Burials

by Mary Anna Evans

  Carson grunted.

  “Your mother’s very good at getting a man to do exactly what she wants, and all the while he’s thinking he’s a free agent. Ask me how I know.”

  “Yeah? Well, she can’t get me to delay my project for a single minute more, and neither can you.”

  “It’s your funeral,” Mickey said.

  Hearing those uncomfortable words, Faye thought about the morning’s unexplained gunshots. To his credit, Mickey winced at what he’d said and withdrew, taking his spot beside Kenny. Emily joined them, and Carson’s crew of three stood beside one of the corner stakes as their project got started.

  Carson and Faye joined them as the backhoe began digging. The security guards slowed their patrols as they looked over their shoulders at the big machine. Faye felt as excited as everyone looked. There’s something about watching heavy machinery operate, up close, that has the power to turn anyone into a three-year-old.

  The backhoe’s sharp blade hit the dirt and scooped a load of dry, loamy topsoil into its bucket. Fine, dry particles hung in the air.

  A small motion of the operator’s hands swiveled the metal beast a quarter-turn, and the great clod of dirt fell to the ground. The bucket took another bite of ground, digging into the red-clay subsoils, and dumping them into the growing pile of backdirt. Instead of slumping into a pile the way Faye’s native sand would have, the hard clay broke into two big pieces surrounded by scattered crumbles and dull green grass.

  Repeating the motion again and again, the operator opened the ground ahead of him and raised a pile of soil to his right. The air filled with the smell of disturbed soil and hot diesel fumes, and Faye liked it.

  The backhoe never tired. As its blade traveled down, Faye stood at Carson’s side and tried to calculate how much he was spending on labor and equipment rental, not to mention those security guards who weren’t in his budget. She wasn’t sure of the exact number, but it was a big one.

  “How’d you get your employer to revisit this job now?”

  “Tourism in this area is up. People love those casinos.”

  Faye knew this was true. Her father-in-law was a regular at the nearest one, when his bank account allowed it.

  “Antiquities protection laws make it tricky to do this kind of work anywhere, these days,” she said.

  “I told the tribe that I thought putting a park here would get the tourists to stay an extra day. The tribal leadership must have thought I was right, because they went ahead. They had to get a lot of people to sign off, but this project has friends in high places. Favors were exchanged, backs were scratched, and surprise! The dig was approved. Obviously, I was thrilled.”

  While they talked, Carson never took his eyes off the moving backhoe. In his right hand, he clutched a meter stick that he would use to gauge whether the operator was getting close to the target depth. The backhoe operator never even gave him a chance.

  Just as Carson was walking to the lip of the excavation to measure its depth, the operator slowly extended the backhoe’s arm to its maximum length. He used it to scrape the bottom of the hole, as gently as if he’d reached out his own finger to dab a bit of food off a baby’s chin. Translucent plastic glinted through a thin layer of residual dirt.

  Faye suppressed a grin and the desire to mutter, Show-off.

  Carson hurried over to speak to the man operating the big yellow machine, talking fast and pointing, as if the operator hadn’t just demonstrated that he could do this job with no help from anybody.

  Working slowly, the operator exposed more of the plastic, while keeping the sides of the excavation straight and the corners square. Eventually, though, he reached the limits of what heavy equipment can do. It was time for the shovel bums to take over.

  Carson’s workers jumped down into the open excavation like people who were happy to use the shovels in their hands. They quickly cleared the bulk of the dirt that remained atop the plastic, then they lined up at the far edge of the plastic, ready to start rolling it back at Carson’s signal. He gave it.

  The slippery film was awkward to handle, but they had most of it out of the hole before Faye’s contracted eight hours were up, and she was glad. She wasn’t ready to walk away. Not just yet. Archaeology was usually slow work, so this dramatic peeling-back of the earth made her heart race. She at least wanted to see undisturbed soil emerge before she left.

  Carson was darting back and forth between Kenny and Mickey as they rolled up the big plastic sheets. Faye hung back, partly to stay out of the way but mostly to let Carson handle his own project.

  When she thought she couldn’t stand being on the sidelines a second longer, Carson glanced over his shoulder and held up a hand, beckoning her to join him as he went back down into the excavation. He had hardly lowered the hand before she was down in the unit with him.

  The sides of the pit were gray-brown at the surface, shading quickly to red as the depth grew greater. Its bottom was like kiln-fired pottery, flat and hard and the color of brick. This was the natural state of Oklahoma dirt. There was no question that this was as far as the previous crew had gotten.

  Kenny and Mickey had hauled the plastic up top, and Carson was helping as they worked hard to handle the unmanageable film as it billowed in the wind. Emily had lingered in the open excavation. Faye hoped she wasn’t a slacker, but Emily didn’t seem lazy. The tall woman was stooped over, taking small steps as if something under her feet felt wrong.

  Faye was already moving in Emily’s direction when the woman looked up from the area of disturbed soil, as long and narrow as a small human body. The soil had sunk as much as three inches in some places. The depression’s corners were square and its sides were so straight that they had to be human-made.

  Emily raised her head and met Faye’s eyes for just an instant. There was only one word for the expression on her face, and it was horror.

  Faye was at Emily’s side in three strides, and this time it was her turn to beckon Carson as Emily dropped to her knees and started digging.

  Faye didn’t think Emily’s technique showed enough care. “Hang on a minute, Emily. Let’s get Carson to come take a look.”

  Emily didn’t seem to hear a word she said.

  “Carson,” Faye called out, “can you get down here?”

  Carson handed his corner of the billowing plastic to Mickey and headed for the rim of the excavation. The scraping of Emily’s trowel on exposed clay filled the open pit.

  Part of Faye’s brain knew that something bad was about to happen. Something really bad. It was telling her to protect herself, and it was making her adrenaline flow. Time slowed and her senses sharpened. The metallic smell of iron-rich soil was strong. She could feel the sun’s heat baking the back of her bare neck, and she could feel the slight coolness of her own shadow on her hands and arms.

  She looked over Emily’s shoulder as she dug, saying, “Really, I think you should wait for Carson.”

  The older woman’s hands were white as bone and scattered with brown blotches left by time. They were in constant motion and they never slowed down.

  Faye recognized the sound of metal on bone before she saw the human femur emerge from the clay. Scraps of khaki-colored twill fabric surrounded it.

  Faye grasped Emily’s shoulder. “You have to stop,” she said. “Carson will need to call the law. The tribe should know, too.”

  The woman never faltered in her digging.

  “Emily!” Carson said as he jumped into the pit and rushed toward them. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Emily proved she hadn’t suddenly lost her hearing by shaking her head, as if that was an adequate answer to his question. She kept her trowel moving, never once pausing to study this grisly thing she’d found.

  Now that Faye was getting a good look at Emily, she could see that the woman’s dark hair was heavily streaked with white. Creases marked the
back of the hand that was wielding a trowel, wielding it as confidently as if it hadn’t been decades since she last worked here.

  Raking the sharp edge of her trowel across the hard-packed clay, Emily carved away a thick layer of soil that was a slap in the face of a professional archaeologist’s conservative technique. She did it again. And again, faster, raking deeper into the soil with every pass. The cheekbone of a human skull emerged.

  “Emily, stop,” Carson said, reaching out to grasp Emily’s wrist. “I mean it.”

  Emily shook his hand away and kept digging. Carson grabbed her wrist again and reached for the other one, but he was too hesitant about it. He moved like a man who had been so big for so long that the fear of hurting people was deeply engrained.

  At five-foot-nothing and a hundred pounds, it would have taken a lot for Faye to hurt this woman who was nearly twice her weight, so she had no worries that she might accidentally hurt Emily. She reached out to grab Emily firmly by the waist.

  Emily dodged them both and moved ever faster, knowing that they weren’t going to let her flout the law forever. She was uncovering the skull too fast, shoveling the soil away too quickly to know whether there were artifacts mingled with it.

  No, not artifacts. Clues. This was not just an archaeological dig that Emily was botching with shoddy technique. This was a crime scene. The shreds of fabric surrounding these bones were of recent manufacture, and Faye had seen a zipper among the cloth cradling the femur Emily had uncovered.

  Faye’s hand found her phone. Carson could handle Emily, if he could just make himself use his strength against someone who was smaller than he was. Somebody needed to call the police.

  The high-pitched tones associated with the numbers nine, one, and one again, sounded at the Sylacauga site for the second time that day. They pierced the dry air and bounced off the sides of the open excavation. They were as manmade and artificial as the straight sides and right-angled corners of this woman’s open grave.

  For it was a woman. Faye was almost sure of it. The grave wasn’t sized for a full-grown man. The portion of the femur that had peeked through the soil had looked too slender to belong to a man and too long to belong to a child. Faye would have called it gracile.

  The lovely sound of the word “gracile” echoed pointlessly in her brain as Carson grabbed Emily by both shoulders and tried to haul her away from the buried skeleton. As Faye waited for the emergency operator to answer, she evaluated the portion of the skull that Emily had covered.

  The chiseled shape of the cheekbone and chin also looked female. Above the exposed cheekbone, obvious fractures radiated from a distinct depression. If Faye had to guess, she’d say that someone had struck this woman a hard blow with a blunt instrument.

  Only seconds had passed, but Faye hardly remembered why the phone on the other end of the connection was ringing. A voice broke the silence for Faye as she stood fascinated by Emily and her frenzied breaking of taboos.

  “Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”

  Before Faye could begin her explanation—“My name is Faye Longchamp-Mantooth and I’m an archaeologist at a dig that has uncovered a human burial”—Emily completely let go of any semblance of proper technique. She turned the point of her trowel into a weapon against the unyielding clay, hacking at it, scraping, gouging.

  Carson wrapped both arms around Emily, trying to get her to stop, but she was a large woman and a strong one. She was struggling so hard that Faye wasn’t sure he could stop her from digging without hurting her, and it was plain to see that using physical force on another human being was something that Carson just did not want to do.

  “You know better than this, Emily!” he said. “What’s going on with you?”

  Emily wriggled her right arm loose, aiming her trowel at the hollow between jaw and clavicle, as if clearing the soil’s weight from the throat of a choking woman. She was wielding it with enough force to splinter any bones in its way.

  The emergency operator was calmly asking Faye to state her emergency as Carson finally used his muscled body with force, shifting Emily’s body hard enough to throw the frantic woman off-balance.

  “You’re fired, Emily. Fired.” Carson sounded like he’d rather be saying anything else but this. “This is completely unethical, and you know it.”

  Emily was powerfully built, broad-shouldered and thick through the middle, and even Carson couldn’t overpower her instantly. She gave the trowel one last raking jab and uncovered something that glinted, sparkled, glittered.

  Lowering her torso almost to the ground, she shifted her weight so far forward and down that Carson was thrown off-balance. Without looking back at him, Emily shook herself free, frantically raking her thumbnail at the thread of silver to free it from the soil.

  The end of the silver thread was fused by clay to the dead woman’s sternum.

  Faye wanted to say “Leave her alone. Let her rest in peace,” but her voice wasn’t working. The emergency operator had noticed this, because she was speaking slowly and plainly into the phone, as if trying to communicate with an injured person descending into shock.

  “Ma’am. Ma’am, can you hear me? Are you okay?”

  Emily was rubbing at the end of the strand of silver, trying to free it from a bone that had long been stained red by the Oklahoma clay. When an irregular object broke free of the bone, she cupped it in one hand and rubbed at the encrusted dirt with the other.

  “I knew it!”

  She flung the object at Carson, who reflexively let go of her shoulders and caught this thing that was flying at his face.

  “I should have known she never left. She would have said good-bye. I should have known that something terrible had happened to her.” Weeping, Emily stretched herself over the grave, facedown. Her tears made muddy spots on the exposed curve of a red-stained cranium.

  Mickey and Kenny had jumped down into the pit and run to Carson, who was studying the silver chain on his open palm. He held it out for them all to see. It was attached to a large pendant in the zigzag shape of the Greek letter sigma.

  His father took it from him, cradled it in his hands, and bowed his head over it. “She wore it all the time. Dr. Townsend, I mean. Her first name was Sophia.”

  The voice in Faye’s ear was growing insistent. “Ma’am. I need you to tell me if you’re safe. I’m sending you some help.”

  Faye found her voice. “Thank you, Operator. I’m fine. Perfectly okay. Just let me tell you what kind of help I need. I need the medical examiner and I need whatever law enforcement agency has jurisdiction in murder cases around here. The tribal police? The sheriff’s office? The FBI? The Bureau of Indian Affairs? I have no idea. All I know is that we’ve found the body of a woman who hasn’t been seen around here in nearly thirty years. The condition of the body suggests that she was murdered. Her name was Dr. Sophia Townsend.”

  Excerpt from the field notes of Dr. Sophia Townsend

  June 3, 1987

  If that simpering woman doesn’t stop forgetting to label the sample bags, I may have to kill her. Even if she finally figures out how to do that simple-minded task, I may have to kill her anyway. She asks constantly whether her field technique is improving, following me around like a mongrel dog, so I think I shall call her Ladybitch.

  As for her fieldwork, no. It is not improving. She handles her trowel like a butcher hacking the gristle out of a chuck roast, but she cries when I say so. I’m giving her a week to give up the weepy shit. If she can’t manage it by then, I’m killing her.

  Her blond and handsome colleague gets to keep his job, because he handles his trowel like a scalpel, but I shall call him Idiot. I haven’t told him that I find him attractive, not yet, but he surely expects that I do.

  His buddy has earned the nickname of Stupidface. He does not handle his trowel like a scalpel, or even like a butter knife, but I still hold out a little hope for h
im. He learns by watching and doing. (Unlike the fatuous Ladybitch.) Stupidface will develop some skill and he doesn’t talk much, so I think I’ll be able to stand having him around until his technique improves. The Hulk talks even less, which makes him a lot easier to stomach.

  All four of them have gorgeous faces and toothsome asses that somewhat compensate for their deplorable lack of skill. This is, of course, why I hired them.

  Chapter Six

  “What now?”

  Carson dropped into the front seat of his truck where Faye sat waiting for him. He looked like he wanted to go somewhere deep in the woods and just throw some rocks at a tree that never did anything to hurt him. He also looked like a man whose dream project was in jeopardy. Faye would have stayed with him for moral support as he waited for the complicated situation to play out, but Roy Cloud was back to investigate the second crime of their day, and he was beckoning her.

  The Sylacauga site had morphed quickly from an archaeological dig to a crime scene. The 911 operator had wanted to send emergency medical personnel immediately. If she hadn’t been standing on the lip of an open grave, Faye would have laughed at how many different ways she’d had to say, “She’s dead. She’s really dead. Seriously, there’s nothing here but some old bones,” to forestall an onslaught of paramedics.

  Faye had done enough work with law enforcement to know how much they hated medical personnel tramping through their crime scene when the victim was beyond help. The medical examiner did still need to officially pronounce the bones dead and take possession of what was left of the body, though.

  The Creek Nation’s Lighthorse Tribal Police had sent a first responder to take control of the scene. She had barely paused to introduce herself as Kira Denton before diving into the task at hand, securing the perimeter.

  The tribe had sent someone who seemed very important. Cloud had walked her around the site, showing her where the shooting had happened and showing her what was left of Sophia Townsend. She’d had intense conversations with Carson and Cloud, before leaving in an expensive but not flashy black sedan. Faye didn’t have to be privy to those conversations to know what they were about. The tribal government wanted everyone to know that they were watching.