LINDA
The fragment sat in Linda's palm, and it felt like something she hadn’t felt since she’d found the first letter from the Wayne Group—hope!
She didn't move. She didn't look up. She was only distantly aware of Ray standing two feet behind her, of the smell of broken concrete and turned earth, of the late afternoon sun warming her shoulders through her blouse. All of that was at the edge of things. At the center was the piece of fired clay in her hand and the fine incised lines running in a precise arc across its curved surface.
Linda turned it slowly.
The outer wall of the vessel had been burnished before firing, smoothed to a finish that caught the light differently from the break edges, which were rough and pale where the clay had fractured. The incised pattern ran in two parallel lines that curved together at one end and diverged at the other, with a series of small, deliberate notches cut between them at regular intervals. At the lower edge of the piece, where it had brokenfrom the larger vessel, there was a thickening of the clay wall that suggested a base junction or a foot ring.
Linda's thumb moved across the notches, counting them. There were seven.
She turned the piece over. The inner surface was undecorated, slightly rougher, with the ghost of a coil join visible where two slabs of clay had been pressed together before firing. The clay body itself was tempered with what appeared to be sand and crushed shell, consistent with what she'd expect from a coastal site. The firing had been uneven, darker on one side, lighter on the other, the way hand-built vessels fired in open pits rather than kilns. Staring at it, Linda counted the notches again just to be sure.Yup, there were seven.
Her heart was going at a pace she hadn't felt since the last dig she'd been on, twenty-three years ago on the coast of Collier County, when her trowel had come up against the edge of a midden that turned out to run forty feet in three directions.
"Linda?" Ray said quietly behind her.
"Give me a minute, Ray," Linda answered, without looking up.
“Linda!” Michael called. “What is it?”
“Shush,” Maggie said gently. “You know how she gets when she’s concentrating.”
“Yes, but on what?” Martin asked, and Linda briefly registered the hint of impatience mingled with curiosity in his voice. “What has she found that could impact the Wayne Group's plans?”
“Uncle Michael,” Jake called as he and Toby arrived. “What’s going on? Why is Gran in the pool?”
“She’s found something,” Maggie replied.
“Oh!” Toby said, and Linda glanced around as the nine-year-old moved next to his grandmother.
“What did you find, Gran?” Jake called. “Is it treasure? Because it can’t be dinosaur bones, as you told me there were none in these parts.”
“Maybe they just haven’t found any yet,” Toby reasoned. “I mean, really, how do they really know? They are actually just speculating if you think about it.”
“Hey, you’re right,” Jake’s voice echoed down to Linda, making her glance around and smile at the two enthusiastic and frighteningly intelligent young men. “They truly don’t know, I mean for one hundred percent sure.”
“Yeah, it’s kind of like them saying green is green,” Toby added. “How do they know it’s really green and we only think of it as green because that’s what we’ve been told it is by someone who named it.”
“Yeah,” Jake agreed. “It’s kind of nuts what we just go along with…”
“Shush,” Maggie hissed. “Linda is concentrating. You two go and have your very weird conversation elsewhere.”
“Sorry,” Jake and Toby said in unison.
“We’ll be quiet,” Jake promised.
Quiet prevailed once again as Linda crouched lower and looked at the edges of the excavation around where the piece was found. The crew had done well. They'd stopped the moment they'd seen something that wasn't soil or root or broken concrete, and they'dleft the surrounding matrix largely undisturbed. She could see at least two more fragments partially visible in the section wall to her left. One of them showed a curve matching the burnished exterior surface, and what might have been the edge of a third piece further down the profile, though that one was not exposed enough to be certain.
Linda’s heart thudded in excitement as she realized that this wasn't a stray piece.
A single fragment could be explained as a trade item, something carried to the site from elsewhere and dropped or discarded. Two or three fragments from the same deposit, in the same stratigraphic layer, three feet below a concrete slab that had been poured decades ago, was a different conversation entirely.
Linda straightened slowly.
She looked at the section wall for a long moment, reading the soil layers the way she'd been taught to read them. The broken concrete and rubble of the pool construction at the top. Below that, a thin band of mixed soil where the original ground surface had been disturbed when the pool was put in. Below that, an undisturbed deposit of dark, organic-rich soil that had been building up for a very long time before anyone had put a pool on top of it.
The fragments were in the undisturbed deposit. Whatever this was, it predated the hotel. It predated the pool. It predated anything the Heart family had built on this ground by a very long margin.
