Vic left the building, carrying the remaining boxes with a stack of several document folders on top, while I studied the newspaper. "Did you find this in a case? I thought I'd picked clean and empty ones."

"Yes, it fell out. The paper seems to be pretty old." I tried to flatten the brittle front page and found the date in the upper right corner. "10th of October 1989, that's thirty-three years almost to the day."

She laughed and stowed her load in the back of the car. "From an archaeologist's point of view, I'd say it qualifies as modern trash. This must be a remnant of an old dig. They used newspapers to pad the finds back in the last century. Put it in the trunk. I'll throw it away."

"Can I keep it?" I had no intention of disposing of the paper. It had a connection to the Raven, and while it eluded me why the ghost bird followed me around, I would find out. This newspaper might hold an important clue.

Vic shrugged and climbed into the car. "Sure, suit yourself. Just make sure it doesn't contain any stray artefacts."

I shook out the paper and folded it, taking care not to tear it, before I sat down in the passenger's seat. Matt leaned over my shoulder from the backseat while I stowed it in my daypack. "Do you think it's important?"

"I don't know. But if there is a reason this fell in front of my feet, I will find it, believe me."

Vic drove us to the other end of town on the ring road. In a residential area with new apartment buildings west of the medieval centre, the construction site stood out from far by a tall crane and a yellow excavator. She passed the open area until she found a parking spot along the road and squeezed her car between two pickup trucks like an expert.

We climbed out, and Vic walked to the trunk, holding onto the handle but not opening it. "Listen, about what I told you yesterday, I think I overreacted. I mean, why should a ghost care to appear on an archaeological site, right?"

Matt and I exchanged glances. We both knew not everyone could see or feel supernatural beings, and some who did wouldn't acknowledge them. Vic might be one such case.

I put on a smile and kept my voice cheery. "Aside from a ghost, you promised us a tour of your excavation, so I hope you're still up for this."

"Sure, after I spooked you with my ghost stories, that's the least I can do." She opens the trunk, her former insecurity blown away. "You're lucky. Today, we will plan to remove the glass urn."

"Sounds promising." Matt picked up his duffel, and I retrieved the cases.

Vic checked our footwear. "Ah, the new boots. Perfect, we only have to fetch hard hats to pass the construction site, then."

We helped her carry the padding and cases to the provisional office placed in an overseas container. There, she moved a few selected items into a smaller box she took with her. Fitted with orange hard hats and bright orange safety vests, we followed her towards the far corner of the construction pit. The rain of the last days had left the ground soft and muddy, so I was glad we stuck to a boardwalk of long wooden planks that kept to the left of the heavy machinery. To the right, the excavator loaded gravelly earth into a waiting lorry. Vic headed towards a tent with an arched roof that reminded me of the growing tents used in nurseries.

Behind our guide's back, my partner switched on one of his portable ghost sensors. He sent me a conspiratorial wink and stowed it in the back pocket of his jeans.

Vic held the tent flap open for us. "We only are allowed another week to finish here, and this is the last sector of the dig before we have to clear up and leave."

The world we entered stood in stark contrast to the noise and mud of the construction site outside. A few steps led us down into a neat rectangular hole. It had almost the size of the tent, perhaps ten by twenty metres, and we were now surrounded on all four sides by straight earth profiles. The air smelled damp and earthy.

Vic followed a walking path laid out with more planks. "Please keep to the boards. We're about to prepare the surface for the final documentation. Don't want to have footprints on the photos, right, Béa?" She had to raise her voice to be heard over the droning of an industrial vacuum cleaner that a dark-skinned woman my age used to vacuum the earthen ground.

Béa looked up and grinned. "Much appreciated. Take care on the second plank there. It's wonky."

When I stepped onto the creaking plank, I understood why sturdy shoes were a must in this place.
A woman in the back looked up from her tablet. She was in her fifties and wore her salt-and-pepper hair in a bun fixed with a pencil. "Hey, everyone. Vic, I'm almost done with the corrections of the drawing and the description. Paul will be here any minute for the extrication."

Vic set down her box beside the boardwalk. "Thanks, Chiara. He called and asked me to fetch padding and cases. These are Matt and San, old friends. I hope you don't mind them peeking over our shoulders during the big moment."

Chiara laughed, saving her work. "Not me, but Paul was in a mood when he left."

"He'll come down—he always does. Besides, Matt and San are experts for all things ghost. So, if we suffer from a genuine haunting here, I'm sure they'll take care of that."

"That's wonderful." Chiara placed her tablet on a tripod-mounted table and addressed us with an eager smile. "The last few days, I thought I'd lost my mind. Béatrice can tell you a story."

The younger woman shut down the noisy vacuum cleaner. "I heard my name."

"I just said the weird apparitions were driving me crazy. Seems we have two ghost experts here." She nodded in our direction.

Béa stepped up. "Amazing. What do we have to do to get rid of the spectre?"

I had to suppress a laugh. These two didn't seem in doubt they had encountered a genuine ghost. "To know this, we first have to find out what kind of ghost or ghosts are hanging out here. Can you describe to us what happened?"

Chiara rubbed her temple. "It's hard to put the right words to it—perhaps the best comparison is like a permanent cold draft in the air despite being in a closed tent? And static electricity, as if we were waiting for a thunderstorm. And then, my drawing pen kept disappearing and turned up in the weirdest places."

Vic shrugged. "Perhaps we were all just stressed with the approaching deadline and everything."

The glance the other two exchanged told me there was more to it. But it was best to play this slow.

Matt seemed of the same opinion. "Alright, why don't you show us what you found, Vicky, and we'll see if we can trace a supernatural manifestation during the visit?"

"Sure, that's what you came for, I guess." Vic knelt beside a shallow, round pit and pointed out a square flask made from blueish glass. It measured perhaps twenty centimetres on each side and was filled with dark soil spotted with small white specks. "This is our spectacular baby. It's an urn, intact and filled with the remains of the funeral pyre. Here you can see the head of a terracotta figurine sticking out. And this will be the shard of an oil lamp. Those rings running around the top are a dead giveaway."

I crouched beside her to study the grave. The urn stood in the pit's middle and seemed good as new. "And this is about the same age as the sculpture we've seen in the museum?"

"It might be, or a few decades younger, around the mid-first century, is my best guess at the moment without seeing more details of the finds inside. We will try to date the pottery in the urn filling. The pit also contained material from the pyre. The Romans used to burn the grave gifts with their dead, so we will have to wash and reassemble all the shards first."

Matt leaned over my shoulder. "And what is the white stuff in the glass container?"

"This?" Vic pointed to a yellowish-white fragment in the dark soil. "It's burnt bone. If we're lucky, our anthropologist can tell us the gender of the buried person. If we find teeth, she can also determine the age."

I was fascinated. "How did you find this tomb? It must be hard not to miss them when the big construction machines are at work."

"Whom do you tell? Béa and I spent days monitoring the excavation work last spring, otherwise we would have missed it. This wasn't the only grave, but the best preserved. Each pit you see here contained another funeral."

Based on this information, I counted at least seven burial pits. "So, this is the ancient cemetery of the Roman town?"

"One of them. There were several around the city, one on each access road." The voice of the newcomer was male, and I turned around to greet him. So did Matt.

"Paul, nice to see you." My friend's words were friendly enough, but his face was pale. I wondered if this was just because of the light filtering through the tent.

"Matthieu. It's been a while." Tall, with dirty blonde hair reaching his shoulders, Paul radiated self-confidence. His grey eyes narrowed while he glanced from Matt to Vic. "What are they doing in here?"

The tension in the air became palpable, and for a second, my wrist tingled. Even Vic seemed to feel the concentrated negativity. "Matt and San offered to check for the weird manifestation we observed these last days."

"Weird manifestation?" His pale brows knitted in a deep frown. "Are you still into that supernatural stuff, Matt?"

Before my partner could answer, Béa stepped in. "Hey, just because you deny the ghost's existence, it doesn't mean that Chiara and I haven't seen it."

Paul ignored her and turned to study the grave out of squinted eyes. "Are you finally done with the basic documentation? I don't have all day to discuss the products of your wild imagination."

Chiara pretended to gag behind his back. "All finished, verified, and saved, Paul. You can proceed working your own magic."

"Right. Victorine, did you bring the padding material I asked for?" She pointed to the box, and he nodded before he sent her another dark glance. "Also, please tell your friends to leave now. This is a working place, and we don't have room for tourists and gawkers."

Anger spots burned red on Vic's cheeks. "I don't see where the problem is if they just watch what we do from the sideline. It's not that they'll stand in the way or break something."
"I don't work with onlookers. Period. And you know as well as I do we have to push this or we'll get into trouble with the landowners." He stooped to pick a roll of plastic wrap from Vic's box. "As the conservator in charge, this is my call."

"And as the archaeologist in charge, I say they can stay."

Paul stood, his arms crossed and his gaze fixed on Vic. I could almost see the daggers he was shooting from his superior height at her. "I always underlined a woman shouldn't be assigned a responsible position in such an enterprise."