Relics

by Mary Anna Evans

  Brent Harbison: Yes, but not everybody has the brains and the mechanical ability to give flying a try. That young man survived his adventure and lived long enough to father Jorge Knight’s grandfather. Jorge could run a home-repair business in his sleep. He deserves that chance, and so do all the Sujosa. It’s people like you who aren’t perceptive enough to want to give it to them.

  Chapter Twenty

  The Sujosa church was of a spare and unadorned design. Simple beams supported the vaulted roof, and clear windows let in dim moonlight that stained glass would have obscured. Pendant light fixtures that put Faye in mind of 1950s schoolrooms radiated brightness throughout the sanctuary, as if to make sure that God’s truth never languished, unseen, in an unlit corner. There were worse places to conduct a meeting of academics who were, as always, torn between their pursuit of pure truth and their need to build their reputations and their careers.

  Faye’s presentation of the lustered potsherd received a quiet response from her peers. They agreed that the sherd was aesthetically interesting, but even Faye had to admit that its historical value was questionable, at least until the laboratory put a date on it.

  Then Faye and Dr. Amory presented their interpretation of Miss Dovey’s song, with remarkable success, considering that they hadn’t rehearsed the presentation. Faye began by briefing the group on the transcript of Carmen’s work that had survived the fire, then Dr. Amory stepped in with his interpretation of the origin of the song and with a cogent explanation of what could be inferred from the dates of the two verses that had served as source material.

  “So, as you can see,” he concluded, “Miss Dovey’s songs and stories give us a direct connection between the Sujosa’s oral history and datable European texts. If our interpretation of the texts is correct, the Sujosa are descended from seamen who left England shortly after the reign of Henry VIII, in the mid-1500s. Oral tradition, buttressed by these texts, suggests that they kidnapped a group of dark-skinned women—maybe from the Mediterranean region or from Africa—whom they later came to love, perhaps even considering them their wives. So far, we have no information on how they came to Alabama.”

  Faye was gratified to see one or two of the support staff taking notes on Amory’s interpretation of the song’s text.

  “Interesting,” Raleigh said in a tone that dampened her gratification considerably. “Of course, a huge percentage of people of all races now living in North America have at least one ancestor who was living in England in the 1500s. And it’s a pretty good assumption that the Sujosa’s forebears didn’t leave for the Americas until sometime after 1492. So you’ve narrowed our time frame by, oh, fifty years or so.”

  Somehow, Raleigh had managed to make their exciting news—the first evidence connecting the Sujosa with their Old World roots—sound puny.

  “Good work,” he added, relegating his faint praise to an afterthought.

  “Now, Ms. Longchamp,” said Raleigh. His change in tone signaled a new topic for which he felt more enthusiasm, “there is the question of Dr. Martinez’s notes. She passed away five days ago. Her notes were not found among the papers in her office, so I had assumed that they perished with her. How is it possible that you failed to tell me that you had them?”

  Faye felt the edge of the pew bite into her thighs. Its hard seat pressed against her legs, effectively preventing her from sinking through the floor and away from the accusing eyes of Raleigh, who was finally right.

  There was no excuse for her failure to bring him Carmen’s notes.

  Her negligence made perfect sense when considered in the context in which Carmen had given them to her. Raleigh had belittled her choice to do in-depth interviews with Miss Dovey, so she’d arranged with Faye to look her notes over while she altered her work plan to suit him. Eventually, she would have incorporated all her work into her final report, but her raw notes were never meant for Raleigh’s eyes.

  But Carmen’s death had changed that. Raleigh had every right to expect Faye to help him gather any surviving remnants of data that his project had paid to gather, and she had simply forgotten to do it. There was only one possible response. She stood up and handed him the sheaf of papers in her lap and said, “You’re right. I’m sorry for my oversight.”

  Silence settled into the old church. Her coworkers sat quiet and still, like soldiers unwilling to peek out of their foxholes for fear of attracting enemy fire.

  In the silence of Faye’s defeat, Joe unfolded his lanky frame from the pew beside her and stood, his muscled arms relaxed at his sides.

  Raleigh glared at him, as if wondering what on earth a mere assistant might be able to add to the discussion.

  Joe waited a moment, then appeared to interpret Raleigh’s silence as permission to speak. “We haven’t been together like this since Carmen passed,” he said quietly. “Some of us knew her better than others, but we all liked her. She was friendly and generous, and she was too young to die. None of us knew Jimmie Lavelle, but he was too young to die, too. We would have done anything to help them, if we could. This seems like a good place to remember them.” He gestured at the old church’s hand-wrought beams. “Would anybody like to join me in a moment of silence?”

  The pews creaked as the project team rose as one to honor Joe’s request. Everyone present, except Joe, knew that his usurpation of Raleigh’s role was unforgivably presumptuous, but their quick response spoke their relief that this uneducated technician had done what needed doing.

  ***

  Faye went back to her office to call Magda after the meeting, despite the fact that a pregnant woman should be asleep at that hour. Magda sounded tired, but stronger; it was good to hear her voice. They talked for an hour about Faye’s work plan for the Lester excavation, and Magda’s enthusiasm shored up Faye’s flagging confidence. Focusing on science and nothing else cleared Faye’s mind until, finally, she thought she might be able to sleep. The bunkhouse lights were out when Faye walked home in the weak moonlight and climbed wearily onto the porch.

  She paused, one hand on the front doorknob, to wipe her boots on the welcome mat. The sound of the sisal mat rubbing against her rubber boot soles brushed loud against the evening’s cool silence. When Amory spoke, his whisper rising from the dark in the direction of the porch swing, she was as startled as if he’d hailed her with a full-voiced shout.

  “Faye. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Dr. Amory?”

  “Come sit with me. I have some interesting news.”

  Faye reflected that it had been a week for interesting news—none of it good. She made her way toward Amory’s silhouette and settled herself beside him on the swing.

  “I found the origin of the name ‘Carmo,’” he said with an excitement most people would have reserved for statements like, My rich uncle died and left me his 1953 Corvette.

  “It’s Portuguese. And you know what else?” he continued. The excitement in his voice escalated, as if he were preparing to tell her that his uncle’s Corvette had 30,000 original miles.

  “Portuguese?” Faye’s heartbeat quickened, reminding her that she, like Amory, was just geeky enough to prefer unraveling a knotty historical question to owning a low-mileage sportscar. “What else did you find out?”

  “You know how Jorge pronounces his name? He doesn’t pronounce it the Spanish way, ‘HOR-hay,’ even though he spells it like the Spanish do. But he doesn’t pronounce it like the English ‘George,’ either. His pronunciation is very distinct: ‘ZHOR-zhay.’”

  “And he’s very ticky about having people pronounce it right, too,” Faye said.

  “Guess who else pronounces ‘Jorge’ his way?”

  “The Portuguese.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  Faye did a little historical math. Moors from northern African had occupied the Iberian Peninsula, including Spain and Portugal, for more than seven hundred years before their final stronghold fell in 1492. Miss Dovey’s song and stories suggested tha
t British sailors had kidnapped a group of dark-skinned women about a half-century later. Could they have stolen Portuguese women who were descended from African Moors?

  She smiled at Amory, though she couldn’t be sure he could see that smile in the dark. “We can work with this,” she said. “We’ll have to get Bingham to check Jorge’s genealogy, to see how far back the name goes in his family.”

  “Trust me. I’ll sic him on this lead before he’s finished with his breakfast cereal.”

  “‘Sic’? Aren’t you from Massachusetts? I never heard a Bostonian use that particular colloquialism.”

  “Maybe I’ve been in Alabama too long.”

  ***

  Leaving Amory on the front porch to savor the results of his research, Faye groped her way through the bunkhouse. After four days’ residence, she was familiar enough with the floor plan to find the way to her bedroom and into her nightclothes without flipping on a light that might awaken Laurel. Sliding under the chilly bedcovers, she curled up into a tight ball.

  But sleep didn’t come easily. She couldn’t quit sifting through her questions about the two deaths. Shoving those questions aside, she found that her nervous anticipation of starting the Lester excavation, compounded by the damp cold slowly penetrating her bones, threatened to keep her up all night. Had she chosen the right site? Were her workers sufficiently trained to get the job done?

  Having exhausted the possibilities of her job worries, Faye’s mind looped back to the mysterious deaths. Was there a reason they hadn’t found Jimmie’s cell phone? Was Carmen’s death related to her professional work? What was to be done about the decision to keep the much-needed project money out of the pockets of the land-poor Sujosa? Was Carmen really part of that ill-conceived plan?

  Faye frowned at the ceiling. Years of living on a pittance had honed her financial skills to the point that she had an instinctive feel for balancing income and outgo. Now that she had a moment to think about it, she realized that something was seriously out of balance in the settlement. The signs of poverty were everywhere, but…some people seemed to be doing better than others, for no reason that was obvious to Faye. Her eyes widened in the dark. That was it!

  How had the Smileys been able to afford a new satellite dish? Leo worked at the limerock mine, where there had been a recent round of layoffs. She doubted he’d had a raise, and Ronya had said she made very little from her pottery. Yet they’d paid an upfront fee for the dish and assumed a monthly satellite service bill that would go on forever. And, she remembered, there was that pole barn, which hadn’t been there four years before.

  How had Jorge managed to buy that brand-new delivery van—when he already had a late-model pickup? And how could she explain Fred’s souped-up motorcycle? Even Jimmie—where had he gotten the cash to buy near-useless cell phones for himself and Irene, not to mention a “pretty decent telescope”? In teenager-speak, “pretty decent” meant top-of-the-line.

  The Sujosa’s income didn’t meet their outgo. Faye knew she was going to waste the rest of a night’s sleep trying to figure out where they were getting all that extra money.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Adam dropped a folder onto the red-checked table of the Alcaskaki Diner and slid into the seat opposite Faye. “You gonna tell me why you had to ask me for a copy of the very same interviews you gave me two days ago?”

  “Would you believe me if I told you I lost my copy?”

  “Nope.”

  “Okay,” sighed Faye. “I had to give it to Raleigh. I should have done so sooner, but I screwed up. Big time.”

  “I think with what’s been going on around here, not to mention the fact that you almost died in a fire, you’re entitled to a slip or two.”

  Faye glanced around the diner, bustling with Friday-morning breakfasters. “Maybe. Why don’t you tell Raleigh that? Listen, let’s order. This cold climate has fired up my appetite, and we don’t have that much time. Does this place serve quick?”

  Adam smiled and beckoned the waitress. Their “Rise-and-Shine Specials” arrived quickly.

  Faye had always believed that calories consumed in diners didn’t count, but she saw ample evidence around her, in the form of broad rears and rounded bellies jammed under dining tables, that those calories did indeed count. Ignoring the likelihood of added poundage, she tucked into her fried eggs and buttered grits.

  “Why aren’t you working? I thought you archaeologists were at it before the crack of dawn,” said Adam through a mouthful of cheese-scrambled eggs.

  “That’s fishermen,” said Faye. “Archaeologists need sunlight to work in.” She peered out the window at the gray sky. “Anyway, I’ll be back at the site by nine. Not that anyone will notice. With everything that’s happened, I can’t see that anybody will be doing much work today.”

  “I see Amanda-Lynne isn’t working here today,” said Adam. “I’ll admit I’m relieved.”

  “I know. It’s awful to see her. Everybody’s worried she’ll completely lose her grip on reality, but Jenny says she’s coping by making plans for Jimmie’s funeral.”

  “It’s going to be a tough winter for her,” said Adam. “Who knows when she’ll be able to work again, and how much can she make here anyway? You don’t rake in a lot of tips when the all-you-can-eat special goes for seven bucks. She’s got no other skills, and she’s lost her husband and now her son. I don’t know how she’ll get by.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” said Faye. “You know this community better than I do.” She ran her thumb over the chipped rim on her coffee cup. “How did Jimmie, who worked part-time in a municipal library, and whose mother waitresses part-time, afford to buy a pair of cell phones and a telescope? How did Jorge pay for that new delivery van? How did Ronya and Leo afford that very nice pole barn and the satellite dish?”

  Adam buttered his toast with care and deliberation. “When people don’t have a lot, Faye, it means a lot to them to have the big TV and the fancy car. They stretch every cent to get all the things that advertising companies tell them they need. It isn’t until the car blows a hose or they need a root canal that they see their mistake. I wish human nature was different, but that’s the way it is.”

  “Maybe,” said Faye, “but if that’s so, why doesn’t Miss Dovey have a convection oven with all the bells and whistles? Why are Elliott and Margie driving a thirty-year-old Ford and only dreaming about a satellite dish?”

  “What are you suggesting?” asked Adam.

  “That there are people in the settlement who have more money than they should have. That they’re hiding something. And whatever it is, it could be a motive for murder.”

  Adam ruminated a moment. “I talked to Jenny Hanahan, and I managed to bring up the subject of that pothole Joe mentioned. She lives by the bridge. She says Jorge always comes back late on Wednesday nights, and she always hears his truck bang through that pothole.”

  “Every Wednesday?” Faye’s eyes widened. “That’s got to be it, then.”

  “Not necessarily. It’s Jorge’s job to drive that truck, and every driver hates to run empty. It may be that somebody’s taking advantage of Jorge’s schedule to save on shipping for a legitimate product they’re selling.”

  “Like what?” asked Faye.

  “Well, Ronya Smiley has her flea market pottery sales. Maybe Jorge takes her stock out every week, so she won’t have to lug it around.”

  Faye shook her head. “What Ronya can get from her pottery doesn’t come close to explaining the amount of money I’m talking about.” She picked up her coffee cup. The chip in its brown rim inexplicably made her think of riches. Real money…Something the right person would pay a fortune for…

  “Well, I’ll check it out,” Adam said. “I suppose you’re suggesting that if Carmen found out this secret, she might have been murdered to keep her quiet.”

  Faye nodded wordlessly, still too deep in her own moment of revelation to speak.

 
; Adam, apparently not noticing that his breakfast partner had left the building, finished his coffee in silence, then nodded to the window. “There goes Brent Harbison. Looks like he’s working, anyway.”

  Faye roused herself to watch Brent’s red sports car crawl past the diner and disappear around a corner. “Did you know Brent didn’t like Carmen?”

  “Why, because it took her about two minutes to blow him off?” Adam joked.

  “No,” said Faye coolly.

  Adam’s freckled face reddened. “Then why?”

  “He said she didn’t care enough for the people she worked with. He accused her of only being interested in using them to further her own career and offering nothing in return. I believe the exact word he used for her was ‘parasite.’”

  “Parasite? Ouch.” He drained his coffee and looked around for the waitress. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

  “I thought it was just normal antagonism between two hard-charging professionals…until I read Carmen’s transcript of her interview with Brent. When he called her a parasite, he meant it.”

  The waitress brought the check and Adam rose. “Well, it’s a quarter to nine. You’re going to be late.”

  “I think the odds of my doing any useful archaeology today are exceedingly slim,” said Faye. She followed Adam out without telling him that she might have figured out what Jorge was hauling out of the settlement. More than that, she knew precisely what he was hauling back home in his nearly empty truck.

  Money didn’t weigh much.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Returning from Alcaskaki, Faye went first to the bunkhouse to look for Joe, but she had no luck. Laurel was missing, too, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to guess where Joe might be. He had picked a fine time to discover the pleasures of romance.

  Elliott was waiting for her at the excavation. Faye found it a pleasure to work with someone who was anxious to be on the time clock, but she didn’t have time to brief him on the full details of the new work plan. She just sent him off to the Lester site, telling him to carry on with the work they’d begun Wednesday and promising to join him as soon as she could.