Tres Leches Cupcakes

by Josi S. Kilpack

  “Thank you,” she said to Roberto, trying to sort it out in her head. There were so many opinions on what was right and what was wrong in regards to archeology. Sadie hadn’t decided what she thought about it, but she did know she’d wanted that jar to stay in one piece and she felt responsible for the fact that it no longer was.

  She turned away from the trailer and headed toward the far corner of the four-acre dig site where the graves of a hundred or so people who’d lived almost six hundred years ago were located. The nearly invisible mounds, weathered from centuries of wind and rain, were all that remained on the surface. On her first day, the project supervisor, Bill Line, had called them “Anasazi”—ancestors of the current Hopi, Zuni, and Pueblo tribes.

  The dig site was divided into three sections and cordoned off by orange surveyor’s tape wrapped around sticks hammered into the ground. One section had already been emptied, catalogued, and smoothed over, little blue flags specifying where the graves had once been. The middle section had blue, orange, and red flags—orange identified where items had been removed, and red marked areas containing bones and artifacts that still needed to be brought up. As the graves were completely emptied, Mr. Line would inspect them, check them off, and allow them to be filled; a blue flag would then communicate the status of that grave. There were only half a dozen blue flags in section two.

  Margo was at the far end of the third section, which only had a couple orange flags amid the red. Section three had only recently been opened to the diggers so the majority of the crew were still finishing up the second section.

  When Sadie arrived at Margo’s dig area in section three, she was shocked to see the jumble of partially uncovered bones. As she looked closer, she could see parts of five different skulls: two large—adults—and three smaller ones of varying sizes. Her throat tightened again. A whole family, gone. Or had there been other children left behind? Orphaned and missing their parents, brothers, and sisters?

  “You said they were sick?” Sadie asked.

  Margo looked up at her briefly. “A severe drought is thought to have caused the Anasazi to struggle for food. Without proper nourishment, disease ran rampant. This burial site was likely used over a few years’ time. It’s assumed the majority of the Anasazi simply abandoned their homes and moved farther south to escape the changing conditions.”

  “Abandoned their homes,” Sadie said. “Like those cliff dwellings at Bandelier?” She pointed to the west; their dig was only a mile or two from the eastern boundary of Bandelier, a national monument preserved by the federal government. Sadie had gone there with Caro when she first arrived in Santa Fe. She’d walked where the cliff dwellers had walked centuries earlier and marveled at what they’d created from stone and mud.

  “Probably,” Margo said. “They left behind their day-to-day equipment that wasn’t essential, and their dead. Now we dig it all back up.”

  Sadie moved around the dig area, a six-by-six-foot square Margo had segregated with a line drawn in the dirt. “It’s so sad,” she said, looking at the skeletons.

  Margo just nodded and went back to where she was chipping dirt from between two rib bones. “Yeah,” she said evenly. “Very sad.” She paused for a moment. “But at least this family was together, and they’ll come up together too. There are worse things.”

  In Sadie’s mind, the family dying together was about as tragic as it could be.

  Margo continued, “Last week I heard Bill talking about some sites by Mimbres being blown up.”

  “Blown up?”

  Margo nodded but kept digging. “Pothunters find a site and use dynamite to blow it up, then comb through the rubble for items they can sell. Most of what’s there gets destroyed, but they can be in and out in a matter of hours, long before anyone can find them and arrest them for theft. Maybe they get a dozen pieces that survive the blast; maybe they get twenty.”

  “That’s horrible,” Sadie said, imagining the senseless destruction of sites like this in the name of profit. “They must destroy more than they take away.”

  Margo nodded. “The bones are always left behind, though, broken and scattered across the desert.” She paused, and Sadie noticed the catch in her voice. “At least these people get respect.” She dug in the dirt for another moment. “Those pothunters don’t care. It’s all about money and power.”

  “Power?” Sadie repeated.

  “It’s a rush for them to have something they aren’t supposed to have—something they feel would have belonged to them until the government made laws taking it away. Finders keepers is kind of a mantra for a lot of the pothunters. It’s a high for them to beat the system they feel infringes on their rights.”

  “Oh,” Sadie said, realizing how complex this issue was. She was such a novice in her understanding of things. “So, you’ve never . . . found anything?”

  Margo paused, then leaned back on her heels and put her hands on her knees, still holding her chisel and small hammer. “A couple summers ago, I went hiking down by the Guadalupes in the southeast—there are all kinds of hidden crevices and small caves honeycombed through the rock there. Not everything was abandoned when the Anasazi left, some things they hid—valuable or sacred things. I’d never found more than an arrowhead or a broken pot here and there, but I’m always looking. To find things in situ is a remarkable experience.” Her eyes sparkled a little bit. “So, while I’m hiking, there was this freak storm.”

  Margo went back to the chipping while she talked. “I ran for this overhang, which wasn’t significant except that due to the angle of the rain it offered me some protection. There was a shrub growing to one side, and I pushed back behind it a little bit only to find that the shrub had grown over the entrance of a very small cave opening. I had to army crawl to get through the opening but inside . . .” She paused in both word and act, obviously reliving the moment. “Inside was some kind of shrine. There were carvings on the walls, and intricate pottery filled with beads and small bones. It was absolutely incredible to see so much stuff in its original place. I stayed for hours, just sitting and looking around this cavern someone had worked so hard to design; somewhere someone had chosen to secure these sacred things they probably expected to come back for one day.” She paused another moment, then went back to work on the bones, leaving Sadie hungry for more information.

  “What did you do with it?” Sadie asked, trying to envision the setting in her mind. Even with her limited understanding of the world of antiquity, she imagined such a cave would be quite the find for a university or archeological group.

  Margo shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Sadie asked, almost disappointed.

  Margo shook her head. “I guess that’s not true. I enjoyed it,” she said wistfully. “I absorbed the spirit of it—the sacredness of the site—and the reverence I felt the people intended for it. Then I left, carefully covering my tracks and adding what was left in my water bottle to the roots of that divine shrub, which was likely the only thing that had protected the place that long.” Margo sat back on her heels again and looked up at Sadie. “This stuff doesn’t belong to us,” she said, waving her hand over the dig site. “Just because we can take it, doesn’t mean we should. It was a very personal victory to me to have been able to leave that cave without disturbing even a single bead. Not many people could do that. I’m proud to say that I did.”

  “I’m not sure I could,” Sadie said, hoping she wasn’t revealing too much. She could still imagine that pot on her mantel at home.

  Margo smiled at her, assuring Sadie she understood, then leaned forward over the tangled bones once more. “I couldn’t have when I started, but I can now.”

  Sadie very much admired Margo’s devotion. From what she’d read, most people wouldn’t have treated that shrine as Margo did. Pothunters would have taken every last item—perhaps even chipping the petroglyphs off the wall. Archeologists would have put the items in a museum, or maybe just in storage. That Margo took pride in her ability to walk a
way was no trivial accomplishment. Chances were good that another explorer would one day find the cave and deplete it entirely; maybe they’d even blow up the entrance like those pothunters Margo had talked about in order to make it easier to empty.

  “Well, why don’t you tell me what to do,” Sadie said, breaking out of her thoughtfulness. “I’m at your disposal.”

  Sadie spent the rest of the afternoon following Margo’s orders. Sometimes she chipped away dirt like Margo did, though not as fast; other times she catalogued the bones Margo removed and then took the items to Roberto, who put them on the “Bone” shelf.

  It was tedious work, and yet Margo never faltered. She wanted the whole family bagged and catalogued by the time they had to leave the dig at five o’clock. She didn’t like leaving partials out overnight, she said. While they dug, they talked. Sadie told her mostly-fictional story of coming to Santa Fe—well, Sarah Worthin’s story—and Margo told Sadie about her two failed marriages and her gypsy-like travels. She liked Santa Fe, though, and was thinking about staying for a while. There were often long stretches of silence, but Sadie got used to those as well. They weren’t awkward, just circumstantial.

  A little after three o’clock, Sadie put the last of the foot bones from the final skeleton in a bag—Margo liked to move from head to toe—and took it to Roberto, confirming they were done with the grave and getting an orange flag to put in the now-empty ground so that Bill could inspect it. When Sadie returned, Margo was standing at the edge of the dig site, smoking another cigarette.

  Sadie wasn’t sure what to do next. She wondered if she should return to digging pots in section two, but she wanted to keep helping Margo. It was nice to have someone to work with, and the skeletons were more interesting than the artifacts. She decided to wait to ask for instructions until Margo finished her smoke break.

  She began wandering in between the nearly invisible mounds in the third section, most of which were adorned with little red flags indicating they hadn’t been cleared out yet. Time had worn the mounds almost even with the ground, which is why the burial site hadn’t been discovered until a bulldozer ripped through the first four graves.

  It was strange to think that each of these slight bumps on the ground had a body beneath it. She let her eyes scan mound after mound until her gaze stopped on one mound that seemed larger than the others. Sadie moved toward it, coming to a stop a few feet away. Was it another mass grave? Was that why it was bigger?

  She heard someone coming toward her and looked up at Margo before turning back to the mound of dirt. “This grave is different,” she said. “Bigger, and the shape of it is more succinct. Do you think it’s another mass grave?”

  “It doesn’t look like the one we just uncovered. Mass graves are wider, not taller,” Margo said, walking around the mound, looking at it closely. “Wanna dig it? So long as there’s only one body down there, I bet the two of us could bring it up before it’s time to leave if we work fast. Might be a leader of prominence with more funerary items than usual.”

  Sadie couldn’t help but smile. It was a small adventure, but an adventure all the same.

  Within five minutes, the two women had their shovels out, carefully digging through one half-inch of dirt at a time until Sadie’s shovel hit something solid. She made eye contact with Margo, and they both lowered their shovels in tandem and picked up their trowels, carefully probing the dirt around the object. A minute later, Sadie sat back on her heels to make sure she was really seeing what she thought she was seeing.

  Margo also stopped. Also stared, then she said quietly, “Is that . . . denim?”

  Chapter 4

  The two women shared a look before silently agreeing to dig a little further to make sure, but within another minute it was obvious that the buried body was wearing jeans.

  “I’ll go get Bill,” Margo said, leaving Sadie to stare at the partially uncovered leg and try to make sense of it. She’d come to terms with the idea of digging up bones from centuries ago . . . but a recent burial? How long had it been there? It. Sadie shook her head and stood up to relieve the cramp in her legs just as Margo returned with Bill and two of the younger crew members. The men immediately began digging, though Margo harangued them with instructions on where to dig and how far down to go down with the tips of their shovels. She took her digging seriously.

  Within five minutes, a full leg was exposed. Within a few more minutes, the trademark button fly of the Levi’s company and several inches of what looked like the bottom hem of a sweatshirt was revealed.

  Bill made a cutting motion with his hands, and the crew members stopped digging, waiting for him to give instructions. He stared at the partially uncovered body, then shook his head and swore. “This is going to add another week to the dig—no question. So much for the early finish bonus.”

  Margo and Sadie exchanged an unimpressed look but remained silent.

  A few more seconds passed before Bill took off his hat, wiping his sweaty forehead with the back of one hand. Several other members of the crew had realized something was going on and gravitated toward the newly dug grave. Bill seemed to notice them for the first time.

  “Stop digging for the day,” he barked while scanning the growing crowd. “We’re done here. The vans leave in ten minutes. Stow the tools and load up.” He turned to Margo and pointed. “You,” he said, then turned to point at Sadie, “and you, stay for the police.” He turned back toward the trailer and pulled his phone out of his pocket. He took a breath and dialed a number.

  “I prefer bones,” Margo said softly, drawing Sadie’s attention. “Old, dry bones.”

  “Have you found bodies before?” Sadie asked. “I mean . . . like this.”

  Margo nodded. “Sort of,” she said. “In Arizona, a junkie tried to break into a trailer left on the dig over the weekend. We found him Monday morning—overdose. It’s a sight and a smell you never forget. This one’s been in the ground long enough that the smell’s worn off, I guess. I’ve never found anyone recently . . . buried.”

  “I wonder how long he’s been in the ground,” Sadie said.

  “Months at least,” Margo said, nodding at the only portion of uncovered skin that was visible: a hand that was sunken, dry and discolored.

  Sadie had to look away. She’d seen a documentary on the rate at which bodies decompose based on climate and covering, but she couldn’t remember what they’d said about deserts.

  “Whoever brought him here had to know this was a burial site, right?” Sadie said, waving toward the other graves in section three. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

  “I guess so, huh?” Margo commented, walking around the grave and cocking her head to the side. “We should finish digging him up. Get a better look at him.”

  Sadie immediately shook her head. “It’s a crime scene now. We’d contaminate it. Plus Bill said to stop digging.”

  “They’re going to bring in a bunch of cops to dig him up. You and I can do a better job.” She didn’t wait for an answer, just dropped to her knees and grabbed her trowel, digging around the side of the body. It was easier digging than the other graves—the dirt hadn’t solidified around the body. Sadie looked toward the trailer. Where was Bill?

  “I really think we should leave it alone.”

  Margo didn’t answer as she kept digging.

  Sadie shifted her weight and realized that despite her objections, she was itching to drop down into the dirt beside Margo and dig too. Her own reaction surprised her. It had been just six months ago that a run-in with a dead body had lit the tinderbox of anxiety and depression Sadie had been trying to ignore. She’d returned home to Garrison soon after, and in the months since that time, had made great progress in coming to terms with what her therapist had deemed post-traumatic stress disorder. She still had her moments—still had nightmares now and again—but she’d learned that staying busy and not becoming too self-focused had helped her stay ahead of most of her problems with it. An occasional Xanax helped too.


  That she wanted to help dig up a body, when accidentally running into one had been so overwhelming last April, was odd but she hoped that it meant she’d made more progress than she’d realized. And yet, the “success” of her curiosity aside, this was a crime scene.

  She was only mildly aware of the rest of the crew loading up in the vans that would take them back to Santa Fe until the first van pulled away, leaving a cloud of dust behind. She expected the next one to leave soon after, but the engine didn’t start up. She looked from Margo—still digging—to the trailer—Bill was still inside—and then to the second van just as someone called out, “Looks like we’ve got another one!”

  Margo looked up from her work, caught Sadie’s eye, and together they hurried toward the area almost directly across from them in section three.

  Shel, a crew member Sadie had profiled on her first day, stood on the perimeter of the dig site, almost at the head of a . . . well, a head. He was leaning on his shovel and looking appropriately shocked by what he’d uncovered. Another crew member was pacing back and forth in front of the grave, and Sadie suspected he was the one who’d shouted out the discovery.

  Shel continued to stare at the body for a moment, and then quickly dropped his shovel and walked away from the dirt-covered hair and decomposed face showing above the ground. Sadie couldn’t be sure, but she thought he pulled a phone out of his pocket before he disappeared around the parked van.