Undercurrents

by Mary Anna Evans

  She’d laughed out loud when he had handed a rangy twenty-something named Richard an onion and a paring knife and told him to chop. Richard, who wore his long hair natural and who also wore a perpetual smile, had set the onion on a picnic table, then stood studying it with his knife pointed at its papery, golden-brown skin.

  His friends were enjoying the fact that Richard had no kitchen skills.

  “You gotta peel the thing.”

  “Seriously. Just pick it up and start cutting.”

  “Dude. It won’t bite you.”

  Faye had a hand reached out to help him when Jeremiah swooped in with a cutting board, spouting instructions at a million words per minute.

  “Y’all, Richard’s going to cry. He just is. That’s what onions make you do. Nobody look. He’ll be okay.”

  A few minutes later, Richard was setting a platter of chopped onions beside the relish, and Jeremiah was chatting up a woman about Richard’s age. Her head was crowned with spiraling braids that made Faye catch her breath at the thought of Frida.

  “Stephanie,” Jeremiah said, “don’t you laugh at Richard and his onions. We’re having burgers tomorrow and we’ll need onions again. You’re next!”

  Jeremiah’s nonprofit hired young people with challenges and helped them develop marketable skills. For this job, he’d brought community college students, ages eighteen through twenty-two. Ordinarily, Faye would be muttering about the wisdom of training anyone to be an archaeology field tech with some misguided notion that it would be a path out of poverty. The job didn’t pay so very well, to put it mildly, not when you considered the wear-and-tear on the body. In this case, she wasn’t as crotchety about the effectiveness of this program, and the reason was Jeremiah.

  She’d seen the curriculum for the training session he’d just put her new hires through, and she approved. He’d taught them how to handle the tools of her trade, but he’d also taught them basic workplace skills. She remembered one line from his syllabus clearly: “Show up on time. Don’t yell at anybody, especially your boss.”

  Before she’d started her own business, she wouldn’t have thought anybody needed to be told that. She would have been wrong. Faye had fired a lot of people whose background would never have been labeled “disadvantaged,” just because they couldn’t manage those simple things. If Richard, Stephanie, and the others listened to Jeremiah, they’d be ending their summer with a glowing recommendation letter from Faye. And so would Jeremiah.

  Jeremiah had even taken them to a bank and helped them open bank accounts where their paychecks would be deposited. He’d done a budgeting lesson that had taught them how the money for their project flowed, but Faye had been able to read between the lines. Jeremiah was also teaching them to handle their own money.

  In every interaction the man had with these young people, there was only one message: “Succeed and prosper!” Faye liked that approach very much.

  When it came time for marshmallow-toasting, Jeremiah’s charges grew quiet, focused on bringing their marshmallows to the perfect shade of brown, then sandwiching them between graham crackers and chocolate for optimum gooeyness.

  “You’re gonna get ’em sugared up. They’re younger than we are. I’m not sure we can keep up with them,” Faye said.

  “We can’t. No doubt about it. But I worked them hard today,” Jeremiah said, raking a string of dried marshmallow off his cheek. “They’ll sleep.”

  She pointed at each of the techs in turn. “I see Richard. And there’s Stephanie. You can’t miss her with that gorgeous hair. What about the woman talking to her, the one with the red buzz cut? Is that Ayesha?”

  “You got it.”

  She pointed at the woman next to Ayesha. “The tall woman with the amazing green eyes is Yvonna, right?”

  “Yep.”

  “And the young man with the muscles and the tattoo on his hand that looks like a knot? Remind me of his name? I remember that it’s almost like David, but not quite.”

  “You have a good memory. His name is Davion. He says the tattoo is a west African symbol for wisdom.”

  “Nice choice! If I were ever going to get a tattoo, I might get that. To be honest, though? I’ve been moving dirt for so long that my shoulders are wrecked and my neck isn’t much better. Tattoos hurt and I hurt enough already. I’m probably going to stay ink-less.”

  Faye bit into the s’more and the world took on a rosy glow. She could have sworn she felt the pain in her neck ebb a little. Maybe marshmallows should be a controlled substance, but she sure hoped the FDA never figured that out.

  “Take a look at these people. They’re gonna do good work for you,” said Jeremiah, holding his arms outstretched at his sides like a minister blessing his flock. “I promise. And when they’re happy, well-adjusted, educated adults, you’ll have the pleasure of knowing that you gave them their first job.”

  “Me and the state of Tennessee.”

  He raised his no-name brand root beer, purchased cheap so the food budget would allow for the marshmallows that Faye and her aching neck were loving so devoutly. “To the state of Tennessee!”

  She raised her own root beer and drank deeply. It had been a long, hard day, and it had taken her an inordinately long time to scrub the memory of Frida’s blood off her body. She was ready to sleep.

  Tomorrow was Saturday, and even though it was the weekend, she had planned to spend at least a half-day both days orienting her new crew and getting the project started—and also keeping them busy and burning off their youthful energy. But Detective McDaniel had told her that it would be at least two days before he would release the crime scene, so now she had a problem. How was she going to keep these people busy and productive until then?

  The museum director had helped Faye and Jeremiah put together a museum tour that should be fun. It would get them prepared for hands-on archaeology, and they’d get the ego boost that comes with seeing things that mere tourists don’t get to see. That would take care of Saturday, or most of it.

  On Sunday, she guessed she could take them to the university library to pore over several piles of books and documents detailing what was already known about the site.

  Would these things hold the attention of five energetic young people who were itching to put their hands in the dirt? Faye was doubtful.

  As she racked her brain for more options, Jeremiah’s phone sounded. Giving her an apologetic glance, he walked away to take the call.

  Faye sat in silence, watching the young people set their marshmallows aflame, then run around with them held high like torches. They were having so much fun doing something so simple, but none of them had ever done it before. Nevertheless, once Jeremiah had shown them how to strip a green stick of leaves and stick a marshmallow on the end, they were instant marshmallow-toasting experts. When Faye thought of all the other simple pleasures they’d probably missed, she wanted to cry, but she figured her energy was better spent making a grocery list that said, “Buy more marshmallows.”

  Quick footsteps sounded behind her and she turned around. It was Jeremiah, and he was crying.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Jeremiah had shape-shifted into a different man. The cheerful, almost goofy, big kid was gone. In its place was a towering man who was both grief-stricken and angry.

  “What? Tell you what?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about Frida? Why didn’t you tell me that she was the dead woman you found?”

  “Wait. You know Frida?” She corrected herself, awkward and miserable. “You knew Frida? Memphis is a big town. It didn’t occur to me that you would know her.”

  “Know her? I loved her. I—” He closed his eyes, shook his head, kept shaking it.

  “You loved her? Oh, Jeremiah.”

  “That was a silly thing for me to say. It was middle school. We were just kids. Children. But—oh, God, when I think
about what happened to her…”

  He bowed his head and wept. Their five young charges noticed and the loud shenanigans stopped dead.

  Faye answered the question in their eyes. “He just found out that someone close to him passed away.”

  Richard lowered the long, graceful hand that held up his flaming marshmallow, blowing it out. “Frida?”

  “You knew Frida, too?” Faye said. “I didn’t know any of you were from Memphis.” It didn’t make sense to her that people who lived just a few miles away would be sleeping here at the campground instead of in their own beds. “If I’d realized any of you might have known her, I wouldn’t have been so quiet about her death. I just…I guess I wanted us to get to know each other without that shadow hanging over us. We can talk about it, if you all want to.”

  Richard spoke up. “You weren’t wrong. We’re not from around here. Davion’s from Kingsport. Ayesha’s from Chattanooga. The rest of us are from Nashville or thereabouts. But my family’s from Memphis and we came here every summer when I was a kid. Frida was older, but all my cousins were friends with her, so I knew her pretty well. She just lived one street over from my grandma, on the same side of the creek.”

  Jeremiah wiped the tears off his cheeks and said, “It’s a big neighborhood, but not that big. People know each other and they care.”

  Richard nodded. “Yeah. They do.”

  Jeremiah turned his head away to wipe his cheeks again. He kept his face turned away as he talked, as if that would somehow hide the fact that he was crying and everybody knew it. “That’s why I run this program the way I do. The kids get work skills that they can take to a job back home, wherever home is. They may want to move away from Nashville or Chattanooga or Kingsport, or they may not, but I don’t want them to have to move. Not if they don’t want to go. I didn’t. I still live two blocks from my parents, but I’ve got this job that I made for myself. It pays the bills, it lets me live where I want to live, and I only have to leave if I want to. Everybody should have that choice.”

  Jeremiah gave up trying to hide the tears. He turned toward the others and let them flow. “Frida should’ve had that choice,” he said his voice rising until it cracked. “She tried. She really did, but life kept throwing boulders at her.”

  He hurried away, disappearing into his cabin. The others moved away in a clump, muttering among themselves.

  Faye’s snack was cold. The gelid marshmallows had mingled with the soft, cool chocolate, and the graham crackers were getting soft. Thinking of children who would never toast a marshmallow in their lives, Faye threw away the sticky mess and went to bed.

  Chapter Sixteen

  As the dark night pressed in through windows so big that they let in all the outdoors, Faye looked around her cabin from the comfort of her freshly made bed. She wished Kali had such a nice place to live. The cabin was brand-new and immaculate, with pine floors and pine-paneled walls. It was built for a vacationing family, a big one. It had a full kitchen with a full-sized refrigerator, not to mention two bedrooms that she wasn’t even using. The bedrooms were furnished with bunk beds, and the sofa in the living area had a pull-out couch.

  Too bad she was going to have to leave it. She was going to have to take Jeremiah and his crew of happy young people away from the campfire and the s’mores and the fresh air, because they weren’t safe here.

  The day stretched out behind her forever, from her futile attempts to save Frida’s life to this moment. It was only now that Faye had enough silence to focus. It was only now that she could see the truth.

  It made absolutely no sense for her to keep her crew in this lovely—not to mention free—place, not when an unsolved murder of exceptional violence had just happened a few miles away, on the far side of this self-same park. She had to take these people someplace safer.

  Like anyone who hadn’t grown up with a lot of money, Faye was a cheapskate at heart. When she added that natural cheapness to her natural talent for crawling the Internet, she was capable of googling up some screaming deals. Already, her computer sat on her lap, open to a travel website offering a seriously screaming deal. She’d found a hotel so desperate to rent its rooms that she could afford to house herself, Jeremiah, and all five of their field techs for the duration of the project.

  Given the circumstances, the state of Tennessee might be willing to pony up the added expense, but she could manage it if they didn’t. Her profit margin would be wafer-thin, but that was a small price to pay for the safety of the people in her care.

  Her budget allowed for three rooms, and the fairest way to divide them seemed to Faye to be two women in the first room, two in the second, and all three men in the third. Stephanie, Yvonna, and Ayesha would be flipping a coin to see who got the unpleasant assignment of sharing a room with the boss. The other two women would share the second room, and Jeremiah, Davion, and Richard would flip another coin to see who slept on the roll-out bed in the third room. Nobody would be comfortable, and Faye’s inner introvert was screaming at the loss of privacy, but this was what she could afford. If she were a killer, she’d go looking for someone vulnerable and alone, so she was actually doing everyone a favor by cramming them into such tight spaces. Her employees would survive the loss of these beautiful cabins, and so would Faye. She made the reservation and fowarded the details to Joe.

  Faye, in particular, had no excuse for complaining. When the project was done, she’d go back to occupying an entire island with her family of four. She could certainly stand living in a crowd until then. She just wasn’t sure she could stand the stress of this one night, knowing that Frida’s killer was out there somewhere, perhaps close by.

  Without thinking, she picked up her phone and dialed McDaniel’s number. When he answered, it took her a moment to clear her overstressed mind and realize why she’d called.

  “I forgot to tell you something that Kali said. When I asked her if she saw who killed her mother, she said, ‘It was dark.’ That got me to thinking. I don’t know how tightly you’ve been able to establish a time for the attack, but it was just getting to be daylight when I found Frida. Unless the killer was working with a flashlight, there had to be a little light during the attack, so it had to happen between the first few minutes of sunup and the half-light when I found her. Maybe you’ve got astronomers or meteorologists or something who can tell you what time that was. I was too busy to look at my watch, so it’s not like I can give you the time to the minute.”

  “I’ve got the time of your 911 call.”

  “Back up from that call a few minutes and you’ll know when I heard the footsteps. The attack had to have happened after dawn and before that time. Maybe that will give you something to go on.”

  “I’ll do that. I appreciate the thought you’re putting put into this.”

  Faye didn’t answer right away. Then she let the silence hang longer than she’d intended.

  “Faye? Is there something else?”

  “I’ve found a hotel for my crew over near Beale Street. It’s far enough away from where Frida died that I can pretend that we’re safe. Tonight, though…” She drew a deep breath. “Tonight, we’re too close to the place where it happened and that scares me. Would you have somebody drive past our cabins now and then? Just to check things out?”

  She didn’t say, “Since I think you followed me here to make sure I was safe, maybe you won’t mind doing me one more favor.” If he did indeed follow her, he knew it.

  “There will be officers out all night, looking for the person who did this to Frida,” McDaniel said. “It will be no trouble at all for them to swing through the campground from time to time. Maybe get out of the car while they’re there. Walk around and check things out. That would make anybody lurking in the bushes think again, don’t you think? You okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m okay. Well, I’m okay when I’m not thinking of Frida. Or Kali. Or of Laneer and Sylvia and Jeremiah. Or
of the person who did those terrible things. Which is to say, never.”

  “Only a sociopath could rest easy after seeing what you saw this morning. But you should close your eyes and try to rest anyway. First, though, draw your drapes. There are going to be a lot of officers of the law driving around outside your window. I’ll make sure of it. I wouldn’t want their headlights to keep you up.”

  By two a.m., Faye was not missing her privacy. She was thinking that maybe she never wanted to be alone again. She was wishing for the company of two or three lively young women. Stephanie, Ayesha, and Yvonna could have hopped on her bed to eat crackers and talk about their love lives for hours, and she would have been perfectly okay with that.

  Heck. Why limit the companions at her imaginary slumber party to the women on her crew? At this time of a dark, scary night, Faye would have been happy for Richard, Davion, and Jeremiah to crowd in with them while they all ate crackers and talked about boyfriends and girlfriends and whatever else young adults talked about these days. Cell phone plans, maybe?

  Faye would have been happy to see them all. A cabin that is delightfully isolated at noon can be a lonely place when the clock ticks past midnight.

  With every hour that passed, the shadows in the corners of Faye’s bedroom grew darker and the rustlings outside her window grew louder. Her hand kept reaching for the phone, aching to tap Joe’s number, but she couldn’t let herself admit to him that she was scared. It had been less that twenty-four hours since she had rejected his request (demand?) for her to come home, which he had made because he was scared. If she made that call and heard his quiet, comforting voice, she would cave. Before breakfast, she would be on a highway going south.

  Nope. Crime statistics were clear, and she knew them because she had looked them up. Something like two-thirds of murdered women in America are killed by an intimate partner, and the statistics are even worse for black women like Frida. What is more, only ten percent of murdered American women are killed by strangers. It was overwhelmingly likely that Frida was killed by someone she knew, and it was overwhelmingly likely that her killer had no interest in killing someone he didn’t know. Specifically, he had no interest in killing Faye, since she knew almost none of the people in the woman’s life.