Burials

by Mary Anna Evans

  His expression was flat, emotionless, unreadable. She wondered if he really didn’t care if he got sent back to the penitentiary. Then the moment passed and he looked like a man who was scared to death of being railroaded because he looked conveniently guilty.

  Sly heaved himself to his feet, opening a narrow closet door that opened into the hall. It was filled with logbooks stacked in disorderly heaps. When he reached in for one, several of those heaps teetered, spilling logbooks onto the hall floor.

  “Are they labeled?”

  “Nope.”

  “How many years did you drive?”

  He looked at her like he didn’t understand the question. “Always.”

  She crouched down and picked up a couple of logbooks at random. Opening them, she saw that they were as different from Sophia Townsend’s notebooks as was possible for them to be. There were no musings and no drawings lovingly rendered. Sly’s records showed only the dates of each job, the mileage, the fuel burned, the time spent on the road, and the money earned. Stapled to the back cover were receipts for the fuel that had taken him all those miles.

  They were the work of a man who was in a hurry, a man who would dearly love to never see another logbook, a man who deep down just wanted to drive home. They were the work of a man who hated his job as much as Sophia Townsend had loved hers.

  She ran a finger over the page, feeling the depressions left by ballpoint pens in whatever color Sly had handy. Blue, red, black. Once, even purple, which led her to wonder where a man without a teenaged daughter got a purple pen. Some pages were dotted and rippled as if their words had been written in the rain.

  “These look real,” she said.

  “You thought I was lying?”

  “No, I was trying to think like a judge and jury, and a judge and jury is going to love these dated receipts. They’re not going to wonder whether these logbooks are something that you fabricated to cover your tracks.”

  Sly opened the back of one notebook and riffled through the receipts as if he could remember every mile that he drove and every gallon of diesel that he burned.

  “Sly, can you look through these for proof of where you were during the period of time after Sophia Townsend went missing? Preferably from the beginning of August through the end of the month, when they closed that excavation with her at the bottom of it. Please tell me you were out-of-state.”

  “I did a lot of runs out to California back then. I hope that’s where I was at.”

  “Me, too.”

  Joe’s face was unreadable, but she thought maybe he was grateful to her for helping his father get himself out of a tough spot. He didn’t seem ready to speak to her yet. He had never stayed angry with her for this long.

  A person could be pushed too far, and no one could ever be completely sure where another person might draw the line. She shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Joe’s line lay on the boundary between openness and secrecy or between truth and deceit. She had pushed that boundary harder than she’d intended.

  As his father took stacks of his old logbooks into his room to review, Joe picked up the book he’d been reading. He took it with him to their room, and he closed the door.

  ***

  Faye had forced Sly into action, urging him to find any record that remained from 1987 that might prove where he was and what he was doing at the time. Maybe it was time to ask herself to do the same thing. She needed to find out what Sly was doing in 1987. No, not just Sly. She needed to see what she could find out about the activities of all the people who surrounded Sophia Townsend in her last days.

  Faye still had library access at the university and she could access it from her laptop. That access included old newspapers. Which newspapers were available was catch-as-catch-can and the time spans covered were spotty, depending on whether someone had decided it was worthwhile to scan them. Still, it was a start.

  Of all the suspects, only one of them had been actively courting publicity at the time of Sophia Townsend’s death, and that person was Alba Callahan. Beyond the question of whether she might have killed Sophia Townsend or Kira Denton, Faye was a little bit fascinated with this woman who had been rabble-rousing way back when Faye was just hitting puberty. If anybody was savvy enough to get newspaper coverage for her protests, it would be Alba Callahan.

  Faye put her computer on the kitchen table and went to the university website. Accessing its library database was painfully slow, given Sly’s turtle-speed Internet service, but she would never ever complain to him about it. She suspected that he’d signed up for it solely because she and Joe were coming to visit.

  Eventually, the index for the Sylacauga newspaper finished downloading, telling her that the paper had not yet digitized its morgue, so she turned to Tulsa. Once she made that choice, it was a simple matter of navigating to 1987.

  Or not. The people in Tulsa must be busily scanning their old papers, with no end in sight, because full text copies of editions from 1911 to 1922 were available and then there was a huge gap before coverage resumed from 1988 to the present. If she had to guess, she’d say that they had begun by scanning the years framing the 1921 race riots, giving historians the opportunity to study the years leading up to the tragedy. They had probably scanned papers as they were printed after 1988, but it was going to take a long time to digitize the long decades between the Tulsa riots and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

  Faye stared at the number 1988, taunting her by going almost far enough back in history but not quite.

  No matter. Faye was completely sure that Alba did not fade into obscurity after Sophia Townsend had her arrested for protesting her dig in 1987. And Faye was right.

  A search for the single word “Alba” brought up a dozen or more hits. Faye was never so glad she wasn’t searching for a woman named “Susan.” There weren’t many Albas in the world.

  And there weren’t many activists as photogenic as Alba Callahan.

  Almost every one of the articles that mentioned Alba Callahan by name included a photograph. Alba had resisted the 1980s trend of “big hair,” keeping her blond locks straight and very long. It must have been so hot, wearing that cape of hair in the Oklahoma sun while protesting at the state capitol, and it must have stayed in her eyes when the spring winds were whipping.

  But what an asset Alba’s hair and face and form had been. What news photographer could resist a photo of lean, strong Alba forcing her way through a crowd of people grabbing at her hair and her tight black jeans? They might try and hold her back, but Alba’s energy was unstoppable.

  One photographer had won a regional news award for a photo of Alba in action, but that wasn’t the one that held Faye’s attention. The photo of Alba that Faye would always remember showed her as an angry woman who was shaking her fist at authority and paying no attention at all to the twelve-year-old in the background. Carson lingered under a tree, bent over an open book.

  This photo clarified a couple of things for Faye.

  First, it answered the question of how big Carson had been when his dad was working with Sophia Townsend. The answer was “big.” In this photo of his mother taken less than a year later, Faye could see that Carson was already taller than many grown men, with the beginnings of the broad torso and tree-like legs of the man she knew. She couldn’t imagine Carson caving in a woman’s head now, much less at age eleven but, for a boy with this much body mass, all it would have taken was a lucky blow. But did a child that age have what it took to bury a dead body in a place it might never be found?

  This was a horrible thought that she pushed away, but another horrible one crept into its place. What would a father do to protect a son who had killed someone, accidentally or not? Would he help his son bury the body? Would the boy’s mother help him bury it? What would a secret like that do to a marriage?

  The second thing that the photo of Carson and his mother did was to give h
er a glimpse into the man’s formative years. Faye hoped her children never saw her as angry as Alba was in this picture, and she hoped they never felt as lonely as Carson looked.

  She remembered that Carson had said that the rifle found behind his father’s house had belonged to Kenny, and she remembered that he’d said that Alba’s gun was a revolver. The conclusion that she drew from the discovery of Kenny’s rifle was not necessarily that Kenny was the killer. Faye’s takeaway was that Alba seemed like as reasonable a suspect for the killings as Kenny or Mickey. Most damning was her ready access to the arsenals in Kenny’s and Mickey’s houses.

  Faye knew that Alba owned a revolver and knew how to shoot it. She also knew that Mickey moved in and out of Alba’s house at will. Was it too much to speculate that all three of them were the closest of neighbors, casually popping into each other’s houses to borrow a cup of sugar or a couple of eggs? Or a rifle capable of dropping an animal the size of deer? Or of dropping a human being?

  When Faye signed off the library site, more than an hour had passed. Joe was still in bed reading and Sly’s door was closed. She should go to bed. More than that, she should go try to make peace with her husband, but she was dreading it. She put it off a few more minutes by deciding that she had one last thing to do.

  She typed up a summary of what she’d learned about Alba Callahan from the Tulsa paper. She added a few paragraphs summing up her conversation with Carson, which made her sadder every time she thought about it. Then she constructed a timeline based on Sophia’s field notes:

  Late May: The dig began, but interesting finds were scant and remained so, because Sophia was still griping about the lack of datable materials in July.

  Mid-June: Sly can be presumed to have been absent from the dig for any later event, because of his testimony that he only worked for Sophia for three weeks.

  Prior to July 30: Sophia argued with Kenny about laboratory dating, and he expressed particular reservations about destructive dating techniques. She sent samples to a lab in Canada during this period, with no luck getting reliable dates.

  July 31: Emily found and broke a potsherd. It is unclear whether she made her first trip to the cabin before or after this event, but it cannot have been long after, as Sophia was last seen on August 7.

  Early August: Sophia grumbled about the lab in Canada’s failure to get any data from the potsherd or the lithics she had sent.

  August 7: The pearls, the figurine, and a skeleton were found and the entries end. Sophia seemed convinced that this burial was so significant to the Creeks that the project would be stopped, perhaps forever. She sent her workers home early, with the possible exception of Mickey, who would have helped her excavate the artifacts found with the skeleton. No witness has admitted to seeing Sophia Townsend alive after this date. Emily and Mickey state that they visited her cabin after she disappeared and came away with the impression that she was still alive, but they did not see her.

  August 31: The excavation is closed with Sophia Townsend at the bottom. This is the last possible date of her death.

  Faye attached both of her summaries and the timeline to an e-mail and addressed it to Roy Cloud.

  Dear Roy,

  I spoke with Carson today, and I thought you would want to know what he said. I know that I’m not working on the case now, but I feel obligated as a citizen to let you know anything I learn that could help you find the killer. And the shooter, if they are not the same person. If Carson is right that the gun is Kenny’s, that is a literal smoking gun pointing at him. But Carson, who knows all of these people better than you or I do, did not think that finding Kenny’s gun cleared Alba of suspicion.

  Based on that conversation, I did some digging around to see what Alba was doing around the time of Sophia Townsend’s disappearance. I found no smoking gun, but I’ve attached some newspaper articles that tell us something about what Alba was like in the eighties. I keep coming around to the question of what any of these people might have been like when they were younger. We can only know them now, and that’s a hindrance to getting to the truth.

  Speaking of the truth, you were correct that I was wrong to betray your trust by going to Sophia’s cabin and taking the risk that I might destroy evidence. It occurs to me that I have not said that I am sorry. I was wrong and I apologize.

  I’m sure there are clues in Sophia’s notes that I have failed to catch, and I’m sure you will want to go through them yourself. I’ll drop my copies off at the station tomorrow.

  For what it’s worth, I hope you find the bastard who did this to Sophia. After reading her notebooks, I have grown quite attached to her. When you read them, I suspect you will feel the same.

  All my best,

  Faye

  By writing that e-mail, Faye found that she could make peace with losing her job as Roy Cloud’s consultant. The more important thing was to regain his respect. Why should that be? She’d only known the man a few days. Why did she care so much what he thought?

  Deep down, Faye knew the answer. Until she’d been immersed in the maelstrom of adultery that had surrounded Sophia Townsend, she might have denied that people could develop such strong feelings so quickly, and she might have denied that she could ever be tempted by any man who wasn’t Joe. This was no longer true.

  Roy Cloud was not Mickey Callahan, nor was he Kenny Meadows, but a woman knows when a man admires her. And Faye was not Sophia Townsend. Joe was the love of her life, but she no longer felt smug in her fidelity. Only now did she realize that it had never before been tested.

  It was time for Faye to admit that she was human. It was time to admit to herself that if there hadn’t been a Joe in her life, there might have been a Roy. She would never act on that and neither would Roy, but that didn’t mean she didn’t feel a tinge of sadness at what might have been.

  Sophia had possessed an uncanny understanding of human emotions and she’d used that knowledge for her own entertainment. Faye, on the other hand, had a lifelong history of being oblivious to matters of the heart. Being oblivious had brought her to some terrible decisions, but maybe she had learned something over the years.

  After reading the final, wistful entry in Sophia’s notebook, Faye understood her better. She’d been judging Sophia’s behavior for days, but her capacity for judgment was all burnt out. All she had left was pity.

  Sophia had led Mickey and Kenny to hurt their wives and each other. Sadder still, they had all hurt Carson, who had been a defenseless child. Faye didn’t intend to go down that road. It was time to go patch things up with her husband.

  She pressed “Send” and her message to Roy Cloud went out into the mysterious tangle of communication that was the Internet. Then she got up and walked away.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Faye had her hand on the bedroom doorknob when Sly came out of his room.

  “I found my logs for 1987, Faye. All of ’em, even August.”

  He wanted to sit right down at the kitchen table and show her what he’d found. Faye didn’t want to wait any longer to talk to Joe, but she couldn’t bring herself to push Sly aside when he had information that might clear him of murder. He looked more alive than he had in days.

  “Show me.”

  “I wasn’t in town when Sophia died. Look. I left town at noon on August 7, and she was working at the dig all afternoon. Mickey, Kenny, and Emily were all with her. Nobody saw her after those three went home that day, but my receipts show that I was down past Houston by that time. Early the next day, I headed west toward New Mexico and kept going for two weeks. See?” He held out a sketch showing his route, marked with dates and times. “I never looped back close enough to Oklahoma to run home and kill her, not and get back to my route, and these logs say I stayed on it the whole time. Receipts, too. Do you think the weigh stations keep their records for this long?”

  “I don’t know. But even if they don’t, these log
books look solid. They give you an alibi from noon on August 7 until…” She checked the sketch. “Until six o’clock on the evening of August 21. You never saw her after that trip?”

  “No. By the time I got home, she’d left her job, and I never saw her after that.”

  “That’s good. Really good.”

  “Do these logs this fix things, Faye? Even if the weigh stations or the trucking company can’t back me up?”

  “They sure help. Especially these receipts. You did well for yourself tonight, Sly.”

  He ducked his head at the praise. “I’ve got grandchildren. I don’t have time to go back to the pen.”

  Faye looked at the meticulous map Sly had made of his August 1987 travels, drawn to scale with an architect’s care. The distance of each leg on the route was labeled in numbers that looked more drawn than written. His handwriting had the elegant neatness of people old enough to have been taught penmanship. Like Joe, Sly had a mental acuity and an attention to detail that put the lie to those who underestimated their intelligence.

  This map almost cleared her father-in-law, but not quite. Sophia had been seen alive late on the afternoon of August 7, 1987. Sly was firmly in the clear for that day and for most of the rest of the month. But the excavation was not closed until August 31, and nobody could be absolutely sure she was dead before that day when she was buried beneath five feet of red clay.

  The conflicting descriptions from the people who visited her cabin after August 7 suggested that she had lived for at least a few more days, closing up the house and leaving with a packed suitcase. If she’d survived to the evening of August 21, then Sly would in theory have had ten days to kill her, but Faye couldn’t bring herself to tell him that. Maybe later, but not while he was sitting here victorious over finding his trucking logs and sorting out what they meant.

  “This will really help, Sly,” she said as he stepped back into his room and closed the door.

  She immediately regretted not telling him that he wasn’t in the clear yet. Keeping that painful knowledge to herself was the kind of omission that Joe would condemn as deceptive. She knew Joe would think she was wrong, but she just couldn’t bear to wipe that proud, hopeful look off her father-in-law’s tired face. Clutching Sly’s sketch, she opened the door to the bedroom she shared with Joe and stepped in.