Effigies

by Mary Anna Evans

  Hunters spend their lives learning to run quickly. He had traveled several miles before the stars had completed half their night’s path. Feeling confident of his escape, he paused on a hilltop beneath the constant stars to thank them for watching over his escape.

  Alas! The quiet air carried the distant baying of his faithful dog, growing nearer, nearer, warning him that the spectre was still coming. Again, he ran through the countryside, until he reached a river too deep and swift to cross. He stood, too afraid to jump in and too afraid to stand still, until his dog’s voice convinced him to plunge into the water. An instant later, the panting dog joined him.

  Behind his dog was something with skeleton hands and glassy eyes. Kowayhoommah had prepared himself for death when his faithful dog seized the bony spectre in its jaws and disappeared with it below the water. Neither hound nor spectre ever surfaced again.

  A changed man, Kowayhoommah was never again prideful or boastful. He shunned pleasures like dance and stickball. Some say that he one day set off to make war on a distant enemy and never returned.

  I like to think that he was lured into the forest by the baying of a faithful dog, and that they wander there together, still.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Wednesday

  Day 6 of the Neshoba County Fair

  Faye spent a lot of time in property assessors’ offices, a fact that made its own poetic sense. History is inextricably bound into the land where it happened and where its relics lie buried. And the land is bound to the people who own it and farm it and pay the taxes on it. The offices of the folks who assess those taxes harbor an amazing amount of information, free for the asking.

  Archaeologists might be known for dashing around the countryside digging up exciting artifacts, but a small fraction of their time is actually spent doing just that. Some of Faye’s colleagues spent their entire careers deep in the bowels of museums “excavating the collections.” Far more artifacts were uncovered during the glorious romantic years of the Victorians and Edwardians than could ever have been properly cataloged and interpreted. Much worthwhile work was being done by scientists who merely studied stuff that was already dug up.

  There were some who used the overstuffed collections of the world’s museums to say that it was wrong to continue excavating. “If no one ever took the time to properly write up the excavations of the past, then what makes it necessary to dig up more artifacts?” they wanted to know.

  It was hard for a thoughtful person to ignore their most persuasive argument: excavation is by its nature an act of destruction. Pulling dirt and artifacts and information out of the ground is like letting a genie out of its bottle. You can’t put it back in. If you miss a critical piece of information, it’s gone forever.

  On the other hand, if you put a worthless piece of information in a governmental file, it’s preserved forever. Faye hefted the tax files on the portion of the Calhoun property under consideration for the road construction project. It was going to take her some time to sort out the useful information from the legalese. The aerial photographs, on the other hand, would be immediately useful.

  She spread them out on a cramped work table in a corner of the file room, using a reference map to piece each one together in the correct sequence. The creek and the highway served as handy reference points to help her orient herself to the landscape she already understood on a human scale.

  Starting at the bottom of the southernmost photo, she could see the roof of Oka Hofobi’s house and, across the highway to the right, the roof of the Calhoun home. Directly across from Oka Hofobi’s place, the massive presence of the ancient mound was unmistakable, though heavily shrouded in ground-level vegetation that masked the areas where Faye had seen wings and a tail. Noticing that the tree cover seemed lighter than she remembered, she checked the date on the photo. It had been taken within the past five years, so any difference she noticed was probably because the photo was shot in the autumn, as the leaves were starting to fall. This was encouraging. She wanted a good look at the ground.

  The creek and its surrounding wetlands were obvious by the texture of the trees and vegetation growing there, even when the water wasn’t visible. She winced inwardly at the sight of a small clearing that was surely the spot where Carroll Calhoun had died. And nearby, just out of range of the photos and maps she’d reviewed in the trailer—maybe, maybe that might be a faint rise in the ground surface. And maybe it was more lightly treed than the surrounding area, which would make sense if this was the site of an overgrown old cemetery that had succumbed to neglect.

  She poked Dr. Mailer’s cell number into her phone. “Hey—I’ve got most of what we need, but neither the geological survey nor the soil conservation service has a field office here. They have offices in Jackson, and I’ll eventually want to go there to talk to the people at Archives and History. In the meantime, I could probably grab some topos someplace where they sell stuff to hunters and hikers, but it might be easier to just pay a little more and download the ones we want. Joe does that for me all the time. I don’t know the quadrangle names, but this should get him in the neighborhood.”

  She reeled off the UTM coordinates that bounded the area in question, and hoped Dr. Mailer would notice that Joe was useful for tasks that required more than a strong back or a preternatural understanding of ancient man’s toolmaking abilities. As she waited for him to write the information down, another thought struck her.

  “You know, I think I could use some historical topos, too. They’re a good source of information on old structures that aren’t there anymore. Joe’s worked with several companies that can get their hands on old maps that aren’t available on the web yet. It takes some time, but they’ll go find the maps, scan them, and zap them right back to you in a day or two.”

  She listened as he groused about the expense of such a thing and about the wisdom of taking yet another worker out of the field. Then, when he agreed—as she’d known he would—she thanked him, saying, “This is the kind of preparation that will make our project work stand out. It’ll make that proposal stand out, too, which is the way to win contracts.”

  And, she neglected to add, the USGS very considerately marks cemeteries on their topographical maps.

  Having gleaned as much information as she could on her first perusal of the tax assessor’s photos, Faye decided which ones she needed and put in an order with the clerk. While she was waiting for them to be duplicated, she pulled the title information out of the files, and adjusted her mind to the numbing process of reading legal documents. She had found important and unexpected information in such files before. Once, she’d even found evidence of criminal activity. If she could just get over the presumption that she was headed for an hour of boring reading, she might learn something.

  Within fifteen minutes, she was certain that her presumption had been wrong, which reminded her yet again not to be presumptuous.

  Mr. Calhoun’s ancestral land wasn’t. Ancestral, that is. He had owned the land surrounding his house for many years, it was true. He had inherited it, along with the marijuana field and the peanut field where the mound sat, from his father, who had inherited it from his own father.

  At the time of his death, he had owned everything in the immediate vicinity, on both sides of the creek. Acres and acres of land bore his name, extending far north of the roadway that served as its southern border, but he didn’t get it from his father. He had bought it, piece by piece, over a period of nearly forty years. The most recent purchase was less than two years old.

  Faye, who was a storyteller at heart, constructed a tale of two neighbors, a successful man and, right next door, a man who had reeled from one disaster to another. And each financial setback had cost him a piece of the legacy left him by his parents. This being agricultural country, “next door” was a relative term. The unfortunate neighbor’s house was more than a mile down the road. And his name was Kenneth Rutland.

  Faye was sad for Neely. In a sense, she’d watched her fath
er decay all her life. Long before his mind and his body failed him, fortune had failed him first. Whatever had caused his financial reversal (poor crops, medical bills, poor business decisions—the possibilities were depressingly endless), he’d had to give up his land, acre by acre. Over time, Neely would have become aware that the creek and woods where she’d played weren’t hers any more. No wonder she was so protective of her father.

  All Mr. Calhoun had done was buy land that was for sale but, since Faye hadn’t liked him all that much, she resented him for it. Probably Neely’s family did, too, but property sales that were legal and above-board and necessary didn’t seem worth killing someone over. Still, Faye wondered who else the prosperous Mr. Calhoun might have bested in a business deal. She was stuck in this office while the blueline printer disgorged a big pile of the photos she’d ordered. Perhaps she should spend that time looking into the Calhouns’ property holdings.

  She thumbed through the legal documents that described Mr. Calhoun’s business life, but found no other purchases or sales. As she thought about it, she realized that the dead man probably had much more dangerous business associates that would never surface in any governmental file. When you’re found dead in a field of marijuana, a field that you yourself own, the presumption would be that you were a criminal, and that you associated with criminals. Drug deals were so much more deadly than real estate transactions.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Faye returned from a morning spent chasing paper trails, only to find an unsettled work crew. An after-lunch thundercloud had chased them into the cramped quarters of the trailer. They unquestionably had plenty of work to do in there, and after Faye arrived, they passed a chatty hour cleaning and cataloging their finds. A particularly well-shaped stone point had made the rounds, passing from hand to hand so its fine workmanship could be appreciated by people who knew it when they saw it. Faye enjoyed the feel of the finely worked stone.

  It had been a productive way to spend the weather-enforced time indoors, but these were not people who enjoyed standing shoulder-to-shoulder and breathing stale air. All six of them cast the occasional glance out the window, but it was Toneisha who noticed that the storm had blown through.

  “Would you look at the sun shine?” she said. “All that wind and thunder, and not the first drop of rain ever hit the ground.” She looked expectantly at Dr. Mailer, and so did everybody else. He was staring distractedly at the door, probably because he (and all the rest of them) knew that there were supposed to be seven people working in the cramped trailer. Not six. Chuck had now been missing for a protracted period during working hours for the second day in a row. Not late. Missing. Dr. Mailer was going to have to do something.

  Belatedly responding to Toneisha’s comment, Dr. Mailer looked around the room as if he’d just come back from a faraway place. “Yes. Yes, let’s get back outside where we can have some fun.”

  Faye was still gathering her tools when she saw Chuck walking up the driveway. He was almost completely wet, except for his head and upper trunk, even though it hadn’t rained. Thundershowers were spotty propositions. Chuck might have been rained on if he’d been far enough away, and his upper body might have stayed dry if he’d draped a newspaper or something over his head, but Faye didn’t think so. The brownish-red tint of the water soaking his socks suggested that he’d been just as dirty as she’d seen him the day before. If he’d waded into the creek in a clumsy attempt to clean off the mud, then he’d look just like he did now.

  Where did he go on these mysterious jaunts? He could only get so far on foot, even with his long legs. Judging by what she’d learned from the property assessor’s files, he’d been on the Nails’ land if he had stayed south of the highway, or he’d been on the Calhouns’ land if he’d wandered north of the highway. It was a fifty-fifty shot. Well, she was planning to stray onto the Calhouns’ land that very evening, so she couldn’t judge Chuck too harshly, but Dr. Mailer could. And he probably should.

  Faye and Joe were uncharacteristically swift in leaving work, slipping into their car just as fast as Toneisha hopped into Bodie’s passenger seat. Mr. Judd was waiting for them at the hotel.

  As she left the trailer, she brushed past Oka Hofobi’s desk. She caught his eye, then, feeling a bit flustered, she looked away. He’d mentioned a movie and invited her to dinner with his family, but there had been no more advances on his part. And Faye hadn’t made any either.

  It was true that Ross was more classically handsome than Oka Hofobi, but Faye found the young archaeologist attractive, too. She liked his quiet calm, which belied the intensity in his black eyes. But was she interested in developing that initial attraction? Apparently not, because she wasn’t pursuing it and neither was he.

  Perhaps he’d lost interest because his mother liked her. That could be a romantic kiss of death for some men.

  She gave him a friendly wave and backed out the door. It was time to fetch Lawrence Judd.

  Faye drove out of Philadelphia with Joe riding shotgun and Mr. Judd resting in the back seat. A single sentence kept running through her brain.

  This is a really bad idea.

  Her mother’s and grandmother’s childrearing tactics had left her constitutionally incapable of talking back to her elders, though she’d tried to rise above that handicap repeatedly as Mr. Judd herded them toward the car.

  “I want to do this,” he had insisted repeatedly. “I don’t even care if I die doing it. If there’s a chance that I can learn something about what happened to me all those years ago, then I’m taking a walk in the woods. Right now.”

  In the midst of the discussion, Faye’s cell phone had rung and, heart sinking, she’d seen the caller’s number and its faraway area code.

  “Hello, Mrs. Judd.”

  Mr. Judd had begun a series of frantic gesticulations that appeared to mean, “Whatever you do, don’t tell her where we’re going!” The man wasn’t afraid of death, but he was absolutely afraid of Sallie Judd.

  Faye knew that she held his fate in her cell-phone-wielding hand, but she didn’t have the heart to press her advantage. If Mr. Judd wanted to take a walk in the woods, she guessed she’d help him. Because if she wouldn’t, she suspected Ross Donnelly would. Or he’d try. He didn’t look like a man who’d been slogging down any creekbeds lately, so Mr. Judd’s chances of survival might be better with Faye and Joe.

  “Oh, he’s looking just great, Mrs. Judd,” she cooed. It was almost true. Anticipation of the afternoon’s discoveries had brought the warm color back to his face. What was more, his urgent gestures in her direction showed that he retained quite a lot of agility. Maybe they could get him to Faye’s suspected cemetery mound without Joe having to haul his unconscious form back to the car.

  At least he had bowed to her insistence that they amend their original plan enough to spare him the drive out to the work site. Faye and Joe had driven into town to fetch him, but the extra few minutes of waiting had made him still more anxious to go wading in a Water of the State.

  Faye parked her car by the project trailer, knowing that the Nails wouldn’t think twice about seeing it there at any time of the day or night. Oka Hofobi had his workaholic tendencies, too. Of course, if he walked back to the trailer to see what she was up to, only to find her missing, she’d eventually have to explain herself. Knowing that the Nails were as devoted to Wednesday night prayer meeting as Mrs. Calhoun, Faye felt fairly sure that they’d never know she’d been there. She intended to be out of the woods and way up the road before prayer meeting was finished.

  The Nail house was deserted. The Calhoun house was deserted. No cars were in sight in either direction. There would be no better time. Faye and Joe stood on either side of Judd, each steadying him with a hand resting lightly on his back, just in case.

  Faye took a deep breath and said, “Let’s go.” The three of them were across the street and concealed in the creekbank foliage within minutes. Faye and Joe each tied their laces together and hung their boots around the
ir necks. Mr. Judd, who hadn’t packed his suitcase for an outing like this, just slipped off his loafers and carried them in one hand. A brief tussle ensued when Joe tried to carry them for him. Mr. Judd won.

  Rolling their pants legs above their knees, the three of them crossed a broad sand bar and stepped into a creek that was gloriously cool on Faye’s bare feet and legs. Fine sand shifted under her feet, and gravel poked into her soles. Remembering Mrs. Nail’s story, Faye smiled to think that she was stomping on the Devil’s body. She remembered now that she had been looking forward to this jaunt.

  “There’s a lot more water today than there was on…that day,” Mr. Judd said, stepping back into the shallows.

  The creek deepened sharply as Faye stepped further from the sandy bank. Within a few steps, the water was lapping at her rolled-up pants legs. The tea-colored murkiness on the far side suggested that the creek was chest-deep or deeper there. Being the shortest, Faye stepped out in front. If she kept her pants dry, then Mr. Judd surely would. Long-legged Joe, whose knees seemed to be roughly level with Faye’s hips, would stay practically dry, if he followed in her footsteps.

  “I hear they’ve had a wet summer, so it makes sense that the water’s high,” Faye observed, picking her way around a small patch of gravel. “What time of year was it when you were attacked?”

  “Early spring. I remember running past dogwoods and redbuds. They were blooming so pretty, and it didn’t seem right for the natural world to be beautiful, because I was so scared. It had been a dry winter, I’m sure of that. So I guess that’s why there’s such a difference in the water level. Remember, I told you that I saw the cemetery and the marijuana field because I had to go looking for someplace with enough water where I could fish.”