Undercurrents

by Mary Anna Evans

  No pictures or descriptions of the workers’ quarters had survived, which was in itself noteworthy. Many CCC crews working together for months and years during the Depression had produced community newsletters, but the history of the Sweetgum State Park workers was lost in silence. Faye suspected this was because this crew, in the segregated 1930s, had been all African-American.

  Other newsletters had pictures of large barracks used for housing. If a structure that size had been built here, Faye stood a decent chance of finding remnants of it. But maybe something ephemeral like rustic cabins or even tents had been considered good enough for a black crew, and there wouldn’t be much left of those for her to find.

  Faye could hear her own African ancestors whispering in her ear. “You like a challenge. Find something that will bring those forgotten people back to the world’s memory.”

  Their voices echoed in her head while she followed Davion and Stephanie, listening to them tell her about their machete work. Accompanying them all was a softer voice, and Faye was pretty sure that it was Frida’s voice in better days. It was a sweet voice, without the rasp of pain that Faye had heard in her groans, and it was saying, “Find the answers. Remember us. Remember us all.”

  GPS receiver in hand, she walked the site boundaries with Stephanie and Davion, who were rightfully proud of their long, straight cuts through the underbrush. With such good machete work, the walking was easy until Faye felt her left ankle roll under her.

  Her boots saved her from a broken ankle or even a sprained one, but nothing could save her from the inevitability of inertia. Her toe was caught on the edge of the depression that had turned her ankle, but her body was moving forward and Faye’s flailing arms weren’t going to stop it. She was going down.

  Her right knee struck the ground, followed quickly by her left knee and the palms of both hands. The right one still held the GPS and she had a sick feeling that she was about to break both her neck and an expensive piece of field equipment. For a moment, she thought she had a fighting chance to keep from doing a face-plant, but no. Her chin hit the ground hard as she finished crumpling.

  Ayesha and Davion were kneeling beside her in an instant, calling for help all the while.

  Faye was more jolted than hurt, but she was moving slow as she gathered herself. Head swimming, she was able to rise to her hands and knees, but then she had to linger in that position until the trees stopped spinning around her.

  She handed the GPS to Davion who said, “Stop worrying about the equipment. It’s fine.”

  The uneven earth that had tripped her was palpable under her hands, a straight-edged raised line. Faye’s dazed eyes still weren’t working quite right, but she was perfectly capable of recognizing something this obviously man-made by touch. She groped to her left and right, following the line as it extended beside her and behind her. It made a perfect rectangle, long and narrow.

  Faye reached for her pocket. By feel, she poked the button on her phone that would take her to Detective McDaniel and was quickly rewarded with his voice saying, “Hello, Faye.”

  “I’ve found something. I’m in the woods, so far from the creek that I have to be well outside your crime scene, so your people didn’t check it out. You need to see this.”

  The grave—and that is what it was, a grave—was old, and there was no evidence of recent activity associated with it. Faye and McDaniel had put their heads together and decided to wait the morning out before deciding if her project could continue. Faye was holding out hope.

  “It only makes sense that you’ll want to focus on the area surrounding the old burial. We can start our survey far, far away,” she said to him. “You’ll hardly know we’re here.”

  “I’ll think about it, Faye,” he had said. “But no promises.”

  She looked at her crew, huddled around Jeremiah and looking like they needed to do something or explode. “I guess I’ll take them back to the motel and…oh, I don’t know…pony up a few bucks for pay-per-view.”

  “Can you send them with Jeremiah?”

  Her face must have spoken for her, and it must have said a resounding “Why?”, because he explained himself quickly. “I could use you here.”

  Faye said, “Then I guess they can watch pay-per-view without me.” She called Jeremiah over and sent her workers away with instructions to make themselves a big pile of sandwiches to eat in front of the TV.

  Standing in the parking lot and watching them go, McDaniel said, “Now that I have your undivided attention, how old is that grave?”

  “Don’t know for sure, but I have some ideas.”

  In her trunk was her briefcase packed with an extensive sequence of historical aerial photos of the area around Sweetgum State Park. She spread the photos across the hood of her car and gave him a visual tour of west Memphis history. The photos covered eighty years at varied intervals—1938, 1951, 1963, 1973, 1987, 1997, 2002, and 2010. Using a magnifier, she showed him what she’d learned while preparing for the project that she was apparently never going to get to start.

  “Look right here. The grave was in an area that was wooded just after the CCC crew built the park. It stayed that way for a long time, but then see what happened in the late 1990s?”

  “Somebody cut a lot of trees.”

  “Yep. A good chunk of the study area was cleared and it stayed cleared until well into this century. I asked around and people tell me that those trees were cut in preparation for a lodge construction project that never happened.”

  “Like now. You’re here because they want to build a lodge, right?”

  “More like a campground with mostly cabins. Anyway, the park kept the area mowed for a while. People even put up some unauthorized volleyball nets, but the vegetation eventually came back in and they stopped coming here. It’s not much fun to play volleyball in a blackberry patch. Since then, the area has been slowly going back to nature. You can see the trees growing in over time on the later photos.”

  “And this tells us what?”

  “Not very much, from your standpoint. I’m thinking that this wasn’t the best place to hide a body when people were using it for recreation, so that’s something useful to know. I’m also thinking that if the grave had already been here while they were coming and going on a daily basis, somebody would have noticed it. It would have been sinking, and somebody besides me would have tripped over it.”

  “If a volleyball player was running in to set the ball, and she took a fall like you did, she’d have broken every bone in her face.”

  “Exactly.”

  His eyes roamed over her face. “Speaking of that, how are you feeling? Bruises? Cuts? Do I need to get you to an emergency room?”

  Faye waved the question away. “I’m fine. But let me finish telling you about the photos. My best guess is that the grave was dug after people stopped playing volleyball here. Say, maybe sometime after 2010 or so. But it wasn’t dug yesterday. It’s had time to sink, and it was covered with a thick layer of pine straw and leaf litter when I found it. Well, when my clumsy foot found it.”

  “You did better than we did.”

  She gave him another dismissive wave of her hand. “I got lucky. How were you supposed to find a shallow dent in the ground, covered in leaves and way outside your search area? You certainly defined a reasonably large piece of ground for your search. What were you going to do? Search the whole park? All of Memphis?”

  “Maybe. If that’s what it takes. I should have searched more than I did.”

  “We don’t even know if the bones your people found in that grave are related to Frida’s death.”

  A woman approached them, stripping off her protective gloves and goggles. Her blond-and-gray hair was pulled back in a short, no-nonsense ponytail. As McDaniel jogged in her direction, he called back to Faye, “If my forensics people are any good at all, they’re about to answer that question.”


  His tone of voice caught Faye’s ear. He sounded like maybe he didn’t think his forensics people were any good, and this was the first time she’d heard him even suggest such a thing.

  He jogged a few more steps, then stopped short. Turning around and walking back toward Faye, he said, “The evidence here is a grave full of old bones. That’s what you do for a living. That’s my forensic archaeologist over there, telling me to hurry, but two heads are better than one. Would you like to come with me and take a look at this skeleton she dug up?”

  Faye was pretty sure that Dr. Margaret Broome did not appreciate her presence. Professional jealousy was the norm in their business, and it probably was the norm in everyone’s business, but Dr. Broome truly had nothing to worry about. Faye did not want her job. She most certainly did not play the one-upmanship games that would prompt her to make her colleague look stupid in front of Detective McDaniel. To signal that she was no threat, she stood by quietly as Dr. Broome spoke, trying to ignore the fact that the woman was a nitwit.

  Dr. Broome was nervous. She moved too fast. She spoke too fast. Faye admired scientists who were deliberate and imperturbable, and Dr. Broome was neither.

  Nervous scientists forgot things. This could be forgiven if they took careful notes, so they could backtrack when they needed to jog their memories. Dr. Broome didn’t even do that. Her field notebook had been dangling unused at her side since Faye first laid eyes on her.

  Nervous scientists also missed things. While Dr. Broome blathered on and on to McDaniel, repeating herself and even contradicting herself, Faye’s attention was focused on a small object a few feet behind the nervous archaeologist. It was barely dime-sized, protruding from the side of the spoil pile of soil removed from the old grave. The spoil pile was only light dirt-brown. The object was dark dirt-brown and it called to her.

  Faye walked over to the spoil pile, careful to touch nothing and to step in areas already networked with footprints. She could feel Dr. Broome’s eyes boring into her back, but she was only going to stop what she was doing if McDaniel said so. He kept his silence.

  Pulling a magnifier out of her pocket, she crouched down to look at the object.

  McDaniel’s curiosity finally got the better of him. He called out to her. “Whatcha got, Faye?”

  “A flower. Dried. About two centimeters in diameter. Maybe a little less.”

  Dr. Broome’s gray eyes raked across the ground around them. It was dotted with the lavender flowers of horsemint, growing in dappled woodland shade. “There are flowers everywhere around here. Your point is…?”

  “My point is that this looks like a flower you’d buy from a florist. There’s only a stub of a stem, but it’s stiff, and you can see that there was a substantial crown of petals. And it’s still showing a lot of red, like maybe it was dyed. It looks like a chrysanthemum to me.”

  Dr. Broome’s lips pursed in…what? Tension? Anger? Frustration? Embarrassment?

  Faye couldn’t tell, but she was relieved to hear the woman’s response, which was the correct one. “We’re going to need to sift that backdirt. Pronto.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  It was too much to hope that Dr. Broome would let Faye or her crew help with the backdirt-sifting. She had insisted on doing it herself, as if determined to atone for something that truly could have happened to anybody. The flower she had missed was, after all, very small, and it was the color of dirt.

  Faye might not be welcome to help but she sure as hell wanted to watch, and McDaniel had said okay. They had settled themselves in two folding chairs several feet away from the slowly dwindling spoil pile, and they were watching the warring emotions on Dr. Broome’s face as she found one tiny object after another. The woman obviously hated herself for dropping the ball. Rightly or wrongly, she almost certainly hated Faye. If Faye hadn’t found the chrysanthemum, she would have never known that she had failed.

  The finds that were embarrassing Dr. Broome so much were all flowers, tiny ones that anyone could have missed. Every one of them was dwarfed by the faded red chrysanthemum that, after years of withering, was now smaller than the end of Faye’s pinkie finger. They looked to Faye like individual blossoms of baby’s breath, a flower usually seen as a cloud of tiny white blooms. Like the dyed red chrysanthemum, babies’ breath would almost certainly have come from a florist.

  “You’re going to hate me.” McDaniel’s eyes stayed on Dr. Broome, but he was talking to Faye.

  “For what?” She also kept her eyes on the forensic archaeologist, because she, too, could do the play-it-cool-and-don’t-make-eye-contact thing.

  “I told you that I’d try to fix it so that your people could keep working. There’s a lot of territory between this body and the creek. It made sense that you could be doing archaeology over by the creek while we did our work way back here. But now—”

  “Now you’re thinking that you didn’t cast a wide enough net after Frida died and you can’t afford to do that again.”

  “Yeah.” Still no eye contact. “I need to throw everything I’ve got at this, and I need everybody out of this part of the park. I’m sorry, Faye. I made a mistake last time and, because of that, I missed this burial. I can’t afford to make the same mistake again. What if I miss clues that will nail the person who did this? Or the one who killed Frida?”

  “You don’t think it might have been the same person?”

  “I can’t jump straight to that conclusion. I know you love your serial killer theory, but I don’t see it.”

  “But the women in Corinth and Earle. Same age, same race, not raped—”

  “Don’t hate me when I say this, but this is what I do for a living and I’m going to tell you straight. A lot of young black women get murdered in this country. It’s a damn shame and it makes me sick inside, but they do. It’s my job to make it stop, and I can’t. That makes me sick inside, too.”

  He quit talking and his gaze dropped to his hands, one on each thigh. He looked like he wanted to be doing something useful with them.

  He finally looked at her again, catching her eye as if wanting to be sure she heard and understood. “How can I say this to you? You look at a cluster of murders of young black women and see a pattern that maybe takes in Mississippi and Arkansas. I look at the same thing and I see a pattern that takes in the whole country. You want to believe there’s one killer, because that means we can find him and make it stop. I just wish that were true.”

  “But the ones in Mississippi and Arkansas showed an obsession with burial—”

  “Two or three killers got their shit together well enough to dig a good grave, instead of dumping their victim in a ditch. Big deal.”

  “It’s a coincidence that they were all found in July?”

  “One out of twelve murdered women, or something like that, get buried in July. Actually, more, because murders peak in the summertime”

  “Are they usually raped? Robbed?”

  “No, not always. I just don’t see a pattern that says ‘serial killer.’ I know you want me to, but I don’t.”

  He flicked his eyes her way in what she thought might possibly be a hint of apology. But she also saw the look of a man who was confident in his experience and proud of it.

  “You’re the expert,” she said, because it was true, but not because it made him right.

  “Well, you’re the expert in bones that have been buried for a long time. How long do you think this body’s been in the ground? You said 2010 or thereabouts before. Now that you’ve seen the bones, does that opinion still stand?”

  “Based on the condition of the body and the look of the soil? In addition to the activity I saw on those old aerial photos? I’d say five years, give or take a few years, so yeah. There’s nothing here to change the opinion I gave you before.”

  The eyes finally flicked her way and they were frustrated.

  “It’s not
an exact science,” she said. “I’m sorry. Your forensics lab may be able to narrow that date range down.”

  “I’ve got people searching our missing persons data to try to figure out who the victim was. I’ll tell them to pay close attention to that time window. So by your logic, I should be looking at missing persons from 2010 all the way up to now, since this supposed serial killer has been active for five years, seven years, maybe more?”

  “I sure hope not.”

  He looked around them, at the open woodland and the thicket beyond. “Well, this isn’t a bad place to hide a body. There could be others out there. Maybe the same killer put ’em there. Maybe not. Either way, I need to search this whole end of the park. How would you do that?”

  “Dr. Broome probably has ideas. It’s her project.”

  “I asked you.”

  Now he definitely was not making eye contact. He was watching his own forensic archaeologist, whose professional judgment he was clearly beginning to doubt.

  “Ground penetrating radar comes immediately to mind. LIDAR—that’s short for light detection and ranging—is great if you’ve got the budget for somebody to fly around in an airplane.”

  “If you’re right that there’s a serial killer crossing state lines, it’ll be the FBI’s budget. They can afford whatever they want to afford. Until then, I’m not sure how much money I can pry out of the department. And if I’m going to lose jurisdiction on this case, I’m not sure I have the time to drag in the fancy equipment beforehand.”

  “What about drones? They’re cheap. Put a camera on one and you can see a lot. You can still do the GPR and LIDAR later, but drones give you quick-and-dirty information. You don’t have to wait for someone to come out and operate them, because you can do it yourself. And you don’t have to wait for them to interpret the data, either. The best thing? You can get a drone at the toy store, if you have to.”