Burial Ground (28 page)

The ground rose ahead of me, to the dropoff over the river, but there were some ruts before I got there, as if someone had spun his wheels in the earth. But there were too many ruts to have been made by a vehicle. And as I neared the spot, I saw that the scars weren’t ruts at all.

“Alan,” Pepper breathed from beside me and I turned involuntarily to look at her. She was trembling, like she was caught in a sudden blast of air, and when I reached out to reassure her I saw that my own hand was trembling, too.

The places where the earth had been turned up were more than ruts and even from where we stood, ten yards away, I could see something orange.

I fought the sickness churning my belly and made myself go closer. The orange was from Ben Picote’s jumpsuit. He was lying beside a shallow grave, facedown.

I looked at the graves closer to the bluff: There were two that looked fresh, a matter of a few days at most, and I thought I knew who they belonged to.

Pepper pointed: “Are those the—?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The two convicts.”

“My God.”

We walked past the fresh mounds to what appeared to be older interments. At one of them, a wild animal had been at work and a jaw gaped from the dirt. I stopped and picked up a shell necklace that had evidently been in the grave with the bones.

Pepper stared, transfixed. “This is the place,” she said. “
Alan, this is the place
.”

I nodded, unsure whether to exult or run. As I walked I saw that there were bones all around, poking from the earth at odd angles—skulls, jawbones, femurs, ribs, even a pelvis. I tried to count but I lost track at forty. They were too jumbled to clearly distinguish. But one thing was sure: The graves themselves were strewn with the burial artifacts of the Tunica nation. A combination of erosion, wild animals, and someone with a spade had uprooted them from their earthen chambers, and now they lay white and bleached in the gold evening.

Pepper crossed her arms over her chest, as if to still the shivering, and I saw her shaking her head in amazement.

“I can’t believe it,” she mumbled. Then, suddenly, she stooped by the first skull and raised it with one hand.

“Alan, this can’t be.”

“What?”

She pointed to one of the teeth. “This skull has a filling. Alan, these can’t be Indians at all.”

I stared down at the tooth, trying to make sense of it.

And Chloe Messner’s words came back at me:

The tooth is yellowed, completely different wear pattern than Joseph Dupont’s premolars. I think it’s been lying around somewhere for a long time
.

I looked over at the two fresher graves and started to gag. I thought I understood now.

“You’re right,” I said finally. “It isn’t an Indian.”

A cloud passed over the sun and for a second I thought I was dizzy.

Too late, I realized it wasn’t a cloud, but a large human figure, standing at the edge of the bluff. A man in a baseball cap, with a rifle. And the rifle was pointed at us.

T
WENTY-FIVE

“So you didn’t drown after all?” rasped a voice I recognized. “Too bad.”

Marcus Briney walked slowly down the bluff toward us. “Now I’ll have to dig a place for you like I did
him
.”

Pepper’s mouth moved silently and I thought for an instant she was going to scream, but instead she finally articulated a single word: “Why?”

Briney shrugged. “Because you know where this place is now. You’ve been here and you’ve seen. Just like the old nigger. Bastard was a danger to me, always poking around. I finally had to get rid of him.”

“But why?” she asked again. “For the treasure?”

Briney spat on the ground. “Treasure? This junk? I seen what happened to that other poor son-of-a-bitch found a treasure, how they took it away from him. Naw, this crap don’t mean nothing to me. It ain’t nothin’ but Indian beads.”

I turned slowly to Pepper.

“It’s the graveyard that he’s trying to protect,” I said and turned back to the other man: “My God, Briney, how many of them were there?”

Briney smiled a crooked smile and shrugged again. “Dunno. Lost count a long time ago. Not so many, though. Twenty-five, tops.” He walked over to some of the older graves. “And the last one was while I was still at the prison. That’s been five years.” He looked down at a bleached fragment of scapula. “Otis, you wise-ass little bastard, you shouldn’t of never tried me like you did. Now look at you, all in little bitty pieces when you coulda left prison a free man after only ten years.” He squinted up at us again. “And you know he was a
white
man, too?” He shook his head. “I always gave the niggers more leeway, because they didn’t know no better. But a white man? Wasn’t no reason in the world for a white man to act the way some of ’em did. I always tried to help, too. I was fair. Everybody said that. Man did his work, didn’t make trouble, I was his best friend. I’ve had cons call me after they got out, thank me for what I did. There’s men out there with new lives because they used their time to learn something.” He sighed. “But there was others just too damn ornery to learn anything at all. Those were the ones I brought here.”

The setting sun sent little red fires dancing in his eyes.

“I told ’em I was gonna help ’em ex-cape.” He chuckled. “And they did: I put ’em in my car and brought ’em here.”

“Nobody ever missed them?” Pepper asked.

“Some of ’em I wrote up as escapes, and the rest just died in prison. Back in them days, when I started, there wasn’t the kind of recordkeeping they have now. A man really could disappear in Angola and never come out. Well, who the hell cared? We’re not talking about people, for God’s sake: We’re talking about scum. Look, my father was killed in the breakout of ’33. Those animals shot him down like a dog. And the parish wouldn’t even pay for the trials. Do you think they deserve any mercy?”

“And the two convicts,” I said. “You got them, too.”

“Sure. It was sort of an accident. I come up here a lot to talk to my boys. Otis, Big Red, Largo, and the others. I tell ’em I’m sorry I had to do this but I explain how it had to be and they understand. I was up here when I seen them two. Well, it was an easy shot. And I figure I did the state a favor.”

“A favor like killing T-Joe Dupont?” I asked.

“That crazy old nigger give him a tooth and T-Joe come asking me about it, said there wasn’t no Indian with fillings and he was going to the law. I tried to stop him but he took off in his truck, so I nailed him through the back window.”

“I figured as much,” I said. “But why did Carter Wascom alibi you? What do you have on him?”

“Carter?” Briney cackled. “He’s got a thing. He likes young girls. When Eulalia grew up he started after other ones. Got into some trouble in Natchez, when he was home visiting his folks, right before Eulalia got sick. They bought him out of it but they shut him out after that.”

“And you found out about it.”

“Well, being assistant warden gets you certain law enforcement connections. I picked it up from a sheriff’s deputy up there I knew.”

“So you blackmailed him into selling you your place at half what it was worth.”

“What was he gonna do with the land? Hell, it was a bargain: He didn’t want Eulalia to know, and when he stirred up all this crap after she died, he didn’t want anybody to know. Wouldn’t help his case any, would it?”

“You killed the dog.”

“Sort of a reminder to Carter.”

“And Absalom?”

“Couldn’t let the old bastard go on, digging stuff up and passing it out to who knows who. So I followed him up here.” He shrugged. “I was going to bury him with the others, but he ran. I shot him and he went over the edge.”

“And now it’s our turn,” I said, trying to keep him from hearing the fear in my voice.

“Hey, you people was coming right at me. How was I supposed to know you hadn’t figured out this place was here? And him in his orange jail uniform. Any citizen’s got a right to shoot an escapee on sight, I say.”

Pepper shook her head, disbelieving. “But what about the artifacts? The beads and these brass bells and …”

“He’s a smart man,” I said. “Mr. Briney here figured that if he buried the bodies with Indian artifacts, anybody like old Absalom who dug them up would figure it was an Indian graveyard and they’d keep quiet.”

Briney grinned again. “You’re smart, too. I wish I didn’t have to kill you, but you got to understand.”

“Yeah,” I said, trying to keep him from seeing me shake.

“Walk on to the edge of the bluff,” Briney said in a suddenly soft voice, like he was coaxing a child. “Go ahead of me and I promise you won’t feel a thing. It’ll be over quick and then I’ll come and talk to you, too.”

“Just a minute,” I said, trying to buy a delay. “Tell me, who was the first one you killed? Do you remember? Do you remember where he was buried?”

Briney frowned. “ ’Course I do. It was a big dumb coon-ass named Dugas. Always mouthing off. I was just a regular guard, then. It was about the time all those guys cut their heels. See, I wasn’t sure up until then. But when I saw how they was trying to get out of work, how far they’d go, my mind was made up. Yeah. Clint Dugas.” He walked over to a spot about midway in the boneyard. “Old Clint would be about here, I reckon.” He squinted up at me. “Why?”

“Just curious.”

“Well, enough curiosity. Just march up to the bluff, okay? Don’t make it any harder than it’s got to be.”

Pepper shot me a look from the corner of her eye and I tried to think of some way to delay the inevitable.

“Go on,” he said, poking the rifle at me, “or I’ll have to shoot you both right here. Starting with
her
.”

My legs wobbled and I wondered if I’d be able to make it the whole twenty yards. There had to be something I could do, some way to stop him. We passed the graves of the two convicts and I shuddered. Soon our graves would look the same way, and years from now, if we were lucky, somebody would dig up our bones. Lucky?

We came to Ben’s body and I halted.

“Mr. Briney …”

The gun barrel poked me in the back. “Keep going.”

I took a step but then I realized Pepper hadn’t moved.

“I’m not going another step,” she said. “You’re just going to have to shoot me here.”

I turned in time to see the gun barrel shift away, toward her.

“If that’s what you want,” Briney said softly and cocked the hammer.

That was when Ben groaned.

“What in hell?” Briney’s head jerked around. Without thinking, I rushed him, pushing him backward. He tripped over the wounded man and lost his footing. The rifle went off and the bullet flew past my head. I grabbed the barrel and pushed it to the side, away from us. But Briney kicked out, his boot catching me in the groin. I doubled in agony and felt myself crumpling to the ground. Briney disentangled himself from Ben, grabbed the rifle, and for an eternal instant I stared down the barrel.

Then there was a sound like a gong being struck and I saw the weapon fall away as its owner toppled to the ground. I looked up through tears to see Pepper standing over him with a shovel.

“A man shouldn’t leave his tools lying around,” she said. “It could be dangerous.”

I tried to grin between clenched teeth.

“Take your time,” she said. “I’ve got the rifle now. And if there’s any permanent damage I may just shoot him where he lies.”

She turned toward me, reaching out to help me up. And didn’t see Briney rising to his knees behind her. I yelled but it didn’t matter, because he was on his feet then, swaying, and before she could level the rifle he toppled backward and disappeared over the edge.

E
PILOGUE

It was two days later and I was sitting in the shade of a red oak with David Goldman, watching the excavation crew sweat in the afternoon sun. It wasn’t my crew, but a group from the forensic anthropology program at the university, and I was just as glad. Frank LeMoine, the official representative of the Tunica-Biloxis, had been hovering all day, to make sure that the wrong bones weren’t disturbed. Not to be out-hovered, Bertha Bomberg, from the Corps of Engineers, had taken the forensic team aside and lectured them on proper archaeological method. The coroner, a thin little man named Potts, had come out in the morning, taken one look at the confusion, and prudently driven back to St. Francisville and his medical practice. No mixing in bureaucratic snafus for him.

By two o’clock the sun was at its zenith and Frank decided the spirits of the dead did not require that their descendants suffer sunstroke, so he drifted over to the hickory tree on the other side of the clearing and pulled the bill of his cap down over his face. From the corner of my eye I saw Bertha heave a sigh of relief and sneak over to her government carryall.

“So how did you figure it out?” David asked finally, waving away a fly. “I mean, that real Indian burials were there, too?”

“I saw a lot of bones,” I said. “More than any twenty-five or thirty graves. I asked Briney where the first person he killed was buried. He pointed to a spot right in the middle. I’d looked at the ones on either side. There was a jawbone on the surface, just left of the Dugas grave. It didn’t have any fillings.”