scalpel and left the room.
The next day she gave up her pursuit of an MD and shifted her sights to psychology.
There was no reason for her to be ashamed of the episode. But she was. She came from a family of doctors. Her grandfather, father, and brother had practiced medicine. She’d wanted to be the first woman in the family to do likewise. And it still bugged her that she hadn’t stayed in the room with the dead man.
Well, she had been in rooms with dead people since then. She had been to crime scenes. She had seen Marilyn Diaz pulled from the water.
She wouldn’t be scared off by a bunch of rotting bones.
Flashlight in hand, she descended into the cellar. At least now she had an explanation for the dead bolt on the underside of the trapdoor. Whoever interred these bodies made sure he wouldn’t be disturbed in his work.
She reached the scatter of fallen bricks and, kneeling, peered at the nest of skeletons. The floor of the burial chamber was loose sandy soil. The back wall was a sandstone outcrop. She scanned the crypt with her flashlight and saw small scuttling things among the bones. Their black carapaces gleamed like shards of onyx.
Nothing to fear. No reason to be creeped out.
She tracked one beetle as hurried over the mound. A small obstruction blocked its path, and it skittered to one side.
The obstruction was something silver, metallic. Nearly invisible, a fleck of metal in the dirt.
She reached in, stretching her arm over the bone pile, and touched the thing. The metal was smooth, rusted in spots. It extended under the soil. Something was buried there.
Deliberately buried? She didn’t think so. It appeared as if loose dirt had cascaded down from the roof of the crypt, dislodged by today’s quake or any of the seismic events of the past century, or just the slow passage of time.
She swept away some of the dirt, exposing more of the metal surface. Her fingers brushed against something sharp. A corner.
Carefully she cleaned off the rest of it. The thing was a rectangle, ten inches square.
The lid of a tin box.
She probed the dirt until she found a handle, like the handle of a lunch bucket.
Casey had told her not to disturb the scene. But the tin intrigued her.
She tested its weight, lifting it by the handle. Not heavy. She could remove it without disrupting the remains.
She pulled a little harder, and the lid popped up. A rusted clasp on the front had opened.
She couldn’t resist the temptation to look inside. Probably a bad idea—Pandora’s box, and all that. She did it anyway, angling the flashlight to reveal the tin’s contents.
What she saw was a book. Frayed black covers. Faint smell of mold.
Paper deteriorated rapidly when stored in adverse conditions, but the tin had kept the book safe from vermin, sealed away from visible light and airborne pollutants. The crypt would be cool year round, and the space was dry enough to inhibit excessive mold formation. The box itself would have prevented too many mold spores from settling on the book and foxing its pages.
She looked more closely at the volume. Embossed in gilt Gothic on the front cover was the word Journal .
She knew then that she had to examine it.
Lowering the lid, she put both hands around the tin and lifted it free. It was crusted in earth, dragging clumps of loose soil and a single black beetle that fell off the bottom and scuttled away.
A diary, left with the dead. Hidden away for years, read by no one—except the ghosts interred with their bones.
eight
In her study, she placed the box on the examination table and lifted out the diary. Her hands trembled a little.
The book was ready to fall apart. The binding was badly cracked. The covers were calfskin, black, dry, stiff with age. Other than the gilt word Journal there was no lettering on the front cover, and no decoration except a band of silver running down the spine. Some of the silver had flaked away.
The leaves of the book had yellowed with
The next day she gave up her pursuit of an MD and shifted her sights to psychology.
There was no reason for her to be ashamed of the episode. But she was. She came from a family of doctors. Her grandfather, father, and brother had practiced medicine. She’d wanted to be the first woman in the family to do likewise. And it still bugged her that she hadn’t stayed in the room with the dead man.
Well, she had been in rooms with dead people since then. She had been to crime scenes. She had seen Marilyn Diaz pulled from the water.
She wouldn’t be scared off by a bunch of rotting bones.
Flashlight in hand, she descended into the cellar. At least now she had an explanation for the dead bolt on the underside of the trapdoor. Whoever interred these bodies made sure he wouldn’t be disturbed in his work.
She reached the scatter of fallen bricks and, kneeling, peered at the nest of skeletons. The floor of the burial chamber was loose sandy soil. The back wall was a sandstone outcrop. She scanned the crypt with her flashlight and saw small scuttling things among the bones. Their black carapaces gleamed like shards of onyx.
Nothing to fear. No reason to be creeped out.
She tracked one beetle as hurried over the mound. A small obstruction blocked its path, and it skittered to one side.
The obstruction was something silver, metallic. Nearly invisible, a fleck of metal in the dirt.
She reached in, stretching her arm over the bone pile, and touched the thing. The metal was smooth, rusted in spots. It extended under the soil. Something was buried there.
Deliberately buried? She didn’t think so. It appeared as if loose dirt had cascaded down from the roof of the crypt, dislodged by today’s quake or any of the seismic events of the past century, or just the slow passage of time.
She swept away some of the dirt, exposing more of the metal surface. Her fingers brushed against something sharp. A corner.
Carefully she cleaned off the rest of it. The thing was a rectangle, ten inches square.
The lid of a tin box.
She probed the dirt until she found a handle, like the handle of a lunch bucket.
Casey had told her not to disturb the scene. But the tin intrigued her.
She tested its weight, lifting it by the handle. Not heavy. She could remove it without disrupting the remains.
She pulled a little harder, and the lid popped up. A rusted clasp on the front had opened.
She couldn’t resist the temptation to look inside. Probably a bad idea—Pandora’s box, and all that. She did it anyway, angling the flashlight to reveal the tin’s contents.
What she saw was a book. Frayed black covers. Faint smell of mold.
Paper deteriorated rapidly when stored in adverse conditions, but the tin had kept the book safe from vermin, sealed away from visible light and airborne pollutants. The crypt would be cool year round, and the space was dry enough to inhibit excessive mold formation. The box itself would have prevented too many mold spores from settling on the book and foxing its pages.
She looked more closely at the volume. Embossed in gilt Gothic on the front cover was the word Journal .
She knew then that she had to examine it.
Lowering the lid, she put both hands around the tin and lifted it free. It was crusted in earth, dragging clumps of loose soil and a single black beetle that fell off the bottom and scuttled away.
A diary, left with the dead. Hidden away for years, read by no one—except the ghosts interred with their bones.
eight
In her study, she placed the box on the examination table and lifted out the diary. Her hands trembled a little.
The book was ready to fall apart. The binding was badly cracked. The covers were calfskin, black, dry, stiff with age. Other than the gilt word Journal there was no lettering on the front cover, and no decoration except a band of silver running down the spine. Some of the silver had flaked away.
The leaves of the book had yellowed with
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