The Other Crowd

He nodded, and shrugged. “Me mum’s probably already got it, then.”

WHILE THREE WOMEN and one man went about cleaning up their loose dirt and packing away their tools for the night, Wesley was still working when Annja returned to the dig square.

He waved her over and showed her the strata trench. Dug down about two feet, this trench was preserved to study the stratigraphy and gauge the year for each level of earth dug. Photographic records were usually kept nowadays, but Wesley explained he’d given Theresa a drawing frame and set her to work recording the north corner of the dig where a few pot fragments had been partially uncovered.

“Everyone should learn how to do it the old-fashioned way,” he said.

Annja sensed he enjoyed teaching and the satisfying tedium of the old-fashioned way. She would never go against a director’s methods, and didn’t mind the old-fashioned way so much herself.

He handed her a trowel, and Annja squatted next to him.

In this quadrant, the crew had dug down to about the mid-nineteenth century, according to a small matchstick tin they’d found two days earlier. Wesley suspected they’d tapped into a farmhouse that may have held victims of the potato famine. He planned to bring in soil samples to a lab in Cork for verification.

“I suspect we’ll find the pathogen that destroyed the crops,” he commented. “As I told you, we haven’t found any bones yet. Perhaps this farmstead was lucky and the family found their way to Liverpool or even America.”

Neither of which option would have been preferred, Annja mused. The Irish immigrants arriving in America had been treated as second-class citizens, if they made the trip successfully. The emigrants crossing the ocean to find prosperity in America were usually struck down with disease and fever during the long journey on the so-called coffin ships. And if they did set foot in New York, they were discriminated against, cheated and treated cruelly.

In England they’d received no better treatment. As soon as they’d arrived in Liverpool most of the Irish riffraff had been deported directly back to Cork.

With the open dig plan, the entire squared-off area was dug down, and baulks, or aisles of dirt marked in a grid and not dug, were not utilized.

Annja preferred the open-dig method. It was well enough that the walls of the open area served as a stratigraphy to measure their progress. One stone wall had been unearthed, and Wesley’s crew had earlier uncovered a fireplace.

“Was that feature apparent before digging began?” she asked Wesley.

“Yes, the entire stretch of wall and the stones of the hearth. The farmer removed the turf and found it. We’ve got dirt here, though, not peat like the other camp. I’m guessing the enemy camp is looking at the end of a farm plot, perhaps animal stables and a pond.”

Wesley pointed out an area he was working on and she moved beside him to inspect.

“A wall feature, yes?” He traced the outline of an oblong mound with the tip of his trowel. “Probably another two or three feet into the earth. Puts us back another few centuries. I just wish we had the time to go at this slowly. Yesterday one of my crew destroyed a wood feature, could have been a table or part of a chair. Can’t blame her, though.”

Annja teased the dirt with her trowel and worked efficiently next to Wesley. “Why the rush?”

“Slater’s been pushing to get us all to leave. I managed to negotiate another week.”

“What have they found that they want to keep you off the entire dig so badly? Have you gone over and taken a look around?”

He swiped a hand over his hair and lifted his face to worship the setting sun. “Tried, but there’s security at night. Only one guard I’ve noticed, but I’m sure that’s a machine gun slung across his shoulder. Couple of nights ago they drove a truck in and something was going on.”

“You camp on-site?”

“Not usually, but I’d been tooling around with this feature, wanted to get deeper. You know how that goes.”

“You love the work,” Annja guessed.

“As much as I bet you love it. I gotta ask, and I hope you don’t mind.”

“Go ahead.”

“How did you ever get involved in a TV show that chases after stories like the other crowd?”

“We chase all sorts, actually. Werewolves, vampires, yeti.” Annja smirked. “We’re an equal-opportunity monster-hunting show.”

“Well, now, you ever talk to a vampire?”

“No. You?”

He cast her that sexy grin that Annja was beginning to realize must work as a sort of lodestone to any women within stumble-over-her-feet range. “Nope, but wouldn’t mind the conversation over roast pheasant with Vlad the Impaler.”

“He’s dead.” She lifted a trowel of displaced dirt and emptied it into a nearby bucket. “And so is Frankenstein’s monster and Dr. Jekyll. Not dead, actually, never existed.”

“Skeptic, eh? So why this assignment?”

“It got me here, sitting in a pile of ancient rubble, with trowel in hand. Couldn’t be happier. Well, I could.”

“How so?”

“Earlier, you mentioned the men who disappeared, but we were interrupted before I could ask more. Can you tell me anything about the girl who disappeared from this dig? Description? Was she friends with everyone here? Anyone have something against her? Was she native to the area?”

“Whoa, the detective is overtaking the archaeologist.”

“It’s what we do, isn’t it? Play detective. Search for clues and piece them together to create a story.”

Wesley tapped the trowel against his boot to shake off the dirt and sat back, wrists resting on his knees. “I wish I could help you, Annja.” He scanned the sky, yet Annja sensed his sudden lack of ease from the tapping of his fingers on his knee.

“Beth Gwillym was spending the summer here on the dig. She came from England, though haven’t a clue whereabouts. I don’t do background checks. Basically, if you’re willing and not stupid, you’re hired. She was pretty, young and amiable. I know it sounds awful, but I’ve been preoccupied with that other damned site lately. While I had in heart to keep my people protected from loose cannons like Slater, I should have been paying more attention to my own site. Beth was friendly with everyone, I do know that, didn’t have any enemies.”

“What about boyfriends? Anyone she was seeing? That she might have had a fight with?”

She couldn’t catch his facial movements because he’d tilted his head down, perhaps away from the sun. Annja suspected it was something less to do with the light than a need to keep secrets. Interesting.

“You’re not going to accept the well-agreed-upon fact that the other crowd snatched her away?”

Annja sighed. “Wesley, I know the Irish hold great reverence for…the fair folk. And sure, faeries like to steal humans, or trick them into their circles and make them dance for years and years.”

“They steal babies, too,” he added, more seriously than she wished. “Leave behind changelings, sometimes nothing more than a dried old stump sitting in the cradle.”

“Right. I don’t wish to challenge anyone’s pagan beliefs—”

“Ooh, the Catholic chick is challenging my beliefs.”

“What makes you say I’m Catholic?”

“A guess. Almost twenty percent of the world is. And I’m not a pagan, just a believer in what feels right.”

“Little people with wings feels right to you in this situation?”

He smirked. “No. But if you’ve read anything about the Irish legends of the Tuatha Dé Danaan, they’re not so little. Our size, actually.”