Chapter 15

I spent another late night with Inspector Lowell and Mr. Boxed Wine, and woke up a little before noon, feeling dreadful. My dreams had been a tangle of rosebushes and hands and my grandmother, and for some reason, my third-grade teacher, because dreams are like that. My head ached dully, but at least I didn't have sleep paralysis.

I stared at the ceiling and thought about ghosts.

I don't believe in ghosts. And if they do exist, they show up in old Gothic manors and crumbling farmhouses, not cookie-cutter tract housing in the middle of a subdivision. No one had died in the house. Gran Mae had died in the hospital, one of those cases where you feel a bit woozy so you go in to get it checked out and the doctor pulls down the charts and says things like "advanced" and "inoperable." She was dead a week later, without ever leaving the hospital again.

Presumably other people had died nearby at some point in the last thousand years. This sort of development was usually on old farmland. I could probably research it, pull up land deeds, see if there had been a house and cross-reference it to an obituary or two… or I could just get up and make coffee because ghosts aren't a thing.

I got up and made coffee.

Caffeine shocked me awake. But the wakefulness only seemed to bring all the things that I couldn't fix into sharper focus, so I went and buried myself in The Project for the next several hours, because if nothing else, at least I could sort hoverfly photos. Even if everything was terrible and Mom was in some kind of trouble and Gail was—what? enabling her? feeding her delusions?—even if all that was true, at least at the end of the day we'd have a couple hundred correctly labeled hoverflies. Sometimes that's the best that you can hope for in life.

I stopped when the coffeepot was empty, debated making another pot, and decided against it. Instead I stood at the sliding glass door and stared out into the garden. The garden somehow devoid of any life except sporadic outbreaks of ladybugs.

It was still nagging at me. Set ghosts aside, because they aren't real. Set Mom aside because… well, honestly because I'm a coward and I couldn't deal with it right this minute. Bugs, though… bugs I know. Bugs I could deal with. If I was going to figure out why there weren't any bugs, I was going to go about it methodically.

My first step was to establish that there really weren't any in the backyard. Sure, I hadn't been seeing any insects except the ladybug hordes, but the human eye is notoriously susceptible. Fortunately, entomologists have a secret weapon when it comes to insect collection, namely, the pitfall trap.

First you get something with smooth sides—a yogurt container, a large plastic cup, one of the leftover margarine tubs that your mother is incapable of throwing out, not that I'm naming names, Mom—whatever. (I found an elderly note with the margarine tubs that read MATCH WITH LIDS. Some things do not change.) You dig a hole and put your container into it so that the lip is level with the surrounding dirt. Toss a few leaves in so that your victims feel at home, then leave it overnight and check in the morning to see who fell in, then let them go. (Alternately, if you are collecting and require the specimens, add an inch of alcohol and a drop of detergent so that they expire swiftly.)

The hard part is digging the hole, particularly in North Carolina clay. I took my ill-gotten margarine tub and picked a likely spot under the rosebushes.

I got about two inches down, hit a root, swore, moved an inch to the side, hit another root, swore again, moved another inch, and finally got about three inches into the clay.

Clink.My spade hit something, but not a root this time. Also not the septic tank, I was pretty sure, which would have gone clonk. (Look, archaeologists get to be very good at determining material composition based on the sound of a spade tapping it. It's a survival skill.)

My first thoughts were that I should go get a toothbrush or a paintbrush to brush away the dirt and cursing myself for not laying out a proper grid. Then the rest of the brain caught up with the archaeologist brain and pointed out that this was my grandmother's backyard, not a midden, and I was not doing a dig. I was making a small hole for bugs to fall into. Totally different.

Mostly different.

Not that people don't do fascinating work in more modern settings, but this was not going to be colonial-era anything, it was going to be, at best, something left over from the developer in the nineties.

I told myself all this but the guilt still got to me, and I got my phone out and took about ten photos, just in case. Then I went back to work with the spade, gingerly loosening the dirt around my discovery.

It was a glass jar. The outside was almost opaque with dirt. I had to be cautious with the spade so that I didn't break it, assuming it wasn't already broken somewhere at the bottom. But after a few minutes of careful levering, it came loose. The resulting hole was more than large enough for my pit trap, which was nice.

I brushed the dirt off my find. An old-fashioned quart mason jar. Not unusual in the South. It was full of small bits of something yellow-white and shaped like lumpy pebbles. The lid was rusted shut, but I didn't need to open it. Any archaeologist worth their salt would have recognized the ivory-colored shapes.

I was holding a jar of human teeth.