Douglas Preston - Crimson Shore

“I assume, with all this activity, that your memory crossing was successful,” she said dryly.

“We shall know in a moment.”

Sinking the shovel into the spot of his most recent probe, he began to dig, placing the sand carefully to one side as he did so. He continued digging, making a hole approximately five feet in diameter, to a uniform depth of two feet. Once this circular pit was complete, he began to dig deeper. The sand was damp and loose, making for easy digging. A few moments later, the blade of the shovel hit something with a dull clang.

Quickly, Pendergast put the shovel aside and knelt within the hole. Using his fingers, he swept away the sand, exposing some rusted pieces of metal.

“Iron hull fasteners,” he explained.

“From the Pembroke Castle ?”

“I’m afraid so.” He glanced around. “The site seems obvious in retrospect, doesn’t it?”

“How did those fasteners get back here in the dunes? Did the sea wash them in?”

“No. The wreckage of the ship was deliberately carried back here and buried. At least, all that washed in. The turn of the tide would have eventually taken what didn’t wash up here out to sea.”

He dug some more, pulling pieces of iron from the sand, shaking them clean, and placing them to one side. The shovel revealed more pieces of metal, which he also placed aside, some still attached to rotting pieces of wood that had once been hull planking. And then, as the shovel bit deeper into the moist sand, it hit something else: something that made a very different, hollow sound.

Pendergast knelt again. Constance joined him. Together, they carefully brushed away the sand from the point of impact. Slowly, a skull was revealed: small, pale brown. One temple was caved in.

“Good God,” Constance murmured.

“Not more than a year old,” Pendergast said. His tone was cold, remote.

Together, they continued sweeping away the sand with the flats of their palms. More small bones were revealed: ribs, hips, long bones. Crowded alongside, additional skulls came to light: some small, some adult. All showed signs of blunt trauma.

“We must leave everything in place,” Pendergast said. “This is a crime scene.”

Constance nodded. Now the bones became so numerous that they formed an almost solid layer embedded in the damp sand. Evidently the people had been killed and buried first, with the ship’s wreckage dumped on top. Pendergast took out a small whisk from the bag and swept the sand away, exposing additional bones. The little ones had evidently been piled helter-skelter on top of one another, seemingly tossed in heaps, while the adults were laid in parallel.

Finally it was too much. Constance stood up and, without a word to Pendergast, walked out and climbed to the top of the hollow, where, breathing deeply, she looked eastward over the cold, unfeeling, alien ocean.

Sergeant Gavin tried to tell himself this was just another murder scene — like that of the historian, McCool, and Dana Dunwoody. And yet at the same time it was so very different. There were the usual pitiless floodlights turning night to day; the purring generators; the police-tape perimeter; the SOC people and the CSI people and the forensics experts and the photographers. Here was the SOCO, Malaga, from Lawrence, a giant of a man, moving about with deliberate grace. The atmosphere was quite unlike what Gavin had observed at the previous murder scenes — everyone went about their business slowly, almost haltingly, without the usual urgency of a murder that needed to be solved. And there was something else — a team of serious-looking men and women, up from Harvard’s Department of Anthropology, who had gridded off the entire site with a crosshatch of staked lines of string, stretched taut, so that the hollow resembled nothing so much as a giant bingo board. They were led by a Dr. Fosswright, a small, neat, dour-looking gentleman with short white hair and a carefully trimmed beard. The forensics people were shuttling back and forth to consult with him, almost as if he were in charge of the scene. Perhaps, in some ways, he was: it was his people who were undertaking the excavation of the site — with little brooms, dental tools, and small paintbrushes — and taking notes on laptops and tablets and shooting innumerable photographs.

Off to one side stood Chief Mourdock, hammy arms hanging by his sides, doing absolutely nothing. Sergeant Gavin shot a private glance at him. The chief looked dazed, like a deer in the headlights. It was remarkable, the change that had come over him. A week ago, he’d been swaggering around, full of himself, acting like the big-city-cop-in-a-small-town. Now he looked pale, unsure, even unnerved; his comfortable little fiefdom, his rapidly approaching retirement, had all been thrown into a state of uncertainty.

And now Gavin saw the architect of that change approaching — Special Agent Pendergast. He had been off to one side, talking to the lone reporter who’d appeared on scene — a young woman from the Boston Globe . It surprised Gavin that the tabloid Herald wasn’t also covering the story. But then again, it was more archaeology than a sensational contemporary murder story. The story would probably appear on some inside page of the Globe , perhaps be picked up by the New York Times and the Washington Post and then soon be forgotten, except for historians... and the locals.

Gavin found it curious that Pendergast would be talking so freely to a reporter. He was usually as close-lipped as an oyster. If it had been anybody else, Gavin might have thought he was staking out bragging rights. But that wasn’t Pendergast’s style. Gavin wondered what he was up to.

He had to admit that he, personally, felt stunned by this discovery. It was almost impossible to believe that members of his own community, the community of his father and his grandfather and his ancestors going back a dozen generations, had cold-bloodedly lured a ship onto the rocks and — finding it full of women and children instead of gold — had butchered them and buried them in a mass grave. It was equally shocking to think that some of his Exmouth contemporaries, descendants of that murderous mob, had passed down that dreadful knowledge — and had then used it to perpetrate the break-in at Percival Lake’s house. But Pendergast’s logic, which he’d laid out in a briefing for Gavin and the chief earlier that evening, was unavoidable. And the proof lay before him: in ever-deepening holes between the grids of string, in the evidence bags full of bones and crumbling, pathetic possessions. What really got to him was when the diggers had uncovered a beautiful, painted porcelain doll found mingled with the heap of small children.

One thing Gavin was absolutely sure of: none of his own antecedents had participated in this atrocity.

He felt a strange mixture of emotions — shock, repulsion, worry, anger... and embarrassment. This was not the way he wanted outsiders to think of Exmouth. The very last thing he wanted was more attention focused on the town. By now, all of Exmouth probably knew the story of the mass murder. His fellow townsfolk would surely feel, as he did, horror for the stain it cast on their village and its history. There would be gossip about whose ancestors were responsible. The whole town would be convulsed with suspicion, scandal, and shame. Ugly and even dangerous times were ahead.

Pendergast approached Gavin. “I am sorry, Sergeant. I can imagine how mortifying this is.”

Gavin nodded. “How did you...?” he began, then stopped. It was a question he’d been asking himself ever since Pendergast briefed him on the atrocity — but even now he could not quite bring himself to ask for more information.