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right?" She studied the drawing
of the person Cody purported to be The Man himself.
    "Nope," he said, raising a single finger as
if to punctuate his point. "It was him, alright."
    "How did God get into your room, Cody?"
    "Well," he said, relaxing his crayon hand,
and resting it on the table. He looked skyward, considering his
reply. "He just appeared."
    "You mean it was like he just appeared in
the doorway and walked right in, don't you?"
    "Nope. I mean he just appeared. He was just
there, in the middle of the room, and then he wasn't. And then
Daddy got mad."
    Trisha frowned. "Why did Daddy get mad,
Cody?"
    "Well," Cody said, taking a deep breath
before continuing, "when he left, he left my room in a terrible
mess."
    Trisha frowned again. God, it seemed, was
alive and well. According to Cody, he looked like Dumbledore in the
movie renditions of Harry Potter , and visited little boys in
the middle of the night to trash their rooms. Trisha stopped
talking long enough to finish her flower. She put down the green
crayon and chose a brown one instead with which she drew a small
circle—the body of a smiling spider with buck-teeth and oversized,
leather work boots.
    "Cody," Trisha said, pausing long enough to
bite her lower lip, "why did God come to visit you?"
    "I don't know," he said, continuing to
colour as he spoke. "I think he was lost." Cody looked up at Trisha
as if to gauge her reaction to this last statement.
    "Why do you think that, Sweetie?"
    "Well, he just stood there, looking around.
He looked at me and then at my room and then he just left."
    "How did he leave, Cody?"
    "He just left. And he messed my room up
good." His face lit up as he spoke, arms flailing wildly for
emphasis. "It was awesome! Poof! And he was gone! It was cool."
     
     

In
Situ
    I absolutely love doing archaeological
research. On a site, there's just me, the soil, and the occasional
artifact—it's paradise. There are no daydreaming students asking
for clarification, no one trying to nickel and dime me for an extra
mark or two on their assignments, no whining because I refuse to
arrange for make-up lab time, just the sun and the dirt and my
trowel. In the case of historical research, the beauty is in the
century-plus written word. Volumes and volumes of lists of deed
owners, title transfers and mortgage liens; maps and census records
and tax assessment roles; microfiche and dusty, yellowed,
hand-written ledgers; for me, there's something desirable about it,
personal, sexy.
    Although I generally jump at the
opportunity—any opportunity—to visit the archives, I never intended
to do any sort of research for Stanley Hume. I never do anything
for which I could get paid, for free. Besides which, my time comes
at a premium and there's very little of it to spare. There are
always lectures to compose, papers to grade, labs to run...Any day
I leave campus by six is a good day. It's a bonus if Palmer comes
with. Even so, unless you're a reality TV junkie (which I'm not),
there's not much else to do but boot up the computer and do some
work. Most nights I barely have time to eat or shower, so there's
no way I was going to spend some of my precious free time doing
research for a total stranger on a collection of artifacts that
would almost certainly turn out to be a fraud. I had fully planned
to hold on to the box for a while, maybe a couple of weeks or so,
and then contact Stanley, make arrangements to drop off the
artifacts and tell him I had found nothing.
    But then the phone calls started to come,
and that damned tin box sat on my desk mocking me every time I sat
down, daring me to open it. Four lousy artifacts: a token, a photo,
a silver case and a small, metallic object—I don't know why the
collection intrigued me as much as it did. If Stanley had truly
excavated the box in his backyard, there had to be a logical
explanation for how these disparate artifacts found their way into
a box buried around the middle of the century. The trouble was,