Findings

by Mary Anna Evans

  “Okay, now look at the big stuff. Has any of the furniture been moved? Besides that overturned desk chair?”

  She shook her head again, and he recorded her response.

  He asked her another question and she had to ask him to repeat it, because the meticulous preparations of the evidence technicians had distracted her. Lifting fingerprints and collecting loose hairs was painstaking work. Any clues they found would probably be fragile and fragmentary, and it would take expertise and intuition to make any sense of them. Not for the first time, Faye reflected that crime scene investigation wasn’t so very different from archaeology.

  “Faye,” the sheriff said again. “Are you listening? Maybe we should do this tomorrow. I hope I never have a night like the one you just spent.”

  She shook her head, trying to bring her focus back to the here-and-now. “Are you kidding? There’s nothing else left that I can do for Douglass. Or for Emma. If there are any clues here, we need to find them now, before the bastards get any further away. You do have people out there looking for them, don’t you?”

  Sheriff Mike gave her a look that asked, Do you truly think I’m an idiot?, and didn’t dignify her question with the answer. No one on his payroll would sleep tonight. The woods, swamp, and gulf were full of his people.

  He directed Faye’s attention back to the cluttered laboratory. “Okay. Look at the pattern of the stuff on the floor. Can you tell anything about what they were looking for?”

  She searched the floor, looking for patterns. That’s what science was…a search for patterns that explained something important. And what could be more important than the murder of a friend? She willed herself to see the pattern, but there was none. Only paper and debris and dirt and blood.

  If this were an archaeological dig, how would she approach it?

  Photographs. Lots of photographs. And sketches. When she dug into history, she was always acutely aware that she wasn’t just uncovering evidence of the past. She was destroying evidence, too. No power on earth could put dirt back in the ground and restore a site to its original condition. Everything had to be done right, the first time.

  When she dug, she needed to know the exact depth where each artifact had been found. A photograph of a precisely vertical slice through the ground gave her a permanent record of every soil horizon. In a sense, it also gave her a slice through time.

  This ransacked room presented a different problem. The debris wasn’t distributed vertically through soil; it was spread horizontally across the floor. The most useful photograph would come from directly above. A simple sheet of graph paper laid over that photo would give investigators a plot with the location of every last piece of trash.

  But how to get that photo?

  The sheriff’s voice intruded on her thoughts. “Faye?”

  She held up a hand, signaling that she needed just another minute to think. He knew her well, so he held his tongue.

  To get the whole floor into one photo would require chopping out the ceiling and the upstairs rooms, then mounting the camera in a helicopter. So that idea could be eliminated. The investigators would have to make do with a composite of several shots.

  Should they take the pictures from atop a high ladder? Possibly, but the drawbacks were serious. The legs of the ladder would obscure part of the floor. Also, dragging a ladder around the room would disturb the very crime scene being photographed.

  Scaffolding was the only answer. And the key to getting the job done was right in front of her, just above eye level.

  “Those windowsills will each support one end of a scaffold,” she said, her eyes on the windows, rather than on the sheriff. “For your photographer.”

  “Do what?” he began, then he caught her meaning. Four high windows were evenly spaced down the opposite wall. If his techs built supports where they sat, snug against the wall pierced by the staircase, then passed scaffolding through those windows, the crime scene would hardly be disturbed. At worst, they’d have to install a single support in the middle of each scaffold. And the benefit of having a perfect record of the location of all this…stuff…would be well worth that drawback.

  “You ever thought of going to the police academy? If I had you working for me, every two-bit criminal in the county might as well move on down the road. ‘Cause you and me would fill the jail with the sorry asses of every last one that stayed.”

  ***

  The scaffolding was in place, and the photographer was working diligently. Hours had passed, and Faye thought she saw dawn’s pink light seeping through the basement’s windows. Sheriff Mike was sitting on the bottom stair with a notebook computer balanced on his lap, and she was perched two steps up, so she could look over his shoulder at the first batch of photos.

  He used his pen as a pointer to gesture at the computer screen. “Maybe all this stuff came out of one box.” The pen drew a circle in the air over the lower right-hand cover of the screen. “Or maybe the stuff in…say…this area here came out of one box, because they were looking for something in particular…something they thought was stored in that box. Something that’s missing now. That’s the kind of pattern we’re looking for. Nobody would know those things but you.”

  The sheriff’s pen dropped to the clipboard balanced on the stair beside him. He scribbled on it like a man who knew that a computer was more efficient, yet preferred paper because it helped him think. His words echoed in Faye’s sleep-addled mind. “Maybe all this stuff came out of one box…”

  The sheriff’s incessant note-taking bothered her for some reason she couldn’t fathom. Didn’t her work require her to take whole books full of notes?

  This, finally, was the question that shifted her brain out of neutral. Yes, her job did require her to fill up one field notebook after another. Her eyes darted around the room. Where were the boxes that had held her field notebooks?

  “They took my field notes.” The sheriff kept taking copious notes of his own. “Why would they take my field notes?”

  The sheriff’s face was troubled. His wife, Dr. Magda Stockard-McKenzie, was an archaeologist and Faye’s mentor. He knew exactly what the loss of a boxful of field notes could mean—months of wasted work and the loss of irreplaceable information. “How much work did you lose, Faye?”

  Faye cracked a smile, the first one since her last conversation with Douglass. “I didn’t lose a second of work, because I always do everything Magda tells me to do. In a file box in my bedroom, I have photocopies of every last page of those notebooks. I used to be sloppy about that kind of thing, until one day when she hid my field notes. I thought I’d lost a whole semester’s work. A shock like that leaves a mark on a girl.”

  ***

  It hadn’t taken Joe long to pilot Faye’s boat out to Joyeuse Island and retrieve her notes. Faye had wanted to go herself, just because she thought the salt spray would clear her head, but the sheriff had made an excellent argument for her to stay right where she was.

  First, he’d said, “Stand here and look at the dirt and junk thrown all over that floor.” After she’d done that, he’d said, “Now come upstairs for a minute. I want a word with you in private.” Once out of earshot of the technicians, he asked, “Could that emerald have been part of a bigger piece of jewelry? A necklace or a bracelet or something?”

  “Absolutely. There’s really no way to know.”

  “And you say that it looked like just a clod of dirt before you cleaned it?”

  Light had dawned. “You need me to sit on those stairs and help you watch your staff, just in case one of them uncovers a priceless emerald.”

  “Yep. I’ve gotta be in and out of the room, talking on the radio to the folks I’ve got out on the water, looking for the killers and their boat. And I need to be in and out of the house, overseeing the technicians who are looking for evidence inside and outside. I’ve got Joe busy upstairs, pretending to keep Emma company while he watches out the windows for bad guys. There’s nobody else to
sit here and watch for emeralds. Besides, you know your lab. It needs to be you keeping an eye on things.”

  “Do you have doubts about any personnel in particular?”

  “Heck, no. But I’d hate to see a bunch of jewels get swept into a dustpan and thrown out the back door. Besides—my techs are real young. They’ve got bills, and they’ve got student loans to pay off. A pocket-sized fortune would be a powerful temptation.”

  “I’d better get back down there.”

  “Good idea.”

  So she’d spent hours watching the technicians work, and she was still sitting there when the sheriff told his staff to knock off work before they went to sleep on their feet.

  After they were gone, he settled himself heavily on the steps beside her, and Faye remembered that he was almost as old as Douglass had been. Time was wreaking havoc on her friends.

  “No emeralds, huh?”

  She shook her head. “Anybody find anything upstairs?”

  “Emma took me on a tour of their art collection. Nice stuff, too. It’s all where it should be. And her jewelry’s in the bedroom, right where she left it.”

  “What can I do to help you find the people who did this to Douglass? And to Emma. Every time they hit Douglass, they were battering Emma, too.”

  “Well, for starters, you can try not to get your own self killed. Stick close to Joe and don’t give any bad guys a chance to get close to you. That means you can’t go out looking for bad guys.”

  Faye rolled her eyes. “I’m not in the habit of doing that.”

  “But you could keep looking into the information that was published in that newspaper article. Especially that silver hip flask. You know—see if there’s anything else that would have attracted thieves or a killer. The emerald’s a long shot, since nobody knew about it but you and Douglass, but it wouldn’t hurt to keep checking that out. You’re gonna do it anyway.”

  She snorted, but couldn’t keep the smile back.

  Emma’s voice wafted down the stairs. “Faye. The morning’s gone and you still haven’t slept. I’ve made up a bed in the room next to mine. It’s time for you to take a nap.”

  Faye wanted to be in her own bed, so she began assembling an excuse, “Oh, Joe and I need to get home to—”

  Emma came far enough down the staircase to make eye contact…serious, motherly, no-nonsense eye contact. “I chased Joe into the guest room five minutes ago. He’s asleep. Don’t make me chase you into your room, too.”

  Not wanting to upset Emma, Faye did as she was told. As her eyes slid shut, she heard steps in the room next door as Emma walked from one end of the room to the other, paused at the window, then paced back. Sometimes, she paused in the middle of the room for no apparent reason. Or, rather, for a reason known only to her. Perhaps she was studying a carpet stain made when Douglass dropped a coffee cup. Or maybe she was surveying the king-sized bed where she would now be sleeping alone.

  After each pause, the deliberate steps began again, at the exact same tempo. This, Faye thought, is what it sounds like to be widowed.

  Chapter Four

  When Faye woke, the glow of late afternoon sun was seeping in her window, and the footsteps in the master bedroom had gone quiet. She would rather eat dirt than wake Emma. Leaving a note on the kitchen table, she slipped out the back door. Joe was on the beach, watching the waves crash. He must have taken his ponytail down when he went to bed, because loose near-black hair played around his face, stirred by the sea wind.

  “I want to go home,” she said. “I want it bad.”

  “Got anything to eat out there?”

  “Peanut butter and bread. I’m out of honey.”

  “How long since you ate that ham sandwich the sheriff’s folks brought out?”

  “Um…”

  “You gotta eat, Faye. You should take better care of yourself than that.”

  Joe reached into the leather bag he wore at his waist and pulled out a handful of jerky. Faye took it, even though she had no notion of what kind of meat Joe had seasoned and desiccated and stored for just such an occasion. It probably wasn’t beef jerky, since Joe didn’t go around shooting cows with his handmade arrows. More likely, it was preserved venison or squirrel or rabbit. Regardless of which animal gave its all for this snack, it was unquestionably tasty. Joe was a man of many gifts, and one of those gifts was a pronounced knack for cooking.

  He rummaged around some more and fetched out some dried blackberries. Like the jerky, they were chewy but good. Faye wondered if Joe’s magic bag held something from every level of the USDA’s food pyramid.

  “This’ll keep you on your feet until we go back inside,” Joe said, adding some pecans to the pile of sustenance on Faye’s palm. “I did want to let Miss Emma sleep, though.”

  “Me, too. She needs a few minutes when she can forget everything.”

  Joe stared at her as if she’d said something idiotic. Faye couldn’t remember ever being on the receiving end of such a look from Joe.

  “Sleep isn’t for forgetting. That’s when the dreams come. The healing dreams. Miss Emma needs to sleep so she can know that everything’s gonna be okay.”

  Suddenly, Faye knew how Joe felt, constantly being treated like a remedial student by everyone around him. Lord, she hoped she didn’t do that to him often. When it came to spiritual matters, Joe possessed the equivalent of a Ph.D. Why did she keep forgetting that?

  Maybe she needed to spend more time dreaming.

  ***

  Faye didn’t know how long she’d sat with her head on Joe’s shoulder, watching the sea birds dive for fish. Something made her look over her shoulder—maybe some of Joe’s intuitive ways were rubbing off on her—and she saw Emma above them, leaning against the deck railing and staring at the self-same birds. The older woman’s face was sleepy and unlined, as if a few hours’ healing sleep had washed away whole years.

  She and Joe hurried up the wooden steps leading to Emma’s vantage point.

  Faye reached out a hand and touched Emma’s shoulder. “How do you feel?”

  “Like I’m living in a brand new world that I don’t like much.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Faye blurted out. “I want to help you make the arrangements for…”

  Emma turned her eyes away from the endless water and focused them on Faye. “I’d like it very much if you’d go with me to the funeral home tomorrow morning. We’re having the funeral on Wednesday, and two days isn’t much time to plan.”

  “Planning a funeral is tough on anybody. I definitely think we should do it together,” Faye said.

  “Oh, it’ll be hard, but not the way you’re thinking. The funeral director’s going to try to sell me a package worthy of the richest man in Micco County. And I’ll be trying to follow the wishes of a man who told me to bury him in a pine box.”

  Faye saw an immediate problem. “I’m not sure they sell those any more. And I’m not sure how the health department feels about them.”

  “There’s plenty of room on Joyeuse Island—” Joe began.

  Faye interrupted him before he finished offering to bury Douglass himself, under a big live oak, without bothering with embalming or fancy hymns or a florist’s services. She knew that he was well-qualified to give the deceased a Creek-style sendoff, but the fact was that Douglass the Deacon would have wanted a Christian burial. And the health department was likely to be somewhat finicky about pesky details like embalming.

  “Joe,” Faye said, “I think you’re going to have to let us plan a traditional funeral.” Then she realized that her statement needed clarifying. “I’m talking about Douglass’ traditions, not Creek ones.”

  Joe nodded that he understood.

  “I think we two women can stand against a hard-sell funeral director,” Emma said. “We know what Douglass liked. He appreciated beautiful things and he was willing to spend his money on them, but he wouldn’t have parted with a nickel just to impress somebody. If we keep
our wits about us, nobody will be able to sell us anything we don’t want.”

  Thinking of hermetically sealed metal caskets lined in quilted satin, Faye found herself hoping that Joe would take care of her burial when the time came.

  ***

  Joe had a characteristic that was most useful in a colleague. He worked in silence.

  He’d been remarkably useful to Faye as she attacked a huge and unpleasant task, sorting through the debris that the burglars left behind. It was like excavating a grievously desecrated historical site, treasures mixed with garbage, then thrown willy-nilly everywhere.

  On Monday, once the technicians had finished their photography and their inch-by-inch survey of the crime scene, the sheriff had asked Faye to take the lead. Today, on her second day of sorting through the mess, Faye had found that she could close her eyes and still see scattered junk imprinted on her retinas.

  She’d grown to hate the sight of her lab, with its cheerful yellow walls and its dark history as a murder scene. Yet she couldn’t leave it. She couldn’t stand to see the artifacts that she’d so carefully excavated lying broken on the floor. She needed to make the place neat and orderly again, because there was no other way to set her broken world right.

  Joe’s skills at cataloging broken bits of flint were nothing short of amazing. As an experienced flintknapper, he could sift through a pile of rock chips and pluck out two pieces that had been broken from the same rock. In a sense, he was gathering up remnants of artifacts that the thieves had damaged and making them whole again. He’d done his darndest to find more emeralds, and so had Faye, but they’d had no luck, so far.

  She tried to reconstruct the thieves’ activities. They’d broken the front door and run straight downstairs. The muddy footprints on Emma’s elegant celery-green carpet made that perfectly clear. Why had they come down here, rather than ransack the house’s expensively furnished living quarters?

  A few possible answers came to mind. Perhaps Douglass was their only target, and they knew he was in the basement alone. But this begged the question of why they wanted him dead, and how they knew where he was, and why they took anything with them. For there was no question that the two boxes that had held her field notes were missing, and Emma had no doubt that she’d seen two men carrying boxes.