Dr. Cooper shook her head. “Any evidence of that was destroyed in the same way the skull and some of the other bones were damaged. By the bulldozer.”

“Where’s the stuff we found with the body?”

Dr. Cooper gestured toward the bench that ran the length of the far wall and turned back to the bones. David Roberts spoke for the first time. He had a habit of keeping his head down when he spoke to Michelle, and of mumbling, so she couldn’t always hear what he was saying. He seemed embarrassed in her presence, as if he fancied her. She knew that her combination of blond hair and green eyes had a captivating effect on some men, but this was ridiculous. Michelle had just turned forty and David couldn’t be more than twenty-two.

She followed him over to the bench, where he pointed to a number of barely recognizable objects. “We can’t say for certain that they’re his,” he said, “but all these were gathered within a short radius of the body.” When she looked more closely, Michelle thought she could make out scraps of material, perhaps fragments of clothing, a belt buckle, coins, a pen knife, a round-edged triangle of plastic, shoe leather, lace eyelets and several round objects. “What are those?” she asked.

“Marbles.” David rubbed one of them with a cloth and handed it to her.

It felt smooth to Michelle’s touch, and inside the heavy glass sphere was a double helix of blue. “Summer, then,” she said, almost to herself.

“Beg your pardon?”

She looked up at David. “Oh, sorry. I said summer. Boys usually played marbles in summer. Outdoors, when the weather was good. What about the coins?”

“A few pennies, half a crown, sixpence, a threepenny bit.”

“All old coinage?”

“Before decimalization, at any rate.”

“So that’s pre-1971.” She picked up a flat, triangular object with rounded edges. “What’s this?”

David polished away some of the grime and revealed a tortoiseshell pattern. “I think it’s a plectrum,” he said. “You know, for a guitar.”

“A musician, then?” Michelle picked up a chain bracelet of some sort, crusted and corroded, with a flat, elongated oval at its center and something written on it.

Dr. Cooper came over. “Yes, I thought that was interesting,” she said. “You know what it is?”

“A bracelet of some kind?”

“Yes. I think it’s an identity bracelet. They became very popular with teenage boys during the mid-sixties. I remember my brother had one. David was able to clean this one up a bit. All the silver plating’s gone, of course, but luckily the engraver’s drill went deep into the alloy underneath. You can read part of the name if you look very closely. Here, use this.” She passed Michelle a magnifying glass. Michelle looked through it and was able to make out the faint edges of some of the engraved letters: GR-HA-. That was all.

“Graham, I’d guess,” said Dr. Cooper.

Michelle looked at the collection of bones, trying to imagine the warm living, breathing human being that they had once formed. A boy. “Graham,” she whispered. “Pity he didn’t have his last name engraved, too. It’d make our job a lot simpler.”