Effigies

by Mary Anna Evans

  Oka Hofobi was nodding slowly, as if he were catching her drift. Joe still looked baffled, but his inattention to matters of money had always been his most charming quality. Other than his face. And his body.

  “I don’t know how long that project has been on the drawing table, but Mr. Calhoun just bought the last piece of property—maybe this very parcel—within the past five years. A large sum of money will go to the owner of this property when the road project is built.”

  “I know,” Oka Hofobi interjected. “My father only sold a little piece for the road project where we’re excavating now, but the money was good. Mr. Calhoun could have funded his retirement with a land sale this big.” He gestured up and down the creek.

  “So don’t you think he might have been willing to ‘hide’ a cemetery, if he thought they might reroute the road to avoid it? Think how bad the publicity would be for the highway department, if it got out that they didn’t let a little graveyard stand in the way of their roadbuilding. They wouldn’t have done it. They would’ve built the road someplace else. Of course, they wouldn’t have built it through this mound, either, but Calhoun might not have recognized it as anything but a little hill.”

  Joe was poking around in the underbrush covering the far corner of the mound. “Ain’t no gravestones here, but there’s a mighty lot of wrought iron.” Gathering on either side of him, Faye and Oka Hofobi looked down at a pile of twisted metal. It had to be the wrought iron fencing that Mr. Judd had described.

  “I reckon you could get a tractor up here,” Joe said, nodding toward the driveway that had once carried coffins and mourners to this place. “You saw what Calhoun did with his. He got it all the way back to that pot field. If you had a tractor, it wouldn’t be all that hard to shove the fence over here, then drag the headstones—”

  “—the really incriminating evidence—” Faye interrupted.

  “Yep. He would have used the tractor to haul the stones someplace where nobody would find them,” Joe finished. “Did he raise cattle? I’m thinking they’re at the bottom of a cow pond somewhere on his land.”

  Faye thought so, too.

  “You two stand back,” she said. “I’ve got to do something unpleasant.”

  Faye looked up into the faces of two men who had completely internalized the Native American proscription against disturbing the dead. She wasn’t sure they were going to let her pass.

  Oka Hofobi’s attitude didn’t surprise her much. He had wrestled with this very issue when he made the decision to pursue archaeology, and he’d grappled with it every day since then. He knew exactly where he stood on the subject of this particular taboo. She had expected him to be a problem.

  Joe, on the other hand, had never once stood between Faye and something she wanted to do. Judging by the expression on his face, this might be the first time. He spoke first. “Why don’t we call the sheriff and tell her what we found? There’s no need to go disturbing the dead, not when Sheriff Rutland can just call the highway people. It’s not too late for them to change their plans for the road. Then these people can just rest right here.”

  Oka Hofobi was nodding. He liked this plan.

  “We can’t risk that. Don’t you remember what happened when Mr. Calhoun thought we were a threat to his property rights? Twelve hours later, he was using his tractor to destroy that threat.”

  “Carroll Calhoun is dead,” Oka Hofobi pointed out in a reasonable tone of voice.

  “Yeah, I know. I saw his body and it wasn’t pretty. You’re still missing the point. Mrs. Calhoun probably knows what her husband did here, and she won’t want the word to get out. Even more important, she’s probably counting on the money from this property sale to take care of her for the rest of her life. Now think through what will happen when Sheriff Rutland calls her and asks permission to take a look at this spot. And she will ask. She would never just come barreling in with a warrant. Mrs. Calhoun hasn’t committed a crime, and people around here are touchy about property rights. Neely will handle this thing very carefully.”

  Joe crossed his arms like a man who didn’t intend to step away, but he grudgingly nodded his understanding of Faye’s argument, saying, “I noticed that you tried more’n once to get the sheriff to take a look at this mound, and she had better things to do. She won’t be any hurry to follow up, just because you’ve got another suspicion.”

  “Exactly.” She waved her trowel for emphasis. “And what happens while Neely takes this thing slow? While she’s waiting for permission to come on the property, Mrs. Calhoun gets one of her hired men to hook up a trailer to the back of that tractor. He digs these four people up and hauls them away. Is that ghoulish enough for you two? Is what I’m planning to do anywhere near that disrespectful? This is all presuming they’re still here at all. We don’t know that yet, and you two won’t let me look.”

  Two expressionless bronze faces looked down on her. If she was getting anywhere with these guys, she sure couldn’t tell it. “Think about it this way. You two just let me confirm that there’s at least one burial up here, and that somebody tried to hide it. If I can prove that fact to Neely, then I believe she’ll get a warrant to search here without notifying Mrs. Calhoun first. Or else we can do it your way. Just don’t come running to me when somebody dumps these four people in a cow pond.”

  Oka Hofobi and Joe reluctantly stepped aside.

  Just because Faye had used all her powers of persuasion to get a chance to disturb one of these graves, it didn’t mean she liked doing it. She’d picked the grave that looked biggest. It was only a few inches longer than the smallest one, but she hoped it was the least likely to harbor a child.

  She was already a couple of feet below the ground surface, but people burying loved ones are serious about putting a lot of dirt between their loved ones and prowling scavengers. Just because she hadn’t found a body within seconds didn’t mean there wasn’t one down there.

  She could tell she was working in disturbed soil, so someone had been digging here before. Of course, there is no natural soil atop a human-constructed mound; it’s all disturbed soil, by definition. Nevertheless, she could see the straight-edged outline at the edges of the rectangular hole that she hoped was a grave. This soil had been disturbed at least twice.

  Oka Hofobi was pacing. Joe was sitting on the ground, eyes closed, probably engaging in some spiritual practice she didn’t understand. Good. She didn’t like doing this any more than they did.

  When her shovel struck rotted wood, she held up a splinter for both men to see. Not expecting any applause, she kept working, muttering under her breath, “No hermetically sealed metal casket here. This burial dates to the days of the plain pine box.”

  There wasn’t much left of that pine box. It had rotted, then collapsed under the burden of the soil above. Faye had already cleared much of that soil away, so it wasn’t long before the angular form of a human jawbone appeared. “Bingo,” she whispered, then regretted not saying something more reverent. Or at least something friendlier, like “Hello.”

  A row of vertebrae, intricately shaped like baroque pearls, lay beneath the jawbone. She crouched there for a minute, studying the bones. Joe and Oka Hofobi looked over her shoulders. When she tentatively reached down a hand and picked up a single vertebra, they both said, “Faye!” in the same outraged voice.

  She put the bone back. “Okay. Maybe even I don’t want to go that far. But we need some proof to show Sheriff Rutland. Hand me my camera.”

  Joe scrounged around in her day pack and found it. She took a close-up of the bones, to get enough detail so that no one could argue that they weren’t human. Then she tried to think like a lawyer. How would she chip a hole in this case?

  The answer was easy. She’d claim that Faye, Joe, and Oka Hofobi had been nowhere near her client’s property when the picture was taken. Getting down on her knees and elbows, she shot a series of photos with identifiable landmarks in the background. It was hard. Most trees look pretty much alike. But she found a
lightning-struck oak that was as individual as a fingerprint. In another shot, she captured the creek in the background, with a particularly twisty curve and a high red bank. Even better, these photos clearly showed that the grave was on a piece of ground ten feet above the surrounding land. This just might work.

  For good measure, she took a picture of the twisted wrought iron fencing at the base of the mound. Pausing for a lawyerly moment to look for holes in her train of evidence, she began to wonder how these people might be identified. It might well be important to know when they were put in the ground, but the odds that Joe and Oka Hofobi would allow her to collect a bone for carbon dating were nil.

  She stood over the open grave, looking down at the exposed vertebra. For an illogical moment, she felt that the bones looked bare and cold, and she wanted to cover them up. Instead, she reached down into the hole.

  Thoughtful and deliberate, she put her hand into the grave and pulled out a chunk of wood, listening for two disapproving voices to say, “Faye!” again. Joe and Oka Hofobi restrained themselves. She held it up, saying, “I’m just taking a piece of the coffin. If we need to date the burial, this might be important. Then, even if Mrs. Calhoun bulldozes the whole mound, we’ll have physical proof that this cemetery existed. That these people existed. They deserve that.”

  The men must have agreed with her, because they let her pocket the wood sample. They looked queasy, but they let her do it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Faye backfilled the excavation neatly, then looked up to see whether her companions had noticed. They were still standing far away from her, as if they were afraid they might catch something. It went without saying that neither of them had helped her with her work.

  She cleaned the trowel and stashed it in her day pack. The binoculars at the bottom of the pack caught her eye. The sun was sinking lower than she’d like, but she was too tired to walk all the way back without taking a little breather. It might be interesting to take a look at the countryside from way up here. Raising the glasses to her face, she turned a little pirouette.

  Almost nothing manmade was in her field of view. Everything she and her companions had worn or carried to this spot was manmade, of course. The mound beneath her feet was built by humans. She believed more strongly every minute that the rising and falling embankments along the creek were manmade. Or at least some of them were. A patch of light through the trees showed her the location of Mr. Calhoun’s pot patch. Everything else—soaring trees, flowing water, broad sky, solid ground—was little changed since the day the Choctaws’ ancestors first laid eyes on this country. They had decided to stay, and Faye understood why.

  A bright spot of artificiality intruded on the moment. Faye trained her binoculars on its rather prosaic source. Mrs. Calhoun had turned on her garage light. Faye could never have seen it if she’d been standing on the ground, but it stood out like a beacon from this elevated vantage point.

  She squinted at that light, and a forty-year-old mystery was solved. Part of it, anyway.

  Faye trained the binoculars on a spot slightly nearer to her than the light. The Calhoun mound was obscured by trees and gathering darkness, but she could see its hulking mass. Which meant that somebody standing on top of it could probably see her, too, if they had binoculars. How much better would that view be if the intervening trees were forty years smaller?

  Another detail surfaced. Mr. Judd had said he was attacked in the early spring, when the redbuds were blooming. None of the other trees would have leafed out yet, so the view from atop the Calhoun mound would have been even sharper. Mr. Calhoun was known to go out birdwatching every afternoon with a pair of binoculars in hand. What had he seen on the day Lawrence Judd was kidnapped?

  Faye thought she had enough information to piece together a coherent story. Mr. Calhoun had gone out for a visit with his birds. He had caught a glimpse of a strange car driving along the rutted paths that networked the woods in this part of the country, built to move agricultural equipment from one field to another. Faye knew now that he hadn’t owned this land in those days, but he would have been curious about why this car was where it didn’t belong. He might have been especially concerned that the driver would happen upon his marijuana field, which property records said he had owned since he inherited it from his father. Of course, he would have hurried out to investigate. Would he have anticipated what he found? A bound and hooded young black man being beaten to death?

  She hadn’t known Mr. Calhoun well. Actually, she hadn’t known him at all. He had seemed irritable, misguided, defensive, but she couldn’t say that she had any indication that he’d been evil. Even if he’d moved four gravestones for his own material gain, that wasn’t the same thing as standing by and letting a young man die horribly. On the basis of the evidence, she now believed that he had rushed in to save a man he didn’t even know, at a real risk to his own life. And, though it had taken forty years, she believed that this risk had indeed cost him his life. Grief stirred in her.

  Mr. Calhoun had prevented Preston Silver from doing murder. Then, for whatever reason, he had kept quiet. Immediately afterward, Mr. Judd had left the state without seeking help from law enforcement which, at that time, might have been no help to a black man at all. There had been an uneasy equilibrium for all these years, until Lawrence Judd had come home and asked for justice.

  Victim. Attacker. Rescuer. The three pieces of the puzzle fit. Lawrence Judd was the known victim and somebody had recently tried to kill him, twice. Carroll Calhoun was the rescuer, and someone had succeeded in killing him. It only made sense that the killer in both cases would be Preston Silver, who was finally faced with the possibility of standing trial for his crime. Recent history showed that Mississippi was now willing to deal with these old sins. When faced with killing the two remaining witnesses, or seeing his face plastered all over CNN, Silver had chosen murder.

  Technology was letting Faye down. Her cell phone had worked reliably all week since she arrived in Neshoba County. Even rural citizens demanded decent cell phone service, these days. Still, there were limits to what could be expected in a low-population area. Faye guessed she’d strayed too far from the road, putting her out of contact with the nearest tower.

  No matter. She needed to walk toward that road, preferably arriving before dark. That meant she’d be walking into cell phone range. She’d be able to call Neely in less than an hour and impress the sheriff with her new insights into Mr. Judd’s attack. It was time to stop dawdling and start walking.

  Faye wished the sun would slow down, because she’d made time to solve yet another mystery. A series of wet holes that were roughly the size of a man’s foot had drawn her eye to a sandbar nestled in a tight bend in the creek. A heavy deposit of gravel in that bend immediately made her think of Chuck.

  She knew that there wasn’t much stone worth quarrying in Neshoba County. At times, prehistoric inhabitants of the area had traded for good stone, but they had generally gathered local gravel for their tools in places like this. Wading out to the gravel deposit, Faye was rewarded with traces of Chuck’s exploration. A few holes where larger chunks of rock were scratched out of the ground, a pile of rock samples stored under an overhang—these things spoke to her of Chuck.

  She held up a broken rock for Joe to see. “A checked pebble…somebody’s been looking for rock worth flintknapping. And they were willing to trespass to do it.”

  “Chuck?” Oka Hofobi asked.

  “He’d be my guess,” Faye said. “Don’t you know he’d love to try to replicate the artifacts we’ve found with local materials? As soon as he looked at the project map and saw this bend in the creek, he would’ve been itching to find out whether there was enough local gravel of good quality to support the activity level at our site without outside trade.”

  Faye would bet good money that Chuck had found that question so irresistible that he’d spent much of the last few days checking pebbles. A simple stone-on-stone blow could knock away a quarter of the p
ebble, exposing its interior so that its suitability for flintknapping could be assessed.

  Dr. Mailer could rest easy. Chuck had earned his dirty, torn clothes the old-fashioned way…by being so fascinated with an archaeological possibility that he couldn’t bring himself to respect somebody else’s property rights.

  She had reluctantly passed on the opportunity to poke around and get a better look at Chuck’s work. It was time to get back to the car. As they walked, she fished the apples out of the day pack and gave one to Joe. Oka Hofobi opted for a bottle of water, and Faye was glad to get sixteen fluid ounces off her back. She was getting tired.

  She jerked her head in the direction of the creek, and they slogged back to its bank. The vegetation was overgrown and rank there, but there was no better landmark than a full, flowing body of water. If she kept close to the creek, at least she could be sure they were heading in the right direction. This was no time to get lost.

  A muffled ring from deep in her day pack told Faye that she had walked back into cell phone territory. They were approaching the open field where Calhoun had died. Maybe the lack of trees improved reception, or maybe they’d just gotten close enough to the well-traveled road to pick up a signal.

  She checked the phone’s display as she answered it. Neely Rutland was on the line. Just the person she’d been trying to reach.

  “Faye, have you been trying to call me?” The sheriff’s voice was strained. “Every time I tried to answer, you were gone.”

  “The service out here is poor. I’ve probably been walking in and out of range.”

  “Out where? Where are you?”

  Faye didn’t want to say. “I’m working, but—”

  “You’re not at your work site. I’m there, and I’m all by myself. There’s nobody in the trailer or in the house.”

  “Chuck must have gone to the hotel. And I guess Mrs. Nail isn’t home from work yet. Oka Hofobi—”