Burials

by Mary Anna Evans

  Carson was still worried about his father, and Faye didn’t blame him. Kenny Meadows, his second father, was a suspect as well. Carson had a lot riding on the results of this murder investigation.

  Joe hadn’t picked up on Carson’s fears, so he kept hammering on the possible guilt of both of his friend’s fathers. “Other than people who worked right here, who else would have known that she’d found artifacts worth stealing?”

  “Anybody could have known that,” Carson said. “If my dad found something cool, he told my mother about it over dinner that very night. Same for Kenny and his wife. Their wives told their friends. It’s a small town. You remember what it’s like to live here, Joe.”

  “I’m sure Cloud will be talking to everybody about what happened that summer,” Faye said. “Well, everybody who remembers 1987.”

  Faye was watching Carson’s face, hoping he would respond to her reassurance that the detective wasn’t necessarily out to get his father. His expression stayed taut. Why?

  Faye walked her logic back. For someone to have killed Sophia Townsend for the artifacts buried beneath her, the killer would have had to have known that they existed and that she had them. Something about that logic made her feel as perplexed as Carson looked.

  ***

  Roy Cloud had left the folding chairs where he’d been conducting his interviews. He walked toward them as Faye, Joe, and Carson watched with all the excitement of three people who didn’t want to answer a single question more.

  Pausing by the passenger window where Faye sat, Cloud said, “You can send your security guards home, Dr. Callahan. Denton will be here all night, earning a little overtime. I’ve got someone driving by to check on her now and then. You can sleep easy. I’ll be back tomorrow about sunup. I expect you’ll be here by then, Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth. Any problem with that?”

  Faye said, “No,” wishing he hadn’t made it so clear that Carson was being left out of the ongoing investigation.

  Cloud told them to have a good evening and left. Now that he was gone, Carson had no reason to stay, not unless he planned to guard the guard. Faye was certainly ready to go find some supper. Joe must have been, too, because as soon as Carson said, “I guess I might as well get on home,” they were both were out of the truck, hurrying away from the awkward conversation and waving good-bye. As she slid into the driver seat of their rental car, Joe cranked his father’s truck.

  They flicked their headlights on to beat back the coming night, and the beams illuminated Kira Denton on the far side of the excavation. She moved with purpose, checking out the woods surrounding her post.

  Faye was chilled by the air conditioner that she’d set at full blast when it was a lot hotter outside. As she fumbled with the car’s unfamiliar controls, her thoughts chilled her as well. She’d finally figured out why Carson had looked so perturbed.

  Faye had read everything Carson had ever published on the Sylacauga site, and Carson had read every one of Sophia Townsend’s surviving field notebooks before he wrote those papers.

  If those notebooks had mentioned artifacts as significant as the ones that had just been found, Carson would have written about them in his papers, so Faye would have read about them. No, he wouldn’t have just written about them. He would have searched high and low for that figurine and that possible string of saltwater pearls, and he would know that they weren’t where they should be, safely ensconced at a curation facility.

  Faye racked her brain for a good reason that the figurine and pearls had been omitted from Dr. Townsend’s field notes. Had she found them that last day? Was she killed before she had time to finish her notes? Had she hidden them, planning to sell them to fund an early retirement?

  Maybe the pertinent notebook had gone missing. Or maybe Dr. Townsend’s team didn’t find the artifacts at all. Maybe someone else had pulled them from the ground.

  But if Sophia Townsend wasn’t the one who found those treasures, then who did? And why were they buried with her?

  Excerpt from the field notes of Dr. Sophia Townsend

  July 31, 1987

  Ladybitch found a potsherd today. It was about the size of my palm, so it had no business being in the backdirt. It was way too big to miss, but somebody missed it, and I suspect Stupidface and his sloppy field technique. He’s always in a hurry to move more dirt than Idiot, just like he’d like to earn more money than he does and drive a bigger truck and have a prettier wife. It’s an asinine way to live, but being a man means that you spend your whole life in a pissing contest. I guess that’s why they’re born with the equipment for a pissing contest.

  Now, let’s think about this. The county sets Idiot’s salary, same as it does Stupidface’s. The school system hired them both on the same day, so they will make the exact same salary until the very day they retire. Or die. Neither of them can afford much of a truck on that salary. And I can’t see a lot of difference in the prettiness of their wives. This means that I have to watch them jockey for primacy with their trowels all day, every day.

  Their trowels, like everything else about them, are exactly the same size.

  Stupidface’s futile flailing with his trowel evidently gouged up a clump of dirt big enough to hide a rather large potsherd, which wound up in the backdirt pile. It might never have seen the light of day if I hadn’t told the terminally inept Ladybitch to sift through all that dirt. I told her that her job was to uncover the tiniest things, because they are so often the most important.

  This is true, in general. In Ladybitch’s case, I just gave her that job to keep her from breaking something important.

  And what did she do with the potsherd, a lovely bit of ceramic art, delicately etched by a long-ago someone with the eye of an artist? She broke it in two places.

  Either I’m going to have to kill these people, or they’re going to be the death of me.

  Chapter Eleven

  It was long after midnight. Roy Cloud knew he would be up the rest of the night working this case, so it only made sense to plan his next steps now, before he was punch-drunk from sleep deprivation.

  Roy’s classes at the academy had not covered this coldest-of-cold-cases scenario. Since graduating, he’d spent twenty-four years fighting crime in the employ of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and he’d taken more continuing education courses than he cared to remember. One would think he’d have gained some education or experience during all those years that would be relevant to this case, but one would be wrong.

  A thirty-year-old corpse—skeleton, really—was not unheard of. He’d worked cold cases that old. He’d solved a few. Sometimes an investigator got a lucky break and nailed a perp who’d walked free for a really long time.

  This cold case, though. Holy hell. The victim had been unearthed by people who had known her personally before she disappeared all those years ago. What were the odds of that?

  Usually, when you found a dead body that had been dead for a while, you had a case file to help you get started. You had interviews with witnesses, with loved ones, and with persons of interest. You had alibis to check. You knew when the victim was last seen.

  Cloud had none of these things. He absolutely wouldn’t blame the FBI if they declined to prosecute this case. The odds of solving it were so low compared to the effort it was going to take to glean even the tiniest clues.

  Fortunately, Cloud was not a man who gave up easily, and he was in the mood to sift everything he knew for tiny clues.

  The victim had disappeared without a word and nobody thought it was worthwhile to call the police. This made no sense.

  A huge number of missing persons cases kicked off with a call reporting that someone had failed to show up for work. People who have jobs tend to show up, because people who have jobs like to keep their paychecks. Yet he was supposed to believe that not once during all the time Sophia Townsend had been gone had any of her coworkers turned to one of the others
and asked, “Whatever happened to our old boss? You don’t think something happened to her, do you?”

  What were the odds of that?

  Cloud called bullshit. By all accounts, Sophia Townsend was so relentlessly unpleasant that she might have been murdered on the spot by a stranger she reamed out for pumping her gas too slow. But she also might have been murdered by one of these people he’d talked to today, and the evidence pointed in that direction. Would anyone else have driven her here and buried her at the bottom of her own excavation?

  At the very least, they all must have suspected that Sophia Townsend had come to harm, but they’d kept their mouths shut to avoid trouble.

  At the worst? One of these people had killed her and concocted a story that made the others believe she’d voluntarily walked away.

  After her body went in the ground and a backhoe covered the grave with tons of soil, her killer couldn’t have expected that her bones would ever surface again. But they had. So it was entirely possible that one of the calm and relaxed people watching that backhoe operator do a bang-up job of digging a great big hole had known that a dead body lay at the bottom of it.

  Could anybody really be that gutsy?

  After due consideration, Cloud decided that even if Emily, Kenny, or Mickey had killed Sophia Townsend, turning down this job wouldn’t have been an option for the murderer. Passing up a good job in Sylacauga would have looked too suspicious. It would have been far smarter to take the job and stand bold and confident on the lip of the newly reopened excavation, pretending to be surprised by the abandoned grave at its floor.

  Or, and this was a thought that Cloud was going to need to ponder, maybe the killer had made one last-ditch effort to stop that backhoe from uncovering Sophia Townsend. Maybe the killer had been prowling with a gun that very morning, terrorizing Kenny Summers, Carson Callahan, and Faye Longchamp-Mantooth and hoping that somebody got scared enough to call off the excavation.

  It could have happened. An archaeologist who was less driven than Carson might have decided that the project wasn’t worth getting killed over. The Creeks, too, could have gotten cold feet. If somebody got shot on their land, they could be defending against an expensive lawsuit. Almost as bad for an organization that depended on tourism, the publicity would have been just terrible.

  So where did all these things leave Cloud and his investigation? Nowhere that made any sense.

  One thing was for sure. He would be a fool to put his full trust in anything any of these people told him about what happened back in 1987.

  A murder scene that was also an archaeological dig made the situation still more off-kilter and repetitive, like a skipping record playing the same tune again and again. The metaphor made Roy smile, since most of his witnesses and all of his suspects were old enough to remember when music meant vinyl and only vinyl.

  Like a skipping vinyl LP, this story hiccupped, jumped backward, ran forward a bit, then hiccupped again. People whose job it was to find buried things from the past, including dead bodies, had found a buried thing from the past. And it was a dead body—the dead body of a person who had, in the past, been looking for buried things from the past.

  Roy Cloud was getting vertigo just thinking about it.

  The fact that the crime scene had also been an archaeological dig at the time of the murder, where the victim and suspects were digging up even older buried things, made things weirder yet again.

  And now the archaeologists were telling him that the silver necklace found around Sophia Townsend’s decomposed neck dated to 1987 or thereabouts, but the pearl found beneath her body might have been pulled from an oyster that had been dead for a millennium.

  The clay figurine with it? Maybe even older.

  Roy liked to read science fiction, but this real-life story felt like an overcomplicated time-travel novel. He’d started drawing a flow chart in his notebook, just to keep track.

  Dr. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth had seemed quite comfortable with this case’s recursive flow of time. Roy decided he wanted her to help him with his flow chart, because he didn’t know some basic things like how many people would have worked on Dr. Townsend’s team. Five? Ten? Fifty?

  Probably not fifty. Roy Cloud had worked for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation for his entire career, and he was in fact an enrolled member of the tribe. He knew that his tribal leaders were skilled in business. There was no way that they’d pay for fifty people to dig up this site. Roy was sure of that much, but he needed Faye Longchamp-Mantooth to tell him how many they did pay, and he didn’t want to wait until morning to find out.

  It was long past a normal person’s bedtime, but murder cases don’t run on the clock. Roy found Dr. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth’s number, newly saved to his phone, and he called her with a single tap of his thumb.

  “Hey there, Doctor Faye. I want to get a few things straight,” he said. “The clothes and the silver necklace belong with the body, right?” he asked. “But the pearl and the little statue that were underneath the body were really old?”

  “I’m pretty sure. Well, except for the canvas bag. I showed you the shreds of canvas sticking out of the ground around the antiquities, remember? Under the skull? I think we’re going to find that the figurine and probably the pearls were buried in a bag that was new in 1987.”

  This was just great. Even the ancient stuff that was making his life difficult was complicated, because somebody—probably the killer—had gone to Walmart and bought a brand-new bag to bury it in.

  “There’s a canvas bag in that grave, too?” he asked her. “Oh, yeah. You did show me that. What else? Jimmy Hoffa?”

  Cloud was a little afraid that she was too young to get the Jimmy Hoffa reference and he was going to have to tell her a long story about a mysteriously missing 1970s union boss. She laughed, and he was relieved.

  “Nope. No Jimmy Hoffa,” she said. “I think we all agree that those bones belong to the woman who was heading up the dig here back in eighty-seven. Detective Cloud—”

  “Call me Roy.”

  “Sure thing. Roy, did you see the size of that pearl? It was fit for a queen. I’m so glad Emily stopped digging when she did. If there really are more pearls buried there, she might have damaged them or even lost them.”

  “Yeah, I did think that pearl looked bigger than any I’ve ever seen in person. I can’t imagine drilling a hole in it with a little sliver of sharp rock, which I guess is how they did it back then.”

  “And the canvas bag. Remember I showed you the plastic thread around its handle? Attached to what’s left of a price tag? I’m guessing the bag was brand-new.”

  What do you know? Roy thought. It was brand-new, I got something right about this weirdo case already. I bet we even find out the bag came from Walmart. But I wouldn’t have seen that little plastic thread without the help of Dr. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth.

  The archaeologist kept telling him about all the things she’d noticed about the ragged wad of dirty old fabric. “The tag is pretty well gone, I’m afraid. It was plastic-coated, so it held up a lot better that Sophia Townsend, but it’s probably illegible. Maybe you’ve got some technicians who can reconstruct enough of the printing to find out where it was bought. I don’t know if that’ll do you any good after all this time, but it’s something.”

  Roy grunted in agreement. The woman knew her stuff. “Get some sleep, Doctor Faye, and I’ll try not to keep disturbing you. It’s hardly fair, considering the little bit that I’m paying you.”

  Roy broke the connection before he realized that he’d never asked Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth the question that had prompted him to call. He decided to save it for their next conversation, because he was sure there would be another one soon. In the meantime, he decided to go bother Vernon McAlester, the Creek Nation’s project liaison. Vernon never had much to say, but people talked more when you showed up in the middle of the night.

 
Roy had known Vernon a long time, but then he’d known everybody around Sylacauga for a long time, especially if they were Creek. Vernon probably wasn’t thirty, so he couldn’t know anything that wasn’t in the project files. Still, Vernon could surely dig around in those files and find out how many people were on the crew. Even better, maybe he could get their names. And maybe he knew some other helpful things.

  As Roy drove through the night, his mind conjured up images of Sophia Townsend’s bones amid a fine scattering of pearls. It conjured up the faces of three people who had never, not in nearly thirty long years, been willing to publicly ask what had happened to that poor woman. He wondered whether Mickey Callahan, Emily Olsen, and Kenny Meadows were sleeping tonight.

  His mind also conjured up the face of Kira Denton, left behind to guard the artifacts that went with Sophia Townsend into the ground.

  Denton was well-trained and well-armed. There was no pressing reason to expect trouble to find her. Roy wasn’t overblessed with available personnel, so he had to stop somewhere when it came to asking people to work all night.

  Still, despite all the rational reasoning that said his officer would be okay, he knew that he needed to raise Denton on the radio and listen to her tell him everything was fine. And he knew he’d be checking on her again, more than once. She would probably get sick of his voice. Given her disposition, she would probably tell him so, but that was her problem.

  ***

  Joe woke because Faye wasn’t beside him.

  He wasn’t surprised that she was up. He had always slept better than she did. He’d tried to teach her to let go of her worries and sink into sleep, but she just couldn’t do it. This was the price she paid for having a fine mind that never really stopped to rest.

  But Faye was a considerate insomniac, so she always got out of bed instead of disturbing him. Tonight, after what she’d seen, Joe thought he should probably go look for her.

  He followed the light at the end of the hall and found her by the fireplace, in front of the easy chair covered in brown-flowered cloth where his father had sat for Joe’s entire life. On the fireplace’s mantel sat the urn where his mother’s ashes waited for closure, but Faye’s eyes weren’t on the urn. They were on the coin-sized object in her hands.