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This story was Joe's first for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, and was a finalist for the 2017 Derringer Award.

* * *

The woman came to Ellen inside a cheap, aluminum briefcase—the burned and shattered bones embedded in five blocks of calcified sand. Ellen barely listened to Luis the whole time he spoke about the dig. She was conscious only of two things: how uncomfortable she felt with the smarmy archaeologist looming over her desk, and how small the sand blocks looked. Could they really contain the remnants of a life?
She let him prattle on about the accommodations he and the other field researchers had endured—the weather, the dismal food—and an abbreviated litany of their other finds. He was slipping into that irritating tone many academics affected, attempting to be simultaneously enthusiastic and coy about their findings. Clearly, there were certain elements of their trip to the extinct lakebed in southern Spain that his cliquey team would keep for themselves. Still, they needed her help if they were going to get a paper out of it.

He seemed offended when she spoke, cutting him short. “How old?”

“What? Oh. We don’t know. Could be thousands.”

“Male or female, would you say?”

“Oh, well. Yes. That.” He shifted his weight. “We don’t even know if they’re human. You’ll see. It’s just a big puzzle.”

So: it was a wild goose chase, then, wasn’t it? Just the sort of thing to palm off on the quiet foreigner, the American post-doc who was supposed to be talented though no one in the department had seen much evidence of it.

Ellen slipped into her own irritating habit—a cocoon of silence—and prayed for Luis to leave. Only when her stubborn wordlessness tainted the air did he flee.

She was new to Madrid. New to their country. Ever since her separation and subsequent divorce from Alejandro, she slept fitfully anyway, the traffic outside her new apartment doing her no favors. It pleased her to rise before dawn and head to the lab to snatch an hour with the remains. Each night she lingered in her office, picking at last night’s leftover fabada stew in a plastic container and waiting for the others to slink home to their families or the wine bars on the outskirts of the university before turning again to the contents of the briefcase.
At last. All was now as it should be. She was alone with the bones.

Bit by bit, an ancient being came together under her fingertips. Almost every day for the next six months, she painstakingly freed the remains from the sand with a dental drill, prizing out more than six hundred bone chips, each no larger than a thumbnail. She washed them carefully with acetic acid, sealed them with a preservative, and pieced them together into a recognizable skeleton.

And yes, it was human. The face was missing, but the top of the skull, the brow, and a piece of jaw had survived. Looking closely at the skull fragments, bits of arm bone, and a hint of pelvis, Ellen became convinced that the bones were indeed human, Homo sapiens for sure. The few teeth clinging to the jaw hinted that she was looking at the body of a mature woman.

Buenos días, Señora.

Moved by the gracile nature of the bones, she began to privately call the woman Graciela.
The blabbers in Luis’s department let slip that they suspected an age of more than thirty thousand years for the entire site. If true, it meant that Graciela was double the age of the cave paintings at Lascaux. More than six times the age of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

She kept her reconstruction under wraps, not yet willing to share the señora’s emerging form with the rest of the lab. As soon as she let Graciela go, the others would start in on their ceaseless tests—isotope ratios, a quest for mitochondrial DNA, and on and on.
To stave them off, when anyone asked, Ellen waffled and cloaked herself in a barrage of poorly enunciated Spanish. They expected as much from her.

If it was you, she thought, you would do the same thing. 
It was still too soon to share her findings. She had so little in her life. The divorce was final. Her family and friends were four thousand miles away. If nothing else, she was grateful for the company of the woman in the briefcase.