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nightstand read 6:25. Good. Plenty of time left in the day. She had set the alarm for 6:30, and now she reached out to switch it off, pleased that she awakened before it went off. Nice to have a sense of minor accomplishment without even getting out of bed. But today was full of big plans. She wanted to get started on disinterring those one-hundred-thirty-odd-year-old gorilla bones. Today was Friday. She had the weekend to work with before it was time for the long ride back to the airport and the endless flight from Mississippi to Washington. There was little time, and she would need all of it.
    Barbara threw back the covers, swung her feet out of bed, sat up, and looked out the window at the new, fresh-scrubbed morning. She heard laughter, looked down, and saw the children, four or five toddlers, tiny nieces and nephews and first-cousins-once-removed, wandering about on still-unsteady legs in the magically dew-brushed lush green of the lawn.
    It was barely light yet, and the sunlight swept in a low, golden fan across the clean, bright day, all of it lovely. Barbara suddenly realized there was a lump in her throat, and she looked back to the tiny children, laughing gleefully because they were alive.
    Barbara had no children, and never would. The doctors hadn’t quite come out and said that, but they had came as close as they could. Michael and she had tried everything before the collapse of their marriage. Probably, trying too hard had contributed to that collapse. Mike had not liked the thermometers or the precise timing that eliminated spontaneity, and, later, had liked even less the idea of storing his seed in the sperm bank for tries at artificial insemination. His sperm was still there, on ice, another relic of the ruined marriage no one quite knew what to do with.
    But children. She watched the children play outside, discovering the marvelous world. Suddenly, the old sorrow washed over her, and it was suddenly one of those times, one of those brief moments, when she felt a sense of grief and loss for a person who had never been brought into existence. It made her world emptier.
    But the toddlers’ bright laughter wafted up toward her window again, chased her regrets away, and she found herself smiling at their adventures.
    She looked out toward the old slaves’ graveyard. Today was going to be her adventure. If she got away with it. If—If she dared go through with it. She drew herself up short. If she dared? She stopped, thought for a moment, and realized she was scared . Of what, precisely, she could not say. She suddenly felt as if she were on the edge of a precipice, stepping out on a bridge that might not hold. She looked again at the graveyard, and told herself quite firmly that there was nothing there to harm her.
    She scooped up her dressing gown and bathroom gear, stepped out into the hall, and headed for the shower before any other early riser could beat her to the hot water. She moved briskly, decisively, through the rituals of morning, as if that could banish her misgivings.
    But what was it that was bothering her? Barbara had always found the shower a good place to think. The routine and privacy of the moment, the luxury of steaming hot water, let her mind relax enough to focus in on the problems at hand. So what was it? True, there were several difficulties to be surmounted before she could get at the gorillas’ burial site—chief among them Great-aunt Josephine. Maybe Barbara was just reacting to Aunt Jo the way she would have as a child, a little girl who knew she was in big trouble and had to work up the nerve to face the music. After all, Barbara had broken into an old trunk—an offense that would have gotten her a tongue-lashing and a real hiding as a kid.
    No, Barbara thought to herself, she definitely was not looking forward to admitting her break-and-enter into Zebulon’s chest—and she was not looking forward to the endless fuss the relatives would make over the journal book. But that all