White River Burning

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Dave Gurney stood at the sink in his big farmhouse kitchen, holding one of Madeleine’s strainers. He was carefully emptying into it what appeared to be several dirt-encrusted brown pebbles from a very old tinted-glass jar.

As he washed away the soil, he could see that the pebbles were smaller, lighter in color, and more uniform than they’d first appeared to be. He laid a paper towel on the sink-island countertop and eased the contents of the strainer onto it. With another paper towel he carefully patted the pebbles dry, then carried them along with the glass jar from the kitchen to his desk in the den and placed them next to his laptop and large magnifying glass. He started the computer and opened the document he’d created with the archaeological graphics program he’d acquired a month earlier—shortly after discovering the remnants of an old laid-stone cellar in the cherry copse above the pond. What he’d found in his examination of the site so far led him to believe that the cellar may have served as the foundation of a late-seventeenth- or early-eighteenth-century structure—perhaps the home of a settler in what then would have been a wild frontier area.

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