Birthright Read Online Free Page A

juggling motherhood and dentistry. How did an old digger like me raise such normal kids?”
    â€œClara,” Callie told him as he opened a door and gestured her in.
    Though she’d expected him to take her to one of the labs, she looked around his sunny, well-appointed office. “I’d forgotten what a slick setup you’ve got here, Leo. No burning desire to go back out and dig?”
    â€œOh, it comes over me now and again. Usually I just take a nap and it goes away. But this time . . . Take a look at this.”
    He walked behind his desk, unlocked a drawer. He drew out a bone fragment in a sealed bag.
    Callie took the bag and, hooking her glasses in the V of her shirt, examined the bone within. “Looks like part of a tibia. Given the size and fusion, probably from a young female. Very well preserved.”
    â€œBest guess of age from visual study?”
    â€œThis is from western Maryland, right? Near a running creek. I don’t like best guess. You got soil samples, stratigraphic report?”
    â€œBallpark. Come on, Blondie, play.”
    â€œJeez.” Her brow knitted as she turned the bag over in her hand. She wanted her fingers on bone. Her foot began to tap to her own inner rhythm. “I don’t know the ground. Visual study, without benefit of testing, I’d make it three to five hundred years old. Could be somewhat older, depending on the silt deposits, the floodplain.”
    She turned the bone over again, and her instincts began to quiver. “That’s Civil War country, isn’t it? This predates that. It’s not from a Rebel soldier boy.”
    â€œIt predates the Civil War,” Leo agreed. “By about five thousand years.”
    When Callie’s head came up, he grinned at her like a lunatic. “Radiocarbon-dating report,” he said, and handed her a file.
    Callie scanned the pages, noted that Leo had run the test twice, on three different samples taken from the site.
    When she looked up again, she had the same maniacal grin as he. “Hot dog,” she said.

Two
    C allie got lost on the way to Woodsboro. She’d taken directions from Leo, but when studying the map had noted a shortcut. It should have been a shortcut. Any logical person would have deemed it a shortcut—which was, in her opinion, exactly what the cartographer figured.
    She had a long-standing feud with mapmakers.
    She didn’t mind being lost. She never stayed that way, after all. And the detour gave her a feel for the area.
    Rugged, rolling hills riotously green with summer spilled into wide fields thick with row crops. Outcroppings of silver rock bumped through the green like gnarled knuckles and rippling finger bones.
    It made her think of those ancient farmers, carving their rows with primitive tools, hacking into that rocky ground to grow their food. To make their place.
    The man who rode his John Deere over those fields owed them a debt.
    He wouldn’t think of it as he plowed and planted and harvested. So she, and those like her, would think of it for him.
    It was a good place, she decided, to work.
    The higher hills were upholstered with forest thatclimbed up toward a sky of glassy blue. Ridge tumbled into valley; valley rose toward ridge, giving the land texture and shadows and scope.
    The sun sheened over the hip-high corn and gave it a wash of gold over green and gave a young chestnut gelding a bright playground for romping. Old houses made from local stone, or their contemporary counterparts of frame or brick or vinyl, stood on rises or flats with plenty of elbow room between them.
    Cows lolled in the heat behind wire or split-rail fences.
    The fields would give way to woods, thick with hardwoods and tangled with sumac and wild mimosa, then the hills would take over, bumpy with rock. The road twisted and turned to follow the snaking line of the creek, and overhead those trees arched to turn the road into a shady tunnel that dropped off on