Burials

by Mary Anna Evans

  “Spiro’s always seemed small,” Faye said, “compared to the other big Mississippian sites.”

  “Exactly.” He spread his big hands and made a big gesture toward the verdant hills to the east to emphasize his point. Carson was born to work outside. Indoors, he would be forever breaking things.

  “Do you have anything that can be carbon-dated?” asked Joe.

  “Not yet, but I budgeted for thermoluminescence if we find any potsherds. You can bet that I’ll start reading up tonight on carbon-dating pearls. I’m not sure it’s right to take a sample of something as potentially significant as that figurine, but maybe sampling just one of those pearls would be okay. It’s just so exciting to find something that’s indisputably different from anything found here before. And to find it on the first day? Amazing. All these years, we’ve had nothing to work with but the few finds left from Dr. Townsend’s work. I’ve squeezed all the information out of those artifacts that I can, and I’m mightily tired of writing the papers that should have been written by Dr. Townsend. God rest her soul.”

  He bowed his head.

  “I’m feeling pretty awful right now. All these years, I’ve been thinking terrible things about her. Saying them, too. I thought she’d walked away from her responsibilities—to her client, to her workers, to history—and all the time she was lying dead in the ground. Murdered.”

  He looked at Faye and Joe for confirmation. “She had to have been murdered, don’t you think? I can’t think of any other reason for her to be buried like that, in secret and with a fractured skull. And it looked like she was still in her work clothes. God.”

  “It’s the only explanation I see,” said Faye.

  Carson started walking back toward the excavation quickly, as if he felt responsibility tugging him. Faye and Joe followed.

  “All through grad school, I kept hoping that I was missing something in those dusty old storage boxes she and her crew left behind, but the boxes never gave up anything but field notebooks and stone tools. No wood, no fibers. If she even found any seeds, they were lost in the confusion when she disappeared. You can’t carbon-date something that was never alive.”

  “No, you can’t,” Faye said. “But reopening Dr. Townsend’s excavation gives you a chance to put a date on this place. Pray for charcoal left behind on a very old hearth.”

  Carson walked even faster. “That’s why I picked this spot for the excavation. Remote sensing showed an anomaly that was big enough to be significant. It could have been a hearth or something else datable. Who could have expected that it would be the bones of Sophia Townsend?”

  When they got to Carson’s pickup, he reached into a Styrofoam cooler sitting on its tailgate and offered them both a beer, but Faye pushed aside a layer of ice and found a soda. “We’re both driving.”

  Carson, who didn’t seem to be as finicky about driving under the influence, sucked down half the bottle before he spoke again. Rubbing a thumb over the water condensed on its label, he went on talking archaeology as if he’d never stopped.

  “Here’s my theory, and I know it’s unorthodox. I think the Spiro site itself was ceremonial, not residential, because the bulk of the population didn’t live there. I think they lived here around Sylacauga.”

  He held out his hands, palms down, making circles that encompassed the land outside the pickup cab. “And I don’t mean that the Spiro people moved here when their civilization started to decline. I think they were always here, leaving the priests at Spiro alone to do their magic. The soil was better here and the creeks were more productive. Spiro couldn’t have supported a population anywhere near the size of a city that could be built at Sylacauga.”

  “Not while Spiro was supporting its priest class,” Joe said.

  Carson nodded like a man who was surprised to hear that his little buddy had amassed some expertise. “Exactly.”

  “Do you think the populations mixed at all?”

  “Sure. The Arkansas River isn’t that far from here by water. They could have paddled downriver to Spiro for festivals and camped. They’d have been fed as part of the ceremonies, so they could travel light. People have done a lot harder things for religion.”

  “People who travel light don’t leave much of a mark,” said Joe, who never carried anything bigger than a backpack. “Except maybe they left canoes and rafts behind at Spiro, if they walked home instead of paddling against the current. Wouldn’t that be something awesome to find?” Joe said.

  Carson’s face lit up. “It certainly would. One day, I’m going to build a traditional canoe and try to paddle this far. I’d have to portage around dams that weren’t there in Mississippian times, but I think it could be done. Anyway, maybe the pearl and the figurine are exactly what we came here to find.”

  Faye had worked with people who were this obsessed with a site. If the murder investigation continued hampering his project, Carson wasn’t going to take it well. He already wasn’t taking it well.

  “Like I told you on the phone, Faye, Dr. Townsend could have rewritten Oklahoma history, if she hadn’t abandoned the job.…”

  Carson’s face went red. “I’ve got to learn to stop saying those kinds of things. It’s such a shock to know that she’s dead. God rest her soul.”

  ***

  Sylvester “Sly” Mantooth cradled a chipped and stained coffee cup in a pair of hands that had handled much more potent drugs than caffeine.

  Nicotine, for sure. He couldn’t have denied the yellow stains on the fingers of his right hand if he’d wanted to, but he didn’t want to. In recent years, Sly had learned to own his mistakes. If a man approached his time in a penitentiary properly, this was his first lesson.

  These hands had handled alcohol, for damn sure, and a lot of it. The love of alcohol, first his father’s and then his own, had marked the first fifty years of his life. He still missed his whiskey, but he didn’t miss the man he was when whiskey got the better of him.

  And drugs. Dear God, the volume of drugs these hands had handled during his short drug-smuggling career. He could never know what those drugs had done to the people who used them, and he was going to have to live with that for the rest of his life.

  Sly had been a trucker since he got kicked out of boarding school, but if he could have rolled together every dollar he’d ever made on hauling legitimate loads, the total wouldn’t touch the money he’d gotten to move those little bags of white powder. Until he got busted. The money had come too late to save Patricia from the cancer they couldn’t afford to treat, and Sly believed in his heart that this was part of his punishment for running drugs.

  These hands didn’t deserve to hold anything better than a chipped and stained coffee cup, but they were soon going to be holding his little grandson again. Sly knew that he didn’t deserve that joy, but he was going to grab it.

  The night before, they’d pounded a hello on his son’s back, because he wasn’t real sure he knew how to hug a grown man. Both of Faye’s little hands had fit easily in their grip as he told her hello and didn’t tell her how grateful he was to her for making his son so happy.

  He’d tell her. One day, he’d tell her.

  Sly had a lot of practice at hiding his feelings, so it hadn’t been all that hard to keep the surprise from his eyes when Joe had hung up the phone and told him that Sophia Townsend’s body had surfaced.

  She was back. After all these years, she was back.

  Chapter Ten

  Faye saw no chance that she and Joe would be getting away from the Sylacauga site any time soon. Roy Cloud had said he had no more need of her till morning, but she knew that Carson would not be leaving until Cloud and the medical examiner finished their work and left his precious excavation to the tender care of Kira Denton.

  Faye couldn’t bring herself to leave Carson sitting alone thinking about the corpse of a woman he had known hidden at the bottom of an excavation
at an ancient site he’d spent his entire adult life studying. Even if she could have justified walking away from Carson by telling herself, I just met him today. How much do I owe him, really? there was Joe to consider. Long ago, Joe had been close enough to this man to earn the nickname, “Little Buddy.” Joe had walked away from Carson once—and his father and his memories of his mother and the whole state of Oklahoma—but Faye knew that he wasn’t going to do it now.

  Faye was worried about Carson. He’d nearly drained his beer and she saw the telltale sidewise glances of a man who really wanted to go pull another one out of the cooler. He was a big man who could surely metabolize a lot more alcohol than she could, but pounding two beers and getting right behind the wheel was a bad idea in Faye’s book. She’d already decided that she or Joe would be driving Carson home if he reached into that cooler again any time soon.

  Carson was putting up a good front, but he had to be stewing over losing control of his site to the police. And to her.

  Good-hearted Joe was a lot more suited than Faye to making folksy small talk, so she was letting him do that.

  “This is beautiful country, ain’t it?” he said. “Not many people, though. The Creeks think they’ll be able get people to come to a park way out here?”

  Carson knew the answer to this, and answering it made him perk up a bit. “People already do come out here. That creek we saw drains into a lake that the locals have always used for fishing and swimming, but the Creeks can’t develop the property into a moneymaking recreational area, not without encroaching on the archaeological resources. Even back in eighty-seven, Dr. Townsend knew that building a tackle shop on top of a burial site wouldn’t go over well around here.”

  “Nor is it legal now,” Faye said.

  “It was illegal here then, too. Oklahoma had a burial desecrations law and an antiquities law even before the federal government passed NAGPRA to address the same issues. We had to. Remember that you’re in the old ‘Indian Territory.’ We’ve always needed to work with tribal leaders. Not that we’ve always done the best job. Nope. Not saying that. I’m just saying that every now and then, we do okay.”

  “NAGPRA must’ve come in right after this site went dormant,” Joe said. “It changed everything.”

  Carson was trying to maintain the affable mask that almost covered his intelligence and ambition—and tonight, anger—but his hands drummed restlessly on the steering wheel. “This is embarrassing, but I was a little relieved when the bones turned out to be Dr. Townsend. If they would’ve been old, NAGPRA red tape would’ve stopped the project until the legal stuff could be figured out. Also, the Creeks would have been completely justified in pulling me off this site for good. It’s their land. If they’d rather leave an ancient burial alone and cancel developing the park, then that’s their right. As it is, once the crime scene is released, we’re good to go.”

  “You may be good to go, but I think you’re going to have a really, really jumpy crew. Unexplained gunfire and a corpse? All in one day? You’re lucky they don’t have many other options for summer jobs,” Faye said.

  “No kidding,” Carson answered, but then he immediately turned the conversation back to his project. This single-mindedness was not a surprise to Faye. She’d been watching Carson all day long and this was the way he operated.

  “Even back in 1987,” he said, “Dr. Townsend was trying to do things right. Up until…until the end. She’d been meticulous up until that time.”

  “Maybe somebody should have suspected that she didn’t leave on purpose,” Faye said.

  “That’s bothering me a lot today,” Carson said. “They say she treated everybody around her like dirt and ran off to the mountains every weekend. She didn’t rent a place in Sylacauga, not even a room where she could move in some of her own stuff. You know what it’s like to spend months in the field.”

  “You want to make yourself comfortable,” Faye said.

  “Exactly. Unless you’re Sophia Townsend.” Carson took the last swig of his beer and put the empty bottle in a cup holder. “She took a room at a cheap motel out by the interstate. Same room every week. Drove in early on Mondays and checked out every Friday morning. Anybody could see she lived out of her suitcase, because it was in her back seat all day every Friday. Even I noticed it, at my age. I remember hearing that the last time anybody saw her, she had that suitcase in the back seat, so it must’ve been a Friday.”

  “People can choose a way to live. It don’t have to be the same way everybody else does it,” Joe said.

  “True,” Carson said, “especially archaeologists. We’re independent-minded people who tend to go our own way. People who knew Dr. Townsend personally weren’t surprised when she decided not to finish this job, but I’ve been living with her work for years. I should have known that a scientist of her caliber wouldn’t walk away from her project.”

  “It must have been strange today, uncovering the body of someone you knew,” Faye said. “What do you remember about her?”

  “One time, I saw Dr. Townsend get right up in Kenny’s face and scream awful names at him. I told Mom and she told my dad to keep me away from her after that, and he mostly did. Sometimes, though, I begged enough that he sneaked me out here.”

  “Your dad was always fun to be around,” Joe said.

  “Yeah and he’s smart. Smart enough to do my job, actually.”

  Carson kept talking like a man who had years of troubles and unanswered questions.

  “Dad’s always said that he didn’t understand how Dr. Townsend could have screwed up the budget so bad. Everything was running smooth. Nobody was drawing any overtime, because she would’ve had a screaming fit before she would’ve paid it. You tell me how she could have spent her whole budget without finishing the work. Accounting is just adding and subtracting. I make sure I have money in my bank account before I spend it. It’s not that different.”

  Faye knew a little bit about the kinds of bad luck that could bust a budget. Broken equipment. Unexpected site conditions. Even the weather. Carson knew those things, too. He was just too wrapped up in this project to be forgiving of Sophia Townsend’s leaky bank accounts.

  Carson pushed a hank of hair behind one ear. It immediately fell back into his face. “Dad usually won’t talk about Dr. Townsend. And I’ve tried.”

  “Except that one time he called her a bitch?” Faye said.

  “Well, yeah. Kenny doesn’t talk much, but he’ll say more than Dad will about their old boss. Usually, Dad will just say that she wasn’t a people person but, like I said, there was that time he called her a bitch. Kenny calls her that all the time. When you’ve got two Sunday-School-teaching men who act like their tongues would fall out if they said a curse word, and you hear them both saying things like that about a woman? When you know they were both raised in a time when you didn’t speak ill of a lady? I have to wonder what she was really like.”

  “Nobody else has anything to say about her?” Faye asked.

  Carson wiped a bead of sweat off his wide forehead. “Nobody but Emily. She’s never argued when Kenny cussed Dr. Townsend, but after today…well, it looked to me like she was very, very close to her late boss.”

  “Or she wanted to be,” said Faye.

  Carson wiped his hair off his forehead again. The man needed a hat to keep his hair out of his face. Faye would have shaved her head before she’d have gone out in the sun like that.

  Carson shrugged and spread his hands. “Oh, I give up. I don’t like to talk bad about the dead, but Dad did open up about Sophia Townsend just once, and there’s no way to soft-pedal what he said. He told me she worked people till they puked. Dad says he had to talk Kenny down more than once when she told him he was lazy, like all his people. Kenny’s full Creek.”

  “Charming woman.”

  “No joke. She had nicknames for them all. Dad’s was ‘Idiot.’”

  It
seemed that Carson did own a bandanna. He yanked it out of his back pants pocket and used it to wipe his face. Faye suppressed a maternal urge to tie it around his head.

  “Going by what Dad told me, Dr. Townsend’s crew hated her, and she didn’t get along with her client any better. Bottom line? She just wasn’t happy. Oh, I think she was sometimes. I remember her staring down into the excavation like she could see right into the past. I think she loved archaeology but she didn’t like being an archaeologist.”

  “Did your dad say where he thought she went when she disappeared?”

  “Same thing as everybody else. She had that little weekend place and he was as sure as he could be that she’d gone there. It’s where I’ve been picturing her all this time. Nothing fancy, just a bedroom, a little kitchen, a bathroom. Enough space for a piano and a lot of books. And a garden out back. When you don’t like people, what else do you need, really?”

  As someone who chose to live on an island, far from everyone but her immediate family, Faye couldn’t judge someone else who wanted to do the same thing.

  “Maybe we’re reading too much into all the talk about Dr. Townsend’s bad temper,” Joe said. “That pearl and that figurine—they’re worth a lot of money. Thieves will kill a woman just for her jewelry. If they’re robbing a house, they’ll kill anybody that gets in the way.”

  There was a place in Faye’s heart that had never healed after robbers murdered her friend Douglass. It ached.

  “That almost makes sense,” Carson said, “except they left the valuables behind.”

  “It makes sense if she resisted and the robbers killed her by accident,” Faye said. “After that, maybe they decided it was better to bury the artifacts with her, rather than sell them and risk being convicted of murder. She—”

  Carson broke in. “If she got killed during a robbery, then anybody could have done it. Not just the people who were working with her. Right?”