“Is that his name?” said Adam.
“He just told me not to touch the bone measuring equipment.”
“Who does he think he is?” Adam punched his hand with his fist.
“According to Lewis, he’s a nervous graduate student who is really counting on a good sample of air.”
“We have to have ID tags now, just to work on our own site,” said Byron. “I’m not used to working like this. It’s like we’ve been taken over by fascists.”
“The equipment is very expensive,” muttered Bill.
“It could be worse,” said Kelsey. “Trent could be here.”
“And Claire,” said Joel.
“One thing about Claire, though,” said Adam. “She’d tell that little pissant where to get off.”
“Or steal one of their fancy trucks,” said Dillon.
Everyone laughed, and Lindsay felt a pang of dread. Where was Claire? She hoped very much that she just ran away.
Suddenly, the sound of a bell ringing in the compound grabbed everyone’s attention.
“What the heck is that?” asked Joel.
“I imagine, the dinner bell,” said Lindsay. “Let’s go eat. I think Mrs. Laurens got her entire family to help with supper tonight.”
Supper was homemade beef stew in deep cooking pots, mountains of cornbread muffins, bowls of fruit salad, and sheets of blackberry cobbler and coconut cake for dessert. Almost everyone went back for seconds and thirds. Still, Mrs. Laurens was apologetic. Lewis hugged her and kissed her cheek.
“Wonderful job, Mrs. Laurens. Wonderful job. You can be proud.”
He can be so charming, thought Lindsay. Amid all the clamor of dining with that many people, Lindsay did manage to get Erin apart from the others and ask her if they could go to her great aunt’s house after dinner.
“Sure. Why?”
“I need to look around.”
“Uncle Alfred and Mom will want to be there. I hope that’s all right.”
“No problem. I was going to suggest that. I need to know if anything else is missing.”
“I’m not sure they would know. Aunt Sugar might.”
* * *
After dinner, Lindsay, Erin, and Luke—who insisted on accompanying Lindsay—drove to Mary Susan Tidwell’s house.
“Everybody is sure on edge at the site,” said Erin. “I think it’s exciting.”
“As soon as they start the digging, they’ll come around,” Lindsay told her. “Right now, the crew’s feeling displaced. I don’t blame them, but we don’t know how to hook up the equipment, much less use it. It’s mostly the environmental scientists’ show right now.”
“Archaeology isn’t like I expected.”
“You expected it to be exotic and romantic?”
“I guess I did. It’s better without Claire. Even Adam’s nice to me now. We went into town together yesterday to get supplies.”
Yesterday. Lindsay had forgotten. Adam’s vehicle was the only one with the warm motor. “Where all did you go?”
“Hardware store. Adam stopped at the bank. He got several rolls of new pennies. He said Lewis asked him to get them for the site. I wanted to ask him what for, but I was afraid that was something I should know, and I didn’t want him to make fun of me.”
“They’re to put in the postholes after the new fence is removed,” said Lindsay.
“Why?”
“When archaeologists are leaving behind holes that in the future might be construed as features that belong to the site, they often mark them in some way. For example, some archaeologists put an empty drink can in the bottom of a survey pit so future archaeologists will know the hole wasn’t contemporaneous with the site. We’re doing block excavations of the structures at the farmstead. Someone later might want to look at the space between the structures. We’ll drop a penny in the postholes before we cover them up, so if they’re ever cross-sectioned, they’ll know the postholes are an artifact of a past excavation process.”
“I’d never have thought of anything like that.”
“Lewis is a stickler for marking features left by the archaeologists. Early in his career he thought he had found a palisade around a village of a people not known to have them. He even published a paper on it with an elaborate hypothesis about the transitional nature of that culture. In the next issue of the journal, another archaeologist wrote a letter to the editor explaining that he had done testing at the site years earlier and had dug postholes to fence off a portion of it. It was his postholes Lewis had found. It was very embarrassing.”
“I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s made mistakes."
“No, we all make them. When you and Adam were out yesterday, did you stop by the diner?” Lindsay hoped her question sounded casual.
“No. We had sandwiches back at the house.”
Erin’s family was waiting when they arrived. Lindsay had expected the house to be more isolated, but there were three neighbors across the way. However, there was no one on either side of her house.
It was a beautiful house—a Queen Anne Free Classic style sitting on a cut stone foundation, with an asymmetrical complex of roofs and gables, turned columns on wooden piers, and a large porch. Lindsay pulled into the drive, and Erin directed her to the rear, which was completely isolated. Even if Mary Susan Tidwell had neighbors on each side, they would not have been able to see through the shrubs and trees around her enormous yard. She had several outbuildings—some metal, some wood—a barn, and a corral that was now empty, but Lindsay smiled remembering Broach Moore and the story about the goat. There was also a driveway into the back.
“Where does that lead?” she asked Erin.
“It eventually goes to the main road. Aunt Susan preferred it. She didn’t like the neighbors to see her come and go.”
They got out of their vehicle, and Lindsay introduced Luke to the Tidwells and to Bonnie Blake.
“Thanks for letting me come take a look,” she said.
“We appreciate your doing something about this,” said Alfred Tidwell.
Alfred unlocked the door and disabled the burglar alarm and they all followed him into an old-fashioned country kitchen. It was very tidy. Lindsay wondered if that was the way Miss Tidwell kept it, or if they had cleaned it after she died. Lindsay was hoping for some clue that would give Lewis the airtight case he was insisting on.
Erin touched the table by the window. “Aunt Susan and I used to have tea here. She’d tell me about the places she’d been looking for her finds, as she called them.”
“See,” said Bonnie Blake to Alfred and Sugar. “I told you she liked Erin.”
“Now, don’t start that, Bonnie,” said Alfred. “We know she liked Erin. We all do.”
“Aunt Susan was a health nut.” Erin ignored her family’s squabbling. “Any food she read about that’d help you live longer—orange juice, green tea, broccoli—she’d eat it.” Erin continued. “She wanted to live as long as possible. I just don’t believe it was her time.”
“She lived here in the back of the house,” said Sugar. They led Lindsay from the kitchen past the bathroom. Lindsay went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet.
“We’ve taken out most of her perishables,” said Sugar, “medicine and all that.”
“Mostly, just drugs for hypertension,” said Bonnie.
“Hypotension,” said Alfred. “She had hypotension. If you paid as much attention to her as me and Sugar, you’d’ve known that.”
“Her bedroom is in here,” said Erin.
The bedroom was as tidy as the kitchen. The bed was made, the dresser tidy, even the mirror was sparkling clean.
“I cleaned up after the funeral,” said Sugar. “We didn’t know it might be a crime scene.”
“The safe is over here,” said Alfred, opening a door that looked like a closet but had a tall black safe behind it. He opened the safe to show Lindsay that it was indeed empty.
“You say she lived in the back here. What’s in the rest of the ho
use?”
“Her finds,” said Bonnie. “The whole house is taken up with them.”
“I’d like to know if anything is missing. Would any of you be able to look around and tell me?”
“Sugar might be able to,” said Alfred.
They walked down a short hallway into the parlor. “She certainly had a lot of stuff,” said Lindsay, on seeing the wall-to-wall shelves of possessions.
“Yes,” agreed Alfred, “she did that.”
“Junk, mostly,” said Bonnie. “Just look at these old comic books. She even put them in separate bags. What was she thinking?”
“She was thinking about protecting them,” said Alfred.
Lindsay glanced through the stack of comic books—old Superman, Green Hornet, Batman, Archie.
“Mrs. Blake,” said Lindsay, “these are very old and probably very valuable.”
“Those? You’re not serious.”
“She’s right,” said Luke. “There’s a good possibility these might be worth several hundred dollars apiece.”
“Comic books?”
“Yes, Mother. They’re very collectible.”
“I don’t know what that means, ‘very collectible.’” Mrs. Blake sounded as if her own unfamiliarity with things was a plot to annoy her.
“It means that these are things that a lot of people collect. Like these toys.” Erin pointed to the shelves of toys, most still in their original boxes.
The room contained many obviously valuable things that could have been removed easily. Lindsay was beginning to doubt that anything had been stolen.
“She was open Fridays and Saturdays,” said Sugar. “After her first heart attack, Alfred or I stayed with her while she was open, to help her keep an eye on the place. But she mainly advertised in collectors’ magazines and sold things that way.”
“She was thinking about starting up a shop on the computer,” said Alfred. “She said some kind of virtuous store. I don’t exactly know what that is.”
“A virtual store, Uncle Alfred. It’s a store on the Internet,” said Erin. “I was trying to talk her into that. That way, she could just take photos of her stuff and post it. If anyone wanted it, they’d just click and pay by credit card number and Aunt Susan could mail it to them.”
“Erin is so clever,” said Mrs. Blake. “She really should be a lawyer.”
“Internet stores aren’t my idea, Mother. It’s the way things are done now.”
“Erin, don’t hide your light under a bushel. You’re a smart girl.”
Erin’s shoulders sagged. “I may be, Mother. But the Internet shop isn’t evidence of it. That’s just what people are doing nowadays.” She walked off to another room before her mother could say anything.
Miss Tidwell didn’t collect many pieces of furniture. There was the odd humidor, chair, trunks, and carousel animals. Most of her collections were things that would have fit in her station wagon. The rooms, both upstairs and down, contained things like old lanterns, glass insulators, bottles and jars, coffee grinders, radios, moldings from old houses, music boxes, snow globes, baskets, magazines, books, carvings, paintings, records, toys, porcelain bric-a-brac, and many things Lindsay had no idea what the purpose was. There could be a fortune contained in the rooms, or it could be mostly junk.
“Do you see anything missing?” asked Lindsay.
“Over here,” said Sugar. She led them to one of the rooms. “This is where she had some of the stuff she collected from real old places that had gone out of business. Like old soda fountains. I like these glasses.”
“Now don’t you go claiming things, Sugar,” said Bonnie.
“They’re just glasses, Mother.”
“You think something is missing?” asked Lindsay.
“She liked old newspaper and printing companies. She had stacks and rolls of old unused paper and some ledgers. They aren’t here, and I know I saw them just a few days before she died.”
“I told you about the ledgers,” said Bonnie. “They can’t be worth anything.”
“Were they written in?” asked Lindsay.
“No,” said Sugar. “It was mostly unused stuff.”
“She must have thrown it away,” said Bonnie. “Why would anyone steal worthless items like that?”
“Was there anything that looked like rubber stamps, with pictures or designs on them?”
Sugar nodded. “Now that you mention it, there was. I don’t know about rubber, but she had a bunch of them that looked like they were made out of wood, and some looked copper. She kept them in boxes. They aren’t here, either.”
“You know something?” asked Bonnie.
“Maybe,” said Lindsay.
“What? Tell us,” she demanded.
“Now, just you wait, Bonnie,” said Alfred. “Be patient. I think Miss Lindsay has found something. You believe us about the documents, don’t you?”
“Yes,” said Lindsay. “Yes, I do.”
Chapter 30
A Flat Tire
LINDSAY WAS ALONE in her room that evening, the door locked, only one lamp on. She looked out the window over at the lit tent city. Luke, her protector sent by John, was downstairs with the guys. Drew and Eric had taken a motel room. She felt safe. She could think.
She opened a drink from her cooler and propped herself up on her bed with her back against the wall. What did it mean when valuable objects were left and worthless ones were missing? Were they worthless? They had to be. Surely there wasn’t a collector’s market for old unused ledgers. Who could she call and ask? Did she know any dealers in collectibles?
Alfred Tidwell had confidence in her, so did Lewis. Why? she wondered. She certainly must look more confident than she felt.
What did she know about the stolen documents? Not much at all. The words Beau and Turkeyville. The story about the man sick in a log cabin. And that she had something that would make Erin famous as an archaeologist. Not as a lawyer, but as an archaeologist. What kind of documents would make an archaeologist famous—at least in Miss Tidwell’s eye? Famous to whom—the whole world, or only to fellow archaeologists?
Lindsay felt that sensation of something familiar lurking in her brain trying to make it to the surface. What? What was familiar? She was an archaeologist—what papers could she come across that would make her famous for finding them? It could be a multitude of things. History was full of lost documents. But they had a connection specifically to archaeology—not simply history. You’re an archaeologist, dammit, think.
Lindsay took a long drink. Sleep on it. Maybe her brain would sort it out during the night.
* * *
Lindsay wasn’t awakened by any blinding revelations, but by banging on her door and Lewis calling her name.
“Yes?” She jumped out of bed. “Is the house on fire, Lewis?”
“No. Just making sure everyone is up. It’s going to be a long day today.”
Lindsay glanced at her clock—set to go off in two minutes. Lewis was probably already fashionably dressed and ready to go. She pulled on her jeans, sneakers, and a sweatshirt jacket over a T-shirt. She ran a brush through her hair before pulling it up into a ponytail, pulling the tail through the back of her West Construction cap. It was the first morning in a long time she felt completely rested.
Breakfast that morning was at the site. Inside the mess tent, Mrs. Laurens and her family set up a steam table with huge trays of bacon, eggs, ham, sausage, biscuits, french toast, pancakes, and orange juice. Lindsay couldn’t imagine cooking this much food. After this site, Mrs. Laurens would either open a restaurant or never cook another meal in her life.
Lindsay made herself a ham and biscuit, got a glass of orange juice, and went to find someone she knew.
“Lindsay.” Lewis was standing with Jarman, Posnansky, and Peter Willis near the tent exit. Breakfast in hand, she went over.
“Lindsay will be doing the analysis of the bones,” Lewis told them.
“Have you ever done anything like this before? I’m going to ne
ed certain samples.” Peter Willis shoved his glasses up on his nose.
Lindsay stared a moment and took a sip of her orange juice to keep from smiling. “No, but I have a chart that tells me how all the bones are connected. How hard can it be?”
Peter put his hands to his head and turned as if to walk off. “Oh, man I don’t believe this.” He looked at his watch. “Okay. It’s early. It’ll take a while to excavate the coffins. We won’t be ready to open the coffins today anyway. We can get Crow or Lipsig here. . . .”
“Peter . . . Peter . . . ,” said Jarman. “Calm down. She’s putting you on.”
“Dr. Chamberlain is a forensic anthropologist,” said Lewis. “She’s done this many times, she’s conducted workshops for the FBI and the GBI on recovering skeletal remains; she knows what she’s doing and will do a good job.”
“Provided you let me handle the equipment,” Lindsay said.
Peter’s cheeks turned red. “Sorry, I didn’t know.” He looked at his feet for a moment before casting his gaze back up to Lindsay. “I need samples . . .”
“I’ve collected many a sample for pollen, entomology, soil. If there’s a special kind of sample you need, you are welcome to tell me what you need, or collect it yourself.”
“It’s just that collecting accurate information is important to us.”
“To us, too,” replied Lindsay. She turned to Jarman. “Where do I go to get a special pass? One of the local physicians is observing the analysis of the remains.”
“Sergeant Stagmeyer.” Jarman looked out over the crowd eating breakfast. “There he is, second row, halfway down.”
Lindsay spotted him. She also saw Drew and her husband coming into the tent and heading for the food. She excused herself to go tell Stagmeyer what she needed.
“No problem. I’ll have one made up.” He took the name down on a notepad. “I’ll do it after I’m finished here. By the way, whoever’s cooking the food’s doing a great job.”
“Mrs. Laurens and her family. I’ll tell her.”
Someone pushed past Lindsay and she leaned forward, holding a chair to keep from falling into the table.
“Sorry.” A man in his late twenties was going between the tables filling a plastic garbage bag with paper plates, napkins, plastic utensils. “You guys enjoy your breakfast?” His dark eyes sparkled as he looked at Lindsay.
Airtight Case Page 28
