Undercurrents

by Mary Anna Evans

  Creepy cashier or not, the store was convenient and she didn’t have time to waste on looking for another one. If luck completely eluded her, one of Frida’s unpleasant exes would be on duty, and the other would be waiting for his shift to start, so that she could enjoy spending time with both of them.

  And, because she’d burned all her good luck that day when she received access to the site a day early, that’s exactly what she got. Frida’s two exes were waiting for them. Mayfield was sitting inside, waiting at a table near the store’s lunch counter, and Linton was working the cash register.

  Stone-faced and silent, Mayfield watched each of Faye’s workers, one by one, as they passed in front of him. She was pretty sure that his eyes lingered longer on the women than the men, which pissed her off and scared her, all at the same time, but he studied the men, too. Jeremiah passed in front of him last and received the same treatment—no talking and lots of looking, despite the fact that Faye was pretty sure that they knew each other.

  When Jeremiah proved her right by nodding and saying, “How you doin’, Mayfield?”, Faye sensed that he wasn’t just passing the time of day. He was trying to provoke the silent man.

  Mayfield didn’t say a thing.

  Faye passed him last and she received even more scrutiny than the younger women had. He had looked their bodies up and down, but he kept his eyes only on her face. His aggressive body language—forward-leaning with hands flat on his thighs—made her jumpy. She wondered why he’d chosen her as the target of his intimidating glare. Was it just because she was an outsider?

  Linton, on the other hand, seemed to have grown a personality since Faye first saw him. Maybe she’d just caught him on a bad day. He assumed his place at the food counter and began taking orders for breakfast biscuits.

  “So that’s one bacon-and-egg biscuit for you,” he said, pointing at Yvonna, “and chicken biscuits for everybody else but Yogurt Girl.”

  He pointed to Stephanie, who seemed to have offended Linton by ordering yogurt instead of something he cooked.

  “Two chicken biscuits for you,” he said, pointing to Davion, “and three for the big dude.” He pointed at Richard. “Good job, Big Dude. You’re gonna like my biscuits. What about your boss lady and ol’ Jeremiah? Where are they at? Do you think they should they get to eat?”

  Faye stepped past Davion and Richard, who were standing between her and the counter. “I’d like scrambled egg on my biscuit.”

  “Hot sauce?”

  “If you’ve got it.”

  Linton, grinning, plunked a tray on the stainless steel counter. It was loaded with six kinds of hot sauce. “Pick your poison.”

  “Don’t go for the one with purple flames on the label,” Jeremiah told her. “Trust me. You’ll regret it.”

  Jeremiah’s patronizing air made her want to choose the purple flames to spite him. Faye knew that this was not a mature response. The man was only trying to be helpful, and spiting him could cost her the lining of her entire digestive tract. Still, the purple flames were calling out to her.

  As Faye perused the sauces, she heard an unfamiliar voice behind her. There was only one unfamiliar person in the store, so it had to be Mayfield.

  “Same old Jeremiah. Pretending to be important when he’s really just a sack of shit.”

  Eight heads swiveled his way. Faye knew that this was what Mayfield had wanted, and she wished they hadn’t given it to him so easily. The man knew how to get people’s attention.

  Linton grabbed everyone’s attention right back. “Takes a sack of shit to know a sack of shit,” he said, but somehow he made it into a joke. On her last visit, Linton had been sullen and silent. She would not have expected him to have charisma, but he did. All eyes were on his handsome face.

  Finally, Faye could see why Frida had married him. Remembering his cold eyes on her when she first saw him, she also had a pretty good idea why Frida had divorced him.

  Mayfield stopped talking and turned his back on Linton. Unbothered, Linton threw some bacon onto the hot griddle and some chicken breasts in the basket fryer, before filling several toaster ovens with biscuits. As everything sizzled and browned, his eyes darted from face to face.

  While the food cooked, Linton focused on Jeremiah. “You coulda called me. I know you got one of these.” He pulled a smartphone out of his pocket and held it out on an open palm. “Don’t you?”

  Jeremiah’s eyes flicked down to the phone in his hand. “Haven’t called you since eleventh grade. Why do you think I oughta do it now?”

  “Because I shouldn’t have gone a day and a night without somebody telling me my wife was dead.”

  “She was your ex-wife. The rules are different when you’re divorced.”

  Jeremiah sounded like he was spoiling for a fight and Faye thought he was overreacting. She also thought he would be smart not to challenge Linton. He was marginally bigger than the man cooking his breakfast, but Faye would have predicted that Linton would come out on top in a fist fight. She wondered how much thought Jeremiah had given to the wisdom of provoking this man.

  Not much, apparently, because he was still talking. “Besides, Sylvia did the calling. If she thought you should know, you’d know.”

  “Sylvia never had any good reason to hate me. But she did.”

  “All you had to do was to make Frida happy. Then she would’ve liked you.”

  “Frida always—” Linton stumbled on his words like a man who was realizing too late that there was no good way to criticize your recently murdered ex-wife.

  Standing there searching for words, Linton looked like a Greek god, but not the Hollywood kind made of washboards, sinew, and zero percent body fat. No, Linton was built like the old statues of Zeus, the ones with thick chests, thick arms, thick necks, and heavy-lidded faces. Even his slick-shaved skull looked heavy, as if forged of bronze.

  “Frida couldn’t afford a lawyer. I didn’t want to afford a lawyer, because I wanted to be married to her. No papers got signed. She was still my wife till the day she died.”

  “Well, she’s dead now and the funeral’s tomorrow,” Jeremiah said, taking a step closer. “You planning to come? If you do, folks will expect you to help Laneer pay for it.”

  “I can chip in, now that I won’t be paying anybody rent every month.”

  “Where you planning to live that won’t charge you rent?”

  “My house. The one that’s mine, now that my wife is dead.”

  Jeremiah took a big step forward, fists clenched, and Linton hustled out from behind the counter. “You wanna fight? We can fight, but we gotta take it outside this store. I don’t want to break anything important with your head.”

  Neither man moved toward the door. To Faye, it looked like Jeremiah and Linton didn’t really want to fight. Not yet. They just wanted to stand face to face and yell at each other.

  “Frida’s house?” Jeremiah demanded. “That she got from her grandmother? You think that’s your house now?”

  The bronze-heavy head nodded once. “The law says it is.”

  It had never occurred to Faye that Frida had owned her home, not seriously. Frida hadn’t even owned a car. If she truly had owned the house, it changed everything. Kali still needed to live with Laneer but, properly invested, the money from renting or selling that house could send her to college. Or cooking school. Faye could totally see Kali in cooking school.

  But if Frida’s possessions went to Linton, house and all, Kali would have her clothes to start her new life, and that was about it. Faye had only known for a moment that inheriting the house had even been an option for Kali. Now, she felt the loss almost as keenly as if it were her own.

  “Don’t be thinking that Laneer will let you anywhere near that girl,” Jeremiah said.

  “She’s my stepdaughter. She can live with Laneer if she wants to, but she don’t have to. If she lives wi
th me, I’ll feed her and make sure she’s got clothes. Make sure she goes to school. All those things that dads do, I’ll do ’em. Laneer ain’t got no reason to keep me away from her.”

  “He thinks he does.”

  Linton gave him the tiniest possible shrug. “Let him think what he thinks. I got a lawyer looking into things. He says it won’t be long before I can move in. Can’t wait to kiss my landlord good-bye. Really can’t wait to have all that extra spending money.”

  Mayfield broke into their conversation like a class clown breaking up a fight between the captain of the football team and the surprisingly fierce president of the chess club. “Didn’t you hear the timer go off? The biscuits are ready.”

  Then he settled back into his chair and watched Linton hand out breakfast orders. Jeremiah and Linton didn’t look his way, but they stopped arguing.

  “Biscuit, biscuit, two biscuits, biscuit, three biscuits, biscuit,” Linton said, counting the well-browned pastries. “Where’s Yogurt Girl?”

  Stephanie raised her hand and he pressed a container of strawberry yogurt into it.

  “What’s your name, Yogurt Girl? Want some coffee? Coffee comes with everybody else’s biscuits, but I’ll give you some on the house.”

  Faye remembered that Sylvia said Mayfield had behaved the same way with Frida, giving her free stuff as part of an obnoxious courtship ritual. She was wondering if she should step in when Stephanie solved her own problem by refusing the coffee brusquely and backing away from him.

  Mayfield laughed at Linton’s failed flirtation with Stephanie, and Faye could see that his amusement pissed Linton off.

  Jeremiah was more sophisticated. Smoother. He only let a flickering smile slip, but Faye could tell that he wanted to laugh just as loud. Davion and Jeremiah were grinning, but not Ayesha and Yvonna. Their faces were expressionless as they each sidled closer to Stephanie. If Linton didn’t get out of their friend’s face, they were going to get in his.

  Faye found her voice. “Everybody go pick out some sandwich meat, and some fruit if you want it. I’ll get the chips. Oh, yeah, and somebody get some water, enough to last the week. Jeremiah, load up the ice chests. We need to get moving.”

  As they left, Mayfield was taking over the register and starting his shift. Linton still stood right where he’d been, staring at Mayfield, a man who’d tried to date the late wife whom he had still loved.

  Chapter Thirty

  Once Mayfield and Linton were in their rearview mirror, Faye’s attitude improved and her crew perked up. Ayesha and Davion had chosen to ride with her, and their rapid-fire questions had bounced off the windows of her car all the way to Sweetgum State Park. Now, the whole group was hauling equipment through the woods and across the creek, and they looked happy to be doing it.

  Faye loved the early days of an excavation, when everybody involved still believed that maybe they’d uncover the American King Tut’s tomb, or something very like it. Maybe something better. Unpacking equipment, walking the site, laying out a sampling grid and finally, finally, breaking ground…these were the days when the whole crew wore smiles and walked with a spring in their steps.

  In a couple of weeks, they’d all have ground-in dirt decorating the knees of their new work clothes. There would also be dirt ground into their cuticles and into the calluses on their palms. On the rare occasions that Faye treated herself to a manicure, the manicurist earned every cent, because she had, for all intents and purposes, spent the past twenty years giving herself dirt tattoos on both hands.

  In a couple of weeks, this perky and hopeful crew would be grateful to find any chip of stone or seed that might be worth cataloging. Reality would set in at about the two-week mark, but Day One was always golden.

  Watching Jeremiah in action made her laugh. He was so invested in the success of his protégés that he was running in circles like a sheepdog barking instructions.

  “Where’s your field notebook? Ayesha? Your notebook? You, too, Davion.”

  “Yvonna, those sandals just won’t do it. I know you have boots. We all went boot-shopping together and I packed everybody’s boots in my car. Go find yours.”

  “Stephanie? This way!”

  Faye assessed her workers for about the hundredth time since she had met them. She was keeping a close eye on Richard. He smelled like yesterday’s liquor, but at least he did not smell like fresh liquor. The odor of his hangover followed him around, and it smelled like sweat, beer, and gin, but he was not drunk today. If he managed to survive a sweaty day under this cloudless July sky, then she might not have to demand that Jeremiah fire him. He would be handy, if he stayed and if he applied himself. He was Jeremiah’s burliest employee, with only Stephanie coming close to him in size. Jeremiah himself was bigger than them all.

  Faye wondered if Jeremiah relied on his size to keep his employees in line. She didn’t have that advantage, but in her observation, physical intimidation only went so far in managing a crew. Faye would never be physically intimidating, but she could project a fearsome attitude and she knew how to earn her team’s respect through sheer professional competence. So far, this approach had been good enough.

  Davion wasn’t as big as Richard and Jeremiah, but he had a wiry strength and he struck Faye as alert and thoughtful. He and Ayesha seemed like the group’s natural leaders, so she put Ayesha in charge of organizing all the gear, and she sent Davion and Stephanie out with machetes to delineate the study area. The site was big, but only parts of it were covered with thick underbrush. Her machete-wielders had a shot at finishing their work before lunch.

  In the meantime, Faye walked the site with a GPS receiver, marking interesting features she’d observed on aerial photos. After they’d all been at their tasks for an hour or so, her phone rang. She found a shady spot and answered it.

  She still hadn’t heard from Joe, so she absent-mindedly answered without checking to see who was calling, figuring it was him. Instead of her husband, she heard a woman’s voice, old and quavery, saying, “Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth? This is Phyllis Windom. You’re telling me that you’ve been playing with my database?”

  “I have, and I was impressed. Please call me Faye.”

  The woman took a wheezing breath, and Faye remembered the news article detailing her health problems. “What’s your story, Faye? Your e-mail didn’t give me the impression that you were one of those murder groupies that gets obsessed with a crime. I hear from a lot of those and I try to handle them with a quick e-mail. Something about your message made me want to pick up the phone.” She paused and Faye heard a cough. “If I’m wrong and you’re crazy, please tell me, so that I can hang up and go on with my day.”

  “I’m not crazy. Truly.” Even as she said it, Faye realized that the words themselves made her sound unbalanced. “I have a personal interest in a case, and I don’t think the police are pursuing all their options.”

  “Of course, you don’t. People who think the police are doing everything right don’t use my database to do an end run around them, now do they?” Faye heard a laugh so uninhibited that she would have called it a cackle. This made her wonder whether it was fair for this woman to be calling other people crazy.

  “The victim’s name was Frida Stone and she died here in Memphis on Friday. One of her friends told me about similar cases of women beaten to death in north Mississippi and east Arkansas.”

  “Easy drives from Memphis.”

  “Exactly. The police here didn’t know about the Arkansas killing, which makes me wonder what else they don’t know. I’ve been poking around your database, but it’s going to take me some time to get up to speed, and I don’t have it. I’m starting a big contract today. Complicated. Big crew. Getting conversant with the software to search your database is going to take time.”

  “What kind of crew?”

  “Archaeology.”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s what it said in the sign
ature line of your email. Anyway, I’m not surprised to hear that you do archaeology. You sound like someone who takes a scientific approach. You also sound like a seeker. Seekers are always busy.”

  Faye was stupidly flattered by praise from this woman who could apparently suss out her prideful weaknesses pretty darn fast. She could see Ayesha approaching with an I-have-a-question expression. “You have me pegged. I’m stupidly busy all the time. In fact, I don’t even have a lot of time to talk right now. Maybe thirty more seconds before I have to turn back into a boss. Can you help?”

  “Give me thirty more seconds of information and I’ll try.”

  “Frida was in her late twenties. African-American. So were the other two women. Great care was taken with the other two burials, but Frida was buried quickly. And alive, but that may be because I interrupted the murderer.”

  “You do have a personal interest in this one. Wow.”

  “No kidding. What else? Oh, yeah. All three victims were found in July. None were raped. All three were beaten to death. They think Frida was killed with a shovel but they don’t know about the other two.”

  Ayesha arrived, looking expectant. Faye didn’t want her to hear this conversation, so her thirty seconds were up. She held up a hand to say, “Hang on just a second,” then told Phyllis Windom that she had to go.

  “Can I text this number?” Windom asked.

  “Yes. Please send me anything you find.”

  “Will do. Have fun seeking, Madame Archaeologist.”

  Davion, Stephanie, and their machetes had done a masterful job of hacking out the boundaries of the study area. There was more machete work to do as the team laid out a sampling grid, but only in a few places. Much of the area was shaded by trees that kept the underbrush down, and there was a sizeable flat area at the center that intrigued Faye. If she were the director of a CCC program who needed to house hundreds of workers, this is where she would have put them.