, scraping off a clump from a plant.
Her knife gently nudged the dirt until she heard a click.
“We need to get the laser scanner to map the interface,” she said, looking back at Anchee.
The graduate student pointed at Molly’s knife. Something glimmered with a metallic edge. Molly pushed the knife forward, popping out a heart-shaped locket.
Her brush grazed the locket like a goldsmith, until it caught a flicker of light.
“This sure isn’t prehistoric,” Molly whispered.
There was an eerie silence about her as she climbed up to her knees, crouching by the display of bones. She pushed away more soil.
As the locket dangled from the tip of her knife, a latch suddenly opened, revealing the remains of a faded heart-shaped photo, which had been eroded by the elements.
“Definitely not prehistoric,” she mumbled, breaking a pained smile, though it didn’t last long.
Molly didn’t want to alarm her students—or the crowd of volunteers at the site. Rumors could get passed quickly. She insisted on keeping ahold of the information in the same way she gripped the locket inside her fist.
“Back to work, folks,” Molly announced, trying her best to act casual. “We’ll let everyone know what we found once we do some tests.”
The workers in the crowd slowly dispersed, though not without a last lingering look over their shoulders at the pit. Warned by Molly to keep to the rules, everyone had resisted taking a photo, other than Anchee. All discoveries at this site remained a secret until Molly made the first public disclosure.
Within an hour, the crew’s lead technology expert, Sandeep Agarwal, had scanned Anchee’s photos of the burial site, and then projected a 3D recording of the soil, moving magically through time.
With Molly and Anchee by his side, Sandeep stood at his outdoor lab station, refusing to take a seat. His turban was plastered in dust. His lab looked more like a game center than an archaeological site. A set of scratched music speakers rested to the side, awaiting a DJ. The constant, though quiet, thump of Punjabi hip-hop, in fact, kept the beat. A canopy of tents and plastic walls protected it from wind and dust. A large grid map of the archaeological site was posted on one of the plastic walls. To the side, two more tables were covered in trays of bones and artifacts gathered from the dig.
“What do you got for me?” Molly asked.
She recruited Sandeep after she had read his academic paper on using remote sensing at a dig in his family’s native Punjabi region on the border of India and Pakistan. She promised him a potential archaeological discovery that would justify shifting his postdoctoral studies from Canada to southern Illinois.
Sandeep pointed at one of the screens, now commanded by Anchee, which displayed a map in various colors from the remote sensing scans.
“Look there,” he said.
Sandeep enlarged the image on the screen.
“Those are alterations of the soil,” Molly said, placing a finger on the screen.
“Someone was digging here long before us,” Sandeep laughed.
His sarcastic tone had a seriousness about it.
More images of the bones popped up on the other screens.
“The question is when,” Molly said quietly. “No way to know how long ago just by looking at this. Could have been a farmer ten, twenty, a hundred years ago. Maybe two hundred years ago. There’s no way of knowing at this point.”
“This whole area is strange,” Sandeep went on. “I haven’t had time to really understand it, but the radar is picking up disturbances way below this grid.”
“We’re dealing with twelve thousand years of history,” she said, “but I think it’s important to focus on the top layers of soil right now.”
“Still, these laser maps are odd,” Sandeep continued, pointing at the screen. “I need to look deeper into this area.”
“Listen, right now it’s more important that we get a sample of the bones and a mold of teeth to the FBI lab in Chicago,” Molly said, stepping away from the computer table.
“FBI? Are you joking?” Anchee said, alarmed. “What about the forensic unit right on the SIU campus? They can handle this.”
“Uncle Sam’s paying the bills on this dig,” Molly said, moving to the edge of the tent wall. “And federal protocol says he has first dibs on anything that might be considered fresh bones.”
She lifted up one of the side flaps as Freddy entered the lab area carrying a tray of bones.
“I’ve sealed off the area as you requested,” Freddy said.
“Thanks,” Molly said, walking back to the table. She picked up two plastic bags, which held the newly found locket and a shoe. “We had enough delays with the pandemic,” she added. “I don’t want to give the feds any reason to shut us down again.”
Copyright © 2024 by Andrew Davis. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
