Undercurrents

by Mary Anna Evans

  Nevertheless, Faye had gotten out of bed twice in an hour, once to jam a chair under the cabin’s front doorknob and again to jam a second chair beneath the knob of her bedroom door. Now she was eyeing her bedroom window, the entry point for the rustles and grunts made by every nocturnal animal in Memphis. Should she move her bed in front of the window, letting the headboard block most of the opening? Or would that cut off her escape if somebody homicidal made it past both of her inexpertly blocked doors?

  As much as she tried to herd her wandering mind onto safer paths, she found herself reliving the moment she had laid eyes on Frida’s face. The memory took her back to the moments afterward that she had spent freeing a living woman from the earth, feeling flesh under her hands and cold dirt under her knees.

  The wordless groaning of a mortally injured woman crawled back into her ears. It had never left her ears, not really. Every time Faye laid her head on her pillow, she heard Frida’s suffering voice.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It had been almost a full day, and still the police hadn’t shown up at his door.

  He’d been doing this for years without getting caught. By now, it was reasonable to assume that he never would, because he was that good at what he did.

  His cool façade covered a careful attention to detail. Rubber gardening gloves contained his fingerprints, and they kept his skin oils and DNA off the women’s bodies. If rape had interested him, he would have had more trouble keeping his DNA to himself, but no. Physical intimacy could never compare to the rush of locking eyes with a woman who knew to her soul that he was preparing to take every single minute she had left.

  He was obsessive about containing their hands, so he had a perfect record of staying out of reach of his victims’ razor-sharp nails. The trick was to incapacitate the woman fast, leaving her alive but unable to do a damn thing to save herself from the grave already waiting.

  A rain jacket with tight-drawn hood kept him from leaving behind a stray hair or flake of dandruff. The jacket’s surface, slick and waterproof, didn’t absorb blood, so it was easy to clean. So were the high-topped rubber boots and the water-repellent hiking pants.

  Not that he needed to clean any of his stuff very much. From the distance of a shovel handle, he usually managed to stay clear of spatter, and the shovel blade itself was easily cleaned. Most of the blood came off while he was shoveling dirt over the still-warm corpse.

  As the investigation cooled down, everything would leave his house, one piece at a time. Freshly washed with bleach, it would all be donated to charity or packed into garbage bags thrown deep into far-flung dumpsters. He got rid of the shovels quickly, after taking a sledgehammer to them. He’d gotten very good at making it look like they were going to the dump because they had finished their useful lives. As far as he was concerned, they had.

  All of this care didn’t mean that there wasn’t a dangerous window when the police might show up with a search warrant. He was smart enough to understand that he could never know when his tools were clean enough to fool a lab. The answer to that question was “Probably never.”

  It was far more important to fool the people doing the investigation. Evading their attention was what he did best. If they never got close enough to his trail to send evidence out for testing, then how could their forensics labs ever uncover the truth?

  After a kill, while the police were trying and failing to find him, his nervous itch had always subsided for a while. He could live for weeks, months sometimes, on the lingering thrill. It distracted him from the paycheck that was too small and the bills that were too large.

  But not this time. He’d been robbed of the climax to Frida’s murder. Another woman had come to save Frida, stealing his tender ritual of laying his victim’s limp form in the grave. She had left him hungry, and he was dangerous when he was hungry.

  He had followed the interloper, lurking close enough to see the warmth in her dealings with Frida’s little girl. The sight of Frida tenderly caring for a child was a trigger for him, and here it was again. Same child, different woman.

  Still hungry, he stood in the shadow of a yet another tree, leaning on a shovel and watching the dim light of a lamp through the window of his new quarry’s bedroom window…through Faye Longchamp-Mantooth’s bedroom window. He knew her name now. Sylvia should really learn to keep her mouth shut, and she should really stop texting all the time. Because of Sylvia, the whole world knew that Faye Longchamp had come upon Frida’s grave so quickly that the scent of his sweat must still have hung in the air.

  It should have been easy to burst through her window and do what had to be done, but for the steady stream of marked police cars cruising through the campground. Tonight was not the night, but she could remember something incriminating at any time. She had to be silenced.

  He hefted his shovel and faded into the woods, knowing that his chance would come soon enough.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Frida never left Faye’s mind, but work was always a distraction for her. She had thoroughly enjoyed their obvious glee as Ayesha, Stephanie, Richard, Davion, and Yvonna threw themselves into their morning in the museum’s archaeology lab. Still, she was counting the hours until McDaniel released the crime scene and they could get started digging.

  Dr. Nillsson, the rather staid matron who ran the museum, had greeted them by inviting them to use the lab’s microscopes. They’d hung back for a moment, until Faye said, “You’re not going to break them. They’re made to be used,” and that was all the reassurance the young people had needed. The five of them had whiled away an hour checking out the chipped edges of a collection of stone points, having so much fun that Faye was pretty sure they’d forgotten they were working.

  Then they’d enjoyed the outdoor exhibits, basically freaking out over the garden where museum staff grew traditional food and medicinal plants.

  “You’re saying that I can chew on this stick and make a toothache go away?” Yvonna said. “Get out.” Then she’d chewed on the stick until her mouth was too numb to talk right.

  The vegetables in the museum’s teaching garden reminded Faye of Laneer’s front-yard vegetable patch, and that reminded her of Kali. She wondered if the girl had started talking to Laneer and Sylvia again. If not, it hurt her to think of the girl sitting in silence, just because there was only one person she was willing to talk to and that person was busy working with old stuff. She promised herself a visit to Kali later in the day.

  Jeremiah gave all five students a sprig of mint to chew, then Davion noticed the nature trail leading to the thousand-year-old mounds that served as the centerpiece of the museum’s grounds. The group’s attention was diverted yet again. After touring the mounds at a run, they were back inside for the afternoon, and Faye was already exhausted. Jeremiah hadn’t even broken a sweat.

  “Check this out,” he said, dragging her over to a large display. “The museum brought in a group of high-schoolers to build this exhibit about their own community. Our community.”

  This was the point where Faye fell in love with Dr. Nilsson. She knew how much dedication it had taken for the museum director to get funding for an exhibit that might seem unimportant to people accustomed to the Met’s multi-billion-dollar collection. But those jaded museum-goers didn’t grow up in places like the struggling neighborhoods of Memphis.

  “Hey! My grandfather went to that high school,” said Richard, pointing at a fading photograph.

  “Mama says we’re part Choctaw,” Ayesha said as she peered at a collection of potsherds collected from the very creek where they’d be working.

  Yvonna, Richard, and Stephanie stood in front of a display of album covers, listening to music recorded in Memphis. The sounds seeped out around their earbuds, treating Faye to a heady mix of Beale Street blues, Elvis Presley rock ’n’ roll, and Isaac Hayes funk.

  The thumping bass of Hayes’ music turned Faye’s thoughts back to Kali
again, and to Laneer, too. Everything seemed to remind her of Frida and her bereaved family.

  “Jeremiah,” she said, drawing close and letting the music cover her voice. “You’re from around here. You knew Frida. You know the people who live here. Have you talked to any of them? Who do they think killed her?”

  He hesitated in his answer. Instead of letting him gather his thoughts, which she knew was the polite approach, she pressed ahead. “Who do you think killed her?”

  He was still slow in answering, but this time she didn’t push him and he eventually spoke.

  “No, I haven’t had a chance to talk to anybody. Well, I’m on Sylvia’s long list of people to gossip-text, but she hasn’t said anything you don’t already know. She’s ready to lock up all of Frida’s exes, and I can’t say that I blame her, but that can’t be a surprise to you. Other than Sylvia? I’m too busy with all this.” He gestured at the five eager young archaeologists in his care.

  “As for me?” he went on. “I don’t like to think about it. I don’t like to think that I know somebody who could do that to Frida. Even Linton. He slapped her once, yeah, and Kali saw it happen. It cost him his marriage. I will hate him forever for that. I—”

  His voice broke. He cleared his throat and tried again. “I’m not going to pretend that I don’t know a soul with a criminal record. I do. I wish I didn’t know the past of everybody in my neighborhood, but I do. Their stories aren’t all pretty. But mostly? We’re talking drugs. Petty theft. Breaking-and-entering. Stuff like that.”

  Faye wasn’t buying it. “You’re telling me that nobody ever uses a gun or a knife when they do their breaking-and-entering or petty stealing? Nobody’s dangerous? That seems like a stretch.”

  “Well, my stepbrother’s doing time for pulling a gun on Mayfield at the corner store, which is damn stupid when you think about how little money Mayfield usually has in his drawer. Didn’t pull the trigger, thank God, but that didn’t keep him out of prison, not with a record like his. And he belongs in prison. He really does, because he’s dangerous. But he’s not beat-a-woman-to-death-for-no-good-reason dangerous. At least, I don’t think so. Anyway, he didn’t kill Frida, not when he’s sitting in West Tennessee State Penitentiary.”

  Faye tried not to think about what it must be like to sit in a penitentiary, waiting for the years to go by. She watched the young people around her, learning to operate a microscope while they grooved to music that was older than they were, and she wondered if they were any older than Jeremiah’s stepbrother.

  “Just because he got caught, it doesn’t mean that they all do,” she pointed out.

  “True. But here’s something else for you to think about when you’re judging who’s dangerous and who’s not. People are good at fooling themselves. If you could peel back their skulls and look inside their heads, how many people doing time in the pen really thought they were going to use that gun? Not many, I don’t think. I think they see it as a shortcut.”

  Davion was back at one of the microscopes, using the hand with the wisdom tattoo to make a fine adjustment. Faye couldn’t imagine a man his age living behind bars for years on end.

  “A shortcut? You think they look at a gun and see a shortcut?”

  “Yeah. I think most of them pick up a gun, believing it’ll make all the people standing between them and some money just step aside. Like magic.”

  “Guns are magic? I guess maybe they are, when you want something that belongs to somebody else.”

  “I’m not saying it’s right. My stepbrother belongs where he is. He could’ve killed somebody or got himself killed. That’s why we have laws—to keep everybody alive. And hopefully happy. I’m just saying that I don’t think many people leave the house thinking ‘I’m gonna kill somebody today, and I’m gonna enjoy it.’ That’s who killed Frida. Somebody who doesn’t think twice about anybody but themselves. Somebody who left his house that morning planning to kill somebody and enjoy doing it.”

  “Do you know anybody like that?”

  “I certainly hope not. And I hope you don’t, either.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Three hours at the museum had proven to be the limit for Faye’s crew. Attention spans waned and, as the morning passed, blood sugar levels dropped. Tempers frayed. When Stephanie leaned toward Davion, locked eyes with him, and deliberately flicked out a finger that knocked a twenty-five-hundred-year-old spear point out of his hand, Faye knew that it was time to go.

  They all rode in Jeremiah’s car, which was old enough to have bench seats in both front and back, complete with seat belts. Nothing else, short of a van or a big SUV, would have carried the whole crew, but this tank did. Faye had thought that he’d need her car to help with transporting personnel, but Jeremiah was a self-sufficient man.

  Less than half an hour after Stephanie’s spear-flicking move, they were standing in the parking lot of the motel that would be their new home. Faye had grown more depressed by the mile after they left the museum’s verdant grounds. As they neared downtown, they sped past tourist-trap motels, chain restaurants, and strip malls for people desperate to shop. Spindly trees planted in parking lots were a sharp contrast to the trees they’d left behind, and it made Faye sad to look at them struggling to grow.

  After parking their cars, Faye and Jeremiah headed toward the motel lobby to check in, and also to make a decision that might be the most important one of the day: Where were they going to eat lunch? Faye judged that the blood-sugar situation was growing dire, so this decision couldn’t wait.

  The aging motel had a generic two-story façade and overflowing trash cans on either side of a front door that creaked as they passed through it. The lone clerk was slow to answer the bell, giving Faye time to look around the small lobby, where dirty footsteps crisscrossed a floor covered with small gray 1980s-era tiles grouted in black. Dusty silk flowers decorated the counter where she waited. Faye could hear her grandmother’s voice saying, “You get what you pay for.”

  Her heart fell when she thought of how happy her crew had been with their cabins, and their outdoor meals, and their burnt marshmallows. She’d taken a lot away from them when she’d decided to play it safe and move them here.

  She handed over her credit card. As she waited for the clerk to make key cards for them all, Jeremiah asked, “Where do you want to eat?”

  Faye had counted five overpriced and boring chain restaurants within an easy walk of the parking lot where her crew stood. Gesturing in their general direction, she said, “How much money did you save from the training budget? Can we afford to eat at any of these places?”

  “Maybe, if we make them to stick to soup. But no worries! I know a barbecue joint, not too far from Beale Street. It’s walking distance from here, and I get the family rate.”

  “You’re related to the owner?”

  “Not by blood, no. But that don’t mean we ain’t brothers. Armand and me? We go way back. Get me?”

  “Armand? Didn’t Frida—?”

  An unidentifiable look flickered over Jeremiah’s face. “Come to think of it, yeah. Frida started working for Armand a few months ago. Does that mean you wanna eat someplace else? It’s not really fair for Armand to lose business because of what some asshole did to Frida.”

  “No, it’s not. Let’s go.” Faye said this in a this-totally-doesn’t-weird-me-out tone of voice, but there was a place at her center that was shaken to think of walking in the workaday steps of the woman she’d only known while she was dying.

  She shook it off.

  “You’re telling me that Armand knows how to do barbecue right?”

  “Massage the pig pieces with a dry rub. Cook it low and slow. Serve it just like you cooked it. No sauce. Ain’t no other way to do it that’s worth the time.”

  Joe, who was a fan of beef barbecued after a long marinade and served with lots of sauce, would have begged to differ, but Joe was not
there.

  Within minutes, Faye and the others were following Jeremiah toward Beale Street like a line of ducklings trailing after their mother. The closer they got to the historic music district, the more people they saw who were obviously on vacation.

  “I know it’s hot, but you gotta step it up.” Jeremiah barked. “It’s a Saturday and it’s July. The tourists are out. If we let them get to the barbecue first, there won’t be a rib left to gnaw on.”

  As they hustled to catch up, he enticed them by explaining why they were passing restaurant after restaurant as they walked in ninety-five-degree heat.

  “At Armand’s, you gotta get the ribs. Or the pulled pork. If you’re not real hungry, get the pulled pork sandwich. And, oh God, wait until you chase it with a bite of Armand’s slaw. Really mustardy. Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth gave me a nice lunch budget, and Armand likes me, so we’re getting dessert, too. Lemon cream pie. Chocolate fudge pie. Peach lattice pie. You’re sweating now, but you’re all gonna thank me when we get where we’re going. I’m serious.”

  Armand was as suave as his name. His high-top fade haircut looked like it was precision-cut weekly, and it set off his sensual mouth and strong bone structure very nicely. Faye might have been married, but she still had eyes.

  Armand’s name was on the “Armand’s Rib Palace” sign, but Armand didn’t cook nor wait tables nor tend bar, not that Faye could see. He greeted guests at the door. He snapped his fingers at waitstaff and pointed at glasses and bread baskets that needed filling. He moved easily from table to table, visiting with his guests without intruding on their conversations or overstaying his welcome.