She pulled a face he couldn’t read as she reached for her crumpled packet of cigarettes and eased out another.
‘We’ll not be up here all that time, either. Just today, and maybe come back for another day in a week or two. We’ll let Rose get all the footage she wants, and I’ll try and see if I can unearth any personal effects-’
Grace looked at him sharply.
‘Gently, ever so carefully,’ he said, throwing his hands up in surrender.
‘I don’t want you pulling this place apart,’ she said sternly.
Julian put on his best pleading, beseeching face — a family dog begging beside a laden dinner table.
‘All right,’ she said gruffly as she lit up. ‘You got two weeks.’
CHAPTER 4
Friday
Sierra Nevada Mountains, California
During the morning Rose diligently filmed the site from all angles. She had Julian doing a variety of walk-through shots. She set up the camera in the clearing, filming him and Grace emerging from the tree line and pretending to act surprised at their discovery.
Julian was impressed by how dutifully compliant Grace was. A stern-faced schoolmarmish lady who didn’t seem the type to suffer this kind of foolishness gladly, she generously played along. By mid-morning Rose felt she had enough in the can and started taking high-resolution close-up shots of some of the exposed remains.
As they explored the site, delicately wiping away the veil of moss and peat, it was becoming clear that there was a lot hidden beneath; timbers that had once upon a time made up wagons had not fared well; now rotten, black and jagged like decayed teeth. However, nestling amongst these fragile skeletons of wood, they were beginning to discover a multitude of personal effects that had been preserved surprisingly well.
In the last hour Julian had unearthed a stash of ceramic items — crockery, much of it still in one piece, stored as it was in barrels of cornmeal. They found the rusted metal remains of a long-barrelled musket, which Grace called a Kentucky rifle, and the remnants of several wooden tool boxes, one complete with a suite of carpentry tools, their metal blades dull with corrosion.