Bone Deep

by Randy Wayne White

  I was sitting, my canvas briefcase in my lap, when Albright came through the door. One look and I knew, before he said, “Everything’s gone. Whoever did it didn’t even bother with fakes in the other safe. Fakes would have been so obvious.”

  In my hand was an envelope containing wide-angle shots of the mastodon tusk, but I waited. “What’s missing?”

  “I just told you—everything.” Which sounded condescending, so he added, “Sorry, Ford. Uhhh”—his eyes found the mini-fridge, where he’d placed the Smirnoff—“I would’ve never found out if it wasn’t for you. Screw the dollar value, what was in there was all that was left of my grandfather’s collection. Irreplaceable, some of those pieces.” He started toward the fridge but reconsidered, saying, “My father, of course, pissed the rest of it away.”

  “The bottom of a bottle can be a long fall,” I agreed.

  Leland tested that for criticism, then decided, “Yeah, a hell of a waste.” He turned away from the bottle and the fridge, saying, “Guess I better call Owen.”

  I carried my briefcase outside, through the gate to my truck, and removed unnecessary gear from my dive bag. Some of it was still damp from diving with Mick and his clients. I put the envelope containing mastodon photos in the bag, plus the spectrophotometer and some filter flasks for water samples, and left my briefcase in the truck. Leland was standing at the window when I returned.

  “Did you get ahold of Owen?”

  “I left a message,” he replied, “but I didn’t mention the safes. He’ll know from my tone I’m upset, though.” The man sounded exhausted, and didn’t ask why I was carrying a different bag. He added, “I was trying to remember if Owen was here the day the insurance agent inventoried the collection.”

  I said, “Two years ago, you said. Think Owen might have memorized the combinations?”

  “I’m pretty sure he didn’t, but maybe. He’s got a first-rate memory, that kid. His mother was the same way.” He looked across the room while his mind worked at something. “The other night, you struck me as a pretty solid guy, Ford. I’m curious about something. Did you really ask your pal Tomlinson if he was screwing Ava?”

  I replied, “Yes . . . but only to protect myself. When I lie, it’s usually for the same reason.”

  Leland nodded. “Then I was right about you.”

  Photos of the mastodon tusk. I was thinking about them while he tried to collect himself by rehashing what had happened, then finally admitted, “I asked you to leave the room because I didn’t want you to see what was inside that safe.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  “I think it would’ve been okay.”

  Rather than ask, I said, “You can’t be too careful.”

  “But I tend to overdo it. Having money—not that we have much left—and owning a piece of Bone Valley attracts all sorts of crazies. So, for me, it’s easier to shut out everyone. I’ve . . . never felt comfortable around people. Which was okay until the last few years. Don’t most men have friends to call when everything goes to hell? I can’t tell the twins, and I sure as hell can’t go running to Ava.” He made a sound of frustration. “Hell . . . maybe I should have taken up golf or something like everyone else my age.”

  His admission had the flavor of adolescent angst, and I pictured Albright as a towering, clumsy kid, the easy target of pint-sized bullies. Because he was wealthy, his shyness would be mistaken for aloofness. Now the towering adult was still a loner and was still an easy target—an ex–fashion model was proving that.

  I tried to lighten things up. “You’re welcome to call Tomlinson. He’s a lot of things, including a Zen Buddhist master. He’ll talk you to death if he doesn’t cure you first.”

  The man chuckled, a weary sound, without turning from the window, but then did turn and wasn’t smiling. “The biker who threatened Esther, what did you mean I’m the one who can put him in jail? If you’re right about Owen, I can’t get the police involved.”

  “Put the bad guys in jail,” I corrected, then explained that Quirt was already in jail.

  “Well . . . that’s great,” he said, then appeared puzzled. “What’s his name again?”

  I told him.

  “Quirt? That’s a strange one. When this was actually a ranch, a couple Florida cowboys worked for us. A quirt is a small whip with knots tied in it so it cuts what it hits. That’s what they called it, a quirt.”

  “The name fits,” I said, “even if he made it up. Our next move—and this is just a suggestion—it all depends on what’s missing from your gun vaults and how long it’s been missing.”

  “We did the inventory less than two years ago,” he said.

  “I’m talking about the pieces your father claimed were stolen. Do you have a list?”

  “Somewhere. I’ve never thrown anything away.”

  “What I’m thinking,” I said, “is part of your collection might have been stolen twice—the second time when Finn Tovar’s house was robbed. If that’s true, and if your insurance company has a manifest list, it all still belongs to you. Including the things your father claimed were stolen.”

  Tovar—once again the name registered, but Leland let it go, saying, “Owning something doesn’t mean much if I don’t know where it is.”

  “You will if the police make a recovery,” I replied.

  Surprised, Leland cleared his throat but remained cautious. “But I don’t want the police involved. Not if it puts Owen at risk. First, I’ll sit him down and ask if he’s gambling again. If so, how much does he owe? To hell with what’s missing, I’m not going to send my own son to jail.”

  “Leland,” I said, looking him in the eyes, “I know where your collection is.”

  He stared back, a Who are you? moment. “I’d like to believe that.”

  “It’s true. Part of your collection anyway.”

  “How?”

  “I can’t tell you,” I said.

  “If Owen’s at risk, you’re going to have to do better than that.”

  “He’s a grown man, Leland. That’s all I can say right now.”

  Albright had already made up his mind to trust me, so it threw him. He started to say, “In that case—” but then stopped, surprised by a sudden thought. “Shit,” he muttered.

  “What’s wrong?”

  He headed for the door, saying, “I need to check on something. Stay here.” Then reconsidered. “No . . . you might as well come along and see for yourself.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Owen and Harris Sanford were in a truck, watching us, as Leland exited the building, and I followed him across the pasture, past the pond, while Toby, in the citrus grove, shifted his weight from left to right.

  I didn’t see or hear their vehicle. Maybe the elephant did.

  Beyond the barn was a rise I hadn’t noticed yesterday, a rounded elevation that, beneath weeds, showed trenching scars as we neared. Leland walked fast but slowed when he got to the top and studied the area. He moved several times, his eyes snatching details from the ground.

  “Thank god,” he said after a while.

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I was worried somebody had been out here digging.”

  “Someone was,” I said. Trench scars were as orderly as graves at the top of the mound where weeds had taken over.

  “Nothing fresh, though,” he said. He took a big breath and let it out, a man who wasn’t overweight but didn’t get much exercise. He stood there, huffing after the long walk, and tugged at his shirt for air. “I was worried because of what’s missing from the safes. If someone knows the combinations, they might have found out about this place, too.”

  “What’s special about it?” I asked. Tractors had harvested sod from the area, it looked like, but years ago.

  Leland walked toward the pond, saying, “I hope I’m right about you,” which meant something
. I watched him kick at an eroded spot, kneel, and sift through a matrix of sand and fossils. He tried two more spots, ignored a nice-looking meg tooth, before saying, “Okay . . . this is more like it.” He brushed off his slacks and handed me a pottery shard, then a wedge of black glass. “Hold it up to the sun,” he suggested.

  Tiny air bubbles were gelled within. I said, “This was handblown,” then examined the pottery: charcoal gray on one side, sand-colored on the other, but not thick like the jar I’d found. “Could be early Indian,” I said, “but where’d the glass come from?”

  He did a slow pan to the water, hands on his hips—a land baron savoring his property—while he tried to recover from his recent shock. “No one but my grandfather could have figured it out. In those days, men—the empire builder types—didn’t bother with college. They learned so much from their failures, they knew damn-near everything by the time they succeeded. I’ve walked archaeologists through this pasture but they never looked twice.”

  I considered the hill’s contours and referenced a map of archaic rivers in my mind. I guessed, “Was this an Indian trading center?”

  “In a way. It was a Paleolithic village, and that was a primary watering hole”—he looked toward the pond—“for god knows how many thousands of years. The early Spaniards were here, too. That was the confusing part. Maybe as early as the fifteen hundreds, they had a camp here—that’s based on the glass we found. It’s everywhere.”

  Aware that my attention vectored, Leland smiled. “You like history, I could tell the night we met. Go ahead, look for yourself.”

  I squatted over the spot while he continued talking. “When I was ten, my grandfather brought me here almost every afternoon. Summer vacation. I’d made my parents mad, for some reason—boys’ camp, that was it. I hated camp, all the bullying crap that went on, and I didn’t like sports. Anyway . . . my Grandpa Henry would load up shovels and sifting screens, strung the area off in quadrants, and we did our own archaeological dig. But first he made me promise not to tell anyone and he meant it. By then, he already knew what this place was. He was another very straight guy. To him, a man’s word meant something. I don’t know how my father got so screwed up.”

  Among fossil fragments and shell, I saw more pottery and another fleck of glass, but also kept watch on Toby. If not for the elephant, I might have seen a truck slowing among trees outside the electrified fence—Owen and Harris Sanford returning to dive the pond.

  Leland talked on about his grandfather, then finally explained why he’d brought me. “A lot of the pieces missing from those safes we found right here. Same with some of the best stuff my father sold off . . . or whatever the hell he did with it.”

  I asked, “Like what? And don’t tell me Ponce de León’s sword. You were testing me the other night.”

  “It’s a way of smoking out kooks who’d kill their mothers to find what we found,” he said. “Those stories are just that—fairy tales. But we did recover the hilt from a sword—no idea who it belonged to, but it could have been De León’s, I suppose.”

  “It was in the safe?”

  “That, and other things my father didn’t bother with because they’d be harder to sell. Now that you bring it up, I like the idea of that rusty old thing being Ponce de León’s.”

  “Or Pedro Menéndez,” I said. “Last night, I was reading about him.”

  “Exactly.” Albright, pleased I was interested, sounded enthused. “I’ve wondered the same thing. Menéndez spent two or three years searching for his son and he made probes inland. There was no way of knowing who it belonged to, though, from the piece we found. Steel with scrollwork, but in pretty bad shape. We didn’t find De Soto’s gold cross either, but that’s not the point. What we found was valuable to me. It was like solving a puzzle. Who was here? Why would a man go off and leave his sword? Like that. You know?”

  I said, “Maybe the archaeologists could’ve helped if you hadn’t steered them in the wrong direction.”

  He took that as a slight and walked to another spot. “I figured the first thing out of your mouth would be, ‘What did we find worth selling?’”

  “Or worth stealing,” I said.

  “I already told you that, too. Ivory from the Ice Age. Several very nice pieces.” Leland noted my reaction before continuing. “Ivory doesn’t hold up well in Florida unless from deep in the muck—or unless it was used as tools by the Ice Age people. I don’t know why that is.”

  “It could have already mineralized by the time they found it,” I suggested.

  “An anaerobic environment, the books say,” he replied, and used his hands to indicate the width of a trench. “We stripped away a layer at a time. Shovels; my grandfather wouldn’t use a tractor. I think he was trying to build up my muscles without me knowing and I didn’t care because it was so interesting.

  “We figured we traveled about five hundred years for every few feet after the topsoil was cleared away. But that varied. Paleolithic tools, the really primitive pieces, were close to the water table or deeper. Stone tools, some coral spearheads, most of them very rough. My mother was furious if I came home muddy, so I brought clean clothes every day. And kept my mouth shut about what we were doing.”

  I probed again, saying, “I’m still surprised you didn’t go for a swim.”

  Leland, grimacing at the pond, said, “With all the snakes? My grandfather wouldn’t allow it. He saw a cottonmouth, back when the barn was still standing, he said was the size of a small alligator. I don’t know how many times I heard him tell that story—a thirty-pound cottonmouth. And he wasn’t a talkative man.”

  I didn’t doubt that but doubted the story. The first Henry L. Albright, I suspected, had been as cunning as he was secretive. Giant reptiles are better than fences when it comes to discouraging visitors. I said, “You two must have been close.”

  “I wish to hell he was still alive. He was a tough businessman, but he lived by a code of ethics. A year later, we found the first burial, then what might have been a mass grave, and that was the end of it. For him, it wasn’t about money. It really bothered him, finding human bones. He made me promise never to dig here again and keep what I knew to myself. That was . . . fifty-one years ago. Aside from Mattie, you’re the first person I’ve brought here.”

  Mattie—Albright’s second wife and Owen’s mother.

  “Why me?”

  The man shrugged and gazed, hollow-eyed, at the water. Because he has no one else, I thought, but he responded, “I’ll pay a reward if you help get our collection back. Why can’t you tell me the whole story?”

  I dodged that, saying, “Do some more digging, you might find even better artifacts. It’s not illegal if you own the property. You’re not tempted?”

  “Lately, yeah, with all the bullshit at home. You know, spend some alone time out here and sift for Spanish material—that’s my real interest. Possibly get a more exact date. Ivory and the burials are below water level, so I wouldn’t disturb any of that. But I’ve read so much about amateurs screwing up important sites . . .” He drifted off again, then focused on his feet. “Most of the Spanish stuff came from right where I’m standing. Pedro Menéndez, or one of them, could have stood on this exact spot.”

  He’d used Menéndez to keep me interested, I guessed, but no need. “You told me the glass was everywhere,” I said.

  “The most valuable pieces are what I’m talking about. My grandfather had a theory. He believed one of the early captains didn’t trust his crew—the men left guarding the ship—so he carried his valuables with him in a leather pouch. Then he was killed, or lost the pouch, because we found it all in one little heap about a yard deep. The pouch was long gone, of course.”

  He searched for a moment, then kicked at the ground. “Right about here. I sifted out every piece myself.” He smiled, remembering, then realized he’d left me hanging.

  “Oh! I found six Span
ish coins and an uncut emerald. A beautiful thing about this big.” He used a thumb and index finger to create a circle. “And also . . . Do you know what a bezoar stone is?”

  I was picturing the two gold doubloons I’d taken from Deon the petty thief when I answered, “I don’t think so.”

  “They’re calcified stones from the bellies of wild goats. In those days, they believed bezoar stones could absorb arsenic from poison wine—which might be true. I found one attached to a gold chain. Only a ship’s captain would carry something like that, my grandpa said. They were popular with royalty.”

  I asked, “It was all supposed to be in the gun vaults?”

  Albright cleared his throat, the pleasant memory erased. “Nope. Like the leather bag, the stone, the emerald, the coins—lots of other nice pieces—they’re all long gone. Which is why I hate opening those damn things.”

  He knelt and refocused on the ground, upset again. “What the hell. Truthfully, I was more interested in the old bottles anyway. Like that piece of glass. They were black unless you held them up to the sun. Or crockery that had fingerprints baked into it from some man or woman who died five hundred years ago in Spain. Not particularly valuable to your typical bone hunter but simple things that to me seemed pretty cool.”

  “Bone hunters like Finn Tovar,” I suggested.

  Leland was sifting dirt but stopped. “I was waiting for you to ask about him. If anyone has your artifacts from Montana, it’s him. Did Tovar tell you his house was robbed? If he did, don’t believe him.”

  My turn to watch for a reaction. “Tovar died a week ago. Brain tumor.”

  “Really?” The troubled land baron brightened. He put his hands on his knees to stand, a tall man with lower-back problems. “Finally . . . some good news. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard that name. Are you sure he’s dead?”

  “I want to show you something,” I said. My dive bag was behind us, and I went to get it while Leland continued talking.