Bone Rattle by Marc Cameron (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕

– when he should have been worried about the heavy backhoe bucket swinging back and forth on the boom over his head. Dean Schimmel, a laborer in tattered Frogg Toggs raingear that looked like he’d found them wadded up in the trunk of an abandoned car, perched on a crumbling hummock of mossy earth a few feet up the valley. As ever, he leaned on a shovel, looking as spindly as the shovel’s handle, and extremely glum. He was supposed to act as safety. To keep an eye on Merculief, make sure he didn’t get himself brained by the swinging backhoe bucket, but Dean Schimmel was just as likely to stare at a passing raven or puff on his cigarette and watch a shuffling porcupine. He was probably a decent enough guy, though he put far too much stock in what Dallas Childers had to say.

That guy was bad news. Merculief could feel it.

Childers, the scowling dude behind the controls of the bright yellow beast, was supposed to stay to the existing road. Instead, he used it as a vague guideline, taking bites of moist earth and rock the size of La-Z-Boy recliners out of the mountain at every other turn. Merculief didn’t try to stop him. Violations of US Forest Service regulations weren’t his problem – unless they involved old bones or Native settlements.

The mine had a strict no-gun policy, but Childers said he’d seen a brown bear a couple of weeks back, so the foreman let him carry his big Glock on a chest rig over his Carhartt overalls. He practiced with it too, every day, out on the old tailings by the ocean. He used oil cans for targets and always made sure someone else was watching so they could see how good he was. He was fast, which was part of being good, Merculief thought. There were no more bear sightings, but Childers just kept right on carrying his Glock. No one ever told him not to. Had it been anybody else, Merculief might have felt safer, but when he thought it over, he was a lot more concerned about Childers and his Glock than any brown bear.

The bulk of the crew was working down at the main operation, through the thick forest, a quarter of a mile away, most of them deep underground. It would be all too easy for Childers to murder him and bury him with the backhoe. Forget finding any bones. Childers just flat hated Indians.

A mixture of Tlingit, Portuguese, and Russian, Isaac Merculief had grown up in Petersburg, a hundred and sixty miles to the south. He knew how to dress for Southeast Alaska weather – mist, rain, fog, snow, wind, or any combination thereof. Extra layers could be shed on the rare but spectacularly beautiful sunny days – but cold and wet was always just around the corner, waiting to slap you in the face. Merculief didn’t mind. The endless rain kept everything an unimaginable green.

The archeologist pulled the collar of the fleece jacket inside his raincoat tighter around his neck, eyes moving from the teeth of the heavy bucket to Dallas Childers’s sheep-killing-dog look. It was in Merculief’s nature to try to say something friendly, a joke to cut the tension, but the backhoe’s engine isolated the three men and left them each cloistered away in their own world, free to despise or pity the other.

Merculief had just looked away, resting his eyes for a moment from the monotonous back-and-forth movement of the backhoe’s boom, when he heard the telltale rattle of the diesel engine revving a little more than usual. Childers had uncovered something and was attempting to swing the bucket back over the top of it.

It was too late. Merculief leaped forward, scrambling in the soupy dirt, nearly falling in front of the backhoe. He shouted, frantically waving his arms, for Childers to stop. A strong hand grabbed the collar of his raincoat and yanked him backward. He heard spewed curses, muffled, but angry, as Schimmel dragged him away.

Childers killed the engine, letting the silence creep in to join the raging hiss of the river below. Everyone at the mine knew he’d been a sniper in the Marine Corps. Isaac thought he still looked at everyone like he was seeing them through the crosshairs of a scope. He slumped in his seat without leaving the cab for almost half a minute, eyes locked forward as if he was trying to figure out his next move.

Isaac hardly noticed the man’s gloom. The miners might not be happy, but this was a real find. He could tell that at first glance. The backhoe had stripped away a large table of stone above the ledge, exposing long, cream-colored leg bones. Human leg bones. The remaining earth had fallen free quickly as the bucket had swung sideways, revealing most of an entire skeleton, situated on a decaying wooden frame. Protected for decades by rock and thick vegetation, the grave was now suddenly exposed to wind and rain. Isaac found himself giddy by the time he climbed down in the roadbed and leaned in to get a better look. Three copper bracelets encircled the wrist bones of the left arm. The remnants of a leather apron lay across the skeleton’s lap, adorned with deer hooves and bits of shell. A rattle about the size of a drinking gourd lay next to the tiny bones that had once been the dead person’s hand, as if he or she had been holding it at the time of burial. It looked to be made of bone and boiled horn – like nothing Merculief had ever seen.

Schimmel moved into the dig, shoulder to shoulder with Merculief, shovel still clutched in his hand. He backpedaled when he saw the skull, mumbling a hasty prayer. Merculief would have laughed had he not been so excited. Schimmel was always talking about haunted mines and Tommy knockers, the ghosts of dead miners who tapped on the adit walls.

Childers remained behind