“They tell me you boys are gonna be in charge here.”

“That depends on what we find. Where are these graves?”

“Right over there.”

Donovan looked across the field but saw nothing. Until a month ago this area of rural Virginia had been thick virgin woodland—but now the area had been scraped clean for two hundred yards on all sides, leaving nothing but featureless brown loam littered with gray-green rock as far as the eye could see. Masses of bulldozed trees lay in twisted piles, awaiting an endless caravan of trucks that would haul them off to paper mills farther to the south; red flags fluttered atop pillars of soil that stood like castle parapets, marking the level of the original surface before excavation had begun.

“Want me to show you?” the deputy offered.

“Just point. If you don’t mind, I like to get my own first impressions.”

Fifty yards ahead Donovan came to a ridge where four rectangular holes lay side by side in the earth, each just a few yards from the next. There were no headstones, but a crude wooden cross made of two-by-fours had been hammered into the ground to mark the head of each grave. The land around the crosses had not yet been disturbed by the excavators and bulldozers, but at the foot of each grave the ground suddenly dropped off, forming a short vertical cliff that exposed the end of each grave as if a four-toothed giant had taken a bite from the hillside.

Donovan could see at a glance what had happened: Some hapless construction worker had sunk the teeth of his backhoe into the rocky Virginia hillside, unaware that he was about to discover the location of a long-forgotten graveyard. It was a fairly common occurrence these days, especially in areas like rural Virginia where people had been living and dying for four hundred years. Survivors moved westward, towns expanded in unpredictable directions, and old graveyards like this one were gradually covered over and forgotten, awaiting the day—sometimes centuries later—when some unfortunate builder would stick a shovel in the ground and find a skull staring back at him. It was just bad luck, that’s all, hard on the nerves and even harder on the checkbook— because every time it happened, the builder was required by law to stop construction until every single grave was identified and carefully moved to a new location. Heaven help you if the graveyard turned out to be sizable, and even heaven couldn’t help you if somebody famous turned out to be buried there—because then the historic preservation people got involved, and that’s when things really got expensive.