Effigies (30 page)
Faye wished she’d insisted on driving. Mrs. Calhoun, showing surprising mental flexibility for a woman of her age, had seen the wisdom in Faye’s plan to corner her husband’s killer. Faye had hardly finished explaining what she needed to do, when she found herself bundled in a blanket and sitting on the passenger seat of Mrs. Calhoun’s car. It was just too bad that Mrs. Calhoun drove like a woman of her age.
Faye mashed an imaginary accelerator to the floor. She knew precisely where Neely Rutland was, right this minute. There was no time to waste.
She comforted herself with the knowledge that the most important task was getting done. She’d told Chief Hinnant exactly where to find Joe and Oka Hofobi. As extra assurance, she’d left a detailed map for him, taped to Mrs. Calhoun’s front door. Perhaps he would find the ancient drain even before Faye reached the fairgrounds. And perhaps he would have pulled her friends into the sunshine before Faye passed her final challenge.
With a little prodding, Mrs. Calhoun nudged her car up to a speed that Faye felt was appropriate to the situation.
Oka Hofobi had held himself up, minute by minute. After a time, he’d leaned on Joe, and Joe had leaned on him, and they’d held each other up. Now, they were leaning together against a clay wall, slowly sliding down into the water. The water was too cold, and their body heat had been seeping into it all night long. They’d had no food to replace the energy they’d burned in their frantic escape. There was simply nothing left inside them to keep them warm, nothing to keep them alive.
There was hardly a splash as their two shivering bodies slid down into the waiting water.
The fairgrounds were crowded, as would be expected on the last day of the Neshoba County Fair. The drinking folk were surely already partying in the cabins surrounding Founders Square, just as there were certainly people still sleeping off last night’s party. The churchgoing family folk were flipping pancakes for their kids. Everybody else who was up and walking had gathered at the Pavilion to see why CNN was there.
Lurking outside the Pavilion and peeking in, Faye could see that Neely was at the podium, but she wasn’t presenting the speech she’d been planning to give. Lawrence Judd’s health was yesterday’s news. Faye and Joe and Oka Hofobi were the stars of the moment, and their stars shone more brightly because, by coincidence, the media folks who came to cover Mr. Judd’s situation were already in place. Neely stood in front of a standing-room-only crowd, giving a status report on the evolving missing-persons crisis. Television cameras and radio crews were broadcasting her every word. It was life-and-death situations like this one that got incumbent sheriffs re-elected.
Neely’s amplified voice echoed over the fairgrounds. “The situation is still developing. We know of three people who are missing. One is a local man, Dr. Oka Hofobi Nail, who has been working at an archaeological site on his family’s property. The other two missing persons are visiting our area as part of the same archaeological project. Their names are Joe Wolf Mantooth and Faye Longchamp. Dr. Nail is a Choctaw man of average stature. Mr. Mantooth is over six feet tall with long black hair. Ms. Longchamp is a small, slender woman with dark skin and short black hair. All three were last seen wearing work clothes and heavy boots. The project supervisor, Dr. Sid Mailer, just notified us that they’re all more than three hours late for work, unusual behavior for any of them. Some might think that Dr. Mailer was premature to call law enforcement so quickly, but when three people are missing in close proximity to a recent murder site…well, we commend him for his responsible behavior.”
Yeah, right,
thought Faye.
You probably wish he’d waited all day to call in the law. It would have given us more time to die.
“All three missing persons were last seen at five p.m. yesterday by their colleague, Dr. Chuck Horowitz. Shortly before that, they were seen by Don Atkins, when they dropped off Mr. Nail’s car for repair at his shop. Mr. Mantooth is not known to own a car. Ms. Longchamp’s car has not been located.”
Bet you’d like to know where it is.
During her long night, Faye had hung onto her car as the only piece of evidence that might point toward their underground prison. Neely could take Faye’s day pack clear across the county and leave it as a red herring for a search team, but she couldn’t move that car unless she found it before anyone else did.
“An eyewitness saw three people fitting the description of our missing persons in Winston County, near Nanih Waiya Mound. An employee at the Golden Moon, where two of the missing persons are staying, stated that she overheard them talking about looking for archaeological sites on private land in that area. We have a team on our way there right now.”
And there was Neely’s red herring. She was telling the truth about what she, Joe, and Oka Hofobi had planned to do that evening. She’d simply moved their jaunt over one county, ensuring that her search team would never find them in time. Faye wondered if there was anything more dangerous than a criminal in a position of power.
A tall latecomer hurried toward the Pavilion. As he neared Faye, his eyes locked on her and he dropped the briefcase in his hand. She put a hand to her mouth, silently begging him not to speak. Ross nodded. For the moment, he silently agreed to just stand there and look at her.
“I’ll take some questions now,” Neely said, nodding at the media folk and their microphones.
Faye stepped into the Pavilion and made her way toward the podium. In a voice loud enough to carry to all four corners of the Pavilion, she called out, “Good. I have a few questions I’d like to ask.”
Heads turned at the sight of her muddy, battered body. She was quickly recognized, based on the description of her that Neely had just read. How many petite, thin, short-haired, brown-skinned women wearing filthy clothes and heavy boots could there possibly be in Neshoba County?
Faye was aware that she was exposing herself to a murderer wearing a sidearm, but confronting her in public was the only way to make certain that Neely was convicted of her crime. Neely might think that if she shot Faye where she stood, then Joe and Oka Hofobi would never be found. She might or might not be able to explain shooting Faye, but she’d be eliminating the only person who knew for sure who killed Carroll Calhoun, then tried to kill three more people.
And there might be a way the sheriff could get away with shooting Faye in front of this crowd. If Neely could make an opportunity to plant a gun on Faye’s dead body, she might be able to craft a story about how she’d known that Faye posed an immediate danger. Even better, what if Neely could make people believe that Faye had walked onto the crowded fairgrounds with a bomb strapped to her chest? She could consider herself elected sheriff for life.
But Faye didn’t think Neely would do any of those things. If she’d killed Calhoun out of shame, so that no one would ever know what her father had done, then killing Faye in full view of the entire Neshoba County Fair made no sense. All those watching, judging eyes would stay her hand. Faye felt safe. Pretty safe.
The sheriff’s first words said that Neely would not be shooting Faye quite yet. “Get my father out of here!”
Someone took hold of the handles of Kenneth Rutland’s wheelchair and someone else cleared a path through the crowd, which melted aside to let the infirm man pass.
Faye advanced on the podium. “You buried me alive, and both my friends. You tried to kill Lawrence Judd. You did kill Carroll Calhoun. Am I going to tell these people why? Or are you?”
“I never knew…nobody ever told me…” A sob interrupted the sheriff, but she stifled it and went on. The microphone in front of her broadcast every word. “I was as shocked as anybody when Mr. Judd stood here and told us about the day he was attacked. The words were hardly out of his mouth when Mr. Calhoun pulled me aside and explained how things were going to be. He said that my daddy was the one that tried to kill Mr. Judd, and I had to do what he said or he’d tell…he’d tell everyone.” Her voice drifted to a whisper, then died.
“Maybe he was lying, Neely,” said an old man in the front row. He stood to face her. “Why would you believe something like that about your own father?”
She leaned against the podium but, like a trained law enforcement officer, she remained alert and she kept her hand within striking distance of her firearm. “Because I knew it was true. I’d spent the last night on top of his mound. You can see forever up there. When Calhoun told me he’d stood up there and saw my father’s car way out there where it had no business being…it made sense. Besides, I’d heard Mr. Judd talk, and I ran those woods when I was a kid. I knew where his cave was, and I knew where that cemetery used to be. The things Calhoun said were…awful…but they explained something I never understood. All those years, my father sold our land, one chunk at a time, and I never knew why. We didn’t need the money. Now I know it was because Calhoun was blackmailing him into practically giving it away. Daddy’s past blackmailing now, so Calhoun figured it was time to start with me. Only this time, he didn’t want land.”
Faye was suddenly glad she’d asked Mrs. Calhoun to wait in the car. She’d wanted to keep the old woman safe from any danger that might erupt when Neely was exposed, but Neely was about to say some things that Calhoun’s widow would rather not hear.
“He wanted to take advantage of the fact that I was the sheriff. He wanted me to look the other way when he and his friends dealt their drugs, and he was going to sell that protection to every two-bit crook in the county. Calhoun wanted my guarantee that I’d look the other way for the criminals who bought him off. How could I live with that?”
How can you live with murder on your soul?
Faye wondered. But she hadn’t heard an unequivocal confession yet, and she had to have one. She advanced another step toward the sheriff. “So he asked you to meet him that night to talk about this perverted business deal.”
“I went out to tell him no. I couldn’t let myself be used that way. I didn’t go out there to kill him—”
“But you took a deadly weapon out of your father’s arrowhead collection with you.” Faye’s voice was calm and pleasant, but she was determined to make this woman admit what she did in front of all these people. Neely had known everyone here all her life, and this was her jury pool. The only way Neely Rutland would be convicted in this county was if she admitted everything in this most public of places. “Why did you meet Carroll Calhoun with a stone blade in your pocket? Why did you kill him?”
Neely almost bowed her head but, at the last minute, she yanked her chin up again. “I killed him because he bulldozed my family’s graveyard. Because he stole our land. Because he was trying to force me to do wrong. And because he hurt my father.”
She broke and ran, one arm wrapped defensively around her chest. Her other hand was raised up to shield her face. Whether Neely hoped to escape, Faye couldn’t tell, but her bolt to freedom was short-lived. While she’d been speaking to Faye, word of the drama in the Pavilion had gotten out into the cabins, and the crowd was swelling by the second.
Neely ran like a woman hoping to escape judgment, but she didn’t run far. There were fifty thousand people to block her way.
Ross liked his car. He was proud of his car. But he had never been so proud to own a car that was blindingly fast until this moment.
He’d also never been so proud and happy to be a big man, capable of wading into a nervous crowd to fetch out a small woman on the verge of collapse. Faye was safe at his side right now. Neely was a small woman, too, but the crowd surrounding her had seemed peaceful enough. He trusted that someone had dialed 911, and that one of her deputies would arrest her and set the wheels of justice to turning. So he’d left her in custody of the crowd.
When he’d opened the car door for Faye, she’d sunk down into the passenger seat’s buttery black leather, and then she’d kept sinking. Arms clutched across her chest, she’d hunched over, leaning further and further forward until her head rested on her knees. Then the shivering had started.
He’d tried to rush her to the emergency room, but she wouldn’t hear of it. At her insistence, his precision-made German engine was taking them out in the country just as fast as it could. Faye remained as she’d been, huddled face-down, but he’d thrown his sport coat over her back to hold in what little body heat she had left. Then he’d put the car’s top up and cranked the heat as high is it would go. It gets very cold in Germany, so his car’s heating system was precision-engineered, too.
He wished Faye would say something, so he’d know for sure that she was conscious.
“Nobody lives forever.”
Joe’s disembodied voice hung in the dark air. His voice was quiet, as always, but it penetrated the stillness of their prison and the gathering fog in Oka Hofobi’s head. Wondering why the man was stating the obvious, Oka Hofobi said, “I’d hoped to make it past forty.”
“I wasn’t talking about you. I was talking about your old man. You’re going to be sorry if he dies before you two work out your problems.”
“It wasn’t me that stopped talking to him.”
Joe didn’t seem to want to talk about the wrongs Oka Hofobi’s father had done him. He just kept on with his philosophical musings. “People our age…we’ve got it all. We’re strong. Our eyes still work good. All the rest of us still works good, too. And the world makes sense to us, because it’s the world we grew up in. I bet your dad struggles to live in our world.”
Oka Hofobi smiled, though he knew Joe probably couldn’t see him in the dim sunlight that seeped out of the hole where Faye had escaped. “Ma has to work the DVD player for him. It’s funny. He could play videotapes, no problem—you just plug them in—but navigating the DVD menu is one step too far for him.”
“You could help him with the DVDs. You could help him with all of it.”
Dammit. This conversation was making him feel like a rebellious teenager, and Oka Hofobi knew he wasn’t. He’d tried, time and again, to reason with his father, one grown man to another. Their broken relationship was not his fault.
“What are you trying to say? If you know some magic solution to the fact that my father can’t treat me like an adult—”
“You’ve got it backward. Your father’s all balled up inside because
he
don’t feel like an adult any more.”
“You think I should treat my father like a child?”
“Nope. You talk to him like somebody you love and respect, but you have consideration for his weaknesses. He knows he has ‘em. And he’s gonna have more. You’re the one with the power now, but you need to be careful with it. Your brother—you can work things out with him man-to-man. You can have a fistfight, if you want to. To make things right with your father, you’re just gonna have to overlook some things. That’s what grown-ups do.”
Light dawned, just as surely as Sinti Hollo had filled their dark prison with light.
“How do you know so much? Do you and your father get along?”
“Well, actually, I spent most of the night figuring all this out. When we get out of here, I’m gonna call my father. I hate to say it, but I think he’ll be surprised to hear from me.”
“Okay,” Oka Hofobi said. “Here’s the deal. I’m going to talk to Pa. And you’re going to call your father. Where’s he at?”
“Oklahoma.”
“I’ll make peace with Pa, and you’ll call Oklahoma, by sundown today. Presuming Faye’s able to bring somebody to dig us out.” The cold took a firmer grip on his bones when he thought about what it would mean if Faye failed…if Neely Rutland had been still waiting outside, ready to kill her before she saved them.
“You can count on Faye.”
Oka Hofobi had known Faye exactly one week, but he knew that this was true. “So how long you planning to keep pretending that Faye’s just a friend to you?”
“Faye ain’t figured out what she’s looking for yet, but I don’t think it’s me.”
Oka Hofobi decided to let that one lie. He changed the subject. “So when are you going to stop wearing white man’s clothes?”
“You got a lot of room to talk. You and your khaki pants. Maybe I’ll get me some polo shirts like yours.”
“My clothes suit me. Yours don’t. But they did. When I first saw you, I thought, ‘There goes a man who’s comfortable in his skin.’”
“I’m not full-blood like you and your folks. Not just your family, but all your people. You’ve got thousands of people right here to teach you about being Choctaw. Both my folks were mostly Creek, but the only things I know about being Indian, I taught myself.”
“I’ve seen you knap flint. Did you make those clothes you were wearing when we met? Moccasins and all?”
“Yeah.”
“Then wear them. Be who you are, Brother.”
“Okay. I’ll wear them. As soon as we get out.”
When Oka Hofobi thought of escaping the cave, he thought of being warm, but that thought was a trap. It only reminded him of the clammy cold, and of the fact that he and Joe were one step from shock and death. He fought that fear by reminding them both that there was hope—only one hope, but it was real. “We’re getting out soon. Faye’s coming.”
“I know.”
The car’s delicately engineered suspension was not made for rutted farm roads, but Ross pushed it hard anyway. Faye had raised herself into an upright position and was giving directions. She peered into the dense undergrowth with life-or-death intensity. Every so often, she raised a hand and pointed.
“There. Turn there.”
Branches dragged along both sides of the car, from bumper to bumper, but Ross figured he could get a new paint job. When he realized that he was further from a paved road than he’d ever been in his entire life, he knew for certain that he was a city boy.
Shortly after that, the shiny red of a fire rescue vehicle leapt out of the dense green woods. Ross pulled off the road and parked next to it, and Faye was gone.
He followed her as she staggered to the flanks of something huge, something that could be nothing other than an Indian mound. A rescue team was clustered around one victim, while another set of rescuers was gathered around a dark and tiny hole in the base of the mound. While Ross followed Faye on her single-minded trek, the rescuers hauled a second victim right out of the ground. The bright warm sunshine beat down on the two wet bodies, and Ross had a timeless sick moment while he searched them both for signs of life.
Faye tottered on her feet, and Ross wasn’t sure she’d get where she was going. She pressed on.
The firefighters were checking pulses and opening airways. Ross rushed on, close behind Faye, ready to be there if the news was bad. He could see Joe and a young Choctaw man who must be Faye’s friend Oka Hofobi. He silently urged them to move.
A rawboned paramedic was checking Oka Hofobi’s pulse. He looked just like an equally rawboned older man who stood nearby as if hoping someone would tell him what to do. A stout woman crouched on the other side of Oka Hofobi’s motionless form. Then the young archaeologist’s body broke out into a head-to-toe shiver, and he curled into a fetal position. He looked miserable, but he was alive. The paramedic covered him with blankets, and the woman re-arranged them, like a young mother tucking a child into bed.
The older man barked, “Quit fussing with those things, woman,” then sat down and tenderly lifted Oka Hofobi’s head onto his lap.
Joe still lay motionless, his big hands limp at his side. Ross took a step in that direction, ready to be there for Faye if…if he was needed.
Faye dropped to her knees at Joe’s side and collapsed with her head resting on his chest. Slowly, both of Joe’s arms reached up and encircled her. Only then did she start to weep. Ross could see her chest heave with each sob.
Ross was drawn to Faye. He liked her a lot, and he admired her. With time, he was pretty sure she could mean more to him than that, a lot more. But she was taken.
And she didn’t even know it.
Ross, however, was not known as a man who gave up easily.