He grinned. “So were you, Jennifer.”

She made her way out of the hospital and down to the parking lot, only half aware of her surroundings. A burial ground—well, that certainly explained the “trouble” Sleighbow had mentioned, and why she had the feeling that there had been something there. The problem was, there wasn’t supposed to be one there.

That may not mean anything. We haven’t charted all the old burial sites yet, not by a long shot. The Arkansas wandered around a lot before the flood-control and irrigation programs settled it in one bed with all the dredging and dams. But—right on the riverbank is an awfully odd place to put a burial site. Especially an old one. And there should have been cairns, not underground burials; the Old Ones hated underground burials. Shoot, they wouldn’t even build the cairns until months after the wind and weather had their way with the dearly departed.

The ancestors had tried not to put burial grounds anywhere near the Arkansas or any other river for just that reason—there was no telling when it would change its course and wash out the site.

Still, if it’s really old, like when the Osage got forced down here from the north, and they didn’t know the Arkansas tended to wander—and if it got buried by some accident or other—

Without actually seeing any of the artifacts, she had no way of telling how old it was, and if that was a possibility.

With a start, she realized that she had reached her truck; she opened the door and got in, reflexively locking her door again. But she didn’t move; she was still thinking things through.

Really old grounds that had been “lost” were being rediscovered all the time in the course of development. Some were even uncovered by digging deeper under a building that had just been demolished—that was how they’d found that bat statue in Mexico not long ago. Since there hadn’t been anything built on that site before, maybe it wasn’t surprising that no one knew anything about it—

But that felt wrong, somehow. It matched the few facts as she knew them, but not the feel of the place.

It felt as if there had been some very powerful, very old relics there—but the feeling was—transitory, I guess. As if they hadn’t been there long.

But that wasn’t consistent with the idea of it being a burial ground.

One thing it did explain, though, was the definite scent of Bad Medicine about Rod Calligan. If he’d violated sacred ground and then destroyed bones and relics, he had definitely incurred the anger of the Little People.

But an Osage burial site—there—it just didn’t add up.

Maybe if someone ripped the stuff off from another site and cached it there?