It had only been minutes since she’d stood in her own driveway, suffused in the warm glow of a first date that had gone very well. She’d been on too many first dates to take this warm glow seriously, but she’d lived too many hard days not to appreciate a good one when it came. She had wondered at herself for shedding her customary wariness, born of a lot of hard years, for this man. An all-night first date was out of the ordinary for her, but he was no stranger and tonight had been a long time in coming. Hope for the future had been a long time in coming, too, but she owned it, if only for a night.
The black sky, the dark prickles of starshine, the pink haze of dawn in the east, all of it had made her happy to be alive. She’d stood for more than a minute on the broken cement of her front sidewalk, taking it in. Then she’d bowed her head over her purse and foraged for her keys, one for the doorknob and one for the stout deadbolt that had cost her more money than she’d wanted to spare. She’d learned the hard way that a door without a deadbolt was an open invitation, scraping together the money for this one when her unbolted door was broken by someone who wanted to take what little she had.
Disaster had happened in the last moments of the sun’s battle with the streetlights, when it was light enough to see but not light enough to see well. Her attacker had come from behind, so she couldn’t see his face, but she could tell that he was twice her size. This was no real identifier. Everybody was twice her size. She had a bird-like body that wasn’t of much use beyond catching the attention of men.
If he’d grabbed her an instant later, she might have had the keys in her hand. She thought she might have been able to rake them across his eyes and get away, but maybe not. Her shoes’ heels were too high for an escape quick enough to save her. Their straps were barely wide enough to bind them to her feet. The odds that she could have shaken off his grip and outrun him were achingly low, but if she’d had her keys to use for weapons, she could have tried.
He had easily lifted her off those teetering heels and wrapped a long arm around her middle. Before she could draw in a breath to use for screaming, he’d stunned her with a hard slap and carried her, running behind her house and through her back yard, taking a hard turn when he reached the creek.
His grip had slipped, but not enough to let her escape him. Her feet had dragged through briars that whipped around her legs, digging their thorns into her bare ankles. At some point, one of them snagged a sandal strap and yanked her shoe right off her foot.
The arm encircling her chest had been a python crushing the breath out of her. When she’d struggled, he had squeezed tighter. Still, she’d clung to hope. There had been nothing else steady in the world but hope and the arm dragging her deeper into the darkness.
When it was over, she had thought, she would take her chance. When his rage was spent, and his lust, she would run. If her body held together, she would be able to run.
Her half-shod feet had dangled in the water as he hauled her across the creek and onto the far shore, where the ground was so, so cold. Now, where no one could possibly hear, he battered her with punches and slaps, knocking her to the ground and yanking her to her feet again and again.
When she’d been sure that he’d never stop, his meaty hand had closed around the fabric of her dress one last time, and he had yanked her uphill, away from the shallow creek crossing and up onto a high bluff where a thick copse of trees made a terrible darkness. The dawning sun’s light was growing, but it was still pale and sickly. It didn’t penetrate the trees’ shadows at all. She didn’t want to go into those shadows.
She let herself go fully limp, which didn’t stop him from dragging her toward the darkness. Perhaps her feet, still dragging on the ground, slowed their progress by a second or two. Eventually, even her knees dragged, but he knew where he wanted to go, and he was intent on taking her there.
As they reached the shadows, she felt the ground grow softer under her knees. It was looser, as if someone had been at work with a hoe or shovel, preparing to plant a season’s seeds. For a moment, her knee balanced on the soft earthen edge of a great hole, then it slid down into the hole and took her with it.
He loomed above her, holding a shovel. Now she knew two truths.
First, this was the tool he had used to dig her grave, so there was now no question that he planned to kill her.
And second, she knew this man. The men in Frida’s life had, by and large, done her no favors, but knowing that this particular man planned to kill her made her want to die.
But she couldn’t die, not when Kali needed her. She had to get away, but she had so little left inside her. No strength, no heart, no hope.
Still she lunged at the rim of her grave and tried to throw herself out, again and again, but it was no use. Her attacker was armed. He wasn’t armed with a gun or a knife, only the shovel he’d used to dig her grave, but the shovel was enough.
Chapter Six
It wasn’t even seven o’clock yet, but the sun was coming up fast. Even the parking lot that served this part of Sweetgum State Park was lovely. It was a vast park to be located within a short drive of a large city’s downtown district. It encompassed a popular campground, a golf course, soccer fields, tennis courts, and more, but Faye would be working in a section that was still pretty wild for an urban park. Bordered by the creek she’d waded with little Kali, this part of the park was undeveloped other than a few walking trails.
The state of Tennessee wanted to build another campground near the creek, and they had hired Faye’s cultural resources firm as part of the preliminary work. Her job as an archaeologist was to make sure that workers didn’t destroy any irreplaceable traces of the past while they were building their new campground.
Faye sat in a parking lot surrounded by leafy trees and underbrush in a million shades of green. Hers was the only car there. She could have sat there for an hour, enjoying the greenery, but she had a job to do.
Closing her car door, she headed for the trail leading from the parking lot straight down to the creek. She, and sometimes Jeremiah, had been doing preliminary work here most of the week—except for the time she’d spent splashing through the creek with Kali—but her full crew was on its way. She had arrived early because there were still some things she wanted to check out before they arrived.
To get from the parking lot to her site on the far side of the creek, she had to get her boots a little wet. Maybe damp was the right word. The trail crossed the creek at a spot where the water was just an inch or two deep, with stepping stones to help people with a real water phobia get across. She could have parked in other lots that wouldn’t have required her to wade the creek to get to work, but she would have had to haul her equipment further. Besides, this was the quietest and the prettiest place to park, so she was happy to get her water-resistant boots a little wet at the beginning of the day and again at the end.
Carrying a heavy load of equipment made the creek crossing harder than usual. Her feet slid off a wet rock in midstream, taking her into the shallow water with a splash and a reflexive curse, but the stumble didn’t slow Faye down. She was enjoying her usual early morning good humor, which was precisely why she had started early in the first place. It only made sense to make efficient use of her favorite time of the day.
As it turned out, taking the wet route to work might not have been the best use of her morning efficiency, because splashing across the creek reminded her of Kali, which caused her pace to flag. Faye tried to shake off the memory of the little girl’s daily hikes for food. She needed to be focusing on her work, not on a kid who had a mother to look out for her. Granted, the mother didn’t seem like an outstanding specimen, but Kali was taking care of herself pretty well. And maybe her mother was just perfect, other than her dubious nutritional choices. Faye and her daily candy bars were not innocent in that regard.
As Faye stood on the creek’s low bank, unpacking the bag holding her tools and field notebook, she
was focused on the bluff above her. Kali must be a morning person, too, because Faye was pretty sure the girl was already up there. She had heard leaves rustling above her the whole time she was approaching the bluff. As the quiet footsteps had pattered along, Faye had expected them to bring a little face to gaze down at her, half-fierce and half-friendly. She had been wrong.
It was embarrassing to admit it, even to herself, but she was hurt that Kali had chosen not to climb down to the waterline and say hello. Faye had thoroughly enjoyed the mile-long conversation between Kali’s free lunch pickup and this spot, but Kali apparently hadn’t enjoyed it as much as she did. If she had, she wouldn’t be up there hiding from Faye.
Two people can learn about a lot about each other while taking a long walk. Kali might not have known who Lassie was when they set off walking—and how many ten-year-olds did?—but she’d known the entire discography of Isaac Hayes. How many ten-year-olds could say that?
“My Uncle Laneer worked with Isaac Hayes at the meat-packing plant back in the day,” Kali had said. “Played bass in his band for a while, till the boss put him on the third shift and he had to quit. Third shift pays better, but you can’t play the clubs when you’re working midnights.”
Faye had agreed that was true, then started singing the guitar intro to “Shaft,” complete with wah-wah effects. Her funky “Bomp-bugga-bomp-a-bomp” must have been good, because Kali had laughed until she splashed butt-first into the water. Faye considered this one of her finest musical moments.
Knowing that her fellow funk-lover was keeping her distance this morning hurt Faye more than it should have, but she shook it off. The only sensible thing to do was to leave the child alone and get to work.
This spot at the edge of Sweetgum Creek would have been pretty minus the green scum on the surface. The scummy water burbled over a pebble-studded sandy bottom, cutting through a small ravine it had carved for itself. Some of the trees lining the creekbed were the sweetgums that had given the creek its name. When a breeze rustled through all those leaves, Faye understood why Kali chose to be outside in the July heat. This was a peaceful place. And a fascinating one for an archaeologist.
Sweetgum Creek had clawed its groove all the way across Memphis, exposing some fascinating strata. Millennia ago, a primeval version of the Mississippi, far larger than the current river, had flowed over the area, covering it with thick layers of silt. Those layers of sediment had entombed ancient tree trunks which were now petrified, mineralized into gleaming, colorful rock. In other parts of Memphis, Sweetgum Creek had exposed those old trunks and much more.
More pertinent to Faye’s expertise were the traces of Paleolithic humans that had been uncovered by this flowing water. They had left little behind but their magnificent spear points of fluted stone and, sometimes, the fossilized skeletons of the wooly mammoths brought down by those spears. Across town, Sweetgum Creek had uncovered one of those woolly mammoths, and a handful of Paleolithic tools, too. Faye burned to find a woolly mammoth.
When she looked at a map showing such spectacular finds upstream from where she stood, she asked herself the question that had kept her going for her entire career: “Why not here?”
Then she gave herself the same answer she always did: “You won’t know unless you look.”
Faye was in Memphis because the state of Tennessee had a problem. They wanted to expand a campground that brought in good income for this park, and their problem had taken the form of a longtime resident of the surrounding neighborhood showing up with a sheaf of old photographs. Those photos showed that a campground along this creek would be nothing new.
When the park had been developed in the 1930s, the Civilian Conservation Corps had done the work of clearing trails and building bridges and structures out of rough-hewn brown stone. It had taken months to do this, maybe years. The CCC had built a huge camp to house their crew, and they had done it right here along Sweetgum Creek.
The thing Faye found most interesting about this camp was that every last one of the workers had been African-American because the CCC program had been segregated. Even the New Deal hadn’t managed to treat everybody the same way. It had been the same old deal.
Those people were part of the park’s history now, and they had a story to tell. The state was going to have to cool its heels until Faye did a cultural resources survey to find any traces the CCC workers had left behind. The time she’d spent poking around at the foot of this bluff had been above and beyond her scope of work, but Faye had been willing to do it, because, well…mammoths! If she was going to be this close to the possibility of a mammoth, she was damn sure going to try to find one.
Never mind that she wasn’t a paleontologist. Some things were bigger than trivia, like whether a lot of self-guided study and a raging sense of curiosity qualified her to do paleontology.
As Faye noted the date in her field notebook, she heard another sound from above, and it wasn’t footsteps. It was a human voice, but the soft, muffled sounds were not words. Was it Kali?
If the little girl was hiding, why would she be making these noises? More concerning to Faye was the pain in the sounds she was hearing. Somebody was in trouble.
Faye laid her trowel down and didn’t waste time by running downstream to the place where the ravine’s walls sloped down to her level. She used both hands and both feet to scale the bluff’s face at its tallest point. As her head cleared the top, she looked around for her young friend.
She saw no one, but she did see a large area of disturbed soil, soft and damp. It hadn’t been there the last time she had stood in that spot, when she was looking for Kali’s hiding place. Her skin prickled. This didn’t look good.
Pressing her hands hard into the top of the bluff, she reached up a knee to rest on its lip. With one shove, she was on level ground and moving fast. Something was very wrong with the way this soil had been dug out and replaced, then carelessly covered with dry leaves and pine needles.
Faye didn’t like the size of the filled-in hole, six feet long and two feet wide. It was the shape of a bed. Or of a grave.
She liked it even less when the soil shook and moved, disturbed by something beneath. The roiling dirt looked like something out of a cheap horror movie, but it was real. Something underground was alive.
Dropping to her knees, she stared at the unnatural shivering of the earth. The leaves strewn over its surface stirred and rustled, even though there was no wind to move them.
Then a hand rose through the dirt and leaves like a plant sprouting from seed. Its fingers were bloody, with broken fingernails, and they grasped at the empty air inches from Faye’s face. She lurched back and screamed. In answer, a raspy voice sounded from underground.
She needed to call 911, but she couldn’t spare the time to talk to a dispatcher while someone was smothering to death in front of her. Her Solomon-like solution was to dial the numbers, then toss the phone on the ground and hope that the dispatcher could use the signal to home in on her location.
The hand clenched into a fist and shuddered, then a second hand pushed through the dirt. The wordless groaning that had brought Faye to this place came again and it made the skin between her shoulder blades crawl. She wished for her trowel, but there was no time to climb back down and fetch it. The person buried here—this woman buried here—was suffocating before her eyes. For these were a woman’s hands, small, slender, with tapered fingers. There were eight rings on each of her hands, one for each finger, including the thumb, with an extra three stacked on each index finger.
Faye allowed herself an instant to think, “Thank God. It isn’t Kali,” then she got to work.
Faye used one forearm to rake the leaves off the makeshift grave, then began clawing at the dirt with her bare hands. Her own fingers were instantly bloody, like the hands of this woman trying to dig herself out of her own grave. Judging that the 911 dispatcher would have picked up, she yelled, “I’ve
got a woman buried alive here. Send help while I dig her up. Sweetgum State Park, south side, near the creek.” Then she forgot about any help that might or might not come, and concentrated on digging.
Checking the location of the woman’s hands, she made a guess as to where her face was and started scraping at the dirt. It was hard-packed, as if the person doing the burying had stomped on it, but Faye made headway out of sheer persistence. Her frenzied digging forced dirt deep under her splintering fingernails, but there would be time later to think about how much it hurt.
When a single one of Faye’s fingertips made contact with something quivering and alive, she worked her hand through the dirt to palpate it. The flesh vibrated with the buried woman’s voice, and this told Faye that she had misjudged when she aimed her digging for the groaning sounds. She’d imagined that this would take her straight to the woman’s mouth and nose. Instead, her hand was on a throat gasping for air. Grateful that she’d dug gently enough to avoid crushing the woman’s windpipe, she shifted her efforts further away from the struggling hands.
A chin emerged from the soil, then a mouth, relentlessly opening and closing. Faye used her dirty finger to clear it of dirt, hoping that this was enough to open her airway, then she kept working upward.
A nose emerged and Faye did her best to clear that, too, of the dirt blocking the air that might save this woman’s life. It was bleeding, broken, perhaps by the feet stomping the dirt into a hard layer above her face and body. She did her best to bring the bleeding nose to light without hurting the woman even more.
Undercurrents Page 3