Burials

by Mary Anna Evans

  The medical examiner arrived soon afterward to confirm that the woman who had been reduced to a sad collection of bones was indeed dead. He checked in with Denton before crossing the crime scene tape she’d draped around the rim of the open excavation.

  This seemed to Faye to be a logical enough place to put the boundary. For all these years, the body had lain two feet under a plastic sheet buried three feet underground. Faye could think of no way that any evidence could have survived elsewhere, but something might have survived under that sheet at the bottom of the old excavation. She didn’t know what it might be—footprints? a single strand of hair with miraculously surviving DNA at the root?—but a case like this would require investigators to play long shots.

  Cloud had talked to Carson first. It hadn’t taken long. How much, really, could Carson know about a woman who was dead and buried when he was a child?

  Now it was Faye’s turn. She and Cloud sat face-to-face in two folding chairs that were just outside the crime scene tape and within eyeshot of the open grave. When he said, “Tell me everything you know,” she did.

  Faye told him every snippet of gossip she’d ever heard about Dr. Townsend’s odd disappearance. Then she told him about the day’s events that had led up to the discovery of bones that were probably Sophia Townsend’s. After that, she cast about awkwardly for something else useful to say. She came up dry, but her time spent working on a Mississippi Choctaw reservation prompted her to ask an unrelated question.

  “Jurisdiction on tribal lands confuses me, Chief Cloud. Is this your case to investigate? And is it going to stay that way?”

  “You tell me and we’ll both know.”

  When Faye laughed, he said, “I’m serious. Kind of serious. Jurisdiction on tribal lands confuses everybody. If this is a murder or manslaughter—and it sure looks like one of those things—then, you’re right, the jurisdiction isn’t mine. It’s federal. That means they’ve already assigned someone to the case and we’ll have some top-notch forensics people on the scene tomorrow as soon as they can get out here to us. But you’ve got to understand how stretched thin those people are. There’s not going to be a lot of evidence to be found here, so they might decline to prosecute. It happens more than you’d think.”

  “I’m guessing you’re not happy about that.”

  “This is tribal land. My land. If I can get justice for that woman by staying involved, I will. I’ll be real nice about it, so the feds won’t mind too much.”

  Faye thought that the Muscogee (Creek) Nation seemed to have been lucky in its choice of police chiefs.

  Chief Cloud changed the subject from the death of Sophia Townsend to archaeology, asking Faye for some background on why Carson had hired her. His manner was low-key as he asked her a series of softball questions about her professional background as the topic of conversation somehow made its way back around to the events of the day. What was the significance of the layer of plastic? What did they hope to find beneath it? He seemed genuinely interested and not at all intimidating, although she thought the capability for steely interrogation was in him.

  None of Faye’s answers could have been any surprise to Cloud after his interview with Carson. He took notes as she spoke, despite the fact that he was recording the conversation. Somehow, those notes taken in longhand on a pad of lined paper made her feel like he took her words very seriously. They made her want to tell him something helpful. They made her dig deeper into her memory than she might have if his cheap disposable pen hadn’t been traveling deliberately over the yellow paper and leaving a thin trail of black ink behind.

  Roy Cloud himself made Faye wish she knew something helpful to tell him. She found his broad, calm face comforting. Trustworthy. She wanted to give Cloud the key he needed to crack this case open, but she didn’t have it. All she had was a question that had been bothering her ever since Emily freed Sophia Townsend’s necklace from the bones that had once encased her heart.

  After Faye had told him every last thing she knew about the case, she asked her question.

  “How is it possible that nobody realized that Dr. Townsend was missing? All these years, nobody ever asked whether she’d really turned into a mountain hermit? Can that be true?”

  Detective Cloud’s poker face was not perfect, because she saw what his eyes did when she asked this question. The lids dropped a millimeter, darkening eyes that were already black. Then he lifted them and held her gaze. There was an entire murder investigation being launched behind those eyes, but he only said, “That’s something I’m trying to find out.”

  He moved to dismiss her, but she said, “Wait. Have you learned anything about the shooting this morning?”

  “If I had a suspect, I could ask for an alibi. If I had any clues, I might be able to come up with a suspect. If I knew for sure somebody was shooting at you, the whole thing might turn into a federal case. As it is, well…I’ve got someone looking at videos from all the businesses along the highway between here and town, but they get a lot of traffic. The shooter would have had to have stopped at one of those businesses and done something that told us that this person, out of all the others on the videos, should make us suspicious.”

  “That’s a long shot.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  Cloud gave her an appraising look and apparently decided to tell her what little he did know. She was, after all, one of the people who’d be in the line of fire if the shooter came back. “I’ve got one long shot that isn’t quite as long as the others. I’ve got somebody looking frame-by-frame at video from the security cameras at a church just a mile down the road from here. A person who’s trying hard can cover that mile pretty fast, even on foot. Somebody fast might’ve been able to cover the whole distance before I got here. That’s where I’d park if I wanted to come in on foot so that nobody could get a look at my car.”

  “And?”

  “The cameras don’t show a single car or truck in the parking lot this morning. They do, however, show the shadow of one vehicle as it passes just outside the range of the cameras at just the right time of day to be our shooter. The driver had to leave the pavement and drive across the grass to avoid those cameras. That just doesn’t seem like an accident, do you think?”

  Cloud raised an eyebrow as if he actually did care what she thought and was going to wait until she responded.

  Faye said, “I’m going to say it’s no accident, since it’s the only clue we’ve got, isn’t it?”

  “If God loved me more, there would be tracks in that grass that I could match to a set of tires, but no. All God gave me was a shadow. That shadow comes into the parking lot about dawn and it leaves right after you people called for help.”

  He held his hand out, palm down, then whisked it to the side as if to emphasize that the person who cast the shadow was really gone.

  “You can’t do much with a shadow,” Faye said.

  “No, you can’t. But you can ask yourself who would know how to stay out of camera range.”

  “A really smart and experienced criminal?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe the head of the church’s facilities committee. Or maybe just a member of the church who pays attention. Or maybe someone who works for the security company that installed the cameras. I know some people who go to that church and I know some people who do security. I’m on it.”

  Then he sent her away to sit beside Carson in the cab of his pickup, where she asked him the same question she’d asked Cloud.

  “Do you really think that nobody realized Dr. Townsend was missing?”

  Carson shrugged. “I’m not the one to ask. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been hearing people say that she got sick of people and went off to live in her mountain cabin. I took the gossips at their word. All those people telling that story must’ve thought it made some sense.”

  “Except,” Faye said, “for maybe one person wh
o knew exactly what had happened to her. That would be the person who started spreading the story about her mountain cabin to cover up the fact that she was dead. Murdered.”

  Carson’s two remaining workers, Kenny and Mickey, were standing a stone’s throw from the truck. She wondered if they could hear her and Carson talking. She could hear their voices through the open window, but the constant wind made the words indistinguishable.

  Their chatter had an uncertain rhythm. The words came in spurts. Sometimes they halted unexpectedly. Sometimes they sputtered out. Dead silence might have been appropriate out of respect for the dead, but it would have been damned uncomfortable. Instead, they’d settled on stiff, awkward conversation. They were surely pondering the fact that their summer jobs were now a lot less secure than they’d thought, and she was pretty sure that their personal budgets depended on that income.

  There’s no rulebook on how to behave after watching a long-dead body being unearthed. Carson had been in elementary school when Sophia Townsend died, and Faye had been in Florida, still in her teens. She felt confused, but not bereaved, and Carson seemed to feel about the same.

  Both Kenny and Mickey must have known Sophia Townsend fairly well. Faye found them to be unreadable. The dead woman had been their boss for months. Yet their eyes were as shielded as if they were still wearing sunglasses in the deep shade of the trees that nearly surrounded the open excavation.

  The other witness who’d known Dr. Townsend, Emily, was taking her turn in the folding chair across from Cloud. Emily was considerably further away than the others, but Faye could just make out the woman’s troubled face.

  Emily was the only person in sight who was obviously grieving for Sophia Townsend. She’d said that Sophia’s parents had died just months before their daughter disappeared. No one could recall any mention of other family members. Was it really possible that no one but Emily had missed her?

  Maybe. According to Carson, the people who remembered her were unanimous in saying that Sophia Townsend had been a very unpleasant person. Faye had already known this, just from years of hearing archaeologists gossip. She supposed it was possible that someone so difficult could be completely without close relationships.

  But Sophia Townsend had certainly had professional relationships. An entire crew of archaeologists that might have included several more workers besides these three had been working for her when she died. How could they all have swallowed the notion that their boss had simply decided to stop coming to work?

  Someone had started that story, and Faye wanted to know who it was.

  Chapter Seven

  It had been nearly an hour and Faye still sat beside Carson, making small talk while the police did their work. Not much had changed, other than that Faye had realized how late it was. She shot off a text to her husband to tell him she might be a while and why.

  Emily was now settled onto the chair opposite Cloud. Before the investigator could begin speaking, the medical examiner approached them quickly, signaling that he needed a word with Cloud.

  Cloud and the medical examiner huddled like two people who didn’t want their conversation heard. Every now and then, they stopped talking and took a long look at the truck where Faye and Carson sat.

  “I think we’re about to have some company,” Faye said.

  A few minutes later, Cloud and the medical examiner proved her right by heading their way.

  Instead of approaching Carson, Cloud stuck his head in Faye’s window, which caught her off-guard. At the end of the day, she’d be back at her father-in-law’s house, and her involvement in this job would be over. She was hardly more than a bystander. Why would he seek her out instead of Carson?

  “Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth,” Cloud said, “I’ve been thinking that you might be important to this investigation, and I guess I’ve been right. The medical examiner here thinks he’s going to need some help.”

  The medical examiner leaned in her window, jostling Cloud out of the way. He shook her hand saying, “The name’s Gerard. Nice to meet you, ma’am. I’d be grateful to have an archaeologist on-hand while we proceed. This ain’t any ordinary case. Anybody can see that. Plus we just found this. We’ve got some time before the forensics people get here to decide how to proceed, but we need to all be on the same page and we need some real specific archaeology expertise here. Check this out.”

  He held out his phone. On its screen was a close-up photo of a small red-stained sphere protruding from a pile of dirt. Gerard had put a quarter next to it, giving the photo a sense of scale.

  “May I?” she asked.

  He handed over his phone. Faye pulled a magnifier out of her pocket to get a better look at the object’s surface patina. She could see a hole that seemed to have been drilled straight through.

  “It’s some kind of bead, right? Really old?” Gerard asked. “Maybe pottery? My daddy used to plow up old beads out by the river. I’d go out in the fields after a big rain, and there they’d be. I’ve still got a big jar of ’em. Lots of times, somebody had scratched designs in the wet clay to make ’em pretty.”

  Faye could see why he’d think this was a pottery bead. It had taken on the color of the red dirt where it had been buried, so it looked like it had been molded from clay.

  “Good guess,” she said, “but no. This doesn’t look like a pottery bead to me. The clay has stained it red, but nobody made this. I’m pretty sure it’s a pearl, and a big one. But I do think you’re right that it’s very old. My gut tells me that it’s been in the ground for a lot longer than Sophia Townsend.”

  “No joke?” Gerard said, leaning over for another look at the picture.

  Cloud nodded. “The creeks and lakes around here are full of mussels. They’re good eating, if you salt them good and don’t mind chewing. Every now and then I find a pearl in my dinner.”

  Faye was still studying the photo. “I don’t think this came from a mussel. I don’t think it came from anywhere around here, actually. I’d say it was a saltwater pearl.”

  “If it’s really old, like you say, how in the heck did they drill that little tiny hole?” Gerard wanted to know. “I figured you could mold clay around a twig to make a pottery bead, but…wow. They made that little hole without a power drill?”

  Faye prepared to tell him exactly how it was done.

  Cloud cut off her incipient monologue. “Could I see that?”

  Faye handed him the phone.

  “Are you a hundred percent sure it’s old? Do you think she could have been wearing a string of pearls when she was killed?” Gerard asked.

  “Maybe. It’s hard to say from just this picture, but that hole doesn’t look machine-drilled to me.”

  Cloud put on his reading glasses to get a better look at the photo. “I hear you saying she was maybe wearing a string of pearls when she died, but that don’t make a bit of sense. Not if she was out here working. Pardon me if I’m wrong, Doctor Faye, but I don’t think you archaeologists dress up much when you’re on the job.”

  Being called “Doctor Faye” made her want to laugh, but Faye enjoyed the way Chief Cloud said it, so she let it slide. She gestured at her own work attire—a lightweight olive drab shirt, long-sleeved to protect her skin from the sun, over a matching pair of cargo pants. “As you can see, I’m not dressed for a cotillion. You think maybe she had a date, but she came out to work for a few minutes first?”

  “There’s no place nice enough to wear pearls in Sylacauga. Not unless you like to wear pearls while you chew on barbecued ribs,” Cloud said. “Oklahoma City, yeah. Or Tulsa. Maybe she was on her way to one of those places. But with who?”

  “Just as likely, she got killed someplace else and the creep brought her body back here to get rid of it,” Carson said.

  “I still think this pearl is old, so old that she wouldn’t have been wearing it. Don’t you agree, Carson? I also think it’s significant that sh
e was buried here,” Faye said.

  She looked at the excavation and imagined the earlier one that had been standing open when Sophia Townsend died. It would have been as wide as this one, five meters, but it would have been much longer. She pictured the thirty-meter trenches that she knew Sophia’s crew had opened and thought that Carson had been singularly unlucky to pick the five-square-meter spot where Sophia Townsend’s body waited.

  “Finding her body here means that the murderer had to be someone who knew there was an excavation and knew where it was,” Cloud said. “Say she was killed while being mugged on the streets of Oklahoma City or was maybe even the victim of a serial killer—the murderer wouldn’t have known there was a handy pit in the woods a few miles outside of Sylacauga. How many people would have known that? Her employees. Her friends—”

  Gerard, the medical examiner, interrupted him to say, “Friends? If she had any of those, or any close family, don’t you think they would’ve missed her when she dropped out of sight? Everybody here’s telling me that nobody ever reported her missing.”

  “Her client. That’s who would have known where the excavation was.” Carson quickly added, “I mean, the contract manager for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, the one who hired her. Her client.”

  He emphasized the word “client,” as if he couldn’t think of any other way to explain the consulting archaeologist’s relationship with the person who paid the bills. “His name’s Phil Smithee. Phil learned his lesson after letting this project spiral out of control. He’s moved way up the ladder since he was the contract manager who didn’t keep a close enough eye on Sophia Townsend and her spending. These days, he heads up the tribe’s purchasing department. He’s over everything, casinos and all. He would have known where she was digging. Lots of people would have. It’s not like it was some big secret she was working out here.”