The Visitant: Book I of the Anasazi Mysteries by Kathleen O'Neal Gear & W. Michael Gear

Author:Kathleen O'Neal Gear & W. Michael Gear [Gear, Kathleen O'Neal & Gear, W. Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0765360004
Amazon: B008S0E7NK
Publisher: Forge Books
Published: 2011-10-25T05:00:00+00:00

18

DUSTY LEANED BACK IN HIS LAWN CHAIR AND TIPPED his chin to the breeze that buffeted the tents. Early that morning, they’d pulled the green rain flies from the tents and attached them to posts to create four ramadas around the central fire pit. It felt much cooler beneath them. Blond hair fluttered around his deeply tanned face. His tie-dyed black-and-white shirt, and Army green shorts, clung to his body like wet snakeskin. The noon temperature sat at an ungodly 108 degrees Fahrenheit. He’d just called an end to work and told the crew to take their two-hour midday break. People had immediately headed for the shade.

Hail Walking Hawk napped in her red tent.

Maureen and Maggie sat to Dusty’s left, hunched over a foldout table that Maggie had brought them from the Park Service headquarters. The wood-veneer top was strewn with the bones of two females. One appeared to be an adolescent girl—Maureen said she was probably eleven or twelve—and the other was the woman Sylvia had excavated, about twenty-two years of age. A magnifying glass, microscope, calipers for measuring the width and breadth of skeletal materials, and a bottle of Lipton’s unsweetened iced tea sat in front of Maureen. She’d braided her long hair and clipped it up in back, but damp black wisps fringed her forehead. At dawn, she’d appeared wearing a white T-shirt and tan shorts. Now, her shirt matched her shorts.

Maggie quietly watched Maureen pick up the magnifying glass and study the length of a femur, the large leg bone. As Maggie leaned forward, short black hair framed her round face, accenting her rich brown eyes. She wore Levi’s cutoffs, black tennis shoes with white socks, and a cream-colored T-shirt.

Dusty gazed across the fire pit, between two tents, and down the length of the canyon to the west. The cliffs wavered like golden phantoms. Not a single cloud adorned the pale blue sky, which meant there was no relief in sight. Without an afternoon thundershower, the heat would remain high well into the evening.

Sylvia rummaged around in the ice chest to Dusty’s right. “God. This heat is almost too much even for me.”

Locks of soaked brown hair straggled from beneath the brim of her straw hat and glued themselves to her freckled cheeks. She looked like a skinny drowned rat. Her soaked khaki shorts, and brown tank top, had a spiderweb of muddy folds where her perspiration had mixed with the tan dirt. She dragged two cans of Coke from the chest, and grabbed a plastic bag of snacks. As she handed one of the Cokes to Dusty, she said, “I feel like the Wicked Witch of the West: I’m melting, melting.”

“Let’s not talk about witches, hmm?”

He glanced at the open tailgate of his Bronco. He’d carefully packed the basilisco out of sight, buried beneath neatly labeled brown paper sacks, soil specimen bags, and Ziplocs. Maggie and Mrs. Walking Hawk, of course, did not know he’d mapped and collected it—as he would have any other artifact.

Dusty popped the top and took a long drink of the cold sweet liquid.

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