Catacombs

by Mary Anna Evans

  Faye ducked into the meeting room seconds before Joe’s session was due to start. She hated to be late, because she knew it would stress him out if he thought she wasn’t coming. Nevertheless, it would stress him out worse if she had to explain how the dark, wet stains splashed across her pant legs got there and why she smelled like root beer.

  The room was full, with only a few open seats in the back. She grabbed one. Faye was ecstatic to see Joe’s talk get this kind of reception, but she had known it would. There were a lot of people in the world who would be fascinated by the things Joe could do, if they only knew he existed. Nobody ever imagined a stone tool that Joe couldn’t make.

  Cully settled into the chair beside her just before Joe started to speak, and Jakob flopped into the one next to Cully. Most of the other faculty had done the collegial thing and come to hear Joe. Faye saw Sadie Raincrow sitting right up front, next to Dr. Althorp. Dr. Dell was sitting directly in front of Faye. She smelled Dr. Dell before she saw her, because she had the aroma of someone who had spent the previous night binge-drinking. Faye guessed that the several drinks she saw the woman down during the party had been followed by a lot more when she was alone in her room afterward, and this made her feel sad.

  Joe’s chair was on a raised platform so that everybody in the room could get a good look at his gloved hands. He wore safety glasses, which he should really do all the time when he was making stone chips fly. Not that he listened when Faye nagged him about it.

  Joe turned his face to the crowd but said nothing. They quieted immediately, and Faye realized that her husband had just exerted the same trick of charisma that she’d seen Cully use when faced with a mob of white supremacists. Maybe Cully and Joe were closer kin than they thought. And maybe Joe had gifts that he didn’t know about yet, because he’d never had the chance to tap them.

  He gestured toward the tarp at his feet. “I’m going to be making a lot of rock chips here today, so please stay in your seats when I’m working. The chips are gonna fly farther than you expect.”

  Faye knew that this was true. She liked to go barefoot outside, and this meant that she’d stepped on Joe’s rock chips more than a few times. They were like little tiny knives.

  “I put this tarp down around my feet because it ain’t fair to leave chips for the nice people who sweep up around here.”

  Faye thought of Grace and the rest of the hotel staff. They had more than enough to do without cleaning up Joe’s tiny knives.

  “Here’s something you should know about those chips. My wife and I have a cultural resources firm and we do a lot of archaeology in places where people flintknapped their tools a long time ago. The chips they left behind look pretty much like the chips I’m making right now. If you’re flintknapping outside, just throw a penny down near your feet and leave it there. That way, if Faye and I dig it up someday, we’ll know we aren’t looking at something left behind a thousand years ago or more.”

  Oh, joy. He was promoting their business right up front. Joe had been worried that he’d be too nervous to remember everything he needed to say, but he was doing great. He didn’t have a lot of experience doing public speaking, but Joe was always relaxed when he had a rock in his hand.

  A voice rose up from the front row. “This penny we’re supposed to leave with our debitage…does it need to be a penny made the very same year when we’re working?”

  This question told Faye a lot about the asker. By his use of the word “debitage,” Faye knew that his interest in flintknapping was serious and he had done a lot of reading on the subject. His concern about the date on the penny said that he probably didn’t have an archaeologist’s sense of the scale of time.

  Joe grinned. “Could be. Wouldn’t hurt. But I don’t think it matters all that much. In the grand scheme of things, there ain’t much difference between 2019 and 1968, do you think? Not when the people the archaeologists are studying lived in the 1500s or the 1100s or maybe even before that. For somebody living in the 1100s, people nowadays, and their stuff, would pretty much all look alike to them. Or at least they would look equally weird.”

  Everybody laughed and Joe took the opportunity to regain control of his topic. “I’m using flint here.” He held up his left hand and showed them a chunk of rock. “You could use chert or jasper or a lot of other things, even glass. Some people like to use beer bottle bottoms, and I gotta say that they do turn out pretty, green and brown and blue and shiny. But we’re here to talk about rocks.”

  He brandished the brown chunk of stone. “How do you pick a good rock for chipping? Here’s one way. If you find a rock you might want to try, give it a sharp tap. The higher the pitch, the better the rock, when it comes to chipping stone.”

  He held up a different object in his left hand. “See this? You can make a knapping tool out of lots of different materials, but I like antler. Listen to the sound when I tap this rock with a chunk of antler.”

  He held the rock and the chipping tool next to the microphone and banged them together. A high-pitched clink sounded, and a murmur followed it as people turned to their neighbors and said things like “That’s cool” and “I’ve gotta remember that one.”

  People were taking pictures and videos on their phones. Some of them were even taking notes on old-fashioned paper. Faye was so proud.

  “If you’re working with good material, you get about a hundred-degree angle from a solid strike. Like this.” He held up both hands, forming an angle with his palms that was a bit more open than a right angle. Then he struck the piece of flint and held up the broken pieces. “That’s what you call ‘percussion flaking.’”

  He leaned down and handed the pieces to a woman on the front row. “Here. Take a look, then pass them around.” Picking up another piece of rock, he held it up to show the crowd.

  “Other times, like when you’re shaping an edge, you might want to use ‘pressure flaking.’ Like this.”

  He pressed the antler hard against the stone’s edge and a sharp, slender flake broke off. Then, again, he passed the example rocks around for everybody to see and feel. Joe was a hands-on learner and he was apparently a hands-on teacher, too.

  He was looking out at the audience now, making Faye acutely aware of her stained pant legs. She was sitting on the aisle and it was just barely possible that Joe would notice them from where he sat. If wondering what had happened to her made him too distracted to give a good talk, she would need to go outside and throttle a few protesters, and she didn’t want to do that. She reached down and tucked her pant legs in her boots.

  Cully was still deeply, silently angry. Faye felt his anger more than she saw it. His leg, pressed close to hers by the jammed-together chairs where they sat, tensed and trembled. She looked at the leg instead of Cully, because she worried that his temper might get the best of him if she looked into his eyes. Around the hem of his pale gray pants, she could see a faint spatter of brown stains. He hadn’t been standing far enough away from her to completely miss the spray of root beer.

  Jakob shifted uncomfortably in his seat on Cully’s other side. She thought at first that he was just an older man with too many aches to enjoy sitting in a cheap folding chair. But then she looked at his eyes. They kept returning to Cully’s glowering face. Jakob was worried about his friend, and Faye could see that he wanted to do something to help. In that moment, she understood Jakob. He felt like it was his job as Cully’s friend to help him be the best he could be. Maybe that was his job as his director, too.

  Sometimes, she felt that way about Joe. She felt like he needed her to smooth a path for him. Make things easier. Keep him from getting in his own way. Maybe this was the job of a person who loved an artist.

  For reasons that she could have never explained, she thought that it was too much to ask some artists to return the favor. They weren’t wired that way emotionally. They had other gifts to give.

  Joe could do it. Joe look
ed out for Faye every day of their lives. But Cully? She wasn’t sure about him. Jakob looked out for him, but Jakob might well be on his own.

  Today, she wanted to give Joe the gift of her own independence. She didn’t need him to be worried about her. She needed him to shine as only he could.

  The white supremacist rabble-rouser had rattled her with his can of root beer, but she planned to hold herself together, for Joe’s sake. She hoped Cully could do the same, too, at least well enough to sit through Joe’s hour-long talk. She wished that she’d told him not to bother her husband about the root beer incident. There was no need for Joe to know that his wife had a problem that he couldn’t help her fix.

  * * *

  Jakob would have known his friend was upset, even if they hadn’t been squeezed into their chairs, thigh touching thigh. If there was one thing Jakob knew, it was actors. He’d directed too many films to be under any illusion about their mental stability. Or lack thereof.

  As actors went, Cully was a model of mental health. Usually.

  He could be kind. He had called Jakob on every one of his last forty-eight birthdays.

  He was unfailingly generous. Jakob didn’t know how many flutes Cully had given away over the years, and he wagered that few of the recipients had any idea how long it took to craft the deceptively simple-looking instruments.

  For an actor, he had a manageable ego. By this, Jakob meant that Cully knew exactly how handsome he was and he knew how to use his looks to his benefit, but he was, in the end, self-aware enough to know he was doing it. He could poke fun at himself, and Jakob knew precious few people who could do that, actor or not.

  In Jakob’s observation, Cully’s mental health grew rocky when he had uninterrupted time to brood. This is a problem for a composer, whose job asks him to lock himself in a studio for weeks on end. It had been a bigger problem in recent years, since Cully lost his wife. Cully and Sue, alone in that house far from Los Angeles and its bustle, had enjoyed the comfortable lives of two homebodies in love.

  For three years now, Cully had lived without her in that big house in a canyon far away from everything, with no place to put his energy except into his music and the long hikes that kept his body in fine working order for a man his age. His musical output had been astonishing, fresher and newer than anyone would expect from a man his age, but Jakob doubted that he’d enjoyed a truly happy moment in all that time. If Cully and Sue had been blessed with children instead of a long series of miscarriages, so many things would have been different.

  Jakob was still able to coax Cully out of his canyon from time to time. He was glad for the time with his friend, but he wouldn’t necessarily say that their visits were fun. Cully’s sense of humor, always dark, was obsidian-black these days.

  In their younger days, when their Saturday nights were spent careening from bar to bar, Jakob’s job had been to stand between Cully and his temper. They both carried a few minor scars from the fights Jakob couldn’t stave off, but he fully believed that there would be a career-ending scar on Cully’s face right now if Jakob hadn’t been there to reel him in.

  For this reason, Jakob’s habit was to keep an eye on his friend’s emotional status at all times. Maybe that’s why Cully had invited him on this trip, because he knew he would need somebody to monitor his mental state. Today, Jakob would describe that mental state as “twitchy.” This was not a good thing.

  Chapter Twenty

  An enthusiastic crowd encircled Joe, and Faye was so happy. Some of them had brought their own flintknapping projects to show him. Sweet-natured Joe praised unidentifiable and misshapen chunks of stone with the same enthusiasm that he showed for exquisitely chipped Clovis-style points that could easily pass for the real thing.

  Others in the crowd were fondling the points that Joe had brought for visual aids. The savviest among them would see from their precise, symmetrical detail exactly how skilled Faye’s husband really was. Some of those savvy people would have the budget to hire him to give a talk like this in another city. Another state. Maybe someday another country.

  Jakob and Cully had slipped away when they saw that they weren’t going to be able to speak to Joe. Faye had lingered until she, too, saw that there was no way to fight her way through the crowd, which made her perversely glad. Now she had an excuse to skedaddle up to their hotel room and change pants. Joe would never have to know about her encounter with a root beer-throwing bigot.

  According to Faye’s wristwatch, the enthusiastic crowd was messing with Carson’s carefully planned schedule. It was way past time for Stacy to do her talk on the history of tribal storytelling in Oklahoma in the years since the Trail of Tears.

  Faye looked around for Stacy, so that she could wish her luck. She didn’t see her, but Carson’s big body and shaggy blond head were hard to miss. He saw her looking at him and hurried to her side.

  Carson skipped hello. He didn’t even start with, “Wasn’t Joe great?” He went straight to “Have you seen Stacy?”

  “Not this morning, no.”

  Carson’s eyes never stopped scanning the faces around him as he spoke. “I don’t understand it. She would never be late for this talk, but she’s dang close to missing it altogether. When it comes to her career, Stacy is…”

  “Intense?”

  “Yeah. Intense. She’s not answering her phone. I knocked on her door and nobody answered. I thought maybe she’d gone to breakfast and left her phone behind, but she’s not here, and now I’m officially worried.”

  “Is it time to ask Kaayla about opening up Stacy’s room to see if she’s in there, sick or hurt?”

  Carson scanned the room once more. “Yeah. It’s time.”

  * * *

  As it turned out, they could have bypassed Kaayla and just taken the elevator straight to Stacy’s room. When the three of them—Carson, Kaayla, and Faye—reached Stacy’s door, they found it open. There were two housekeeping carts in the hall. A stout blond woman was stacking towels on the far cart but nobody was standing with the one outside Stacy’s room, where the noise of a vacuum wafted out into the hall.

  When they entered, they found Grace busily vacuuming the room’s elegant brown-and-gold-patterned carpet. She jumped like she’d been caught stealing, then she looked at Kaayla with a question on her face.

  “Hello, Grace. We’re looking for Dr. Wong. Have you seen her?”

  “Is this her room? There wasn’t anybody in it when I got here.”

  “Is her computer here?” Carson asked, and Grace’s brow furrowed.

  “I haven’t touched any of her things, truly,” she said quickly. “Everything is just as she left it.”

  Faye hurried to ease her concern. “Nobody’s accusing you of anything, Grace. We’re just worried about Dr. Wong.”

  “If Stacy left here to do her speech, she would have taken her computer with her,” Carson said. “She said that she’d be bringing all of her audiovisuals on her computer.”

  “Her computer? It’s right here,” Kaayla said, standing at the room’s small desk. “It’s plugged into the electronics port. We’ve installed one in all the rooms.”

  Faye saw a white cord dangling from the port. “Here’s her phone charger. I don’t know why she’s not answering her phone, but it looks like she has it with her. Does anything else look unusual?”

  The bed was unmade, rumpled on just one side. There was nothing in the trash can but a coffee cup and a potato chip bag.

  Faye didn’t know what else to do but check the bathroom.

  She found nothing in the bathroom more surprising than a towel on the floor and a makeup bag on the counter. The shower curtain was half-closed. Faye couldn’t say why she felt like she’d entered a crime scene, but she did feel that. Or maybe she felt more like she’d stepped onto the set of Psycho.

  Faye peered around the shower curtain without touching it, because she felt lik
e she should keep her fingerprints to herself. She stuck her head out of the bathroom and said, “The tub is dry and the towel is almost dry. If Stacy showered this morning, it was very, very early. Unless you’ve already cleaned it, Grace.”

  Grace shook her head.

  Faye checked the area around the sink. “Her toothbrush looks dry.”

  When she came out of the bathroom, Carson said, “Stacy is pretty finicky about how she looks. I’m gonna say that the dry shower and toothbrush tell us the same thing that the computer does. When she left, she thought she’d be coming back here before she gave her presentation.”

  “Yep, I agree. She was coming back. Or she thought she was,” Faye said, her heart sinking.

  She would have dropped, discouraged, onto the chair beside the bed, but a black wool suit, stylishly cut, was already there. The jacket was artfully spread across the chair’s back, and the skirt and blouse were draped over one overstuffed arm. On the floor in front of the chair, Faye saw a pair of high-heeled pumps. A pair of pantyhose, still in their cardboard packaging, lay on a small table beside the chair. Beside it was a matching set of lingerie in petal-pink lace—bra, camisole, and panties.

  Stacy’s beautiful underwear communicated vulnerability in a way that her computer and her toothbrush had not. Faye’s eyes burned with sudden tears. Her friend had put a lot of effort into making sure her clothes were perfect for her big presentation. The owner of this underwear had not walked away and forgotten to show up.

  “I’m calling the police,” Carson said.

  “Good idea,” Faye said as her hand went to her own phone, but not to call the police. She knew that local police usually handled missing persons cases. Just because Stacy had vanished the day after a deadly bomb blast in the same hotel complex, it didn’t mean that investigating it was the job of the FBI. Still, Faye’s gut said that there was a link. If she was right that Stacy’s disappearance was somehow connected to the bombing, then she supposed that the FBI would eventually step in. Why not now?