Orphan of Creation by Roger MacBride Allen Page B

could give an order. “Leon, take over, honey. My voice is getting tired and I need a stretch.”
    She handed her middle-aged nephew the book and stood up. Taking a shortcut through the interior of the house, she passed through the front parlor room where a squad of the more sentimental aunts was going over the other things—the bedside library, the clothes, the glasses—that Barbara had found in the trunk. Aunt Josephine made her way into the foyer and back outside. She shielded her eyes and peered out across the yard.
    There the two of them were, crouched in the middle of a huge patch bare dirt that sat like the squared-off bulls-eye in the center of an even larger patch of ground that had been mowed—no, shaved , within an inch of its life. Lord help us all, Josephine thought, this yard was never going to look the same again. Now the two of them seemed to be spooling out lengths of string across the plowed patch, working carefully with a tape measure as they paid out the taut lengths of twine. She shook her head and headed out across the lawn. She stalked over to the two kneeling figures, and glared down at them. “And just what are the two of you doing now , as if you haven’t done enough damage already?” she asked in her best school-marm voice.
    Livingston looked up, his voice bubbling with enthusiasm. “Setting up a reference grid, Aunt Josephine.” He pointed to the stakes at the corners and along the sides of the plowed-up area. “Those are exactly a meter apart. We run these lines from one side to the other, ten centimeters off the ground, and we can get an exact grid reference on anything we dig up.”
    “You two aren’t planning to dig up this whole yard, are you?” Josephine asked, getting a bit alarmed.
    “I sure hope not,” Barbara answered. She looked up from her notebook and grinned. There was a big smudge of dirt on her nose and another on her forehead, but she didn’t seem to notice. “We’ve got a metal detector that should let us zero in on the caskets, if they are still here. We’re just about ready to get to work with it.”
    “Hmmph. I see. Well, before you do one more thing to my poor side yard, Livingston Jones, you run and fetch me a chair. I’m going to set right here and keep an eye on you two before you put a whole underground subway in here.”
    Livingston stood up and brushed the worst of the dust off his trousers. “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and got going.
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    Livingston felt a distinct sense of relief as he headed toward the house. Aunt Jo was putting up with them. The words might sound a bit severe, but Livingston had caught the slight tone of indulgence in Aunt Jo’s voice. It was the voice she had used back when he was a kid visiting during summer vacation, when she had caught him reading a worthwhile book after bedtime. When he had been caught with a comic book, there was hell to pay.
    He found an unused garden chair on the porch, but before he could make his escape, Barbara’s mother captured him and demanded to know what was going on. He confessed that they were getting to the interesting part.
    The result, of course, was that a whole parade of aunts and uncles and children and parents were soon on their way to the site, carrying chairs and parasols and cool drinks, settling down to watch Livingston and Barbara at work, peppering them with questions, making jokes, then wandering off to watch a frisbee tournament or a pick-up football game between the younger set, or check on the progress of the Big Game blaring from the sitting room television, then wandering back to ask the same questions and make the same jokes. The dig quickly turned into the focal point of a family carnival.
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    Barbara looked up from her work and suddenly realized just how many of her relatives had gathered around. It was all too familiar to Barbara, though she would never dare say so to anyone here. At every dig she had ever been on, the locals had wandered in to make a nuisance of