by Amy Cross
“Of course,” Clark said, setting the piece of bone down, “I'll just -”
“Now, boy!” Levant roared angrily. “Where are your sample bags?”
“Inside, but -”
“What are they doing inside?”
“I put them down when I was -”
“And you just left them there?”
“Well, I -”
“Go and get them, boy! Now!”
Clark hesitated, caught like a rabbit in the headlights, before mumbling an apology and climbing down from the rear of the cart. He tried to force a smile as he picked up the piece of bone, but he couldn't help noticing Levant's very deliberate, very audible sigh. Mumbling a few more apologies and promises to do better, Clark scurried into the cabin to fetch his sample bags, leaving Levant standing alone next to the cart.
“Students,” Levant muttered, rolling his eyes as he turned to look more closely at two withered bodies “For every one that's half-decent, there are another nine who don't know what the hell they're doing. It's a wonder any -”
Before he could finish, his attention was caught by something glinting in the low light. He reached over, struggling to extend his hand far enough, but he was too old these days to start climbing about. Straining even more, he was finally able to move some of the rotten limbs aside, and to his surprise he saw what looked like a gold coin. He scraped the coin along the cart's wooden board, drawing it closer and then picking it up, and then he examined it in the cold midday light.
“Now this is interesting, he murmured, turning the coin over between finger and thumb. “I'm not sure I've ever seen...”
For a moment, he could only stare in wonder at the coin, trying to determine its provenance. More than anything else at the site so far, this coin had really attracted his attention, and he was engaged by the fact that he genuinely didn't know what he'd found. As an expert in many areas, he wasn't much used to coming across something that seemed so unusual, and he couldn't help wondering whether the coin might prove highly significant. Certainly it was unusual, being both rather large and rather heavy. Since such matters were an area of particular interest to him, Levant felt a flicker of jealousy at the thought of young Ms. Chandler getting all the credit for what amounted to a major stroke of luck.
Glancing back at the bones, he was about to ponder the unlikely nature of his discovery when – suddenly – he spotted what appeared to be a second such coin.
After checking to make sure that he still wasn't being observed, he reached over and slid the second coin out, and sure enough he found that it was very similar to the first. He checked yet again that he was alone, and then he quickly looked for any more of the coins. Not finding any, he looked down at the two specimens in his hand and felt a flicker of curiosity in his chest. After all his years of teaching, it had been a very long time indeed since Levant had felt the kind of pure, unbridled burst of intrigue that he felt right now. To stand on the verge of a new discovery made him feel vital again. Young, again.
“Leave the discoveries to the younger generation,” one of his colleagues had told him a while back. “We've done our work.”
He hadn't shown it at the time, of course, but that comment had bristled terribly. Why, he thought, shouldn't he still make a few breakthroughs? Why should a man – or woman – be shuffled off the stage, just because he or she had hit some arbitrary age that was deemed to be too old?
Nonsense.
A few seconds later, hearing Clark returning from the cabin, Levant had only a brief moment to make a decision. And in that moment, for better or for worse, he chose to slip the coins into his pocket.
“I got the bags,” Clark said as he climbed back onto the rear of the cart. “Sorry again, Doctor Levant. I remember you saying how important it is to always have them with us. I won't make the same mistake again.”
“I certainly hope not,” Levant said with bluster, although he was already wondering whether he'd done the right thing with the coins. Still, there was no turning back now. He just hoped there weren't too much crumbs and pieces of fluff in his pocket. “I taught you to be better than that, Mr. Clark. Much better. Any mistakes on your part are a poor reflection of my abilities as a teacher.”
“I know. I'm really, really sorry. I really just -”
“Well, stop making excuses,” Levant continued, well aware that he was blustering more than usual but – crucially – unable to stop himself. Deep down, he was worried that someone might have seen him pocket the coins after all, although he was certain this was not the case. “Get to work.”
“Of course. I'm sorry.”
Levant stepped back and watched as Clark slipped the errant finger bone into a bag, and then he saw him peer more closely at the bodies. He had no idea how Clark had failed to notice the two coins earlier, but they would surely have been discovered soon, and then what? Levant had a strong suspicion that they would have been cataloged and forgotten, ignored by students who wouldn't have recognized their potential interest. Or perhaps lost. Or, perhaps, even stolen. He reasoned, therefore, that he had done the right thing by liberating the coins. Let the students have their site, there was more than enough for them to work with. Reaching into his pocket, Levant felt the two coins and allowed himself a faint smile as he turned and headed back to his car.
So many of his colleagues mocked him and accused him of being irrelevant to modern study. The coins, he was starting to believe, would put him back on the academic map. He'd show them all.
Twenty
“Hello,” Catherine Chandler said as she knelt down in the cabin, in front of the dead body on the chair. “My name's Catherine and, if you don't mind, I'm just going to take a quick look at you. Is that okay?”
She looked at the withered, semi-exploded face that stared back at her, and then she turned and saw a fellow student, Muriel Robson, watching her from the far side of the room.
“What?” Chandler asked.
“Nothing.”
“You're giving me a funny look.”
“Do you always talk to dead bodies right before you examine them?”
“I'm just being polite,” Chandler replied, although she allowed herself a faint smile. “This was a living, breathing human being once. I should introduce myself, at least.”
“Sure.” Muriel hesitated. “And... ask them questions?”
“It was rhetorical.”
“Okey dokey,” Muriel said, turning and getting back to her task of examining the mysterious box she'd found on the floor. “Whatever you say. I still can't make out what this thing was for, though.”
Chandler looked over and saw that the box looked crude, perhaps homemade, and that it had a slit on one side.
“A child's toy, perhaps?” she suggested.
“You really think there were children out here?”
“No, but I don't have any other guesses.”
Muriel leaned down and sniffed the box, and she immediately scrunched her nose as she pulled back.
“Not nice?” Chandler asked.
“It smells like something died in there.”
“A trap, maybe?”
“I don't think so.”
“It looks homemade,” Chandler pointed out. “It must have served some purpose.”
“Maybe it was used for hiding things,” Muriel suggested. “Or maybe it was some kind of makeshift bird feeder. I don't know. I'm really stumped.”
Chandler turned back to look at the dead man's face. For a moment, she stared at the empty eye socket on the undamaged side, and then she looked at the strands of hair that clung to thin patches of skin on the skull. There was just enough extant material to allow her to hazard a guess as to the man's general appearance, and she imagined a sturdy, late middle-aged gentleman with perhaps a touch of old-fashioned nobility. She reminded herself that she might be wrong about this, of course, but deep down she had her impression and it wasn't going to get dislodged just yet. Not without some evidence to the contrary.
Reaching ove
r to the table, she picked up a piece of paper that she'd already put into a sample bag.
“Richard Garrett,” she read aloud from the faded page. “Was that you? Were you Richard Garrett? Were you the one who visited the Lordstown Sheriff's Office and made a purchase of two bodies? And would that be the two bodies on the cart out there?” She turned back to the dead man. “Call me cynical,” she added, “but something about this whole situation doesn't feel like a simple robbery gone wrong.”
She waited, almost as if she expected the man to answer, and then she set the paper aside.
“Excuse me, Mr. Garrett,” she continued, as she reached out and gently pulled aside the edges of his jacket. “No disrespect intended. I just want to know a little more about you.”
Much of the flesh on the man's chest had rotted away, exposing great sections of his rib-cage. The bones were yellowish but, for the most part, in fairly good condition. There was what looked like a healed section of damage on one of the ribs, which Chandler immediately recognized as the sign of a battle wound. So this Mr. Garrett had once fought, and given his age and other indicators it seemed most likely that he'd been a combatant in the American Civil War. The wound had obviously healed a long time before death, though, so for now Chandler turned her attention to the knife blade that was protruding from between two other ribs. This, she reasoned, seemed much more likely to have been acquired very shortly before Mr. Garrett went to meet his maker.
“Stabbed and shot,” Chandler whispered. “Someone must have been very keen to make sure you didn't come back.” She pulled the edges of the jacket out a little further. “Was this cabin your home, Mr. Garrett? Or were you only -”
Suddenly the head turned slightly, and Chandler gasped as she pulled away and fell back. Landing hard on her butt, she shuffled to the wall, staring at the dead body with wide-open, terrified eyes. Her heart was racing, and after a moment she heard movement nearby.
“Catherine?” Muriel said cautiously, still examining the strange box. “Are you okay over there?”
“Yeah, I...”
Chandler's voice trailed off as she continued to stare at the dead man. His head had definitely moved, but she realized now that it been more of a downward movement, consistent with the body's weight having shifted. Still, she waited a moment, just in case the head twitched again.
Finally, taking a deep breath, she told herself that of course that's what had happened. She'd been examining the man's chest and pulling his jacket open, and she'd merely caused a very slight adjustment in his position. This had been enough to make his head tilt a little, and now she breathed a sigh of relief as she realized she'd allowed herself to get spooked.
Getting back onto her knees, she shuffled back over toward the chair and – at the same time – she smiled at her own foolishness.
“Forgive me, Mr. Garrett,” she said. “You gave me a little scare there.”
Leaning down, she began to examine the knife's tip more closely. As she worked, Garrett's head remained perfectly still above her. Even though it had moved, however, its empty eye-socket remained fixed on the broken window – and on the spot where, many years earlier, Stuart Munver had hung himself.
Twenty-One
“Of course, it's perfectly possible that these things were antiques by the time they ended up in that cabin,” Levant said as he examined the coins in his hotel room, with his phone set neatly nearby. “There are markings, but I just can't quite make them out.”
“I've never seen anything quite like them before,” his colleague, Doctor Doreen Mellors, replied over the phone's speakers. “When you sent those photos through just now, I was really stumped. The text isn't Latin or Greek, it's nothing I recognize. The size seems unusual too. The most I can tell you is that they don't seem transactional. I highly doubt that they were used as currency.”
“Do you think they were more symbolic?” Levant suggested. “Ceremonial, perhaps? Religious?”
“The size makes it unlikely that they were used in everyday life,” she replied, “but I'm sure they had value. And you say there were just the two of them?”
“As far as I could tell.”
“They're identical?”
“As far as I can tell.”
“And they were with two sets of human remains?”
“They were with the two on the cart, yes.”
“Interesting.”
“Why's that interesting?” he asked.
He waited, still examining the coins, and then he turned and looked at the phone.
“Two coins,” Doreen said after a moment, “one for each of the two bodies. I'm leaning toward the idea that they must have been placed there for very specific ritual reasons.”
“Some kind of superstition?”
“You'd be surprised what people believed in some parts of the country,” she replied, “even as recently as a century and a half ago.” There was the sound of a chuckle, although her voice was briefly lost in static. Even in town, cellphone coverage was patchy at best. “We shouldn't laugh,” she added. “There were some very primitive ideas floating around, and people genuinely believed them. That doesn't mean they were idiots, it just means that had rather backward-looking ideas about the world. Simple ideas.”
“A coin for the ferryman,” Levant whispered.
“What was that?”
He paused for a moment.
“Jack? What did you just say?”
“Nothing,” he replied, shaking his head as he set the coins down. “Doreen, thank you for your time, but it's getting late and I think I might need to get to bed soon.”
“By which you mean, you're going to the hotel bar.”
“There's no bar in this rundown place,” he muttered, allowing himself to sound a little tired. “No, I think I shall get to bed nice and early, and then I shall go back out to the site in the morning and see what I can turn up. No doubt Chandler and those other idiots have missed all the important stuff. Oh, and Doreen... I hope you'll remember what I said earlier. I acquired the coins in a rather unfortunate manner, and I wouldn't like people to talk. Not until I'm ready to make an announcement, anyway.”
“Your secret's safe with me,” she replied. “Anything's better than letting a bunch of foolhardy students run the roost. We both know how idiotic they can be.”
“We should shoulder some of the blame,” he pointed out. “After all, we're the ones who taught them everything they know. And I'm sure we were just as bad when we were their age.”
“Speak for yourself,” she said. “I for one was far worse. Mellors out.”
With that, the call went dead, and Levant leaned back in the creaking old chair and stared down for a moment longer at the coins. His conversation with Doctor Mellors had helped clarify his own thoughts a little, but he still wasn't exactly sure where the coins had come from or why they'd been left on the cart with those two bodies. He disliked the idea that they were ceremonial, since that made them less interesting to him from an academic perspective, but he supposed Doreen might have been right. Still, as he continued to stare at the coins, one other – far more tantalizing – possibility remained in his thoughts.
“A coin for the ferryman,” he said again.
For a moment, in his mind's eye, he imagined two dead souls standing on the shore of a dark lake, watching as a boat slowly sailed toward them. At the rear of the boat there stood a tall, hooded figure shrouded in darkness. This figure did not move a muscle until the boat bumped against the shore, at which point he stepped off and allowed the two dead souls to approach. From beneath his robes, the figure uncurled a withered, deathless hand, into the palm of which the souls placed one gold coin each. Now that they had paid their toll, they were allowed to step onto the boat, ready for the journey to the other shore, which waited out in the cold darkness of this terrible underworld.
Levant thought of this image for a moment longer. It was childish, he told himself, and utterly uninteresting from an academic standpoint. Nevertheless, he had to
concede that such concepts appeared in the mythologies of numerous cultures. From Ancient Greece and Rome to various sites all across northern Europe, Charon's obol was a common enough idea, although in most cases the coin was placed in the dead person's mouth rather than in their hand. Had he, he wondered, stumbled upon some variant that had played out in the American mid-west during the nineteenth century? Had these primitive superstitions seemed important to someone in that remote cabin?
“A coin for the ferryman,” he said yet again. “For the journey to the land of the dead.”
Twenty-Two
“Are you sure about this?” Muriel said as she stopped at her van and turned. “You'll be freezing.”
“I've got blankets in my car,” Chandler said, traipsing after her across the muddy clearing. “I'll be fine. And I really don't want to waste two hours going back to town tonight, and another two hours coming here in the morning.”
“You don't have anything to prove, you know. You're already top of the class and all that jazz.”
“I want to work.”
“You mean you want to impress your parents.”
“This is professional,” Chandler replied, clearly a little irritated at the – quite common – suggestion that she was motivated by a desire to obtain her parents' approval. “I want to figure this site out. I want to know what happened here.”
“But...”
Muriel hesitated, and then she sighed. The sun was setting now, casting long shadows that reached from the tree-line almost all the way to the cabin itself, and the air temperature was noticeably much lower than it had been during the day. At the same time, she knew there was no point arguing with Catherine Chandler, who'd always had a habit of being headstrong, usually at the most inopportune moments.
“I'll be fine,” Chandler said again. “There are still a few things I want to get done tonight. And time's money, remember?”
“Sure, but...”
“But what?”
For a few seconds, Muriel seemed reluctant to say any more, but then she looked past Chandler and stared at the cabin.
