Bog Queen - 6

A gnes recognizes the woman from the back. She is seated alone in front of Kieran’s desk when Agnes walks in, and the curve of her upper spine is unmistakable, much more severe in a woman of her age. Agnes speaks without thinking.

“You must be Ms. Navarro’s daughter.”

The woman looks at her. She is still dressed for travel, in black slacks and a black wool sweater, a heavy brass necklace like a sheet of armor over her breastbone. She is in her late fifties, her face lined and her hair streaked with gray, and her presence has a weight and gravity to it, the way she turns in her chair but does not rise.

“My name is Dorotea Navarro,” she says. “I came here to bring my aunt home.”

Kieran enters the room then, looking harried and holding two cups of tea.

“I see you’ve met Dr. Linstrom,” he says.

“Yes,” says Dorotea, and then to Agnes, “Maybe you can explain it to me, because I still don’t understand. This man, Mr. Bergmann, has confessed to killing my aunt and burying her body. You have found a body, just where he says he buried her, but you’re saying it is not her body? It is someone else?”

Dorotea is obviously angry, but her clarity of purpose is calming to Agnes, who responds with her own.

“It is my determination,” she says, “that the remains discovered on Tuesday are not those of Isabela Navarro.”

Dorotea leans forward. She is wearing dark-red lipstick. Her gray eyes are sharp.

“If it is not my aunt,” she asks, “then who is it?”

In Agnes’s last year of grad school, when she was working two days a week at the medical examiner’s office in Las Minas, a man came to the front desk with a jawbone in a plastic bag. He was a detectorist, his hair and skin desert-fried, he had found no gold or silver in ten years but he had found this: a bleached-out time-cracked hunk of human skull.

Right away Agnes could see it was not normal. She had this gift, everyone said it, an instinct for the body and its forms. It extends to the living too; she knows when women are pregnant before they show, sometimes she can guess people’s jobs by their gait or the way they hold their shoulders. Her father is always surprised by what she can divine, even some of her professors have been impressed, but to her it is no trick or miracle, only the result of years spent looking at each human body with curiosity and care.

This jawbone did not give her much to go on. Only one tooth remained, and it was damaged, split in half by some postmortem trauma. But even half a tooth was enough for Agnes to spot the distinctive pattern of wear: Flour or meal ground by hand in a stone quern contains tiny flecks of rock that abrade the chewing surfaces of the teeth, producing, over a lifetime of such a diet, a smoothed and flattened appearance. The jawbone at Las Minas had belonged to someone who lived in the area between 500 and 600 C.E. , likely a member of an Ancestral Puebloan group who consumed a diet high in cornmeal or other stone-ground corn. The fragment was returned, after carbon dating, to officials of the Hopi tribe. Agnes delivered it herself, she felt light but mournful afterward, she had the feeling of a circle closing. The image of the jaw and stone-burnished tooth had slept in Agnes’s mind until it was needed again.

“I’m not sure yet,” Agnes says. “But I think she lived a really long time ago.”

Dorotea nods. She maintains a firm and searching eye contact that makes Agnes sweat under the arms.

“And where,” she asks, “is my aunt?”

“We—” Agnes begins, taking a breath, her expertise now exhausted. “We don’t know.”

Agnes did not deal with families in Las Minas, her work was out in the desert or down in the basement with the cold light. She saw them coming in and out sometimes, pink-eyed, their faces baggy from lack of sleep, and she felt a tug toward them, a desire to give or impart something. But it was not her place; her responsibility, she told herself, was to the dead.

“The police will continue looking for her, of course,” Agnes says, uncertainty making her voice sound tight and unconvincing.

“This is the number for the police liaison,” Kieran says, sliding a card across his desk. “He’s really your best point of contact going forward.”

“What will happen to Mr. Bergmann?” Dorotea asks. “Will there be a trial? Or will he go free now because there is no body?”

Kieran’s phone lights up. “I apologize,” he says shortly, and leaves the room.

“As my colleague says, I think the police liaison—” Agnes attempts.

“I spent a lot of money to come here,” Dorotea interrupts. “A lot of money, and I am not a wealthy person. I got the first flight I could. They told me my aunt was here. They told me I could bring her home.”

“I’m very sorry if you were given inaccurate information,” Agnes says. She heard the medical examiner speak on the phone this way sometimes, in difficult situations: the passive voice, the conditional “if,” like a recording on a bus or in an airport. The conversations usually ended quickly; no one argues with the airport voice. Agnes, however, cannot accomplish this effect—her words in her own head sound feckless and whiny. Dorotea leans forward in her chair, looking at once vehement and self-contained.

“Our mother never got over losing her sister,” she says. “She had pictures all over the house. I will show you.”

She pulls the images up on her phone: Isabela as a girl of seven or eight, standing next to a bicycle; Isabela as a teenager, giving the camera a challenging stare; Isabela as a child again, this time with another girl who must be her sister, both in white dresses and white socks with seed pearls, the sister softer in the face and body with a little bob haircut, Isabela with something mocking in her gaze; Isabela as a young woman, her head thrown back in laughter. The two of them together, maybe fourteen and sixteen—Isabela, the older girl, looks at something outside the frame of the photo, but her sister, still with that softness in her cheeks and chin, gazes upward at Isabela in frank adoration.

Agnes is not a stranger to grief, not exactly. This is what she knows of her own mother, most of it gleaned from her father in small pieces over the course of many years: She liked to paint. She played the violin. She was nearly six feet tall. (Agnes gets her height from her mother, since she was sixteen she has been able to look down at the top of her father’s head.) She had a brilliant mind, if she had gone to college she could have been a mathematician. This Agnes’s father told Agnes one October evening—the dark falling, that surprise desert cold—when her seventh-grade math teacher had sent her home with a calculus textbook and a note stating that there were no classes appropriate to her level available at the school.

Her mother’s parents had eight children, they were part of a fundamentalist religious sect, they were very poor and believed that women, especially, should be educated in the home. Agnes’s mother left when she turned eighteen and enrolled in bookkeeping classes at a community college outside Denver, where she met Agnes’s father, who was studying electrical engineering. They were married five years before Agnes was born. Agnes’s father badly wanted children; her mother consented to have just one. When Agnes was not quite two years old, her mother died suddenly of a heart condition that would have been identified in childhood had she gotten proper medical care.

Until Agnes was ten she had to attend regular appointments with a cardiologist to determine whether she too would develop the condition. Agnes was not told the purpose of the appointments until much later, but she felt her father’s fear. When she was very young she believed the doctors might hurt or even kill her; she continued to experience this as a feeling long after she knew it to be false as an idea. She was a shy child, often a half step behind the others, and she was more comfortable with her father than with other children, a preference he did not discourage. The two of them formed a unit, safe and impregnable, as long as they stayed together, she felt—and did this feeling come from him or from within herself, it was almost impossible to tease the two apart—no one could harm either of them, they were protected from loss.

Now, today, Agnes wonders what it was like for Dorotea to grow up under the photographs of the lost girl with the forthright stare. Was it like Agnes’s father’s house, that warm dark womb smelling of grilled cheese and solder? And what did Dorotea do when she left that place, when she emerged adult from within the walls of her mother’s loss, how did she spend her youth and enter into the thick-skinned steadiness of middle age? Did she feel panicked and unequipped, was she confident, how long did it take her to stop looking up for her mother’s reaction to whatever she was doing, did she ever stop looking?

“Um,” Agnes says, “are you close? With your mother?”

Dorotea looks confused and annoyed.

“My mother died last year,” she says.

“I’m so sorry,” Agnes says, her face hot. “I didn’t realize. I—”

“Close? What kind of a question is that? Was I close with my mother? She was my mother.”

“I just meant, it must have made an impact on you, your mother, losing her sister—”

Dorotea narrows her eyes. “What is your job here? You are a student?”

Agnes stands embarrassed in her red sneakers.

“No. No, I’m an anthropologist. I consult with the county on cases involving bones and teeth.”

“You came from America to do this? They don’t have anthropologists in this country?”

“No, they do.”

“Are you some kind of expert, then? They brought you over just for this case?”

“No. I mean yes, I am an expert in dentition, but I came here a while back. I’m a postdoctoral fellow, I don’t know if you know what that means?”

“Of course I know what it means,” Dorotea says. “For a moment I thought, ‘Ah, perhaps they requested someone really special for this case, a woman who has been missing for fifty-seven years.’ But no, you are just a very young person, not a student but very recently a student. Perhaps last year?”

“Last year,” Agnes admits.

“And you are the one I am supposed to trust when you say these remains are not Isabela’s?”

Agnes’s embarrassment and insecurity fall away. She knows what she’s seen: on the X-rays, in the old records with their handwritten measurements, and on the cold uncanny body itself. She draws herself up so that her eyes look down into Dorotea’s eyes.

“Trust me,” she says. “These remains are not Isabela’s.”

Kieran returns to the room, into a magnetic field that buzzes and then dissipates around him. His hair sticks up in the back as though he has been scratching his scalp.

“Unfortunately Dr. Linstrom and I are needed elsewhere,” he tells Dorotea. “The police liaison will keep you informed of any developments. If you need help booking your flight back, I think Melinda can help you with that.”

Dorotea looks at him, then back at Agnes.

“Oh,” she says, “I am not leaving.”

Agnes does not know what she expected a bog to be like, but not this. Below the rise is a wide, dark, barren expanse of earth, a wasteland. The soil has been deeply harrowed in horizontal lines, the top layers of peat pulled back and cut away, leaving behind black mud and the twisted branches of dead trees, bleached a lusterless silver in the cold. Agnes has a feeling of vicarious pain, like looking at a burn or laceration in living flesh. The sky above is muffled and birdless.

Parked at the eastern edge of the mud are two tractors, one fitted with an enormous, toothed attachment like the blade of a circular saw. A man stands in front of it looking at his phone. Some yards away, in the center of the mud field, is a larger group: ten or fifteen men and women in windbreakers and rubber boots, one of them setting up a barbecue grill, a pair pitching a purple tent. A blond dog is nosing among them, collecting attention.

“Fuck,” Kieran says quietly.

Agnes’s sneakers slide in the muck as she and Kieran scramble down the rise. The man by the tractor puts away his phone and waves to the coroner.

“How’s Emily?” he asks when they reach him.

“She’s great, she’s great. A handful, you know. How’s—it’s Charlie, right?”

“That’s right. The same. Yesterday he decided he’s not going to bed unless we let him sleep with the flyswatter. So, you know what? We just let him.”

“You pick your battles,” Kieran says. He is smiling and shaking his head, he is at ease. Agnes can imagine him in a backyard somewhere, children running, him lifting a beer.

Kieran gestures at the people with the tent.

“So Officer Taylor called me. What exactly is going on here? Who’s this?”

“They’re environmentalists,” the tractor man says. “I think. They showed up yesterday, after the . . . you know. After the news was on Facebook and everything. They say they’re ‘occupying’ the area, so if we try to operate the equipment, they’re going to lie down in the mud. I said we’re not even trying to operate right now, because of your investigation. But Fiona, she said we’d better stick around, in case they try to do something to the machinery.”

“Idiots,” Kieran says.

“Maybe you could talk to them? I don’t know if they’re planning on letting you dig or what.”

“ ‘Letting’ us?” Kieran says lightly, but with an edge. “We work for them now?”

He starts across the mud, and Agnes follows. As they walk she sees the landscape is more complex than it first appeared—in the pocks and furrows left, presumably, by heavy equipment, black water has collected, and in the water are green patches, acid-bright, with a look of depth and complexity to them, as though each is composed of many smaller growths. The patches are clearly living but utterly alien; Agnes recalls a comic book her father bought her as a child, in which the hero set foot on a far-off world, where craters bloomed uncannily with blobs of purple mold. She wants to kneel in the muck and take a closer look, but Kieran has already closed the distance between him and the people with the tent, the dog is gamboling toward him with mud on its feet, and a man breaks off from the group and approaches too, so that when they meet they are four. Kieran bends to scritch the dog behind the ears as he begins to speak.

“This is an active investigation site,” he says.

The man does not respond directly. Instead he extends his hand. Agnes puts him in his late twenties, perhaps thirty years old, but he moves with the confidence of an older man, or a woman, someone aware of the presence of their body in the world. His skin is light brown; his eyes are green. From the way he stands she can tell he is left-handed.

“Kieran, right?” he says. “I’m Nicholas Bailey. I believe your sister used to take my mum’s movement classes.”

“Oh right,” Kieran says, looking uncomfortable. “Mrs. Bailey, with the, ah—” He gestures stiffly at his head.

“That’s right, the white-lady dreads.” Nicholas is smiling. “She cut them off, thank God. How’s your sister?”

“She’s fine, she’s great. She, uh, she used to really like those classes. Look—”

But Nicholas has turned to Agnes. He is slightly shorter than her; he looks up into her face. She blinks her gaze away and then back again.

“You’re not from here,” he says, smiling.

“No.”

Where Agnes is from, she used to sit in the backyard at twilight and watch the scorpions scuttling between the rocks. In summer the dry heat would break the blood vessels in her nose. Her first week in this country, her sneakers grew a coat of green mold all over, she had to run them through the washing machine and their color was never the same.

“Little bit of background, then,” says Nicholas. “From pretty much the dawn of time until twenty years ago, where we’re standing was common land. The people living nearby would come from time to time and cut a bit of peat to keep their houses warm, but for the most part they left it alone. It was home to five species of native butterfly, seventeen species of bird, and, of course, the moss itself, which has the ability to sequester carbon, making it one of the most potent natural antidotes to climate change. Then the council sold the land to the peat company. They brought in industrial cutters and turners and, well, you can see the result.”

He pauses for effect. The sun struggles out from behind a cloud and casts weak light on the black mud.

“We’ve filed suit against the company for environmental harm, and we’re confident that we’ll win,” he continues. “But in the meantime, we have a moral obligation to reclaim this land for its original owners, the people of Ludlow and—not to be too grandiose, but I think this is justified—all the people on earth, who will benefit when the moss is restored to the living, breathing ecosystem it was always meant to be.”

In college there was a man, another student, who used to organize Occupy protests on campus. Agnes did not join the protests, she joined in very little at the university, unusual as she was, younger than all the other students and living at home. But she was drawn to this man, the way he could broadcast the content of his mind, as though it was simple to be public in this way. It came naturally to him, even his body moved in accordance with his ideas. Agnes has not thought of him in years, they stopped running into each other, but she thinks of him now, he and this man Nicholas are not dissimilar. Nicholas stands with his shoulders back and his hands spread wide as if to encompass their surroundings. His posture and voice assume an audience.

“Jesus Christ,” Kieran says, turning away for a moment and then turning back. “You’re only here because we’re here, isn’t that right? You’re capitalizing on our investigation to get publicity for your”—he casts a hand about vaguely in the direction of the tent—“whatever this is.”

“It’s part of our job to bring public attention to environmental degradation and the prospect of renewal,” Nicholas says. “I’m certainly not going to apologize for that. But I’ll also tell you that this is a critical time for the moss. You may not be aware of this—few people in the community are—but the peat company is engaged in a final push to extract any remaining resources from the site before it’s sold. They already have an interested buyer—I understand they’re planning to put in luxury flats.”

Kieran shakes his head as though a fly is buzzing around him.

“Look,” he says, “none of this is my business right now. We have a body we need to identify.”

Nicholas looks confused.

“You haven’t identified the body?” he asks. “I thought it was Roger Bergmann’s wife. Isabela something? I read that he confessed.”

“He did,” Agnes says. “It’s complicated.”

“Complicated how?”

“These remains—” Agnes pauses, she wants to speak well, briefly but with authority. “They’re not consistent with Isabela Navarro’s presumed time of death. We believe they may be much older.”

“How old?” he asks. A new sharpness in his eyes, he stands a little closer.

“I don’t know,” Agnes says. “Hundreds of years, maybe more. I sent a sample off for carbon dating, but it’s going to take a couple of days. In the meantime we need to grid out and excavate the site as soon as possible.”

Really the excavation should have begun already. Agnes wishes she had been present when the peat-cutting crew discovered the body in the first place, when they lifted it from the bog. Every moment that the turned earth is exposed to air, every time a rubber boot tramples over the spot where the left metatarsal might lie—

“There’s a risk of damaging the evidence,” she says.

“Evidence of what?”

Generally in the case of an unidentified decedent, Agnes’s first task would be to comb dental records and disappearances looking for a match. In this case, however, if the body really is hundreds of years old, she will probably never be able to put a name to it. It is a disappointment; she likes to know a person, to understand the arc of a life from birth to death and beyond. But her second task, equally important, remains.

“Evidence of how she died,” Agnes says.

Nicholas is looking at her still with that sharp focus.

“Why do you need to know how she died?” he asks.

When people find out what Agnes does—the estate agent who showed her the flat, for example, apologizing for the fact that the oven door did not open all the way—sometimes they are disgusted. “I could never do that,” the agent said, and she was probably right. Agnes is aware that most people find human remains upsetting. But she is never sure how to respond to their expressions of distaste when her own experience is so opposite to theirs.

“No,” was all she said to the estate agent, and the silence hung between them in the ugly kitchen like smoke.

But why must someone do it, the work she does? She thinks for a moment. It gives her pleasure to be asked this question and to sense his full attention as she considers her response.

“In this case, with a historical body, the cause of death could tell us something about the time she lived in,” Agnes says finally. “Did she have a disease, was she hurt in an accident, was there a war?”

Nicholas nods, he can tell she is not finished.

“But also, the way someone dies is part of the story of their life,” Agnes says. “It’s like—you know how some people believe the dead can’t rest unless we avenge them, or unless they get a proper burial?”

“Sure, of course.”

“It’s a little bit like that, I think. Something we owe the dead, to find out as much as we can.”

“I understand, I do,” Nicholas says. His manner is changing again. Agnes feels his focus widen and dilute. “You have a duty. But we have one too. It’s our job to protect this ecosystem and bring it back to health. Any kind of excavation here is, of necessity, going to delay that process. Now, if you’d like to make a request, I can certainly put it to our group for a vote—”

Kieran cuts him off. “We’re not going to argue with you anymore,” he says, “and we’re not putting anything up for a vote. If you’re not going to cooperate with us, we’ll need to have you arrested for interfering with an investigation. Do you want to go to jail?”

A few of the others have turned to watch them—a woman with long red hair stands windblown on the mud, the dog now sniffing at her feet. The purple tent is finished, and a pair is pitching a blue one.

“We’re certainly prepared for that,” Nicholas said. “But as I told Stephen”—he gestures at the tractor—“the police may want to consider the optics of arresting peaceful protesters, especially in light of recent events.”

“What events?” Agnes asks.

“Kieran can explain that best, I think,” Nicholas says. “Nice to meet you, Agnes. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

He walks off then across the mud, and Agnes sees the dog bounding again over to him, all the people stopping their work and looking up to see what he has to say.