Page 69 of The Witch

Is she? “She was here last time.”

He doesn’t say anything. I guess he doesn’t want to badmouth a fellow employee for incompetence, although I wouldn’t blame him in this case.

I expected him to lead me to his office, but instead he takes me into a small conference room. He pulls out one of the seats for me, which makes me remember what a gentleman he was when we had dinner together. I feel a twinge of regret that I never took him up on his next offer.

“I’d rather stand,” I say.

He cocks his head to the side. “Is everything okay?”

I’m not entirely sure how to answer that question, so instead, I reach into the tote bag and pull out the blanket. It takes me a second to unwrap the bone and lay it gently on top of the blanket on the conference table. When I lift my eyes, Henry’s face has gone white.

“Whoa!” he gasps. “What the hell is that?”

“I found it in my backyard.” I keep my voice low, even though we’re all alone in this room. “It was buried near the woods.”

I found the spot where Gram dug up the bone, right on the periphery of the property. There were likely more bones under there, but I didn’t dare dig deeper. It’s clear whoever put it there never wanted it to be found.

Henry takes a step back, his hands in the air. “You need to call the police if you found human remains in your backyard.”

I suspected he would say that. Somehow, I have to convince him otherwise. “I think it belonged to Caroline Eldridge. Ethel told me she was buried in our backyard, in an unmarked grave.”

“Okay, sure.” He still seems reluctant to get anywhere near that bone. “Sounds right. But you still need to call the police.”

“Henry,” I say, “if I call the police, they’re going to turn Pemberton into a crime scene. My grandmother would be traumatized. And all over some bones from hundreds of years ago. Is that really what you want when the museum is trying to buy the property?”

He takes in a breath, still staring down at the remains of what was once a human being. “I don’t know, Julia.”

“Do you think the benefactors would even still want Pemberton after that? If the backyard was found to be a graveyard, it would certainly limit development on the property.”

He sighs and rubs his chin. “What do you want me to do? You brought a human bone into the museum. How am I supposed to react to this?”

“Well,” I say, “I thought you might be able to figure out how old it is. If it’s the right age to belong to Caroline Eldridge.”

He looks at the bone more carefully now, although he still seems reluctant to touch it. “It does look pretty old, but I can’t say that with any accuracy.”

“Do you know anyone who could?”

He flashes me a lopsided smile. “You’re killing me, Julia.”

“You do, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” He runs a hand through his hair, disturbing his neat cut. “I do. I have a friend in Boston who can do carbon-fourteen dating. He can’t get it down to the year or anything like that, but within fifty or so years, sure.”

“So?” I look from the bone to his face. “Will you do it?”

He drops into one of the conference chairs. “What the hell am I supposed to tell my friend about where this came from?”

“Make up some story. I’m sure you could come up with something.”

“Yeah…” He stares at the bone for a minute, then looks back up at me. “Okay. Fine. But if the carbon-fourteen dating comes back as anything less than one hundred years, we have to go straight to the police.”

“Deal.”

The thought of this bone being less than one hundred years old is very unsettling. My grandmother is eighty-five years old and has lived at Pemberton her entire life. If it has been buried more recently than that…

No, I can’t think about that possibility. There’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for the bones being buried on our property.

But of course, that comes back to the reason why Gram dug it up. Who told her where Caroline’s grave was located? There certainly wasn’t any marker that I could see.