Burials

by Mary Anna Evans

  There was another gurgling swallow.

  “I’m sure Roy didn’t—”

  “Hey, speaking of shutting me out, I’m guessing he did the same to you. After Sly showed up at the funeral this morning, I mean. My dad and your—um—dad-in-law have put us both in a bad spot. Did I ever tell you that Old Sly used to drive me around in his truck, just like Kenny did? There were probably whole years when I spent more time with Sly and Kenny than I did with my own dad.”

  Faye could picture her father-in-law taking an interest in a boy whose dad was too busy sleeping around to pay him much attention. “Did Joe go with you?”

  “Yeah. Me and my little buddy and his dad, riding around Sylacauga and eating cheeseburgers. Never knew why Sly stopped coming around, not till today. My mom explained it all. Everything. Well, almost everything. Told me she and Dad would still be married today if Sophia Townsend hadn’t come along. Not sure what Sly had to do with all that, because I know for damn sure he wasn’t sleeping with Mom, but there you go. My parents tore up my life, but they can’t manage to explain why in a way that makes sense. Not even after all this time.”

  Faye was beginning to think that Carson shouldn’t be alone, but calling his mother to go check on him seemed like a terrible thing to do to a forty-year-old man. “So how can I help you? Did you really just call me to apologize?”

  “Nope. I called you because I have a plan. And it’s a good one. It’s a great plan.”

  “Do tell. What kind of plan are we talking about?”

  “You’ve got a lot more experience working with law enforcement than I do. A lot more. Because I have none. I want you to meet me at my dad’s house. Maybe he’ll tell me things he won’t tell Roy Cloud. Maybe we can get to the bottom of this, just us. Not Roy. Yep. To the bottom of it. That’s where we need to get.”

  “This probably isn’t the best time—”

  “If you won’t come with me, I’m going myself. Right now. I’ve got my truck keys in my hand.”

  Faye could hear the keys jingle. That sealed it. Carson couldn’t safely drive his car down his own fifteen-foot driveway in this condition.

  “No, I’ll go. Let me come get you.”

  ***

  Carson was in bad shape, even worse than he sounded. He answered the door wearing one boot, then spent ten minutes looking for the other one. He found it in the kitchen.

  The sock was in the bathroom. After five tries to get it turned right-side-out, he gave up and wore it the way it was. He talked throughout the long process of getting himself shod. Faye let him take his time, figuring when he finished putting on his boot, he’d be fifteen minutes closer to sober. Unless he started drinking again.

  While Carson struggled with his boot, Faye spent the time scanning the room for a telltale bit of aquamarine. Carson probably would have hidden the notebook he’d filched from Sophia’s cabin that morning, but he wasn’t expecting guests and maybe alcohol had made him careless.

  No luck. She kept hoping he’d go to the bathroom and give her a chance to look around, but Carson continued lacing and re-lacing his boot, and he kept talking.

  “Can’t make anything make sense. Couldn’t have been Kenny shooting at us that first morning. Dad can be an asshole, but he loves me, so I don’t think it was him. If Emily Olsen knows how to shoot a gun, I’ll—”

  It took him a while to come up with something that would fully communicate his doubt of Emily’s gun skills.

  “—I’ll drink to that.”

  He jumped up from the couch, boot still untied, and lurched toward the refrigerator. Faye grabbed his arm and steered him toward the door. “We need to go talk to your dad. Remember?”

  “But I want a beer.”

  She reached up and put her hands on his shoulders, pushing him toward the door. “No open containers in the car and no time to wait. Let’s get to your dad’s house and see what he has to say for himself.”

  “Yeah. What’s he got to say for himself? It better be good.”

  Faye devoutly hoped so.

  ***

  Faye thought she’d been pretty smooth in her efforts to find out about the notebook that Carson had stolen. As soon as they got settled in her car, she’d started steering the conversation in that direction.

  She’d opened with a casual mention of the field notebooks she officially knew about. “I finally got a chance to read my copies of Sophia’s field notes. Thanks for giving me those.”

  “Don’t thank me too much. You know Roy Cloud would’ve made me give ’em to you if I hadn’t done it on my own. And I didn’t like doing it. Get your own project. You’re capable. No need to take mine.”

  She let that bit of bitterness slide. “It was interesting to read them after having read your papers on her work. I could see how you’d managed to make some well-argued conclusions based on those notes, without muddying the conversation by mentioning how…unorthodox…they were.”

  “I don’t like to insert myself into my work. Distance. Objectivity. Gotta have those. Sophia didn’t feel that way. Obviously.”

  “Did you ever notice that the notes stop days before she left? She was so careful to record everything. Surely she made notes during those last few days.”

  Carson was not drunk enough to admit that he knew about the last notebook, much less that he had it. But he was too drunk to cover his feelings. The cagey expression on his face was laughable.

  “Sure she did, but it’s been a long, long time. Nearly thirty years. That’s a long time. Things get lost. If that notebook got separated from the others somehow, it could be gone forever. Gone. Thrown away, probably. When I wrote my papers on her work, I knew I had to go with what I had.”

  Faye personally thought that Carson should have mentioned the discrepancy in dates when he wrote those papers. It would not have harmed their scientific reliability to mention that more data might have existed. She wondered why Carson had wanted to keep the possible existence of another notebook a secret. If she understood why he’d done that, she might have a fighting chance to understand why he’d stolen it. As for the question of how he knew where it was or why he hadn’t stolen it already, that was anybody’s guess.

  “I texted my mom to tell her we’re coming,” he said, holding out his phone to see. The screen said simply ‘K.’

  His laugh hurt Faye’s ears. “That’s my mom. She texts like a teenager.”

  Carson poked a quick message into his phone and waited. There was no return text.

  “Typical. She texts like a teenager, but she manages her phone like an old person. She probably left it in the bathroom. She does that all the time.”

  “I don’t always do so well with my phone, either.”

  He leaned close to her ear and fake-whispered, “I bet she always answers when Dad texts. Right away. I mean it. Right away. All these years, she’s stayed single, a pretty woman like that. You know you’re pretty when your son can see it. Right?”

  Faye nodded and kept her eyes on the road.

  Carson wasn’t finished making uncomfortable revelations about his mom. “She goes out. Sly even took her out a time or two after Joe’s mom died. But she comes home early so Dad won’t worry. Is that messed up or what?”

  Faye wasn’t sure it was much more messed up than the thought of sleek Alba and rough-around-the-edges Sly. But she wasn’t surprised to hear that they’d gone out. He was Sly, after all. He liked the ladies and the ladies liked him.

  “Sophia got a lot of things right, Faye. You know that? As many times as I read those notebooks, I could never poke a hole in her logic. Any of it.”

  “I bet you tried. Proving somebody wrong is a good way to get your work noticed.”

  Carson’s drunken giggle made Faye cringe. “You got that right, just like Sophia got a lot of things right. Want to know the rightest thing she wrote in those notebooks?”


  “Sure,” Faye said, hoping that Carson was about to make the revelation that would crack this case wide open.

  He leaned over close to her and the smell of beer was so strong that she could almost identify the brand he drank.

  “Sophia was a hundred percent right when she called my father an idiot.”

  ***

  There were display cases on all four walls of Mickey’s living room. They held an eye-popping array of arrowheads, ceramic vessels, silver and gold coins, and old bottles. Faye wondered if he’d found all these things himself, or if he spent a lot of time in pawn shops and on eBay.

  Above the cases hung his gun collection and souvenirs from the animals he’d shot. Deer heads didn’t bother Faye overmuch. Joe had shot many deer over the years to feed their family, and the only reason he didn’t mount the heads was that he didn’t like all those eyes looking at him. A person who was willing to eat meat had to be realistic about the animal who died for it.

  Mickey’s other trophies—a carefully posed bobcat, a swan stuffed to look like it was in flight, a fox with a pheasant carcass in its mouth, a squirrel mounted on a branch—seemed to have been shot for show rather than for food. Faye had serious ethical issues about killing for sport. Maybe Mickey had eaten the squirrel and the pheasant, but she doubted that a swan was good for eating. Certainly not a bobcat.

  Try as she might, she could not picture Alba living with this profusion of stuff. Mickey must have used twenty-nine years of singlehood to hone his idiosyncratic sense of style.

  Mickey had greeted his son with a “Howdy,” and an overlong hug. Unless Faye missed her guess, Carson wasn’t the only one who had been drinking heavily. He was not, however, too drunk to notice Carson’s condition.

  His “Glad you’re here,” segued quickly into “Carson. Son, are you all right?”

  “Fine. I’m just fine, Dad,” Carson said, dropping into a chair to hide the fact that he was staggering. Mickey did the same, and probably for the same reason.

  “We’re here because…um…Faye and I are here because we’ve both been dismissed by Roy Cloud, so we had nothing better to do than come see you. And all…this…” He gestured vaguely at the antiquities collection, the taxidermy, and the guns. “We’re thinking maybe we should turn ourselves into citizen cops.”

  Faye and Mickey simultaneously said, “What?”

  “Neither of us like Cloud sniffing around our dads. Dads-in-law. Whatever. And I include Kenny and Sly on my list of dads. Faye and me, we’re gonna find out who really killed Sophia Townsend and Kira Denton. I’d also like to know who it was that shot at me and Faye and Kenny. Faye and me, we’re smart. We can get to the bottom of this mystery, just like Scooby-Doo. Like the Hardy Boys. Right, Faye?”

  Carson leaned forward, resting his elbows on his thighs, and fastened his gaze on Mickey’s face. Deepening his voice to sound like a television detective, he said, “Dad, tell us what you remember about August 7, 1987.”

  “It was just a day, just another day,” said Mickey, who didn’t seem to mind being the subject of his son’s mock interrogation. “I didn’t know it would be the last day I saw Sophia. How could I? If I’d known, I’d have paid more attention.”

  “Seems like you paid her plenty of attention. That’s what Mom says.”

  Mickey blinked once before he answered. “It was a long time ago, and I paid for it. I lost your mother, and I could have lost you. Maybe I did. Did I?”

  Carson said nothing but, “Do you have a beer to spare? I bet you do.”

  Mickey said, “Not tonight,” then he gave Faye a look that said, Help me. She obliged by diverting the subject from beer.

  “I understand that Sophia sent her crew home early on that last day,” she said. “I’ve been wondering—”

  Mickey recoiled. “How do you know that? You couldn’t know that.”

  Faye began to explain, but Mickey wasn’t listening. At first, she thought she’d screwed up in revealing that she knew something about Sophia’s last day on the job. Then she decided that any question that got this much of a reaction out of a murder suspect couldn’t be all bad.

  “It’s not possible for you to know that. I didn’t even remember it until you mentioned it.”

  Mickey rose in a huff and walked through a door toward the rear of the house, slamming it shut behind him. Faye looked at Carson and mouthed, “What now?”

  An instant later, the sound of a gunshot reached her, followed by a grunt and the sound of a body hitting the floor, Faye had a moment—only an instant, really—when reality seemed to blink out. It was a moment when she thought, “Somebody’s shot Mickey. Or maybe he’s shot himself,” and she thought it in such a calm, everyday fashion that she wondered if it were possible to get accustomed to such a thing.

  Another shot sounded, and then there was silence.

  This time, Carson was the one pushing her in the direction he wanted her to go. He slung a heavy arm across her shoulders and forced her to hit the floor as hard as he did. The impact of her body on the cold tile floor shook her back to reality. Carson was already crawling on his elbows, like a soldier inching toward enemy lines while under heavy fire.

  “Dad? Dad, are you okay?”

  Mickey said something that was unintelligible through the closed door. Carson reached up for the doorknob. “Dad?”

  Another shot sounded. Carson shoved the door open, then dropped back on his stomach. He slithered through the door, trying to get to his father.

  “I’m okay,” Mickey was saying, over and over. “I’m okay, son. I’m okay.”

  Faye couldn’t see any blood on Mickey, so maybe he really was okay. Carson didn’t seem to question his father’s claim to be okay, because he’d turned away and started crawling across the floor toward the window.

  Faye wasn’t sure why she felt so responsible for Carson. It might have been because he was drunk or it might have been because he seemed like a broken-hearted little boy trapped in a forty-year-old body. For whatever reason, Faye crawled after him, slapping him on the back to get his attention.

  “Stop! Are you crazy? There’s somebody out there with a gun! Somebody’s shooting a gun.”

  He reached the wall and grabbed onto the windowsill to heave himself up. When his head rose above that windowsill, Faye had a horrifying vision of a bullet hitting him in the face. The first shot had come just as Mickey entered the room and turned on the light, silhouetting himself in the window. Now Carson was trying to make himself into the same kind of target.

  Faye reached up, but instead of using the windowsill to haul herself off the ground, she used Carson’s shoulders, hoping to use her weight to throw him off-balance. She wasn’t nearly heavy enough to pull off that maneuver, so when Carson stood up, he dragged her with him.

  Still sprawled on the floor, Mickey spoke sharply and with the authority of a teacher or a father. “Carson. Get down.”

  Carson sank back to the floor, taking Faye with him, but not before she got a glimpse of the scene outside the window. She saw no shooter, no neighbor’s house, no road, no sign of any civilization at all. Mickey’s back yard sloped down to a thickly wooded area, just like the woods that had harbored the shooter on the day she met Carson. Every house on the short dead-end road where he lived backed up to the same woods. It was going to be very difficult to track the shooter through all that undergrowth.

  As soon as Faye hit the floor, she pulled her phone out of her pocket. Perhaps she should have called 911, but that would have required three keystroke to dial the number, plus a fourth to place the call. Instead, with a single keystroke, she let speed dial connect her directly to Chief Roy Cloud.

  Another shot sounded. She hoped Roy would come to help them soon.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  “Alba. I have to get to Alba.”

  Mickey was still on all fours, but now he was crawlin
g toward the front door of his house. Faye listened to Roy Cloud’s phone ring, wondering if Mickey was planning to crawl all the way to his ex-wife’s house.

  “Dad, are you insane? You can’t go out there.”

  “She’s by herself. All alone. I have to get to Alba.”

  Carson was hanging onto his father’s shirttail with both hands. “Call her, Dad. Call her and see if she’s okay. You’ve got a cell phone in your pocket.”

  “Oh, yeah.” Mickey pulled a clamshell phone out of his rear pocket and used his index finger to punch in a phone number.

  Faye was barely two feet away from Mickey, so she could hear Alba’s phone ringing almost as clearly as she heard Roy’s.

  When Roy picked up, Faye said only, “I’m at Mickey’s. Somebody’s shooting again. They’re in the woods out back. I heard one of the bullets hit the house.”

  “We’re on our way.”

  “Bring Bleck.”

  “Damn, woman. You really like that dog.”

  ***

  “You’re okay? You’re really okay?”

  Mickey stopped talking and Faye could hear Alba’s voice wafting out of Mickey’s phone. The volume on Mickey’s cell phone suggested that maybe his hearing was starting to go. Alba was saying something about Kenny.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I need to check on him, too.”

  Faye looked at Carson. “Is he going to call everybody he knows? There’s a nut shooting at him, but it’s not like there’s an earthquake or a hurricane that’s trying to take out the whole county. Why would he think anybody else would be in danger?”

  “He’s just checking to see if any stray bullets came their way. They live next door.”

  “Together?” Faye asked. Then she realized what Carson was saying. “They live on both sides of Mickey’s house?”

  Carson nodded. He pointed to his right. “Kenny.” Then he pointed to his left. “Mom.”

  Faye remembered that Carson had said that Kenny and Mickey lived next door to each other and always had, but it would never have occurred to her that they lived side-by-side next to Alba in the only three houses at the end of a long country road. Could these people possibly be more emotionally enmeshed? How could Mickey stand to live next door to both his ex-wife and the man who was his rival in a long-ago love affair?