Read an Excerpt
It was heaped on top of a mound of dirt by a yellow giant. The backhoe roared and grumbled nearby, a yellow piece of machinery frozen in place by its driver who wasn't quite sure what he had disturbed. Over the course of the past two hours the flat ground had been transformed into a gouged pit exposing more colorful pieces of history. But it wasn't the color that drew the driver's attention. It was the white objects. Long and short, smooth and jagged, they had been ripped from their resting place and exposed for the world to see.
The backhoe was silenced and the driver climbed down from the cab. He paused at the crest and stared down at the floor of the pit. More objects had broken the surface. Puzzled, he shoved his hard hat up to wipe the sweat from his forehead. A man in a white shirt and tie ambled over. They convened at the base of the mound.
"This doesn't look good," the driver said. "It doesn't look good at all." They knelt down as though praying to the god of backhoes.
The foreman lifted one bone the size of a broken baseball bat. "Could be from an animal."
The driver shoved his hard hat up and snorted. "Like what? A giraffe?"
Beyond the makeshift orange fence used to contain their site were specialty shops, a bank, and two restaurants. Other than the honking of horns, the foreman saw few signs of foot traffic. Their laughter and the way they huddled on the ground, however, were drawing the curiosity of the other workers.
"Breyton will blow another artery if construction is delayed even one day," the foreman said, drilling him with his eyes. He leaned in close and whispered, "Don't breathe a word of this. Go on like nothing's happened andlet's remove any suspicious debris before some pedestrian starts getting curious."
The sun scurried behind a cloud, fearing witness to such a conspiracy.
The driver of the backhoe stood and stared into the pit. "What if there's more in there? What if we uncovered an old cemetery?"
"Can't be an old cemetery. We would have seen coffins. You see any coffins in there, Baker?" The foreman was aware of a mass of hardhats headed his way. It would be difficult to keep these many mouths shut.
"No," Baker replied. "Don't mean they weren't old and disintegrated. Don't seem right, Joe." He picked through the mound of dirt and gravel until his weathered and calloused fingers found something familiar. He held up an arrowhead which had been crudely shaped from stone and chiseled to a fine point. "I think we're going to have more problems than just some old cemetery bones, Joe."
"All the more reason to hide what we've seen."
As though the object at the top of the mound could hear, it shifted its position sending debris trickling down. Bent cans and twisted metal hurried out of its way. It picked up speed, drawing the attention of the rest of the workers as well as witnesses beyond the orange fence. It slid the last few feet and rested at the foreman's steel-toed work boot. It was a human skull.
