A queasy silence fell. Most everyone in the room developed a consuming interest in their toes, but Faye kept her eyes focused on their faces. They didn’t all agree with this man’s racist poison. She knew it. All the way back from the Pavilion, they had talked about Judd’s ordeal and she’d heard the revulsion in their voices. How did this dried-up little old man turn them into cowards?
“Preston Silver…” began the least lily-livered man in the room, but a quick glance silenced him. Faye watched Silver’s lizard eyes rake the room, lingering on her own dark face longer than she liked.
Sheriff Rutland, the only person in the room that Faye was sure had the gumption to stand up to him, hid her face by bending over the bag hanging on the back of her father’s wheelchair. Pulling out a spoon and a jar of puréed peas, she asserted her authority only far enough to say, “Stop stirring things up, Preston. It’s not constructive.” She opened the baby food jar. Faye was close enough to smell the sick-sweet, green odor of the peas.
Watching Neely’s father’s visible enjoyment of his jar of green paste and noticing a bulge in his trousers in the shape of an adult diaper, Faye was inclined to forgive the woman for her temporary cowardice. She wasn’t clear how far she herself wanted to go in stirring up a confrontation, but it wasn’t in Faye’s nature to slink away and let a bigot dominate an important conversation.
“Speaking of medals,” she piped up, “I hear that Congressman Judd’s up for the Congressional Medal of Freedom—the highest honor our country can give a civilian. If his speech today doesn’t make the national news, you know it will if that medal comes through. It will look a lot better for Neshoba County if Judd’s attacker is behind bars, and you’re throwing a parade for the man who rescued him.”
Silver’s gaze swiveled her way, then everybody else in the room lifted their eyes from their toes and focused them on her. Dr. Mailer had brought the team to the Fair to get acquainted with the locals. Well, she may not have strictly made their acquaintance, but she surely had their attention.
Thinking of Dr. Mailer, she realized that she’d barely seen him since they’d arrived at the Pavilion. Oka Hofobi, Toneisha, Chuck, and Bodie—they’d all faded away after Judd’s speech. She and Joe should probably ease out of this party, too, but she couldn’t bring herself to slink away and let Silver think he’d intimidated her. She decided to have one more beer and leave when it was empty. Joe, who knew her well, leaned far to the left and accessed the nearest cooler with his long, rangy arm. He grabbed the can on top, without checking to see whether it was the tastiest cheap brand, and opened it for her. Faye drank slowly, trying to calculate how long she should make her twelve-fluid-ounce stalling tactic last.
Silver rose from his chair with a grunt and disappeared into the kitchen. Calhoun and their friends followed him. Faye took a long sip.
The blonde woman handed Faye a bag of chips. “I didn’t know that Congressman Judd was up for the Medal of Freedom. That is so cool. And he’s from right here in Neshoba County.”
“Too bad we didn’t treat him better when we had him,” said the Molly Hatchet fan, passing Faye the French onion dip. “I’m Todd and this is my wife, Jennifer.” He gestured to the blonde. “What’s your name, anyway? You’re not from around here, are you?”
“I’m Faye and this is my friend, Joe. We’re with the archaeological team working out at the Nail place.”
“You folks ran into a little trouble yesterday, didn’t you?” Jennifer said. “Is everybody okay?”
“Everybody’s fine,” Sheriff Rutland said, still spooning mashed peas. “I gotta say that I never thought a bunch of scholars would have such guts. You two in particular. I believe you could chew the heads off nails.”
“Faye eats nails for breakfast.” Joe popped open a beer of his own.
“That’s how I get my minimum daily requirement of iron.” Faye quaffed about half the beer. She was gratified to hear laughter come from all corners of the room. If Silver felt like lynching her, he wouldn’t be able to count on these people to help him.
Faye leaned close to Neely’s ear, so that she couldn’t be heard by Calhoun in the next room. Or by any spies remaining behind. “You know, Sheriff, Mr. Calhoun’s mound is really important. I spent just a minute on top of it yesterday, and I got a new perspective on the lay of the land all around it.”
“I know what you mean. I spent last night up there, you know.”
“I do know, and I want to shake your hand for what you did yesterday.” Neely stuck out a hand and Faye pumped it once. “As I was saying, you get a good feel for the topography of the land when you’re standing up on that mound, and I saw some decent evidence that Calhoun’s mound is both bigger and more important than it looks at first sight.”
“What does your professor think about that?”
“I didn’t get a chance to tell him yet. But he’ll agree. So do you think you can get me permission just to go up there once? All I’ll do is stand still and look around. Truly.”
“No way.” The authority of an enforcer of the law had crept back into Neely’s tired voice.
“Mr. Calhoun’s got a right to be mad, but he knows you, and—”
“To hell with Carroll Calhoun. I don’t care about his property rights. I don’t care about your historical preservation. I just care about keeping the peace. Neshoba County is chock-full of good people, and they come in all colors, but there are a few Neanderthals who would shoot you right off the top of that mound. Nobody goes up there but me.”
An odor like incense wafted out of the kitchen, along with laughter and the voices of a covey of old men. Could they possibly be smoking pot in there? With the sheriff in the next room?
The cabin’s windows were open. They looked out on another cabin so close that Faye could have reached out her window and snagged a piece of coconut cake off the kitchen table. Smoking pot in such close quarters was nuts.
Everybody got interested in their toes again. Faye couldn’t get a good look at Neely’s face. After a few minutes, the sheriff closed the empty jar and wiped off the spoon. Sliding them into the bag, she pulled out a wet wipe and cleaned her father’s mouth. “There, Daddy. Did that taste good?” She wheeled the old man’s wheelchair out into the night.
Fragrant smoke continued to fill the room.
It was dark and she couldn’t see his face, but Faye could tell that Joe was perturbed. His disapproval filled the still evening air.
What made him so special that nobody else could play his little lookout game with him? Anyone with eyes could see that Neely Rutland would not be spending tonight perched atop Calhoun’s mound. Nobody was superhuman, though Neely would like to be. She was probably even now lying face-down and dreamless on a cot at the Neshoba County Fairgrounds.
While Neely’s deputies would surely be arriving any minute now for another night’s watch, there could be no substitute for having a sentry on the high ground. Yet she had plainly said that nobody would be climbing the mound but her. Her deputies would need help. Joe was more than happy to provide it, but he had proved notably resistant to the idea that Faye might be able to help. Too bad. She was crouched beside him beneath a tree made invisible by the moonless night. He’d just have to learn to live with it.
Her supper roiled in her stomach. The plateful of roast beef, gravy, rice, macaroni salad, and green beans, while undeniably delicious, was not sitting well atop the afternoon’s beers. Or the afternoon’s interpersonal nastiness. She and Joe had escaped the Fair as quickly as they could manage it, without showing weakness in the face of Silver and his cronies.
Stopping at a diner where they could linger over tasty food loaded with grease and salt had seemed comforting at the time. For dessert, she and Joe had enjoyed a tremendous argument over whether he needed her to help him in his self-appointed role of Chief Mound Protector. She had won, since Joe wasn’t in the habit of telling her No, so now she sat beside him, suffering from indigestion and his festering disapproval.
A tremendous grind and roar split the night. Beams from twin headlights jiggled frantically as the tractor behind them raced across the uneven terrain between Calhoun’s house and the mound.
“He’s doing it again,” Faye said out loud, knowing that Calhoun wouldn’t hear her over the tractor’s din. “He’s stoned, and he knows Neely’s half-dead with fatigue, and he thinks he can get away with it.” She yanked her phone out of her pocket and dialed 911. “We’ve got an emergency. I don’t know the address, but we’re in a field right across the road from the Nail house. We’re on Carroll Calhoun’s land. He’s, um…he’s threatening people with his tractor.” That seemed close enough to the truth, and it should bring a prompt response. She listened a moment. “Yeah, you can send an ambulance, just in case, but what we really need are some armed deputies. And Sheriff Rutland.”
The tractor’s gears shrieked, and it took an abrupt right turn. When Faye saw where it was now headed, she hurled the phone to the ground and started running. She needed to stop this.
How could she stop it? The destructive edge of the tractor’s blade was headed for the faint remnant of one of the berms she thought she’d seen from atop the mound. A wing. He was going to scrape up one of the eagle’s wings.
Faye put her head down and ran harder. She could hear Joe behind her, but now, just this once, she might be able to outrun him, because she was on the side of the angels. Come hell or high water, she was going to save this magnificent bird built out of earth. Presuming it was really there. But how would she ever know if this man destroyed it before she got a chance to see?
“Faye, it’s not worth getting killed over.” Joe’s voice came closer. “He’s mad, and he’s high. He might be sorry later, but you’d still be dead.” She kept running. When she felt Joe’s arms wrap around her chest and slam her to the ground, she was mightily perturbed that he could overtake her and tackle her, with enough wind left over to talk to her while he was doing it.
The tractor ground to a halt a few feet from the mound’s wing, and Faye was jubilant. He’d seen them and he didn’t want witnesses to the destruction. Then the headlights swung around and the beast started rolling in their direction.
“Get up, get up, get off me!” she chanted, shoving at Joe. “He’s coming this way.”
The tractor was moving at four times the speed Calhoun had used to intimidate the archaeologists only a day before. This was not simple intimidation. He was announcing his intention to roll right over them.
Jumping up in one motion, Joe grabbed Faye by the hand and yanked her onto her feet. By stumbling and sliding and taking impossibly long strides, she managed to keep up with him, but where would they go? Oka Hofobi’s house lay across the road, hidden in the dark. Its cozy safety beckoned her, but Joe had other ideas. A dense forest was his notion of safety, not a homey brick house. If she could have gotten a breath, she would have reminded him that Calhoun’s tractor could eat trees for breakfast, but Joe was in no state to listen to reason. They plunged into a forest so dense and dark that only Joe’s sharp eyes kept them from slamming headfirst into a waiting tree.
A tree crashed to the ground behind them. Still, Faye was beginning to feel some hope. They were moving a lot faster than the tractor now, since it took a considerable amount of time for Calhoun to pause and batter down the trees in his way.
Joe kept dragging her deeper into a sheltering thicket that she couldn’t see. When he stopped, she crashed hard into his back. Only then did she realize why their flight had ended so abruptly. The tractor had stopped moving.
A flashlight beam wavered in the air, swinging back and forth in a search pattern that said Calhoun didn’t know where they were. Joe firmly pushed her behind a tree, but he did it slowly, so that she wouldn’t put a foot down on a twig and give them away with a dry, wooden snap. Then he vanished behind a tree located precisely between her and danger, because that was simply who he was.
Don’t breathe so hard, she told herself, as if she believed that her mind could control her body’s autonomic nervous system. When her breathing quieted, she wondered what other powers her mind possessed that she didn’t know about.
Her vision and hearing and sense of smell sharpened in response to danger, obeying prehistoric instructions buried in her DNA. Things that she would never ordinarily have noticed assaulted her now, sometimes painfully. This must be how Joe, with his woodsman’s gifts, felt all the time.
She could hear the creak of the fabric in Calhoun’s pants every time he bent a knee and took a step. She couldn’t smell him—only Joe had senses that refined—but she could smell something acrid. What was it?
Smoke. It was smoke. Was she smelling the remnants of the pot that Calhoun had been enjoying a few hours before, still clinging to his clothes? No, it was simple wood smoke.
Calhoun’s boots continued to crunch through the underbrush.
How long he looked for them Faye couldn’t say, though she did know that the flashlight’s beam played more than once over the bark of the tree that hid her. Only the sound of sirens in the distance saved them. Calhoun fled deeper into the woods.
Minutes passed while they listened to their rescuers’ sirens approach. When Calhoun was out of earshot, Faye risked a peek behind her. Much deeper into the woods was a prickle of orange light so faint that she would never have seen it without her adrenaline-enhanced vision.
Faye and Joe knew the law had arrived when the sirens stopped growing closer. So far from the road that they couldn’t even see the law officer’s flashing lights, Faye and Joe let the screaming sirens atop the now-stationary cars lead them to their rescuers. When they emerged from their hiding place, they found only an empty house, an idling tractor, and a silent pickup truck.
One officer stated the obvious. “He’s on foot.”
Oka Hofobi, Davis, and their father rushed up, hauling hunting rifles. “We heard the racket,” Oka Hofobi started, but he was interrupted by a six-and-a-half-foot-tall deputy who said only, “We’ve got no need for armed civilians.” The three Choctaws hung their rifles on their pickup’s gun rack, but they didn’t leave until they were told to go.
“Sheriff Rutland—” Faye wheezed, surprised to feel her breath leave her again.
“She’s on her way.”
Neely Rutland would probably be gratified to know how safe that made Faye feel. She made a mental note to tell her.
“Look, there may be someone else out here tonight,” she told the big deputy who seemed to be in charge. “I saw a campfire way out in the woods.”
“Can you get us there?”
Faye looked up at the stars as if they could give her directional guidance, but in the end, she would have had to say “No,” if Joe hadn’t interrupted.
“I can take you.”
Well, of course he could. Joe could probably tell them what kind of wood had been used to build the campfire, just by the smell. Or by the color of the glowing embers.
Faye realized how hard she and Joe had run during their escape when she saw how long it took to reach the campfire. They found its dying embers at the edge of a sizeable clearing planted in rows of lush, healthy marijuana plants.
The man who had built the fire was no longer seated on the well-worn stump beside it. He was sprawled on the ground nearby. Faye recognized him, even with his face half-obscured by blood, by his clothes and his size and his iron-gray hair. The ragged wound across his neck and the blood soaking into the ground around his head told Faye everything she needed to know about what had happened here. His throat had been slit, and the implement lying on the ground beside him was surely sharp enough to do it. The sleek stone knife looked like it would do a very efficient job of cutting a man’s trachea open. Its single cutting edge was bloody.
The tall deputy nodded to the other lawman, before whipping out his radio to alert Sheriff Rutland. The smaller deputy started resuscitation, but Carroll Calhoun was surely dead.
Faye tried to make sense of the crime scene. Had Mr. Calhoun built
the fire, then left it long enough to chase her and Joe with a tractor? Had someone been waiting for him when he returned? Or was this someone else’s campfire? Had he surprised someone who killed him rather than let him report the illegal crop?
One thing was certain. His killer hadn’t had much time to flee. As if reading her mind, the tall deputy and his colleague began a routine search pattern, shining bright lights at their feet to illuminate any tracks the killer had left.
Who wanted Calhoun dead? Well, maybe Faye had, a little bit, if she were to be perfectly honest. And the rest of the archaeological team. And the entire Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. The man hadn’t done much to attract friends lately.
She wondered if she would be considered a suspect in the killing. Sheriff Rutland would be a fool if she didn’t investigate a woman who was nearby when the crime occurred. Especially one who’d had two, maybe three run-ins with the victim. Faye wasn’t overly concerned. She had the utmost respect for the truth, and the truth was that she’d had nothing to do with Calhoun’s death.
She could handle being under suspicion. She was innocent and she believed in the integrity of the law. Still, there was one thing that bothered her. No one other than Faye and Joe and Sheriff Mike McKenzie, back home in Florida, knew that Joe had once killed a man with a stone implement, but if she ever breathed a word of that truth to anyone, Joe would be in serious trouble now.
Sweet Jesus. Joe probably had his pockets full, right this minute, of deadly sharpened rocks that he’d made himself. Flintknapping was simply what he did, and he carried his treasures with him everywhere. If he were searched, then Joe would be headed for questions and accusations and maybe even jail. If he escaped arrest tonight, but Sheriff Rutland learned later about his special skills, he would again be in jeopardy.
She was Joe’s alibi for this killing, just as he was hers. If she were sheriff, she wouldn’t believe either of them, not for a minute. Faye knew she could take care of herself. If it came down to it, she could hire a lawyer who would help her say the right things to law enforcement and in court. Joe, on the other hand, didn’t know how to tell anything but the truth. A crafty prosecutor could trick him into hanging himself.
Effigies Page 6
