Burial Ground (9 page)

“I’m going down,” I said.

“Do you want me to go first?” she asked, and I could tell she was serious.

“I can manage,” I told her. “Just wait here at the top and then you can follow me.”

I grabbed a tree root and lowered myself gingerly, hunting for a foothold against a small sapling part of the way down. The soil was wet from being in the shade and as I transferred my weight to the small tree I felt my foot starting to slip. I reached for a branch hanging out over the chasm and felt it bend. My foot slipped away from the sapling and I fought to regain my purchase. I wedged my foot between the tiny trunk and the bluff and then, to my horror, felt the sapling give way. I plunged down but something caught my free hand.

“Hang on,” P. E. Courtney said.

I lashed out with my foot, found a small niche in the soft earth, and then launched myself over to where I could grab another root. This time the root held and I was able to lower myself to the bottom of the gully.

I looked down at my slacks: They were smeared with red clay, and water was seeping into my shoes. Worst of all, P. E. Courtney was picking her way down as daintily as a veteran rock climber.

A few seconds later she landed beside me, on the wet gravel.

“Oh,” she said. “You have on low quarters. Your feet are getting wet.”

I looked down: She’d changed footwear again, this time to low hiking boots.

“It’s happened before,” I said. “Look.”

She stared down where I was pointing. It was a pair of deep impressions, now filled with water.

“Somebody crossed here,” I said.

“Your friend?”

“I don’t know.”

But it had to be. And as I searched the gravel on this side I saw other marks, too many for one person.

Either he’d been following someone or they’d been following him.

I considered the steep face of the gully opposite.

“He couldn’t have gotten up there,” I said. “He has to have followed the stream to a place where the banks were lower.”

“You want to split up and each take a direction?” she asked.

I shook my head. “We stick together. One lost person is enough.”

“I have a compass,” she said.

“Good,” I growled. “Because I don’t.”

Not that we’d need it following a stream. But I didn’t like what I was feeling about this place. And I was beginning to think maybe P. E. Courtney might be able to handle herself in the woods after all.

We followed the little trickle north, the bluffs on our right side. My feet crunched into the gravel, and a couple of times I had to step quickly to keep from sinking. I no longer saw any more boot marks and began to wonder if I’d made the right decision: What if he
had
gone the other way, toward the confluence of the two streams? And the truth came to me suddenly: He hadn’t had a map, so, of course, there was no way he could have known.

Damn. She’d been thinking straight and I hadn’t. Why the hell hadn’t she said something? Was she just being nice, catering to my male ego? P. E. Courtney didn’t seem the type, yet…

The sound of a limb breaking tore my thoughts back to the here and now. A huge bough came crashing toward us and I lunged against her, driving her away from the danger. A half-second later the great limb landed in the water two feet away, showering us with droplets.

“My God,” she said, getting up slowly from the gravel verge. “I didn’t even see that thing …”

Maybe it was the fear in her eyes, but for the first time I thought I detected a crack in her East Coast veneer.

I reached out a hand to help her up and she took it, then, as she steadied herself, let go quickly and started to brush herself off as if she were afraid some telltale trace of weakness might still cling to her.

Now I looked down at the piece of wood that had almost killed us.

“I didn’t hear the limb break,” she said. Then, seeing me staring at it, she took a step closer: “What’s wrong?”

“You didn’t hear it because it didn’t break,” I said. “At least, not just now. Look at the ends.”

They were fungus-covered. The huge trunk had been lying on the ground above, long enough to be infested with rot.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said under my breath.

“What?”

That was when we heard the crackle of sticks breaking somewhere on the edge of the cliff above us.

I grabbed her hand and jerked her forward. “
Now!
”

Soil was cascading down from where someone stood on the edge above us, hidden by the forest shadows.

“I don’t guess you’ve got a gun in there someplace,” I said, nodding at her pack.

She shook her head. “Sorry.”

The footsteps were definite now, crunching the dead leaves and twigs of the forest overhead. I searched the defile in front of us for a way to go, but there was no choice except forward.

At that second another log came crashing down from above and I grabbed P. E. and pulled her after me into the streambed. The cold water filled my shoes, but that was the least of my concerns: If we stayed close to the bluff on the right, we were prey for whatever got thrown down on us, but here, out from under the edge, we could be picked off by a gun.

“This way,” I said, pointing ahead. We ran upstream to a place where the left bank was low and she scrambled up it easily. I followed and, touching the grass on the top, crawled behind a log.

The echoes of our splashes died away and gradually the sounds of the forest returned to normal. I pointed at the cliff face across from us.

“They’ll play hell getting down that.”

“So what do we do?” she asked. “We need to get out of here and get help.”

“Where’s your phone?” I asked.

She fished it out of her pocket and punched in 911.

Only static.

I watched her put it away, chagrined. “I say we go to the island and hike out on one of the jeep roads the map shows. Whoever that was will probably go back.”

And, I thought, we would be leaving David to whatever had happened to him. But there was nothing to be done; two lost people couldn’t help a third.

For a moment longer I watched the leafy curtain across the creek, and then I scrambled backward on hands and knees until I was completely in shadow and got slowly to my feet, P. E. following.

She pulled out the map tube, which she’d had slung across her back on a cord. “Here’s where I think we are,” she said. “The hills should end the other side of this ridge, and then a quarter-mile and we’re on the island.”

I nodded. “And once we get there, there’s a trail running down the middle.”

“Right.” She stowed the map and we started toward the edge of the ridge.

The side sloped at about forty degrees and I started down on my seat, sliding and skidding until I hit the bottom and came up on my feet. P. E. wasn’t so lucky and rolled into an untidy heap. When I stretched out a hand to help her she ignored it and dragged herself upright.

“I think the island’s that way,” she said, pointing ahead of us.

We lurched through a stand of palmetto and I felt our feet sinking into the mud. We were out of the hills now and into the coastal plain. This had been an old course of the Mississippi, at a time when the first white men were taking this land from the Tunica and their kinsmen, and that was why no one really believed there was still a Tunica village to be found: The irresistible waters would have torn it away well over a century ago.

I stole a look at my watch. It was just after ten. We’d been in the woods for an hour and the heat was suffocating.

P. E. Courtney unslung her little backpack, reached into it, and withdrew a plastic water bottle.

I watched, incredulous, as she took a long swallow, then offered it to me.

“Water?” she asked sweetly.

“I’ll go a little longer, thanks,” I said, and then kicked myself mentally.

Just ahead of us was a bottom area, studded with jutting cypress knees. The surface was green with duckweed and I wondered if we dared try to cross. But before I could say anything, she was sloshing forward into the swamp, arms outstretched for balance. I started to call after her and realized it would do no good.

I saw the water reach her calves, then her thighs.

Grudgingly, I admitted I’d been wrong in my assessment of her ability do to fieldwork. All I could do now was follow.

I tried to hurry, but the mud sucked at my feet and I felt like a man in a dream.

Twenty feet ahead of me, she was hauling herself up out of the water, though it looked like she’d found a briar patch for her landfall.

I wondered if she had a collapsible machete in her pack.

Somehow she found her way out of the briars and I followed, leaving bits and pieces of myself on the thorns. She waited, standing atop a tree stump, and took a reading with her compass.

“Straight ahead,” she pronounced.

Who was I to argue?

The undergrowth grew thinner, and I saw with relief that the surface we walked on was becoming sandy. The smell of the river was heavy now, and I listened for the sound of waves or boats passing, but as yet there was nothing.

“Look,” P. E. called, pointing. There was a lighter area ahead, where more sun fell through the trees, and I knew it had to be the path that ran from one end of the island to the other. A few seconds later I emerged onto the trail. It had been made by the jeeps and ATVs going to hunting stands. I would have given several portions of my anatomy for an ATV just now.

We reexamined the topographic sheet. The easiest way off the island was to follow the trail right, toward the tip, and then take what appeared to be a small bridge back across the bayou. If we did this, we would have a trek of half a mile across the floodplain and another mile or so through the hills on a winding track, before we hit the paved road, a mile north of where our cars were parked.

“Are you sure you don’t want some water?” she asked.

This time I swallowed my pride and said yes.

I took a couple of gulps and forced myself to stop.

“Thanks.” I handed the bottle back to her. The trees were thinner ahead of us and as we started toward them I saw a brightness that I knew was glare from the river. I made a straight line through the brush for the water, and emerged into the open. Below me erosion had etched gullies into the sand, from the bluff top to the water’s edge. The water itself was brown, and here and there tiny mirrors of sunlight sparkled on the waves. The opposite bank, nearly a mile away, was a low tree line, riding a white belt of sand. I thought about the escaped convicts and how desperate Angola had made them that they were willing to brave thirty miles of river. They’d beached near here, according to the guards, and then, being creatures of dry land, had headed inland and away from the river with its mysterious depths and devilish currents.

I let myself down slowly onto the sand, and touched something eroding from the soil.

“What do you have, a cartridge case?” she asked.

I shrugged. “Brass.”

“I’ve seen lots of it. This place must be a shooting gallery during hunting season.”

“Must be,” I agreed.

She peered down at me. “Say, are you going to make it? You look tired.”

I started to tell her I’d dance at her funeral, but held my tongue. “I’m fine,” I said.

“Are you sure?” She pulled the water bottle out of her pack: “Here. Take some. I don’t want you having heat stroke.”

I was still staring at the water bottle when the brush crackled behind her. She let the bottle fall from her hand and it went rolling down the slope toward the river. Suddenly dogs were baying and there was a din of men’s voices and the crackle of radios. A man in camouflage green stepped from the trees, rifle in hand.

“What the hell are you people doing here?” he demanded in a gravelly voice.

E
IGHT

I pulled myself to my feet.

Other armed men materialized from the trees. Most wore camouflage, but some were dressed in the dark blue with red trim that identified them as members of the prison guard force. A couple of bloodhounds strained at their leashes and the man holding them looked as if it wouldn’t take much to let them loose.

“I asked you a question,” the man with the gravelly voice said. “Who are you people and what are you doing here?”

“We’re looking—” We started to answer together and then stopped. P. E. glanced at me and I began over.

“We’re looking for a friend who disappeared yesterday. We went to Absalom Moon’s place and found his car. It looked like he went into the woods.”

The team leader cast a scornful look at my mud-spattered clothes. He was a wiry man with a baseball cap and sunglasses over a jutting jaw, and there were places on his cheek that his razor had missed.

“And you came back here dressed like that?” He nodded at P. E. “Hell,
she’s
better dressed for the woods than you are.”

P. E. managed a demure smile. “I don’t think he always dresses like this in the field,” she said sweetly, and I restrained myself from grabbing her neck.