Mesa Verde Victim. Scott Graham

been studying them in school.”

      “As you’ve been learning,” Chuck said to her with a nod, “Mesa Verde, west of here, was the center of their civilization a thousand years ago. After they abandoned the region, their stone villages in the canyons there survived because they were built under overhanging cliffs, out of the weather.”

      “That’s why it’s a national park.”

      “You got it. Most of the places Ancestral Puebloans lived were out in the open, so their houses and villages wore away over the centuries and were covered up by dirt and plants. But there were a few other places besides Mesa Verde where Ancestral Puebloans lived under cliffs—one of which was just a few miles north of Durango.”

      “Whoa,” Rosie said. “Right here, where we live.”

      Janelle tapped the face of her wristwatch with her fingertip, her eyes on Chuck. “We need to get over to Audrey’s.”

      He turned to the girls. “Your Uncle Clarence knows the story of the postcard.”

      Clarence inclined his head. “Falls Creek.”

      Chuck nodded. “The classic Anthro 101 case study.” He turned to Carmelita and Rosie. “I’ll finish telling you about it on the way across town.”

      A Durango police SUV approached Clarence’s apartment complex as Chuck drove the big Bender Archaeological pickup out of the parking lot. Janelle sat opposite him in the passenger seat, the girls in back. He resumed the story of the postcard as he steered the truck away from Clarence’s building.

      “Archaeologists excavated the Falls Creek site north of Durango in the 1930s. By then, the villages under the Mesa Verde cliffs had been cleaned out, starting with Gustaf Nordenskiöld from Sweden in 1891. He shipped artifacts and human remains from Mesa Verde to Scandinavia, where they were held up until just a little while ago. After Nordenskiöld finished his excavations, other early archaeologists swooped in. So did looters. When the easy-to-get artifacts were gone from Mesa Verde,

      archaeologists and looters turned their attention to lesser-

      known Ancestral Puebloan sites to keep on learning or stealing whatever they could.”

      Carmelita caught Chuck’s eye in the rearview mirror. “Like Falls Creek?”

      “Yep.”

      Rosie rubbed her hands together. “And that’s when they made their big postcard discovery, isn’t it?”

      “That’s right,” Chuck told her. “The first thing we archaeologists do when we’re studying a site is survey it and collect any artifacts left above ground. Next, we dig into the site layer by layer, cataloguing new items we unearth as we go. That’s called stratification. It lets us learn what was going on at a site decade by decade, sometimes even year by year. Stratification is something Nordenskiöld, the archaeologist from Sweden, actually helped invent. Around here, early archaeologists were particularly interested in the trash heaps, called midden piles, Ancestral Puebloans left at the foot of their villages.”

      They crossed Main Avenue and entered the Crestview neighborhood on the west side of town.

      “By the time of the Falls Creek excavation,” Chuck said,

      “archaeologists knew Ancestral Puebloans had used their middens as cemeteries, burying human remains right along with their trash. That might seem odd to us, but it was perfectly normal for them. Every now and then, archaeologists came across protected, crypt-like spaces containing human remains in the middle of the trash heaps. The corpses in those spaces often were adorned with personal possessions—turkey-feather shrouds, fur cloaks and blankets, necklaces and bracelets, even toys left with the bodies of children.”

      “What about Falls Creek?” Rosie asked. “You said they dug up one of the most amazingly amazing discoveries ever in the whole world there.”

      “They did.” Chuck turned onto the quiet street leading to the home of Barney and Audrey. “Except, they made the discovery above ground, with no digging into a midden pile required.”

      Rosie bounced up and down in her seat. “What’d they find?” she asked breathlessly.

      Chuck widened his eyes at her in the mirror. “Mummies.”

      3

      Chuck rolled the truck to a stop behind a Durango police SUV already parked in front of the home of Barney and Audrey. The house was a 1950s rancher in a line of similar

      single-story homes, all with attached one-car garages and

      postage-stamp-sized front yards. The houses backed up to Overend Park, the sprawling forest park, webbed with trails, that skirted the west side of town.

      Chuck turned to the girls in the back seat. “They found a bunch of mummified human remains at Falls Creek.”

      “The postcard has a picture of mummies on it?” Rosie asked.

      “Actually, the card has a picture on it of one mummified person in particular.”

      Carmelita unbuckled her seatbelt and scooted forward. She folded her forearms on the top of the front seat and rested her chin on them. “Like from Egypt?”

      “Exactly like that,” Chuck said. “The air is so dry here in the Four Corners that the body was almost perfectly preserved, the same way the desert dryness in Egypt preserved the mummies there.”

      “And they made a picture postcard of it?”

      “Of her, yes. Lots of them, in fact. They named her Esther and took her around the country on a big tour, like a carnival attraction. After that, they put her in a glass case in the Mesa Verde National Park Museum so everybody who visited the park could look at her.”

      “That’s so gross.”

      “The whole thing is pretty awful by today’s standards,” Chuck agreed.

      “But you had one of the postcards of the mummy in your files.”

      “There’s an argument for keeping things like the postcard around to remind ourselves not to do anything like that ever again. In Esther’s case, it took a lot of years, but they finally stopped displaying her, and they stopped selling the postcards of her, too. Eventually, her body was returned to where it was found.”

      “And after that, everybody forgot about her?”

      “Mostly, yes. She’s at peace now. At least, that’s how I feel about her. But she’ll always be at risk. Her corpse is one of the most perfectly preserved examples of mummified human remains ever found on this continent. She’s worth a lot of money to grave robbers if they ever were to find out where she was reburied. They’d love to dig her up and sell her into some rich person’s private collection. But she was a real, live human being. She deserves our respect, even our reverence, instead.”

      Janelle reached past Carmelita and put her hand on Chuck’s arm. “Just like Barney was a real, live person,” she reminded him.

      Chuck killed the engine. In the sudden quiet, he stared out the window at the home of Barney and Audrey. How could

      Barney possibly be dead? And why had he been clutching a picture postcard of Esther, taken from Chuck’s study, when he died?

      Janelle climbed out of the truck. “Vamanos,” she said to Chuck through the open passenger door. “You’re the one who said we have to move fast, for Barney’s sake.” She tipped her head in the direction of the house. “And for Audrey.”

      Chuck clung to the steering wheel. “This just makes it so real.”

      “It is real.”

      He turned to the girls. “Audrey needs us right now, okay?”

      Carmelita lifted her chin from her arms and looked at him with steady eyes. “I’m ready.”

      “So am I,” said Rosie.

      Sandra