Garden of bone book 6, p.23
Garden of Bone: Book 6, page 23
"Which one was it?" Eleri asked.
“Not Carson." Donovan shook his head.
Eleri breathed out a sigh of relief. "One of the other two?"
Donovan nodded. "The taller one."
She thought back. "I guess he somewhat looked like you."
Donovan didn’t add to that comment, and Eleri kept going. “You’re right. Your sense of smell is probably far more reliable than anything else. But what does it mean?"
"I have no idea. I asked Wade, but he didn’t get back to me yet. I would assume brothers and sisters could definitely be scent-detected. Parents and children, too.”
“Makes sense.” Eleri turned and walked another row of headstones, not seeing anything that caught her eye. Not yet. She remained hopeful. “Cousins?”
“Probably."
“Couldn’t you smell that relationship with your dad?”
Donovan smirked. “My dad was drunk so often that if I could smell anything other than alcohol, it was a miracle. He was just my father. I never thought about how he smelled and whether or not that signified our relationship.”
"Biologically speaking," Eleri offered up, "it would make sense if you could smell any relationship that would make it inappropriate to mate."
"Well, that's a lovely thought," he replied, following down the next row of headstones and reading the inscriptions, seemingly as a distraction for the weird conversation they were having.
"Well, isn't that the whole reason for the evolutionary development of being able to sense family relationships?"
"So, what you're saying," Donovan asked, "is that I shouldn't mate with this guy."
She laughed. "Well, I'm saying your genetic relationship must be close enough that if you were going to, you should reconsider."
"I'll take that under advisement.” He then turned and pointed. "Look, Eleri.”
"What am I looking at?"
His fingers motioned again to the headstone. "Not new, but not horribly old either."
The large name at the top read Burke. In fact, the whole name was Nelly Mackenzie Burke.
"Huh," Eleri said. "Do you think it's any relation?"
Donovan shrugged. "I think it's highly probable. They named their daughter Mackenzie. Maybe it was a family name.”
“That's not uncommon." Eleri nodded, thinking she bore a family name of her own. "We know that Mackenzie Burke has lineage ties back to this area, to the Dauphines. It makes sense she might have an ancestor buried here." Eleri thought for a bit. "We still don't know why they wound up in Nebraska. It seems strange to me."
"I don't know," he said with a shrug. "Your mother managed to get her family into Kentucky, of all places."
Eleri had to smile at that. Nathalie Beaumont had certainly achieved a lot, and Donovan was right. It could be something as simple as a job that had taken the family to Nebraska.
"Okay," Eleri said. "So, let's play this out. Let's assume this is a relative of our missing Mackenzie Burke. What does it mean?"
"Well," Donovan said, "I didn't come to this grave site because of the name on the headstone. I came because of the smell."
She raised her eyebrow at him, wondering if he was telling her he was smelling family relationships in dead bodies. He didn't take the bait, though.
He dropped an entirely different bomb. “The earth here has been freshly turned.”
"What?” No. There was grass growing, much the same as the others.
“This graveyard is only passably well-tended," he said, "and I think that's an advantage."
"What do you mean?" Her heart was beating faster at all the possibilities freshly turned earth brought to mind.
"Well, if it was beautiful, even, green lawn, then it would be obvious someone had been digging. However, I think, you could smooth out the top layer, maybe dig it up like sod?" He said it with a question mark, as though he was thinking his way through it while he was speaking. "Set it aside. Dig up the earth. Do whatever you wanted, and put it back, and because ..." He looked left and right, and Eleri did, too, now taking stock of the way the grass grew in patches. "Because of the patchiness of the grass all around here, I don't think anybody would really notice."
Eleri was forced to agree. "But why would the earth have been recently turned here? It doesn't make sense." She looked at the headstone. "This body has been in the grave for a half a century. There's no reason to dig here—unless it was to dig up the body."
She wanted to get on her phone and at least look for a little bit of information, but once again, they weren't turning their phones on. They weren't going to undo the power of Grandmere's spell with the flick of a button on some tech. She wasn’t willing to waste the cut she’d taken down her arm, which was still bandaged, just to turn on the phone.
Besides, she couldn't log into the databases from her phone anyway—and that was where she really wanted to look. She needed to find out if Nelly Mackenzie Burke truly was an ancestor of the first missing girl.
"What we really need," Donovan said, “is to get somebody in here with GPR."
They'd used ground penetrating radar before, but Eleri thought it would be difficult now. "It's like the sweeper for bugs on the car, though," she said with a touch of irritation. "We can do it, but as soon as we requisition it from the FBI and make them pay for somebody to come out and operate it ..."
Donovan nodded. "Right. Then it’s not our case anymore. It’s theirs."
"Exactly." Then Eleri had another thought. "You know, we don't have to requisition a T-bar to check the soil."
Donovan nodded. Checking the density of the soil was something they'd done often before, something most forensic scientists did when looking for bodies. It was easy enough to find the edges of a grave by looking for differences in the pack of the ground. A piece of metal spike, maybe half an inch to three quarters of an inch around with a slight point at the end and a T across the top, was just right for pushing into the earth to see if you encountered rocks, caskets, or loose enough earth to sink in easily.
In many cases, they could use a T-bar to define a grave close to six feet by eight feet, where a body had been buried. It was even possible to tell exactly how deep the grave was. The stick test was done the vast majority of the time before scientists began digging.
Donovan wanted them to have two sticks, as they were in a cemetery and needed to be fast and non-obvious while they did it.
"I didn't bring mine,” Eleri said. “It's a rental car." She sighed out the words as though “rental car” had become her new, go-to issue for every piece of equipment she didn’t have on her. She’d really thought she’d packed well for this trip. Apparently not.
She thought about coming back with the sticks as she looked around from where they were standing. The good news about New Orleans cemeteries was that they were above ground, which meant that, as they walked through the lanes, they were relatively hidden from people walking by. Mausoleums stood a full story tall, the marble gray and rough from age. She could only see the street in a couple of places, and there were only a few straight lines of sight through the headstones, the standing angels, and the buildings where someone on the street could see her.
If they could get the stick into the graveyard, they could certainly come back to this grave and poke around without anyone much the wiser.
"It’s probably better that we come back tomorrow and do this right," she offered.
Donovan agreed, but they didn’t head out immediately to purchase the tools. Instead, they continued their walk through the graveyard aisles. They checked headstone names, now specifically looking for more Burkes and more Mackenzies.
They found a handful of each, but there was nothing unusual about that. Families tended to want to be buried next to loved ones, and the majority of them ended up buried in clusters in the same cemetery. There were even a small number of Dauphines buried here. The dates on the headstones went back well over a hundred years.
Even so, that wasn't what surprised Eleri. It was Donovan, who told her where the earth had been turned. Before they left the cemetery, they had more than ten sites to check.
47
Donovan stood inside the open door of the car, looking at the edge of the cemetery the next morning. It was early enough that he could still smell the sunrise on the grass. They'd stopped by a home improvement store on the way back to Eleri’s great-grandmother's and had been lucky enough to find two of the soil probe sticks they needed still in stock.
The checkout lady had looked at them oddly, though Donovan couldn't imagine this was the worst she'd seen—even just in the past twenty-four hours—so he’d merely offered his credit card and taken the two out the door. Eleri had pushed him, suggesting she pay for it.
"No," he'd said. "You're going to buy me dinner."
She joked about the quantity of dinner he ate, but readily agreed. He thought again how this was coming out of both their pockets, and how her pockets were much, much deeper than his. He was on leave, and that meant not getting a paycheck. But when he had looked at his tiny partner next to him, he thought about what a rock she was and how very different this was for him—radically different from just a few years ago.
Eleri was neck deep in her own troubles here. He kept himself from telling her that Wade had texted him back. Donovan worked under the weight of that message—if the smell was strong enough to notice without Donovan trying to finding it, then it was immediate family.
He’d lain in bed last night, staring at the walls and thinking about that. Immediate family.
It wasn’t his father or his mother, obviously. He had no children, and even if he did, this guy had been too old for that. An uncle? But that didn’t make any sense. While he didn’t put it past his father to lie, his grandparents had never mentioned having another child. It would have to be an uncle, but younger than Donovan.
Given the man’s looks and that scent … all Donovan could think was brother. But how?
He pushed the nagging thought aside and tried to pay attention to Eleri’s problems.
Before going back to the cemetery, they’d found yet another hole-in-the-wall restaurant and taken a table at the back. They'd eaten deli sandwiches, piled high with turkey and roast beef. To Donovan, those sandwiches tasted a lot more like home than Grandmere's cooking did. He loved what Grandmere made—and he was a fan of food in general—but it was nice to have a simple sandwich. It also was nice to have Eleri pull out the scrap of paper from her purse and look at the list they’d made while walking through the graveyard the day before.
When they'd entered the tiny eatery, they had headed for the back and he'd cautiously sniffed at everything as they went by. It was easy, because Eleri understood what he was doing and walked slowly, as though she was having trouble picking out a table. She made it seem normal for him to meander through the diner.
There weren't any wolves in there at all, and he was grateful. It didn’t mean they weren’t followed—only that if someone was tracing them, they'd learned not to send a spy he could smell.
It was the best the two of them could do. Since they hadn't been harassed or even seemingly followed at all at the cemetery today, they'd taken a chance and had their conversation at the little restaurant the night before. He preferred keeping it out of the house. He didn’t like the feeling that they dragged something into Grandmere’s with them each time they came home.
So here they were, in the cemetery again, just after dawn. They were well-fed again and walking among the graves. The humidity almost made dew on the grass, but not quite. It didn't get cold enough for the water to condense here. Instead, it hung in the air and settled on everything that brushed it, including his skin.
This was such a strange feeling for a boy who'd grown up all over the North and West. He thought he'd experienced change in climate while heading to South Carolina, but nothing had prepared him for New Orleans in the summer.
"Okay," Eleri said. "Let’s do this."
He looked at her cargo pants, which were bulky enough today to make her look several sizes larger. She'd insisted not only on the soil probe sticks, but on stockpiling anything else they might need. He’d bought the sticks, but she’d bought every other tool known to mankind.
She was irritated about it, too, saying she hated buying things twice. But it didn’t stop her from gathering paint brushes, a three-pointed hand rake, and several trowels. Then she’d added a tiny dust pan with a stiff-bristled hand broom. Clearly, she was planning on digging up some bodies, or at least finding something in the dirt.
Donovan hadn't asked. He'd only been prepared to poke at the ground with his pointy stick. Eleri was loaded for bear. Instead of carrying her purse, which she left locked in the car, she carried only her ID and credit cards with her, tucked into a back pocket. She'd slung everything into each possible pocket on her pants and followed by handing him the last few pieces that didn’t fit on her person. Now he felt that his pants were overloaded, too.
The Glock in the side pocket along his right thigh added to his bulk. He could see that Eleri’s left side sagged a little bit under the weight of her own gun. She’d not been willing to leave it in her purse this time.
As they closed the car doors and walked up the steps into the cemetery, he'd once again taken a cautious inhale. Grandmere had been up as early as them, and despite their speed getting out the door, she'd managed to get a reasonable meal into them before they left. He was going to miss that when he headed home.
He could still smell the remnants of gravy and biscuits on his own breath, but it didn't change the scent of earth here in the cemetery. He could smell the hard-packed, old soil from most of the graves. He could smell the spores that clung to the marble, eking out a living in the rough spaces as the rock weathered. Some of the stones were still buffed to a reasonable shine, the letters carved with precision. But the older stones, though the letters were very neat, were now rough to the touch. All manner of things had embedded in the pores over the decades.
He could smell flowers that had been brought and left, and he knew some of them were placed here just a few days ago. He didn't smell that anyone had passed through since he and Eleri had been here yesterday evening, and that made him a little more comfortable with what they were doing. Still, though the trowels and the guns were in their pockets, it had been harder sneaking in the T-bars. Eleri had joked about sliding it down her pants leg, and Donovan thought for a moment she was serious, pointing out that she wouldn't be able to bend her left knee if she did it.
"I know," she said. "I'm better off pretending it's a crutch and that I have a twisted ankle."
He'd laughed, and then he'd taken both of the T-bars in his hand as they'd walked up the street. Better it looked like one person carrying something than two. But now they stood over the grave of Nelly McKenzie Burke and began poking at the dirt. Eleri's bar slid in almost all the way up to the T handle.
"It's very loose," she said. "You were absolutely right."
Donovan tried his own spot in the space between two graves and found that the bar barely went in at all.
"It doesn't go out this far," he said, and he rapidly jabbed the stick at the earth from a series of points about six inches apart. One, two, three, four. It suddenly sunk in several feet. Eleri motioned to him, and the two of them began marking out a space. Once they'd found it, it seemed to cover the same size—width and height—that the original grave had.
"Do you think they dug this woman up?" Eleri asked. Donovan shrugged. Given what he’d already seen from these people, anything was possible.
He had to admit that he wasn't looking forward to possibly digging up a body, whether partially decomposed or still in the casket. His best hope was to run into a skeleton, and that was saying something.
He looked at his partner now. Case or no case, they were partners. She would lead the way here.
Once the space was all mapped out, he glanced at her as though to ask were they really going to do this?
Eleri tipped her head. She glanced back over her shoulders, an action as guilty as it could possibly be, and Donovan only laughed.
"So, do we do this now? Or come back at night?"
She just stared at him, the tools in her pants clearly saying “now.”
"Okay, let’s do a test dig now. You keep alert. Hopefully, if someone comes up, we can cover what we’re doing.”
It didn't sound like much of a plan beyond “Hope it doesn’t happen but scramble if it does”—but Eleri was going for it. She managed to dig a test space several feet deep without hitting anything, and then said, "All right, next one."
Still, no one had come to the cemetery, though several people had walked by on the sidewalks surrounding the edges. The space was large, perhaps even a few acres, and Donovan tried to appreciate the land value of that. They saw people passing on the street, but when they stayed low, the people didn't seem to see them or notice that they were digging.
Before they left the cemetery, they had performed test digs on three of the graves. It was Eleri who decided they needed to head home. The sun was directly overhead, and both of them had sweat dripping down their temples. Donovan felt it tracing his spine. He didn't dislike it, but Eleri squirmed.
He put his hand out over her wrist, trying to avoid the bandage there, and stopped her hand. "Is your arm bothering you?" he asked, suddenly thinking about her injury, though he'd been looking at the bandage off and on all day.
"No," she nodded. "It’s just getting hot and it's daylight. I think it might be best to come back and actually do a full excavation on one of these at night. I don’t know why, but I know we need to keep digging.”
48
Eleri once again parked at the edge of the block and walked with Donovan through the gates and up the steps into the cemetery. She was a little surprised when the gates opened so easily. She’d fully expected someone to lock the place up at night—but in this neighborhood, that apparently wasn't the case.
