Findings

by Mary Anna Evans

  Those buttons came off a jacket that had lain in the ground and moldered with its fallen wearer. The person selling them had robbed a grave.

  Faye’s own hands weren’t completely clean of the stain of illicit trading in artifacts, though it had been a long time since the need for money had backed her into that corner. One thing she didn’t do, however, was profit by stealing from the dead.

  Nita gestured at Faye and Joe. “I think we need to ask Herbie why these two people are on his property.”

  “Are we still on Herbie’s property?” Wayland asked. “Seems like he’d be taking us over here to dig, if he owned the home site. Bound to be a lot of interesting stuff laying around an old house like this.”

  “Those guys don’t want bricks and old bottles and trash like that. Herbie knows it’s the battlefield they want. And he knows who’s paid their money, too.” Nita grabbed Faye by the elbow and bellowed, “Herbie!”

  Joe took a big step forward.

  Faye held up a hand to calm Joe. Nobody’d hurt her, not yet. Herbie was hustling in their direction. Behind him, she saw a sight that intrigued her and made her heart sink, all at the same time. Several treasure hunters were donning SCUBA gear. Some of the most intrepid were already in the river.

  “What’s going on here?” Herbie asked. “My rules are simple, and here they are. I’ve nailed them to half the trees in these woods.”

  He held out a sheet of paper with a heading that said THESE ARE THE RULES. READ THEM! As Faye reached out a hand and took it, recognition dawned on Herbie’s face. He knew who she was, so he knew there was an archaeologist crashing his pothunting party. He tried to snatch his sheet of rules back, but Faye already had it firmly in her grasp.

  Faye could read uncertainty in Herbie’s eyes. For an instant, he wasn’t sure how to proceed. Recovering his equilibrium, he quickly adopted an attitude of arrogant bluster.

  “I don’t have many rules,” he said, though the densely typed sheet in Faye’s hand put the lie to that claim. “You four people are already breaking the biggest one. I marked the boundaries as clear as I knew how.”

  He pointed at two trees marked at breast-height with a ring of orange tape. Flashes of orange peeked through the woods in all directions. Herbie was telling the truth on that point. He’d marked his boundaries clearly, and she was on the wrong side of the line.

  Suddenly, confusion erupted in the clearing, rather near the spot where Nita and Wayland had stepped into the woods and found them. People were running from all directions. Faye’s first impression was that a fight had broken out. Then some of the louder, clearer voices reached her ears over the general hubbub.

  “Chip found a rifle. Look at that!

  “Can you tell anything about it?”

  “What’s that sticking out of the ground under it? Hey, Herbie! Get over here and tell us what this is.”

  Then Wayland spoke in a voice so loud that it silenced the others. He took a few steps in the direction of the diggers, then pointed to the shadows where Faye and Joe stood. “Ask her. She’s an archaeologist. She’ll know what you’ve got there.”

  The silence deepened. This was not a crowd to welcome an archaeologist who had crashed their party. Except for Chip. He rushed to her side, holding out the muddy remnants of an old rifle. “Faye—can you tell me anything about this? Do you think it’s from the Civil War?”

  “’Course it’s from the Civil War,” Herbie rumbled, trying to get between them. “This is a battlefield, ain’t it?”

  Chip was wiping at the metal barrel with a shirttail. “I don’t know. Could be a hunting rifle some hunter dropped last year. Could be from the Indian Wars, for all I know. It’s kinda cool to think maybe it belonged to Osceola or somebody like that. What do you think, Faye? Is it old?”

  Liz had said that Chip was a history major. He sure acted like one. She reached for the gun barrel, but Herbie succeeded in getting between them.

  The crowd was quiet…waiting. If Herbie wanted Faye and Joe gone, she wasn’t sure what these people would do.

  Herbie clapped a pudgy hand on Chip’s shoulder. “I got somebody who’ll appraise that thing for you, Chip. You don’t need this trespasser to tell you what it’s worth.”

  Chip hadn’t asked her what it was worth. He’d asked her how old it was.

  Chip looked at Faye over Herbie’s head. “What do you think it’s worth?”

  Her heart sank. If Chip, a known history buff, was willing to sell his prize, then the whole lot of them were. Well, there had been a time when she’d have been willing to sell it, too, if it would have helped save Joyeuse.

  She opened her mouth to tell him she’d have to spend some time with it to assign an age or a value. Herbie stopped her. “I think it’s time for you to go home. We don’t want any trouble around here.”

  Still, the crowd said nothing. More than a hundred faces were turned toward Herbie, waiting to follow his lead. She sure hoped he was sincere when he said he didn’t want any trouble. Joe was still bristling and holding his machete in plain view, so that was a point in their favor.

  “We’ll walk her back to her car,” Wayland said. Nita was still holding Faye’s elbow. “We know how to keep a lady safe,” he added. “Safe enough.”

  Was this guy anxious to display the chivalry that typified his romantic view of the Civil War era? Or was he dangerous?

  Herbie considered the offer as if he himself wasn’t sure what Wayland’s motivation was. Finally, he said, “I think I’ll be the lady’s escort. Because I don’t want any trouble around here.”

  Faye eyeballed Joe, wondering why no one had noticed that the lady had a perfectly good escort. Herbie didn’t take the hint.

  “Where’s your car?” he demanded.

  “We have a boat.” Faye noticed that Joe spoke in an appropriately dangerous tone of voice. The sheriff would approve. Ross might even approve, though Faye doubted it.

  Faye could feel a hundred or more pairs of eyes boring into her back as Herbie marched them to the river bank where Joe’s boat waited. She amused herself by trying to calculate how many of those watchers were carrying a concealed weapon. A fascination with military history tended to go hand-in-hand with a passion for weapons.

  A person shot and killed on this spot might never be found, not unless a witness came forward. Surely nobody in the crowd was so utterly confident in this motley crew of pothunters as to commit murder in front of dozens of them. For the first time, Faye was glad of the large crowd.

  As if reading her thoughts, Herbie leaned close and murmured, “You should be careful where you go poking around, ma’am. I have friends here who’ve parlayed their finds into a nice little income. They live off those sales, some of them. And I do all right myself, charging people for the right to dig. There’s more than one here who’d kill you as soon as look at you, if you was to get between them and their money.”

  Faye refrained from pointing out that he might consider looking for better friends.

  Soon enough, they reached the boat. When Herbie saw them safely in it, he used his foot to push the boat away from the bank. Only when they had started the motor and begun to head downstream did he turn and walk away.

  ***

  Joyeuse Island was a nice little boat ride from the ruins of Bachelder’s home, and Joe was at the helm, so Faye had plenty of time to read Herbie’s rules. They were:

  You find it, you keep it.

  No trespassing outside the boundaries marked in orange. I mean it.

  No littering. I don’t feel like picking up after you. And pack your trash out with you when you go home.

  Use the latrines provided and use the shovel afterwards. I’m serious.

  No fighting. I will kick you out. I won’t refund your payment, either.

  People who paid the camping fee should pitch their tents in the camping area only. People who didn’t pay the camping fee should go home at night. I know it’s a long way. Deal with
it or pay the fee.

  If you rented diving gear or a metal detector from me, take care of it, or I’ll keep your deposit.

  If you find something worth selling, I know people with money who like old things. I can act as your broker. My fee is 25%. Take it or leave it.

  If you mess with somebody else’s finds, you’ll get hurt. What are you going to do? Call the law?

  At the bottom of the list of rules, Herbie had posted his fees for campsites, equipment rental, and food.

  “Herbie’s making out like a bandit!” Joe said, looking over her shoulder. Faye wasn’t sure he should be trying to read while he steered the boat through these shallow waters. “I’m surprised he’s not charging for the latrine.”

  “He wants people to use it.”

  “You got a point there. But did you see what he’s charging for a ham sandwich? And I’d have to want a beer real bad before I’d pay that much.”

  “After a long hot day of digging, I imagine Herbie can charge whatever he wants to for a cold beer. If he could keep this racket going, he could retire from the insurance business, except he’s gonna run out of artifacts, sooner or later. Looks like he’s trying to make his money while he can.”

  “Should we tell Sheriff Mike?”

  Faye sighed. “It’s not his county. And I don’t know that there’s any laws being broken. Except maybe Herbie should be paying sales tax on all that money. It’s his land and he can dig it up if he wants to. I guess he can charge people to do it for him. If they don’t disturb any burials, they’re probably in the clear, legally. But, yeah. We should tell Sheriff Mike. He’s working two murder cases, and we just got a look at several dozen people who are willing to skirt the law in a pretty serious fashion.”

  “Why do you think there’s so much treasure for those people to hunt way out here? One of those guys said something about a battlefield. Did the Civil War come through here? Why?”

  Joe scanned a landscape that didn’t look like a strategic military target. Unless you were an alligator. This swamp would look especially good to a gator.

  “You taking American History this fall?”

  Joe nodded.

  “Then listen and learn, my young apprentice. You can get a paper out of this. An A-plus paper. The Confederacy started life as a nation under some severe disadvantages. Name some.”

  “Well…they were in a war, right away.”

  “Yep. They were at war before they’d had time to set up a government, generate some income, acquire some weapons, form a military hierarchy…it’s a wonder they managed as well as they did. What else?”

  “They didn’t have the factories they needed to make guns and ammunition and ships.”

  “Nor the raw materials. Anything else?”

  “They could’ve used a few thousand more soldiers. A lot of thousands of more soldiers.”

  “Very good. But that’s all military stuff. What does everybody need?”

  “Um…food and water?”

  Faye slapped him on the shoulder. “Good. I hope I’m the teaching assistant in your class this fall. Most of the South had water, plenty of it. It was a farming culture, so food wasn’t an immediate issue, but it became one. First, they had to feed an army that wasn’t producing food. Then the war destroyed crops and disrupted transportation. The coastline was blockaded the whole time to keep foreign imports out. All those disadvantages added up. As early as 1863, women were rioting for bread in the streets of Richmond.”

  Joe looked around him again, surveying this gator haven for the solution to the Confederacy’s food supply problem. “Not much to eat here but fish.”

  “Precisely. There were canneries on the Florida coast. Saltworks, too. Bachelder may well have sold this property to an industrialist—someone who could make more money off salt and fish than he was making by growing cotton that he couldn’t sell, anyway. Or maybe he was businessman enough to run those enterprises himself.”

  “The Yankees sent an army down here because somebody was selling fish and salt?”

  “Sure. The Confederacy needed food to keep their army on its feet, and the Federals knew it. There were battles in this area with the sole purpose of keeping that protein out of the hands of the rebel army. I’m thinking that Herbie owns the site of one of those skirmishes. Those divers may be looting a ship sent to the bottom of the river nearly a hundred-and-fifty years ago. It’s tragic.” She fell silent.

  “You’re not sneaking back out here to look for a sunk ship or a fish cannery, Faye. You’ll get shot.”

  The sound of Joe’s voice caught her up short. It had a harsher edge than usual.

  “You telling me what to do?”

  “I’m hoping you’ll listen to good sense.”

  “Well, okay. If you put it that way, I’ll leave Herbie and his friends to rape history in peace.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Why was Faye surprised to see Ross sitting in Sheriff Mike’s office? She should have been no more surprised to see him there than she was to see Sheriff Mike working today, on a Saturday.

  Ross looked very comfortable, leaning back in his chair, feet flat on the floor, legs spread, hands resting palms-down on his thighs. But then, Ross always looked relaxed, strong, and in charge.

  The snippet of conversation that she overheard before both men rose to greet her involved squirrels, dogs, and ammunition, so she knew that Ross had gotten the sheriff to talking about his favorite subject: hunting. Did Ross hunt? She had no idea. She doubted he’d spent much time stalking squirrels during his formative years in Brooklyn, but he lived in Atlanta now. He was also a lobbyist. She supposed that people who hoped to influence Georgia politicians would do well to learn how to shoot woodland creatures. If Ross needed any help developing those skills, all he had to do was to ask Joe.

  Perhaps Ross’ newly acquired hunting expertise had stood him in good stead today. Perhaps he had wanted to see her and had made his daily call in person Sheriff Mike as a way to “accidentally” bump into her.

  Now she was being paranoid and silly. She had a cell phone. If Ross wanted to see her, he would call her like a normal human being. He had no need to manipulate events like a…well, like a lobbyist or a politician.

  “Where in the world have you two been?” Sheriff Mike asked. Responding to Faye’s blank look, he ran his fingers through his graying hair like a comb.

  She did the same, and pulled a twig and two leaves out of her hair. Peeking at Joe out of the corner of her eye, she saw that he had a good deal more than that caught in his mane. Because he had a lot more hair that she did. Right now, he seemed to be wearing the equivalent of half a tree. He was also muddy to his knees.

  She sneaked a peek at her own feet. Yes. A good portion of Bachelder’s swamp had come home with her.

  “I told you I was planning to get dirty. Remember? We went to look for Jedediah Bachelder’s homesite.”

  “Found it, too,” Joe added proudly. “Also, we found a bunch of people I didn’t like much.”

  Faye wished Joe had kept this bit of information to himself. She’d planned to tell the sheriff privately about stumbling onto the pothunting party. And she’d planned to make their encounter with a host of dangerous characters sound tame and non-threatening. Like a walk in the park. Swamp. Whatever.

  “Were they dangerous?” Ross reached a hand toward Faye, then stopped himself.

  “One of them was holding a gun…” she began.

  Ross’ face was the very picture of consternation. So was the sheriff’s.

  “…but it was a hundred-and-fifty years old. Give or take. And it was real rusty.”

  “I think the barrel was jammed full of clay, too,” Joe offered.

  “You two are going to be the death of me.” Sheriff Mike looked a little stressed. He had jumped to his feet at Faye’s mention of a gun, and Faye regretted teasing him about such a thing. It was in really poor taste, considering the events of the past few days. She alm
ost told him to sit down, then she remembered that he had Magda to nag him into a healthy old age.

  “Who were these people and why were they carrying an old, dirty gun?” Ross asked in a tone of infinite patience.

  “Pothunters. Collectors. Connoisseurs of historical artifacts. Call them what you like. They were tearing up a Civil War battlefield with gusto. And they were paying through the nose for the privilege.”

  “Listen to me carefully, Faye.” The sheriff still hadn’t sat down. His badge glittered under the fluorescent lights, as if to remind Faye that his words carried serious authority. “Stay away from unsavory characters. There are murderers out there.”

  Ross nodded at the sheriff’s words.

  “We thought we’d be alone with the snakes. Really. We should have been alone. Who knew these idiots would be there, too? But I thought you’d want to know who we saw out there. Herbie, the Civil War re-enactor. It’s his land. And a bunch of his re-enactor friends. Also, two skinhead-types that hang out at Liz’s place—Wayland and Nita. I think they’re married. To each other, I mean. And speaking of Liz, I saw Chip, too.”

  “Sit, everybody,” the sheriff said, pulling in a chair from another room. “Does it seem weird to you that you recognized so many of those people?”

  “Not really. Herbie and Wayland and Nita are regulars at Liz’s. They must live around here. And Chip obviously does. The rest of them were new to me this weekend, but according to this, they’ve been digging that battlefield for days.” She pulled Herbie’s rules out of her pocket and pointed to the dates posted on the bottom. “Liz’s place is the closest restaurant by miles. I imagine everybody got tired of Herbie’s overpriced ham sandwiches fairly quickly. Even Herbie.”