Burials

by Mary Anna Evans

  “She’s going with me. If you people try to stop me, she dies. Tell Roy Cloud that if his people try to stop me, she dies. Highway Patrol, border guards, anybody that tries to get in my way, she’ll die and I’ll take a few of them out, too. Cloud will make sure they stay away from me. He’d be as sorry to see this one go as I was when Sophia went. I do believe he’s crazy about her.”

  Faye’s hearing faded and took her vision with it. Her head lolled onto Mickey’s shoulder. She barely had the strength to speak, but she did speak, and she was surprised to hear what she said.

  “She loves you.” Her voice was so low that it would have been inaudible if her lips hadn’t been brushing his ear.

  The arm around her chest squeezed her harder. Faye couldn’t breathe. The light dimmed again and the noise in her ears roared still louder.

  “Who? Who loves me?”

  All she could do was turn her fading eyes toward Alba, who was kneeling on the ground in her bloody yellow suit with both arms around her son. Mickey turned his head toward his ex-wife and Faye was never able to describe the look she saw there.

  Maybe it was love and maybe it was hate. Faye wanted to say that it was self-hatred, but that was too easy. Just because she was horrified by the things Mickey had done didn’t mean that he was. It was possible that Mickey had never given up on justifying his actions to himself, to Alba, to everybody.

  But he didn’t try to justify himself in that moment. He didn’t say any of the expected things, like “It’s not what you think,” or “I couldn’t stand the thought of going to jail,” or “I didn’t want to let my son know what I’d done.” He said only, “I wish—” without ever saying what it was that he wished.

  The next moment was one that Faye would try for the rest of her life to forget. And she would fail.

  The cool circle on Faye’s skin where the gun’s muzzle was resting suddenly warmed as he pulled it away from her cheek. Still looking at Alba, he put it to his own head, and pulled the trigger.

  ***

  It was a long while before Faye fully came to herself. Later, she would recall falling to the ground with Mickey’s dying body, scrabbling on her hands and knees to get away from it. She would remember Carson holding his mother back from his father’s corpse with all the strength in his massive arms, and still Alba had nearly broken free.

  Faye would always be able to call up the image of her husband running to her, dropping to his knees and taking her in his arms. She would never forget the sight of Sly standing among the carnage with a tire iron in his hand and nobody to smite with it. In those memories, Roy Cloud would always be barreling into view behind Sly at the very moment Mickey Callahan put his gun to her temple, because her unanswered phone and Alba’s had told him there was trouble, and his fine mind had told him where to go looking for it.

  She would remember Roy’s face, as dark and troubled as the sky above them, and she would remember the sound of the tornado siren screaming for them to take cover. She would always be able to call up the roaring noise coming from all around her. It had made the ground shake. It had caught in her bones and stayed there.

  After that she recalled nothing but darkness for a time, but clarity had returned in Alba’s dark basement. There had been no time to empty the storm shelter of its Christmas ornaments, and not enough room for them all, anyway. Alba’s basement had been forced to fill the need.

  Faye supposed Joe had carried her there, though she’d never asked him. She would never speak of that day to anyone ever again. She was sure that Carson had carried Alba, who never stopped screaming for Mickey, not even when the twister tore her roof away and they looked up into the underside of death.

  If the tornado had dropped the roof on them, none of them would have left the basement alive, but most of Alba’s roof was found the next day in the front yard of her late ex-husband’s house. A few scattered shingles were found at the Sylacauga site, miles away, and Faye would always suspect that they were Alba’s.

  Agent Bigbee spent the life of the tornado lying facedown in a ditch miles away from them, praying for it to pass over him, and it did. He had driven out into the rising storm, trying to respond to Cloud’s call reporting Emily’s death, only abandoning that goal when the twister nearly rolled his car off the road.

  Pieces of Mickey’s house were scattered all the way to town, and so were his guns. Faye would always imagine that his collected artifacts had been given back to the land that they never should have left.

  Kenny’s house had suffered a gas leak and burned to the ground before the rain even stopped falling. She would never learn the fate of the little figurine and the handful of pearls and the old skeleton that Kenny had stolen on the night that Kira Denton died. No trace of them was found in the house’s burned-out shell, nor was there any sign of Kenny’s old toolbox.

  Faye had never believed the figurine and pearls and bone were still aboveground when the tornado struck. As soon as Kenny recovered them from Sophia Townsend’s grave, she knew he would have reburied them in a place where they could rest in peace. Somewhere near Sylacauga, they lay underground, together, as they had always been and as they should be.

  Perhaps they were somewhere near the Sylacauga site, where the storm had flooded Carson’s excavation nearly to the rim. A fallen tree bridged it. There were more fallen trees than standing ones in the woods around the open hole, and the standing trees had lost half their branches. A sandy bluff had slumped into the creek where people had fished for generations.

  Some time later, representatives of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation would survey the site and judge that it would no longer make a very good park. Instead, they would place a historical marker on the highway nearby, documenting the presence of Mississippian-era cultural remains there and crediting the discovery to Drs. Sophia Townsend and Carson Callahan. The historical marker would also document the date and location of the most destructive tornado in Sylacauga’s history. The town itself, it would note, was unscathed.

  Faye would always disagree.

  Chapter Thirty

  Only four days after the tornado, Faye awoke to a loud, happy morning. Michael and Amande had flown in the night before, and Michael was lying on the kitchen floor doing what toddlers do when they’ve had too much excitement and too little sleep. He was screaming something about how much he missed the pony he’d ridden for his lessons. Faye was terrified that Joe was going to decide that this was an excellent time to buy him one. Rewarding this kind of behavior would ensure daily tantrums for the rest of their lives.

  Amande, who was pretty confident that she had destroyed the SAT before getting on the airplane, was swapping questionable jokes with Sly. Faye was trying not to listen or to laugh, but she was keeping her mouth shut. Her adopted daughter was practically grown. It was far too late for Faye to police her sense of humor.

  The unexpected knock on the front door reminded Faye of Emily, and she felt a pang. The knock came at a more humane hour than Emily might have chosen, but Faye and her family were still sitting around the breakfast table, so it was early enough. Faye opened the door and found Carson waiting outside.

  He skipped “Hello,” and began with, “I’ve let my employer know about the old burial and the pearls and the figurine. I’ve told the Muscogee Nation everything. It seems that they are probably going to let me keep my job as their tribal archaeologist, though for the life of me I couldn’t tell you why.”

  “The Creeks are gracious people. You know that.” Faye gestured for him to come in, but he was still talking and he seemed to want to do it while standing on the doorstep.

  “The Creeks are in touch with the preservation office and the wheels of NAGPRA are starting to roll, but it’s all a legal formality. They’ll never let anybody put a shovel in the ground at the Sylacauga site, not ever again. Fortunately, they’ve got a lot of ordinary everyday archaeology on other tribal lands that will keep me bus
y for as long as I want to work here, but I can’t tell you how long that will be.”

  Faye was glad to know what the Creeks were going to do, but she was looking at a man who had just watched his father and his almost-father die horribly. It didn’t seem right to be talking business. “How are you, Carson? Really, how are you? Come in.”

  Carson stepped through the door, but he was more in a mood to talk than listen. “I know you’ve figured out what happened with the notebook, which is the reason I deserve to lose my job.”

  “The last notebook?”

  He nodded.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong,” she said, “but I think the last notebook was never lost. It waited for years at the curation facility with all the other notebooks and with the artifacts found in 1987. When you grew up, it only made sense that you’d gravitate toward the project that fascinated you as a kid. As soon as you started your graduate work, you would have found those notebooks and devoured the information in them. When was that? About 1999? 2000?”

  “Something like that. I looked everywhere for the pearls and the figurine that she drew in that last notebook. And those bones. They weren’t at the curation facility. I ransacked the warehouse where the Creeks store things they don’t use but don’t want to throw away. I did the same thing at the university, which has a lot more places to store things and forget about them than the Creeks do. I really thought I’d find them. I mean, a skeleton? Come on. Who would have thrown that away without a word?”

  “But you never told anybody. I figure it’s because you knew that those bones could complicate the work you wanted so much to do. As you just said, the Creeks know about them now and they’ve stopped all work at the site.”

  Carson dropped his gaze. Studying his feet was preferable to meeting Faye’s appraising eyes. “I told myself that I’d pull the plug if I found those bones. Until I had them, though, they weren’t real. All I had were a few words on a page.”

  “So you hid the page.”

  He raised his eyes and there was challenge there. “I could have destroyed the page and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I couldn’t do that, so Sophia’s cabin seemed to be the perfect answer. Nobody was going to find it there. Even if they did, they wouldn’t know its significance. And even if someone did understand its significance, they wouldn’t know I put it there. Why would they suspect it? It was Sophia’s notebook and it was in Sophia’s house.”

  “But if the situation ever changed, you could fetch the notebook and have the information you needed. And you wouldn’t be carrying the guilt of destroying something irreplaceable.”

  No answer. Just the same challenging gaze.

  “Was there anything else in that notebook that you didn’t want the world to know?”

  “No. Not at all. Actually, there was something wonderful in it. I know you’ve only seen the last few pages of the notebook, so you can’t know what else Sophia found that day.”

  Faye couldn’t stay angry with Carson when he let his enthusiasm show. “What?”

  “A hearth. She found the charcoal she needed to date the site. That’s why I’ve been burning to dig here. Don’t look at me that way. As far as I knew, the pearls and figurine were long gone, boxed up and stored somewhere. The bones might still have been somewhere in one of those thirty-meter trenches, but what were the odds that one five-meter-square pit was going to uncover them?”

  “How did you choose that particular five-meter square?”

  “Like I told you, I did some magnetometry, and there it was. It was as clear an anomaly as you can hope to see with remote testing, too big and obvious to be a few old bones. At least that’s what I told myself. I thought it was the hearth. I thought I could do a quick dig, small and cheap, and bring up inarguable proof of the site’s age without much chance of disturbing the old burial.”

  In Carson’s shoes, she would have been just as excited, and she might have been just as reckless. She hoped not.

  “Hiding that notebook wasn’t a completely ethical solution,” he said, “but I thought it was ethical enough. You’re free to spread the word to all our colleagues and let them pass judgment.”

  “I’m inclined to think that you’ve been through enough hell lately.”

  The challenge on his face melted and Faye was glad for a moment, until he broke into tears. Fear and anger had been propping him up, and she’d taken it away.

  Joe heard the sobs and came to help. Together, they led him into the kitchen and poured him a cup of strong coffee that was not going to heal his troubles at all, but the routine of sweetening it and adding cream did stop his tears. Joe handed him a tall pile of pancakes doused in sorghum syrup, which wasn’t going to fix anything either, but the concern of the people around the table just might.

  “How’s Alba?” Sly asked. Faye cringed, thinking that a reminder of his bereaved mother might start Carson’s tears again, but the man held it together.

  “Not too bad, considering. She’s been staying with me since—” He drew a deep breath. “Since, well, you know. I’m sure she’ll sell the land where her house used to be, and I’ll probably sell Dad’s.”

  “Will you stay here?” Faye asked.

  Sly looked at her with a why-would-they-not? expression, but Joe didn’t. Faye’s husband knew that there were times when you just had to go.

  “I think Mom and I both know that staying here means we’ll probably be single for the rest of our lives. I’ve known for a long time that I want this.” He gestured at the cluttered kitchen, the screaming toddler, and maybe even the crappy rental house. “I want a family. If I haven’t already met the right woman here, I never will. Mom will probably move to Oklahoma City, where she can harass our public servants on a more regular basis. She doesn’t deserve to be alone forever, so I hope there’s somebody for her there. I don’t know where I’ll go. When I think about what it will be like to leave, I remember you, Joe. You left and you made it work. Just look around.” He raised his coffee cup in Joe’s direction and then Faye’s, Amande’s, Michael’s, and Sly’s. “Maybe I can get lucky enough to have a family like this.”

  “If you can find a woman dumb enough to have you,” Joe said, sitting down to his own breakfast. “And blind. She’d need to be blind.”

  “Like Faye, little buddy. Like Faye. Look what she married.”

  “Stay for lunch,” Sly said.

  Carson looked at his plate, which was loaded with about a million calories. “I probably won’t be able to eat again until next week sometime.”

  “Stay till you’re hungry. I reckon it’s been about thirty years since I bought you a cheeseburger.”

  ***

  The call came while Faye was putting Michael down for a nap, so she waited until he was quiet before she returned it.

  “You did good, Doctor Faye.”

  “It doesn’t feel like I did good. How many people are dead?”

  “Did you pull any triggers? I didn’t see you pull any triggers. I carry some blame for Emily, for sure. I didn’t see what kind of danger she was in. What did you do wrong?”

  Faye leaned against the wall outside Michael’s room and slid slowly down to sit on the floor. She needed to keep her voice down so that she didn’t wake her son. “There had to be some way to get the truth out of Mickey and Kenny that didn’t end with them being dead.”

  “I’ve been running scenarios in my head since the day it happened. I could’ve done this thing. I could’ve done that thing. If I’d done this other thing, maybe I’d have figured everything out right away and Kira would still be with us. It’s my job to carry guilt like that. It’s not yours. Let it go.”

  She stared at the wall where Sly had hung the pictures of the kids that she’d sent him. “Maybe someday.”

  “You’re the one who knew what to say to Mickey. In your shoes, with that gun to my head, I would’ve said the wrong
thing and you might be dead. Carson. Alba. Sly. Me, too, I guess.”

  She wanted to answer, but all she could give him was a long sigh.

  “I’ve been thinking about Sophia’s necklace.” Roy’s voice was cool, almost casual, as if he’d like her to believe that thinking about the necklace didn’t break his heart.

  Faye could do cool and casual, so she pretended that she didn’t know what necklace he could possibly mean. “The silver one with the little sigma?”

  “Yeah, that one. I think it’s going to go missing from the evidence file. Not tomorrow and not next week, but someday.”

  “Say something like that went missing. Where might it go?”

  “It belongs in Alabama on the Creek reservation where Sophia lived for all of her growing-up years, the place where good people who never knew her are making sure she gets a proper burial. I can’t tell you why I don’t want to give them the necklace, too, but I don’t.”

  “It’s as much a memorial to Emily as it is to Sophia. I think it should be in the keeping of somebody who understands that.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  Somehow, she knew that he wasn’t finished speaking so she waited for what came next.

  After a good long pause, Roy proved her right, “There’s bound to be a good place to bury Sophia’s necklace somewhere on that reservation.”

  Faye nodded her agreement, as if Roy were there to see. Then she made herself speak up so that he could hear her. “I live in the Florida Panhandle, not so far from Alabama. If somebody wanted help burying that necklace, I own a shovel.”

  “Good to know.”

  Again, Roy waited a moment to speak, and the quiet interval felt to Faye like Roy’s own elegy for the people who had been lost.

  “Tell you what,” he said, breaking the silence. “I get oddball cases like this sometimes. This probably won’t be the last time I need an archaeology doctor to help me. When I do, I’ll hire your company and you’ll get a free trip to come see Sly. You can bring his grandkids to see him. Joe, too. Everybody wins, right?”