Burials

by Mary Anna Evans

  Joe reached for her phone. The last photo taken was still on the screen. He thumbed through the next few pages, stopping abruptly when he saw Sophia’s drawing.

  “That’s Dad’s potsherd. The little heart that he’s kept for years. Faye. What’s going on?”

  The crunching gravel and billowing dust spared her from having to answer. She got out of the car and waited for the betrayed look on Roy Cloud’s face when she told him what she’d done.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  “I can’t believe you did this, Faye.”

  Roy looked just as betrayed as she’d expected, and it was no surprise that he’d dropped the endearing “Doctor Faye.” They’d worked together for days, seeking justice. Then, as soon as she felt the need to defend a loved one, she had driven like a madwoman so she could be sure she had enough time to subvert justice.

  Technically.

  She was technically interfering with the investigation, but she wasn’t trying to subvert justice. She just wanted to help Sly, a man she believed in her heart to be innocent. This did not make what she’d done right. And she’d dragged Joe into it, which didn’t make her proud of herself, either.

  Did good results mitigate an action that was wrong? Faye wasn’t willing to wade into that ethical territory, but the result of her action was that Bigbee and Cloud now knew that the notebook existed. He also knew that Carson had some reason to want it. Part of that reason seemed to be that he didn’t want the law to have it.

  Most of all, Cloud and Bigbee now had copies of some of the pages from that missing notebook, because Faye had taken pictures of them. This was probably the reason they were still listening to what she had to say, instead of yelling at her or arresting her or something.

  She had held her phone out to Cloud, saying, “It’s only the last few pages and I haven’t had time to read them yet, but I think you’ll recognize a couple of the drawings.”

  He’d whistled when he saw the drawings of the figurine and the pearls. When he got to the other drawing he said, “I’ll be damned. There’s the potsherd you found in the grave. The design on it is unmistakable.”

  When Joe heard Cloud say that Faye had found one of the other potsherds, she felt his eyes on her. She and Joe were lovers and partners. They shared everything. They had no secrets from each other. Rather, they’d had no secrets until she chose not to tell him that she’d found a sherd in an unmarked grave that matched the one his father had inexplicably hidden.

  Knowing that this conversation could go nowhere good, Faye told Cloud and Bigbee what she knew anyway. She was done with being dishonest and secretive. She didn’t do it well.

  “I think I know where the other two pieces are,” she said, looking into the eyes of three men who all had good reasons not to trust her any more.

  “Do you plan to tell me?” Cloud asked.

  “Do you remember how Sophia wrote that she’d argued with Kenny about lab tests? That’s because they often require a sample of the object being tested. There are ethical issues with damaging or destroying something irreplaceable, just to find out how old it is. Kenny apparently objected to her doing that, possibly because he felt that it disrespected the ancestors who made these things. See this piece of the sherd, the plain one with no decoration?”

  Cloud gave her a curt nod.

  “Imagine you’re Sophia. You want to test the sherd very badly. You’re working with an experimental lab that may need even larger than usual samples. Emily considerately breaks it for you. Don’t you think you might send the plain, boring piece of pottery to the lab? They could test it, destroy it, whatever, but the interesting part of the sherd is preserved. Even better, it wasn’t you that damaged the object to collect a sample.”

  “So where’s the third sherd? And why didn’t you tell me you knew where it was, or that it even existed at all?”

  This was going to be the hardest revelation of all. It would reveal to Roy that she’d been keeping an important piece of evidence from him to protect her father-in-law. It would reveal the same thing to her trusting husband. And it would vault Joe’s father to the top of the suspect list.

  It killed her to lose Joe’s trust and Roy’s respect, but it had to be done.

  “Sly has the third potsherd. Well, he had it when we got here, but it’s been days since I saw it. He’s had it for a very long time.”

  “You’re fired.”

  Roy’s head whipped in the direction of Bigbee’s voice.

  The agent repeated himself. “You’re fired, Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth. Insubordination is intolerable.”

  “She’s not yours to fire.” Roy’s voice was clipped and cool. “She’s my consultant. I’m the one paying her.”

  “Are you forgetting that this isn’t your case, Cloud?”

  “I am not. But that doesn’t mean that she’s yours to fire. I’ll say if she works for me or not.” Focusing his black eyes on Faye’s, he said, “You’re fired, Faye.”

  ***

  The ride home was long and silent. Joe didn’t ask Faye why she hadn’t told him that his father’s potsherd linked him to Sophia Townsend’s murder, and he didn’t ask her why she’d kept the information from Roy Cloud, too.

  About halfway back to Sylacauga, he looked at her and said, “Sometimes I think I don’t even know you.” Then he shifted his eyes back to the road and said nothing more.

  When they got home, they found Sly sitting at the kitchen table, filling the ashtray full of ashes and cigarette butts. The wreath of smoke around his head made Faye queasy, and so did the smear of grease on the plate by his elbow. At least he had eaten something.

  “If Cloud asked me once whether I’d ever had an argument with Sophia, he must’ve asked me a dozen times. I told him no. I got along with Sophia better than the rest of ’em did.”

  He brought the cigarette to his mouth, then held it suspended there without taking a drag. “I did. She said I was smarter than those two college boys put together. And almost as big as the two of ’em put together. Gracious, she worked us hard. There was a time when I thought I might die right there in the pit. Sunstroke. Heart attack. Something like that.”

  Sly finally put the cigarette between his lips and drew in a breath.

  “Is that why you quit, Dad?”

  The smoke left Sly’s lungs and Faye’s eyes watered. He didn’t look at his son, but he answered him.

  “Nah. Whatever else I ever did wrong, I ain’t never been scared of hard work. But I was a little scared of Sophia. When Cloud asked me why I quit that job I needed bad, I told him that married people who spent too much time with Sophia Townsend didn’t generally stay married too much longer. I needed my wife more than I needed that job.”

  Joe, who had been looking at his hands folded in his lap, lifted his head. He met Sly’s eyes, and Faye could see the anger at his father for keeping secrets fade. Whenever Sly needed to patch things up with Joe, now or in the future, all he would ever have to do would be to remind Joe that he had loved Patricia.

  Faye didn’t have that advantage. She had never seen Joe as angry with her as he was right now, and she had no idea what it would take to make things right between them.

  “After Cloud left to go to Sophia’s cabin, we all stood together—me, Mickey, Kenny, Emily. We talked like thirty years ain’t passed. And nothing had changed. The three of them stood away from me in a little knot and said things that sounded nice but wasn’t. Well, not Emily. She ain’t never said a mean thing in her life. It was Mickey that said, ‘You did the right thing to go. I think Sophia yelled at you every day that rolled.’ I said it looked to me like she was yelling at all of us and he just grunted.”

  “Mickey was always full of himself,” Joe said. “Even a kid can tell that. I used to feel sorry for Carson.”

  Now it was Sly’s turn to look up from the hands that were tearing apart the cigarette he’d inte
nded to light next. He looked like he wanted to say, “You’re telling me that you thought some other kid had a worse dad than you did?”

  Instead, he said, “Emily is an odd one, but sometimes she ain’t far wrong. She said, ‘You missed her after you left, didn’t you?’ I knew Mickey and Kenny would go running to Cloud and tell him I looked like the kind of man who would kill a woman he thought was sexy, but I didn’t lie. I said, ‘Yeah, Emily. I missed her. I missed all of y’all, and you can believe that or not. It don’t make no matter to me.’”

  Joe took the torn-up cigarette out of his father’s hand and put it in the ashtray. “What did Kenny say?”

  “He said, ‘Things weren’t the same after you left.’ Maybe he meant he wished I’d stayed, but maybe he meant that his world looked a lot more cheery without me in it.”

  As bad as things were, Sly’s clear-eyed understanding of his so-called friends made Faye want to smile.

  Like most smokers, Sly never knew what to do with his hands when they were empty. He reached for his cigarette pack again. “Kenny said something else double-edged. He said, ‘I never understood why you left,’ when what he really meant was ‘I never understood how you could leave her.’ Then he just looked at me like he thought I killed the woman, when everybody standing there knew that he wrecked his own marriage for her. Mickey, too. And now they have the gall to let people think I might be the one that done wrong. God knows what they said about me to Cloud.”

  “You don’t think they told him you killed her, do you? Dad?”

  Sly fetched the frayed cigarette out of the ashtray and finished destroying it. Then he shook another one out of the pack and lit it. “I don’t know what they said. I don’t want to think about it and I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Faye and Joe sat with Sly awhile and watched him smoke, but he had nothing more to say to them. It appeared that Faye’s husband had nothing more to say to her, either. After a while, she decided she couldn’t stand the silence any more, so she packed her briefcase and left. Neither man said good-bye.

  ***

  Faye had left Sly’s house without a plan. She’d wanted to read the pages that she’d been able to copy out of Sophia’s final notebook, but it wasn’t like she had an office where she could work. She pulled into a parking space on Sylacauga’s brick-paved Main Street, planning to burn a bunch of gasoline to keep the car cool so she could sit there and read.

  The sky was tumultuous with blowing clouds and Faye was glad that Sophia Townsend’s bones were no longer exposed to the elements. She would have said that it would rain any moment, but she’d thought that ever since they got back from Arkansas. Oklahoma clouds had a way of threatening rainstorms without delivering. That is, they made you think they weren’t going to deliver, then they unleashed a deluge when you least expected it.

  Just as she was getting settled, she noticed that the dress store shared space with a coffee shop. It even had Wi-Fi. Faye figured she’d rather give her money to a local business than to an oil company, so she turned off the gas-slurping car and went inside seeking air conditioning and a latte.

  After uploading the notebook pages from her phone to her computer, she could finally get a detailed look at what they said, even to the details of Sophia’s tight, controlled handwriting. Faye read about her frustration with the Canadian lab that couldn’t retrieve DNA from a stone knife. She studied the meticulously detailed drawing of the three pieces of the broken potsherd. And then she reached the last entry, Sophia Townsend’s last known written communication.

  Excerpt from the field notes of Dr. Sophia Townsend

  August 7, 1987

  Why do the most interesting and troublesome finds always come on a Friday afternoon?

  This afternoon, Ladybitch pulled a piece of a rib from the ground and miraculously failed to break it into smithereens. It was pretty big, and therefore it looked pretty startling lying there in the dirt. She asked me, in that tremulous voice that I find endlessly annoying, whether it was human.

  It can be hard to tell with a single bone that you’re not even finished digging up, so I said maybe. Or maybe it was from a deer or something, but yeah. I think it’s human, and isn’t that going to make my life hell? There are laws against burial desecration and that’s just fine. I’m a law-abiding citizen, when I’m not behind the wheel of a car that has enough horsepower to really move, but I do not have the budget to wait for some bureaucrat to dick around. More to the point, I doubt the Creeks will go ahead with the project if they learn that this is a burial site. Why would they disturb the dead so they can build an archaeological park to honor the dead?

  I need to know whether I have really uncovered a human burial before I involve the bureaucrats. Ladybitch will have a weeping fit if it turns out to be human. She might have a weeping fit, anyway, even if that rib does belong to a deer or—I don’t know, maybe a bear. She cannot stay here while I do more digging to check out the situation.

  Stupidface and his misplaced tribal pride would be equally troublesome. If we found a broken piece of a fish bone the length of my thumbnail, he would want to call in the authorities to make sure the little fishy’s spirit wasn’t disturbed. No. Just no. He has got to go, too.

  I may let Idiot stay and help me, or I may send him home. He certainly does not have Stupidface’s moral qualms and he’s big enough to be of some actual use, but he likes to help with the detail work and he’s simply not good at it. I may need to do this by myself.

  ***

  Damn. The bone was human and it’s got friends. I’ve moved more soil than I should have, enough to see that there’s probably an entire skeleton here. And that’s not all. It’s almost certainly very old, because there were the most amazing things buried with it.

  There were pearls scattered around the throat area, serious pearls, big ones that show that these people had a trade network extending to the Gulf of Mexico. Even better, there was a museum-quality clay figurine an arm’s-length away from the skeleton. For the record, I will say that I found it before I knew there was a burial here. I will also say, for the record, that the pearls also turned up before I had confirmed that this was a burial. Otherwise, I would have left the grave goods where they lay.

  These things are now locked safely in the shed, but they are too valuable to stay there for long. I need to get them to the Creeks and help them decide where to curate them and everything else I found all this summer. They are the most spectacular finds of my career. They’re going to sink this project, but those are the breaks. If these were my people, and I guess they are, I would want them to protect their past.

  I might as well call it a night. I’m already pushing my luck with the law, so I’m just going to throw a tarp over the bones and call my client.

  But first, I want to enjoy this last quiet evening in a most beautiful spot. I want to watch the fireflies come out and I want to listen to the night sounds begin. I want to put the finishing touches on this sketch of the figurine and the pearls, so that I’ll have something to remember this place by. And I want to work some more on the sketch of three broken pieces of an old, old potsherd that will never be reunited in this life. I sent one piece to a lab, where they destroyed it for nothing. Fool that I am, I gave another piece away. I, Sophia Townsend, who never gave her heart to anybody, has given it away to a man with a wife and child.

  I suppose I’ll never get it back.

  When this long day is finally done, I’ll go home and start hustling up another job. My heart’s not in it this time. Maybe this is what happens when you get older, or maybe it’s because there’s someone here that I’d rather not leave. I have so gloried in my solitude and independence that it has taken me a long time to get lonely, but I’m lonely now.

  So before I face the long ride home and the long days in a house built for one, I will let my paper and pencils keep me company. We have traveled a long road together and there are mor
e miles to come.

  I’m feeling low tonight, but I will rise to the occasion come morning. I always do.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Faye’s latte was cold. She’d neglected it while reading Sophia Townsend’s last field notes, but she was too cheap not to drink it. She was down to the dregs when her phone rang.

  Instead of hello, Carson said, “I’m sorry I’ve been an asshole. Sorry. Really sorry. I mean it. Sorry.”

  Her first thought was I really shouldn’t have to put up with drunk calls from a man who is not an ex.

  She looked at her watch. It was past four. Carson sounded like he’d been in his cups since he got home from Sophia’s cabin, maybe since he left the funeral.

  She flailed around for something to say. “You haven’t been that bad. You—”

  “Yeah, I have. Maybe I wasn’t out-and-out mean, but I sure wasn’t nice. I could have helped you out. Should’ve helped you out. I could have been nicer—yeah, that’s the word, nice—and I wasn’t. Nice, I mean. It’s not your fault my project got shut down. We found the body of a murdered woman, for God’s sake. What did I think was going to happen?”

  She heard the telltale gurgle of a man who was making a drunk call even worse by continuing to drink.

  “Well, I accept your apology, whether or not it was necessary.” Faye said this in a firm, we-don’t-really-have-to-talk-about-this-now voice that she hoped would end the call while Carson was still making some sense and before he started crying.

  Carson was long past being able to take a hint, so he kept talking. “Oh, it was necessary. Necessary. Did I really think Roy Cloud would trust me when my own dad was one of his murder suspects? I did not. No, not good ol’ Roy, not when he’s got the clout to get me barred from my own job. I could’ve helped him with the murder investigation, but he’s shut me out. Totally.”