Who's sorry now? by Jill Churchill Page A

would be returned to the holes in the ground after the sifting. Each time he excavated a bucket full of soil, he’d pass it up to her to put on the pile that was rapidly building up.
    Pretty soon she could see the skeleton’s upper legs start to appear, then the knees. ”Does this tell you anything?”
    ”Just that she did a lot of things squatting. Probably grinding corn on a stone, or making the balls of clay that the beads were made of. Young as she is, there seem to be slight signs of rickets as well.”
    ”What are rickets?” Lily asked.
    ”It’s a little complicated. You need calcium to grow good bones, but it’s impossible to do so without vitamin D.”
    ”How do you get vitamin D?”
    ”From sunshine mostly,” Dr. Toller said. ”She may have grown up in a cave.”
    ”Wouldn’t there have been a fire in the cave?” Lily asked.
    ”Probably. But a wood fire doesn’t provide enough natural light, or none at all, I suppose.”
    As he was still uncovering the legs of the skeleton Lily made up an excuse to go help Mrs. Prinney with something she was preparing for dinner.
    An hour later, Dr. Toller came in and asked Mimi where Miss Brewster was. ”I have something important to show her.”
    Mimi delivered the message to Lily, who was in her bedroom, reading a book with Agatha lying at the bottom of her bed.
    She ran downstairs, Agatha so excited that something interesting might be happening that she was right on Lily’s heels.
    Dr. Toller was deep in the hole. ”Look at her feet.”
    Lily squatted down to look. The skeleton was wearing pretty moccasins, entirely intact. Dr. Toller had carefully removed them and washed them off. They had tiny, pretty beads all over the front.
    ”How on earth did those survive?” she asked. ”Beeswax, most likely. I can’t think of anything else that would have so thoroughly impregnated the leather well enough to preserve them so perfectly. I also have unearthed the pelvis.”
    ”What are you going to do with the skeleton now that you have the whole thing?”
    ”I owe it to the pathologist to send it to him. We’ve agreed that once he’s gone over it, it will go into a museum. Someday, someone will figure out how to date old bones. I hope it’s within my lifetime. Do you think the Harbinger boys would make me a crate in which to ship her?”
    ”Why are you calling the skeleton ‘her’?” Lily asked.
    Only slightly embarrassed to explain in detail, he merely said, ”A woman’s pelvis is designed to separate to let a baby’s head through the birth canal. A man’s isn’t.”
    Her, Lily thought. She’d still been thinking of the skeleton as ”it.” From now on, the skeleton would be a girl.
    Dr. Toller was still staying at Grace and Favor but was late for dinner, so Mr. Prinney made a further announcement about the library. ”It appears that we’ve already resolved the problem that Miss and Mr. Brewster and I were dealing with. So feel free to use the room anytime you wish.”
    Everybody was obviously curious. But they were too polite to ask questions.
    Lily changed the subject. ”Dr. Toller should be here soon. He has interesting things to tell you about the skeleton. Especially about her moccasins.”
    ”What about them?” Robert asked.
    ”I should let Dr. Toller tell you. But I can hardly keep it to myself. She was wearing small moccasins. They’re completely intact and very pretty. He says they were probably soaked thoroughly in beeswax. Aside from a scrap of leather, and the other beads that were loose in the soil, that’s the only article of clothing that survived. The beads are smaller than the other ones that were found.”
    A moment later, Dr. Toller arrived, apologizing for being late but proudly showing around the small shoes.
    ”Poor little girl,” Phoebe said. ”Can you tell how she died?”
    ”No, I’m afraid I can’t,” Dr. Toller admitted. ”There was no sign of an injury. No broken bones, at least. It could have been a