Birthright by Nora Roberts Read Free Book Online Page A

when he let himself, he wondered what had fractured his family. Had it been that instant when Jessica disappeared? Or had it been his mother’s unrelenting, unwavering determination to find her again?
    Or was it the moment when he himself had realized one simple fact: that by reaching for one child, his mother had lost another.
    None of them, it seemed, had been able to live with that.
    He would do what he could, as he had done countless times before. He attached the files, e-mailed them to his mother.
    Then he turned off his computer, turned off his thoughts. And buried himself in a book.
    T here was nothing like the beginning of a dig, that time when anything is possible and there is no limit to the potential of the discovery. Callie had a couple of fresh-faced undergraduates who might be more help than trouble. Right now they were free labor that came along with a small grant from the university. She’d take what she could get.
    She would have Rose Jordan as geologist, a woman she both respected and liked. She had Leo’s lab, and the man himself as consultant. Once she had Nick Long pulled in as anthropologist, she’d be in fat city.
    She worked with the students, digging shovel samples, and had already chosen the two-trunked oak at the north-west corner of the pond as her datum point.
    With that as her fixed reference they’d begin measuring the vertical and horizontal location of everything on the site.
    She’d completed the plan of the site’s surface the night before, and had begun to plot her one-meter-square divisions.
    Today they’d start running the rope lines to mark the divisions.
    Then the fun began.
    A cold front had dumped the humidity and temperatures into the nearly tolerable range. It had also brought rain the night before that had turned the ground soggy and soft. Her boots were already mucked past the ankle, her hands were filthy and she smelled of sweat and the eucalyptus oil she’d used to discourage insects.
    For Callie, it didn’t get much better.
    She glanced over at the toot of a horn, and this time the interruption had her leaning on her shovel and grinning. She’d known Leo wouldn’t be able to stay away for long.
    “Keep at it,” she told the students. “Dig slow, sieve thoroughly. Document everything.”
    She walked over to meet Leo. “We’re finding flakes in every shovel sample,” she told him. “My theory is we’re in the knapping area there.” She gestured to where the two students continued to dig and sieve the soil. “Rosie will verify rhyolite flakes. They sat there, honing the rock intoarrowheads, spear points, tools. Go a little deeper, we’ll find discarded samples.”
    “She’ll be here this afternoon.”
    “Cool.”
    “How are the students doing?”
    “Not bad. The girl, Sonya, she’s got potential. Bob, he’s able and willing. And earnest. Really, really earnest.” She shrugged. “We’ll wear some of that down in no time. I tell you what I figure. Every time I turn around, somebody’s bopping by here wanting a little tutorial. I’m going to put Bob on community relations.”
    She glanced back. “He’s got this farm-fresh Howdy Doody face. They’ll love that. Let him give the visitors a nice little lecture on what we’re doing, what we’re looking for, how we do it. I can’t be stopping every ten minutes to play nice with the locals.”
    “I’ll take that for you today.”
    “That’s great. I’m going to run the lines. I’ve got the surface plan worked up, if you want to take a look. You can give me a hand with marking the plots in between your outdoor classroom obligations.”
    She glanced at her ancient Timex, then tapped the list she’d already made and fixed to her clipboard. “Leo, I’m going to need containers. I don’t want to start pulling bones out of the ground and have them go to dust on me once they’re out of the bog. I need equipment. I need nitrogen gas, dry ice. I need more tools. More sieves, more trowels, more