"Have you heard the verdict?" Her voice belied her small frame. It was low and husky.
"No, I had to give an exam ..."
"Yes, I saw your blindfolded students. I suppose that fits ... teaching them that they can make a positive identification without looking." The woman walked into Lindsay's office and stood, putting her palms on the desk and leaning forward.
"Is there a point to your visit?" asked Lindsay.
"I wanted to be the one to tell you that the jury found Dennis Ferguson guilty. I hope that pleases YOU."
Lindsay frowned. "Nothing about this event pleases me."
"What really gets to me is that you don't have any misgivings about convicting a man on the flimsiest of evidence."
"I was sure"
"How can you possibly not have doubts? Are you that arrogant?" She stopped and looked at Lindsay for a moment, her green eyes clearly showing her anger. "God, you are, aren't you'? You've set yourself up here as some great ... bone ... guru, haven't you? And that performance really topped it."
"Performance?" asked Lindsay.
"The way you pulled the rabbit out of the hat on the stand. It was the drama that convinced the jury, not the facts ... It was the damn show you put on. You are the most arrogant, manipulative woman I have ever met."
Lindsay started to speak when the woman turned on her heel and left.
Sally, who had been standing just outside the doorway, watched after the retreating figure before she came into Lindsay's office. "Well, who peed in her Wheaties?"
"I suppose I did," replied Lindsay....
The March winds lingered into April, and it was unseasonably cold as Lindsay showed the students at Barrow Elementary School how much you can learn about people by examining their tombstones. Lindsay and the class of sixteen young students were in the old cemetery beside Baldwin Hall. Campus lore said it was where the university buried deceased students in centuries gone by when it was inconvenient to ship the bodies back home. The story may have been true, but the graveyard was actually the remnants of the old City of Athens Cemetery, encroached on over the years by the expanding university. Most of the residents had been exhumed long ago and moved elsewhere so that only a fraction of an acre of the cemetery remained on the campus. Lindsay had just finished talking about identifying the different kinds of rock the tombstones were carved from and asked if there were any questions.
"Can we dig one up and look at the bones?" asked a nine-year-old dressed in a red and black UGA sweatshirt.
Lindsay was saved from answering by Sally, who had come to tell her she had a phone call from Max Gilbert, the prosecutor of Denny Ferguson. She left the students and their teacher with Sally and hurried to see what he wanted.
"I have some bad news," he told Lindsay when she picked up her office phone. "Denny Ferguson is on the loose."
"There's a call for you" Susan Gitten leaned from the door of Lindsay's cabin, yelling to her. "Do you want me to tell them you've gone?"
Lindsay turned from stroking her horse's neck and glanced at her Land Rover, packed and ready to go. "Yes ... no, I'll take it." She rested her cheek on Mandrake's velvet-soft nose, gave his neck another pat, and walked to the cabin.
"Lindsay Chamberlain," she said.
"Dr. Chamberlain, this is Sheriff Howard, over in Cordwain. We met last year at that cemetery flooding thing."
"I remember. What can I do for you?"
"A farmer up here's found a skeleton in a field he's plowing. I wonder if you'd come take a look. I got a deputy guarding it right now" Lindsay looked at her watch. She had planned to be on the road by now, but then, she had also vowed to have a leisurely trip and a flexible schedule. "We don't have anybody here who can tell us what to do with it," he added as he gave her directions to the farm.
"I'll leave right now. It should take about forty minutes."
"Thanks. I sure do appreciate this. It's probably an Indian burial ground he's stumbled on, then again ..."
BEVERLY CONNOR weaves her professional experiences as an archaeologist and her knowledge of Southern culture into interlinked stories of the past and present in her Lindsay Chamberlain mystery series. Originally from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, Connor now lives in Oglethorpe County, Georgia, with her husband, her dogs, her horse, and her cats. A Rumor of Bones is the first volume in the Lindsay Chamberlain archaeological murder mystery series.
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