Orphan of Creation by Roger MacBride Allen Page A

house.
    He came back about ten minutes later, drinks in hand. “Took me a while to escape,” he said. “The whole mob is gathered around Aunt Josephine, listening to her read aloud from that journal you found. They all wanted to know what you were up to, and Aunt Josephine skipped ahead and read the passage you showed her this morning. I think we’ll have an audience in a minute.”
    Barbara shook her head. “Wonderful. Nothing I like better than sidewalk superintendents. C’mon, let’s get back to it while we still can. I’ve sketched in all the markers. If you sort of connect the dots and extend the line from the places you can still see the washout, it looks as if the old road curved a bit, sort of looped a little bit closer to the burial site than the present one does. Grab a few more stakes, will you?”
    They walked down the present-day plantation road to the point where it crossed the burial-ground road. “Okay, partner,” she said cheerfully. “Now we work from the sketch map and the line of the old road we’ve staked out and figure out where it crossed this path. Wish I had a surveyor’s transit, but I think I can manage on eyeballs. Gimme one of those stakes.” She stared back along the lines of stakes running north and south, muttering to herself, tracing the old roadline. She took the stake and walked to the closest south-side stake, then backed up the way she had come, dragging a stake in the dirt. She marked her line across the burial-ground path and met up neatly with the closest stake on the north side, then repeated the performance with the line of stakes marking the other edge of the old washout road. She had now, she hoped, relocated the shifted landmark of the crossroads, under which the gorillas were supposedly buried. “Grab the tape measure, Liv,” she said. They used the measure, four more stakes, and a few tricks in geometry to mark out a square exactly eight meters on a side, with the theoretical fossil crossroads at its center. “That’s it, Liv. Our prime search area. Now let’s get that rider mower out here and see if we can’t rig up some sort of bulldozer blade.”
    Either Aunt Josephine had an altogether exaggerated fear of southern Mississippi snowstorms, or the mower salesman was most persuasive, but they didn’t have to jury-rig anything. Put neatly away in the rear of the garage was a perfectly good, purpose-made, never-been used ‘dozer blade attachment for the mower. In twenty minutes, they had the old crossroads scraped clean of the top ten centimeters of soil, and, hopefully, clear of most of the casual litter that would jam the metal detector.
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    Aunt Josephine, sitting on the far side of the wraparound porch from Barbara’s work site, surrounded by a crowd of relatives listening to her read from the journal, was growing more and more restive. For starters, she had been sitting in one place, reading to herself or aloud, for hours now, and she was an active, busy person. Her excitement over finding the treasure trove in the attic was expressing itself in the form of nervous energy. She felt a great need to bustle, to do things, not so much for the sake of doing them, but more as a way of soothing herself. Not only that, but she had gotten a constant stream of reports from some of the teenagers who had wandered over to watch Barbara and Livingston at work. She could hear the growl of her brand-new power mower again. In point of plain fact, she was getting a bit worried about just how big a hole that fool girl Barbara was fixing to dig. It sounded like they’d be halfway to putting in a swimming pool by the time it was all over. It was high time she got over there and took a look for herself.
    With a start, she realized she had been reading aloud without hearing the words herself for a page and a half. The same thing had happened back in her teaching days, when she was preoccupied. That settled it. She closed the book, looked up, and spotted someone to whom she