Undercurrents

by Mary Anna Evans

  Again, she yelled in the general direction of the phone, “She’s breathing now, but she’s hurt. Get somebody here quick.”

  Gently, she cleared the buried eyes and forehead of their burden. The woman’s eyes didn’t open and the writhing of her arms didn’t slow, but her face was in open air and she was breathing, so Faye finally felt safe to stop digging and pick up her phone.

  The dispatcher was saying, “Ma’am? “Ma’am? Are you there? I can barely hear you.”

  “I’ve got a woman in distress, apparently the victim of an attempted murder who was buried alive. She’s hurt bad. I’m just inside the southern boundary of Sweetgum State Park.”

  The 911 operator made a choking sound. Faye figured that terrible stories were a daily part of this guy’s job, but that this one shocked even him. He took a long snort of air like it was a bump of cocaine that might give him the jolt he needed to get through this.

  It must have helped, because he rallied and said, “Buried alive, you say? Okay. Okay, I’m sending somebody right now. That’s a big park. Can you give me some details about where you’re at?”

  “I’m about five hundred feet upstream from the south parking lot, across the creek and on top of the bluff. They’ll need to cross the creek right there at the parking lot, where the banks are low on both sides. The water’s shallow there, so they won’t have any trouble getting across. Once they get to this side, the woods here are pretty open. They can get a stretcher through, easy.”

  “There’s no place closer that they can park?”

  “They’d have to haul the stretcher down a long trail and through some thick underbrush. This is easier. Trust me.”

  “Give me a second to get them that info.”

  The woman moved, arms and legs spasming again and again. A splash of red at the base of her throat was visible even through smears of dirt.

  Faye tried to clear the dirt from the open wound, but the effort was futile. She gave up and put both hands on it, pressing gently but firmly in hopes of stopping the bleeding. If it helped, she couldn’t tell. It was possible that the pressure of the earth had stanched the bleeding and saved this woman’s life. For now. She couldn’t wait long for help to come. Later, it would be time to worry about sanitation and infection.

  “Okay, I’ve got paramedics on their way to you. What can you tell me about the patient’s condition?”

  “She’s injured, but I can’t tell how it happened. Maybe she was shot. Maybe she was knifed. I don’t know, but she’s bleeding from her upper chest. A lot. I’m guessing the person who buried her thought she was dead. Or didn’t care.”

  “Any idea how long she was there?”

  “No. I mean, I was in this very spot a couple of days ago and she couldn’t have been there then. There was no sign of digging.” She stopped, shaking her head to clear it. “What am I blathering about? This blood is fresh. We’re not talking about days. We’re not even talking about hours. She had to have been here when I got here this morning, because I would have heard digging. And I—” She stopped short and glanced around her.

  “Ma’am? Are you okay?”

  “I’m sorry. I was thinking. I’ll stand by what I just said. I would have heard somebody digging a hole big enough to dump a body in, and I didn’t. But I did hear footsteps. Maybe I got here just in time to hear the person who did this leave.”

  “How’s the patient now?”

  “Still breathing, but not well. Ragged.” Faye reached for her wrist. “Pulse is okay, I think. It’s really fast, but it’s there.”

  “Do you know CPR? Just in case.”

  “I do.”

  Faye couldn’t stop thinking about the footsteps. Had she heard this woman’s attacker? Or had she heard Kali?

  Praying that the little girl hadn’t seen any of this, she looked toward Kali’s hiding place, but couldn’t see through the leafy undergrowth. She would have loved to hurry over there and look, but the person in front of her was struggling more for every breath. Faye was right where she needed to be.

  How had this woman lived more than a few minutes underground? An air pocket was the only explanation. There must have been an air pocket near her nose or mouth, with the overlying soil being just porous enough to keep her alive.

  Or to ensure that she died slowly, depending on how you looked at it.

  Faye stomped on those thoughts, refusing to imagine what it must have been like for the woman to see the hole waiting, to feel the impact as she was thrown into it, to lie in the iron-cold grave and watch the soil fall on her own body.

  Did she fight back? Maybe. Her hands were free. More likely, she’d been unconscious or too injured to move when she was dumped here. It would have been impossible to cover a struggling body so completely.

  “Ma’am?” the 911 operator said, and from his tone, Faye realized that he was repeating himself. “Are you still okay? How’s the patient?”

  “I’m fine. She’s about the same. I’m going to dig some more of the dirt away from her torso. Maybe it will help her breathe.”

  “That sounds like a good idea. But only enough to get her stable, until the police arrive. Evidence.”

  Yes. Evidence. Wouldn’t want to mess that up, but I cannot sit here without trying to make this poor woman more comfortable.

  Faye began gently pulling soil away from the woman’s chest, careful not to disturb the wound that was spilling more blood by the second. As she worked, she scanned the shallow grave and the area around it, hoping that the butcher who did this had left clues behind. She saw nothing.

  She rocked back on her heels to survey her work. There was no more dirt on the woman’s chest or abdomen to restrict her breathing. She was still buried from her pubic bone down, but Faye couldn’t justify disturbing the crime scene any further.

  Faye was no doctor, but she’d had extensive first aid training to prepare her for leading field teams on projects that were often remote and in dangerous terrain. One of the first things every first aid instructor said was always, “Look at your patient.”

  So Faye looked. She saw dark skin, ashen with shock. She saw eyes rolled back under eyelids, their sclera red, raw, and caked with dirt. The woman’s lips, too, were covered with dirt and the inside of her mouth was still caked with it, impairing her breathing.

  Faye kept a rag in her pocket when she worked. An archaeologist never knew when she might need to wipe dirt off something, but this was the first time she’d ever used it to clean soil out of a human mouth.

  The mouth moved. Air and a sound passed out, and Faye half-believed that the sound was “Thank you.” The rational half of her believed that this person was too far from consciousness to frame even that reflexive phrase. That rational half also heard the disturbing rattle in the woman’s breathing and hoped the paramedics got there before she had to decide what to do about it.

  The sun was rising higher. Faye noticed that she was finally getting warm. She’d been too distracted to notice the chill morning air. The warming rays of the sun reminded her, again, to look at her patient.

  The ground where the woman was buried was cold and damp. Faye always wore a long-sleeved, button-front shirt to work, because it protected against sun, bug bites, and briars. In recent years, she’d begun wearing a thin white undershirt under it, for those times when she just couldn’t take the heat. She peeled off her outer shirt and laid it over the woman’s exposed torso, wondering how much longer it would take the paramedics to come.

  Even as she tucked the shirt’s fabric around the wounded chest, bright blood began to soak through it. Flashing lights, just as red, appeared through the trees that separated her from the parking lot. A siren screamed. And the rattling breaths of the woman in front of her stopped coming.

  Faye grabbed a cool wrist with one hand. With the other, she used the other hand to grasp the injured woman under the neck and upper b
ack, hoping to open her airway while she searched for a pulse that simply wasn’t there.

  Crying out, “Here! We’re over here,” she put the heel of her hand on the woman’s breastbone and laid her other hand atop it. As she began counting compressions, she shouted, “She’s crashing. Come quick!” but she doubted they were close enough to understand her words over the burbling of the flowing stream between them.

  The sound of slamming ambulance doors was sharp enough to pierce the background noise of creek and birdsong. A moment later, she heard the voices of people who were splashing across the creek to bring her help, but it seemed like the faraway sounds were coming from another country.

  Using the weight of her upper body, she pressed on the limp woman’s chest a hundred-and-twenty times a minute, wondering if help would arrive before she needed to switch to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. No help came.

  She clasped the back of the woman’s neck with one hand and put the other on her forehead, looking for an airway angle that would work a miracle. None was forthcoming, so she used the cloth to wipe the inert woman’s mouth, then leaned down and gave a rescue breath. She was relieved to see the wounded chest rise, so the patient’s airway was open.

  She gave another rescue breath. No response.

  The crackling of feet on breaking twigs and fallen leaves approached, but help still hadn’t reached them. If she remembered her training right, it was time to do more chest compressions. Faye was in the middle of her third set of compressions, kneeling on the hard ground with both hands pressing into a limp woman’s bloody chest, when a paramedic grasped her shoulders, gently moved her aside, and took over the job.

  “Do you know her?” he said, dropping to his knees beside his patient.

  “No, I just found her here.”

  He didn’t answer. He simply threw her some alcohol wipes to clean herself up, then went to work trying to save a life.

  Faye scuttled backward on hands and knees, trying to get out of the way of the professionals who didn’t seem to be having any more luck than she’d had. She knelt on the ground, compulsively using the wipes, one after another, to clean her face, her mouth, her hands.

  As the rescue team worked, she focused on the face of unconscious woman. The victim looked young, probably not even thirty, and she was very thin. Traces of makeup still showed on her face. Grains of sand and dirt clung to red lipstick and thickly applied mascara. Her hairstyle was a mass of tiny auburn braids that must have taken hours to plait. She had several golden hoops in the ear Faye could see, and there was also a bloody tear in her earlobe where yet another hoop must have been.

  She looked like a woman who had a lot of living yet to do, but none of the paramedics’ efforts had brought her back and Faye didn’t think they ever would.

  Chapter Seven

  He had been robbed of something dear.

  He had waited so long for his time alone with Frida. An hour would have been enough. Two hours would have been an explosive joy. He wasn’t a demanding man, but the few minutes he’d been given to vent his love and rage simply had not been enough. He deserved more.

  The splashing of feet in the creek, a stumble, and a soft curse had alerted him to the intruder. He’d had no choice but to dump Frida into the ground without ceremony, tossing a few shovelfuls of dirt over her before he fled.

  And now he was left with no outlet for his hunger.

  Worse, he was left with the question of whether the interloper had seen him. He had been hunting and harvesting women for a long time, but he was smart and the rest of the world was dumb. He had never come so close to being caught.

  Perhaps he shouldn’t have run. Perhaps he should have stood his ground and laid two women in this grave. She was no taller than Frida, although she was more muscular and she moved with more authority. She took up more space in her world than Frida, but he could have swatted her to the ground with one hand. If he’d been clear-headed, instead of besotted with the fragile Frida, he would have killed her as soon as her head cleared the bluff, instead of giving her time to dial 911. The 911 call changed everything.

  What if she fought back, even a little, and the emergency personnel arrived before he could finish the job? What if she saw his face and he didn’t have time to silence her? He was a cautious man and this was why he was not sitting on Death Row. It was also why this woman had not been swatted out of existence with a shovel.

  His caution had kept him from silencing her on sight, but now he was left with the fear that she’d seen him. Even if she hadn’t seen his face, perhaps she had seen something else, a piece of evidence that would eventually surface from her subconscious and lead the police to him.

  He memorized her face, because he would need to find her again. She had deep brown eyes with the intelligence and intensity of a deer sniffing human scent. He memorized her tears trembling on her lower lids because she was too busy digging to wipe them away. He memorized brown hands that were both strong and delicate as they worked to free Frida from a grave where he’d intended for her to stay. The set of her jaw had said that she would not be deterred from this task or any other. He needed to know her name, where she lived, what she did every day.

  This woman moved him as much as Frida had, and this was a good thing. He was going to need to silence her. He might as well enjoy it.

  Chapter Eight

  Nobody was looking at Faye. Quietly, she backed away from the paramedics, working hard to save a woman who needed them badly. She needed to know that Kali was not watching this.

  Stepping between the bushes and tree trunks that hid the little girl’s hiding place, Faye entered the small clearing where Kali whiled away her days. She expelled a relieved sigh when she saw that no one was there.

  The magazines were right where Faye had seen them, still wrapped in plastic that was now beaded with dew. Kali’s bag of trash hadn’t moved, either. Only one thing was different. Trash was scattered across the small patch of grass where the little girl sat. Faye knew this was where she sat, because there was no room for her to sit anywhere else.

  The trash bothered Faye for two reasons. First, throwing garbage around seemed uncharacteristic for a child who cared enough about her space to keep a trash bag handy. And second, it made no sense for there to be trash in the only open spot large enough for sitting unless Kali had dropped it as she left, probably in a hurry. Otherwise, she would have been sitting on an ice cream wrapper.

  Looking more closely at the ice cream wrapper, Faye’s heart sank. It held a half-eaten ice cream sandwich, and the chocolate mass cradled between flat chocolate cookies was only partially melted. She knew Kali’s mother kept ice cream around the house. All evidence pointed to Kali sitting right here, and so recently that she must have seen terrible things. She’d almost certainly seen Faye find the buried woman. Worse, it was entirely possible that she’d seen her be buried. She might even have seen her stabbed or shot.

  A lightly worn path led from Kali’s hiding place and Faye followed it. The path paralleled the creek, and the water sounds got louder with every step as it descended to another shallow crossing like the one near Faye’s parked car. Once across, it took a hard right away from the creek and put Faye within sight of the back doorstep of a modest home.

  The house’s white vinyl siding was cracked and mildewed. Dark windows watched Faye like fathomless eyes. A metal swingset that looked as old as Faye stood rusting in the yard with no swings at the end of its chains. It wasn’t a beautiful home, but the roof was solid and the yard was neatly kept. Maybe Jeremiah had been right when he’d said that there were a lot of children who were worse off than Kali.

  Faye heard more voices behind her saying, “You say there’s a witness? Where is she?” so she turned away from Kali’s house. The police had come and she needed to go help them find a monster.

  The detective was not impressed with Faye’s ice cream clue, or he said he wasn’t. She
showed him the wrapper, hidden in a circle of trees, and he was only marginally interested until she told him that the ice cream in it was still frozen.

  Upon hearing that news, he yelled at her for disturbing evidence. She wanted to say, “Which exactly is bothering you? Are you annoyed that I showed you a worthless piece of trash, or are you annoyed that I disturbed something worthwhile? That’s ironic, since you would have ignored it if I hadn’t been here. Besides, how was I to know that the ice cream wasn’t melted unless I checked? If I had waited for you, we would never have known that it was still frozen when I got here.”

  But she said nothing, because the detective did not seem like someone who really wanted to hear what people thought.

  Instead, she asked the question that never left her mind. “How is she?”

  The man had introduced himself as Detective McDaniel. He didn’t answer her question about the victim’s condition, but Faye could see the paramedics starting an IV and dead people didn’t get IVs. The woman was still limp and unresponsive, but maybe there was hope.

  “Can you tell me who she is?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t know who she is,” she said. “I wish I did.” She wasn’t sure he believed her. Why else would he ask, again, “Are you sure?”

  She answered him with “I’ve never seen her before in my life,” despite feeling insulted that he had asked her to tell him, yet again, that the injured woman was a stranger.

  His “Hmm,” was loaded down with doubt. “Ma’am, I need you to explain to me how you came to find this poor woman.”

  “I heard some noises up above me—”

  He interrupted her to ask, “What kind of noises?”

  “Footsteps. A voice—”

  He interrupted her again. “The killer’s voice?”