Lovely In Her Bones

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “But surely…”

  Amelanchier gave her a tight smile. “I didn’t mean Dr. Putnam. He treats us like regular folks. But back before him, people died just because they… just because they…”

  “I guess this is the other side of the Moonshine Massacre,” Elizabeth put in quickly. “No wonder y’all resented the law up here.”

  The old woman waved her hand as if she were brushing away the thought. “That didn’t have much to do with it. That moonshine business was them spitting Harknesses, Bevel’s kin. They’re even worse than the blacksnake Harknesses.”

  From her folklore course, Elizabeth understood that mountain families with the same last name were often distinguished by a descriptive prefix. “Why blacksnake?” she asked.

  Amelanchier snorted. “On account of Varner Harkness-he must be my age if he’s a day. He used to chase girls through the briar patch waving a black snake over his head like a bullwhip.”

  Elizabeth wrinkled her nose. “What a charming family.”

  “I wouldn’t give you one red cent for the whole lot of them.”

  “I know Bevel Harkness wants the strip miners to come in. Do the others agree with him?”

  “I reckon they ought to, seeing as how their land is part of what the mining company wants. They’d get the money, and the rest of us would get the run-off down the creek.”

  “How can those people get away with it?” demanded Elizabeth. “Can’t you turn them in for killing the sheriff’s nephew?”

  Amelanchier appeared not to have heard. “I think I’ll pick ramps to go with my beans,” she announced, hoisting an ark-shaped woven basket. Fashioned of blue and lavender reeds with a handle of twisted wood, the basket seemed as much a work of art as a utensil.

  “How lovely!” breathed Elizabeth. “What’s it made of?”

  Amelanchier cradled the basket on her arm. “This here’s grapevine, and that’s wisteria, but-see this handle?” She pointed to the twisted branch. “That’s the best part. It’s kudzu.”

  “Kudzu? Ugh!” Elizabeth displayed the Southerner’s dislike for that nuisance plant, imported to stop erosion, which strangled all the vegetation in its path. Kudzu even covered abandoned barns and houses with its jungle growth. People said that the only way to get rid of it was to burn it, roots and all.

  “Yep. Kudzu is the ugliest, most trifling plant alive-but it makes a right nice basket handle, don’t it?”

  Elizabeth smiled. “And the Harknesses? Do they make right nice basket handles too?”

  “I reckon they’re good for something,” said Amelanchier, pleased that Elizabeth had seen the parallel.

  “I don’t suppose anything could be done without the murder victim’s body anyway,” Elizabeth decided. “It was never found, was it?”

  Amelanchier gripped the porch railing and crept down the steps. “You could lose something a lot bigger than a man in these hills,” she said. “You ever pick ramps? It stinks like two days past judgment, but it sure does perk up beans. Come on.”

  Elizabeth watched the old woman stooping at the edge of the yard to uproot the wild onionlike plants. The smell from the broken stems was a mixture of garlic and onion, so strong that the tongue felt the heaviness of the odor. Amelanchier brushed the dirt from the white bulb roots and dropped them in the basket.

  “Would you like me to do that?” asked Elizabeth, suddenly aware of how frail she looked.

  Amelanchier smiled; her copper face shone with sweat. “Thank you, no. I like to keep my hand in. But I am taking it easier than what I used to.” She nodded toward the cabin. “Comfrey rigged me up a generator powered by the creek water, so I don’t have to fool with oil lamps. And I got a microwave that’s real good to dry herbs in.” Seeing Elizabeth’s look of disbelief, she added, “I keep it hid when the tourists are about. They like to think I still live on poke salad and corn pone.”

  Elizabeth blinked. “But you do! I mean, what about the raccoon?”

  “I love the old food when I’m up to fixing it, and I usually cook if Comfrey’s coming by, but I’m like as not to have canned spaghetti and packaged cupcakes any other time.” She shook her head. “It just don’t do to let the tourists know. They like to think that time has passed us by up here on the ridge, just like the four-lane did. They need to believe the old ways are still around as much as they need the root medicine. So I keep my store food in the root cellar.”

  “But-tonight you’re having beans and ramps?”

  “Yep,” said Amelanchier, winking. “And frozen pizza!”

  Dear Bill,

  I know you’re going to find this out from the campus newspapers, but I thought I’d better give you more details than that. Alex Lerche has been murdered. I’m pretty sure he was killed by someone up here who wants the strip miners to get the Indians’ land; probably the same person who trashed our computer. I don’t want to go into all that right now. I just wanted you to know that I’m all right, that we’re continuing the dig, and that I’m not coming home.

  It isn’t that I’m being ghoulish about wanting to stay and see who did it-which would be why you would stay-it’s because of Milo. He is terribly upset over all this, and I honestly think that if we left, he’d finish the project by himself without even stopping to eat or sleep. He’s being a perfect bear, too! I realize that men are supposed to contain their grief, but the fallout from all that suppression is very hard to live with. If you have any advice on how to cope with him without getting one’s head bitten off, I wish you would let me know. He acts as if death has just been invented to torment him. He has cornered the market on suffering. I know I sound angry, but it is a frustrating feeling to care about someone and not be allowed to help them. Milo can’t find “feelings” on his anatomy chart, so he won’t admit that they exist!

  I’m not giving up, though. By all means, write to me if you think you could be of any help, but don’t come up here. I don’t think Milo could take an amateur detective playing around with this case. We should be home in a week or so. You can be vague and reassuring with Mother and Dad for that long, can’t you? Thanks!

  Love,

  Elizabeth

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PILOT BARNES seldom agreed with his brother-in-law about anything, be it fertilizer or Carolina basketball strategy. Watching Warren straddle a chair backwards and pontificate on every subject that came up set Pilot’s teeth on edge. This murder case was no exception; Warren had a layman’s compulsion to second-guess the police, as if his hours of viewing “Dragnet” and “Barnaby Jones” counted toward a degree in police science. He had heard about the case from Marcia, when Pilot was late coming home, and had called the next morning to pronounce the case a lucky break for Pilot career-wise. Having a big-time murder case to solve, without Duncan Johnson around to take credit for it, could be parlayed into a bid for the sheriff’s job, according to Warren. Pilot didn’t believe it. He saw it as an unlimited opportunity to screw up in Duncan Johnson’s absence.

  “Morning, Pilot,” said Hamp McKenna, easing his way past the floorboard that creaked if you stepped on it. “I came to do a little paperwork, so if you need to go anywhere, I’ll be here about an hour. I’d stay longer, but I’ve got a sick calf up home.” He looked at Pilot appraisingly. “She looks better than you do, though.”

  Pilot squinted up at him with a sour smile. “I’ll live.”

  “Lord, so will she, I hope! She’s a purebred Charolais-cost me more than two car payments. You heard from Duncan yet?”

  “No. He’s still on the boat.”

  “Well, I hope he’s catching more than we are. You solved the case yet?”

  Pilot studied the geological survey map of the county, staring at it as if the lines would re-form to a profile of the murderer. He sighed. “I guess we just keep asking questions.”

  Hamp walked over to the map. “Pilot,” he said slowly, “there’s something you may not have thought of. Where did the murder take place?”

  Pilot Barnes sco
wled at him. “You were right there with me when we went into the tent. You took the pictures yourself! Now what the hell do you mean asking me-”

  Hamp shook his head impatiently. “No. I know what the death scene looked like. What I meant was: whose land is it on?”

  Pilot’s mouth hung open, frozen in midsyllable by this new possibility. “Why-church land.” But he didn’t sound sure about it.

  “It’s a good little ways from the church,” Hamp reminded him.

  “I didn’t notice any fences around, either,” Pilot grunted. “So you’re saying-”

  “Not for sure. But it is a possibility. The forest service land goes into that section of the county, but we don’t know where the cutoff point is. Can you tell from the map?”

  “Not for sure. But I don’t have to be positive. Reasonable certainty ought to be enough!”

  Hamp relaxed. “Yeah, I thought it would be. So, you gonna do it?”

  Pilot set his jaw. “Absolutely. Screw Duncan Johnson. I’m calling in the FBI.”

  The phrase “calling in the FBI” had a magic ring to it that brightened their spirits at once. It summoned visions of television actors in business suits driving up in dark green LTDs and solving the case fifty-one minutes, with the trial thrown in as afterthought before the closing credits. Pilot did suppose that it would be like that in real life, be nevertheless it was reassuring to know that a phone call to the number labeled “FBI” on Duncan Johnson’s desk would bring to bear the power of the federal government in their backcountry murder case. This authority could be invoked because Hamp McKenna had thought of the one loophole that would involve them: reasonable certainty that the crime had occurred on federal land. Pilot dialed the number with a feeling of pleasant expectation.

  It rang eight times.

  Pilot pictured a suspect holding the entire FBI office at gunpoint. Lantern-jawed agents and their beautiful blond secretary staring courageously at the barrel of a.44 Magnum while the phone pealed away, unanswered. Pilot wondered who you called to rescue the FBI. Unable to think of an answer to that one, he kept sitting there letting the phone ring. Finally someone picked it up.

  “Hello?” said a thin, piping voice.

  Pilot took the receiver away from his ear and looked at it. “Is this the FBI?” he asked uncertainly.

  “Yes, it is,” the little voice assured him. “Just a minute.” He heard the clunk of the phone being set down, and the voice yelling: “Daddy! Telephone!”

  Pilot closed his eyes. To paraphrase his favorite beer commercial, it didn’t get any worse than this. After several minutes’ wait, the phone was picked up and a grown-up voice said: “Yello, FBI. This is Garrett.”

  Pilot hadn’t planned out what he was going to say. In a halting voice he managed to explain about his murder case and the possibility of its having occurred on federal land. Agent Garrett listened to the deputy’s entire explanation in an unhurried evidence. Finally he said: “I’ll come over and check it. Give me directions.”

  In the background, Pilot could hear little voices sanding lemonade. He could stand it no longer. In this FBI headquarters?”

  Agent Garrett laughed. “In a manner of speaking. He regional office is in Asheville, but since I’m assigned to this rural area, I just work out of my house. I go in twice a month to do the paperwork. Don’t worry about the informality, Deputy. I get the job done.”

  Pilot hung up the phone. If it weren’t for the unquestionably dead body on the slab, he could swear that Duncan Johnson had staged all this before he left.

  Ron Garrett frowned speculatively as he peered at Pilot Barnes’ map of the county. He ran his finger along a boundary line and then stopped, his finger poised above a smaller map he’d brought with him, but he couldn’t seem to find the corresponding lines.

  “What do you think?” asked the deputy anxiously. “Is that within federal land?”

  Garrett shrugged. “It’s close. I’d rather let my office have the final say-so on it, and even then there might have to be a survey. I guess we could check old courthouse records. But don’t worry about it. You called me out to have a look, so the least I can do is view the site. You want to show me the way?”

  “I can take you in the patrol car,” Pilot offered.

  “Nah. You ride with me. I have my kit in the trunk. Never know what we might need in the way of equipment.” He turned to Hamp McKenna. “You’re welcome to ride along too. Just watch where you sit in the back seat.”

  Hamp blinked. “Why? Evidence?”

  “There’s a model airplane back there. Belongs to my kid.”

  “So you’re going to investigate this anyway?” asked Pilot.

  “Sure. Why not? Maybe I can help you out with information on your suspects. You said they were from out of state, didn’t you?”

  “Most of them.”

  “No problem. We’ll run their names through the computer and see what we get. Fingerprints, too, if you want.”

  Pilot nodded gratefully. He decided that Agent Garrett looked like a regular FBI person-tall, slender, well groomed, and dressed in sensible but fashionable outdoor clothes. He was sure that the car would also be an appropriately dark and expensive sedan. Once the deputy had recovered from the shock of the phone call, he had accepted this rural version of the FBI without too much trouble. Everything in the country was a little out of kilter as far as stereotypes went. The mailmen didn’t dress in blue uniforms and drive white postal vans, the firemen drove their own cars to the fire, and FBI headquarters was a brick house with a carport. It just proved what Pilot had always known: he didn’t live in the America you saw on television. He straightened his hat and followed the agent outside.

  Milo entered the motel room like one entering a shrine. Alex’s coffee cup still sat on the desk top beside the computer, and his scribbled notes littered the bed. It looked haphazard, but it wasn’t. Alex would have known the location of every page of it. Mechanically Milo began to collect them into a pile. He supposed that they were his now, professionally speaking. Tessa would not want Alex’s technical notes. Even now she must be parceling out his clothes and books, packing away the memory of Alex in little cardboard boxes for the Goodwill.

  “You’re dead, Alex,” he said, as if there were someone there to be told.

  It was Milo’s first feeling of death as a personal loss; before, he had always reacted selfishly to the news of a death in his parents’ circle of friends, affronted that his childhood world was changing irretrievably. When he was away at school, preoccupied with his own life, he subconsciously expected his hometown, his childhood acquaintances to stay the same. The death of his mother’s cousin, the kind lady on the farm, had annoyed him not because he would miss her-he had not seen her since he was ten-but because it pushed his childhood farther into an unredeemable past. One by one his grade school teachers and parents’ friends would die, until one day he would go home to find the small town urbanlized beyond recognition and peopled by strangers. He remembered the feeling of isolation that that ralization brought; it had come back. Alex had closed a door to Milo’s college life, placing it firmly in the past tense, beyond recall. The present seemed arrower than ever.

  What would he do now? Back at the university here would be a restrained meeting. Temporary measures would be taken to cover Alex’s fall classes, and the dean would claim to be “taking the matter under advisement.” Milo hoped it wouldn’t mean starting over at another university. He banished the unworthy thought, wondering why even genuine grief must be tempered with selfishness. With a sigh, he sat down at the desk and flipped on the computer to finish Alex’s project. That was a species of grief.

  The screen was a luminous void. Milo opened the notebook to the columns of figures recorded in Elizabeth’s spiky handwriting. She wanted Milo to confide in her. He could tell by the way she acted; but he wouldn’t parade his grief to further a romance. What would she expect of him in the name of intimacy? Tears? A stirring resolution to track down the killer? Woul
d Alex want that if it were someone he cared about? Would he want his death avenged? Absently, Milo typed: “Should we catch the murderer?”

  The words flashed on the screen in precise glowing letters. The machine hummed, and flashed its response: “Invalid command. Please try again or enter Help.”

  Agent Garrett frowned at the recently scrubbed camp table, still streaked with soaked-in blood. “A tomahawk, huh? I wonder what that means?”

  “No fingerprints on a bark handle, for one thing,” said Pilot Barnes.

  Garrett nodded. “Okay. That might indicate premeditation. A tomahawk… Didn’t you say there were Indians around here?”

  “There are Cullowhees,” the deputy replied. “Some people don’t think it’s the same thing.”

  “Anyway they don’t use tomahawks,” Hamp pointed out. “They don’t use much of nothing Indian.”

  “It wasn’t an old one. It was one of the ones they sell at Cherokee, made in Taiwan, with plastic cords and dyed chicken feathers. But the rock was the real thing. It took a chunk out of the back of his head like grease going through a goose.”

  “Have you been able to trace ownership?” asked Garrett, ignoring the deputy’s colorful bravado.

  “Nope.”

  “I guess that isn’t a job for a two-man force. There must be a couple of thousand tourists in and out of Cherokee every day, and every store on the strip sells them. My kids have one. But you might let me take it up to the lab anyway. They might be able to find something. But it’s slim. I’d say your best bet would be to go for cui bono.”

  “Motive, you mean,” said Pilot, trying not to make it sound like a guess.

  “Sure. Was there any particular reason for eliminating this individual?”

  “When it comes to motive, we got too much of a good thing. The guy was working on a project to give this land to the Cullowhees, and keep some people from making a killing selling this land to a strip-mining company.”