She hadn’t seen any other moss in the area and shined her light around just to make sure.
At the same time, she remembered reading once about how things being buried below the surface of the ground affected what grew on top of the ground, which was one reason why topography could change from one inch to the next even under the same sky with the same weather in the same climate.
Dizzy, with a wet and stinging chin—bleeding, she suspected—Lucy figured that she was in over her head. She was supposing based on need, not on fact, or evidence. And she couldn’t let it go.
Some part of her recognized that she was losing it as she clawed at the dirt. She knew, on some level, as she felt the dirt and growth beneath her nails, that she should stop. She should get in her car, drive home, take a hot bath and go to bed. Or call someone for help.
What kind of help she wasn’t sure. Didn’t matter. She had to dig. She had to do this herself.
Didn’t matter what her mind told her. Didn’t matter if she looked crazy. If she was crazy.
She couldn’t stop. Her fingers dug. She hurt all over. She was aware of her own cries in the darkness. And she couldn’t slow her arms down.
Tasting blood, but driven from the inside out, Lucy continued to dig. She’d tire herself out. Satisfy herself that she’d done all she could do. She’d drive away and no one would ever know that for a short time on a Saturday night in November she’d taken leave of her senses.
Several minutes later, she was still digging, stopping only long enough to take off her scarf, place it over her chin and tie it at the back of her neck. Pulling her gun out of her holster, she used the butt to get through some rock. Something caused that moss to grow, and Lucy had to know what it was.
Maybe an underground trickle of water. A leak in the water table? Was such a thing possible? Probably not.
She kept digging. With both hands. When the hole got too deep for her to reach sitting up, she lay down on her belly. Her cell phone dug into her hip bone. She didn’t care. She dug.
The back end of her pistol was covered in dirt. She didn’t care. She dug.
Time passed and she had no idea how late it had grown. Or how early it might be. Her head throbbed. Her chin stung. She still tasted blood. And she dug.
She hadn’t found anything yet.
She had to find something.
Had to find what made that moss grow.
She was crying. Her tears were dripping off the end of her nose into the dirt. They made her face itch but she couldn’t scratch. Her hands were caked with dirt. The tips of her fingers had grown numb. And she just couldn’t stop.
And then she did. With her right hand, Lucy scooped down as far as her arm would go, scooping out the next handful of dirt, and scraped her knuckles on something hard. And sharp. And crusty.
A rock, she first thought. Turning her hand, she felt the object with blistered and bleeding fingers. And froze. Lucy’s head fell to the earth, catching on the opening of the hole she’d dug, stopping there as her arm hung in the ground. She couldn’t pull up the object in her fingers. And she couldn’t let go.
She wasn’t sure what she held, at least not on a conscious level. Her whole body was shaking. Her heart pounded and she was breathing like she’d run a marathon. After a couple of minutes of lying still, she gave a tug. The object gave way and Lucy brought it to the surface.
A bone.
She’d known. Maybe. The second her fingers felt the aged piece of calcium in the ground.
But she didn’t want to know. It was probably an animal bone. Something that died long, long ago.
Maybe even a dinosaur bone.
Sitting up, the piece of bone still in her hand, Lucy stared into the hole. She couldn’t dig any farther without a tool.
And through the fog surrounding her mind, she had the thought that she probably shouldn’t do anything more, anyway. Just in case this was a crime scene.
She should never have distur
bed a crime scene.
Looking down, she stared in the darkness at the fragment in her hand. She tried to loosen her fingers, to see if she could tell anything about the bone—what kind of bone, from what kind of creature—but she couldn’t let go. Tears dripped onto her fist. She didn’t want to wet the evidence.
With her left hand, Lucy reached for her cell phone. Pushed a button. Listened to the ringing.