Before Sunrise

Phoebe sat down at her desk and put her head in her hands. “And it’s November already. We’ll have snow and sleet soon and the roof will just collapse under the weight. Why did I take this job? Why?”

“Because nobody else wanted it?”

Phoebe actually chuckled. Marie was incorrigible. She grinned at the younger woman. “No, actually because nobody else wanted me,” she corrected.

“I can’t believe that. You graduated in the top one percent of your class, and you did a great job with your master’s degree, which you completed in record time,” Marie recalled. “I read your curriculum vitae,” she added when Phoebe looked surprised.

“Credentials aren’t everything,” Phoebe replied.

“Yes, but your area of expertise is forensic anthropology,” came the reply. “There must be a lot of jobs going in that area, because it’s so specialized.”

“There were none when I needed one,” she said quietly, pulling a file toward her. “I wanted to get away from my family, from everything. This is an area where I didn’t know anyone, and where I wasn’t likely to run into…” She was going to say Cortez, but she bit her tongue. Marie perched her ample figure on the edge of the desk, pushing back her long, thick straight hair. “I know you don’t talk about it,” she said, “but I think you’re better now, aren’t you?”

She nodded. “Yes. I think I’m over it.”

“You will be when you rush out to Drake’s car and kiss him blind and beg him to take you on a date,” Marie said with a wicked grin.

Phoebe glared at her. “From what you’ve already told me, Drake’s got a girl on every street corner,” she said. “He loves women, all shapes and sizes and ages, and they love him. I don’t want an overused man.”

Marie’s eyes popped.

Phoebe realized what she’d said and burst out laughing. “Well, hypothetically speaking,” she murmured, flushing. “And don’t you dare tell Drake I said that!”

Marie touched her ample bosom. “Would I do that?”

“In a heartbeat,” Phoebe agreed. “Get to work. Find me a way to budget roof repair and pothole repair into our fiscal year.”

“We could go over to the Yonah Reservation and talk to Fred Fourkiller,” she replied. “He can make medicine. Maybe he can influence the board of directors to give us a bigger budget!” Medicine reminded her of Cortez, who was descended from a long line of medicine men. Involuntarily her hand rested on her middle desk drawer. She jerked it back.

“We may have to try that if all else fails,” Phoebe said, turning on her computer. “I’d better get my paperwork done before the school crowd arrives,” she added. “We have another busload at eleven, from the middle school.” She glanced at Marie wistfully. “When I first came here, we were lucky to get two tourists a month. Now it’s busloads of kids every week.”

“A lot of people around here have Cherokee blood, because we’re so close to the reservation,” Marie reminded her with a smile. “They want to learn about their heritage, so history classes like to come here.”

“It’s nice revenue, like all those regional books on local history that we sell in the souvenir shop,” Phoebe had to admit. “I only wish we had a patron.”

“It’s early days yet,” Marie said with a smile. “I’ll get to work.”

She went out, closing the door behind her. Phoebe’s one assistant on staff, Harriett White, was taking the classes through the exhibits. Harriett was widowed, and in her fifties. She’d once been a professor of history at Duke University, but she didn’t want to go back to a full-time job. She’d applied at the museum without any real expectation of acceptance, and Phoebe had phoned her the minute she read the application. At first, she couldn’t understand why someone with Harriett’s credentials would be applying for an assistant’s job, but she learned that Harriett wanted a less demanding position that enabled her to continue in the field she loved. The woman turned out to be a hard worker and much appreciated.

PHOEBE HESITATED for a minute before she opened her middle drawer and took out a small prayer wheel dangling a feather—not an eagle feather, or she’d have been in trouble. It was an odd little gift. Cortez had mailed it to her the week after her graduation. It was one of only two letters she ever had from him. It contained this prayer wheel, wrapped in rawhide, with the feather attached and a blade of sweetgrass woven into the center. Cortez had said that his father wanted her to have it, and to keep it close. She wasn’t superstitious, but it was something of his family…and precious. She was never far away from it.

Next to it was another letter, very thin, with her name and address scrawled in the same hand that had addressed the letter with the prayer wheel. She touched it as if it were a poisonous snake, even after three years. Gritting her teeth, she made herself take out the small newspaper clipping it contained—nothing else had been in the envelope—and look at it. It reminded her not to get sentimental about Cortez.

She read nothing except the small headline—Jeremiah Cortez Weds Mary Baker. There was no photo of the happy couple, just their names and the date of the wedding. Phoebe never forgot that. It was three weeks to the day from her graduation from college.

She tucked the clipping back into the envelope, pushing back the anguish of the day she’d received it. She kept it beside the prayer wheel always, to remind her not to get too nostalgic about her brief romance. It kept her single. She never wanted to take a chance like that again. She’d thrown her heart away, for nothing. She would never understand why Cortez had given her hope of a shared future and then sent her nothing more than a cold clipping about his marriage. No note, no apology, no explanation. Nothing.

She would have written to him, if for no other reason than to ask why he hadn’t told her he was engaged. But there was no return address on the second letter. Worse, the letter she’d written to him at the first letter’s address was returned to her, unopened, as unforwardable. She was shattered. Utterly shattered. Her sunny, optimistic personality had gone into eclipse after that. Nobody who’d known her even three years ago would recognize her. She’d cut her hair, adopted a businesslike personality and dressed like a matron. She looked like the curator of a museum. Which was what she was. Sometimes she could go a whole day without even thinking about Jeremiah Cortez. Today wasn’t one of them.

She shoved the envelope to the back of the drawer and closed it firmly. She had a good job and a secure future. She kept a dog at home for protection in the small cabin where she lived. She didn’t date anyone. She had no social life, except when she was invited to various political functions to ask for funding for the small museum. Sadly, the politicians who came to the gatherings had little money to offer, despite the state of the economy. Probably it was that her small museum didn’t have enough political clout to offer in respect to the funding it needed. They got some through private donations, but most of their patrons weren’t wealthy. It was a hand-to-mouth existence.

Phoebe sat back, looking around the office which was as bare of personal effects as her little house. She didn’t collect things anymore. There was a mandala on the wall that one of the Bird Clan of the Cherokee people had made for her, and a blowgun that a sixth-grader’s father had made. She smiled, looking at it. People were always surprised when they were told that the Cherokee people had used blowguns in the past to hunt with. Usually they were more surprised to find that Cherokee people lived in houses and didn’t wear warbonnets and loincloths and paint, unless they were portraying the historical Trail of Tears in the annual pageant, “Unto These Hills,” on the not-too-distant Quallah Indian Reservation near Cherokee, North Carolina. People had some strange ideas about Native Americans.

THE PHONE RANG while Phoebe was trying to force herself to answer her e-mail. She picked it up absently. “Chenocetah Cherokee Museum,” she announced pleasantly.

“Is this Miss Keller?” a man’s voice asked.

“Yes,” she replied, ignoring her computer screen. The man sounded disturbed. “What can I do for you?”

There was a hesitation. “You can arrange to have a site dated by organic material, can’t you? Don’t you have a small foundation budget to help with that sort of thing?”

“Well, yes, although we can date by tree ring age…”

“I mean skeletal remains,” he added. “I have a skull…I have a whole skeleton, in fact. There’s a great deal of patination, and in situ in a cave with Paleo-Indian lithic specimens, Folsom point if I’m not mistaken…There are two effigy figures that would certainly date from the Hopewell period, very fine…The skull has an enlarged brain case and wide nasal cavities, the dentition is indicative of…well, the skull is possibly Neanderthal in origin.”

She actually gasped. She clutched the phone so hard that her knuckles went white. “Are you serious? We’ve never dated anything back further than ten to twelve thousand years, and that’s at a site in Tennessee, not North Carolina. There simply are no authenticated Neanderthal remains anywhere in North America…!”

“That’s right. But I…found some,” he said. “I think I…found some.”

She sat up straight. “Is this some sort of hoax?” she asked coldly. “Because if it is…”

“I know you’re wary—I don’t blame you.” He paused. “I’m a doctor of anthropology visiting the area. I know what I’m talking about. This is no hoax. But…they’re covering it up,” he added in a rushed whisper. “He said that if this gets out, they’ll kill him, they’ll kill me! They’ll do anything to keep the project going. If we tell, they’ll be shut down indefinitely while the site’s being excavated. Of course, it would mean national publicity as well, and it will bankrupt him!”

“Him, who?” she demanded. “Where’s the site? And who are you?”

“I can’t tell you…not yet. I’ll call you back when I can. They’re watching me…!” On the other end of the line, Phoebe heard a loud knock and the sound of a door opening. There was a woman’s strident voice in the background, but it was muffled. She guessed that he must have put his hand on the receiver. “Yes, I was just…speaking to my daughter! Yes, to my daughter. I’m coming!” he called to his visitor. Then he came back on the line. “I’ll speak to you later…goodbye,” he told Phoebe. There was a sudden noise and the phone slammed down.

She pressed star 69 on her phone to get the number that had called her, but it had been blocked at the source. She ground her teeth together and put down the phone. Maybe it was just a hoax, she thought. There had been several such “discoveries” over the years, including one in California that professed to show a set of human remains, which would predate the Cro-Magnon period—and those so-called Neanderthal findings were dated by one of the most famous anthropologists on earth. But the date was controversial and it was discounted by most authorities. There was a similar story from New Mexico which put forth the theory that a set of remains found in a cave were over thirty-five thousand years old, but they mysteriously vanished before they could be scientifically evaluated. Whether those cases were hoaxes or not could never be proved. The newest archaeological controversy revolved around Kennewick man, a California find, who was purported to be from the Paleo-Indian period, but who did not have predominantly Native American features. That controversy was still raging.

Perhaps this man who’d called her was just some crackpot with time to kill, Phoebe reasoned. But he’d sounded very sincere. And frightened. She chided her own gullibility. It was nothing at all and she was overreacting. She pulled up her computer screen and got back to her e-mail.

THE DOOR OPENED unexpectedly, and a tall, well-built man with a light olive complexion, short black hair and dark twinkling eyes stuck his head in. “Time to eat!” he said.

She looked up from her computer screen, smiling at the deputy sheriff. “Hi, Drake. Marie said you were bringing lunch. Thanks!”

“No sweat. I get hungry, too, Miss Keller, and sometimes I have to eat on the run,” he drawled, moving into the office with two box lunches. “Which is why mine is still in the car. I’m on my way to a call now. I brought these for you and Marie.” She punched a button on her phone. “Marie, Drake’s here with food!”

“I’ll be right there!” she called excitedly.

“At least somebody’s happy to see me, even if it’s just my cousin,” he said with mock disappointment. “You’re preoccupied.”

“I am,” she agreed, closing down the computer program. She looked up worriedly. “I just had a call a couple of hours ago. Maybe he was a crank, or a crackpot. But he sounded scared.”

Drake’s easy smile faded. He moved closer. “What was it about?”

“He said something about human skeletal remains that might date to the Neanderthal period being covered up by some contractor,” she said, boiling the conversation down to its basics. “He hung up abruptly. I tried to get his number, but he had it blocked.”

“Neanderthal remains. Uh-huh,” he said mockingly.