Burials

by Mary Anna Evans

  She said, “Sure. After the memorial service, I guess?”

  “Yeah. We’ll be at the cabin before the morning’s done. At least Emily’s making sure we get an early start.”

  Bigbee snorted. “That woman needs a hobby. Or a boyfriend.”

  Roy studied the report some more. “According to the officer who wrote this, Mickey did call these people, just like he said. He did meet them and take them to the cabin. They did find the house shuttered and the car gone. There really were sheets on the furniture.”

  “So Mickey was telling the truth and he cared enough to check.” Faye said. “Does that mean he’s not a suspect?”

  “Wouldn’t it be smart of him to go out there, put her suitcase in her car and find a way to get rid of it, drape some sheets, close the shutters? Then call the sheriff? It makes him look a lot like a caring friend and not a bit like a suspect.”

  “You’re a suspicious man, Roy Cloud.”

  “Just doing my job.”

  ***

  The afternoon and evening weren’t much different from the day before. Faye came home to find Joe at the kitchen table, but at least he wasn’t smoking. Sly was in the living room in front of the TV, looking at it but paying no attention to what was on the screen. He wasn’t smoking, either. He was holding a cigarette that had gone out.

  She and Joe made some sandwiches, but Sly said he wasn’t hungry. Within the hour, he went to bed, carrying Patricia’s urn.

  Joe listened absently as Faye told him about her day. The ashtray in front of him was empty, but his forefinger tapped a nicotine-craving beat on the table next to it. Time and again, she saw him like this, proving to himself that he had willpower. Joe had spent all his adult years proving to himself that he was nothing like his old man. He had done this by, time after time, putting aside the cigarettes he’d like to smoke and the liquor he’d like to drink.

  She found an excuse to go into the living room, hoping to see that the potsherd had been returned to its spot on the mantel. There was no need for the excuse, because Joe was paying no attention to what she said or did.

  The potsherd was still gone.

  After Joe went to bed, Faye found that she had passed from sleepiness into the kind of overstimulated hyperdrive that was terrible for her health but good for her ability to rack up billable hours. She spread Sophia Townsend’s notes out on the kitchen table, poured herself a tall glass of milk, and got to work.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The sun was rising over the Sylacauga site when Faye and Joe arrived for the funeral. It was half-obscured by banks of slate-blue clouds, but it’s hard to fully hide the sun. Its rays gilded the underside of each cloud, rimming it in red-gold. She had seen thousands of dawns from Joyeuse Island, and this one was no more colorful. The sky was no bigger than the blue dome that arched over her home and the surrounding Gulf of Mexico. Yet this sky, this cloud, this dawn were all different. Not better. Different. Faye couldn’t have described how they were different. They just were.

  Faye could see that Emily was beside herself with excitement. She’d succeeded in getting eight people to join her in honoring Sophia Townsend’s memory. Even better, she’d managed to turn this kind gesture into an inappropriate intrusion by insisting that they get up at five o’clock in the morning to do so. For Emily, this was a red-letter day.

  Faye and Joe left the parking area with Roy Cloud. Mickey, Alba, Carson, and Kenny arrived in separate cars and walked behind them. Agent Bigbee arrived last and hung back to watch everyone else. Emily hurried to greet them all as soon as they came into sight.

  Roy shook her hand and thanked her for organizing the memorial service. “This was a nice thing for you to do, Emily. You’re a good friend to Sophia. Can I ask you a favor?”

  “Certainly. I’m so glad you’re all here today.”

  “Do you mind if we take some time to remember Kira, too? It nearly killed me to hear that her folks are having her funeral in Albuquerque. I can’t leave this investigation or I’d be on the plane tomorrow to be there for her. If you’re willing, I can say a few words in her memory. It’s the least I can do.”

  Emily looked like she didn’t want Sophia to have to share the spotlight with Kira, but even she couldn’t dismiss a police chief’s request to honor his fallen comrade.

  Cloud said, “I’ve got a lot of memories of Kira to share. Anybody else who wants to say something about her or about Dr. Townsend should have a chance. Right, Emily?”

  Emily’s nod was a little too late and a little too tentative, but she gave it. She led them to the rim of the excavation where she’d set up chairs. In front of the row of chairs was a card table covered with a white cloth and set with two candles.

  Emily had to strike three matches to light the candles, because the constant wind kept snuffing the flames. Once lit, the candles guttered, always on the verge of going out. Emily kept her eyes on them as if willing them to stay lit.

  “Welcome, everyone. I’m so grateful you all could come today. I think we should begin by remembering Kira Denton.”

  Faye knew she was being uncharitable, but it felt like Emily was clearly defining Kira as the opening act, making Sophia this funeral’s headliner.

  Cloud rose from his chair and said, “Kira Denton was utterly admirable for her honesty, her loyalty, her professionalism, and her selflessness. When the Andersons’ house burned down, she organized the drive to get them back on their feet. She hounded people…oh, excuse me…she politely asked every last officer to donate clothes, food, toys, furniture, anything they thought a family might need. When people forgot the promises they made, she hounded…oh, excuse me…she politely reminded them that the people waiting had nothing but the clothes on their back.”

  The first “Oh, excuse me” brought chuckles. The second one was harder to hear, because Roy Cloud was in tears, but he kept going.

  “Kira didn’t forget people after she helped them. Not Kira. She calls the Andersons and all the others she helped all the time. I mean, she did call them. Before. She called to make sure their children had school clothes. She called to tell people that the price had dropped on a truck they wanted. If a family couldn’t afford a ham at Christmas, Kira got one donated or bought it herself. The person who took her from us has deprived the world of someone who truly wanted to make a difference in people’s lives. When we remember Kira, we have to remember the Andersons, too, and people who are in their shoes. If we do that, we’ll keep her alive and with us, at least a little bit.”

  This time Roy wasn’t able to keep going. He had to stop and wipe his eyes. “I will hunt the person who killed Kira Denton for the rest of my life, if that’s what it takes to get justice for her. She should be here on this beautiful day. I will miss her.”

  After he spoke, there was silence. No one else present had known Kira, and Faye found that inexpressibly sad. She herself had no memories of either Sophia or Kira to offer. She was surprised to find herself blinking back tears for these women who were strangers to her. Unshed, they stung in her throat.

  If this had been an ordinary funeral, she could have brought flowers for the graves. She could have baked a casserole for the families, because she found feeding people to be a satisfying way to show love and care. These outlets for grief weren’t available today, so she just sat next to Joe and sniffled.

  Emily sensed that no one else was going to speak for Kira, so she moved ahead to the reason she’d brought them all together. She said, “And now I’d like for us to remember Sophia Townsend, who has come back to us after twenty-nine years.”

  Her voice was high and quavery, as if she were struggling to be heard over the wind. Or perhaps it was because she was holding something back. It certainly wasn’t tears that Emily was withholding, because they flowed steadily down her face and she never once reached up a hand to wipe them away.

  “It is a hard thing,” she sai
d, “to memorialize someone who has been gone for so long, but Sophia deserves that. Anybody would deserve it after being murdered and buried in an un-

  marked grave for years and years.”

  She bit her lip.

  “Anyone who ever met Sophia Townsend was struck by her sheer intelligence and her passion for life. I’ve heard people described as ‘live wires’ all my life, but I never understood the term until I met Sophia. She had a vital energy that is hard to describe. I only know that I couldn’t look away.”

  She opened the pasteboard box in front of her. Inside of it was a stack of homemade booklets, folded and stapled. “Time has taken so much. There is almost nothing left of Sophia’s life. Just her bones and a stack of archaeological papers that are still cited today and a dainty silver necklace.”

  Faye couldn’t miss the meaningful look that Emily aimed at Roy. She might as well have said, “Give me the necklace and give it to me now.”

  Emily shifted her eyes from Roy Cloud’s face to address the full group. “Sophia was at her best when she directed that vitality and energy toward her work. I started putting together a bibliography of her papers as a keepsake for her mourners, because I wanted us to remember the work that was the focus of her life. And also because I thought the papers were the closest things we would ever have to an enduring image of her. When I started this project, I thought that she didn’t leave a photo of herself for us to remember her by.”

  Emily moved toward the seated guests, handing a booklet to each of them. “But then, as I looked through her work yesterday, I saw that she did leave a visual memory for us. I found these images in some of her published papers. Sharing them with you seemed like a fitting way to memorialize her.”

  Faye looked at the cover of the booklet in her hands. It was a regular, everyday photo, and the caption said that it was taken during an archaeological dig Sophia had done five years before she came to work in Sylacauga. The photo showed a collection of beads brought to North America by sixteenth-century Europeans. Behind the beads was a hand included in the photo to provide scale. It took Faye a second to realize what she was seeing.

  This was a photo of Sophia Townsend’s hand, probably taken years before she even heard the word Sylacauga.

  “I thought this picture of Sophia’s hand was almost as personal and intimate as a close-up photo of her face would have been. That’s why I put it on the cover, but be sure you look inside. I found other precious mementos to share with you.”

  Faye opened the booklet and was rewarded with a copy of one of Sophia’s lovely illustrations.

  Emily opened her own booklet and held out that page for people to see. “This is Sophia’s rendering of what Poverty Point might have looked like thirty-five hundred years ago.”

  Sophia had drawn a bustling town stretching out along a creek bank where people were fishing. Behind them, sturdy houses stood on manmade soil berms. Silhouetted behind the houses was a tremendous earthen mound. The next time Faye was trying to explain to someone that it had been possible to live a comfortable and healthy life far in the past, she would be using this drawing as an illustration.

  On the next page was a copy of another photograph. It was so unexpected that Faye drew a quick breath when her eyes landed on it.

  “This photo was taken at a project Sophia did while she was still a graduate student. Behind her is a reconstruction of a Mississippian village that she helped design and build. She was twenty-three.”

  Fay could see that the photo had been taken to document the build phase of the project and that Sophia’s presence in the shot was an accident. Yet she dominated the frame.

  The camera had loved her glowing skin and her tousled black hair. She was looking at someone standing outside the frame of the photo and she was laughing.

  Faye saw Kenny Summers reach out a hand to touch the image of her youthful face. Mickey and Alba Callahan, moving with the synchronicity of a married couple who hadn’t spent the past twenty-nine years divorced, both gave the photo a quick glance and closed the booklet quickly.

  The other pages were taken up by the bibliography that Emily had promised, and it was every bit as long and distinguished as she had led them to believe.

  Faye leaned toward Roy Cloud and whispered, “You should give Emily that necklace.” She gestured at the booklet in her hand that Emily had probably stayed up all night to make. “Have you ever seen love like this?”

  Roy said, “She’ll get it when we close the case, if I have to steal it out of the evidence file myself.”

  Emily stood before them, wringing her hands while everyone present studied her last gift to Sophia Townsend. She’d probably rehearsed a longer eulogy and she’d probably planned a more eloquent summing-up, but she had run out of steam.

  After a long, awkward pause, she said quietly, “I just wanted you to know who she really was. Did anybody else have anything to share?”

  Mickey, who was carefully avoiding eye contact with his ex-wife, said, “I’d like to say something.” He rose and began, “Sophia was not someone you can describe in a sentence or a wonderful booklet like this one Emily made or even in a whole stack of books. She—”

  The wind had stopped and the group had fallen so silent that the well-maintained engine of an approaching pickup truck seemed as loud as a military jet.

  Someone was late to the funeral.

  Chapter Twenty

  Roy Cloud looked up as he heard the truck approach. His reflexes were fast, so the only person who turned his head quicker was young Joe Wolf Mantooth, sitting on the other side of his wife, the estimable Doctor Faye. An instant later, everyone else looked to see who was coming, except for Bigbee, who was keeping his eyes on the assembled crowd.

  A battered white pickup, evenly coated with a patina of dust, pulled into the parking area and stopped. Roy had been with Muscogee Nation’s Lighthorse Tribal Police long enough to know what all the local ex-cons drove. That truck belonged to Sly Mantooth.

  Joe Wolf Mantooth looked at his wife and grunted in the way that married people do when there’s no reason for words. Then he stood up and started walking fast in Sly’s direction, like a man who was trying to intercept trouble before it arrived.

  Roy remembered the Mantooth boy from some years back. He had grown into a fine-looking man. Mid-thirties, really tall, well-built without being bulky. Dark-brown skin and a black ponytail hanging halfway down his back. Quiet and confident, with a peaceful air about him. Doctor Faye had married well.

  Roy remembered when Sly had looked like that, minus the ponytail and the peaceful air, and he remembered how far down Sly had spiraled when his wife died and his son tried to walk as far away as he could get from his no-account dad. Nobody within fifty miles had blamed Joe for going. Coming back now to deal with his dad and the past spoke highly of him, and so did his choice of a wife.

  Sly Mantooth’s son had come home as a successful businessman with a happy family. Who would have thought it?

  Roy pitied young Joe, because he sensed that Sly’s belated arrival did not bode well.

  ***

  Sly Mantooth had tried to stay away, but here he was. He knew he should have stayed at home with Patricia’s ashes, since he would soon scatter them and lose his last physical connection with the love of his life, but Sophia Townsend had always been a complication.

  She hadn’t been the love of his life, not even close. He hadn’t loved her at all, not much. He hadn’t even liked her much, but there was no explaining the magnetism that sometimes fired between two people who had nothing more in common than lust. And sometimes it fired upon first meeting, which was even harder to explain.

  Patricia had made him feel open and free. When their relationship was good, and it had been good for a lot of years, she had made him feel like he was man enough to take on the world.

  Sophia had made him feel like he was trapped in a hot
room with an open flame. She was too dangerous to turn his back on, so he had no choice but to look at her. Nothing could make him forget she was there.

  Where Sophia was concerned, Sly did things he shouldn’t, like coming here today.

  Patricia had surely known how he felt about Sophia. His passion for her would have been obvious to anyone past puberty, and it would have been that much more obvious to the woman who shared his bed.

  They had never talked about it, so he had never reassured her, never told her flat-out that she was the only woman for him. He’d been too much of a coward to own up to his feelings, so Patricia had died without knowing where she stood. These were the things he thought about when he looked at the damnable urn that held all that remained of his wife.

  All eyes were on him. They were all here, the combustible group who had surrounded Sophia in her last days, and he needed to be with them on the day of her memorial. Unfortunately, his son was here, too, so he would be a witness to whatever came next.

  Joe had started walking his father’s way before Sly even got the truck in park. Calm and steady Joe knew that trouble followed his father, so here he came, ready to help. How Sly loved that boy…that man. His son was a man now.

  Since even hawk-eyed Joe didn’t have eyes in the back of his head, his son couldn’t see the tableau behind him. Nobody could but Sly, who was in a position to take in the full scene. Every single head had swiveled his way as soon as he stepped out of the truck.

  Faye’s sweet face said that she’d been afraid all along that Sly would eventually break her husband’s heart.

  Kenny, Mickey, and Emily looked surprised to see Sly. Shocked, even. This might have hurt his feelings under other circumstances. The turmoil of the weeks after he stopped being able to work under Sophia Townsend had bonded the three shovel bums who had stayed on the job, so much so that it had slipped their minds that he was ever among them. Twenty-nine years can do strange things to the mind, especially when there are things that the mind actively wants to forget.