part of what’s left of those civilizations.”
“What’re you looking for in your studies?”
“Answers.”
She nodded at that. She always wanted answers. “To what questions?”
“All of them.”
She rose to pour him another mug of coffee. “You’re ambitious.”
“No. Curious.”
When her lips curved this time it wasn’t her polite smile. It was generous and warm and slid beautifully over her face, into her eyes. And made his stomach tighten. “That’s much better than ambition.”
“You think?”
“Absolutely. Ambition can be—usually is—narrow. Curiosity is broad and liberated and open to possibilities. What do your bones tell you?” She laughed again, then gestured to the cluttered side table before she sat again. “Those bones.”
What the hell, he thought. He had to write it up anyway. It wouldn’t hurt to talk it through—in a limited fashion.
“That she was about forty-five years old when she died,” he began.
“She?”
“That’s right. Native American female. She’d had several fractures—leg and arm, probably from that fall—several years before she died. Which indicates that her culture was less nomadic than previously thought, and that the sick and injured were tended, treated.”
“Well, of course, they would tend to her.”
“There’s no ‘of course’ about it. In some cultures, injuries of that type, the type that would incapacitate and prevent the wounded from pulling her weight in the tribe, would have resulted in abandonment.”
“Ah well. Cruelty is nothing new,” she murmured.
“No, and neither is efficiency, or survival of the fittest. But in this case, the tribe cared for the sick and injured, and buried their dead with respect and ceremony. Probably buried within a day. She, and others unearthed in the project, were wrapped in a kind of yarn made from native plants. Complex weave,” he continued, thinking aloud now rather than talking to Camilla. “Had to have a loom, had to take considerabletime. Couldn’t have moved nomadically. Semipermanent site. Plenty of game there—and seeds, nuts, roots, wood for fires and huts. Seafood.”
“You know all this from a few bones?”
“What?”
She saw, actually saw him click back to her. The way his eyes focused again, clouded with vague annoyance. “You learned this from a few bones?” she repeated.
It was barely the surface of what he’d learned—and theorized. “We got more than a few, and findings other than bones.”
“The more you learn, the more you understand how they lived, why they did things. What came from their lives, and what was lost. You look for—is this right—how they built their homes, cooked their food. How they raised their children, buried their dead. What deities they worshiped, and battles they fought. And in the end, how we evolved from that.”
It was, he admitted, a nice summary for a layman. There was a brain inside the classy package. “That’s close enough.”
“Perhaps the women cooked soup over an open fire.”
The glint of humor caught him, had him nearly smiling back. “Women have been copping kitchen duty since the start. You’ve got to figure there’s a reason for that.”
“Oh, I do. Men are more inclined to beat their chests and pick fights than see to the more basic, and less heroic tasks.”
“There you go.” He rose. Despite the coffee, he was dragging. It was the main reason he skipped the pain pills as often as possible. “I’m going up. Spare bed’s in the first room, left of the stairs.”
Without a thank-you, a good-night or even one of his occasional grunts, he left Camilla alone in front of the fire.
Chapter 3
I don’t know what to make of my host
, Camilla wrote. It was late now, and she’d opted to huddle on the miserable sofa in front of the fire as the spare room upstairs had been chilly and damp—and dark.
She hadn’t heard a sound out of Del, and though she’d tried both the lights and the phone, she’d gotten