in windy fields of memory,
piercing like a knife.
―Basho
I was haunted by a memory of a painting I once saw that depicted a beautiful woman embracing a skeleton. It summed up for me the whole sordid business of Abe's cold cases and conjured up horrific images of the holocaust.
Is this what we were about―hunting down atrocities of the past? If it were, I wasn't sure I could go on and overcome my nausea.
I hoped the skeleton we unearthed in Esther's garden was not a young Jewish girl, or part of a series of appalling atrocities that would made me question basic humanity.
I knew Nat was thinking the same thing as the team assembled again at the house the following Saturday.
Greg had seen an anomaly on the ground scan that indicated a disturbance of the soil or some sort of cavity. I could only hope it was something benign and not the gruesome remains of some unspeakable travesty.
But Gail and I both sensed the grounds of the house could only produce a bitter harvest.
Greg, Nat and I all pitched in to dig where the scan indicated an anomaly, and the further down we dug the more we became convinced the results would be appalling.
But at about a yard down Greg's spade clanged on what appeared to be a metal object, yet it had not shown as such on the magnetometry nor was it picked up by the metal detectors―that was perplexing.
We dug around the object and found it to be a metallic-looking pod that was curiously undetectable to metal detectors and definitely not magnetic.
"I have some background in metallurgy," Greg said, "but I've never come across a metal exhibiting these properties."
"Well, let's exhume it and analyze it," I replied. "It seems to be some kind of container."
It turned out I was right and the pod could be pried open like two crowns of an egg. Some kind of attraction held the parts together but whatever the nature of the force field, it was weak enough to be broken by simply pulling the the crowns apart.
Inside the pod was a journal consisting of typed pages in some sort of code.
It was obviously some arcane cipher and Greg and I were disappointed because we had no idea of how to decipher the encryption, but Nat seemed nonplussed.
"I have colleagues who specialize in algorithmic decipherment and code breaking," Nat said. "These guys specialize in historical manuscripts and cracking things like the Mayan script. I wouldn't worry too much about the contents and just be happy it's not a buried body."
"Amen to that," Gail sighed.
I should have been relieved there were no more skeletons to rattle bones through nights alone with my thoughts, but I was feeling unsettled and overwhelmed, like a swimmer venturing out beyond his depths.
I consoled myself I had a team who themselves had access to other experts, but it was a long way from the art of mere house whispering and wondered if I were equal to the task.
But one thing I knew for certain, Abe would be intrigued when I finally shared what we had uncovered.
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