Page 5 of The Bones in the Yard

“Madeeha, please.”

“Madeeha,” I repeated, remembering that smiling was something people liked. Being a cop had been easier. You don’t have to be polite.

“I’ll just call Helen, if you’ll give me a sec?”

“Okay.” I stood there awkwardly while she called the museum’s director, then recounted more or less what I’d explained.

Then she hung up and gave me a half-smile. “Helen was planning on ripping those out anyway, so we have permission to attack the raspberries.”

I sighed heavily. “Great.”

“That didn’t sound great,” Madeeha observed.

“Ever pulled out raspberry bushes?” I asked her.

“No?”

“You’ll see,” I replied, then headed back to get Ward and tell him we were going to be tangling with some bushes.

2

Madeeha had—thankfucking God—found a couple pairs of leather work gloves somewhere, and the two of us had indeed gone after the raspberry bushes, although when I’d seen that there were still berries on them I had insisted that we find something to put the fruit in.

You don’t waste perfectly good raspberries.

We had a decent bowl-full by the time Ward called out that we could probably start digging instead of wresting with spikey barbed-wire-plant-hell. As cheerful as Madeeha had been when we’d started, she was clearly regretting her decisions now and immediately took off to find a shovel.

It may have been fall, but September in Virginia is only marginally less hot than July and August, and I was a sweaty, disgusting mess. If it weren’t for the fact that my being a sweaty, disgusting mess was essentially Ward’s fault, I might have felt bad about the fact that he was going to have to drive back to Richmond trapped in a car with me.

I sat in the grass beside his chair under the overhang where we were both blissfully protected from the direct sunlight. I hadn’t been in the shade over in the raspberries, but at least I’d been wearing sleeves.

Sleeves that were now thoroughly ruined by a combination of mud and a variety of small tears caused by the raspberry brambles that were also responsible for the tiny bloodstains that accompanied at least half of the tears. This was not my first tangle with a raspberry patch, so I knew that it could have been so much worse.

When Madeeha came back out with only one shovel, I sighed, but stood up. This would also not be my first time digging up a grave.

Madeeha’s expression was apologetic. I smiled at her and gave her an out. “You could wash the berries,” I suggested, taking the shovel from her.

“I could also finish picking the rest of them first,thenwash them,” she replied, and I couldn’t help my smile turning into a grin.

“Or that,” I agreed.

We both headed back to the patch.

She finished first—no surprise there—and went inside with the bowl full of sweet-tart goodness. Hopefully she’d bring them back out once they were washed, because I was starting to get hungry.

The problem with digging when you’re looking for a body is that you can’t just put your back into it. It’d honestly be easier if you could. Instead, you have to be careful, sort of turning the earth before taking a shovel-full to make sure you weren’t bringing a finger or a foot with you when you dug.

I’d seen more than my share of evidence damaged—sometimes badly—by over-enthusiastic digging or accidental discovery with a plow or a backhoe. The CSIs got really pissed when that happened. Usually, so does the ME.

So I was being careful, which meant that I spent about three times as long hunched over in the sun poking at the dirt before I found anything of interest that wasn’t a goddamn rock.

I knelt down to look at what the whitish smooth surface was that I’d found.

And frowned.

What had looked at first like the curve of bone—a skull maybe, or a pelvis—appeared to be… a seashell? Further brushing of dirt with my work gloves revealed it as one of the big, kind of swirly ones, although it was broken.

Instinct made me stop and take out my phone to snap a few pictures, because while we weren’t that far from the ocean, we were definitely not in sandy soil, and it was very doubtful that whatever had lived in this shell had crawled its way all the way the fuck out here and died in the raspberries or whatever the fuck had been here before them, since it was buried a good three feet down.

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