Mesa Verde Victim. Scott Graham

At first sight, the concealed chamber looked coffin-sized.

      The sixteen-year-old stood on the uncovered mud-and-thatch roof of the buried vault. He was neck deep in the crater he’d dug over the last several hours, having deepened and widened the cavity by turns, tossing shovelfuls of soil and pebbles over his shoulder in dusty arcs. It was long past nightfall, his kerosene lantern low on fuel and sputtering. Sweat streamed in runnels down his back. His palms were blistered, the muscles of his arms and shoulders crying out for relief.

      He had until midnight, not a second longer, to unearth the rumored cache. If, after centuries in hiding, the artifacts waited as Gustaf Nordenskiöld insisted, and if Joey reached them in time, he was to wrap them in cloth, stow them in his saddlebags, and set off for the train station thirty miles to the east, descending the rocky trail from the dig site, changing horses at the Mancos livery in the pre-dawn darkness, and galloping over Mancos Divide to reach Durango by mid-morning. There, he would add the treasures to the boxcar already loaded with objects gathered from Mesa Verde by Gustaf over the last two months. Joey would collect the reward pledged by the Swedish explorer-scientist, and the train would chuff away to Denver, the artifacts bound ultimately for Stockholm.

      Joey paused to wipe his brow with the sleeve of his coarse work shirt. The pungent scent of piñon and juniper wafted off the clifftop above. The hour was late, the minutes ticking past. He tucked the tail of his shirt into his canvas work pants and straightened his suspenders, thumbing them over his shoulders. He took a bite of dried meat from the strip of jerky in his pocket, resettled his bandanna over his nose, and resumed the process of breaking into the vault, bent on discovering the hidden cache in time—and thereby setting a new course for his life.

      He’d toiled since childhood on his family’s root-vegetable farm. The small plot of land on the banks of the Mancos River was to him a place of endless tedium. Plant, irrigate, weed, repeat, year after monotonous year, with little opportunity for formal schooling. For as long as he could remember, he’d lived with the desire to pursue a genuine education, something, anything, beyond the bits of writing he managed for himself at night, by lantern light, after evening chores and before he fell exhausted into the narrow bed in the loft he shared with his younger brother Carl.

      Local girls ignored him, batting their eyes instead at the wealthy sons of ranchers and store owners. Soon enough, however, the girls would know their mistake. The money he’d already earned from Gustaf plus the sizable bonus the Swede promised for the secret cache of artifacts would enable Joey to buy a ticket to Denver and find a job in the big city, there to pursue the studies the money would afford him.

      Brown-haired, mustachioed Gustaf, in his early twenties, had stopped by the Cannon farm several weeks ago. Seated on his gleaming roan, the Swede had inquired of Joey’s father in stilted English as to the availability of a laborer unafraid of hard work. Joey’s father offered up his oldest son for a share of Joey’s earnings. As Joey loped away on Gustaf’s extra mount toward the green mesa looming two thousand feet above the Cannon farm, he directed a triumphant glance back at his siblings, chief among them Carl, a year younger and equally determined to escape the hardscrabble life he shared with Joey in the Mancos Valley.

      In Gustaf’s employ, Joey worked his way across the plateau with the three other members of the Swede’s hired excavation team, moving from one ancient, abandoned, stone-and-

      mortar housing complex to the next. Prehistoric people had constructed the multistory dwellings deep in the plateau’s canyons over many centuries, until the people had deserted the mesa en masse for unknown reasons, leaving an abundance of their worldly goods behind. With his fellow workers, Joey collected and packaged in straw-filled crates the ancient people’s abandoned possessions—finely crafted clay pots and mugs; clothing and jewelry, including beaded turquoise necklaces, deerskin blankets, and turkey-feather shawls; projectile points, knife blades, and hide scrapers flaked from obsidian; and spiritual fetishes and children’s toys fashioned from wood and clay to resemble rabbits, ravens, great horned owls, and bighorn sheep. Joey and the other hired hands also removed human remains interred in midden piles below the abandoned complexes—perfectly preserved skulls and full skeletons of adults, and the corpses of infants wrapped in blankets and tucked in reed baskets.

      Gustaf rode back and forth between the plateau and his suite in Durango’s Strater Hotel, assessing the team’s progress during his visits to the remote canyons that cut straight down into the top of the sandstone plateau, and communicating by letter and telegram while in Durango with his primary financier, his father, the famed baron and noted Arctic explorer Adolf Eric Nordenskiöld.

      At the height of the collection process, Gustaf was detained in his room at the Strater, accused by local authorities of the theft and attempted removal of cultural items from the United States. But the young Swede’s wealth and connections resulted in his release after only a few hours. His succinct telegram home, the contents of which he shared with Joey, said it all: “Much Trouble Some Expense No Danger.”

      Brief though it was, Gustaf’s detainment spurred him to move up the departure date for his return to Europe—and to single out Joey for the solitary mission in the heretofore unexplored canyon on the far west side of the plateau, culminating in tonight’s hurried dig.

      Midnight was less than an hour away when Joey broke through a layer of dried mud and intertwined sticks with the tip of his shovel, punching into the chamber at the bottom of the depression he’d dug over the preceding hours. He twisted the shovel, ripping apart the thatched twigs to create a blade-wide opening through the roof of the vault beneath his feet. He squatted and reached through the opening into the concealed chamber, his arm disappearing to his elbow. Sweeping his hand back and forth, he captured only air in his extended fingers. He lay on his stomach and extended the full length of his arm through the opening. He grinned as he swung his arm through the stale air of the vault. This had to be the secret chamber Gustaf sought.

      Joey’s fingers struck something stone-like standing upright in the hidden space. The unseen artifact toppled over with a quiet clink.

      He withdrew his arm. The stale odor of must seeped from the vault. Thatched willow branches, sheered by his shovel blade, formed a ragged edge around the mouth of the opening. He gripped the thatched branches and tugged. A portion of plaited sticks and dried mud the size of a dinner plate came away in his hands. He tore off additional chunks of sticks and mud.

      He directed his lantern through the enlarged opening and into the chamber. The toppled artifact lay on the dusty floor of the vault beneath him, amid a dozen more of the objects lined upright on the bottom of the small room. He drew an exhilarated breath. The reward and the new life it promised him were nearly within his grasp.

      He placed his lamp in the dirt at the bottom of the depression and swung his feet into the opening to the chamber, preparing to shimmy into the secret vault. Clods of dirt rolled past him, tumbling down the side of the cavity he’d dug into the floor of the alcove, and the sharpened blade of an ax struck the top of his head. The ax cleaved his skull, parting bone and brain matter in a powerful, deadly blow.

      Joey’s killer slid to the bottom of the depression and withdrew the blade of the ax from Joey’s head with a slippery snick. Joey’s body slumped sideways and lay twitching. The man tugged Joey’s feet from the chamber opening and dropped into the hidden vault in Joey’s place, crouching with his leather satchel over his shoulder and Joey’s flickering lantern in his hand.

      The lantern illuminated the low-roofed vault lined with the priceless artifacts sought by Gustaf—and others. The man filled his satchel with the objects and hoisted himself out of the chamber. He lifted Joey’s inert body to a sitting position and shoved. The teenager’s corpse slithered through the opening and flopped backward to the floor of the chamber with a muted thump.

      The man wedged the plate-sized portions of sticks and mud back over the opening, resealing the secret vault. He climbed out of the neck-deep depression and set about refilling it with Joey’s shovel. Dirt and pebbles poured down the sides of the cavity and gathered atop the closed chamber. The stick-and-mud thatching, back in place over the opening to the vault, disappeared beneath the cascading debris as the man transformed the chamber, shovelful by shovelful, into Joey’s unmarked grave.