Burials

by Mary Anna Evans

  This was that day. The Muscogee (Creek) Nation had wasted a great deal of money the first time they tried to develop this site. It was up to Carson to make sure it didn’t happen again.

  If Dr. Townsend had wanted to continue her career as an archaeologist, running away from an active contract and leaving her client holding the bag would have made it impossible. Careers don’t bounce back from such things. But she clearly hadn’t wanted to keep being an archaeologist.

  Rumor had it that she’d moved to a mountain cabin that she’d owned for years, cutting herself off from friends, coworkers, lovers, everybody. Or maybe she hadn’t had any friends to leave behind. Her reputation for pure meanness bore out the idea that she’d found other people burdensome.

  Dr. Townsend’s parents had both died in the year prior to her abrupt departure. The gossips thought maybe she’d inherited enough money to walk away from her job. It made some sense that a woman like that would have withdrawn from the world the instant she’d accumulated enough money to make it possible.

  “What has Emily told you about the earlier work?” she asked.

  “Not much that I didn’t already know. I’ve been the Creek’s tribal archaeologist for five years, but I’ve been busy monitoring run-of-the-mill construction projects and roadwork for all of that time. This is my first opportunity to do work here that I consider important, even groundbreaking. This is a fascinating habitation site, quite old, but it’s a big question mark in a lot of ways. Everything I know about this site comes from studying the artifacts Dr. Townsend uncovered and left behind. And her field notes. She left behind more notes than artifacts.”

  “The tribe wasn’t interested in going forward with the work she’d started?”

  “Nobody but me has ever thought there was more to this site than the handful of stone tools they found in 1987. The tribe just wasn’t interested in spending the money to continue her work, so I’ve done my best with what I had. I did my master’s work by studying Dr. Townsend’s finds and field notes—‘excavating the collection,’ some might say. I carried that work forward into my dissertation as much as I could. The notebooks, in particular, are…interesting.”

  Faye had known colleagues who were this obsessed with one particular site. Sometimes they were right. “What do you mean when you say the notebooks are interesting?”

  “She was a true scientist, meticulous about recording everything—the time of day, the weather, the precise coordinates of every find. I can’t describe to you how detailed her notes and sketches were. Just imagine an old-time archaeologist recording every last little thing because he’s working without a camera.”

  He wasn’t telling her everything.

  “I don’t think that was what you meant when you said ‘interesting’ in that tone of voice.”

  “Well, her very professional sketches were a big contrast to her unprofessional sniping about her crew, her client, the job. Everything. I mean, who puts that in their field notes? I was actually pretty excited when I first read those notes. I thought I was seeing evidence that she’d planned to walk away from the job all along. Why else would you call your client a fat bastard in notes that he might eventually see?”

  “Are you saying you don’t consider calling her client a fat bastard to be evidence that she was planning to abandon the work?”

  “I did, until I talked to people who knew her. You know how people are at conferences after they’ve had a few drinks. Their lips get loose.”

  This was why Faye did her drinking at home with Joe.

  “According to people who worked with Dr. Townsend, her notes were always that way. They think that calling people names in writing kept her from screaming at them in public. Maybe it worked sometimes, but everybody says she did a lot of screaming anyway.”

  “But she kept getting work? Why?”

  “Because she was that good.”

  Carson had done a thesis and a dissertation on the woman’s work, and he’d published some impressive papers on it, too, so Faye was going to have to take his word for that.

  “Did her notes give you everything you needed to do this job? What about after she left? If the firm that closed the excavation did a crappy job, you’re in deep trouble.”

  “That’s why it’s so helpful to have some of Dr. Townsend’s workers onboard. Emily, in particular, remembers a lot of details from the time after her boss ran away. The firm the Creeks hired to close the excavation went bankrupt years ago, but I have Emily to tell me about their work. Her description makes it sound like they did everything by the book. I don’t think we’ll find any surprises when we open it back up.”

  “We’ve talked a lot about Emily, but what about the other two workers? What do you know about their skill level?”

  Faye pointed at two men wearing red baseball caps. No one else but the backhoe operator, Emily, and the security guards was there, so they had to be Carson’s paid employees by process of elimination. She recognized one of them as Kenny, the man who had bonded with them while they waited for Cloud to arrive.

  Kenny was dark-skinned, broad-shouldered and maybe a little taller than average. She could see a scrape on his chin and another one on his arm, which reminded her of their traumatic morning. Kenny had been so scared by the gunshots that he’d thrown himself at the ground, face-first. She would have done the same.

  His eyes were hidden behind dark sunglasses, but he looked like he was keeping everyone and everything under surveillance. He stood, arms crossed, next to Carson’s other paid worker, who also wore dark glasses. His body language said that they were friends, but Kenny was doing none of the talking.

  Kenny’s talkative friend was remarkably similar in build—not tall and not short, well-muscled and sturdy—but his face was paler and it was framed by a blond-and-gray beard.

  “They don’t worry me nearly so much,” Carson said. “They’re both teachers at the middle school in Sylacauga. In case you haven’t noticed, the site’s called Sylacauga and so’s the town.”

  “Doesn’t that get confusing?”

  Carson smiled. “Sometimes. But if you don’t call things what the locals call them, it gets even more confusing.”

  Faye watched Kenny interact with the man at his side. They didn’t look at each other as they talked. Instead, they stood looking into the distance as if they’d both noticed something fascinating. The man who wasn’t Kenny talked constantly. He punctuated his chatter by occasionally stopping to spit. Sometimes Kenny spit, too.

  “So you found two middle school teachers willing to spend their summer vacation sweating for just about nothing. You can’t possibly afford to pay them much.”

  “No worries. The state of Oklahoma makes me look like I’m made of money. Oklahoma doesn’t even pay its teachers enough to eat on the regular, so most all of them get summer jobs every year.”

  “It’s not just Oklahoma that shorts teacher pay.”

  “I hear you. It just so happens that my personal middle school teachers love what they do. They also love Sylacauga, both the town and the site. They were born here and they’ll die here, so they’re willing to teach for the little bit that Oklahoma pays them. And they love archaeology almost as much as they love living in Sylacauga. They worked here in 1987 for Dr. Townsend, and it wasn’t their first summer project. If there’s been a summer dig within driving distance of here during the past thirty years, those two guys worked it. They’re worth a lot more than I’m paying them.”

  Faye hoped Carson was right. “So tell me about your teachers who would rather be archaeologists.”

  “They worked for Dr. Townsend, just like Emily, but they’ve got even less to say about her. About the only word my father’s said about her in twenty-nine years is ‘bitch.’”

  It took Faye a second to realize what Carson was saying.

  “Wait. You’re telling me that your dad’s gonna be working fo
r you?”

  He nodded toward the blond-bearded worker. Carson looked absolutely nothing like Joe, but for the second that his head inclined toward his father, the archaeologist reminded Faye of her husband. Carson looked exactly as excited as Joe would be by the prospect of working side-by-side with his dad for months on end.

  “It’s not like I’m in a huge metropolitan area, crammed with experienced archaeologists who want to work for cheap,” he explained. “Dad’s experience at this site goes back to when I was maybe eleven. I lived for the times he brought me out here with him. Dr. Townsend seemed like a goddess to me, just as beautiful and just as scary. I never said a word to her, but she’s the reason I’m an archaeologist today. Anyway, yeah. That’s my dad. The one with the beard. His name’s Mickey. I’ll introduce you in a minute.”

  Faye wanted to pat Carson on the hand and say “There, there,” but she could add eleven and twenty-nine. It made no sense to treat a forty-year-old man like a child, even if he did present himself more like a teenage surfer than like a professional who was almost as old as she was.

  Nodding at Kenny, she said, “I don’t know much about him, other than that we spent half the morning being scared witless together.”

  “Kenny? He’s Dad’s best friend and he always has been. They’re next-door neighbors. They hunt together. They watch football together every weekend. Everybody should have a friend like that. Kenny teaches earth science. Dad teaches biology, because there was never going to be much for him to do in Sylacauga with his other degree, the one in anthropology. And Dad will never, ever leave Sylacauga. They’ve been teaching at the same school all my life. Kenny caught me shoplifting bubble gum at the convenience store when I was nine.”

  Faye wasn’t sure how she’d feel if she had to be the boss of two men who remembered what she looked like with her baby teeth. “What did he do? Make you take the gum back and confess? And I suppose he told your dad.”

  “Nope and nope. He paid for the gum. Then he put me in his car and drove. I was dead-sure that he was taking me to jail. Two hours in that car, driving around backwoods Oklahoma, and Kenny never opened his mouth. After he gave me enough time to think about what I’d done—more than enough time—he took me home. Still never said a word.”

  “So you’ve basically got two dads working for you.”

  Carson gave a single slow nod. “They’re good at the work. They’re damn smart. They’re reliable as the sunrise. I’ll survive.”

  Her phone vibrated in her pocket. Faye let it wait.

  “How’s the Muscogee tribe to work for?”

  “Great. Our relationship has always been totally businesslike. That makes plenty of sense, because they’re businesspeople in a big way. They run eleven casinos and thirty smokeshops and God knows what else. They don’t make mistakes in hiring and training their project managers any more, so the Dr. Townsend problem will never happen again. This project is small potatoes to them, but they’re paying close attention. This is their heritage and I’m digging it up.”

  “It’s not just the Muscogee tribe who’ll be watching to make sure you do this job right. Uncover human remains or burial goods, and everything will get more complicated and it will cost more.”

  Carson nodded impatiently, as if to say Everybody knows that.

  “The Creeks want to build a museum here as the centerpiece of an archaeological park,” he said. “They want to showcase history right where it happened, and that history might go back a very long way. As in a thousand years back.”

  Faye raised an eyebrow, but did not say what she was thinking, which was, Everybody thinks their site is the biggest and the oldest.

  Carson was on a roll, so much so that he didn’t even notice Faye’s skeptical eyebrow. “Dr. Townsend believed the Mississippians were here, and so do I. Nobody else has ever thought they were so far west. This park could be like no other, and I want to see it happen. So do the Creeks, but they also want to make money.”

  Faye looked around at the land with its low trees and rolling hills and big sky. It had its own beauty, but it was nothing like the lush southeastern lands where the Muscogee had lived before being forced to walk the Trail of Tears. “Do you blame them for wanting to make a little money?”

  “Oh, hell no. If people want to lose their money at the tribe’s gaming tables, I’m happy for the Creeks to have it. The park will be an excellent place for gamblers to send their families while they feed slot machines. If the families are having a good time here, the gamblers will be able to stay long enough to leave a few more dollars at the blackjack table. I know how this works and I completely understand what my employer wants from me.”

  The backhoe operator beckoned and Carson excused himself.

  As Carson walked away, Faye’s phone vibrated again, twice in quick succession. She didn’t like to text on company time. It was probably Joe and it was probably nothing, but three texts so close together could mean something was wrong with one of the children.

  She slid her phone out of her pocket, took a quick peek, then pocketed it again. Joe’s urgent messages had been:

  Dad aint stopped talking since u left

  he’s on his 8th cup of coffee & that can’t b good

  may have to kill him or run away frm home again

  Faye liked her father-in-law quite a lot. Okay, she loved Sly and so did Joe. But there was no denying that they’d both been irritated when he’d played the mother card to manipulate Joe into coming for a visit. They would have come eventually, but Sly’s insistence that they scatter Patricia’s ashes on her birthday had yanked a knot into their schedule.

  College-bound Amande was scheduled to take her SATs on the very day of Patricia’s long-delayed funeral. Little Michael was already booked for a week of prepaid and expensive riding lessons. Faye had thought this was excessive for such a small child, but she’d kept her mouth shut because she knew her husband very well. The child might as well be comfortable in the saddle when Santa left a pinto pony under the tree. And yes, she did expect Joe to bring the pony indoors for its Christmas morning unveiling.

  The family had decided that Faye and Joe would fly out for the funeral, with Amande and Michael coming after the SATs and the pony riding. She hoped this made Sly happy, and she hoped he wasn’t making her husband too miserable.

  Joe was a grown man. He would survive spending a day alone with his dad.

  Chapter Five

  The backhoe rolled to the lip of the excavation. The first part of this dig was going to go fast. Faye hoped that Emily had been right that the excavation was closed properly after Dr. Townsend’s dereliction of duty.

  Any archaeological project can be interrupted by time or foul weather or, unfortunately, lack of funds. A decades-long hiatus like this one was unusual, but it sometimes happened, and there was no way to know how long any closed excavation would stay closed. That’s why it was so important to close it right.

  The armchair archaeologist might think, What’s the big deal? Fill in the hole. When the project starts back up, open the hole again. But the professional knows that there is a right way to close down an unfinished excavation that may someday be reopened, and that’s what Carson was doing today. He was reopening an old, unfinished excavation.

  The 1987 dig had been far more extensive than the one Carson had planned. Based on Dr. Townsend’s field notes and his own preliminary remote-sensing data, he intended to reopen a five-meter-by-five-meter segment of a trench that had been thirty meters long, five meters wide, and a meter deep.

  This was the area where Carson thought his team was most likely to find cultural remains. If they found nothing, then the Creeks could feel reasonably confident about building their visitor’s center on this spot. If they did find something significant, Carson would be a very happy man and the visitor’s center would just have to be built somewhere else.

  Presuming proper field tec
hnique had been followed in 1987, a layer of plastic had been placed carefully at the bottom of the excavation. Then a backhoe had refilled the hole with the same soil that had come out of it. It had been screened first, of course, for artifacts and other important clues to the past, but its stratigraphy had been completely scrambled. It was impossible to put it back the way it had been before, so there was no point in trying.

  This was why Carson could tell the backhoe operator to dig quickly. There was nothing left to learn from the soil above that all-important plastic.

  The operator looked down at Carson. “Want to tell me one more time what you need done? Once this machine has done something, you can’t undo it.”

  Carson gestured toward a rectangular area marked at the corners by stout stakes. “That’s the spot. When you get down about a meter, slow down. We’ll be looking for a layer of plastic.”

  The man nodded, then walked back to the backhoe and settled himself in the operator’s seat. Carson watched him go, so intent on his work that he jumped when his father walked up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Son, you sure you want to do this today?” Mickey asked. “I keep thinking about those shots you heard this morning. Do you really think those guards are keeping anybody safe here? It’s not like they can stop bullets.”

  “Dad—”

  “You know what your mother would say.”

  “If I’d listened to her, I’d be doing a nice, safe desk job right now. Maybe I’d be managing a nonprofit or working for a government agency. The only element of risk would be whether I could make it to retirement before I put myself out of my misery. How long has it been since I let Mom tell me what to do?”

  “Not as long as you think. Was it really your idea to buy that house down the street from her office so she can poke her head in the door any time of the day or night?”