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paled before the formidable figure of Aunt Jo. How to get around the strong-willed old lady?
    And if she did win Aunt Jo over, what then? Barbara would have to come up with tools, assistants, figure a way to pinpoint the burials and log them in . . . She grinned to herself. Politics and logistics, soothing the local potentates, scrounging up hardware and help. This was going to be just like a regular dig. It occurred to Barbara that maybe she could use some advice. Well, if Aunt Josephine cooperated, she might try a phone call to one of her Washington colleagues.
    By the time she was out of the shower, dried off, dressed in work clothes, and had her hair in some sort of order, Barbara had decided the best way to handle Aunt Jo was head on. Time to take the bull by the horns, so to speak. Subtlety would be lost on the strong personalities around here. She glanced at the clock. 7:05. Aunt Josephine would be down in her kitchen working on breakfast by now.
    Barbara picked up the journal book and nervously headed downstairs, into the big, sun-bright kitchen. The warm, clean smells of fresh, hot breakfast being made flooded the air—biscuits, flour, bacon, coffee, milk, the tang of orange juice—all mingled with the comfortable fragrance of a kitchen cleaned and polished until it shined. The gurgle of the percolator and the sizzle of the frying bacon seemed the perfect background accompaniment to it all. Aunt Josephine was standing over the kitchen table, busy with her rolling pin and biscuit cutter, vigorously making up another sheet of her buttermilk biscuits.
    Aunt Josephine looked up, her dark, round face framed owlishly by her gold-rimmed glasses. “Well, come on in, child, and give a body some help here. If you’re going to stand around my kitchen, I might as well get some work out of you.”
    Barbara almost protested, but then decided it would be good politics to follow the path of least resistance. She carefully set the journal book down on the sideboard. The spare rolling pin was in the third drawer down, as always, tidily wrapped up in its canvas rolling cloth. She pulled a mound of dough out of the mixing bowl, dredged it with flour, dusted the rolling pin, and set to work.
    The fresh, warm fragrance of the dough took her back to her own childhood, to the first romantic days of her own marriage, when even making breakfast was special; to the early morning bustle she had even forgotten she missed. But this was not the time for such thoughts. She had to face that damned music.
    “Aunt Josephine,” she said slowly, “I think I might be in big trouble with you.”
    “You’re never too old for that, child. What is it?”
    “Well, I was up in the attic yesterday—-”
    “And you broke open the lock on Zebulon’s chest,” Josephine said matter-of-factly. “I was up there after you, to put away the Thanksgiving platter until Christmas. I could see it had been fussed with, and the lock hasp fell away in my hands when I touched it. I knew it had to be you.”
    “And you weren’t going to say anything?”
    “Well, I was plenty mad to begin with, but I got to thinking just how foolish it was to have a trunk full of memories up there, locked up and forgotten about. What’s the point of having things to remember a body by if no one can remember what the remembrances are?
    “Besides, heavens only knows where the key to that trunk has got to—someone was going to have to break it open sooner or later. It might as well be the family’s professional grave robber.” Josephine gave her great-niece one of her best stern looks for a full half second before breaking into a broad smile.
    Barbara smiled back and breathed a sigh of relief. She never knew what would happen when she crossed Great-aunt Josephine. The tough old girl might decide to let you get away with it, if your motives were pure or you were on her good side. Then she would struggle valiantly to find a good reason to forgive you. But she was just as likely