Burials

by Mary Anna Evans

  Kira Denton had been dead less than a day. The person who killed her had knelt by her grave to dig up a figurine, some pearls, and a mysterious box that was large enough to be awkward to carry. It was inconceivable that the killer had accomplished these things without getting dirty. Filthy.

  If the killer was one of the archaeologists, then a little bit of dirt wouldn’t be noteworthy. If the killer wasn’t one of the archaeologists, though, ground-in dirt could be hard to explain.

  Stained clothes can be shed, as evidenced by the monumentally dirty clothes waiting in a plastic bag in the trunk of Faye’s rental car.

  Stained skin? Not so much.

  Photocopying is a slow and mindless task, and even Carson couldn’t talk all the time, so Faye had a lot of time to think these things through. She came up with no answers, other than that she needed to call Roy Cloud as soon as she could conveniently slip away from Carson. It was hard to stand next to him, knowing how he would feel if he knew what she was about to do. He would view her next action as a stab in his back.

  She stood at the machine, feeding it sheets of paper and thinking about paper and clay and skin and hands. Mostly, she thought about Alba Callahan’s graceful hands.

  They had been remarkably unwrinkled and free of age spots as they waved in the air and clutched Faye’s own hands so warmly. Alba’s nails had been shorter than Faye would have expected, and they had been painted with a polish dark enough to cover almost anything, but there had been nothing else remarkable on the backs of Alba’s hands.

  This was not true when she flipped them over. Staining the rough areas at the base of each of her palms, there had been a barely discernible reddish tinge that was the color of hard-baked bricks.

  The stains on Alba Callahan’s hands were the deep orange-red of Oklahoma clay.

  Excerpt from the field notes of Dr. Sophia Townsend

  July 28, 1987

  I would sell my mother to find a potsherd.

  Or a bit of charcoal from a very old hearth. Or a bone fragment. Or a shell. Or a pile of nutshells where someone sat down and hulled a pile of hickory nuts. But I’ve given up on finding something that was once alive and therefore suitable for carbon dating, so I’d settle for a potsherd that I could send to a lab for thermoluminescence testing.

  I can’t find one.

  So I’ve been reduced to desperate measures, shipping stone knives and bird points to a professor in Canada who is probably unbalanced. He says he can get detectable amounts of blood and plant residue off their surfaces. He claims he can then get radiocarbon dates on the blood and plant material, but that’s probably bullshit. I can’t imagine that he can get enough organic material for his equipment to see, but he insists that he can. My regular lab certainly can’t. He hasn’t managed it so far, despite the number of American dollars that I have sent across the border.

  I also mailed a couple of flint tools to him for thermoluminescence tests, but that only works if the rock was heat-treated to make it easier to shape or…hell, I don’t know…if it fell into a fire by accident because its maker got drunk. No luck.

  Of course, I had no luck. I’ve had no luck with any part of this godforsaken job.

  For instance, I’m saddled with Stupidface, who thinks that a teaching certificate in earth science gives him a right to an opinion on how I run my project. He insists that relative dating works just fine and I shouldn’t get all worked up over a lack of objective laboratory data. He’s under the impression that we can guess the age of everything we uncover by its place in the stratigraphy.

  That’s what I consider his approach to be. Guessing.

  “If this tool is found below that one, then it’s older,” he says. “Study the layers of soil. You don’t need a lab to tell you how old these things are. To do lab tests of something, you have to destroy it just to get a sample. Is that why we’re looking for old things? To tear them up? How does that respect the person who made them? The soil will tell you how time passed here. Listen to it speak.”

  Sorry, Stupidface.

  In my world, dirt doesn’t talk. I want to establish a date for this site that can’t be torn apart by small-minded academics infatuated with their own unsubstantiated theories. I don’t want to lead from weakness, justifying my position by saying, “Look! This spear point was found one centimeter above that one and three centimeters below the other one. They were all found in soil that is indicative…”

  Oh, I can’t even pretend to write in academic bullshit doublespeak. I certainly can’t stand up in front of a crowd of small-minded hacks and listen to them tear my academic bullshit apart.

  Relative dating just doesn’t work for me. I want lab data.

  I want objective dates to hang my hat on, and I will have them. I will find something that is inarguably datable, and I will find a certified lab to put its stamp of approval on that date. Then we will know the age and significance of this site.

  Make no mistake. This place is significant.

  And that is why I would sell my mother for a potsherd.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “So Alba Callahan doesn’t strike you as a woman to get her hands dirty?”

  Roy Cloud didn’t sound like he had grave concerns that Alba might be guilty. Maybe a criminal investigator who knew all his suspects personally didn’t have the most clear-headed judgment.

  Faye wished they were face-to-face, but he was out doing detective things while she was trying to get back to Sly’s house for a little of the family time that had brought her to Oklahoma. She had called Cloud because she figured it wasn’t all that important to be face-to-face when she had nothing to say but “Alba Callahan’s hands look suspicious, so question her before she washes them.”

  “You don’t think she’s capable of murder?” Faye asked. “Is that because you’ve known her a long time and you think she’s a good person? Or is it because you don’t think she could pull it off?”

  “Oh, Alba’s one of the most capable people I know. If I had to name the person in Sylacauga most capable of planning and executing a convoluted killing and cover-up like Sophia Townsend’s, it would be Alba. Most killers aren’t smart enough to get somebody else to bury all their evidence under five feet of dirt for thirty years. Alba’s that smart. And she had a couple of motives.”

  He hadn’t risen to Faye’s baited question of whether he thought Alba was a good person.

  “A couple of motives? I know Alba opposed Dr. Townsend’s work at the Sylacauga site. What’s her other motive?”

  “I see that you aren’t tapped into the Sylacauga gossip machine yet. Alba’s motive is very clear-cut. She and Mickey broke up because he was sleeping with Sophia. The really interesting thing is that Kenny was, too.”

  “Well, that sheds a little light, doesn’t it?”

  “Hang on.”

  The entire process of Cloud ordering a cheeseburger and a root beer, from “Can I take your order?” to “Have a good day!” seeped out of her phone. Now Faye was hungry.

  She heard Cloud take a big slurp of root beer. “Sorry. When I’m working a new case, I eat all my meals in a rolling car. I’m on my way home from utterly failing to find any record of where Dr. Townsend’s cabin was. I dropped the ball when I didn’t ask her employees if they knew its location, so I’m calling ’em all back in tomorrow.”

  “They’re gonna hate you for that, if they don’t already.”

  “Alba Callahan probably does hate me already. I interviewed her this afternoon, probably right before you saw her. Did she look nervous? Rumpled? Guilty? Please tell me she looked guilty so I can arrest her and go home.”

  “Sorry to break it to you, but no. There wasn’t a rumpled hair on her sleek blond head. I did not get the sense that you had intimidated Alba Callahan into confessing to murder.”

  He sighed. “Not surprised.”

  “Why do you think sh
e would’ve looked nervous?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because I asked her if she murdered Sophia Townsend.”

  If being asked by a police chief whether she’d committed murder didn’t rumple Alba Callahan, Faye figured nothing would.

  “What did she say?”

  “Alba said, and I quote: ‘I didn’t kill Sophia Townsend, though God knows she had it coming. If I’d done it, you would never have found her and you never would have been able to prove a thing.’”

  He laughed, but his laugh was broken off by an audible bite of the cheeseburger.

  Still chewing, he said, “You know, Doctor Faye, I kind of believe her.”

  Faye wasn’t in the mood to listen to him eat, so she said, “Well, if you find somebody whose alibi you don’t believe, just let me know. Otherwise, I’ll busy myself with reading these field notebooks until I talk to you tomorrow. I want to see my family before they go to bed and I need to sleep at least a few hours.”

  “Wait! One more thing!”

  Faye hoped he’d let her hang up before she had to listen to the cheeseburger wrapper crackle again. “Yes?”

  “Before you worry too much more about the dirt stains on Alba’s hands, why don’t you drive past her house?”

  “Is it urgent? Can I do it tomorrow? And why?”

  “She’s got the prettiest yard in town. Prize-winning antique roses. Crape myrtles. Blueberry bushes. All that jazz.”

  “And…?”

  “She does all the yard work herself. Alba knows how to look top drawer—hair, clothes, shoes, bag, everything. But her hands are always a wreck. I think she’s got red mud underneath her skin in some places. It’s like she has dirt tattoos.”

  Blueberries, flowers, and prize roses. Faye wouldn’t have thought those beautiful things could make her feel so stupid.

  “Really. Go look at her flowers. They’re great. She and my late wife used to pass plants back and forth all the time. They both had the greenest thumbs. Charlotte always said that if Alba stuck a wood pencil in the ground, it would take root and grow into a tree.”

  “Now I feel like an idiot.”

  “Don’t. Just because Alba grows pretty flowers, it doesn’t mean she’s not a killer. Remember that, Faye. Alba’s got enough anger in her to fuel more than one murder. And she’s not the only one.”

  Faye hung up the phone and drove. Roy Cloud sure knew a lot about everybody in Sylacauga. She might find him affable and down-home, but if Sophia Townsend’s killer had also spent the last twenty-nine years in Sylacauga, Cloud and his insider knowledge would be terrifying. So who was he talking about when he said that Alba Callahan wasn’t the only angry person in town?

  Emily Olsen was angry and sad and grief-stricken over a woman she had loved. But was she angry before Sophia Townsend’s bones appeared?

  Faye thought of Emily’s life. Her husband was dead, probably years before his time. Early widows had good reason to be angry. She had at least one child, but Faye had gotten the impression from the way Carson mentioned her son that he didn’t come around much. Emily could be angry about that.

  A fifty-ish widow with no kids to keep her distracted from her grief would have enough free time to work up a powerful anger at fate. Emily could be looking at forty more years that promised to be no more fulfilling than this one.

  And maybe Emily’s last forty years hadn’t been as fulfilling as people might think. Maybe she would have been happier spending her life with a woman. She might be angry that she’d been born in a time when that choice would have been very hard. She might be angry with herself that she didn’t make the choice anyway.

  Emily was far from the only angry person in Faye’s immediate vicinity. Kenny and Mickey had worked for forty years in jobs that paid criminally low wages for men of their intelligence. They’d both been divorced for nearly thirty years from wives that Faye presumed they had loved. They could be as lonely as Emily and just as angry.

  Looking around Sylacauga for angry people took her directly to Carson. It seemed so unlikely that he could have murdered a woman when he was eleven, though looking at his size now, she guessed it was theoretically possible. Children who are that troubled rarely move on to a successful academic and professional career, but he clearly felt some anger now.

  Carson hadn’t mentioned a life partner and his home had felt like a place where a single man lived alone. His mother’s single glance at Faye’s left hand made her think that there was no partner and no immediate prospect of one. He could be just as lonely as his parents, Emily, and Kenny.

  Faye couldn’t see a straight line from Carson’s anger and loneliness to shooting Kira Denton, but Carson was more than old enough to kill somebody now. He was not, however, a magician, so he couldn’t possibly have fired those shots that had scared them so badly just a day before, not while he was crouched right next to Faye.

  Kenny, too, was off the hook for that shooting. She’d seen him lying prone on the ground during the incident. Besides, Roy Cloud and Bleck would have surely found the gun, because Kenny wouldn’t have had any way to get rid of it.

  She pulled into the driveway of the shabby old house where her husband had finished growing up. She let herself in the back door and found Joe at the Formica-topped kitchen table in a green fake leather chair, smoking a cigarette. He didn’t speak when she came in. He didn’t even say hello. He just looked up at her.

  Joe had taken his hair down from its customary ponytail and it hung loose around his slumping shoulders. He was wearing a stretched-out t-shirt that she didn’t recognize. Maybe it had been in this house since he left it, all those years ago. His mouth was set and his eyes were shielded. He didn’t even look like himself.

  Joe was a quiet man, but he did talk to his wife. When he went mute with Faye, it meant he was in pain.

  There were four cigarettes stubbed out in the gold-tone ashtray in front of him, and they weren’t Sly’s brand. The cigarettes underscored the message that something wasn’t right with her husband.

  Sometimes Joe smoked a cigarette, just one, while sitting outside enjoying the night air. He justified the habit to his worried wife as an ancient spiritual practice of his people, who gave the world tobacco. Faye thought it was cheating to use religion to settle an argument, and she didn’t think tobacco was much of a gift.

  They’d had this fight more than a few times. Faye’s only consolation was that Joe never smoked indoors and he never smoked more than one cigarette at a time. The pile of cigarette butts in front of Joe told Faye that something was wrong. His silence told her that he couldn’t even bring himself to tell her what it was.

  “Joe. What is it?”

  “I thought yesterday was bad when Dad wouldn’t stop talking. Today? He ain’t said a word to me since you left.”

  “Is he drinking again?”

  “No.”

  “Thank goodness.”

  “But he ain’t even drinking water. Or eating. He’s been in that chair all day. The TV’s on, but he ain’t watching.”

  He stubbed out the cigarette and fumbled with the pack for another one. Faye wanted so badly to take it out of his hands.

  “I come all this way to see him and now he won’t talk to me? At all? I did something wrong, Faye. We’ve been doing real good, Dad and me, and I’ve done something to mess it up. I just don’t know what it was.”

  He took a long drag on the cigarette, then let it go. There was enough smoke in the air to make Faye feel dizzy and sick.

  Suddenly, Joe sat up a little straighter and set his burning cigarette into the groove on the ashtray’s rim. His face turned toward the hallway.

  The TV in the living room was still playing, but Faye could hear shuffling steps coming their way on the worn wood floor. She didn’t like the sound of those steps. Her father-in-law was still vital and strong. He did not shuffle like an old man.

>   Sly trudged through the door and he looked worse than his steps sounded. His usual good posture was gone. His back slumped in a way that made him look shorter and heavier, and his worn t-shirt looked like Joe’s, only twenty years older. His bronze skin was sallow. His black eyes were dull. Even his jaw-length black hair was dull. When he spoke, his voice was dull, too.

  “Good to see you’re back safe, Daughter. It’s been a long day. I believe I’ll head to bed.”

  He turned to leave before either of them could answer him, and he almost made it out of sight before he stopped walking. As Sly stood stock-still in the hallway, Faye was afraid.

  Now she knew why Joe was distraught. This was like seeing someone fall into Alzheimer’s disease in a single day. Could Sly be having a stroke while they watched?

  They had both half-risen when he turned around, so they hovered awkwardly over their chairs when Sly turned around and began to speak.

  “It ain’t easy. Burying your mother, I mean. Been thinking about it all day. Where to put her. Where to spread her ashes. What to do with this damn urn that I’ve been living with for fifteen years.”

  Faye hadn’t noticed that he was holding the urn in both hands.

  “I just don’t know how to do it. Never did. The Creek ways weren’t her ways, no matter what the Dawes Rolls say. She stopped going to church right after she met me. You know we never went to church, Son. Didn’t even get married in a church.”

  He seemed to be waiting for a response, so Joe nodded. “I remember, Dad.”

  “I’m thinking she felt like God sent her the wrong man, so she was gonna keep her distance from His house.”

  “Dad, I don’t believe that.”

  “I never went to church at all in my whole life. I never learned the Creek ways, neither, nor the language, because they wouldn’t let us be Creek at school. They cut our hair. Just cut it off like we didn’t need it. They wouldn’t let our parents be Creek before us, nor their parents. It’s just…it’s gone, that’s what it is. The language, the religion, all of it’s gone for me. I don’t know nothing about how anybody buries their people. That’s why I never buried her. And also, if I didn’t bury her, I still had her.”