Burials

by Mary Anna Evans

  Supposing Alba was truly innocent, what were the odds that she was taking Faye into a face-off with the real killer?

  As the evidence stood, Faye could only make sense of the crimes if she took them individually. Taken individually, she would suspect Mickey of the first shooting, since Kenny was one of the victims and couldn’t have done it. But she would suspect Kenny of the most recent shooting, since Mickey had been in the house with her. Carson was right beside Faye during both incidents. She had seen these things with her own eyes. She herself was a witness to these people’s innocence.

  The only witness to Sly’s innocence was Joe, but she believed in Joe’s integrity to her very core. He wouldn’t lie, not even to save his father. Try as she might, Faye could come up with no theory that pointed to any one of Sophia’s former employees. Who else was there?

  The blood-covered woman sitting beside Faye was pushing her expensive European sedan to its limit. She also had a gun in her purse, and she’d just threatened Faye with it. Faye knew of no alibi for Alba for any of the crimes. The only argument against Alba’s guilt was her convincing grief at Emily’s death. But that grief could be real, even if she did kill Emily. Maybe a murderer really would feel that much pain when confronted by the victim’s dead body.

  Should Faye be afraid of Alba?

  The woman had suffered visible shock when she saw Emily’s body. Perhaps she killed her. If not, and maybe even if so, Alba must be driven by the need to protect her son and prove that the man she still loved wasn’t guilty of murder.

  The proper question was not whether she should be afraid of Alba. The proper question was whether she should be afraid of a single-minded and adrenaline-charged woman who was frightened for her loved ones and armed. Faye decided that she should indeed, and the fact that she’d had to think about it suggested that Faye’s own adrenaline was messing with her mind.

  To make matters worse, a powerful wind was blowing thunderclouds in from the west.

  “Weather’s looking bad,” she said.

  “It’s that time of year,” Alba said, never taking her eyes off the road. “You get used to it when you live in Oklahoma.”

  Alba’s driving had gone past aggressive and was firmly in the reckless zone. Faye could feel the rising wind shoving the car sideways and she could see how hard Alba was gripping the steering wheel to maintain control. If the green-gray clouds looming over them started dropping rain or, from the looks of it, hail, even iron-willed Alba wouldn’t be able to make the car behave on the slick road.

  Faye had lived through hurricanes, but she’d never seen a tornado’s violent funnel. She had seen how a hurricane could flatten a long swath of coastline, demolishing everything manmade and washing it out to sea, but tornadoes went beyond even that. They dealt in impossibilities. Tornadoes left washing machines in trees. They piled cars into neat stacks. They deposited the naked corpses of their victims on the roofs of their neighbors’ houses.

  “You can tell me where we’re going,” Faye said. “There’s nothing I can do about it in this car and without a phone. It seems like we’re going to your house?”

  “Yes. Nobody would think Mickey was dumb enough to hide on the same street where the bullets flew yesterday, so it’s the perfect place for him to wait out the danger. Am I right?”

  Faye gave her a weak “Yeah?” and Alba took that as confirmation.

  “I thought that was a brilliant idea, if I do say so myself. Carson didn’t want to leave his own home, but he’s staying at mine anyway. He doesn’t spend a lot of time arguing with his mother.”

  Faye believed that.

  “I put them in my basement. It’s completely underground, so they’ll be safe if somebody starts taking potshots again. I picked them up, so their trucks are in front of their own houses, like decoys.”

  Faye guessed that was as good a plan as any. Looking at the way the roadside trees were bending sideways, she asked, “Do you have a storm shelter?”

  “I’m a native Oklahoman. I store my Christmas decorations in my storm shelter. If the tornadoes wanted me, they would have gotten me by now.”

  The wind was piling the anvil-shaped thunderheads higher. Faye tried to focus on the need to get away from Alba, but which should she fear more? The armed woman beside her or the gathering storm outside?

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Joe stood at the front window of his father’s house. It was so dark outside that the streetlights had come on. “I don’t like Faye being out in this.”

  “Me, neither.” Sly walked up behind him to get a look. “You know where she is?”

  The phone in Joe’s pocket beeped. He glanced at it and said, “Nope, I don’t know where she is, but this is awful.” He held it out for his father to see.

  “Well, text her back and find out where she is and what happened to Emily.” Sly held the phone in both hands and stared at the screen like a man who thought the message it displayed would change. Maybe reality would change with it. “I’d like to kill the bastard that did this. As a matter of fact, I think I will.”

  “How are you planning to do that? You got a gun?”

  “I’m a convicted felon who doesn’t want to go back to prison. No, I don’t have a gun. Besides, I won’t need one. I can take Mickey Callahan apart with my bare hands.”

  “You’re sure it’s him?”

  “I’ve known Mickey all my life. I’ve been sure all along.”

  “Then why do you need to kill him today?”

  “Because I’ve known Emily Olsen all my life, too. Kira Denton had the police department to make sure she got justice and they haven’t managed it yet. Emily’s son can’t even be bothered to drive over here from Tulsa and spend an afternoon with her. Emily ain’t got a soul to make sure the lowlife that shot her pays.”

  “Where are you planning to look for Mickey?”

  “His house. Carson’s house. His wife’s house. Ex-wife. He doesn’t go all that many places. If somebody figures out that I’m looking for him so I can kill him, I might get a little help to find him. Nobody likes that know-it-all creep.”

  Joe followed him out the door. He said, “I thought you didn’t want to go back to prison.”

  “I didn’t want to swap my freedom for a gun. Emily? Yeah, I’ll swap my freedom for the life of the asshole who took hers.”

  “Dad, please don’t do this.”

  “You can’t stop me. Don’t try.”

  “Then I’m coming with you.”

  “Are you armed?”

  Joe’s hand went to the leather bag at his waist where he kept a handy stone weapon that he’d chipped himself. “Always.”

  “Then come on. Let’s go.”

  ***

  Faye’s brain couldn’t stop chewing on the events of the afternoon of August 7, 1987. As Alba drove and refused to talk, Faye tried and failed to make all the pieces fit. The pieces of the potsherd. The pieces of all the shattered lives that surrounded Sophia Townsend. The bony pieces of Sophia’s body that she’d seen with her own eyes.

  And what about the bone that was found on that last day? Was it just one piece of another skeleton that still haunted the Sylacauga site? How did it fit into the puzzle?

  Where had that old skeleton been over all the years since Sophia found it? In her journal, she’d said that the existence of the skeleton would sink her project, because the Creeks would shut it down before they’d disturb an ancient burial. She’d seemed resigned to leaving Sylacauga and starting again. What if she had changed her mind?

  Would she really have destroyed the old skeleton to save this project that had become an obsession for her? Would she have hidden it someplace where it still hadn’t turned up? Where could that possibly be? Not at the curation facility where the rest of the project’s finds had been stored. At her cabin, maybe? Had Carson found it there?

  The Arkansas p
olice report from Mickey’s last visit to her cabin suggested that Sophia had spent time there after the project shut down but before she died. It was possible that she’d hidden the bones there, but it just didn’t sound like something Sophia would do.

  Faye laughed at herself for thinking she could know a woman from this distance in time, even after reading pages and pages of the woman’s private thoughts. This made no more sense than thinking she knew her because she’d seen her bones lying in her grave.

  This thought called to mind an image of Sophia’s grave, just as they’d found it, and it told Faye what she needed to know. It told her exactly where the other bones had been all this time.

  They had been in the box buried beneath Sophia’s body.

  Faye could picture the size and shape of the rectangular hole dug by the person who had shot Kira. It was absolutely big enough to hold the disarticulated bones of a human skeleton, especially since this skeleton had been so old that many of its bones were likely broken or missing.

  Faye believed this to be true, because it gave the chain of events a narrative that was at least slightly more coherent. Sophia had been killed sometime after she disappeared and before the excavation was backfilled.

  The killer had dug her grave in the bottom of the excavation. The killer had then dug a deeper hole in the middle of the grave, reinterring the old skeleton at the bottom of it in a large box. A canvas bag holding the pearls, the figurine, and the engraved potsherd had been laid on top of the box before soil was shoveled around it all. Sophia’s body had been laid on top of all those buried things, and then more dirt was shoveled in to cover her under two feet of dirt. Soon afterward, the excavation was backfilled with another meter of soil, virtually guaranteeing that nobody would ever find Sophia and the treasures buried with her.

  It had been a perfect plan—until it failed. The killer must have been terrified to learn that the excavation was to be reopened.

  With this scenario in mind, it made sense that the killer had, in 1987, gone into the shed being used by the project, retrieving a stray potsherd. It made perfect sense if that someone had purposely reinterred the skeleton with all of the original grave goods that were available.

  The killer’s care in making sure the burial was returned to the ground with all of its associated goods didn’t speak of Mickey Callahan. It spoke of Kenny Meadows, the man who had pestered Sophia Townsend for her entire last summer because he respected the artifacts too much to condone damaging them for lab tests.

  Then why did she still suspect Mickey Callahan? Perhaps because she didn’t like him, but perhaps it was because he was said to have been crazy about Sophia. The woman was carrying on with his best friend right in front of him. Domestic violence was a story as old as time.

  If he’d been jealous enough to hit her, anything could have happened. He could have beaten her to death outright, or she could simply have fallen and hit her head on a rock. In either case, Faye absolutely thought he would have buried her and all the evidence, then gone around doing things like calling the Arkansas sheriff so he could hide his tracks. He could even have gone out to the cabin to fake a trip for Sophia by closing up the house and putting a dated gas receipt on her kitchen counter. Nobody ever said Mickey wasn’t smart.

  The trouble with both these theories is that they flew in the face of facts that Faye had witnessed for herself. She herself was Kenny’s alibi for the first shooting and Mickey’s alibi for the second one. This left her wondering again whether the woman driving the car where she sat was the one guilty of murderous domestic violence, or whether her son could have managed murder while still very young.

  It did not escape her attention that any objective observer would say, based on all the evidence, that Sly was still the most likely suspect.

  ***

  As Alba steered the car onto the bumpy road where she lived, Faye kept trying to picture the killer. First, she imagined Kenny walking through Emily’s unlocked door and murdering her. Then she tried imagining Mickey doing the same thing. She even tried to picture Sly driving to Emily’s house with a gun. Faye couldn’t come up with a scenario that allowed any of those people to do all the crimes that haunted Sylacauga, yet she did believe all the crimes were related.

  It was only when she broadened her thinking a single notch that the answer came to her and she said it out loud.

  “It was both of them.”

  Alba jerked her head at Faye. Her attention was completely removed from the road, where it was much needed. “Both of who?”

  “What if Mickey was doing the shooting on the first day? Afterward, he could have gone on foot as far as the church where Roy says somebody parked. It would have been easy to double back from there and drive to work. He wouldn’t have had to come all that close to us to do the shooting. If the two of them were working together, he would only have needed to be close enough to see Kenny. Kenny could have judged the most effective times for shots to be fired and given Mickey hand signals. If Mickey was shooting from further away than was possible for a man without an accomplice, then the police would have had trouble finding his trail.”

  She was ridiculously glad to clear Bleck from missing something so obvious as the trail of a smelly human being.

  Alba snorted again, but she didn’t argue with Faye.

  “And what if Kenny was doing the shooting yesterday?” Faye went on. “He could have dropped the rifle before he ran back to his house. He might even have thought it wouldn’t be traced to him. It was unregistered. If Carson hadn’t recognized it—”

  “I don’t like Carson being mixed up in any of this.”

  “Me either, but he is. Anyway, if Kenny dropped the unregistered rifle, then walked in the creek to get back to his house, Bleck wouldn’t have found a trail.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Alba said. “Why would either Mickey or Kenny do these terrible things, much less do them together?”

  “Something happened in 1987 on that last afternoon of the project, and it was important enough to rattle Mickey when he found out we had information about it. I asked him a question that showed that I knew things I shouldn’t know. He might have thought that Kenny was the one who talked, but Emily’s the one who’s dead. As far as we know, Kenny’s not, so Mickey seems okay with letting Kenny stay alive with damning information. If they’re working together, he doesn’t have to worry about what Kenny knows.”

  Faye wouldn’t have thought it possible that Alba could grip the wheel more tightly or push the car to go even faster. She said, “You’re making this more complicated than it needs to be.”

  “Think about it. Name a reason why somebody would shoot Emily. With all the shooting that’s been going on around here, I’m going to presume that her death is related to whatever is driving the shooters.”

  “Shooter.”

  “Have it your way, but I’m still going to presume that her death isn’t something random, like a robbery gone wrong or…I don’t know…an attack by a violent prison escapee. Will you grant me that much?”

  “Maybe.”

  This was a reasonable enough response, and Faye was always happy to see evidence of reasonable thought in a person who was packing heat. “Can you imagine Emily doing something that would drive somebody to murder? Do you think this could be a revenge killing?”

  “Revenge against Emily? Don’t be stupid.”

  “Can you imagine her blackmailing someone? If Emily had known who killed Sophia Townsend, would she have kept it to herself so that she could extort money from the murderer?”

  “Heavens, no.”

  “Why else do people get killed? Domestic violence? Could Emily have been having an affair with someone dangerous?”

  “Please.”

  “So tell me how a sweet, loving, nonconfrontational person who doesn’t hang around with dangerous people gets murdered? I say it’s because she knew something
dangerous.”

  Finally, Alba allowed herself to think like an experienced attorney instead of a passionate person defending her loved ones. “You’re right. Either she had something valuable or she knew something dangerous. Those are the only motives that make sense.”

  For the rest of their breakneck trip, nothing Faye could do would prompt Alba to say a single word.

  ***

  Alba skidded to a stop and slammed the car into park. “Get out.”

  Faye thought of running, but where would that get her? Maybe Alba was hoping for a reason to shoot. If Faye made a break for it now, Alma could put several holes in her before she could find a safe place to hide.

  Would she do that? Probably. Alba didn’t seem like someone who would carry a gun she wasn’t willing to shoot.

  As they walked down Alba’s front path, the woman’s lovingly tended flowers blew in the rising wind. In the dim sunlight, filtered through heavy clouds, they seemed to glow. A rose bush reached out a branch that snagged the blood-stained sleeve of Alma’s jacket. Downy leaves of pineapple sage brushed their ankles and smelled wonderful.

  On the front doorstep sat a massive display of flowering plants. Alba paused there to pluck a dead begonia leaf and Faye thought, There it is. Proof that this situation has driven her around the bend. She’s taken a hostage as she carries a gun on a mission to confront her ex-husband who may be a murderer, yet she needs to stop and make sure that her flowers are perfect.

  There were many ways the crimes could have been accomplished by multiple killers. Perhaps Alba was the one conspiring with Mickey. Or with Kenny. Carson could have been involved. But only Alba could have been working alone. Or Sly.

  Alba’s front door opened into a single massive living space, stylish and recently renovated. The far wall was all windows, with a row of French doors opening onto the back yard. No one was in the room, but Faye could see two people enjoying the patio.