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  “Oh you think so?” She pursed her lips together coyly. “I thought you were too tired for such naughty behavior.”

  “Bacon is very energizing.”

  She laughed and took a bite of donut, carrying the pastry back to the counter with her. “I can just wear jeans today, right? Because if I need to dress up, we’re going to have to go shopping first.”

  “Right. This is probably going to be the least official thing you’ve ever gone to in your life.”

  Madison’s cell phone started ringing. She ignored it. “You only say that because you’ve gone to them before.”

  “Not exactly like this, but I’m assuming it’s the same as most of the ‘unofficial’ artifact meetings I’ve been at.” He paused. “Your phone is ringing.”

  “Noted. It’s my mother.”

  “You should answer it.”

  “Trust me, you don’t want to witness the carnage if I do.”

  “Tell her we’re on a schedule.” He picked up the phone and handed it to her. “And tell her I said hi.”

  “She’ll want to talk to you if I do that.” Madison slid her finger across the face of the phone and then held it to her ear. “Hello, Mother.”

  “Hi, Madison!” Her mother sounded overly excited, like she was preparing to coach Madison into having a great day. “I saw the press release this morning. Was that your dig?”

  “Yes, that was us.” Madison pulled open the dresser and fished through her clean shirts, finally pulling out a hot pink tank top and a tight black shirt. “Pretty cool, huh? We’re on our way to talk to some experts on what we found.”

  “Rick and I are so excited for you, sweetie.”

  Madison strongly doubted Tricky Dick even acknowledged the press release existed. “I’m excited too, Mom. This has been so much more amazing than I thought it was going to be.”

  “And your counseling sessions?”

  “Well, they’re as one would expect them to be. Pretty much a waste of time.”

  “You shouldn’t say that, Madison. You have to learn—”

  “I know, Mom. I know.” She rolled her eyes and searched for her flare legged jeans. “I’m learning my lesson just like the court wanted. Since I’m twenty-one now, you’d think they’d just go ahead and drop those charges.”

  Mike cleared his throat and nodded to the floor. Her jeans were in a rumpled pile, along with her bra and panties. “You left those there last night.”

  “Is someone with you, Madison?”

  “Uh, yeah, someone’s with me.” Madison shook her fist at Mike as she retrieved her jeans.

  He chuckled.

  “Oh, you’re making friends. That’s good.”

  “Mom, I’m not a social outcast, even when I’m at home.”

  “No, honey, no I’m not saying that at all. I’m just saying I’m glad you’re not spending all your time being serious. Or drinking.”

  “Nope, not drinking.” She pulled clean underpants on one leg, and then the other, as she pressed the phone against her ear with her shoulder. She shimmed them up her body. “Just working and having fun.”

  Mike sat in the chair and slouched down to watch her dress. He cocked his head to the side. “I don’t think that’s all you’re doing.”

  She widened her eyes and him, unsuccessfully attempting to hold back a smile.

  Her mother fell silent for a moment. “Is that a male you’re with?”

  “Yup, that’s a male I’m with.” She snapped her fingers at Mike and pointed at the phone. “His name’s Mike.”

  Mike waved at the phone. “Hi, Madison’s mom.”

  “He says hello.”

  “Madison.” Her mother again fell silent, as if she were searching for the right thing to say. “Is he on the dig with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You barely know him.”

  “Well, he’s pretty amazing.” Madison nibbled on her bottom lip. “And, really, Mom, I have to go. We have to be at park headquarters in like, an hour. I still have to get dressed.”

  Mike snickered.

  “Ugh, I mean, I still have to get ready.” Madison pressed her fist to her forehead. That slip was going to go over well. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Madison.” Her mom drew in a sharp breath. “Just have fun. Be careful, have fun. And…tell him I said hello, too.”

  “Thanks, Mom. Love you.”

  “I love you, too. Bye, sweetie.”

  Madison hung up the cell phone and tossed it to the bed. She pointed at Mike. “You, sir, are trouble.”

  “I’m only pretty amazing?” He pouted. “I retract my previous statement denying you my donuts, if it offended the lovely Miss Madison.”

  She crawled into his lap, straddling him, and kissed him. “What did you prefer I said? Something more along the lines of, ‘Yeah, Mom, he’s sexy, got an amazing body, and is phenomenal in bed?’”

  “Well, I don’t want to brag.” He slid his hand under her shirt, flicking his finger over her belly button ring. “It’s good that you talked to her. You usually don’t.”

  “I usually don’t have much to say to her.” Madison shrugged her shoulders and then pulled her shirt off, tossing it to the floor. “If there was a Madison Monroe fan club, she wouldn’t be a charter member.”

  “I’d be the president.”

  “Biased.” She gave him sufficient time to take in the curves of her body and then slid to the floor, walking back to the counter to finish getting ready. “Anyway, she’s been fairly apathetic to my general behavior since she married my step-father. It’s a strained relationship but, hey, I’m trying. Right?”

  “I think you’re trying to do a lot of things right now.”

  She ran her tongue over her bottom lip and then turned back to the mirror, leaning over to finish applying her eye makeup. “Possibly. What about your parents? Are they cool?”

  “Yeah, I always had a good relationship with them growing up. They were insanely supportive when I came home from Afghanistan with my…ah…issues. But, Maddy, I joined the Army when I was seventeen and moved out permanently when I was eighteen. I’m used to being on my own and they’re used to me being away. It’s just different.”

  She tugged her jeans on and then fastened her bra around her shoulders. “I always wonder if things would have been different if my dad hadn’t died. Maybe we all would have been…I don’t know, happier or something. Better people.”

  “I think you turned out fine.”

  “Well, thanks.” She smiled at him. “It means a lot to me.”

  “You hog the sheets though.”

  “Seriously, dude?”

  He laughed and walked behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist. “Come on, beautiful. Let’s hit the road.”

  Madison finished getting dressed and pulled her hair back, then followed Mike down to the Jeep. “Before I forget, my mother said hello.”

  “See? She likes me already.”

  He pulled the Jeep out onto the main street and drove north out of town, through the tighter, congested streets of the tourist areas before heading out onto the highway. The park’s headquarters were contained in an antebellum farm complex and tucked back far off the main road, much like the Spangler Farm. Several smaller administrative buildings were dwarfed by a large farmhouse and bank barn.

  Mike pulled the Jeep into a space beside Liam’s car. Liam was out of his vehicle and around to Mike’s window in an instant. “What the hell are we doing here?”

  “I take it Brad gave you about the same amount of information he gave us.” Mike pulled off his sunglasses and tucked them in his visor. “I’m trying to muster up the appropriate amount of excitement for whatever it is.”

  “He mentioned something about results, but not results they’re ready to make official yet.” Liam huffed. “What kind of results can they find on remains? A minie ball lodged in the skull? A bayonet through the sternum—not that I’m even sure that’s physically possible—or some kind of cache of unexploded
ordinance? I mean, unexploded ordinance just rains down on the douche like manna from Heaven.”

  “I would find all of those results to be absolutely fascinating.” Madison flashed a thumbs up sign at him. “Sign me up.”

  “Where’s Brad?” Mike craned his neck as he looked around the lot. “And, of lesser concern, Cianna?”

  “It’s not nine yet.” Liam shrugged. “He’ll be here.”

  “We can only be so lucky.”

  Liam leaned over and studied Madison. “Are you feeling any better?”

  “Uh, yeah?” She said, uncertain what exactly he was talking about. “I wasn’t aware I was feeling bad.”

  “No, I mean better about the remains.”

  “Being him, you mean?”

  “Okay.”

  “It’s been a lot to process.”

  “This has been the strangest dig I’ve ever worked.” Liam ran his hand over the back of his head. “Brad’s acting like a loon, the dig has been simultaneously dull and completely out of control. I need a sedative.”

  Mike drummed his fingers against the steering wheel. “I thought it’s been pretty good so far.”

  “You would. You’ve been getting laid nonstop for over a week.”

  “Don’t get mad at me, man. You could have gone out with that guy again, you just chose not to.”

  “Mikey. He said he had herpes. At Applebee’s.” Liam huffed and then abruptly straightened. “Here comes Brad. I can’t tell if the bitch is with him.”

  Brad maneuvered the pickup truck into a nearby space. He jumped out of the cab with far more energy than Madison felt was necessary for that time of morning and headed in their direction. “You guys ready for this?”

  “So, what’s the deal?” Mike stepped out of the Jeep, closing the door behind him. “What’d they find?”

  “No idea.” Brad started walking toward the farmhouse. “I think it’s going to change everything for us, though. I think it’s huge.”

  Madison circled around the Jeep to Mike and Liam. She watched Brad hustle to the farmhouse. Cianna, who’d been slow to slide out of the truck cab, was hurrying after him, trying to simultaneously swing a huge, designer purse over her shoulder. It was almost—almost—sad. “I get the feeling he’s going to take credit for this.”

  “Hell yeah he is.” Liam adjusted the collar of his shirt. “His name is on the dig. We’re just the muscle. Well, Mike’s the muscle. I’m the personality and Madison’s the sexpot.”

  “Uh, okay.” Madison glanced at him. “Usually I play the role of drunk or bookish weird girl.”

  Mike slid his arm around her and pulled her against him. “I agree with Liam’s assessment. Which, take note, because that’ll never happen again.”

  They followed Brad and Cianna to the farmhouse. Although the outside resembled any other farmhouse in the area, the interior of the building had been refurbished into an office space. There were large paintings depicting the 1863 battle in Gettysburg displayed on the walls and a huge, awkwardly placed green fern shoved in one of the corners. It reminded Madison of the reception area in a funeral parlor. The furniture looked comfortable, but ill-used and the heavy burgundy curtains looked like shrouds in a church.

  Superintendent Frye was waiting for them, shuffling through a file folder splayed open on the secretary’s desk. “I’m glad you all could join us on such short notice.” He shook Brad’s hand, but nodded congenially at the other four diggers. “We have everything set up in the archeology suites. Follow me.”

  He led them back outside the farmhouse and to one of the larger outbuildings. It was a modern building constructed to complement the other structures in the complex, with similarly painted siding and blue shuttered windows. The inside of the building was more like a gynecologist’s office, with steel tub sinks and groutless tiled floor. An examination table was in the center of the room, and beside it stood a man and a woman, both wearing khaki slacks and white long sleeved shirts.

  Madison realized these were the heralded experts, the two brought in to confirm what she, Mike, and Liam had pulled from the ground. The man looked to be in his mid-fifties, tall and lanky with a thick beard and stringy blond hair. The woman appeared about ten years younger. Her hair was short, dark brown streaked with gray, and she peered at them through thick, round glasses.

  Superintendent Frye raised his hand in greeting to them. “Team, I want you to meet our osteo-archeologist Jan Williams and forensic anthropologist, Scott Spada. Scott and Jan, this is the archeological crew brought in for the survey. This is our dig head, Bradley Emerson. You may remember him from his discovery of the unexploded cartridge rounds from Allegheny Arsenal.”

  Introductions were quick and rushed, with lots of hand shaking and repetition of names. Madison was fairly sure the two experts fell suit with Superintendent Frye—only acknowledging Brad’s participation in the dig—until Scott held on to her hand for an extra beat. “You’re the one who found the remains.”

  She flushed. “Yes, sir.”

  “Excellent job, Miss Monroe.”

  He let go of her hand and crossed back behind the examination table. He nodded at the osteo-archeologist. “You go ahead, Jan, since it was mostly your effort.”

  The remains were laid out as in physiologic order, showing just how much actually had survived the passage of time. Jan pulled on examination gloves. “The condition of the remains is remarkable, considering how long they’d been in the ground. We’re attributing that to the rubber blanket that was over it. In theory, the rubber repelled water to a certain extent and protected the bones from substantial deterioration. We did a standard examination of the remains. It’s my professional option, based on all our testing and both physical and elemental observation, they are period to the Civil War.”

  She started at the top of the table and gestured to the skull. “The wear on the subject’s teeth give a developmental age of between age eighteen and twenty-four. There was evidence of cavities. One of the back molars is missing.”

  Madison shuddered. She wasn’t sure how comfortable she felt with Jan referring to the remains as ‘the subject’. ‘The subject’ had once been a person. ‘The subject’ once was Ben.

  Scott handed her a laser pointer. She leveled it at the spinal column. “We found a bullet lodged approximately between the 2nd and 3rd thoracic vertebra or, rather, what was left of the vertebra. The impact of soft lead would explode bone outward, sending bone shards into the surrounding tissue. Clearly, this would have been the cause of death. Moving downward, we measured the length of the femur and determined the subject stood an estimated height of five foot three inches.”

  Liam cleared his throat. “That’s below average for the period, isn’t it?”

  “You have people at all ends of the height spectrum, of course.” Scott pointed both index fingers at Liam, like he’d just told the punch line of a joke and was waiting for response. “But that’s what we thought, too.”

  “I measured the pelvic bones probably a dozen times.” The pitch of Jan’s voice rose, her excitement growing. “I had Scott verify twice. The subject is female.”

  Impossible.

  “Female?” Brad repeated. His voice sounded strangely uncertain, devoid of his typical arrogance. “You’re sure?”

  “I checked, and then I rechecked.” Jan dropped the laser pointer in her pocket. “Pardon my candor, but this is huge. It’s definitely female. The structure of the skull is more feminine than the typical brows we see in males. The confirmation is in the pelvic structure. There’s no doubt it’s female.”

  No one spoke.

  Madison stared at the remains on the examination table. It wasn’t Ben. After all this, the remains he’d dragged her to, the body he’d helped her discover, wasn’t him. It was a woman. Instead of answering her questions, it seemed like the revelation only spurred more. Why was there a woman buried at the site of a military hospital? Who was she? How did she get there?

  Liam was the first to verbalize what ev
eryone was no doubt thinking. “Are you saying we discovered the remains of a female soldier? That’s not huge…that’s like, the first ever. That’s monumental.”

  “Off the record,” — Frye extended his hand to Brad — “this is the biggest archeological discovery in the history of the park. Congratulations, Brad. You’re going to feel the echoes of this one for a while.”

  Brad whooped, pumping his fist into the air. “That’s my team! Way to go, guys!”

  There were hugs and congratulations all around. Madison even awkwardly hugged Cianna, despite the fact she hadn’t lifted a finger over the entire course of the dig, but when faced with Brad, she froze. “Way to go team.”

  He opened his arms to her. “Come here, Madison. We’re celebrating.”

  Reluctantly, she let him hug her. His embrace was too tight and too long; his entire body seemed to excrete sweat and the overpowering reek of cologne. She quickly pulled free, stepping backwards against Mike.

  He looped his arm around her waist, leaning his head close to hers. “That’s my girl. This one’s all yours.”

  “Hardly. You and Liam did just as much as I did.”

  Jan held her hands up. “We can’t officially confirm that the female you found was, in life, disguised as a soldier and lost her life in battle. It’s conjecture.”

  Madison cleared her throat. “I found a federal sack coat in the same test pit, not too far from where we found the remains.”

  “She was covered with a gum blanket so, yes, there’s a lot of evidence that she was somehow affiliated with the Army.” Jan shook her head. “Unfortunately, with no records and no specific evidence proving she disguised herself as a male, we can only surmise why she was buried there. She could have been a civilian.”

  “I have to disagree with that.” Mike broke in. “If a female civilian was killed in military presence, we would have had records of it. Look at Jennie Wade in town. I mean, that was a huge deal. She baked bread for soldiers and died in the process—we know the whole timeline.”

  “If she wasn’t a soldier, why did she have a federal gum blanket over her body?” Liam tugged on his lower lip. “Someone had to have put it there on purpose.”