Sophia had bedeviled him, flirting and then pushing him away. She’d made him lewd promises that had succeeded in their aim, which was to distract him from his wife. For the rest of his days, it would pain him to remember how Patricia had looked Sophia over with her own intelligent eyes, sizing up the competition.
He should have told Patricia how he felt about her. He should have told her every day.
But what was a man to do about temptation? What is there to do about temptation, other than to remove oneself from it? He hadn’t done that. He’d gone to work for three weeks, twenty-one days, and he’d let Sophia play him. Then the day had come when he just couldn’t do it any more, but he could have never explained why.
She’d played him against his friends, too, so now he didn’t have those friends any more. He wondered if they even remembered why they had grown apart.
It had been so long. So many days in a man’s life were alike, going to work and coming home just the same as always. When Sly looked back, there were thousands of days that stayed just out of reach, but only dozens of days that stayed clear in their joy or grief. This was the way of time, an ever-moving thing that was always just beyond his grasp.
He remembered some things about that summer. Mickey Callahan had been as obsessed with Sophia as he had, and so had Kenny Meadows and Emily Olsen. The woman had cost Mickey and Kenny their marriages. Sly still wasn’t sure how he’d been lucky enough to keep his.
Sly wondered whether Carson Callahan knew why his parents divorced. He was old enough now to understand the power of a woman so sensual that the air around her vibrated with sex, even when she was wearing worn army surplus pants and not a drop of makeup. If Carson had been unlucky, he had gained personal experience with a woman who had both Sophia’s powerful sexuality and her fondness for using it to turn the people around her into toys.
Sly knew men like that, too. At any given bar, they were working the room until they found a woman whose needs made her vulnerable. Or a man. It didn’t really matter to people like Sophia who it was they sucked dry. He wondered if Emily ever told her husband of twenty-five years that she had once been crazy in love with a woman. Judging by his daughter-in law’s description of Emily’s behavior when Sophia’s bones came to light, Sly would say that Emily had never stopped being in love with a woman.
After all this time, Sly remained amazed at how easily people had swallowed the story that Sophia Townsend had run away to the mountains. Everybody had shaken their heads and said, “Well, she never liked anybody much and she did like that cabin. Can’t say that I’m surprised.”
That was bullshit. Sophia Townsend needed people. She needed people to bedevil. Quite frankly, she needed people to torture.
The people who lived in the town of Sylacauga had not been sorry to see the back of Sophia Townsend. Now the law would be looking for the person who killed her, and they would quickly figure out which of the locals might know something about her death.
Sly Mantooth had known the dead woman. He had worked for her for a little while, although nobody seemed to have remembered that. Yet.
It was no big secret that he had loved her a little. He gripped the chipped, stained coffee cup and waited for a knock on his door.
***
Faye braced her trembling legs as she half-stepped and half-jumped into the excavation. She hadn’t realized what the tense day and night and morning had done to her, and the crisis wasn’t over.
Everything was in flux. Hannity was still in serious condition. A careful search of the woods had uncovered no shooter and no identifiable footprints on the hard-baked soil. Threatening clouds blew overhead, and Faye couldn’t take her eyes off them. She had lived through countless coastal storms and a single Category 5 hurricane, so she had seen clouds roil and blow before, but she’d never seen ordinary everyday clouds move the way the clouds in Oklahoma did.
As a scientist, she understood that she was standing at the crossroads of the North American climate, where the jet stream brought icy air from the North Pole to mingle with the hot, wet air blowing off the Gulf of Mexico. As a human being standing underneath the turbulent clouds as they fled across the sky, she felt awe.
She also felt fear. A thunderstorm at this moment would be a disaster, washing away almost any hope of finding Sophia Townsend’s killer. The weather forecast had changed overnight, predicting heavy rain, winds, thunder, lightning, maybe even hail. Bigbee and his forensics team were coming as fast as they could, but Sylacauga was a long way from nowhere. The team was racing a monster thunderstorm and losing.
Cloud had decided that it was too risky to leave Sophia’s bones in an open hole that could be flooded any minute, and Bigbee had agreed. As soon as he gave the go-ahead to start without him, Cloud had beckoned Faye to clamber into the excavation with him. Scattered raindrops were hitting the hard dirt, so they might not have long to salvage any information Sophia Townsend’s grave held.
Those bones and the things buried with them were the only clues they had in the Townsend investigation. Even that evidence could be gone or destroyed now by the person Hannity had seen digging the night before. Faye had no idea whether the pearls and figurine still waited in the twenty-nine-year-old grave she was about to visit. The ghoulish image of a shadowy figure packing up Sophia’s bones and hauling them away shook Faye to her core.
As Faye drew near, she knew things were bad. It was easy to see that someone had been digging in Sophia Townsend’s grave.
She walked to the gravesite and crouched beside it. Roy Cloud stood behind her, careful to keep his shadow away from the area where she needed to work.
“Gone,” she said. “It’s all gone. Not her bones, but everything else.”
Sophia’s bones had been disturbed but gently. The bones that had composed the top of her body—skull, vertebrae, ribs, clavicles, scapulae—had been neatly stacked beside her pelvis. The intruder had then dug a deep hole into the vacant space left behind.
Faye looked with wordless regret at the disturbed soil where the Mississippian artifacts had been. Every last pearl was gone, pried out of the hard clay. The figurine had been taken. Even the cheap canvas bag was gone, with not a stray fiber left to show that it was ever there.
She sat back on her heels and said, “At least we took pictures.”
That was cold comfort for the loss of the most spectacular finds she’d ever seen while still in-situ.
Then the adrenaline-fueled trembling in her hands returned as she saw the size of the hole left by the intruder. It was far bigger than necessary for the retrieval of just the figurine and the pearls. She could only wonder what else had been waiting just below Sophia’s bones, below the pearls and the figurine.
“Do you remember the rectangle in the bottom of her grave?” she asked. “The darker soil? That’s what they dug up. All of it.”
The intruder had left a box-shaped hole as deep as her arm was long. “Do you see that?”
She moved aside so that Cloud could look. He said, “It looks to me like somebody dug up something fairly large, maybe the size of a case of beer or even bigger. What do you think it was?”
“I have no idea, but it wasn’t just the pearls and figurine.”
Faye didn’t know what to do with herself after she had stated that disturbing fact, so she did what she did best. She went back to documenting the current state of Sophia Townsend’s grave, photographing the rearranged bones and sketching them to account for the differences between the human eye and the camera lens. Every gust of wind brought a few more raindrops.
As she sketched, she watched Gerard and one of Cloud’s officers crouch beside Sophia Townsend’s body, preparing to excavate it as tenderly as a mother lifts an infant from its bed. After the bones were safely removed and packed into paper bags, Faye examined the hole in the soil that had been beneath them. It was rectangular in cross-section, with loose dirt around its r
im where someone had worked to get a strong enough grip on the box to yank it out of the ground.
A hard edge in the soft soil caught her attention and she said, “Look at that. I think it’s a potsherd.”
She freed it from the soil and brushed it clean, holding it up for Cloud to see.
“I’m pretty sure it’s Mississippian.” She was so startled by the pattern decorating the potsherd that she spoke too softly and he asked her to repeat herself. “Mississippian. You know, like Spiro Mounds. About a thousand years old. Carson’s going to have a coronary when he sees this.”
The potsherd had four sides and it was about the size of four or five postage stamps. It was incised with an intricate design, a rainbow-like pattern of concentric semi-circles bordered on one side with a stylized feather.
“And that’s good?”
“If it’s Mississippian? It will make Carson’s year. If this is what I think it is, this will make his career.”
“So it’s valuable?”
Faye’s eyes kept returning to its shape, which was vaguely like an envelope, a square with a triangle sitting on top. It bowed outward slightly, as if it came from the side of a large round pot.
“Valuable? No, not really. It’s valuable to science, but a collector wouldn’t bother with it. The pearls and the figurine? Yes. They have intrinsic value. You could sell them for big bucks, but not this.”
“Can you tell anything by where you found it?”
“It’s in disturbed soil, so no, not much. I’m not sure it’s been here long. I searched the surface yesterday, and it wasn’t here. It’s right where you’d expect it to be if it fell out of that canvas bag when the thief dug it up, so that’s what I think happened. I wonder what it was doing in there.”
Cloud studied the hole. “Maybe the thief threw it on the ground because the two artifacts in the bag with it were worth a lot of money, but it wasn’t worth carrying out of this hole. And who knows what was in that box underneath? Maybe something even better. Do you think it was just a lucky accident that they came to steal two things and got away with three? Or did somebody already know the box was here underneath her?”
Faye couldn’t stop looking at the potsherd. “I don’t know. They probably already knew. Why else would you keep digging after removing the canvas bag?”
“It stands to reason that the person who knew the box was here would be the person who buried it.”
She nodded, still looking the engraved patterns on the sherd. “And it stands to reason that the person who buried those things under Sophia Townsend’s body is the same person who put her in the ground.”
Chapter Fourteen
Faye stood on the porch of a strange house, listening to rain pound hard on the roof above her. They had been lucky to get Sophia Townsend’s bones safely out of the ground before the storm hit. Agent Bigbee and his people had arrived an hour later and they’d stood in raingear alongside Faye and Roy, looking at the way the falling drops pockmarked the water standing in the bottom of the excavation.
Then they’d all gone back to the police station, shed the raingear, and wiped their wet faces before sitting down to discuss the case. In the end, it made no sense for anybody but Bigbee to stay in Sylacauga, especially when they had access to Roy’s excellent photodocumentation of the site before the rain. Sophia Townsend’s bones were ready to go to the lab and the rain had washed away any hope of finding much more.
Bigbee had praised Cloud’s work on the case, saying, “You’ve salvaged this case, Roy. The storm could have cost us everything. Let’s you and me sit down and go over the interview notes you took yesterday.”
“You and me” didn’t seem to involve Faye, so she had excused herself. On her way to the car, she texted Roy to say that she needed to spend some time with Sophia Townsend’s field notes. She figured he could share that information with Agent Bigbee, or not, as he saw fit.
Not many minutes later, after driving through heavy rain being blown sideways, Faye stood on Carson’s front porch saying the same thing she had to Roy: “I need to spend some time with Sophia Townsend’s field notes.”
Faye said this politely and in a pleasant tone, but Carson couldn’t have been happy to hear it, nor to see her standing on his front doorstep with an annoying request.
Carson answered Faye with, “I’m sure Roy Cloud would appreciate your unbiased opinion on what they have to say,” and he too spoke politely, but his face said a lot more.
Carson looked violated. There was no other word for it. It was as if Faye had said, “I need to search your house. I’ll be rifling through your underwear drawer and inspecting the sheets on your bed. If you keep a diary, I’ll be reading that, too.”
The look passed quickly and Carson was himself again, anxious to help with the investigation and willing to talk about his work with a fellow professional who had spent most of the day doing work that he’d spent his whole career waiting to do.
Carson’s home was a small, gray, wood-framed house dating to the mid-twentieth century, old enough to be architecturally interesting but not old enough to be expensive. It suited him.
The floorboards of the porch creaked under her feet. They had been recently swept but not recently painted. Carson pushed open the screen door and let her into a living space much like the house’s exterior, clean but far from new. The floor was covered with freshly waxed linoleum tiles that reminded Faye of her childhood schoolrooms. The furniture spoke of thrift shops and parental hand-me-downs.
He gestured for her to come in, so she followed him across the room. Carson was big, no question. Dirt is heavy, and he had broad shoulders made for lifting it.
Walking behind him, Faye could see the muscles of his back, overdeveloped from neck to waist. They showed through his thin cotton shirt. His thighs strained at the dirt-brown cargo shorts covering them. Below their hems and above his socks, calf muscles bulged. She wished she were half as well-constructed for her work. She also wondered how big Carson had been when he was eleven. Then she wondered at herself for even thinking that a child that age could have done something so horrible.
“I think you’ll find the notebooks…um…fascinating,” Carson said. “Do you need the originals or can you make do with photocopies?”
Faye considered the question. She’d prefer to see the notebooks just as Dr. Townsend had written in them, but they were a direct physical link to the place and time of the woman’s death. That made them evidence and she shouldn’t be handling them.
“I probably need both. I need to take the originals to Roy Cloud and Agent Bigbee, at least for now, but I’ll also need a set of copies to review. I guess it’s possible there could still be fingerprints on the originals—”
“Underneath years and years of my fingerprints. And my dissertation advisor’s. Not to mention several other experts I’ve consulted over the years. And, I suppose, the prints of the archaeologists hired to close the excavation back in 1987 could be there, too. But I’m sure Roy Cloud is enough of a miracle worker to find something useful under all that old skin oil.”
Faye almost took a step backward to retreat from his sarcasm and frustration, but she held firm. “I hear you. There are probably no useful prints left on those notebooks, but disentangling all those prints is a job for the police, don’t you think? And, oh, I don’t know—couldn’t they find hairs or fibers or something? The odds of using them to find Sophia’s killer seem pretty low, but this is an oddball case. We’re going to have to turn over every rock that might have a clue under it.”
“Then we shouldn’t make Roy Cloud wait even a second,” Carson said as he pulled open the door of a coat closet. “He’s the boss of everything now.”
He lifted a banker’s box off the top shelf and shoved it in Faye’s direction, as if challenging her to carry it as easily as he did. When she grabbed it, he said, “The originals. Here you go. Tell Cloud to make sure
his people take good care of them.”
The box was heavy, but not unmanageably so. If Carson was hoping to see her stagger under it, he was going to be disappointed.
She carried it to the dining room table and set it down next to stacks of paperwork, then lifted the lid. She knew better than to add her name to the long list of people who had left fingerprints on those field notebooks, but she did want to look at them.
The box held a dozen or so blue bound notebooks. She had expected there to be more, but now she remembered that Sophia Townsend hadn’t even finished out the summer at the Sylacauga site. She hadn’t had time to fill shelves and shelves of notebooks.
Some of the books were stained with smears of red dirt, and those smears made Faye sad. They made Sophia Townsend real. They made her an ordinary person who got dirty sometimes. They made her nothing more than a woman doing her job and living her life, expecting that she had fifty years left to do those things.
These notebooks held Sophia Townsend’s thoughts. Their pages were covered with her handwriting. One of them might have been the last thing she held in her hands.
“Don’t worry. I’ll treat them as gently as irreplaceable artifacts,” she said.
“That’s what they are.”
Carson’s face softened as he looked at the notebooks, like a father looking at his children. How many hours had he spent with them over the years?
Faye said, “Yeah, they are,” and carefully put the lid back on the box.
Carson didn’t seem to have anything to say. He just stood there like a man wishing she would go away.
Faye couldn’t give him that wish yet. “What about the photo-
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