Airtight Case (12 page)

“I didn’t come here to spy. I came here under direction from Francisco Lewis to help out at the site. Today I spoke with Lewis. I asked if he had any ulterior motive for sending me here. He and Keith York are friends. He said York is concerned about the Tidwell accusations—not that he believes the accusations, but he doesn’t want rumors to get out of hand. Lewis, as is his way, told York I could come take a look. As is also his way, he didn’t tell me until I’d been up here a week. I’m not a spy, and I believe Lewis and York simply thought I could help in some way. Lewis seems to think I’m good at damage control.”

“Are you?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t know any of my colleagues who would call me diplomatic.”

A hint of a smile played around Drew’s lips. “But you do have a knack for solving things. I’ve read about you.”

“It’s what we archaeologists do, isn’t it?”

“I didn’t kill that Tidwell woman, and I didn’t steal anything of hers.”

“As far as I know, no one but Alfred Tidwell thinks you did, and from what Sharon and Bill said at dinner, he’s probably just trying to get a settlement.”

“The only papers any of us saw were from the historical society, and they have the originals.” Drew leaned her head back against the wall and looked at the ceiling. “Maybe he thought those papers were hers.”

“Have York get you a lawyer.”

“My husband’s a lawyer. He said he’ll sort it out.”

“Then it’s on its way to being solved.”

“I don’t want a public record of these accusations against me.” Drew stood up. “Did you tell that process server, Broach Moore, I was here?”

Lindsay stood. “No, I didn’t. Why on earth would I? I have my own problems.”

Drew focused on the woods in the distance, as if trying to see something that made sense to her.

“Maybe it was Mr. Laurens or his wife who tipped Moore off. They live in the community. Maybe they thought it was their duty.”

“Maybe Adam was right,” Lindsay suggested. “Perhaps Moore came back looking for his truck and just saw you. I can tell you, he loves that truck.”

Drew shrugged. “Maybe. Look. I’ll tell Claire to lay off you. I know she’s not easy to get along with.” She pulled back the curtain and started to leave, hesitated, and turned back to Lindsay. “I’d prefer you not investigate this Tidwell business. After all, it isn’t your or Lewis’s concern, is it?”

“No it isn’t. I didn’t really plan to do anything but talk to you anyway. This was not my idea. There is one other thing.”

“What’s that?” Drew let the curtain drop.

“Trent. It’s obvious that he stays in some kind of altered state of awareness. You really need to have a talk with him.”

“Have you seen him using drugs?”

“No. But this is a big house. I have a theory that some of the knocking and tapping sounds are Trent going either to the attic or the basement. I know others at the site are concerned about it. If this thing with Tidwell does end up in court, it won’t help your case if a member of the crew under your supervision is caught buying or using drugs.”

“That’s a good point. I’ll speak with him.” Drew smiled and left.

Lindsay hoped Drew would remember to see about a door. Maybe John would build her one. She sat back down on her bed and studied the maps. As she leafed through the ground-penetrating radar profiles, an anomaly jumped out at her. It was in the profile that sliced through the trash pit—where Adam was digging a trench. Something large and solid about four feet deep. She carefully examined the other profiles and found a similar pattern at the same depth in the slice through the feature she believed to be a cemetery. Lindsay circled the suspicious shapes. She had an inkling of what they might be. She had seen a radar profile with a dense signature like this before. This kind of discovery was far more interesting than whatever drama Drew and the local community residents were playing out.

She thought about showing the anomalies to Drew but decided against it. Right now, Drew was probably too focused on her legal problems to appreciate the possibilities. Tomorrow would be soon enough. Instead, Lindsay changed into her nightshirt and slipped under the covers with a book she’d been wanting to read, an autobiography of a female forensic anthropologist.
Maybe I should write a book
, she thought as the room grew dark, leaving only a small circle of lamplight at the head of her bed.

She didn’t know how it happened, but suddenly it was pitch dark and she was lying on something lumpy. She couldn’t breathe. She strained to take a breath, and jerked with a spasm of coughing. Something grainy was in her mouth . . . Dirt? Was it dirt? She tried to spit it out, but couldn’t. It was harder to breathe, and her head ached. She could die from the pain. She wanted to hold her head in her hands, but her arms were pinned. Some heavy thickness covered her entire body. She felt paralyzed, unable to move. She panicked, tried to cry, but choked on whatever was in her mouth. She was blind, or in the dark, or her eyes were closed.

Open your eyes.

Darkness.

Open them!

Glittering shafts of light danced for a moment, then were gone, then were back and gone again. There was a small hollow of space around her head, a small place that wasn’t covered by the heavy thickness, but the space was disappearing. Every struggle to move made the space smaller.

You have to move. You have to move
.

She lifted and pushed her right arm with all her strength . . . until she felt . . . a breeze. Something fell on her face. She felt panic.

Move. Move. Hurry. Struggle harder.

She rose from her grave.

Lindsay jerked awake grappling with the sheet covering her head, gasping for breath. Her heart beat so fast and hard her hand went to her chest to hold it. She stayed in that position, frozen with nauseating fear.

Oh, God, don’t let me relive this every night.

Her breaths were as ragged as if she were still . . . still there. She gathered the strength to get out of bed and slip on her shoes. Shaking from head to foot, she grabbed her robe and slipped it on as she stumbled through her curtains and down the hall.

The bathroom door was closed and she saw a thin strip of light coming from under it. Someone was there.
Damn. What time is it? Why don’t people stay in bed?
she thought irritably as she started downstairs to the bathroom on the first floor. The stairs were dark. Why hadn’t she thought to bring a flashlight? She walked slowly, keeping a hand on the wall. Except for the creaking, the dark confined space reminded her of the cave she’d been lost in. The stairway was like the long cave tunnels she had wanted to lead upward, but invariably led down.

It’s a staircase
, she told herself over and over.
A staircase. You know where it leads.

The tiny bathroom at the bottom of the stairs, thankfully, was unoccupied. She fumbled with the light switch and made a mental note not to drink anything before she went to bed at night. She wished she had brought some aspirin with her. Her head was splitting.

Lindsay crossed over to the sink and turned on the faucet. She glanced into the mirror over the sink and jumped back. She would have screamed if she had any breath in her. It wasn’t her face staring back at her. It was the face of a girl with flaming red hair, freckles, deep green eyes, and features contorted in terror.

Chapter 12

Something In The Trench

LINDSAY STARED AT the face, not moving, not realizing that she was holding her breath until her lungs forced her to gasp for oxygen. She closed her eyes and rubbed her eyelids with the tips of her fingers. When she looked in the mirror again, her own face stared back at her, pale and frightened.

God, what was that?
Lindsay reached out and touched the mirror. Was it a trick of the light? How could the light have changed her image to such a ghastly reflection? A ghost?
There’s no such thing as ghosts.
Insanity?
No, not that, please.

She shook as she washed and dried her hands, avoiding looking in the mirror again. At the bottom of the staircase, she stopped cold. Unable to walk back up the dark narrow stairs, she turned and ran out the front door of the house to the safety of her Explorer.

The metal door handle of the truck was ice cold to the touch. The upward pressure of her grasp on the handle caused the interior light of the vehicle to come on. She pulled on the door. It was locked. What was the door keypad code? Her mind was blank.

Stop and think . . . Fox . . . the dental formula for a fox.

Her finger flew over the keypad. The door unlocked with a loud click. Once inside the safe chamber, she slammed the door behind her, belatedly worrying about waking up the household. But the windows were all still dark.

In the relative safety of the SUV, she started to cry. Her sobs were checked by some deep-seated inhibition against displaying weaknesses. If someone saw her run out of the house, it wouldn’t do to have red swollen eyes in the morning.

Why do I care? What’s wrong with me?

She wiped her eyes, feeling alone and needing to talk to someone friendly. But who? Her friends and family would only worry. Her enemies would use it against her. Everyone would think she had lost her mind.

She should talk to John, but his company had been awarded a big project that required his full attention. He couldn’t be worried with holding her hand. Her brother would want to come get her. Her good friend Harper was gone to Spain. Her parents didn’t know the whole story. There was no one.

She thought of Derrick. Perhaps she could talk to him—Derrick, her ex-fiancé, at one time her best friend. The usually unflappable Derrick had come close to yelling at her.

“Lindsay, dammit, you just barely escaped permanent damage to your brain—your brain, Lindsay!”

As if that were worse than death. Maybe it was worse for her, and maybe she had come close to dying so many times that Derrick was used to that danger. No he wasn’t. It was why he’d left her.

“You’re a danger junkie, Lindsay,” he had said to her. “You’ve made danger an intellectual pursuit. I just can’t take standing by, watching you go from one peril to the next.”

What would he say now? That he’d warned her. That she’d finally done it. No, she couldn’t talk to Derrick.

Get a hold of yourself,
said that inner voice that was the core of her.
You just saw something. People do that. It’s not a big deal. The doctors said your brain is fine. The scans found nothing wrong. Do your work here, or go home, one or the other, but don’t fall apart.

She opened the sleeping bag she kept tucked behind the driver’s seat and let the back seat down. When she finally settled into the fleecy warmth, she fell asleep thinking those thoughts over and over.

Don’t fall apart.

She was awakened by the ringing phone. Why was the phone ringing in her room?—it didn’t have a phone. She wasn’t in her room. It was her car phone. She stretched forward and grabbed the phone.

“Yes?”

“Lindsay, is this you? My old eyes must have made a mistake. I was calling Emily. I’m sorry if I disturbed you.”

It was George West, Cherokee elder and John’s father. Lindsay rubbed her eyes and looked out the window. It was still dark out, even the house was still and unlit. She settled back deep in her sleeping bag.

“You didn’t disturb me. I’m glad you called.”

“And how are you?”

“I’m fine. I . . .”

She fumbled through an account of her middle of the night experience, feeling silly when she had finished.

“So, you had a vision.”

“A hallucination, I imagine.”

There was a pause. Lindsay saw a light come on in the window of the second-floor room where Drew and Claire slept. The house was waking up.

“What were you doing before your encounter in the mirror?”

“I’d awakened from a dream . . . about what happened to me.”

“And before that?”

“I was reading about the history of the site. Normal archaeological information . . . there was some stuff about ghosts. The, uh, house I’m staying in is supposed to be haunted.”

Lindsay heard a car. Mrs. Laurens’ old Buick was rounding the curve to the side parking lot. She was arriving to make breakfast.

“So you read about ghosts, dream about your ordeal, then see something strange in the mirror in the middle of the night. If that happened to John, what would you tell him?”

“That the play of shadows distorted his features and he saw his fears. Apparitions in mirrors are fairly clichéd ghostly stuff that taps into childhood fears. His subconscious expected to see something scary in the mirror, and he did.”

“Why can’t you tell yourself that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you can’t because you are afraid that your mind is no longer reliable and you feel guilty for allowing yourself to get hurt. You think?”

“I suppose.”

“John works with a lot of complex machines. Sometimes when one is moved to a new place it has to be recalibrated. And sometimes the machine is working right, but the operator misreads it. Either way, it’s not the machine’s fault. It’s doing what it’s supposed to. Maybe your brain is not failing, but working the way it should.”

Lindsay was silent.

“You have had visions before.”

“I can mentally reconstruct an archaeological site to its original condition, but that’s because I have data and understand what it means.”

“Maybe you just don’t know what this means yet.”

“You think it means something?”

“It means something. Maybe just your fear. But that doesn’t mean your brain’s not working.”

“Thanks, George. I’m glad you called.”

“I’m glad I did, too. Take care of yourself.”

Lindsay was smiling when she got out of the Explorer and walked up the steps to the house. As she opened the door, she realized she had left it unlocked. She tiptoed past the guys’ bedroom—the round room directly under hers. The stairs were much less foreboding this morning. She managed to make it up to her room without passing anyone, without having to explain what she was doing running around in her robe.
Not that it should matter
, she thought, as she slipped on her work clothes and went back downstairs.