Effigies (20 page)

But not today. She had no interest in wading into a cave filled with waist-deep water, not without a change of clothes. And not when they were already pushing their chances of getting back to the car before dark.

And certainly not when Mr. Judd looked measurably sicker every minute he stood looking at the place where he’d suffered so completely. “The water’s up farther than I thought,” he muttered. “The floor of that cave was dry. Almost dry. There were a few puddles, and it was mucky everywhere, but…” His voice trailed off, and he turned a pair of eyes on Faye that simply broke her heart.

“Let’s find us a cemetery hill,” she said briskly, grabbing his elbow and dragging him over to a spot where the bank dipped down almost to the level of the creek. Not looking where she was going, she stepped hard into a spot where the creek grew suddenly deeper. If she hadn’t had a good hold on Mr. Judd’s arm, she would have toppled right in.

Faye stared down into the hole’s cool, clear depths, unable to forget her memory of Mrs. Nail’s voice. She’d said that water monsters, White People of the Water, lived in pools just like this one. She twitched her shoulders hard, trying to physically shake off the eerie story. Faye wasn’t superstitious, but standing here within spitting distance of the cave where Mr. Judd had suffered gave her the creeps. Thoughts of water monsters only made things worse.

She hauled Mr. Judd right out of the Waters of the State and onto Mrs. Calhoun’s land, saying, “Why don’t you look around?”

They all three saw it at once.

A small flat-topped hill, like a miniature of Mr. Calhoun’s tremendous mound, was clearly visible not far away. They had almost passed it.

Faye saw nothing to make her think that a cemetery had ever graced its top, nothing except a dirt track that curved up its side. Whether they are brought by a modern hearse, or hauled in a wagon, or carried by pallbearers, the dead in their caskets are heavy. It only made sense that some kind of driveway would be associated with a graveyard.

“There was an iron fence on top, draped with running roses,” Mr. Judd said, transfixed. “And one of those tall marble monuments that rich people put in their family plots. We’d be able to see them from here, if they were still up there.” He turned to Faye. “You realize that this means we were right?”

“You’re talking about our theory that you were attacked because you knew too much about Calhoun’s marijuana plot?”

“Yeah. If that plot was back there,” he pointed behind him, “and not far past it is this mound where the cemetery was. And not far past
it
is the cave where I hid just a week later after somebody tried to kill me right nearby. Well, it just seems like too much of a coincidence. Surely the field and the mound and the cave and the beating would all be connected somehow.”

“It’s still not proof,” Faye said, but, deep down, she agreed with him.

Chapter Twenty

It was obvious that Dr. Mailer hadn’t listened to a word that left Faye’s mouth. He had stopped casting caustic glances at the damp mud on her pants and shoes. Instead, his eyes kept wandering toward the floor, and his verbal responses had deteriorated to the level of an occasional grunt.

If she could have crossed the hotel lobby without running into her boss, he’d never have known about her semi-legal doings. As it was, she’d been caught hours after her workday ended, and she was far dirtier than she’d been the last time he saw her. She could hardly deny that she’d been up to something. She’d hoped that Mailer’s scientific curiosity would save her from his disapproval.

“I thought you’d be excited by what Joe and I found—another mound and maybe some prehistoric water diversion devices. Besides that, I still think that Calhoun’s mound might have been a bird effigy. Think of how beautiful it would have been when it was first built!”

“Well, we can’t do much besides think about it, now, can we? We’ve got no permission to even walk over and look at it. And you had no permission to go stomping through Mrs. Calhoun’s private property tonight.”

Faye opened her mouth to defend herself, but Dr. Mailer had finally started to talk. He wasn’t about to quit. “Don’t give me that stuff about ‘Waters of the State.’ You’re probably right, if you want to split legal hairs, but that won’t help Mrs. Calhoun’s feelings, if she finds out what you did. It also won’t help the bad publicity we’ll get if word gets out.”

Faye tried to talk again, but she failed.

“And you took Joe with you. You’re supposed to be the smart one.”

She blurted out, “Joe’s not dumb,” even though it wasn’t strictly pertinent to the conversation, because it just needed saying.

Dr. Mailer was relentless. “I know he’s not dumb, but he’s not savvy like you are, either. He depends on you. Why would you want to get that man in trouble?”

Faye was desperately grateful she hadn’t told Dr. Mailer that she’d taken Mr. Judd with her on her exploratory jaunt. There seemed nothing for her to say but, “I’m sorry.”

Because dressing down a subordinate came about as naturally to Mailer as flying without an airplane, he immediately relented. “I know you’re sorry. But Chuck’s not, and I have no idea what to do about it.”

“You think he’s been trespassing on Mrs. Calhoun’s property?”

“I don’t know what in the heck he’s been up to, but he can’t keep walking off the job site without saying a word. He can’t keep coming back wet and covered in mud, either. Did you see him today? His pants weren’t just filthy. They were actually torn.”

“Chuck
is
a management challenge…”

“And I’m a management failure.”

Faye tried to interrupt with a tactful denial but, in an uncharacteristically forceful tone, Mailer wouldn’t let her.

“I don’t manage. I encourage and direct people who want to work. I’m not a boss. I wasn’t trained to be one, and I don’t really want to be one. I’m an archaeologist and a teacher. I’m good at those things. Project management is a necessary evil in my line of work.”

Faye, who wasn’t a manager either, but who knew how to attack a problem instead of wallowing in it, tried a straightforward tactic. “Have you talked to Chuck?”

“I’ve tried, but he doesn’t say anything that makes any sense. He gets upset and says things like, ‘People shouldn’t stand in the way of science.’ Or ‘People aren’t important. Knowledge is.’ Then he stops talking to me and starts spreading stone tools out on his desk. It’s the same pieces, every time. He keeps them in a box under his desk. He sorts them by type—points, unifaces, manufacturing flakes. Next, he sorts them by the type of rock they’re made from. Then he sorts them by age. He talks to himself the whole time, like I’m not there. For a while I couldn’t figure out what he was saying, but I finally understood him today, and it shook me up.”

Mailer paused so long that Faye couldn’t stand it any longer. “What did he say?” Mailer was still silent, so she tried again. “What did Chuck say?”

“He just keeps repeating five words: ‘One of them is missing.’”

The significance of those words hit Faye like a jab in the stomach. They couldn’t be ignored, not when a man had been killed just days before with a razor-sharp stone tool.

“It looks bad for Chuck,” he went on, “but let’s think about this like scientists. Anybody on our team could have taken a tool from Chuck’s box. Every one of us was angry at Mr. Calhoun for what he did with his tractor. I don’t see that Chuck’s motive is any stronger than anybody else’s. If Calhoun was killed over his destruction of the mound, then one of us has a lot bigger reason to be upset about that.”

“Oka Hofobi.”

“Yep. I don’t think he did it, but his alibi is paper-thin. Who’s going to believe his mother? Especially a mother like Mrs. Nail, who’ll protect her baby until he’s eligible for Medicare. If I’m not going to doubt Oka Hofobi’s innocence, I don’t feel right about doubting Chuck’s, just because he’s strange.”

Faye followed his logic, and she agreed.

“I’ve been thinking about calling a friend of mine who’s a psychologist,” Mailer went on. “Just to get some advice on how to handle Chuck.”

“He scares you, doesn’t he?”

“Yeah, and I’m ashamed of it.” Mailer absently rubbed the palms of his hands together. Faye recognized the gesture as something he did when he was nervous or off-balance. When Chuck was anxious, he counted his arrowheads and talked to himself. The two habits served the same purpose, but Mailer’s mannerisms were socially acceptable and Chuck’s just weren’t. And that, she realized, crossed over into the realm of psychology.

“It wouldn’t hurt to talk to an expert,” she said cautiously, “particularly since we don’t know where Chuck was when Mr. Calhoun was killed.”

“I know that, and the sheriff knows that, but she hasn’t followed up on it. At least, not that I can tell. I’ve tried to tell myself that Chuck’s behavior just looks bad. It doesn’t make him guilty. One side of my brain says I should tell the sheriff about his erratic habits. The other side of my brain is afraid of making Chuck a target of her suspicion. Deep down, I think he’s innocent. And I think he may be mentally ill. People like Chuck have suffered from witch hunts for all of history. My instinct tells me to protect him. Does that make me weak?”

Faye hardly had the energy to drag herself off the elevator. She hoped she had enough energy to take a shower, because she felt truly filthy. She summoned the courage to step through the sliding metal doors. There in the elevator lobby’s small sitting area, wearing clothes that proclaimed that he, too, had not showered, sat Joe.

It had only taken Mailer a quarter-hour to give Faye a solid dressing-down. Joe seemed to have spent that time here in meditation. There could be no other explanation for the fact that he looked serene and rested, while she felt like dog meat.

“I saw Mailer drag you off,” he said, “and I figured he was going to give you a good talking-to.”

“My mama would have called it a ‘come-to-Jesus meeting.’ She had more talent in that direction than Mailer, come to think of it. Before he got finished with me, he started ragging on himself.”

“So you’re okay?” Joe said, standing up with the air of a man who was finally going to get his shower.

“It’d take somebody a lot meaner than Dr. Mailer to get me down. But Joe?”

“Yeah?”

She looked around to see whether anyone was listening. “I think he’s really worried about Chuck. I think he’s worried that Chuck may have killed Mr. Calhoun. What do you think?”

“Nah. He’s too tall.”

“Too tall? I can see how somebody could be too small to overpower a big man like Mr. Calhoun, but how could somebody be too tall?”

“You got a good look at Mr. Calhoun’s body, same as I did. Couldn’t you tell from the cut on his neck that the killer had to be shorter than him? Also, he’d have to be right-handed.” He grabbed Faye’s shoulders and turned her around so that he was facing her back. “See? If I grabbed your head from behind and pulled it back so’s I could cut your throat, the natural way my arm moves would make the cut side-to-side, with maybe a little uptick on the right side.” He dropped to his knees. “Now, if I’m shorter than you, I’ve got to reach up with my left hand to grab your head. I can’t pull it straight back, so your neck is stretched back at a cockeyed angle. My right hand, the one that’s holding the knife, has the same problem. It’s hard for me to slice from side-to-side without dragging the knife down as it moves to the right.”

Thoroughly creeped out by having her throat slashed twice, even in pantomime, Faye pulled away. “Well, no, I didn’t know those things. I haven’t made a science of studying mortal wounds. I guess it’s just not part of my skill set.”

“Maybe you need to go hunting with me sometime.” Joe grinned like a man who was pleased to know something Faye didn’t, just this once.

“I figure there are a few things so grisly that I don’t even care to know them. Why didn’t you tell the sheriff?”

“I figured she knew. She’s a sheriff and all. Mortal wounds are everyday business for her. Besides, I wasn’t about to do any talking. You kept twitching around and looking at me like you was afraid I’d say something stupid. So I didn’t say anything at all.”

Faye wondered if she’d been as obvious to anyone else. Like, say, the sheriff.

“Maybe that’s why Sheriff Rutland never suspected you like I thought she might. The shape of the wound told her that you couldn’t have done it. Did you notice anything else at the murder scene? Like you say, the sheriff probably saw all you did, and maybe more, but I’m not experienced with killing and how it’s done. Enlighten me.”

“Judging from where the blood was, I’d say Calhoun was killed where he was found, right out in the middle of that open field. I couldn’t see any scuff marks on the ground, like he would’ve made if there’d been a big fight.”

“So he knew his killer. Or he thought he had nothing to fear.”

“Right. Or else he didn’t hear the person sneaking up behind him, but that don’t seem real likely, since I get the impression he was a real outdoorsman. I think he would’ve heard something, or at least he’d have recognized that something wasn’t right. The sound of the night animals and bugs would’ve told him that.”

Faye realized that Joe was crediting Mr. Calhoun with his own skills, which could be an overestimate, but she didn’t say anything. “So you think he saw the killer, and he wasn’t afraid.”

Joe nodded once. “Not at first. But you can bet he was afraid after that friend of his twisted his arm behind him and broke it.”

The thought of suffering such a violent assault from someone she assumed to be her friend brought the gorge into Faye’s throat. She asked, “Did you notice any other gory details?”

Joe shook his head.

They were silent a moment, pondering the unpleasant facts, until a cheery thought occurred to Faye. “Chuck’s at least as tall as Mr. Calhoun was, and I’m pretty sure he’s left-handed. We should tell Dr. Mailer not to worry so much about him. He’s weird, but he’s not a killer. I don’t think.” She tried to remember how tall Calhoun had been. “Can we eliminate anybody else?”

“Mr. Calhoun was pretty tall, almost as tall as me. I’d say the only other person we know who’s even close to his height, besides me and Chuck, is Dr. Mailer. I haven’t noticed that anybody else is left-handed, so that doesn’t help us any.”

Faye was willing to take whatever she could get.

The light on Faye’s bedside phone was signaling that she had a message waiting for her. She considered ignoring it, but she’d never get any sleep with that red light flashing on and off interminably. Besides, Faye could be antisocial at times, but she wasn’t stupid. There was a killer out there somewhere, as much as she hated to think about it. It would be foolish to ignore a message that might say something like, “There’s an ax-murderer under your bed!”

Besides, there was a new man in her life. Well, maybe Ross wasn’t in her life yet, but he was knocking on the door. Of course, she was going to check that message.

The phone rang before she reached it, and the voice that said, “Hello, Faye,” did belong to that new man who was hovering around the corners of her life.