Relics

by Mary Anna Evans

  Lesson 2: Even if you could afford to dig the entire site down to bedrock, the site’s inhabitants would be most unhappy if you did.

  Lesson 3: Because of these constraints, you’re bound to miss something.

  Lesson 4: You’d really, really rather not miss a single thing so, in essence, you’re screwed before you start.

  Magda had emphasized repeatedly the importance of Phase I work—reviewing existing reports and maps and courthouse documents to glean site knowledge the cheap and easy way.

  Making sure her crew was trained to work properly and watching them backfill the unproductive holes they’d dug under Raleigh’s tutelage would keep them busy for a few days, while she located a better site. And she’d have to find time to wear out some shoe leather. There was no substitute for walking a potential site, but the Sujosa settlement was a big place. She’d have to choose carefully where she put her boots. The Lester’s Hill mound would be an interesting place to start.

  The sudden thrumming of raindrops on the tin roof over her head told her that she would not be walking anywhere that morning. She resisted the temptation to call Magda. This project was a chance for her to prove her professional worth, and she was going to succeed or fail on her own. Carmen’s death was a blow of the sort she could not have prepared for, but it was her choice whether to give up before she had started, or to carry on. She got out of bed and got dressed.

  After breakfast, she pulled the hood of her Army surplus rain gear far over her head to keep the November-cold drizzle off her face and slogged over to the church, where the archaeology crew met each morning to get their day’s assignments. Joe was waiting for her just inside the door, dressed in rain gear, but the three Sujosa men sitting on the back pew barely looked up when she entered. Faye recognized them from the photos in their personnel files. Jorge was an olive-complexioned redhead in his twenties. Fred was stout and middle-aged. Elliott had a narrow face like the head of an axe. Their sullen expressions clearly said that they expected to be given the day off due to inclement weather.

  “I’m sure we can find some work to do,” Faye offered, in a tone of voice that suggested she thought her crew was champing at the bit for some productive work. “To start, I want to check over the artifacts you’ve found so far. You probably haven’t had time to make sure they’re clean and properly labeled—”

  “They’re clean,” Jorge interrupted. “Cleaner than they need to be. Raleigh made sure of that. Go look in the shed.”

  So Raleigh had done a smidgen of crew training. That, at least, was good news. “Well, Jorge—” Faye said, taking care to give the name its proper Spanish pronunciation.

  “Not ‘Hor-hay,’” Jorge said. “It’s ‘Zhor-zhay,’ but if that’s too hard for you, why don’t you try just regular old ‘George.’ You never heard of the name ‘George’? George Washington, George Bush, George W, King George, George Wallace…It’s a name for a man that’s in charge. Presidents and governors and stuff.”

  For a half-second, Faye thought an incredulous “George Wallace?” was going to escape her lips. She settled for crisply dismissing Jorge’s rant.

  “Well, my name’s not George, but I’m in charge at the moment,” Faye said. “So let’s go to the shed. Rainy days give us a chance to make sure our equipment is clean and that the artifacts we find are well-organized. You have the key?”

  Elliott had the key and used it to open the door of the shed. From the looks of things, Raleigh hadn’t been big on enforcing the cleaning techniques that had irked Jorge. Faye found three rain parkas pasted to the floor with a thin layer of dried mud. She handed them to Jorge and said, “You wanna be in charge of something? You’re in charge of keeping our protective gear in order. Raincoats, safety glasses, rubber gloves—if I see somebody who’s not dressed for work, I’m gonna look at you and ask why.”

  Gesturing at the spades, trowels, and machetes tossed into the rear corner of the work shed, she told Elliott, “You will keep our excavating equipment in good shape and in order. If I need anything—a screen, a bucket, a roll of duct tape, and I do mean anything—I will look to you.”

  She looked at her crew. Jorge and Fred had donned the filthy parkas. Elliott wasn’t wearing his parka, apparently choosing to be cold and wet, but clean. Joe was standing three paces away from the others, as if to say he’d rather work alone than with such losers.

  “Now,” Faye said, “where have you stored the artifacts?” She stood in the shed and scanned the shelves for the acid-free cardboard storage boxes required by most government agencies.

  Elliott pulled a single ratty shoebox out of the corner of the shed, and handed it to her. She lifted the lid and, remembering Magda’s advice on keeping her temper, she twisted the corners of her mouth into a fake smile and took a few deliberate breaths. How could Raleigh have let this happen?

  She selected a glass Coca-Cola bottle from the jumble of junk in the box. Its outside surfaces were slick-smooth, so these guys had at least taken a stab at the necessary cleanup. But its neck was full of dried red clay, as if someone had jammed it, neck-first, into the ground, about thirty-five years before. She could have dated the bottle fairly precisely by the raised lettering on the curved sides of the green glass bottle, but she didn’t have to. Coke bottles of this design were older than Faye, but not by much. Poking at the bottle caps and aspirin bottles and spark plugs and broken plates thrown into the shoe box, she judged that the Coke bottle was the oldest thing they’d found in the month that they’d been on the job.

  As she picked through the box of trash, her mouth fell open. “Not a single solitary thing is labeled,” she barked in her crew’s general direction.

  “Aw, we know where we found it,” Fred said. “We dug up the trash pit behind Hanahan’s store and that’s what we found. That’s the only place where we found much of anything, so we just wrote ‘Hanahan’s’ on the box and let it go at that.”

  Faye prayed that she had now uncovered the full extent of this debacle, and that no other ugly surprises awaited her. “Okay, Joe and Fred are going to haul every solitary item out of the interior of this shed. They’re going to wipe the shelves down and mop the floor. Elliott, take the smaller equipment to the bunkhouse and wash every piece in the kitchen sink. Use soap, for heaven’s sake, and dry everything good before you bring it back here to the shed. Rest assured that I will be here to make sure that you store it neatly. And you—” she said, looking at Jorge, “I want you to take these plastic garbage cans to the church and put them under the porch roof out of the rain. Any equipment that’s too big to wash in a sink will get washed in those garbage cans. Joe will remind you how to properly clean your gear.”

  She pointed at the box. “This, gentlemen, is junk. It belongs in the dumpster behind Hanahan’s. We cannot forget to label any cultural materials we find and document them in our field notebooks. Not even the tiniest one. Nothing about this project is more important that that.”

  The men did not scuttle away to do their chores with the chastened expressions that Faye had hoped to see, but they did get the work done. By noon, the rain was gone, leaving behind it sunshine and a clammy breeze.

  Faye’s head prickled, and she would have sworn that she could feel every last suture holding the lips of her scalp wound together. The damp cold and her crew’s insolence had taken their toll, leaving Faye drained by lunchtime. She couldn’t help but wonder how she would manage to get through the rest of the day, and the day after that, and the day after that.

  ***

  After dismissing her crew for lunch, Faye fled the scene of their archaeological crimes. Tired or not, she needed to talk with Adam. She found him supervising the removal of debris from the carcass of the burned house, taking notes and talking to the photographer, who was documenting the process from every angle.

  Faye tried to catch his attention without bellowing. In the end, it was the photographer who tapped on Adam’s shoulder and pointed her out.

 
“Take a water break,” he told his team. “It’s cool out here today, but you’re working hard. You’ve gotta keep your fluids up.”

  He stepped away from what was left of the house, shaking ashes from his boots. “Are you back to watch again? The dog went home, so we’re putting on a pretty boring show today.”

  “No, I’m working today, but I’ve been thinking about the fire. I may have remembered something important.”

  “Like what?”

  She held up her shiny metal briefcase. “If I’d brought home a pile of work in this case, it would have still been in the house, wouldn’t it?”

  “Well, obviously, you didn’t, but yeah, there would be a lot left of that briefcase after a fire. We would have found it.”

  “But Carmen did bring her briefcase home, and it was like mine, only bigger. I didn’t see you find it yesterday.”

  Adam eyeballed the briefcase again. “You know, fighting fires is hands-on work. When you’ve got a house full of firefighters doing their jobs, things get kicked around.”

  “But you haven’t found it yet?”

  “No, and I think we would’ve found it by now, if it was anywhere in the house. But I promise I’ll look for it. Are you sure she brought it home? I hear she worked door-to-door, asking the Sujosa folks questions they wouldn’t answer. Maybe she left it at somebody’s house.”

  “I don’t think she brought it home. I know she brought it home. I saw her.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  Faye swallowed, hesitant to say something that might make her sound paranoid, but determined to make her point. “I know you think otherwise, but I don’t believe Carmen pulled that heater from the parlor into her own room, not after she told me she didn’t need it. I’m saying maybe somebody else did it for her. And if her briefcase is missing, then maybe that same somebody took it.”

  “You’re suggesting arson.”

  “I guess I am.”

  Adam sighed, but he refrained from calling her a paranoid nutcase, so Faye was encouraged. “Arson seems very unlikely in this case,” he said. “The house wasn’t insured, so Amanda-Lynne Lavelle suffered a total loss. I can’t think of any way that anybody at all could profit financially from the loss of this house. That leaves us with only a couple of other possibilities. Either somebody wanted revenge on Amanda-Lynne or they wanted to hurt somebody asleep in the house. Or else somebody had a fire fetish. And yet, according to you, once they got finished moving the kerosene heater and setting the fire, they took Dr. Martinez’s briefcase for a souvenir.”

  He had succinctly presented Faye’s own suspicions, but they sounded far-fetched coming out of someone else’s mouth. “If you don’t think the idea’s worth pursuing, never mind,” she said in what she hoped was a meek little voice, as she turned to walk away.

  “Go ahead and say it.”

  She looked back over her shoulder at him. “Say what?”

  “Say what you’re really thinking: ‘If you don’t think the idea’s worth pursuing, never mind—I’ll just pursue it myself.’”

  Faye studied his face until she was sure she saw good humor in his brown eyes. “You’re good. Do you read everybody that well?”

  “I’ve got five sisters. I can damn near read the mind of anybody with two X chromosomes.”

  “And here I am, just an only child. When it comes to psychic ability, you’ve got me completely outgunned. I guess you don’t want me to ask around the settlement to see if anybody’s got Carmen’s briefcase,” she said, brandishing her own silvery case.

  “Hell, no. Not even maybe. All right, I’ll check it out. And stick close to your friends if you truly believe someone dislikes you enough to set fire to the roof over your head.”

  “I’ve thought that several times since I got here.”

  “What else has happened?” he asked, again reading her with alarming accuracy. “Something that put you on your guard?”

  Faye hesitated, then shook her head. “Nothing as bad as the fire. Let’s just say I’m not convinced that the project team is really welcome here.”

  “I’m going to tell you something,” he said. “You’ll have to keep it to yourself, but I want you to understand that it’s not just male ego telling you to stay quiet and let me go around asking the questions. We found some footprints out back.” He jerked his head in the direction of the wooded area behind the burned house.

  The hair on the back of her neck rose. “Did the person walk from there to the house? Where did they go afterward?”

  “Can’t tell,” Adam said. “The slow rain that started on the night Carmen died was a big help in putting the fire out, but it played havoc with any physical evidence an arsonist might have left outside the house. The fire—and the firefighters—made a holy mess inside the house, but we’re used to that. We found prints that had been sheltered from the rain by some shade trees. They were made by boots that looked an awful lot like—those,“ he said, pointing at Faye’s feet.

  She looked at her feet as if she expected them to walk off and start another fire.

  “—Except your boots are about four sizes too small to be the ones I’m looking for.”

  “You got any guesses about who’s got those boots?”

  “Nope, but if you see me watching somebody’s feet, you’ll know why.”

  A silence opened between them, filled only by a question that Faye was too chicken to ask. She decided to edge up on it sidewise. “You said yesterday that you were going to the autopsy,” she began, then she paused, not knowing how to broach the issue that threatened to become a morbid preoccupation.

  “It was smoke inhalation. She didn’t suffer,” Adam said, further enhancing Faye’s opinion of his woman-reading skills. “A lot of times, house-fire victims wake up, realizing that something is wrong, and sit bolt upright in bed. They take one good breath of hot, toxic smoke, and it’s more or less over.”

  Faye elected not to press him on what he meant by “more or less.”

  “In Carmen’s case,” he went on, “I couldn’t say for sure that she ever woke up at all. If she did, you sure couldn’t tell it from her position in the bed.” He touched her gently on the elbow with the sturdy, dependable-looking hand of a fireman. “It could have happened to you. Instead, you kept yourself alive, and you saved Laurel, too. You said that Laurel’s screams woke you up. Why didn’t you hear Carmen call for help? Because Carmen was beyond your help. I know it’s hard to let go of the notion that you should have saved her, but it wasn’t possible.”

  “How easy would it be for you to let go of a notion like that? How soon could you forgive yourself?”

  “I was a firefighter for ten years before I got this job.”

  It wasn’t an answer to her question, but it was. Adam’s simple declarative sentence held the despairing echo of other voices consumed by years of fires that couldn’t be fought.

  Chapter Eleven

  Faye stood watching Fred, Elliott, Joe, and Jorge shovel soil like men who were serious about their work. She would have been happier if the soil had been traveling in the right direction—out of the excavation, rather than into it—but their work signified progress all the same.

  Before they had begun backfilling the unproductive holes they’d dug under Dr. Raleigh’s supervision, Faye had given them a refresher course on proper archaeological technique—the rudimentary knowledge Raleigh should have communicated before he let any of them near the excavation site. First, she’d demonstrated how to use the flat-bottomed trowel that would enable each of them to keep the walls of his unit absolutely vertical and the floor absolutely flat.

  “What’s a unit?” Fred had asked.

  “The hole you’re digging, dumbass,” Elliott had said in his own tactful way.

  She’d explained that they must clear away the soil in thin layers, each of them less than a centimeter thick.

  “How big is that?” from Elliott.

  “I don’t know, sma
rtass, but it looks like you don’t, either,” Fred said, enjoying his chance to retaliate.

  Faye asked them to hold out their pinkie fingers. Jorge held up his middle one, grinning, until he saw the look on Joe’s face. He quickly adjusted his hand to show the finger Faye had requested.

  “Your pinkie fingernail is a little more than a centimeter long. You will always check each layer you excavate with a ruler, but that fingernail is a handy rule-of-thumb—”

  “You mean rule-of-pinkie,” Elliott said, then doubled over with laughter, unable to resist his own wit.

  She’d shown them how to pull back the tarps protecting the backdirt, in preparation for refilling the mud-lined units. Precisely why Raleigh had tarps protecting the backdirt, but none keeping the units dry, she couldn’t say.

  They’d watched with interest for a few minutes while she sifted a few trowels full of soil through a screen, looking for tiny bits of residue like bones left from long-ago dinners. She’d hoped to discuss the flotation techniques that were so useful for separating lightweight things like seeds from the surrounding soil, but it was obvious that their limited attention spans had been exceeded, so she set them to work backfilling the old excavations. As they had fairly well destroyed any information the patch of ground might once have held, there wasn’t much more harm that they could do. By the time they’d put the site back the way they’d found it, Faye would have had several days to improve their field technique before they moved to the mound site and started doing some real archaeology.

  As the late afternoon sun dipped low, Fred looked at his watch, as if to remind Faye that it was nearly quitting time. She let him stew while she walked past each worker one more time, since that seemed a supervisor-like thing to do.

  As she stood watching Jorge, she noticed something that was too big in his pile of backdirt. If they’d used proper technique when they’d dug here in the first place, then the object would have been screened out of the soil. Whatever it was, she doubted it was pertinent to the goal of this dig, since it had come from a dump site that she believed to be less than seventy years old. Still, this was a teachable moment. She could show her crew how sizeable artifacts could be missed through sheer carelessness.