Burials
Page 16
Emily was still chattering. Faye noticed that her mood had brightened the instant her thoughts shifted to the past and Sophia Townsend. “I’m pretty sure she was up, though, because I could see a light in the bedroom window. I pictured her in there reading, and it was such a cozy image. The curtains were drawn, so I couldn’t see in, except in the kitchen. There were more tomatoes on the kitchen windowsill, just getting ripe, so her garden must have come in. How can I describe it to you? It just looked like a place where someone was living her life, not like a place where the owner was never coming home.”
“Did you see her car?”
“Her car? I don’t remember anything about her car. I was only interested in whether she was okay. I saw as much as I could see without disturbing her, then I went home.”
Emily sure knew a lot about Sophia’s windows. How did she know which one was the bedroom if the blinds were drawn? Could she really have seen the vegetables on the kitchen windowsill without peeking in the window?
Emily might have used binoculars to study Sophia’s cabin from a distance, but that was as creepy as standing outside a window and looking in.
“Did you tell anybody you’d gone out there?”
“I told Mickey, since he was the one who’d said she ran away to her cabin. He seemed relieved to hear that she seemed to be okay.”
Emily wasn’t finished rhapsodizing about her final uninvited trip to trespass on Sophia Townsend’s private property. “It was such a beautiful sight—the house, the garden, the wildflowers, the vegetables in the window—that I decided Sophia was better off without a job and without us. She was certainly better off without me. There wasn’t anything that I could add to her perfect life.” Her fever-bright expression dimmed. “So I went home.”
“This is all really interesting, Emily, but why exactly are you here? You said you needed my help.”
Emily blushed and the tears started again. “You have a lot of influence with Roy Cloud.”
Faye tried to brush it off, saying, “No, he just listens to me when it comes to archaeology. That’s all. We only met day before yesterday.”
“It’s true. He respected you the very instant he saw you. You’re like Sophia. You have the same competence, and you even have a little bit of her swagger. People respond to people like you and Sophia. You make them feel safe. I can see that Roy appreciates that about you.”
Faye was more flattered to hear this than she would have expected. Was she becoming yet another Sophia fangirl?
“How exactly do you want me to use this influence I supposedly have over Roy Cloud?”
“I want you to ask him if I can have Sophia’s necklace.”
This request was so perfectly Emily that Faye was amazed she hadn’t been expecting it.
“I’m sure he needs the necklace for evidence, and he’ll have to answer to Agent Bigbee,” Faye said. “When all’s said and done, I guess they might try to find out if she had family who might want it.”
Now the woman’s hands were clasped as if she were begging. “There was no one. Not here and not in Alabama. No family. No friends. Nobody. I checked.”
How had Emily checked? Court records? A private detective? Was there no limit to this woman’s willingness to intrude?
“I cared about her and I was the only one who did. I would treasure her necklace forever. Please.”
“I can mention it to Chief Cloud and Agent Bigbee, but I can’t imagine—”
“Oh, thank you! This means so much to me. I don’t even have a picture of her. Back then, we didn’t take pictures all the time the way people do now. We probably would have taken a group shot at the end of the summer, but we didn’t make it to the end. Not as a group. Not all of us.”
“I’ll ask him. No guarantees.”
“You shouldn’t let anyone fade away into nothingness.” Emily’s expression dared Faye to argue. “There shouldn’t come a time when you have nothing left of them but memories.”
Faye couldn’t help thinking of Sly, who had never let Patricia’s ashes go. She knew without looking at the fireplace behind her that the urn was still gone. The potsherd, too.
“Emily, can I ask you something unrelated?”
“Sure.”
“Sophia’s notes mentioned that you found a potsherd toward the end of the dig. About palm-size. Incised with curving patterns. Do you remember it?”
Emily’s face fell. “I do remember. I found it and I broke it. I felt so terrible for letting Sophia down. I thought she was never going to finish yelling at me.”
“Do you remember a clay figurine? Small and shaped like a woman? Or any pearls?”
“No, and I would have remembered something that exciting.”
“Do you remember finding anything else out of the ordinary? Something that might fit in a box this size?”
Faye held out her arms as if she was carrying a load of firewood.
“No, nothing that big. But there was that one bone.”
“A bone? Was it human? When did you find it?”
“It was late, sometime during the last week before Sophia left, sometime after we found the potsherd. Mickey said it was human, but she just told him he was wrong and set it aside. Then she made fun of him for thinking a middle school biology teacher might know more than she did.”
“Do you know where it was found?”
Emily shook her head. “No. I wasn’t there. Maybe I’d gone to the bathroom. I did see it, though. It looked like a rib bone, broken into two or three pieces. Maybe it wasn’t human, but Mickey should know, don’t you think?”
Faye knew that finding a human bone on tribal land could have triggered antiquities protection laws, even in 1987. Sophia might have had a vested interest in saying that the bone wasn’t human if she wanted to avoid government red tape slowing down a project that was already over budget. But there was another issue at play. Bone, human or otherwise, can be carbon-dated. According to the papers Carson had published, Sophia never found anything that she could use to date the site.
Maybe Sophia had been willing to miss the chance of dating the bone if it was human and could put the project that was her bread-and-butter on hold. Hiding the fact that she’d found it was unethical and illegal, but Sophia Townsend didn’t seem to respect much. Why should Faye expect her to respect the law or even human decency? Arguing against that was the extreme professionalism of Sophia Townsend’s documented work.
And what about the pearl? Faye was no expert on the subject, but she knew pearls were still hard to date. Radiocarbon results were affected by events as arcane as the upwelling of water from the ocean depths and DNA testing had only recently become available. The analysis would have been even harder in 1987, if it could have been done at all.
Still, if Faye understood Sophia’s obsession with dating the Sylacauga site, she thought Sophia would have at least tried to find a lab willing to work with an ancient pearl. Based on Carson’s papers and her limited time with the field notes, Faye knew of nothing that proved Sophia had ever seen the pearls.
Could it be that she never got a chance to document the bone, the figurine, and the pearls in her notes because they were found on her very last day? No, that couldn’t be true, not if Emily was right that Sophia had been at her cabin days after her last day at the dig. If she did indeed find them, it seemed out-of-character for her to fail to document them in her notes. What happened on Sophia Townsend’s last day at work to cause her to abandon the job where she’d lavished so much care?
Chapter Seventeen
“Damn straight I want to know more about that bone,” Cloud said. “I also want to know whether Emily is getting professional help. That woman does not sound stable.”
“What? You don’t approve of following people for hours so you can find out where they live? Or hiding outside the house to watch them shower? Stalkers need love, too.”
“Did you say Emily said the bone turned up about the time Dr. Townsend died? On the very last day anybody saw her alive? I’m glad Bigbee wanted to call everybody in again today to talk about Sophia’s cabin, because I want to ask them about that bone. I don’t know why I didn’t hammer harder on whether any of them had ever been to the cabin themselves. Everybody talked like it was her retreat from people, which did suit the antisocial woman everybody said she was. I was an idiot not to think that she maybe took her lovers out there.”
“It’s a weird case. You were flying by the seat of your pants on the first day.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sure that’s what it was. How’s this? Emily got you up at an ungodly hour, so why don’t we go ahead and start the day?”
Faye looked longingly at the untouched cup of coffee in her hand. Well, she owned a travel mug.
“Can you come on down to the station and help us with the interviews, Doctor Faye? Bigbee is very good at intimidating witnesses by staring at them and saying exactly nothing. And I’m plenty capable of asking a bunch of people the same questions over and over, just to see what they say. I even throw in a new one now and then to keep them on their toes, but I don’t know a damn thing about ancient bones and potsherds. That’s what you call those little bits of broken pots? Potsherds?”
“Yes. You’re saying it right.”
“Potsherds. Okay. Let’s start with Kenny Summers, because you tell me that the notebooks say he was arguing with his boss during that last week.”
“Hang on,” Faye said, searching through the loaded dish rack for her travel mug. “What about Mickey? Emily says he’s the one who told her their boss had run off to her mountain cabin. I’d like to know who told him.”
“So you think we should chase this rumor until somebody tells us where it came from? Or until somebody says something that can’t possibly be true? I like it, Doctor Faye. And yeah. We can start with Mickey.”
“I can be there before you and Bigbee get Mickey in the hot seat.”
Faye put the travel mug on the table and started sliding papers into her briefcase with the hand that wasn’t holding the phone. She’d be able to leave as soon as she broke the connection and put on some clothes that she hadn’t slept in.
“You do that. I believe I’ll bring Alba Callahan in to talk to us, too. Besides the fact that she’s still a suspect, I want to hear what she has to say about everybody else. Kenny, Mickey, and Emily—they’re all book-smart but people-dumb. Alba’s book-smart, too, but she’s a small-town attorney. She’s almost as people-smart as a small-town police chief like me.”
“Almost but not quite?”
“Heh. You got that right. We’ll talk to all of them, but we’ll do Carson Callahan last. He’s the only living person that we know of who has read all those field notes. I trust that you plan to remedy that?”
“I was up with them most of the night. I’ll go back to them as soon as we finish with the interviews.” She slid one binder full of Sophia’s notes into her briefcase, hoping she got a break during the day when she could do some more reading.
“How often do I work a murder case where the victim wrote a few books about what she was doing in her last days? Tell me how you’re getting along with reading them when you come.”
Faye said good-bye and gathered her things. She gave Joe a good-bye kiss, then went looking for Sly. He was back in his easy chair, motionless and silent. When she told him she was leaving, he nodded but didn’t answer.
As Faye headed out, she gave the mantel one last glance. The urn was back among the clutter, right where it had been the day before, but the sherd was nowhere to be seen. She couldn’t have explained why she didn’t just ask Sly where it was, but she didn’t. Instead, she hurried out the door so that she didn’t have to stay in the same room as her father-in-law’s suffering eyes.
***
“Did you ever visit Sophia Townsend’s weekend cabin?”
Cloud had beaten around the bush for nearly half an hour before delivering the question Faye knew he wanted to ask the most. Bigbee had spent that time proving that he did indeed have an intimidating stare. When the witnesses weren’t there, he was an affable enough guy. When they came around, she could have sworn he turned to stone.
When Cloud asked if he’d ever visited the cabin, Mickey Callahan said, “Do what?” as if he didn’t understand the question, but he quickly recovered his cocky attitude. “Of course, I did. I took the cops out there after she went missing.”
Cloud looked at Mickey like he didn’t understand his response. “That’s not possible. I checked our files for any paperwork on missing persons reports from the time after Dr. Townsend disappeared. I found none, and all of you people have been telling me that you didn’t ever realize that she was missing. Explain.”
“Something just smelled fishy to me. Kenny and Emily disagreed with me about that, so I decided to go check on her myself. I went to the sheriff’s office in the county where she lived and told them they needed to do a welfare check. They sent somebody up the mountain to check on her and I tagged along.”
Faye felt sorry for Cloud, trying to wrap his head around a scenario he hadn’t expected. Bigbee was still wearing his rock face.
“If you called the law to help you look for her, there should be a record of it,” he said. “We’ve had somebody call every county in this end of the state that has a hill big enough that somebody might call it a mountain. Maybe I should have done it myself.”
“Did you check Arkansas? Because that’s where her property was.”
Bigbee let his face twitch.
Cloud swallowed visibly and tried to recover. “It’s a good distance to Arkansas. I never would’ve thought she’d drive that far just for weekends.”
“Sophia liked to drive.”
Cloud quickly regrouped enough to respond to the unexpected information. “Apparently she did. Can you tell me why you took the police to check on a woman you knew very, very well? Why didn’t you just go on your own?”
Mickey didn’t flinch at the insinuation behind Cloud’s “very, very” statement. “I got the police to go with me because I was afraid I might find her dead. Or maybe I was afraid she’d shoot me when she saw me coming. I thought she’d probably hold her fire if I came with the police, although you could never be sure about anything with Sophia.”
“She had guns?”
“Sure she did. You haven’t learned enough about her yet to know that she was quite serious about protecting herself?”
Faye could see that Cloud was still processing the fact that Sophia had lived in Arkansas.
“Surely the folks at the sheriff’s office in Arkansas let the people here know that they’d checked on her.”
“Why? Nobody here had reported her missing, not even me. For the deputies who went with me, it was a simple welfare check. Once they knew she wasn’t lying dead on the floor, they were out of there. For all any of us knew, she’d decided she was tired of people. It would have been just like her. If we would’ve found something that didn’t seem right, the Arkansas people would’ve called the police here or I’d have done it myself. Didn’t happen.”
Mickey delivered this explanation slowly. He enunciated every syllable, like he was talking to a misbehaving eighth grader. Faye disliked sarcastic people, and she thought Cloud was probably about ready to slap Mickey for his tone of voice. She also thought Cloud was ready to slap himself for not considering that Sophia Townsend might have considered Arkansas to be a reasonable weekend drive from Sylacauga.
“So what did you and the folks from the Arkansas sheriff’s department see
? Was Dr. Townsend at home?”
“No. She wasn’t there.”
“You went in without a warrant?”
“She didn’t answer when we knocked. The door was unlocked. Like I said, she could have been dead in there, so yeah. We went in.”
“She wasn’t there?”
“Nope. Neither was her car. We found a receipt on the kitchen counter that said she’d bought gas a few days after her last day at work. That seemed like a pretty good indication that she’d at least made it home safe. The cabin looked like it was shut down for the winter, which was weird in August. The shutters were closed. There were sheets on the furniture. Things like that.”
“You’re sure she didn’t always keep sheets on the furniture?” Bigbee asked.
“Sophia? She might have lived in a tiny house, but she wanted things just so. Sheets would have been too sloppy. Anyway, here’s the most important thing. There wasn’t a suitcase in the house. I knew she had one, because we all saw it taking up the whole back seat of her car every Friday. It was old. Blue. Hard-sided. No wheels. I’d have known it anywhere.”
“Are you saying you think she was on a trip? That’s why you didn’t call the police here?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Emily had told me what she saw when she drove out there after Sophia disappeared. By the time I took the Arkansas cops to check on her, everything was different. The house was shut up. The lights were off. Her car was gone. Her suitcase wasn’t under the bed. In my shoes, wouldn’t you have thought she’d gone on a trip?”
Cloud couldn’t argue with Mickey’s very logical point, but Faye could see that he was peeved by the biology teacher’s snarky tone. He looked as serene as ever, but the pen he was using to doodle in the margins of his notepad was cutting deep grooves into the paper.
Mickey was enjoying his moment of unassailable logic. “The Arkansas officer agreed with me. There was plenty of evidence that said she was fine. Judging by the gas receipt, she’d come home after her last day of work and kept living her life. Judging by the shutters and the sheets and the lack of a suitcase or car, she’d packed up and gone on a trip sometime after that. We figured that’s why she bought gas. Neither of us saw any need to give you people a call because she wasn’t missing. At least, she wasn’t missing as far as we knew. We thought she was an adult who had decided she didn’t want to be where she was. She had that right.”