Their client pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped at the sweat on his neck. “The traffic engineers are still running the numbers, but I imagine the road’ll go down one side of the creek. If they can avoid crossing the creek, then maybe they can avoid messing up the wetlands. Not to mention avoiding the permitting that would go along with that. Also, staying on one side of the creek will avoid the expense of building a bridge. Of course, that all presumes that you people don’t find evidence that Columbus himself camped here in 1492. Then we’d have to map out a road that preserved what’s left of his privy.”
Mailer wisely let that comment slide. “And the road will go…”
“It’ll go right straight through to town. Probably cut the drive time to Philadelphia in half. It’s a popular project. I sure hope Columbus and his outhouse don’t mess it up.”
Peach pie was an excellent chaser for the undistinguished box lunches that the hotel had packed for the archaeology team. They had dragged as many chairs into Dr. Mailer’s office as they could manage, so everyone could eat together. All that body heat overwhelmed the air conditioning that had drawn them indoors in the first place, but anything was cooler than a Neshoba County summer noon.
“Is your mom going to cook us dessert every day, Oke?” Bodie asked, licking peach juice off his fork. “Please say yes.”
“That’s an awful lot of work,” Faye said, also hoping Oka Hofobi would say yes.
“Ma cooks the way other people meditate. It calms her mind. But don’t worry that we’re taking too much advantage of her. Dr. Mailer just had twenty pounds of shrimp delivered to her kitchen door. And he told her that if she tried to serve it to the work team, that he wouldn’t let us eat it.”
Mailer hid his sheepish face behind a forkful of flaky crust. “Just seemed like the mannerly thing to do.”
Five bottles of water were raised in his honor. The sixth bottle was somewhere out of sight, in Chuck’s hand. He never ate with the others, so he invariably missed Mrs. Nail’s desserts, since his colleagues weren’t quite mannerly enough to save him a piece.
“About that project across the street—” Faye began.
“Business, business, business,” Toneisha groused. “Is it always business with you?”
“If we get that project, we’ll be back here next summer, eating whatever Mrs. Nail decides she wants to cook for us,” Faye observed.
Toneisha saw her point.
“So, Dr. Mailer, would you like me to look over the aerial photographs we’re using for this site, so that I can start thinking about next year’s project? I got the impression that the proposal will have a tight deadline, but we’re in a good position to be ahead of the competition. It wouldn’t hurt to do some of the legwork now, before the request for proposals hits the streets.”
“I think Faye just wants to work in the air conditioning this afternoon,” Bodie declared. “I think we should keep her outside until she’s moved as much dirt as me and Toneisha.”
“That won’t take long,” Faye said, setting aside her plate and heading for the door.
“Leave Faye alone,” Mailer said.
Joe, who didn’t take criticism of Faye well at all, visibly relaxed.
“She’s a heckuva researcher,” Mailer continued. “When Faye compiles the background data, the proposal practically writes itself. We might not be sitting here now, if it hadn’t been for the prep work she did for the proposal that got us this work. It’s okay with me if she wants to take the afternoon to develop a battle plan for winning us another job like this one, only bigger. But Faye, keep track of how you spend your time. It wouldn’t be right to bill the client for hours spent trying to get even more money out of them.”
“Oh, don’t worry. My time sheet will be accurate.”
Within minutes, Dr. Mailer’s office wastebasket was full of paper plates and plastic forks, and Faye was alone in an air conditioned room.
The aerial photographs were stored in Chuck’s office. They were meticulously organized, as was everything else that Chuck touched. Even better, they were cross-referenced to a file holding topographic maps of the area surrounding the Nails’ farm. Faye left Chuck’s desk alone and, instead, spread the photos out, one by one, across the bare work table behind it. She studied them, first with a magnifier, then she laid duplicate copies side-by-side so that she could use a stereoscope to get a three-dimensional feel for the lay of the land.
It was true that she was looking for information on how to plan a field survey, and she was keeping an eye out for details that might help this billable project, as well, but she had yet another motive she hadn’t shared with Dr. Mailer. Her gut told her that studying these photos might help her find the hilltop cemetery that she and Mr. Judd would be seeking just as soon as he was well enough to walk.
The sheriff seemed too preoccupied with Calhoun’s murder to give Mr. Judd’s decades-old attack much thought. Faye, however, was nearly obsessed with it. It was a crime that cried out for resolution, before all the participants were dead and their secrets were buried with them. What was more, there was the tantalizing possibility that the two crimes were related. Calhoun was found dead in a marijuana field, and Judd remembered seeing a marijuana field just days before he was kidnapped.
Preston Silver seemed to be another recurring factor in both crimes. He was a friend of the dead man, and they were seen together on the night of the murder. He was reputed to be a Klansman, and Judd’s kidnapping seemed racially motivated. Most telling of all, Judd nearly died just hours after Preston Silver handled his medicines.
Locating a hilltop graveyard based on a man’s forty-year-old recollections might seem unimportant to the sheriff, but Faye thought differently. She promised herself that she would deliver that cemetery to Lawrence Judd, one way or another.
She squinted hard at the aerial photographs, looking for evidence of a graveyard. Unfortunately—or fortunately, if you were a woodland creature—the land near the creek was heavily treed. If there was a small hill somewhere near the water, she sure couldn’t see it.
Faye was always fascinated by the things you could see from the air that were obscured at ground level. Standing in the Nails’ front yard, she would have said that the land north of the highway was near-wilderness, except for the few fields and pastures visible from the road, but she’d have been wrong.
It was true that a heavy fringe of trees bordered on the highway, probably because the land spread out in a low bowl on either side of the creek in that area. North of that, though, there was an irregular patchwork of agricultural land that started not too far from Calhoun’s unlucky pot field. These fields were bounded by heavy woods that extended along the creek and across scattered wetlands. When standing on the ground in one of those clearings, you got the impression of being surrounded by wilderness, but that impression was misleading.
Even more interesting to Faye was the network of…what would she call them? Paths? Or roads? They looked like the dirt track that ran from the highway to the field where Calhoun was killed, and Faye judged that they were just wide enough and just smooth enough to move farming equipment from one field to another. She imagined it would be a tooth-rattling experience, but tractors moved slow.
Turning her attention from the aerial photos, she pored over the topographic maps, since they could show her how the property would look if somebody shaved off all the trees. They also depicted most cemeteries, though it was dangerous to base a professional decision on them. Small family plots were sometimes omitted from these maps, a fact that had bit a few archaeologists on the butt. Whenever a big, expensive roadbuilding crew was forced to stand idle because somebody failed to tell them that Great-Aunt Nancy’s tombstone lay in their path, the archaeologist in question looked very, very bad.
There was no cemetery shown on the most recent topo. Faye only felt confident in inferring that no large, public cemetery had existed in the area at the time of the survey. Could there have been a small, family cemetery, priv
ate and overgrown? There certainly could.
Squinting at the little black contour lines that showed her where the land sloped up and where it dipped down, she tried to imagine what Mr. Judd’s cemetery hill would have looked like and where it had been. Nothing jumped off the page at her, but there was a texture to the surrounding landscape that was most intriguing to an archaeologist.
Mr. Calhoun’s mound stood, large and obvious, near the road. She couldn’t make out the sweeping wings that she’d seen extending to either side, but the map’s contour intervals were 10 feet apart. The human eye could distinguish contours a fraction of that size.
The creek was easy to follow, and Faye’s eyes were drawn to its shape. It looked somehow…artificial. It seemed too straight in some places, and there were other places where it took curves that didn’t seem natural. Its banks looked wrong, too. In some places, they were quite steep. They could have been natural bluffs, or they could have been the remnants of ancient earthworks. Small expanses of water trapped by these long curving banks of earth put Faye in mind of the Fort Ancient site in Ohio, where ancient Americans had built sophisticated water control structures as part of a vast mound complex.
An elliptical basin west of the creek also caught Faye’s eye. As best she could tell, it was dry. Whether it was natural was anybody’s guess, but one thing was clear. If ancient Americans had built mounds and dikes and ceremonial earthworks throughout these woods, they would have had to get the dirt from somewhere. This depression might be the borrow pit where they got that dirt. Or it might be just a big hole in the ground. There was no way to know without going there to look.
Faye admired the creek’s elegant, sweeping curves. Modern civil engineers were very proud of their ability to put water where they wanted it. They were even prouder when they were able to keep it there.
The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina showed that they weren’t always successful with their water-moving, but the Americas’ ancient moundbuilding cultures had built levees that were still doing their job after standing for millennia. And it was just possible that they’d done it right here in Carroll Calhoun’s back yard. Maybe the man had been right to worry about losing the use of his property. If Faye was reading these maps right, an important mound complex might cover vast tracts of his farmland. Well, she guessed it was his wife’s farmland, now.
Faye followed the path of the creek with her finger. She ran out of map before she ran out of potential earthworks. That meant that there was still hope that she would find Mr. Judd’s mysterious hill on a map that showed the area just north of this one.
A theory was tickling at her brain, one that tied two of her goals together. Faye just loved it when that happened. If there truly had been a mound complex here, then it was missing some mounds. Actually, it was missing a lot of mounds. Which didn’t surprise Faye in the least.
Many ancient mounds had been lost over time. Some of them were destroyed on purpose, to clear land for farming. Busy farmers sometimes just plowed over the dirt humps that they saw as nuisances. Every year, another layer of dirt was lost to the plow and to erosion, until nothing was left. And some mounds were loved to death, by people who dug into them looking for arrowheads and pottery. Once disturbed, erosion took over and wiped those mounds out, too.
These days, there was usually a reason why a mound was still standing. A number of early settlers had actually built houses atop ancient mounds, destroying anything in the top layers, but preserving the rest. Mr. Calhoun, despite his resentment of Faye and her archaeologist friends, had chosen not to plow his mound. Perhaps, deep down, he had appreciated its value. For whatever reason, it still stood because he had allowed it to stand.
Another common factor that preserved ancient mounds was the fact that their artificial high ground made an idyllic site for cemeteries. Nobody was going to raze a hill that supported a graveyard. So, Faye wondered, what if Mr. Judd’s cemetery looked like it was on a hilltop because it had been built on top of an old mound? The location was logical, if she was right about this being the site of an ancient complex. And the cemetery would have preserved that mound when all the others, except for Mr. Calhoun’s, were long gone.
Clearly, she needed to get as much information on these properties as possible. This would mean a call to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History and a trip to the property assessor’s, for sure. These government offices were air conditioned, which would generate still more ribbing from her co-workers. Faye was pretty sure she could handle it.
Chuck shuffled in the door, taking great care to wipe the mud off his feet. His knees were muddy, too, and so was the ever-present rag that hung out of his back pocket so that he could wipe his hands clean at any time. It wasn’t in his nature to tolerate dirt or disarray.
“I believe this is my office,” he said, and he wasn’t smiling.
“I believe our boss asked me to do some work in here,” Faye said in a most polite tone of voice, but she couldn’t resist adding, “and I believe you are very late getting back from lunch.”
Chuck didn’t speak again, but something in the way that he spread his work over the desktop felt vaguely threatening. Large men had the power to intimidate because they had the ability to simply loom. Faye respected men like Joe and Dr. Mailer, who never used their size in that way. She would wager that it never occurred to them that it might be useful to look threatening. And maybe it didn’t occur to Chuck, either, but he was doing it, anyway. Faye cleared out as quickly as she could.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Quitting time had come and gone, but only Bodie and Toneisha had left. They had driven away, laughing so loudly that Faye could still hear them after their car door had swung closed. Before strolling to the car, Bodie had taken a few minutes to show off his atlatl skills for his new girlfriend. The flintknapped head of his spear was well-weighted, and his control of the hinged throwing mechanism multiplied the significant power of his arms. His spear left the thrower with a force that left no doubt in Faye’s mind that Bodie would never starve if he were stranded in the wilderness.
She surrendered to an unwelcome vision of a spear very like Bodie’s piercing a man’s neck from behind with such power that its head protruded through his throat. She had once watched a man die in just that way. Shaking her head to chase away that image, she searched around for something more pleasant to watch.
A few yards away, outside the trailer where she sat, Faye could see Joe getting paid for having fun. He was crouched in the shadow of the project trailer, squatting in the position that all humans used before chairs were invented. His feet rested in the center of a large drop cloth, and he held a rock in one hand and a piece of antler in the other. Chuck hovered just outside the boundary of the drop cloth, watching Joe’s every move.
Joe, as relaxed as ever, hung motionless in a squatting position that would have made Faye’s entire body shriek. Using the antler tool, he patiently shaped the stone in his hand into something useful. It would have been more useful a few centuries in the past but, for people like Joe, it would still serve its purpose.
Chuck took notes every time the antler pressed out another stone flake. Periodically, he motioned for Joe to stop what he was doing, so that he could take pictures and note each flake’s shape and size. Then he marked identifying numbers on the chips that corresponded with numbers he inscribed on the drop cloth.
It was interesting work that they were doing. Preliminary testing at the site—augmented substantially with the records that Oka Hofobi had kept as his life’s work—suggested that ancient Americans had used portions of the land under their feet as a factory of sorts. They had manufactured stone tools on this one spot, and they had done little else. They hadn’t cooked or made pottery or tanned hides here. Oka Hofobi had found tenuous evidence of those other activities over the years, but not within many yards of the spot where they were now digging. To avoid muddying the waters, Joe and Chuck had picked a spot for their re-enactment where no artifacts had been found,
to avoid contaminating an old site with their modern research.
Fully investigating this site would give an overview of how a society organized itself, a topic that was of some interest to current archaeology. Faye knew that the Poverty Point site appeared to have separate activity areas, but the Nails’ property was inhabited 1500 years after the glory days at Poverty Point. That was a long time for communities to function in the same way, which suggested that this setup was a useful and practical one.
Chuck clearly didn’t care how the community organized itself. If Faye was a generalist at heart, then Chuck was the ultimate specialist. He wanted to know how ancient stone tools were constructed, and that was all he wanted to know. Joe was the answer to his professional dreams. If Chuck had his way, Joe would do nothing all day, every day, but knap flint. Not that Joe would object to that in the least.
Faye watched the two of them interact as she worked quietly next to Oka Hofobi, cleaning the finds of the day. Sherds of pottery and flakes of stone and bits of bone…the stuff of archaeology could easily be mistaken for trash. They had actually once been trash, but time had enhanced their value. Faye gloried in the information that could be gleaned from such unprepossessing things. This was meditative, quiet work, and having someone working nearby was a comfortable experience, even when that someone wasn’t talking. Now and then, one of them broke the silence. This time, it was Faye.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we got the big project our client was talking about this morning?”
“It’d sure be nice for me. There’s nothing like being able to walk to work.”
Faye held a flake of flint up to the light. It was a different shade of brown than the others she’d uncovered. She’d wager that Chuck could tell her where it had been dug, down to the specific quarry, all those centuries ago. Unless it had been collected from a pile of gravel beside a long-ago creekbed. Whatever its source, Chuck would know.
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