'Four Without Graves'

"'Four Without Graves'? What is that all about?" you wonder out loud.

There is fire in Claudia's eyes. "I don't think anyone knows. Sounds as if the anthropologists were quite anxious to get clues from Perdita's diary. But it wasn't ready until just now."

"What did happen to the 'Four Without Graves,' do you think?"

She pulls at her lip. "Could have been many things. Heavy metal poisoning, for one. Another lost expedition, Franklin's in 1845, may have been doomed by lead contamination of their tinned food."

"What else?"

"Disease, of course," she goes on. "Not a 'normal' one, like scurvy or yellow fever. It sounds like it was something much more fearful. Like smallpox. Or the plague."

She thinks a moment more, then shrugs. "That's all I can come up with at the moment."

"Hmmm," you say. "We need to find out more."

An Access Excellence Science Mystery sponsored by Genentech, Inc.
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