“Don’t jinx yourself,” Shawn warned.
“Why do you want to find DNA?” Alex asked. “Do you have anything in particular in mind?”
Sana just shrugged. “I think it will be interesting and a challenge. It might be fun to see where she was from, genealogically speaking. The ossuary was found in Rome, but that doesn’t mean she was from Rome, or even Italy. In the first century AD, there was a lot of migration because of the Pax Romana. And it will be an interesting addition to the international mitochondrial database, having a first-century woman.”
“How are you going to do it?” Alex asked. “What procedure are you going to follow?”
“First I’ll try a tooth as a source,” Sana said. “If that doesn’t work, I’ll use bone marrow. Either way, it’s not a complicated process. It will involve a thorough cleaning of the outside of the tooth to remove any DNA contamination. Then I’ll cut into the crown of the tooth, pull out the dried pulp material from the pulp cavity, suspend it with detergent to break open the cells, treat it with proteases to eliminate the proteins, then extract the DNA. Once I have the DNA in solution, I’ll amplify it with a PCR, then quantify it, then sequence it. It’s as simple as that.”
“What’s your time frame?” Alex asked. “I’d be interested in a follow-up, if you wouldn’t mind.”
Sana glanced at Shawn, who gave an almost imperceptible nod of approval. “It depends to a degree on that first rate-limiting step. Whether there is intact mitochondrial DNA available. If there is, I should have it in a few days or up to a week. Some of the steps function best when they are allowed to percolate overnight.”
“Well,” Alex said, getting up from his chair and giving Sana’s back a pat, “I want to thank you all for including me. It’s been a terrific morning.” His eyes happened to catch the three ancient scrolls as he started toward the gowning room to take off the protective gear. He stopped and looked back at Shawn. “I’ve been so engrossed with this skeleton, I forgot to ask about the scrolls. What’s the plan with them?”
“To read them,” Shawn said, with a touch of jealousy at the man’s apparent informality with his wife. “But first I have to unroll them, which is going to be a task. They are, excuse the pun, drier than a bone, and quite fragile.”
“Are they made of papyrus?” Alex asked. He bent over and looked at each closely. He didn’t dare touch them.
“They are papyrus, yes,” Shawn said.
“Will they be easy to unroll?”
“I wish,” Shawn said. “It is going to be a painstaking process that has to be done millimeter by millimeter. They could disintegrate into thousands of tiny pieces, and on top of that, we have to be careful.”
Everyone laughed, even Shawn.
“What a pleasant fellow,” Sana said after Alex left, then to herself she added, “in comparison to my husband.”
“Oh, you noticed,” Shawn said mockingly out loud, then to himself added, “I know exactly what you are doing, and I am going to ignore it — I’m not going to get jealous. It’s not worth getting riled up, and I won’t give you the satisfaction.”
“All right, people!” Jack said suddenly, clapping his hands loudly to get everyone’s attention. “Let’s get to work! Let’s crank out what has to be done so you two can get under way. I’m going nuts about whether you’re going to make a positive identification of these bones. But let me warn you, if you continue to quarrel with each other, I’m out of here, and I’m off your dinner list, and if I’m off, then I believe James is off, meaning party over!”
For a moment Shawn and Sana glared at each other. After several minutes, Sana put her head back and laughed. “God, what a couple of children we are.”
“Speak for yourself!” Shawn snapped. He didn’t like the new Sana.
“I am. I think we are beginning to become too similar, like a dog and its master.”
Now it was Shawn’s turn to laugh. “So, which one is the dog?”
“That’s easy to tell, the way you’ve been barking lately,” Sana teased, still smiling. She turned to Jack. “He knows better than to invite people to dinner without discussing it with me first. If we’ve talked about it once, we’ve talked about it a dozen times.”
“You always have to have the last word,” Shawn snapped.
Jack stepped between the husband and wife and motioned as if he was calling for a time-out in a basketball game. “Stop!” he said. “Stop taunting each other. You guys are pathetic! Loosen up and let’s get to work.”
“I’m going to Home Depot,” Shawn said abruptly. “Jack, can you lend me a hand?”
“I might need a pair of pliers,” Sana said. “Let me see if one of the eye teeth comes out with ease.” She picked up the skull and pulled on the right eye tooth, which was in remarkably good shape. The tooth came out easily with a slight popping sound. “That was easy. Nope! I don’t need any pliers.”
“What do you need from Home Depot?” Jack asked.
“A bunch of plate-glass sheets,” Shawn said. “And a small sonic humidifier that I can jury-rig to direct a tiny puff of water vapor where I want it to go. I already have several pair of tongs like those used by philatelists in my backpack. Unrolling these scrolls is not going to be easy. The papyrus will flake, so I’ll need to protect it immediately under glass. For all I know, as I said to Alex, the papyri may all come apart in pieces and have to be put together like a jigsaw puzzle. I don’t know what to expect, to be completely truthful.”
“While you boys go to the Home Depot, I’m going to go into the laboratory and get going with my end of the project,” Sana said, brandishing the eye tooth. “The quicker I get it into a sonicator with the detergent, the quicker I can saw off the crown to get at the pulp.”
“What about tonight?” Jack asked. “Are you two going to behave? Is the dinner party still on or what?”
“Of course it is still on,” Sana said. “I hope our testiness with each other doesn’t make you feel too uncomfortable or unwelcome. We’ll promise to be good. I just don’t like it when Shawn doesn’t discuss the idea with me before he invites people over. It’s not that I don’t enjoy having people over, I do. I actually like to cook and rarely get the chance, so I’m going to enjoy tonight. In fact, as soon as I get my pulp extraction into the incubator to dry overnight, I’m out of here to shop and have some fun preparing what I hope you two and James will enjoy. It will be fun, provided Shawn and James behave.”
“Okay. You’ve put my mind at ease,” Jack said. “But, as far as my coming is concerned, I do need to check in with my wife to see if she minds. We have a new baby, and she’s doing the lion’s share of caregiving.”
“A new baby, how nice,” Sana said, without the excitement most young women would have expressed. Nor did she invite mother and baby. “Surely she won’t begrudge you an evening with your old college buddies.”
“It’s more complicated than you might think,” Jack explained, not wanting to be more specific.
“Well, we’ll understand if you can’t come,” Shawn said. “But we do hope you can. What we’ve found in the ossuary is incredible, and I’m going to enjoy riding His Excellency James.”
“Please don’t overdo it,” Jack said. “He’s really upset about this whole thing and its potential repercussions.”
“He should be,” Shawn said.
“I wouldn’t be so blithe,” Jack warned. “James is married to the Church. If nothing else, he is fearsomely loyal.”
Their mission to Home Depot accomplished, with what seemed like a ton of glass panes in a taxi’s trunk, Jack again tried to encourage Shawn to go easy on James that evening, reminding him that he had a long way to go before he could prove he’d discovered the bones of the Virgin Mary.