One

The boy looks at the archaeologist.

The archaeologist looks at the boy sometimes, too. But he has work to do, and limited money and limited time on the island.

It is hard to get funding for this kind of dig, small and obscure, and the travel expenses alone have eaten a big chunk out of his budget. It has cost him a fortune to get his team up here, though he has to admit he is actually embarrassed by how little they’re charging him at the Wardhouse—the island’s only guest house.

His team consists of three young graduates; again because they are cheap. Happily he can also say, hand on heart, that they are all three promising diggers. There’s Nancy, an American he’s known since she was an undergraduate; Isabella, a German girl, from Leipzig, and finally there’s Mat, he’s not from the island itself, but from the mainland, about a hundred miles south along the coast. In this remote part of the country, where distances are vast, that almost makes him a local.

*   *   *

But there’s something about the boy that keeps taking Edward’s attention away. Every day, the boy comes to the dig, and stands on a low bump, one of many in this corner of the meadow, to get a good view of their work. Every day, around noon, a woman’s voice calls to him from behind a nearby garden hedge, and he disappears, presumably for lunch. Half an hour later he reappears, takes up his spot on the mound, and spends the rest of the day watching.

He must be about sixteen Edward supposes, but he’s big and strong, like a man twice that age. Edward suspects there is something wrong with him. He never speaks, though his lips are slightly parted much of the time, as if he is about to.

In his hands, like a small child, he is always, always, holding a soft toy. It is a brown hare. He holds it by its long ears, so that it droops from his big palm, dangling as if crucified.