Maya Mound Mayhem (A Logan Dickerson Cozy Mystery Book 3) (12 page)

Chapter
Thirty-One

“This is a
disaster,” I said. I just wanted to cry. A dead body in my trailer. Me and my
geriatric gang of thugs trying to dispose of it. I could hear the detective now
asking me about trying to hide the body. “What am I going to do,” I voiced my
thoughts.

“Well. We can help
you,” Miss Vivee said.

“Vouch for your
whereabouts at the time of the murder,” Mac said.

I shook my head.
“How can you vouch for me, we don’t know what time she was killed.” I looked at
them. “Plus, you two thought I had killed her.”

“It was only
because of the circumstantial information,” Miss Vivee said. “Your trailer and
all.”

“But we have to
admit,” Mac said. “We weren’t able to come up with a motive for you to want her
dead.”

“I did have a
motive,” I said. I figured I may as well spill the beans. “Aaron and Laura
tried to kill me.”

“What?” Mac asked.

“When?” Miss Vivee
said at almost the same time.

“Back in Belize.”
I swallowed hard. “Actually it was in Panama. They wanted to take over my dig
in Belize and they had followed us there. They were going to force us out. They
killed a guy on my team. Jairo
Zacapa.
”

“Who killed him?”

“I’m not sure who
exactly pulled the trigger-”

“He was shot?”
Miss Vivee said before I could finish my sentence.

“Yeah. In the
stomach.” I saw Miss Vivee clutch her throat. “My mother and I were in a cave
at the time,” I continued. “But he made it in to warn us before he collapsed.
To tell us that there were bad guys outside. Those bad guys turned out to be
Laura, Aaron and another man. I still don’t know who the other man was.”

Mac walked crossed
the room to where Laura’s body was and stood over it. “And she was there?”

I nodded.

“Tell me
everything you know about Aaron Coulter,” Mac said.

So I did. I told
them both all about my experience in Mesoamerica. And about Simon Melas. And
that what I knew about Aaron I had learned from him.

“Tell us about
Simon,” Miss Vivee said as she sat down on the couch.

I had paused to
take a breath and then I told them about him, too. About how my benefactor
Simon Melas had said that Aaron Coulter was a prodigy boy gone bad boy. That
he’d had a hard time with something he started over in Egypt - looking for
tunnels under the Sphinx thinking there would be a library under here. But
there wasn’t one in Egypt I told them because I had found it in Central
America.

“And that’s why
they tried to kill you?” Miss Vivee said when I finished telling my story.

“Yes. That’s why
they tried to kill me.” I felt a tear roll down my cheek. It was scary to say
out loud that someone had tried to take your life. I felt my heart picking up
pace even though both of those people were dead, it still made me nervous.

“Vivee,” Mac said.
“Do you think all of this,” he waved his hand at Laura’s body, “has to do with
what happened to Logan and her mother in Belize?”

“I don’t think so.
They didn’t seem to want Logan dead now. Leastways they didn’t attempt to take
her life.”

“Thank goodness,”
I said. “But I’m not even sure if they knew who I was.”

“I’m sure they
did,” Miss Vivee said. “If Aaron Coulter was an archaeologist he would have
known your mother, right?”

“Yes. I’m sure he
did. At least he knew of her,” I said. “Archaeologists, if they’ve made a name
for themselves, good or bad, pretty much know each other.”

“So if he saw your
name on anything, or they mentioned to him when they were trying to decide who
to put in charge down here, then he would have seen your last name.”

“So you think that
he was going to try and take this dig from me, too? Kill me to do it?”

“Don’t know. But
if he discovered you wanted to prove that there were Maya here, which they
probably did, he might have.” She looked at me. “Everyone seems to know it, you
must have been shouting it from the mountain tops.”

“Maybe not that
loudly,” I said sheepishly. I had made it known that that was my plan. “But I
did find out something strange.”

“What?” Miss Vivee
asked. “The paper that Aaron wrote was taken from the website.”

“What does that
matter,” Miss Vivee said. “You’ve got a copy of it.” She pointed to the one I
had dropped on the table when I first came in.

“The publication
is for undergrad students. The professors only have their names on as
advisors.”

“So Aaron Coulter
didn’t write the paper,” Mac asked.

“No,” I said.
“Jackson Reid did.”

“Who is that?”
Miss Vivee asked.

“Bugs,” Mac and I
said at the same time.

“Well isn’t that
interesting,” she said. “How does he write an article for a school he doesn’t
attend?”

I hunched my
shoulders. “I don’t know.”

“So that means
both Bugs and Aaron would have known that you wouldn’t last long here,” Miss
Vivee said. “And at least Aaron knew what they wanted. He knew how to play the
game.”

“Yeah. They only
put me here because they thought they could manipulate me,” I said. “They
thought since I was young, trying to make a name for myself, I’d go along with
what they wanted.”

“But it doesn’t
matter now what they were going to do. Bugs. Aaron. Or Miss Laura there,” Miss
Vivee said and pointed to the body. “We just need to figure out who killed
Aaron and Laura so we can save you from rotting away in jail.”

“Really, Miss
Vivee. I wish you’d stop saying I’m going to jail.”

“I know, dear.”
She looked at me sympathetically. “The truth hurts. But now that we know you
have a motive, it will seem to the police like an open and shut case,” Miss
Vivee said nonchalantly.

“I don’t think the
detective knows about her motive though, Dear,” Mac said. “And of course we
won’t tell,” he looked at me as he spoke.

“Oh my God,” I
said and plopped down on the couch. “Why is this happening to me?”

Chapter
Thirty-Two

“Well, are we
hiding the body or not?” Miss Vivee asked. “Although, if you didn’t kill her, I
don’t know if I want to risk Mac’s health to move it.”

She was so
matter-of-fact in her statements like finding a dead body and deciding to
dispose of it was as easy as deciding whether you wanted eggs or cereal for
breakfast.

“We are not hiding
the body, Miss Vivee.” I shook my head. “We are going to call the authorities.”

“That’s fine with
me, dear,” she said. “But you do know that they probably will arrest you.”

“Why?” I said. The
worry I had starting feeling inside I could tell was starting to spill out into
my face. “Why would they arrest me?”

With exaggerated
animation she widened her eyes. “We just had this big discussion about it,
Logan. Don’t you remember? I say. You’re not too bright sometimes. The woman, who
is your archenemy, is found dead in your trailer. You can’t see that that looks
suspicious?”

 I let my eyes
roll to the back of my head.

“She is not my
archenemy.” But I knew she was right. “We need to figure this out,” I said.
“C’mon.” I pulled Miss Vivee up from the couch, held her hand and walked her
over to the body. Mac followed us and we stood over her and stared.

“Well what do you
think,” I said. I was hoping that Miss Vivee could use her sixth sense to
determine how Laura Tyler died. Then, if we could figure that out, we’d be able
to figure out who killed her.

“I don’t see
anything that could have killed her,” Miss Vivee said. “Do you, Mac?”

“No. No bullet
wound. No stab wound.”

“Well what about
poison?” I asked. “She’s got that rash-like stuff all over her.”

“Looks like poison
ivy,” Miss Vivee said and then a smile came over her face like she’d just had a
realization.

“What?” I said and
looked down at the body. “Does that mean something to you-” But before I could
finish my sentence something crawled out of Laura’s nose.

“A bug,” I
screeched.

“Bugs,” Miss Vivee
said at the same time.

“Is there more
than one?” I jumped back. “Oh crap!”

Chapter
Thirty-Three

“Call Bay and tell
him to come down here,” Miss Vivee said.

“Why,” I said and
narrowed my eyes. “Do you know who killed Laura?”

“Don’t you?” she
asked.

“No. Not unless it
has something to do with those bugs.” I said. Then I smiled. “Bugs? Is that who
killed her?”

“I think so,” Miss
Vivee said. “Look at her face and arms.”

“Yes. I know. I
just asked you did that mean anything.”

“It’s
urushiol
reacting with her skin. She was exposed to it before she died. It is from a
black poisonwood tree.”

“Bugs had lots of
trees at his house, I’ll give you that. But did you see a black poisonwood
tree?”

“I did,” Miss
Vivee said.

“And so did you,”
Mac said. “Bugs called it a Chechen tree.”

“From the Maya
story?”

“They are one in
the same,” Miss Vivee said. “A body’s response to the poison looks very similar
to what you get from poison ivy. Same chemical causes the reaction. Might not
have been identified correctly if I hadn’t of seen the extract at his house.
Now it’ll be easy to prove that her rash came from the extract he has.”

“It’ll be on him,
too,” I said. “If he put it on her.”

“Not if he used
the antidote,” Mac said. “Remember the Chaca Tree Extract he had?” I nodded.
“It’s a cure for the poison from the Chechen tree.”

“Oh. Yeah. I knew
that,” I said and smiled.

“And that bug that
crawled out of Laura’s face was one I’d seen at his house,” Miss Vivee said. “It’s
called a burrowing bug. A
cydnidae
. We’re
going to have to see if we can catch it. It’s evidence.”

I wasn’t
going after any bugs.

“Is that what
killed her?” I asked.

“I doubt it,” Mac
said. “They infect but I never heard of one killing anybody. But the way the
rash is spread over her mouth and nose, I’d say he placed his hand or a cloth
that had the extract on it over her face. Probably smothered her.”

“That simple?
No-never-before-heard-of method of death that you two usually come up with?” I
asked.

“There’s no making
you happy, is it?” Miss Vivee said. “We’ve figured it out. You’re off the
hook.”

“Well what about
Aaron?” I said. “We still haven’t figured out who killed him.”

“Bugs killed Aaron,
too,” she said.

“How do you know?”

“He used lye to
try to get rid of Aaron’s body. That’ll be your proof.”

“Where did you get
that from?” I asked. I didn’t know how she could know that.

“Remember Mac said
that Aaron’s body was probably soaked in sodium hydroxide?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I
remember.”

“Sodium hydroxide
is lye,” Mac said. He looked at Miss Vivee and smiled knowingly. “And lye is
used to unclog drains.”

I didn’t get it.

“I don’t get it,”
I said.

“Bugs told you
that he had something powerful to keep his drains clear because the roots kept
clogging them up,” Miss Vivee said.

“Yeah, he did,” I
said. “I forgot about that.”

“Well that
something powerful I’m sure was sodium hydroxide.”

“But why? Why did
he do it?”

“Bugs seemed to be
living beyond his means with that house, all that furniture and his
experiments. We can’t figure out everything, but I’d bet it had something to do
with that seeing that Aaron Coulter liked to
take
things.”

I glanced over at
the window. “You know I think Bugs is out there now.” I looked at Miss Vivee
and Mac. “I think he came to work today.”

“Well I guess so,”
Miss Vivee said. “He brought the body.”

“He might come in
here,” I said.

“Well, I suggest
you hurry and call Bay then,” Mac said.

Epilogue

My mother says
archaeologists are the creators of our history. They dig it up. They interpret
it. They tell us what to believe. So with that realization she knows that the
history that we’ve been taught isn’t always necessarily the truth.

“They don’t want
you to know what really happened,” she has said to me more times than I can
count. Heck, she’s even hidden some of our history. And I helped her do it.

That’s why I
couldn’t be too upset when I quit as the lead archaeologist for the dig at Track
Rock Gap. Or when I found that the article that Bugs had showed me that the
U.S. Forest Service wrote to relay their negative stance on Maya migration really
was what they were planning to post. Let them have their made up history.

It seems like Bugs
was in over his head. The paper I’d gotten a copy of that had been listed on
Aaron Coulter’s faculty page about Maya living in America had been co-written
by one Jackson Reid – also known as Bugs, didn’t have one ounce of proof in it.
It appeared, just like I had been accused of by Riley, they were going to try
and manufacture evidence. Bugs had worked with Aaron before, it was a way that
he kept enough money to live in his house and house all his bugs. I guess they
hadn’t continued to see eye to eye . . .

Clive Armsgoode
got my job. Riley, whatever her beliefs really were, stayed on and helped him.
I don’t know if they do any real scientific excavation at Track Rock Gap
nowadays.

I decided that
there were other ways for me to prove that the Maya came to the United States.
There’s been evidence reported of Maya ruins in Tennessee and West Virginia.
Who knows, maybe they would be more open to discovering the truth.

Meanwhile, I went
back to Yasamee to spend some time with my boyfriend and his family – and oh
yeah, to try to steer clear of any murders. I’ve definitely had my fill of
those.

The End