"Yes," said Lindsay. "I really think it might be a good idea to chip in. You know, create a little social cohesion in the department."
"Maybe. I don't like attracting attention by spending a lot of money right now."
"Do you get the Journal of Historical Archaeology?" Lindsay asked.
"No, but it's in the departmental library."
"The issue I'm looking for is missing."
"I'm sure Kenneth subscribes to it," Frank said.
Lindsay thought it wise not to tell Frank about any suspicion she might have of Kerwin, especially in view of the suspicions she had just raised about Einer. Frank admonished her once more as she went out the door not to involve Einer. Lindsay said nothing, and she could see by the look on Frank's face that he was uneasy.
Lindsay passed Kenneth Kerwin's door. It was cracked open, but he wasn't there. She looked up and down the hallway and into the main office. No one was in sight. She slipped into his office and stood there for a moment. The uneasy feeling of standing with her back to the door made her move aside, almost behind the door. She scanned his desk and his shelves and saw what she was looking for. There were two identical volumes of the missing journal side by side. She took one copy from the shelf and moved the books closer together to cover the gap just as she heard Kerwin's voice in the main office.
Lindsay held her breath. She could hear her heartbeat in her ears. She stood still for a moment, then eased herself farther behind the door and listened. She could hear him talking to Frank. He was still angry over the vote. It sounded as though Frank was trying to leave the main office, so that meant Kerwin would be facing the door. He would see her if she left. Damn. She looked briefly over his office. There was no closet in which to secret herself, no window to climb out-not that either of those options would work anyway. She stood motionless, barely breathing. Abruptly, their arguing stopped, and Kerwin came marching into his office. Lindsay's heart stopped. She clutched the journal behind her back. Just as suddenly, he marched out again, and Lindsay could hear him following Frank down the hall and, presumably, into the men's room. Lindsay wasted no time. She slipped out the door and almost ran down to her office by the back way.
She closed the door and sat down at her desk, breathing hard, not from exertion but fright. What in the world was I thinking? she asked herself. That has got to be the most appalling bit of behavior I've carried out in a long timesecretly going into a fellow faculty member's office and absconding with a piece of personal property. The fact that one of the copies probably belonged to the department was a minor technicality.
She opened the journal to Kerwin's article. It was not long, a simple analysis of the importance of the Rayburn Mill site to the creation of several present-day communities. There was a map showing the location of the site and nearby communities within a ten-mile radius. An accompanying aerial photograph showed the remnants of the ancient connecting roadbeds. It was interesting-Kerwin was not a sloppy researcher.
The site was on a river. The old roads led to each community like the spokes of a wheel. The former relationships of the communities to one another and to the old textile mill were lost to current memory. The old roads grown over and new ones leading elsewhere indicated shifted patterns of economic focus. There was a footnote citing Shirley Foster as the source of information on the way textiles produced at the mill were used and of their importance to European textile manufacturing. The citation was referenced as a personal communication. There was nothing odd or unusual about that. Researchers often cite information received in conversations and correspondence with colleagues. Kerwin never denied knowing or even working with Shirley Foster on a professional basis. What, Lindsay wondered, did Kerwin not want her to see?
The only reason she was suspicious of him was because of the photograph in which he seemed to be looking adoringly at Shirley. That could be nothing, or it could be that he simply thought her to be a beautiful woman, which she was. The fact that he seemed to be hiding the journal could have been an unfortunate coincidence. And what did it matter anyway? She had more pressing concerns-like her exhausted finances. She opened her drawer to look for the bottle of Turns she had bought that morning.
Lindsay put the journal and the Turns in her briefcase and saw her checkbook lying inside. She took it out and thumbed through the checks. She knew buying the parcel of land would make things tight for a while, especially in view of the work she was doing to renovate her cabin. But owning the source of the stream was a good investment.
She had left a cushion in her savings account for emergencies, but she hadn't expected the $10,000 emergency that her well going dry had presented. Now there was the other half of the bill for the well, the monthly payments for the filtration system and the payments for her original parcel of land, not to mention Mandrake's upkeep. And there were the payments for the Rover. At the time she bought it, she could well afford an expensive automobile, but now-she reached for the phone and called the Ford dealer a few miles from where she lived.
"Well, hey, Miss Chamberlain. You going to let me talk you into trading that old Land Rover for a new Explorer?"
"Yes."
"What?"
Lindsay smiled. He clearly was making a joke and didn't expect that. "It will have to be a used Explorer. I want to lower my monthly payments substantially."
"Tell me what you want, and I'll get on the computer right away."
Lindsay gave him a list of things she would like to have but emphasized the importance of keeping the cost down.
"No problem," he said. "You have a color you particularly like?"
"Oh, if a green one comes along, like the Rover, I'd like that. But right now, I'd accept one with just the primer."
He laughed. "I'll give you a call in a couple of days."
Lindsay hung up the phone. She felt better. She gathered up her purse and briefcase and walked outside to her Rover. She would go home and go through her grandfather's papers and visit with her brother.
Lindsay pulled onto the road and started to turn down the highway toward her home but instead turned in the opposite direction. There were still a few hours of light left, and she decided to visit the Rayburn site.
It wasn't far, just across the line into Dover County. She'd been there before. The excavation of the site had been finished for several years, but the manager's house hadn't been located. Some of the students working on the site had come up with an idea of where it might be. Lindsay had helped them dig a few test trenches, but in the end they had failed to find anything.
Lindsay turned off onto the dirt road that led to the Rayburn Mill site. The road was still in use by the occupants of the one house off it, a large gray structure under a grove of trees. Past the house, the road became overgrown, badly eroded, and rugged. She drove the Rover as far as she could, got out, and walked the rest of the way.
Not much was left of the site. The rock foundation of the factory itself was overgrown. The filled-in squares of the once excavated row houses boasted a thick carpet of tall weeds waving in the breeze-all that was left of the dwellings where several generations of factory workers had lived. Lindsay remembered the student who analyzed the animal bones collected from the rear of the house sites. The workers' diet had included chicken, rabbit, deer, and squirrel-indicating a significant hunting component in their personal economics. There had probably been gardens, too, but Lindsay didn't recall if any had been described in the research report.
The whole site was surrounded by woods. A river flowed by the place where the factory once stood. There were no boats on it now, but during the time of the mill's operation, the river was the route for taking the mill's wares to the coast for shipment to markets around the world. Across the river, thick woods now grew. The site that, according to Kerwin's article, had once been a bustling focus of commerce was now a peaceful place in the process of being reclaimed by nature.
Lindsay didn't know what she hoped to accomplish by coming here-find some clue to Kerwin's beha
vior? What? Did she need to find a clue to Kerwin's behavior? She shrugged and walked around the place, visualizing what it was like when it was alive. She could make out one of the old roadbeds through the woods. There was something about old roadbeds that seemed to last forever: the faint dip in the ground, the slightly shorter trees, the bare remnants of the road's sides-like a ghostly avenue superimposed over the woods. She smiled and stepped back onto a place where there was no ground. She fell into darkness.
Chapter 16
LINDSAY LANDED ON her feet, jarring her entire frame, and collapsed to the ground. For a moment the breath was knocked out of her and she gasped involuntarily, trying to get her lungs working again. In the next moment a wave of pain went up through her bones. When the pain left and she caught her breath, she stood up on shaky legs and looked around her. She was surrounded by dirt walls.
"Oh, damn, not again," she cried and looked up through a round hole at sky and tree canopies. "The well. Damn, I forgot about the well." Why, she thought, hadn't they filled it in? "Damn."
She stood on the dry well bottom of soft earth and forest litter and tested her legs. She felt her arms. She seemed to be all right. She had landed on her feet, and her skeleton had absorbed the shock of the fall. Had she landed on her side, she might have been seriously injured.
How to fall correctly was one of the things her mother taught her. "You will fall off your horse sooner or later," she had told her. "Try to land on your feet. If you are going over headfirst, you need to break your fall with your hands, so don't have your reins wrapped around them."
Once, on the rare occasion of her mother teaching a riding class, she was giving the same instruction to a little boy. The boy's father overheard her and came marching over. "Don't teach him to fall!" he had shouted at her. "That's teaching him to fail!" Her mother looked at the man for several moments, raking her gaze over him from head to foot before she spoke. "That's the stupidest philosophy I've ever heard. Falling isn't a failure. It's obeying the laws of gravity when you get thrown off balance. Are you going to explain your school of thought to the horse?"
Her mother, however, had given her no instructions on getting out of a well. "I don't suppose anybody's up there?" Lindsay shouted. Her question was met with silence.
The old well was less than twenty feet deep. If the dirt walls weren't too soft, she could climb out. Lindsay felt the sides with her fingertips. The walls felt like sandpaper-hard earth. It probably wouldn't cave in on her, but it might be hard to get hand- and footholds. About four feet from the top, she saw a root growing from the wall. That could be good. She fished in her pockets and only came up with a quarter. She had left her keys in the Rover, and her pocketknife was in her purse.
"I'm going to have to start wearing a tool belt everywhere," she said aloud. Damn, she hadn't told a soul where she was going.
She took the quarter and began scraping a toehold. The earth was hard, not impossible, but it would be slow going. She dug toeholds up the side of the wall as far as she could reach, aiming for the root.
Lindsay thrust a toe into one of the holes she had scraped out and began to climb, alternately using the gouges for fingers and toes. This isn't that hard, she thought. I'm becoming really good at escaping from holes in the ground. As she climbed, she scraped out more handholds. Her arms and hands were becoming exhausted.
The earth was softer nearer the top, and the digging went faster-so did the climbing. She was almost to the root when one of the holds crumbled under her weight, pulling her off balance. She grabbed for the root as she started to fall, holding on to it like a rope, dangling from the side of the well. She hung there for a moment before the root started pulling out of the wall like a thread unraveling from a sweater. Suddenly, she was back at the bottom of the well, holding a long piece of root in her hand. The action had loosened the soil, and now there was a deep gash down the side of the well.
Lindsay examined the loose dirt, wondering if there was a danger of the well caving in. She felt her heart pound as fear took hold of it. The light overhead was growing dim as the sun began its descent. It wouldn't be long before she had no light. Already, it was growing darker in the well. She toyed for a moment with the idea of throwing the end of the root up and seeing if she could snag something, an idea immediately abandoned as stupid.
It was not until Lindsay determined that the gash had made her original path too unstable and she should just start again that she realized she no longer had her quarter-not a great tool, but the only one she had. Lindsay was determined she was not going to spend the night in the well, even if she had to use her fingernails to claw her way to the top.
The quarter wasn't visible and Lindsay searched the ground, feeling through the leaves and pine straw with her hands. Her fingers stung as bits of stems pricked them as she hunted. Something hard scraped her flesh, and she drew back her hand. Blood oozed from a thin scrape across the tips of her fingers. She dug through the leaves for the offending object. It was a railroad spike. She grinned, forgetting about her scraped fingers in the joy of finding such a useful tool.
Lindsay went back to work again, digging toeholds with the spike. The work went faster. She climbed, dug more holds, and occasionally stuck the spike in the side of the well and pulled herself up. She was almost to the top when a hand appeared in front of her face.
"Can I help you?"
Lindsay was startled for a moment and stared at the hand. It was a woman's hand. She followed it up and looked into the face of Sheriff Irene Varnadore. Lindsay gratefully took her hand, and the sheriff pulled as Lindsay levered herself up and out of the well.
"Thanks," she said, leaning over, breathing heavily.
The sheriff shrugged. "You were almost out. How did you get in?"
"Stupidity and carelessness," said Lindsay, brushing the caked dirt from her clothes as best she could.
Irene Varnadore didn't look like a sheriff, dressed as she was in plum slacks and pink blouse. Law enforcement duds were remarkably defeminizing.
"Are you hurt?" Irene asked.
"I don't think so. Just dirty, exhausted, and humiliated."
Irene looked at her cut hand. "You need to wash that," she said, adding almost hesitantly, "I just made a pot of beef stew. Would you like to come to my place and clean up and have dinner?"
"That sounds good. Yes, I would." Then it came to her to wonder about her good fortune. "How did you come to be here?"
"I live in that house a mile back. You must have passed it. I saw a vehicle drive by. There's nothing down here but this old place. At first I thought it was just kids looking for a place to park, then there was something about the Rover that seemed familiar. I thought I'd check it out."
"I'm grateful you did."
Irene shrugged again. "I really didn't do anything."
"It's a comfort to know that somebody noticed me passing by."
Lindsay climbed into her Rover and followed the sheriff to her house, a modem-looking modular design with gray siding and a steep, slanted roof with dormer windows on the upper floor.
Inside, the look was southwestern, with geometric motif rugs on pine floors, wood and leather sofa and chairs, cactus, and driftwood accessories. The house was uncluttered and clean. Lindsay left her shoes at the door.
"There's a bathroom down that hall and to the right. Towels and washcloths are in the wicker cabinet."
Lindsay followed her directions into an old-fashioned bath with a pedestaled lavatory, claw-footed tub, and a brass towel stand. She chose a matching rose-colored towel and washcloth from the cabinet and washed her face and arms, dusted off her clothes, and cleaned her cut fingers. She fished in her purse for a brush and ran it through her tangled hair. She found a sponge in the cabinet and cleaned the bathroom of the dirt she had brought in. She thought she should call Sinjin and tell him she would be late but remembered he was out with Sally.
Lindsay followed the sounds and found Irene setting a tureen of beef stew on the dining table set wi
th silver, china bowls, and iced tea. This room looked older than the rest of the house. The wood in the flooring was a larger cut than in the other floors and was fitted with wooden pegs. The brick in the fireplace was old, with a newer walnut mantel holding an assortment of photographs.
"Go ahead and sit down," said Irene. "I'll just get the cornbread." She left and returned shortly with round steaming bread on a plate.
"Were you expecting company?" asked Lindsay, suddenly feeling like she was taking someone's seat.
"Jesse-he's a highway patrolman I see-we had a date to eat and watch a couple of movies. Nothing much. There's a pileup halfway between here and Atlanta, and he had to go. I heard about it on the scanner," she added.
"It was nice of you to ask me in." Lindsay spread the napkin in her lap. They ate the first few bites in silence. The beef was tender, and the vegetables were cut in large chunks. "This is so good," said Lindsay.
"It's my grandmother's recipe. The bread, too," Irene told her.
"This looks like an old part of the house-"
"It is," said Irene. "My grandparents bought it in the thirties. It was old then. They built onto it. Didn't follow the original design, though."
"I wonder if this was the mill manager's house," Lindsay mused. "Was this part of the old textile mill?"
"I don't know. Could be, I guess."
"Archaeologists tried to find the manager's house and couldn't. It'd be interesting if it was here all along, just changed with the times."
"I heard Luke Ferris asked you for help." Irene didn't seem displeased, just curious.
"Yes, but I'm not sure there's anything I can do," Lindsay said.
"Did he tell you his story? You don't need to answer, I can tell by the look on your face he did." Irene shook her head.
Lindsay tried to look noncommittal and thought she probably failed. "It's just that I know his sister, and him, too, a little. I just can't imagine it."
"People do funny things. His story's weak all the way around. Whatever I thought of Shirt, I don't believe for a minute she planned a rendezvous with him."
Dressed to Die: A Lindsay Chamberlain Novel Page 18