I won’t miss that.
When he looked around for his teammates, he was reminded that even a simple task like that was now twice as hard as it had once been, but he resisted the temptation to activate the implant. The headache had finally let go, and he was in no hurry to bring it back.
He spied Rook, fast asleep on another cot. Queen had somehow managed to squeeze onto it as well, sitting in the hollow of Rook’s fetal curl, doing a Sudoku puzzle. Asya and King sat together on the deck, cleaning their weapons and conversing quietly.
“Where’s Bish?”
Even as he said it, he realized his mistake. Asya and King glanced up, and he knew they had heard him, but he waved a dismissive hand. “I mean, what’s up? Where are we?”
“Just left a little airstrip outside Mexico City,” King said. “We dropped off our passenger. And the bodies. It’s Mexico’s ball now.”
“For all the good that will do.” Mano’s arrest probably wouldn’t make much difference in the ongoing conflict. The cartels had almost as much power as the government, and their money had a lot of influence inside it. Knight however wasn’t as interested in the politics of the drug war as he was in hitting the ‘delete’ key on his comment about Bishop.
It had been a stupid slip-up. This was their first field assignment since the Congo, and even though he had come to terms with Erik Somers’s death, being in the familiar environment of Crescent’s cargo bay had transported him back in time, if only for a moment.
It was the nature of their business that people died. ‘There are old soldiers and there are bold soldiers,’ so the saying went, ‘but there are no old, bold soldiers.’
They didn’t come any bolder than Erik Somers. He had proved that with his final sacrifice.
And while Knight had initially refused to accept that his teammate was actually dead—his body had not been recovered—it was only because Erik had always seemed invincible. That belief, which he had held onto for several weeks, long after they buried an empty coffin in a cemetery outside the town where Erik had grown up, was not just Knight stuck in the denial stage of the grief process.
King regarded him for a moment. “I think this time might be different. What we saw tonight… That fighting cage, the bodies, those… What did Rook call them? ‘Hell pigs?’ That’s the kind of evil that wakes people up.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“Me, too. You sure you’re okay?”
“Of course.” Knight said, and then wondered why he had lied.
8
Manns Harbor, North Carolina
Jason Harris swerved into the outside lane and then whipped the Ford Escape into a parking lot. Ellen Dare, in the passenger seat, looked up from the papers on her lap. “Careful, Jason. These hick town cops can turn a traffic ticket into the Midnight Express.”
Jason looked at her sideways even as he slowed the Ford to a crawl. “Hick town? That’s no way to talk about your peeps.”
“Peeps?” Ellen arched an eyebrow, then shook her head in disgust. “Just because my ancestors once lived here, does not make the people my ‘peeps.’ And nobody talks like that anymore. You’re a graduate student now, Jason. Grow up.”
The frizzy blonde head and self-described ‘pleasantly plump’ upper body of Haley Stephens leaned through the gap between the two seats. “What’s Midnight Express?”
My graduate student thinks he’s in a nineties boy band, and my videographer knows nothing about film history. We’re off to a great start.
“Never mind,” Ellen turned her gaze forward just as Jason steered into the drive-thru lane of a fast food restaurant. “Mr. Pig? Really, Jason? It’s only nine-thirty. Find a Starbuck’s, for God’s sake.”
“These guys have the most incredible chorizo breakfast burrito.”
“Chorizo?” Haley made no effort to hide her disgust. “Do you know what goes into that stuff?”
“As a matter of fact, I do. Which is more than anyone can say for Chicken McNuggets.”
Ellen tuned out the conversation. The fare at the fast food chain wasn’t her idea of a balanced breakfast, but there would be coffee and probably some kind of variation on hash browns, and that would be enough to get her day started. Today, at least. If they were going to spend the next two weeks on Roanoke Island, she would have to come up with a better plan.
The one thing she was sure of was that she wouldn’t have time to prepare meals. She had just ten days to find the evidence that would support her theory about the fate of the so-called Lost Colony. It wouldn’t have to be much. A button from a coat, a tool, a bone… What, wasn’t as important as where. Context was everything.
The mystery of the Lost Colony was largely a fiction, romantic folklore designed to add an aura of drama to the historical record. Mystery was what brought the tourists around. The reality, which had been amply demonstrated by forensic science and extensive historic research, was far duller. The Roanoke Colony, after enduring a series of compounding misfortunes, had left the island and been assimilated by one or more Native American groups in the region. Much of what people believed about the Lost Colony was simply wrong, the result of embellishments made for dramatic effect or confusion with completely fictitious ghost stories.
It was popularly believed for example, that when John White returned to the colony three years after leaving it, he found houses put in order, tools stored and tables set with plates of uneaten food, as if the entire colony had been teleported away in an instant while sitting down to dinner. In truth, there were no houses, no tables, no tools. The houses had been disassembled and completely removed. Archaeologists had found no evidence to support the idea that the houses had been burned or attacked by hostile natives, which meant that the colonists themselves had torn down the settlement and carried everything to a new location.
Yet, when the fanciful elements were peeled away, there remained a compelling mystery and an untold story—a true story—that Ellen wanted the world to know, the story of her ancestor: Eleanor Dare.
Although she had refuted Jason’s suggestion otherwise, Ellen felt a strong connection to the Outer Banks. She had been to the site of the Lost Colony three times previously, and while she—a die-hard urbanite—got along with the residents of the remote island towns about as well as oil got along with water, whenever she visited the old site, she felt like it was a homecoming.
Although more than four centuries had passed, Roanoke Island still remembered the colonists, and in particular, Virginia Dare, the first child born of European parents in what would one day become the United States. The county was named for her. The five-mile four-lane span that now bore them across the Croatan Sound was called the Virginia Dare Memorial Bridge. Yet, aside from that bit of historical trivia, nothing else was known about Virginia Dare, or the fate that had befallen her and her parents. Nothing that could be conclusively proved, at least. That was something Ellen hoped to change.
She had always loved history, particularly that moment in time where the cultures of the Old and New Worlds collided, for she was a product of that collision. Although there was no formal evidence of her mixed heritage, her red-blonde hair and fair skin, as well as family and tribal tradition, were testimony enough to the fact that, at some point in the history of the Native American people who now called themselves the Saponi Nation, there had been an introduction of European DNA. Many believed the source of that infusion was the missing colonists of Roanoke. Ellen had taken that hypothesis one step further.
She took a sip from her coffee, then set it in the cup holder and shuffled through the sheaf of papers until she found the photographs. The images were burned into her memory, but looking at them was like a form of meditation. The pictures were of a quartz block that had been discovered in 1937 in the woods near Edenton, North Carolina, sixty miles northwest of Roanoke. Her fingers touched the letters and numbers, as if feeling their texture, and she murmured the message displayed there:
Ananias Dare & Virginia went hence vnto heaven 1
591.
Anye Englishman Shew John White Govr Via.
“Ananias Dare and Virginia Dare went hence into heaven, 1591. Any Englishman, show John White, Governor of Virginia.”
She slid the photograph aside to reveal the second, which showed the reverse side of the stone:
Father soone After yov goe for Englande we cam hither
onlie misarie & warretow yeare
Above halfe DeaDe ere tow yeere moore
from sickenes beine fovre & twentie
salvage with mesage of shipp vnto vs
smal space of time they affrite of revenge rann al awaye
wee bleeve yt nott you/ soone after ye salvages faine spirts angrie
suddiane mvrther al save seaven
mine childe ananias to slaine wth mvch misarie
bvrie al neere fovre myles easte this river vppon smal hil
names writ al ther on rocke
pvtt this ther alsoe
salvage shew this vnto yov & hither wee promise yov
to give greate plentie presents E W D
She had read the message so many times that she no longer struggled with the unusual language and spelling.
EWD stood for Eleanor White Dare, the daughter of John White, the governor of Virginia Colony, who had returned to England in a futile effort to resupply the Roanoke colonists. The quartz block became known as the Dare Stone, and over the course of the next few years, several more stones were found. Forty-eight in all, each purporting to be a record of the events that followed the abandonment of the Roanoke colony. Soon, the inconsistencies in the language and the narrative provided by the stones led to an investigation. It exposed the Dare Stones as a hoax, perpetrated by one or more stone-cutters with a penchant for dealing in forged Native American artifacts. But a few scholars maintained that the first stone was authentic. Ellen’s own research supported this position, and if the record contained on that stone was true, if those truly were the words of Eleanor Dare, then the solution to one of America’s oldest murder mysteries was within her reach.
According to Eleanor Dare, only twenty-four of the colonists had survived the first year at Roanoke, a survival rate of just twenty percent. Exactly what had happened thereafter was not clear, but the fact of the Dare Stone’s existence and the location where it had been discovered suggested that the survivors had attempted to find refuge among the natives where they lived, evidently without incident for another three years. Then, a misunderstanding with their native hosts led to the massacre of all but seven. Eleanor Dare survived, but her husband and daughter did not.
The Dare Stone—the first, authentic Dare Stone—was the foundation upon which Ellen had built both her professional career and her sense of who she was. As she developed and refined her hypothesis about the fate of the colonists, she began to see how the story of Eleanor Dare was the beginning of her own story.
“Here we are,” Jason announced, as he pulled into the parking lot of the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site.
“Nobody move,” Haley trilled, hastening to disentangle herself from the back seat. A moment later, she was standing in front of the Escape, video-camera in hand, motioning for them to get out.
Ellen gathered her papers and ordered her thoughts before opening her door. Once outside, she spoke to the camera. “We’re here at the Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, the location of the Lost Colony. Archaeologists have been looking for evidence of what happened to the colonists for decades and come up empty-handed. That’s good news for us, because it means we know where not to look.” She paused, staring into the camera for a moment, then said, “How was that?”
“Good enough for now,” Haley said, not lowering the camera. “We can reshoot if we come up with a better hook.”
Ellen nodded. “Jason, get the equipment.”
With Haley filming every moment, they made their way out of the parking lot and into the woods to the west. Ellen held up the GPS receiver for the camera. “Many people have wondered how the Lost Colony could have vanished so completely. This has led some scholars to conclude that the colonists packed up and took everything when they left, presumably to live with the Croatan Indians on Hatteras Island. But if the message in the Dare Stone is authentic, then nearly one hundred of the colonists perished in that first year, before the survivors left. Their remains are here.” She made a sweeping gesture. “Somewhere. Somewhere nobody has thought to look.
“It has always been accepted that the area where we are now standing is the site of the Lost Colony, but from the time that it was abandoned until the nineteenth century, the island was mostly uninhabited. After John White’s return in 1591, the next time the Lost Colony appears in the historic record is in 1709, when explorer John Lawson visited what he believed to be the ruins of the colony. The location has been fixed ever since. But what if the fort Lawson visited was not the site of the Lost Colony?
“According to John White, the original fort first occupied by Richard Grenville’s expedition and later by the Roanoke Colony was situated on the north shore of the island. But the shoreline of the Outer Banks islands changes dramatically every year. A comparison of the coastline between 1851 and 1970 showed that over nine hundred feet of coastline were lost to erosion. That means there’s a very good chance that the original site of the colony could have washed away long before Lawson’s visit. Unless, of course, Lawson was looking in the wrong place.”
A gesture from Haley stopped her before she could go on. “We’re gonna do all this background stuff in post, remember?”
Ellen gave a guilty nod. “I’m a history teacher. Lecturing is what I do.”
“Well, today you’re digging. That’s what we want to get on camera.”
The GPS chirped, announcing that they had arrived at their destination. Ellen glanced at it, then showed it to the camera. “We’ve arrived. If I’m right, this is the graveyard of the Roanoke Colony, where all but twenty-four of the settlers were laid to rest. We’ve been given permission to make several exploratory excavations. If we can find anything to support my theory, we’ll return next year…”
She broke off when she spied Haley making a ‘get on with it’ gesture.
Jason dropped the bundle he was carrying, a collection of small folding shovels and garden trowels, which they would be using like surgeons’ scalpels to slowly peel back the layers of soil, which, Ellen hoped, concealed the last resting place of the Roanoke colonists. “Is it just me,” he mumbled, “or does having that camera watching your every move make this feel like the start of The Blair Witch Project?”
“Don’t you forget it, sweetheart,” Haley replied playfully. “The camera sees all, every time you scratch your ass or pick your nose.”
Ellen ignored their banter and started placing survey markers at specific intervals to mark the area where they would be digging.
Her hypothesis turned on the idea that the colonists would have buried their dead far from the settlement, and well away from the constantly moving shoreline. Given their limited resources, it was unlikely that the survivors would have made any kind of permanent grave markers, and wooden crosses would have long since decayed away to nothing. She had settled on this location as the most likely site of the cemetery, but there were more than a dozen other possible locations they would be checking out over the next two weeks. None of them had been excavated by archaeologists working for the US Forest Service. Ellen did not dare hope that they would get lucky on the first try. There was every chance that nothing remained to be found at all. The bones might have dissolved in the soil, or she might have been wrong in her assumption that the cemetery had been located away from the eroding shoreline. But if they did find something, some piece of evidence to confirm that at least some of the colonists had died and been buried here, it would be the first step toward proving that the Dare Stone was a real and accurate record of Eleanor Dare’s life. And if it was, then she would be one step closer to proving that she herself was the woman’s direct descendant.
> There was no doubt in Ellen’s mind that she had some of the blood of the Lost Colony in her, but making the case for Dare ancestry hinged on the numbers. According to the stone, Eleanor Dare was one of only seven colonists to survive the massacre in 1591. That meant there was a roughly one-in-seven chance that Ellen’s family line traced back to Eleanor Dare herself.
It was impossible to resist the urge to fantasize about what might have happened. Had Eleanor conceived a second child with her husband in the intervening years? Had a native warrior taken her for his own wife after the death of Ananias?
One thing at a time, she told herself. First, I have to prove the Dare Stone authentic. Then I can begin looking for the graves of Ananias and Virginia. Once she located the remains of Virginia Dare, DNA testing would provide solid evidence that ‘Dare’ was not merely an appellation she had chosen and changed legally eight years earlier, but her true family name. The Dare Stone provided ample clues to narrow the search, but she would need a lot more in the way of resources to begin that quest in earnest. That was why it was so important to hit a home run with this expedition.
The shovels made a harsh rasping noise as she and Jason began digging. At first, she jumped excitedly every time the metal blade hit something harder than the sandy island soil, but after uncovering numerous roots and rocks, she tempered her enthusiasm and fell into an automatic routine. She dug until she reached bedrock, and then she climbed out of the hole, filled it in and moved to the next marker. After a few hours, she was so unplugged from herself that it took a moment for her to register Jason’s excited shouts. When she finally did, all of her earlier enthusiasm returned in a rush.
Cannibal Page 6
