Ashes and Bones by Dana Cameron Page A

and you’d like to cash it in. They’re not going to ask.”
    “They don’t have to report it to the authorities, or something? The IRS wouldn’t—?”
    “Look, kiddo, you could find an auction house—you said it was British gold, right? Find a large British auction house, if you want, and get the best price. But that’s too high profile, even. You could go and sell it online. Or you could just go down to the corner—”
    “Yeah, yeah, the corner coin store. Rob, seriously? Is it that easy?”
    “It’s that easy.”
    I shivered. That not only meant that it would be nigh on impossible to track Tony, if it was bars, as I bet the dealers wouldn’t be likely to tell me who’d been selling them what. It also meant that he had a very large amount of very disposable income.
    “Look, I can tell you the other stuff if you want, Em, but really? You don’t need it.”
    I didn’t need it: I was already hosed. “Okay, gotcha. Thanks for your help, Rob.”
    He laughed, and in other times it was a noise that would have brought a smile to my face, too. “You make a shitty criminal, Em. But if you ever stopped thinking so damn much, that would be different.”
    “Yeah, yeah, rub it in, why don’t you?”
    Maybe he could hear the frustration in my voice; it had nothing to do with my lack of criminal genius. “I’ll email you, if I think of anything that will help you, okay?”
    “Thanks, Rob, I mean it. Catch you later.” I hung up and rubbed my head. I guess if it ached, it was from running headlong into so many dead ends.

Chapter 6
    W ITH ARCHAEOLOGY, YOU ’ D THINK THINGS WOULD be straight forward, but they never are. Read the books, dig the site, wash the stuff, write up the report, reap fortune and glory. And while that is essentially correct, it leaves out the details of schedules, paperwork, personnel, budgets, meetings, PMS, home life, and homicidal maniacs. So it was a relief to be able to actually get out into the field the next two days to do some testing out at Penitence Point.
    There wasn’t a lot to be done, and so it worked out to be just Meg and me, again, out at the Point. Neal had gotten his doctorate in the spring and was trying to set up his own company, and so didn’t have the time, even if he could have used the money; Dian was gone, out of the picture, having been offered a job as an office manager that was going to keep her a lot more secure than any job in archaeology would. It was a little sad, too, to think this might be one of the last summers that Meg and I would work in the field together, as she was working full-time on her dissertation and would be gone, probably, in a year or two.
    There were lots of emotions that I was trying to clear out of my head so I could concentrate on the work. A nice collection of one-by-ones, all along the western boundary of the site, near the line of silver birches that led down to the edge of the bluff and the river. Meg looked a lot happier than she did in my office; now she was more surely in her element.
    “Did I remember to mention in my email yesterday?” Meg said. “I asked Katie Bell if she wanted to join us, just for the experience. She was back for a visit, before she goes off into the wide world of graduate school next year. Told her we’d be dropping some phone booths and maybe some TPs, and did she want to come along?”
    “Let me guess,” I said. “She had no idea that you were talking about.”
    “Right. I mean, she knew TP was ‘test pit.’ But it wasn’t just that she didn’t know that I meant square-meter units, she didn’t know what an actual phone booth was.”
    “Surely she must have seen them in movies,” I said. “How old is she? Twenty-one, twenty-two?”
    Meg nodded. “She finally did remember having seen them in movies, but that was her only reference point. I bet she doesn’t know what a vinyl album is, either, or that you can make tea without a microwave, or that floppy disks used to be floppy.”
    “She’s