Burials

by Mary Anna Evans

  ***

  “I thought you weren’t coming.”

  Joe sat up in bed with a book in his hand. Was he waiting up for her? Had he been doing that all week while she obsessed over the fate of Sophia Townsend?

  “I was talking to your dad. Well, I was futzing around on the Internet and then I was talking to your dad. I’m sorry it’s so late.”

  She wanted to say, “What have you done to make me think you wanted me to come to bed?” but she swallowed that testy comment.

  As much as Joe might want to believe that nothing less than undiluted truth was acceptable, Faye knew that there were times when silence was better than saying the wrong thing. At the moment, there was only one thing she could say that was better than silence. She’d already said it to Roy Cloud when she should have said it to Joe first.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what? Some of it? All of it?”

  “All of it. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you that your dad’s potsherd linked him to Sophia and maybe to her murder. I just…I just didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want it to be true.”

  “You didn’t tell Cloud, either. What if my dad is guilty? You didn’t know him back then and he’s done some bad things. Maybe he did kill Sophia Townsend. Would you be happy if Dad got away with murder because you didn’t tell Cloud and Bigbee what you knew?”

  “I didn’t want that to be true, either.”

  Joe sat up straighter and pulled the covers up to his waist, but he didn’t invite her join him.

  “Dad didn’t tell me he worked for her. You didn’t tell me that he’s been keeping a potsherd she found for all these years. You didn’t tell Cloud about it, either. Carson didn’t tell anybody about that notebook he stole. As best I can tell Roy Cloud hasn’t done any lying, but he’s the only one.”

  “You’re both very honest people.” And maybe I just found out what attracts me to a man.

  “I didn’t want to hurt you,” she continued. “Or your dad. Not even Roy Cloud. The funny thing is that I did those deceitful things while I was trying so hard to get to the truth.”

  “Is that why you’re so obsessed with this woman’s death? I couldn’t figure it out, myself.”

  “Be fair. Until this morning, helping find Sophia’s killer was my job. Maybe I got carried away because I was afraid for Sly. And, knowing me, you know there was probably some unhealthy obsession with solving an unsolvable puzzle. Is that so wrong?”

  “No, not too much.” Joe pulled back the covers and fluffed up the pillow next to him. “Come over here?”

  She didn’t have to be asked twice.

  “Faye, look at all these people. Kenny. Mickey. Sophia. Carson. Secrets are their sickness. Don’t be one of them.”

  She stretched her full length along Joe’s body and pressed her lips to his neck. “Are we going to be okay?”

  He didn’t speak at first, and her heart stopped. Then he said, “Yes. Forever,” and reached for her with both hands.

  ***

  Faye knew all was well with the world when Joe greeted the morning with a griddle and his incomparable French toast, moist and eggy and heaped with powdered sugar.

  The smell of cinnamon and vanilla had also roused Sly, who was talking a blue streak and chugging down coffee. He seemed to have had enough of being Old Man Sly, because there was no shuffle in his feet and no stammer in his mouth. He was busy telling Joe about every single highway he’d traveled in 1987, and he was doing it in excruciating detail, but Joe didn’t seem to mind. He was, in fact, encouraging him.

  “Want some cream and sugar? So tell me more about driving across Death Valley in a truck with an iffy radiator.”

  Joe was a good listener, so he had both eyes fastened on his dad, but he held out a plate heaped high with carbs without looking and Faye grabbed it.

  “You two go ahead with your talk about Death Valley and eighteen-wheelers and don’t mind me. I haven’t done anything important this morning. I just figured out how to get in touch with somebody who probably talked to Sophia Townsend about her work in 1987 and, even better, probably remembers it. It may even be somebody who can help us prove that she was dead before you got home from your trip, Sly.”

  There. She’d admitted to Sly that his logbooks weren’t enough to clear him on their own. He didn’t even flinch. He was plenty smart enough to figure out the truth without her help. She’d been babying a grown man for no reason. She was going to have to stop protecting people.

  “Daughter, how do you plan to find somebody that remembers talking to her after all this time?” Sly said, tapping his empty plate with his fork so that Joe knew to reload it.

  “In her notes, she said that she was getting labwork that would have been very specialized at that time. Maybe even experimental. For whatever reason—either because American labs weren’t doing the test or because they charged too much—she had to use a Canadian lab to get the job done. How many analytical labs in Canada do you think were trying to test blood residue on ancient stone tools in 1987?”

  “I don’t know,” Sly said. “Do you?”

  “I’ve got the Internet and a telephone. Somebody knows and I will find them.”

  ***

  By the time Faye had finished her French toast in the Central Time Zone, Canadians in the Newfoundland, Atlantic, and Eastern Time Zones were at work. After she ran through all the analytical laboratories in those time zones, she could head west to the Mountain Time Zone and beyond. It was time to start rolling back the years to 1987.

  All morning, she talked to twenty-two-year-old lab techs who didn’t have much to say beyond “Eh?” but, by noon, she’d hit paydirt in the form of an illustrious professor who had been a grad student in 1987. He had worked in his dissertation advisor’s lab, doing work that was cutting edge, even experimental. When he told Faye that, she knew that all those phone calls had paid off.

  “I remember Sophia,” the professor said. “She had the most wonderful voice. I’ve forgotten most of our other clients, but I remember her.”

  Faye was getting a little tired of hearing about Sophia Townsend’s phenomenal sex appeal. At least it was proving helpful now.

  “I remember calling her to say that we’d failed to get enough blood residue to carbon date the spear point she sent.” He sounded like he was still sorry he’d disappointed her.

  “She would have sent it in late July of 1987. Is that the sample you’re talking about?”

  “Sounds right. I remember that it was a hot summer. And I remember that she sent a tiny little potsherd—plain, nothing fancy—for thermoluminescence testing sometime after that. Maybe the end of July? Early August? Anyway, I actually came up with a date for her on that. About a thousand years back, I think. I tried to call her several times to tell her the good news, but I never got through. Just left messages on her machine. Eventually, I mailed the report, but I never heard from her again.”

  Faye wondered if the report had languished in a post office box until it was thrown away. Maybe it was there still. Or maybe it was hiding in a deep-storage file kept by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.

  “She never sent you a pearl or a sample taken from a clay figurine?”

  “Nope. I’d remember something like a pearl. And I’d remember if I had ever heard her voice again.”

  ***

  So Sophia had disappeared from phone contact with the Canadian lab after she sent the plain potsherd for testing. Her notes were very clear that she had sent that potsherd a week before she disappeared. Faye thought that pointed to a death date shortly after she stopped writing in the journal, perhaps on the very day of the last entry, although that didn’t explain why two different people had reported evidence that she’d been home after that. She wasn’t too keen on talking to Roy Cloud, possibly ever again, but she really did need to tell him about the Canadian lab.

 
Maybe she could get away with an e-mail.

  When she opened her e-mail, she saw that Roy had already written to her.

  Dear Doctor Faye,

  Sometimes I am hasty when I’m under stress. In your shoes, I might have been just as quick to hightail it to Arkansas to look for clues if I thought it would save my father-in-law. Why don’t we hit the reset button? I need your skills.

  I’m probably smart enough to notice if you’re trying to cover for Sly, and I think you’re honorable enough not to do that. (Again.) If you promise to be straight with me from here on out, I’d like you to stay on as my consultant, even though it will naturally more get Bigbee’s goat if you do. Perhaps we shouldn’t tell him.

  Since I believe you’ll be willing to come back and help me out, I’m not going to waste time waiting for you to decide. Come to the station when you can. I’ll be there, buried under paperwork that is not doing a damn thing to solve this case for me. Bigbee says he’s spending the morning at his hotel trying to dig out from some of his other cases, so we will not have his judgmental eyes on us. That should be a relief.

  All the best,

  Roy

  PS—Keep your copies of the notes. It will be days before I have time to read them, and I probably wouldn’t understand the archaeological stuff anyway. You, on the other hand, are fully capable of teasing enough evidence to convict a murderer out of a stray mark Sophia Townsend left in the margin in 1987. Please do that soon, okay?

  ***

  Joe leaned against the kitchen door and watched Faye pack her briefcase. “Did you have any luck talking to Canada? Cloud will want to know.”

  “I did. And I think the answers I got should help your dad. Cross your fingers on that. Otherwise, Sly’s in a bad spot.”

  He saw her scratching around in the bottom of her purse, so he reached in the kitchen drawer and handed her a pen.

  “Remember the broken potsherd? Well, the Canadian professor said that Sophia sent him a small, plain potsherd just before she went silent. Don’t you think she would have sent him the least interesting part of the broken sherd? And don’t you think that the one I found was one of the engraved pieces, which she would have kept?”

  “And you think Dad’s got the third sherd? How’d he get it?”

  “He’s going to have to tell us that.”

  Joe was still leaning on the door like it needed him to hold it up. “That’s all real interesting, but what are you getting at?”

  “Why did I find a potsherd in Sophia’s grave? Why wasn’t it in one of those boxes of artifacts that had been stored all those years? We’ve been thinking that she might have surprised a thief with a canvas bag full of valuable artifacts—the pearls, the figurine, maybe more. By that logic, this person was probably the person who killed her, maybe by accident and maybe on purpose. Then the killer buried the artifacts with her, because selling them would make it possible to trace them back to the killer.”

  Joe thought for a moment. “The potsherd would have been packed up and in the shed by that time. The killer would have had to go through the storage boxes, find the potsherd, and put it in the bag with the other stolen stuff. Which wouldn’t have been that hard to do, but why? It’s not valuable, is it?”

  “Nope. We really need to find out whether one of her workers worked late with her that day. Nobody else but Sophia and her helper, if she had one, could have known they’d uncovered valuable grave goods. She says in her notes that she was planning to ask Mickey and maybe she did. Or maybe she changed her mind and asked Kenny or someone else. Or maybe she sent them all home and did the work by herself. If she wasn’t alone, then the person who stayed late might have killed her or told someone what they’d found. Word would have gotten around fast enough for somebody else to kill her. All indications, though, are that it was Mickey.”

  Joe announced, “I’ve thought he did it all along,” with a certainty that surprised Faye. Joe wouldn’t accuse a man of murder lightly. “Emily wasn’t the helper that day. That’s for sure. I don’t think she’s a good enough liar to convince Roy Cloud that she didn’t know about the pearls and the figurine.”

  “What about Kenny? I think he could tell Roy lies with a straight face. So could Mickey. Adulterers are usually very good liars.”

  “Could be. I’d rather think it was Mickey, because I don’t like him, but I’ve got a better reason for thinking it wasn’t Kenny. Stealing those things would go against his beliefs about disturbing burials goods.”

  “What if he really needed money?”

  “Nope. Don’t think so. What I do think is that he would have told Sophia straight-out that she was wrong to send that potsherd to a lab that was going to make dust out of it. I also don’t think he knew about the bone.”

  “I think they all knew about the bone.”

  “Yeah, but Sophia told them she thought it came from a deer. If Kenny thought for sure it was human, he would have reported it right away.”

  Faye couldn’t say that she disagreed. If she were Sophia and she had something to hide, it was the ethically flexible Mickey that she’d invite to help her. She shouldered her briefcase and gathered an armful of her copies of Sophia’s field notebooks.

  “Where do you think Alba fits into all this?” she asked. “The dead woman was having an affair with Alba’s husband. Roy’s got to be more suspicious of Alba than he lets on.”

  “No joke.”

  “If I were Alba, and if Sophia was fooling around with you, I might have killed her myself.”

  ***

  On her way out of the house to meet Roy, Faye did her habitual morning check of the mantel and found that the potsherd was still not there. She needed to find out how Sly got it, even if the conversation was painful for him. She knew of no other candidate for the man Sophia called the Hulk. It had not escaped Faye’s attention that the Hulk was the only employee that she had never insulted.

  In her last entry, Sophia had said that she gave a piece of her heart to a man with a wife and child. She had also said that she gave him a piece of the potsherd.

  The sequence of events between Sophia and Sly seemed pretty clear. Faye knew now how he got the potsherd, and she knew that Sly was a state away when she was last seen. He said he never saw her again after leaving on that trip, so she must have given him the sherd sometime after Emily broke it and before he left for California. Did Faye really need to know the details of his relationship with Sophia? Maybe. Those details could point to the killer.

  Asking Sly pointed questions about his relationship with Sophia could cause him pain, but Faye couldn’t afford to respect his secrets. Secrecy had upended her own life over the past few days, and it had protected Sophia’s killer for a lot of years. When Faye got home that evening, she and Sly needed to have a heart-to-heart talk.

  ***

  Roy Cloud was an obstinate man.

  Faye, for the fourth time, tried to explain to him that her conversation with the lab-tech-turned-professor proved that Sophia Townsend died on or shortly after August 7. More personally important to her was proving to Roy that she died while Sly was far away, and he knew it. Roy was having none of it.

  “She stopped responding to calls from the lab long before Sly got home,” she said. “You know she would have called the lab tech back, especially since he left messages telling her the good news.”

  “Maybe she had her reasons. Maybe she’d already left on that mysterious trip. Maybe she knew he’d eventually mail the report. Maybe she didn’t go quiet on him because she was dead. Maybe she had better things to do.”

  Faye slapped her hand on a printout of the last few pages of the last notebook. “Listen to this, Roy, because it’s even more important. Pearls are a whole different thing from potsherds and spear points. They were once alive. In a perfect world, they could be carbon-dated. There are complicating factors, especially with 1980s technology,
but still. She was working with a lab willing to try experimental analyses at the very edge of what was possible. If she had multiple pearls, and we know she did, I’m sure she would have sent one and asked them to go for the gusto. But she didn’t. She had to have been killed right after those pearls surfaced. I just know it.”

  Roy shook his head.

  Faye tried another tack. “Having read her notebooks, I see that writing in them was part of the fabric of her life. The best explanation for the lack of entries after August 7 is that she was dead after that.”

  “I hear what you’re saying and it’s good logic, but it’s not proof. Maybe she started another notebook that we don’t know about.”

  “Oh, fine. Be that way.” As a parting shot, Faye said, “If you’re wondering why the project budget was overspent with very little to show for it in the field, here’s your answer. She paid for multiple lab tests, and we know that they were experimental. Doesn’t that say to you that she was obsessed, possibly to an unhealthy degree, with putting an objectively measured date on the site? She wouldn’t have gone silent on the man who was helping her do that.”

  “Still not proof. If you want to change my mind, you’re going to have to do better than that, Doctor Faye.”

  “But Roy, you can’t—”

  The door behind her burst open. Alba strode in, followed by a stammering clerk telling her to stop doing what she had already done. “Ma’am, Chief Cloud is in a meeting and can’t be disturbed. I told you to wait outside. You can’t go in there. Ma’am!”

  Alba, as put-together as always, was rocking a pencil skirt, leather jacket, and ankle boots, all of them pale yellow. The boots’ tall, chunky heels did not slow her down.

  “Roy Cloud, I demand to know what you’re doing to protect my ex-husband and my son from the nut who’s running around Sylacauga with a gun. If you don’t keep them both safe, I’ll make you miserable for the rest of your life.”