Free Jordan's Stormy Banks: A Body Farm Novella by Jefferson Bass

beside it and obscuring my view. As I tugged, though, the skull shifted—bone grating against rock—and I froze. “I’ll be damned,” I said, for the second time in minutes. The seedling, I realized, wasn’t growing beside the skull; it was growing from the skull—from the left eye orbit, in fact—something I’d never seen before. Wriggling my fingers gently beneath the skull, I cradled it, then lifted and twisted, tugging tendrils of root from the rocky crevices below. The seedling was a foot tall, the fronds of tiny oval leaves reminding me of a fern. As I held it up, with Tyler snapping photographs and the sheriff and TBI agent looking on, I felt as if I were displaying a bizarrely potted houseplant. “Bubba,” I said, nodding toward the bin, “would you mind opening one of those evidence bags for me?” Meffert scrambled to comply, unfolding the paper bag and setting it on the most level patch of rubble he could find.
    Leaning down, I set the skull inside the bag. “You gonna just leave that tree in it?” asked Meffert.
    “For now,” I said, bending the seedling so I could tuck it completely into the bag. “When we get back to UT, I’ll take it over to a botanist—a guy I know in the Forestry Department—and get him to slice it open, count the growth rings. However many rings he finds, we’ll know she’s been here at least that many years.”
    “Huh,” Meffert grunted, nodding. Suddenly he added, “ Watch it!”
    Just as he spoke, I felt a sharp pain on my wrist. I looked down in time to see a wasp pumping the last of its venom into the narrow band of skin between the top of my glove and the bottom of my sleeve. “Dam na tion,” I muttered, flattening the wasp with a hard slap. “Where the hell did that come from?”
    “Yonder comes another one,” Meffert said, “right out of the evidence bag.” Sure enough, at that moment a second wasp emerged from the open bag and made a beeline for my wrist, drawn by the “danger” pheromones the first one had given off. Meffert’s hand darted downward, and by the time I realized what he was doing, he had caught and crushed the wasp in midair, barehanded. “Sumbitches must be nesting in that skull,” he said. I was dubious, but not for long; two more wasps emerged from the bag, both of them deftly dispatched by Meffert. We watched and waited, but the attack seemed to be over.
    “You’re quick, Bubba,” I said, rubbing my wrist. “You that fast on the draw with a gun?”
    He smiled. “Nobody’s ever give me a reason to find out.”
    “Well, watch my back, if you don’t mind.”
    I resumed my inspection of the postcranial skeleton, scanning the bones from neck to feet. “Y’all were right about the size,” I said. “Just guessing, I’d say right around five feet. And female,” I added, bending low over the flare of the hip bones. “And young.”
    “How young?” asked Cotterell.
    I hedged. “Be easier to tell once we get the bones back to the lab and finish cleaning ’em up. But I’m guessing teenager.”
    “Any chance this is just some old Indian skeleton?” the sheriff asked hopefully. “Make our job a hell of a lot easier if she was.”
    “Sorry, Sheriff,” I said. “She’s definitely modern.”
    Meffert chuckled. “Isn’t that what you said about that dead guy over near Nashville a couple years ago? The one turned out to be a Civil War soldier?”
    “Well, she’s lying on top of all this shale,” I pointed out. “If she’s not modern, this must be the world’s oldest strip mine.” I said it with a smile, but the smile was forced, and it was contradicted by the deep crimson my face had turned at the reminder of the Civil War soldier.
    “Don’t take it so hard, Doc,” Meffert added. “You only missed it by a hunnerd-something years.”
    “Too bad that soldier didn’t have a tree growing outta his head,” the sheriff added. “Big ol’ pecan tree, with a historical marker on it? You’da got it right for