"I was hoping for another chance to speak to Brendan, too," Cormac said, pulling his last shoelace tight. McGann had disappeared from the bog so quickly this afternoon that he hadn't had a proper chance to bring up the subject of financial compensation. Artifacts found on Bord na Mona lands paid a fairly decent finder's fee--mainly to keep the turf board workers honest--but there was no regular system of payment for objects that turned up on private property. Most people didn't expect anything for discovery of human remains. But part of his job here was to find out whether that would be a problem--without actually asking the question, of course.

"He can be a bit rough, I know, but Brendan is really the decentest man you could meet," Una said. "He's just out of sorts because it's another setback. It's already the end of April, and he figures we should have finished footing the turf a fortnight ago."

As they drove out of the village, Cormac began to feel he was getting his bearings about the place. Dunbeg was in the center of a small peninsula that jutted out into Lough Derg. He knew that around the curve of the small inlet north of the town was Bracklyn House, and beyond that another quarter mile down the sh.o.r.e lay the brown expanse of Drumcleggan Bog. The day's fair weather had lasted into evening, and now there was a high, milky cast to the sunlight that played on the waves of Lough Derg, visible now and again through the overgrown hedgerows as they made their way up the high road out of the village.

Una was quiet for a moment, then asked: "You got the cailin rua safely off to Dublin, then?" The cailin rua, Cormac thought. It was a fitting name for her: the red girl. "n.o.body said what's going to happen to her."

"Well, Dr. Gavin and the museum staff will see if they can estimate her age, and try to figure out how she died, I suppose. There'd be more to go on, obviously, if the body were also intact, but they can still gather quite a lot of information." Una was silent, and he could feel her discomfort in the face of his enthusiasm.

"That's not what you wanted to know, is it?"

"Actually, what I meant was what will happen to her in the end, after all that."

"Well, at the moment the National Museum is keeping all its bog specimens in a special fridge," Cormac answered, feeling as he said the words how callous it sounded.

"But what's it in aid of? Maybe the poor girl deserves some peace."

"If we can preserve bog remains, then we have a chance to answer questions in the future that we haven't even conceived of yet. The examinations are carried out with the greatest respect." Una didn't seem satisfied by his answers, but said no more.

As they rounded a bend in the road, a forbidding tower house hove into view among the trees. The imposing stonework looked mostly intact, but its roof gaped open toward the sky and tufts of gra.s.s and wild phlox grew out of the chimney stones. Narrow windows were slashed into the sides of its gray stone bulk, which was half enshrouded in ivy. Though he'd been down this road earlier, Cormac had not seen it before.

"That's O'Flaherty's Tower," Una said. "They were the big family around here once. It belongs to Bracklyn House now--to Hugh Osborne."

As Cormac slowed the jeep to study the tower more closely, a large crow appeared out of one of the upper windows, spread its wings, and began to wheel around the ruin. A second bird joined it, then another, and another, in rapid succession until the topmost part was enveloped in a whirling ma.s.s of dark wings and a cacophony of croaking calls. The sight touched that place inside him, unrevealed to anyone, where he tucked away such otherworldly images and impressions, things connected somehow to myth and memory, to times and places that modern humankind could not completely understand.

Then, as unexpectedly as they had appeared, the noisy crowd of birds vanished, leaving a single dark shape dipping and soaring around the castle walls, the evening light glinting off its jet-black wings. A voice broke through beside him: "Are you all right?" Una asked. Cormac looked down and saw his hands on the steering wheel, feeling as if he'd just awakened from a dream. The jeep wasn't moving. He'd come to a full stop in the middle of the road.

"People say the place is haunted," Una continued, "and looking at you just now, I'm half tempted to believe it."

"Sorry," he said, pressing on the accelerator once more. Around a curve in the road, the dense forest around the tower gradually gave way to light undergrowth, and finally to the stone-walled grounds of the Osborne estate. "This is where Hugh Osborne lives?"

Una nodded. Through the imposing stone and wrought-iron gates Cormac could see a lawn and formal gardens, and Bracklyn House itself, a st.u.r.dy manor house of dark gray stone, its steep slate roof rimmed around with stepped gables and crenellations. It was modest, as Irish country houses went, and retained the rough-hewn look of the century in which it was built.

"Fine old place," he said. A harmless remark, but one glance at Una told him that it had tipped the scale.

Her words came in a torrent: "I suppose Devaney explained to you how the police have tried over and over again to pin the blame on Hugh for what happened? Of course there's no proof, because he didn't do anything. Just a lot of malicious talk from spiteful people with nothing better to occupy their minds. Whatever happened to Mina and the child, I'm certain Hugh had nothing to do with it. Anyone could see how he adored his family. The last two years have been awful, on top of everything else to have the police sniffing around asking questions, and the whole town watching, and waiting--" She stopped and took a breath, but seemed determined not to shed any tears. "Sometimes I really hate this f.e.c.kin' place."

Why did he imagine that Una McGann had more than once been in the position of defending Hugh Osborne? "I suppose you've known him a long time?" He watched her face and posture soften.

"Not long, actually. He's quite a bit older, and he was always away at school when we were growing up. But I got to know him when I was taking some cla.s.ses at the university in Galway--he teaches geography there. I'd be hitching up to school the odd time and he'd give me a lift."

"What were you studying?"

"Studio arts," Una said. "I never finished." Her tone suggested there might be more to the story, but he gathered it was not something she felt comfortable talking about. "You're very good, listening to me go on," she said.

"Did you know his wife?"

"Not really. Just to say h.e.l.lo. We used to pa.s.s along the road. I don't know how Hugh has kept going at all."

Cormac hadn't reached a point where he'd begun to think of himself as a confirmed bachelor, but he had never been married, never been a father. He searched the windows of Bracklyn House for signs of life as he tried to put himself in Hugh Osborne's place. Una followed his gaze, then looked down at her hands, doubled into fists in her lap.

He wanted to ask Una what she thought might have happened to Mina Osborne, but thought better of it. As they pulled away from the gate, Cormac wondered whether Una's ministrations to Osborne out on the bog were anything more than neighborly concern. He remembered the fork twisting uneasily in her brother's hands as well.

They had driven less than a quarter mile when Una spoke up: "You can turn in at the next gate on your left." Cormac did as she instructed, and the jeep thundered over a cattle grid and up a steep drive. The McGann house was all but invisible from the road, tucked up against the side of the hill, and surrounded on three sides by pale green fir trees that brushed against its eaves. Like many old farmhouses, it was broad-shouldered and compact, close to the ground, with small-paned windows. The exterior had been freshly whitewashed, and the front door and window frames recently painted with glossy black enamel. An old-fashioned dog rose grew to one side of the door, and every flower bed looked lovingly tended. An ancient black car was parked on one side of the tin-covered shed in the haggard. Everything about this place suggested a family farm of thirty, perhaps even forty years ago.

"Brendan's the man with the spade and the paintbrush here," Una said. "He loves this place as if it were his child. He was that upset when my father replaced the old thatched roof--he slept out in the shed for three days. When they wanted to build a new house, he was like a briar. Wouldn't hear of it."

Cormac understood. A man who still insisted on cutting his own turf by hand wouldn't exactly be a man who thrived on change. Una pushed open the shiny black front door. The house was divided in two equal halves, with the main hallway down the center. She led him into the kitchen, clearly the heart of the house. A heavy pine table stood in the middle of the room, its oilcloth heaped with onion skins and carrot peelings, and a dresser full of blue willow delft china stood beside the sink. The old stone fireplace still dominated the room, but it was cold at the moment. What heat there was apparently came from the enormous cooker that stood to one side of the fireplace, and the smell wafting from the cast iron pot that sat on top of it reminded Cormac that he was ravenous.

"You'll have tea? Of course you will," Una answered for him. "Fintan must have finished up the stew before he went out. The lads pretend to be useless, but they're well able to fend for themselves." She checked the kettle, and began to fill it at the sink, giving Cormac a chance to look around the s.p.a.ce.

A narrow stairway led up to a closed loft that hung over the far side of the room. Cormac wondered if the bedrooms here were like those in his grandmother's house: he pictured the horrid flowered wallpaper in musty rooms of his childhood, furnished with swaybacked metal beds and pictures of the Sacred Heart. Beneath the loft stood a second cooker, this one covered with white enamel buckets. In shelving all around it were large gla.s.s canisters, all labeled in the same neat hand. They contained mysterious organic substances that looked like bark, roots, and other dried plant material. He recognized pale green lichens, coppery onion skins, and the fibrous rhizomes of wildflowers, but others were strange in name and appearance: "Madder root," "Cochineal," and "Hypernic." Hanks of yarn, some dyed, some natural, bawn-colored wool, were stacked in binlike baskets on another set of shelves. The low ceiling, coupled with the strange-looking contents, gave this place the atmosphere of a medieval alchemist's lair. In the back corner of the kitchen, beneath the stairs, stood a large loom, its complicated system of warp and weft temporarily at rest. Hanging on the wall beside it was a length of cloth, a textured landscape in earthy tones reminiscent of lichens and sphagnum moss, with flecks of purple fox-glove and b.u.t.terwort. Cormac's eye was drawn to the subtle variations in color; he could make out the incomplete arcs of two circles, almost like the long-buried footprints of a pair of ringforts.

"This your work?"

"Yes, such as it is," Una said, sounding somewhat preoccupied. She swept around him, scooping up a pile of papers, a jumper, and a newspaper from the well-worn sofa whose back rested against the front window.

"Please, do sit down, and forgive the mess. I've become a bit blind to it, I'm afraid." What she called mess was the comfortable, familiar flotsam of everyday life, and it gave the room a sense of warmth and animation he suddenly felt his own orderly house in Ranelagh sorely lacked.

"What is all that?" he asked, gesturing toward the area under the loft.

"I suppose you could call it my studio. It used to be all very tidy when I was just doing the weaving. But since I've begun making my own dyes, it's taken over the whole b.l.o.o.d.y kitchen. I'm hoping to get a bigger s.p.a.ce soon."

Cormac heard a commotion at the back door, and a small girl about five years old burst through the door, her round face circled by a corona of fair ringlets. She wore denim overalls, yellow wellingtons, and a tweedy green jacket with large red b.u.t.tons. The child's bright eyes traveled to Una, then to Cormac, and she darted out the back door again as quickly as she'd come in.

"Fintan, will you come on?" they could hear her plead in an exasperated tone, as though he'd been holding her up all day. "We've got company for tea."

A clean-shaven young man in a baggy sweater smiled and nodded as he stuck his head in through the door, and set down a basket that seemed to be laden with moss and mushrooms, then turned to pull off his boots outside. "Stew should be nearly ready," he said to Una through the open door.

"Cormac Maguire, this is my brother, Fintan, and this," Una said, as the child scurried around to her side, "is my daughter, Aoife."

Conversation at the McGanns' supper table reminded Cormac of the few times he'd gone home for a weekend with a cla.s.smate from school. At home there was only himself and his mother, and they never wanted for conversation, but in the circle of a larger family than his own, there was a kind of uncontrolled energy he found irresistible. The subject matter around this kitchen table was nothing lofty, and yet Cormac watched with fascination as words and laughter leapt and slid across the table. There was only one party noticeably silent: Brendan had barely acknowledged Cormac's presence when he came in, and after answering a few questions, sat apart from the rest of them at the end of the long table. He chewed noisily, mopping the meaty juice of the stew with rough pieces torn from a heel of brown bread, and spoke not a word to anyone. Soon he pushed away from the table and retreated to the chair beside the fireplace, grinding tobacco between his rough palms and filling his pipe in a way that suggested years of habit. Indeed, everyone behaved as if this were a perfectly normal occurrence, and perhaps it was.

No one had mentioned Aoife's father. Perhaps he was absent, as Cormac's own father had been. After the meal, the little girl set out the spoils she'd collected--a broad white toadstool, acorns and chestnuts, soft patches of pale green moss, and, finally, a small sprig of white hawthorn flowers. Brendan's face darkened.

"Aoife, take those outside. Right now--do you hear me? It's bad luck bringing them into a house. And you," he said, jabbing a finger at Fintan, "ought to know better."

"Ah, Brendan, they're lovely," Aoife protested, as she playfully thrust the pale flowers into his face. He recoiled and stood, towering awkwardly over the little girl.

"Why must you always argue? Jaysus, you're just like Una," he said, the pitch of his voice rising. "Can you not just do as you're told?" He wrenched the flowers from the child's grasp and marched to the back door to fling them out into the darkness. Cormac remembered his grandmother's horror when he'd brought a similar bouquet home as a small boy. His mother had tried to explain that it was just superst.i.tion. It was only years later he'd read that hawthorn was considered unlucky because its sweet, stale fragrance suggested the smell of death. What would a child know of that?

"Maybe I'd better be getting back," Cormac said, remembering the music session in Dunbeg. He turned to Fintan. "I can give you a lift in, if you like."

The pub was already fairly crowded when they arrived, and a handful of musicians had gathered just inside the door near the stone fireplace. A half dozen pints of porter, creamy tops measuring their levels, stood waiting on the short tables at the center of the group, while the air above their heads coursed with the swirling rhythm of a reel that Cormac recognized immediately as a splendid setting of "Rakish Paddy." As Fintan stepped to the bar to order drinks, one of the fiddle players turned to look at them--it was Garrett Devaney. The policeman raised his eyebrows by way of greeting, all the while keeping his bow in motion and his chin lovingly pressed to the body of his fiddle.

When Fintan handed him his pint, Cormac sat down and began putting together his ebony flute, carefully wedging together the silver-rimmed seals of waxed string, lining up the finger holes, testing the sound and the feel of it against his lower lip. As he did so, he watched Fintan's elaborate process of a.s.sembling and strapping on his uilleann pipes, one narrow leather belt buckled around his waist, the other around his right arm to work the small bellows. It had always seemed to Cormac a ritual akin to strapping on the phylacteries of some ancient religion.

As the pulsating rhythm of the tune ended, an old man with a bald head burst out laughing as he set down his flute and reached for his full pint. "Be the holy, that was a good one," he said to the fellow beside him. "A real scorcher." Fintan quickly introduced Cormac around the circle. The stocky man beside the chortling flute player sat leaning forward, listening intently. At first Cormac wondered what set this man apart from the others. No instrument, for a start, but as the fellow reached out and touched the table for his drink, Cormac realized that he was blind, though he moved like a person who hadn't always been so.

"That's Ned Raftery, my old schoolteacher," said Fintan. "Great f.u.c.kin' singer."

Devaney broke in beside them with a sideways glance. "Glad you could join us."

Cormac didn't quite know what to make of the policeman. The wry look didn't disguise the fact that Devaney's eyes were everywhere, even here, among his friends and neighbors, sizing things up, cannily recording and filing everything away.

The pub door swung open, and Hugh Osborne entered. Conversation suspended for the briefest instant as his presence registered around the bar, then resumed at normal volume, but Osborne seemed completely unaware of the momentary stir he caused. As he surveyed the room, his gaze alighted on Cormac, hesitating slightly, as though he only half recognized the face. He moved to the bar, where he ordered a drink and stood alongside a young man whose dark, cropped head seemed barely suspended between the peaks of his shoulders. Osborne spoke a few words to the boy, who jerked his arm away awkwardly, though Cormac would almost swear he hadn't been touched.

In contrast to the work clothes he'd been wearing at the site this afternoon, Osborne was dressed expensively, even elegantly now, in a black silk jacket and camel-colored slacks. But it wasn't just the clothing; the man had a natural physical grace that was all the more noticeable because of his height. Fintan followed Cormac's gaze.

"You get the story on him?" he asked confidentially. Cormac nodded, and Fintan continued: "I don't know if he's as guilty as everybody around here likes to make out. A lot of 'em are just f.u.c.kin' delighted seeing the big man down in the mud. I think that's a load of b.o.l.l.o.c.ks. But I wish Una would wise up all the same."

"Maybe they're just friends," Cormac said.

Fintan looked at him. "Right," he said, "maybe they are."

A while later, on his way back from the gents', Cormac pa.s.sed by the end of the bar, near the young man to whom Osborne had spoken. The crowd hushed as one of the fiddles began to play "The Dear Irish Boy," an old air whose haunting melody never failed to raise the hairs on the back of Cormac's neck. He stopped for a moment to listen, feeling his chest and throat tighten at the desolation in the pleading notes. The boy at his side drew back and stared hollowly at Cormac for a long moment, then turned unsteadily, lifted a gla.s.s to his lips, and drank greedily, as if by draining the gla.s.s he could dive headfirst into oblivion. And so he could, Cormac thought. The young man rapped his gla.s.s once on the bar and Cormac heard the publican whisper furiously: "You've had enough, now. Clear off." There was no response but another rap of the gla.s.s. "Go home, will yeh? Before you get us both in a rake of trouble." The boy peered blackly at the barman, then lurched away and stumbled in slow motion through the crowd and out into the night. Hugh Osborne followed the boy, ducking his head as he pushed his way out the door. Cormac saw that he wasn't the only one watching: Devaney was taking it all in as well.

6.

It was morning. Cormac could hear the pub coming to life downstairs, the unloading of aluminum casks of beer, the clink and rattle of bottles in wooden crates, the puttering diesel roar of a lorry as it pulled away to the next delivery. He'd slept wretchedly, his rest disturbed by fearful, brackish dreams of being pursued by a shadowy a.s.sailant through a dark wood.

He turned over to try to sleep again, but a knock sounded at the door. "Mr. Maguire?" a raspy, adolescent voice inquired. "It's nine o'clock. You asked to be called."

"b.o.l.l.o.c.ks," Cormac muttered under his breath. Aloud he said, "Yes, all right. Thanks very much. Any chance of a cup of tea?" There was no reply except the sound of a large pair of trainers bounding down the narrow carpeted stairs. He'd better make a move if he was going to meet Nora in the lab at two.

There was tea--a full breakfast, in fact, waiting for him in the bar below. He'd just tucked into a mighty-looking fry of eggs, sausages, rashers, and tomatoes when the pub door opened. Una McGann entered, followed by Hugh Osborne, who appeared reluctant to be disturbing anyone's breakfast.

"Please forgive the interruption," Una said. "I've just had a brain wave." The two men shook hands, then stood for a moment awkwardly.

"Won't you join me?" Cormac asked. Behind the bar, he could hear Dermot Lynch, the publican, clattering together spoons and crockery.

Settling his large frame onto one of the small upholstered stools that stood like dwarves about his knees, Hugh Osborne first cast a glance at Una, then addressed Cormac: "I'm developing a parcel of land for a workshop that will demonstrate and sell traditional crafts." Cormac realized at that moment that he'd never heard the man's voice. It had a deep ba.s.s timbre, and an accent that was neither Irish nor wholly English, but somewhere between the two. Osborne leaned forward, and the dark circles under his eyes suggested that he'd not slept well the previous night either.

"We've enlisted a couple of other weavers, a metalsmith, and several potters," he continued. "And of course, Una's dyeworks is a central part of the plan." Listening to him, Cormac got the sense that Hugh Osborne was a naturally diffident person. He remembered what it was like to live an eventful life in a small town, and felt a surge of compa.s.sion for the lanky figure who faced him across the table.

"It's an ideal setting, really, given the history of the place...." Osborne's voice trailed off.

"Sounds promising," Cormac said, "although I'm not quite clear how it involves me."

"Sorry, sorry, I should have explained that at the outset," Osborne said, coloring slightly. "We're due to be putting in electrical and gas lines in a few weeks' time. And I'm sure you know that in order to get planning permission, we first have to make an archaeological survey of the site. We were all set to begin, and the consulting firm I originally hired to do the work pulled out. Conflict with another project that's taking longer than antic.i.p.ated. And every other licensed archaeologist I've contacted is fully booked. I realize you probably don't normally do this sort of thing, but we're behind schedule as it is. I'd pay the usual fees, of course. It might take a week or two. Rather a busman's holiday, I suppose--but you could stay at the house while you work. Of course, I don't know what your schedule looks like."

"I'm actually on sabbatical this term," Cormac said. "The thing is, I'm supposed to be finishing a book; the publishers are breathing down my neck."

"I understand completely," said Osborne.

"And I told Dr. Gavin I'd be back in Dublin this afternoon for the exam on that girl from the bog." Cormac realized that he had been vaguely unsettled by Devaney's suspicions. He looked across the table, where Una and Hugh studied his face in antic.i.p.ation. "I don't know what to say. Can I let you know?"

"By all means. Think it over."

"I'm sorry I can't be more definite just now."

Osborne rose. "Quite all right. I do understand." He offered no handshake this time. One flicker of the deep-set eyes was enough to let Cormac know he wasn't the first to balk.

"Good-bye then," Osborne said as he moved toward the door of the pub. "I'm sorry if we disturbed your breakfast." Una McGann gave Cormac a bewildered look, and pressed a slip of paper in his hand. "Here's the telephone number."

"Tell him I'll ring this afternoon," Cormac said. The words sounded unconvincing even to himself.

At one o'clock in the afternoon, the head of the nameless red-haired girl lay, still embedded in peat, on an examining table in the conservation lab at Collins Barracks in Dublin. Perched on a stool at one end of the table, Cormac studied the strange bundle as he waited for Nora Gavin. The scent of wet turf filled the room, and diffused daylight streamed in from a single unshaded cas.e.m.e.nt window that looked out onto the expansive stone-paved courtyard. Just over a century ago, when this building was still the largest army barracks in the British empire, Queen Victoria had made a visit here to inspect her troops. Something of the spartan, military ambience of those days remained in these chambers, despite the fact that two wings of the quad were now occupied by the National Museum.

Cormac could hear Nora speaking on the phone in the adjacent office. "That would be great. Okay, see you soon. Thank you so much." She pushed open the door to the lab. "That was radiology up at Beaumont Hospital," she said. "They can fit us in for a CT scan at six, so we'll have to get a move on here."

Nora reached into a drawer beneath the table for a pair of surgical gloves, pulling them on over the cuffs of her lab coat. As she performed this ordinary task, her professional demeanor seemed to snap into place as well, fitting her as smoothly as the thin layer of latex against her skin. She gingerly removed the black plastic, then began to remove the larger piece of sopping turf, and to arrange the matted strands of reddish hair. As the young woman's features emerged in the merciless fluorescent glare of the lab, her expression was even more ghastly than it had seemed out against the earthy blackness of the bog, but Nora's hands were steady, and as gentle as if her patient lived. Whatever had so visibly affected her yesterday seemed to have loosened its hold. Cormac wondered what sort of a life Nora Gavin had left behind her in the States, and in particular why she had pulled up stakes midcareer and moved to Dublin. He had a suspicion that Gabriel McCrossan had known more about her circ.u.mstances than he'd been willing to share.

"We'll have to wait for Drummond to do the official postmortem, of course. He said he might be available tomorrow, provided things remain quiet."

As she spoke, Nora was carefully removing bits of peat from the red-haired girl's face, and applying a mist of deionized water from a spray bottle. Cormac suddenly realized that if he apologized for the way he'd behaved the night of Gabriel's dinner party, she would have absolutely no idea what he was talking about. There was something about that realization, and about sitting here watching Nora Gavin at her work, that he found enormously enjoyable. As he drew closer to observe, Cormac saw that the red-haired girl's skin, now washed clean of its protective peat, was soft and brown as tanned leather. He studied the lifelike curve of her upper lip, the faint covering of down on her cheek, and had to resist an urge to smooth her furrowed brow.

"Is she the first you've ever seen up close?" she asked. He nodded. "Me too. You can help if you like," she said. "But you'll have to wear these." She handed him a pair of gloves from a drawer. "We have to keep her as clean as possible." She crossed to the door and called into the next office, "I'm ready for a hand, Ray, whenever you are." Raymond Flynn, the conservation technician, joined them. Cormac watched and occasionally lent a hand as Nora and Flynn measured the circ.u.mference of the girl's cranium and the length of her damp red hair, taking photographs and carefully noting their measurements as they went along, pausing frequently for the spray bottle. When they were finished with that phase of the exam, Nora carried the girl's head at arm's length to the adjacent X-ray room, positioned it on a negative plate, then retreated outside and closed the chamber door while Flynn activated the machine.

"We might be able to hazard a few guesses about how old she is," Nora said when they'd returned to the examining table. "It's tough to determine age with any accuracy unless we can get a closer look at her molars. The jaw looks pretty pliable, but we'll have to be extremely careful." She used surgical tweezers and a pair of scissors to extract a small piece of skin and a lock of hair for chemical a.n.a.lysis, then a tiny sample of muscle tissue from the girl's severed neck. She saw Cormac watching closely as she carefully removed a small section of an artery.

"Turns out cholesterol is the most reliable stuff for carbon-dating bog bodies; it's insoluble in water, less likely to be contaminated by the surrounding material. Without the rest of the body, cause of death is probably going to be an educated guess. There don't appear to be any ligature marks around the throat. I see several things that point toward decapitation as the cause."

"Such as?"

"Well, come here for a second. Look at the wound." Nora reached for the magnifying gla.s.s on the tray beside her. "It's a very clean cut. Look at the way the blood vessels have been sliced through, not torn. Probably a single blow from a fairly sharp blade." She gestured for him to take the gla.s.s, which he did with some trepidation. "You wouldn't bother being quick about it if the person were unconscious or already dead. And what else could make a person bite down through her own lip like that? She was probably lucky, if that's how it happened. At least it was over quickly. And look at this." She pointed to what appeared to be a small abrasion on the girl's chin. "See how the adipocere, that yellowish waxy material under the skin, is exposed here? Looks to me like a small section of the skin has been cut away. That could have been done with the same blow of the axe--or sword, or whatever kind of blade it was that severed her head."

He must have looked puzzled. Nora leaned forward impulsively to demonstrate, holding her hands behind her back as if they were bound. She lowered her head to the level of the tabletop.

"Look, if I'm on the block, my natural reaction would be to contract, to become as small as possible." He studied the back of Nora's slender neck, the edge of dark hair that stood out against her pale skin, the small hollow between the tendons that supported her head. How easy it must seem, at first, to sever such a vulnerable connection. But how difficult it must prove, as well, considering the toughness of bone and sinew that must be cut through.

"Do you see how it would happen? If my chin is tucked tight, it comes in line with the blade." She straightened again. "We can probably figure out all kinds of things about how she was killed. But the real question is why? This girl is hardly more than a child. The other thing I can't get over is how incredibly well-preserved she is. The lab will check of course, but I can't see any visible evidence of insect eggs or larvae. She must have gone into the bog very soon after her death--which means she was probably killed at or very near the bog."

"You realize we've probably found out all we're going to about this girl," Cormac said. He wished there were more as well, but they had to be prepared for reality.

"Yes, I know. But I'm not ready to be perfectly rational about all this yet."

Should he mention the offer he'd had from Osborne this morning? He could easily drop the whole thing, go on as he had been, finishing his book, preparing to go back to teaching in the fall. He could see his entire future so clearly down that course. Why did he feel that once he stepped from that comfort zone, he would never be able to return? Then again, what was the point of this or any convergence, if not to create new paths?

"Hugh Osborne asked if I'd be interested in coming back to do a small job for him--a general archaeological survey on a construction site." A light seemed to spring from Nora's dark blue eyes as she turned to him.

"Oh, Cormac--" she began, then stopped abruptly. "Please tell me you didn't turn him down."