Трудности перевода

I had been trying to avoid thinking about the apparition in my room, but the more I tried, the more the knot of dread, the one that hadn’t quite untied itself since last night, kinked and twisted in my chest. “Do you have any idea who it might be, or how he died?” I asked.
“Unless there’s damage to the bones,” answered Dr. Douglas, “it’s impossible to tell the cause of death. And after so long in the ground, it’s very difficult to tell at what point the damage occurred.”
“The poor guy had a bulldozer driven over him,” said Mark.
Dr. Douglas shook her head in sad disapproval. “Such a shame.”
Ben gave a suffering sigh, as if he’d heard this before. “It isn’t as if we knew he was there.”
“That’s true,” said the professor, though she still sounded like a disappointed parent. “It couldn’t be helped, I suppose.”
Mark, better at staying on the subject, told me, “Back at school we’ll analyze those shreds of cloth we found, find out what kind of fabric it was. That might give us some clues.”
“Can you tell from the skull if he was Anglo or Hispanic or Native American?” asked Phin, and I wondered what she was thinking.