Free Orphan of Creation by Roger MacBride Allen

down next to the garage some years ago. A line of cars from half a dozen states were parked along the plantation road at the moment, relatives having cautiously pulled off the asphalt onto the soft, narrow, gravelly shoulder. Fortunately, the line of cars began at the front of the main house and worked its way back to the county road. None of them were blocking the excavation area. Barbara was eager to avoid explanations as long as possible. She didn’t feel like going through a big involved song and dance just to get Uncle Clem to move his Buick.
    Barbara crouched down by the side of the present crossroads, sipped at her coffee, and thought. The gorillas had in theory been buried at the crossroads, at the point where the plantation road met the path to the burial ground. She had to determine the exact burial sites from the clues in Zebulon’s journal, and from her reading of the land.
    The gravel road down from the burial ground was only a hundred meters or so long, and it ran straight as an arrow. Barbara smiled at herself. She was thinking in scientific meters already, instead of civilian feet and yards. Translating between the two systems was an automatic reflex for most American workers in the sciences.
    Though the burial ground road was straight, the old plantation road curved here and there, meandering over its leisurely present-day route from the house to the garage.
    That was the tricky part. Small country lanes and roads have a habit of moving around, shifting their beds in much the same way a river does, moving to one side for a rock or a tree or a building that might not be there ten or twenty or a hundred years later, the next time the road was rebuilt. A road might develop gullies or potholes, forcing traffic to shift left or right in a temporary move that might accidentally become permanent as erosion washed the gully out further. A flash flood might wash the road out altogether, to be replaced in more or less the same place, if at all. Then—as was the case here—a casual modern-day road builder might simply slop some asphalt on the beaten-down gravel, effectively sealing over many of the clues as to how the road had evolved, until erosion began its patient gnawing at the edges of the asphalt, and the newest road slowly sank into the old, beaten down and punished by the weight of traffic.
    The gravel road from the burial ground was strictly the shortest distance between two points and nothing else. It was too short, too straight, to have shifted much. Clearly, then, Barbara’s first task lay in figuring out where the plantation road had been in antebellum days. Then she could zero in on the crossroads of the past and know where to dig.
    She set her half-full coffee cup on the ground by the edge of the asphalt and stepped out onto the low crown of the road. She laid her aunt’s kitchen yardstick athwart the plantation road at the present crossroads, dug out her camera and tripod, and spent twenty minutes carefully photographing the undisturbed site from a half dozen angles, thoroughly describing each photo in her notebook. She finished off her remaining stock of film.
    Next step: ground survey. Read the earth and see what it had to say. But the grass was overgrown, making it harder to read the ground. There was an oversized rider mower in the garden shed.
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    When Livingston arrived an hour or so later, slowly threading his car past the line of visiting relatives’ cars parked on the side of the narrow plantation road, his cousin Barbara was just about finished with the mower. An area about the size of a baseball diamond was cut down to a pathetic stubble less than an inch high. The ground that had looked so smooth and level when hidden by the grass was revealed as rough and hummocky, much littered with road gravel, broken twigs, and other debris. It was a quick-and-dirty mowing job, with some narrow strips of grass simply trampled down or missed altogether. Barbara was by the garden shed, emptying the