Burials

by Mary Anna Evans

  “Dad,” Joe said, “it’s okay. I learned some Creek words that I’ll teach you. It’ll all be okay.”

  If Sly heard his son speaking, Faye couldn’t tell it.

  “It’s not too late,” Joe said.

  Sly looked at him hard, but he didn’t speak.

  “Dad, it’s not too late to grow your hair. Do you hear me? You can have your hair back.”

  Sly brushed his hand over the urn lightly. The gesture looked well-practiced.

  “I got so confused and upset when the cancer took Patricia so quick that I told the people at the hospital to go ahead and cremate her. Then they come to me with her ashes. I’m supposed to know what to do with them?”

  He turned and walked toward his bedroom. He passed the living room without a pause, so he must have intended to take the urn to his bedroom for the night. For all Faye knew, he took it to his bedroom every night.

  He was speaking as he left, but Faye couldn’t tell if he was talking to them or to himself.

  “If I would’ve known what to do with Patricia, I would’ve made her happy while she was alive.”

  ***

  Faye lingered at the kitchen table until Joe excused himself to go to the bathroom. As soon as she heard the door close, she went to the fireplace. Its mantel was cluttered with junk mail, coffee cups, and packs of cigarettes, but there was an open spot where Patricia’s urn had been.

  Faye checked that open spot first, then she broadened her search to the rest of the mantel, to the hearth, to the end table where Sly had left yet another coffee cup. She searched until she heard the bathroom door open. Then she dropped into Sly’s easy chair before Joe came back, as if nothing whatsoever was on her mind.

  She had no idea why she didn’t want Joe to know what she was doing. She supposed it was because she thought her suspicions would cause him pain on a day when he’d had quite enough of it.

  She knew one thing for sure, but she didn’t know what it meant. Sly’s potsherd was nowhere in the living room or the kitchen. It simply wasn’t there. Joe had told her that it had laid around the house for most of his growing up years. Just twenty-four hours before, it had been on the mantel, as if Sly intended for it to be on display.

  Now it was gone.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Faye had passed in and out of sleep for hours, fretting about Sly’s missing potsherd when she was awake and visiting disturbed corners of her psyche when she wasn’t. Her subconscious could put her anywhere it liked when she was asleep, and tonight it wanted her to dream about finding her loved ones buried deep in the ground. Tonight, being awake was far more pleasant than being asleep.

  It was an odd coincidence that she’d found a sherd in Sophia Townsend’s grave, one with a rainbow-and-feather pattern so similar to the design etched on Sly’s sherd, but it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. If the Sylacauga site turned out to have housed a large city in Mississippian times, as Carson believed, then there could be many pots of similar design lingering underground in the area. Finding parts of two of them would be like a future archaeologists digging up Atlanta and finding two broken Coke bottles. It could happen.

  But what were the odds that those future archaeologists would find two pieces of the self-same broken Coke bottle? Sure, it was possible to find all the pieces of a single broken Coke bottle by excavating the spot where the bottle had met its end, leaving all its pieces conveniently close together. Once those pieces were separated, though, it was like throwing a bunch of needles into a haystack as big as all outdoors.

  Nevertheless, Faye thought she might actually have found two pieces of the same pot in two very different locations. The patterns were so similar. The sherds had felt the same in her hand, as if they were made from the same clay, tempered with the same shells, shaped into the same vessel by the same hands.

  Both sherds had been a tiny bit convex, as if they came from two round vessels of the same size—or as if they came from the same vessel. Faye felt almost certain that the triangular projection at the top of the potsherd from the grave would fit neatly into the triangular notch that had made Sly’s potsherd look like a heart. If she could just find the heart-shaped potsherd, she would know for sure.

  In graduate school, Faye’s assistantship had required her to reassemble broken pots for hours on end. Or to try to reassemble them. Real world puzzles are harder to solve than jigsaw puzzles sold in sealed boxes. Experience like Faye’s leaves a person with a feel for pieces that fit and pieces that don’t fit. She wanted to hold both sherds, one in each hand. She wanted to hold them against each other and see if they matched, but she couldn’t. Somebody, probably Sly, had taken the sherd off his mantel today and put it someplace where it couldn’t be seen.

  She wanted to know why.

  And yet when Joe had emerged from the bathroom to tell her good night, she didn’t ask him who had moved the potsherd and she knew she wouldn’t be asking Sly. Faye felt herself shying away from talking to the two most important adult men in her life about that little piece of ancient dried clay. She just didn’t know why.

  Maybe she didn’t want to know.

  ***

  Faye wasn’t sure anybody in the house was sleeping.

  Joe was lying still with his eyes closed when she crept out of their bedroom, but that didn’t mean he was asleep. She could see light leaking from the crack at the bottom of Sly’s door. Maybe he was still awake, or maybe he had forgotten to turn his lamp off.

  In case someone in the house had succeeded in slipping into sleep, she moved quietly as she gathered Sophia Townsend’s notebooks, her reading glasses, and a glass of milk. Since she was awake, she might as well work.

  When she came on this trip, she’d planned to work for Carson the first day and then shift into vacation mode. She’d certainly never expected to be billable in the middle of the night. Roy Cloud might joke about paying her a low hourly rate, but money was money and she might as well spend her waking hours earning some. If Sly’s physical and mental health continued with the nose dive they’d seen a few hours before, she and Joe might need to take care of him much sooner than they’d ever dreamed.

  She settled herself at the kitchen table and opened the notebook on top. Sophia Townsend, despite having been dead for nearly thirty years, managed to shock Faye on the first page. Calling one’s employees “Idiot” and “Stupidface” was ludicrously disrespectful, but openly carrying on affairs with married employees? Sleeping with multiple employees and using sex to manipulate them? Was this business as usual in 1987, or was Sophia Townsend a special case?

  Faye was going to presume she was a special case.

  The woman’s brash words weren’t pleasant to read. Reading them was part of Faye’s job, but she was going to let it wait. At the moment, she only had enough brain power to look at pretty pictures. Fortunately, the notebooks were full of pretty pictures. Sophia Townsend had missed her calling as an archaeological illustrator.

  Sophia’s plot plans weren’t just complete and factual. They were beautiful. She had included nonessentials like trees, grass, and gravel at a level of detail that was almost lifelike. These were not sketches dashed off in the field. They were evidence of love for her work, as an artist and as an archaeologist.

  After flipping through all the notebooks and admiring Sophia’s sketches, Faye found the drawing that she expected to find. It was near the end of the very last book. It was a potsherd, incised with a familiar feather-and-rainbow pattern. It was accompanied by notes saying that Emily Olsen had found it and immediately broken it into three pieces. Those notes were studded with Sophia-like epithets like “Ladybitch.” The woman had not been pleased with Emily for breaking it.

  Sophia had used colored pencils to draw the potsherd as it had been when it was found, inscribing two heavy black lines across the drawing to show where it had been broken. Faye was not surprised to see the shapes of tw
o of the pieces. One of them was shaped like a heart, and the other was shaped like an envelope, with the triangular projection fitting neatly into the notch at the top of the heart. These two pieces seemed to come from near the rim of the vessel, which must have been ringed near the top with the incised decorations. The third piece came from a spot further down from the rim. It was smooth and plain and the color of dirt.

  Like all of Sophia’s illustrations, this image was expertly drawn, with the potsherds’ contours represented by shading and fine-textured tippling. The illustrations were so detailed, so real, that Faye could feel the textures and contours of the original pieces in her hand.

  Faye pictured Sophia sitting alone in the evenings, sketching and drawing until the illustrations suited her. She must have spent a great deal of her off-hours with her notebooks, when she wasn’t sleeping with her employees. How else could she have generated the voluminous notes that included everything that professional archaeologists could be expected to record and so many things that no one would expect to read in a quasi-public document?

  How public were field notes, really? Sophia might have included pages from her notes for the appendix of a final report, but she would be the one choosing the pages and doing the copying. Readers of the report would see her gorgeous drawings, not the dirty laundry she had aired on the previous page. Someone would have to be deeply interested in her work to delve into the original notes. This was something that might never happen in the original archaeologist’s lifetime, but the possibility was always there.

  It was possible that Sophia had enjoyed the danger of being revealed as unprofessional in her work life and unethical in her private life. Perhaps it gave her the same rush that lured people to jump out of airplanes again and again, risking their lives for the chemical surge that was an adrenaline junkie’s drug.

  In a peculiar way, these notebooks were her memoirs. They were a thorough blending of a woman’s professional and personal lives. Faye remembered what she’d been taught about field notes. They were to be written with history in mind. They could feasibly survive the person writing them, the artifacts found, and even the archaeological remains that they described. They were history in the raw.

  Field notes were the memoirs of an archaeological project. Sophia Townsend had merely enlarged the parameters, defining her whole life as an archaeological project.

  Faye spent the rest of the night flipping through the notes again, reading selected entries but mostly marveling at the detailed contours and shading of every single illustrated chipped stone knife or spear point. Try as she might, though, Faye never found a drawing of a particular pottery figurine or a handful of old pearls.

  ***

  When the sun began to pink up the sky, Faye knew that she’d stayed up too long to go back to bed. She walked toward the mantel as she sleepily made her way from the bathroom to the coffee pot and the sugar bowl, despite the fact that Sly wasn’t even up so the potsherd couldn’t possibly be there.

  Checking the mantel had become an instant new habit, and she knew that she’d be checking every time she passed by the fireplace. She checked. Still no potsherd.

  The knock at the front door surprised her. It was nowhere near a civilized hour to arrive at someone’s house, and it wouldn’t be for quite some time. She slept in a t-shirt and gym shorts, so she was nominally dressed, but she hadn’t put on her shoes. The uninvited guest would just have to look at her bare feet.

  Coffee cup in hand, she made her way to the front door. Emily was standing on the doorstep. Her eyes were red and she looked like she’d slept in her actual clothes, a rumpled button-front shirt and a pair of jeans.

  “I know it’s early, but I just—I couldn’t be by myself for a minute longer.”

  Faye could see who needed coffee the most, so she held out her full cup without asking Emily how she took it. Emily didn’t even look at it. She just took a long sip of the dark and sugary brew.

  After Faye got Emily settled in Sly’s easy chair and sat down in the chair facing it, she realized that she’d forgotten to pour herself another cup. It would have to wait now, because Emily was in no shape to be left alone.

  Faye stated the obvious. “I can see you’re upset.”

  Emily nodded several times, still holding the steaming cup close to her mouth.

  “Did you come here to tell me why?”

  Emily gave her more nervous little nods. “Yes. Yes, I did. I need your help.”

  “I’m happy to help, but you have to tell me what you need.”

  “Coffee was a good start.” Emily laughed at her own little joke, then dissolved into tears.

  Joe and Sly had stuck their heads out of their bedroom doors to see who had come to visit. When Emily started to weep, Faye saw them pull their heads back in like two turtles confronted with a curious dog.

  “Is it about Sophia Townsend’s death?” she asked Emily. “You must have been close.”

  “Yes. No. Not close at all, really, but I admired her so. She was…indomitable. Yeah, that’s how I’d describe her. Nothing and nobody could stop her from doing what she wanted to do. I’ve never known anybody like that. Certainly not me.”

  The sobs had stopped, but Emily’s cheeks were still wet. “I wanted to be just like her. I wanted her to like me. I wanted to be her friend. I was jealous of her.”

  “Jealous of what?”

  “Of her freedom. She didn’t care what people thought of her. She said what she thought. She swore like a sailor, only with a much bigger vocabulary. Did you know she called me Ladybitch?”

  Faye did know, because she had seen the notebooks, but she didn’t say so. “Well, that’s an unusual nickname.”

  “I liked it because she gave it to me.”

  “Did you ever spend time with her outside of work?”

  Emily’s eyes dropped to the coffee cup in her hands. “No. Well, I tried to. I was desperate to know where she went on Friday evenings. She’d get in her truck and tear out at a speed that would have gotten anybody else killed. Driving was just one more thing that she did well. All weekend, I would wonder what she was doing. One day when I couldn’t stand it any more, I decided to follow her. I thought I was going to wreck my car and die in flames, but I kept up with her. I’m proud of that.”

  “You saw her cabin?”

  “I did! I followed her almost all the way there and parked my car on a side road that was downhill from her driveway a little. After waiting a few minutes to give her time to change clothes and relax for a bit, I walked up the driveway and knocked on her door.”

  So Emily’s habit of showing up unannounced went back a long way.

  “How did it go? Did she invite you in? Ask you to dinner?” Faye asked, though she was pretty sure she knew how Sophia Townsend would have reacted to this kind of intrusion.

  She gave a quick shake of the head. “That’s what I’d hoped for, but no. When she opened the door, she was so angry. So, so angry. It was like she’d lost the ability to talk in sentences. She just screamed words at me, most of them swear words. She screamed and screamed while I ran to my car and drove back down the mountain.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not. I got to see her away from work and I got to see her weekend place. It made her seem more real. More human. It knocked her off her pedestal and made me think that someday maybe we could be friends.”

  Given what Faye knew about Sophia Townsend, this seemed profoundly unlikely.

  “What was her place like?”

  “Beautiful. Just beautiful. She’d only had it about four years—I checked the courthouse records—but she’d made it her own.”

  “The courthouse? Do you remember which county she lived in? Could you find the cabin now?”

  “Oh, heavens no. Do you know how long thirty years is? I couldn’t drive there on a bet, but I remember what her property looked like
as if I had just been there yesterday. She’d planted wildflowers and herbs in the yard, and she had a garden out back. I remember that she’d set a bunch of tomatoes on her kitchen windowsill to finish getting ripe. She had an outdoor shower, which only makes sense for an archaeologist. Maybe I’ll get one, so I can wash the dirt off before I go in the house.”

  Faye reflected that it took a special kind of stalker to look up her beloved’s property records. She didn’t know that she blamed Sophia for screaming at Emily and calling her names.

  Emily’s statement that she had waited while Sophia changed out of her dirty work clothes grew more disturbing as Faye thought about it. Sophia would surely have showered before changing. Did Emily really wait in her car? Or did she lurk in the bushes and watch Sophia shower in the open air? Maybe that was the reason the woman had greeted Emily with incoherent screaming.

  “I went back out there one more time after I heard she’d gone away. The cabin, the property, the long drive up the mountain—it was all just the same. So beautiful.”

  This revelation shifted Faye’s attention from Emily’s disturbing past behavior to the story she was telling in the moment. “You went back? When?”

  She was going to ask “Why?” but then she remembered that stalkers don’t need a reason for the things they do.

  “It was a couple of days after she didn’t come to work. I wanted to make sure she was okay.”

  “Did you see her?”

  If Emily saw Sophia a few days after the disappearance, then the narrative Faye was using to picture the crime was completely wrong. She’d been going with the simplest explanation, which was that Sophia was killed at the end of the last day she came to work and buried immediately on the spot. If Emily saw her after that, this couldn’t be true.

  “No, I didn’t see her. It was early, so I was embarrassed to knock.”

  If it was too early for Emily to knock, it was pretty freaking early.