Relics (10 page)

She dropped to the ground beside him. “I wish some of the other field team members could be here. They would feel better.”

Joe nodded, taking a deep drag of hot tobacco smoke into his lungs. Faye was pretty sure he only smoked on ritual occasions, and she wondered how he escaped addiction. He gestured to the basin. Faye responded to the wordless invitation and dipped a hand into it, anointing her hands and face with the good-smelling water. She understood almost nothing about Native American spiritual practices, but she would have given a lot to experience the kind of peace that Joe wore like a mantle.

“Is Carmen—” Faye hesitated. Her mind was so Western and analytical that she could hardly frame her question.

“Carmen is here,” Joe said, relieving her of the burden of asking a question that her left brain said was ridiculous. “She doesn’t know what happened to her. Most folks who die sudden or too young feel that way, but I think there’s something else she wants us to know.”

“What is it?”

Joe shrugged his broad shoulders. He took a long straight stick and poked at the fire. “I think Carmen’s going to hang around here until we figure that out.”

***

Since Faye knew Joe wouldn’t be roasting a chicken over his ceremonial fire, she knew that supper would be sketchy and late. No one else on the project team seemed to have the time or inclination to cook. They were all accomplished eaters, though, so the odds that any of Joe’s pinto beans had survived twenty-four hours in the communal refrigerator were negligible. Instead of looking for something to eat, Faye opted to try to salvage her day by finding out who owned the property around her two possible sites.

Jenny Hanahan, the woman who ran the grocery store which appeared to be the beating heart of the Sujosa settlement, was the obvious person to ask.

“DeWayne Montrose owns the property that the Indian mound sits on. He’ll sprout wings and fly before he’ll let you dig on any property that belongs to him,” was Jenny’s encouraging answer to Faye’s first question. “What else do you want to know?”

“Who owns the property around the bridge?”

“Miss Dovey owns all that property, on both sides of the river and both sides of the road,” said Jenny.

“Really?” said Faye. “Isn’t her place in the other direction?”

“Her husband Taylor never had any brothers or sisters, so all the Murdock land passed to Miss Dovey when he died.” She paused to ring up a six-pack for Jorge. “Miss Dovey’s father left her a goodly chunk of the Miller land, too,” she continued. “And of course she’s got the property she and Taylor bought while they were married. Her land is scattered all over the place and most of it’s worn out. The rest of it wasn’t ever worth farming in the first place. That’s the way land is in this settlement—it just sits there. Give me a store, now that’s real property.”

“Do you think Miss Dovey’d let me work down by the bridge?” Faye had asked.

“She’s never been known to tell a young person no, and everybody’s a young person to her, these days. Besides, the land’s not worth a hill of beans. You couldn’t hurt it if you tried. Ain’t nothing underneath the briers and the kudzu but thin red dirt, and most of that’s washed into the river. You could stand in some of those gullies and not even your head would poke out the top.” Thrusting a phone into Faye’s hand, Jenny said, “Give her a call. I bet she’ll say, yes.”

Age had rasped a jagged edge on Miss Dovey’s voice, but it couldn’t wear away the softness that revealed who the old woman really was. She would mother everyone within reach for as long as she drew breath.

“You spin an interesting tale, Ms. Longchamp. Do you really think you might find something important under my land?”

“It’s very possible.” Faye felt her Southern upbringing bubble up in her chest. She was incapable of speaking to a woman of Miss Dovey’s age and experience without peppering her speech with terms of respect. She caved in to the urge to say “ma’am.” “Yes, ma’am, it’s quite possible. May I have permission to excavate on your property?”

“I’m sure a few holes wouldn’t hurt that worthless land, but why don’t you come over here and let’s talk about it? The old schoolteacher in me is right curious about what you and your scientist friends find so interesting about us Sujosa. I have some biscuits left over from supper that are still warm, and I’ll put a pot of coffee on.”

There was nothing for Faye to say but, “Yes, ma’am.”

***

Faye took the project’s diesel pickup, a massive brute of a truck that was better suited to the settlement roads than her own ancient car. Before she’d traveled far, she realized that the trip might have been quicker and safer if she’d walked. Like most Sujosa homes, Miss Dovey’s house was much closer to the settlement center when traveling by foot than it was by car. The route to Miss Dovey’s crawled up a steep slope, one switchback at a time. The notion of streetlights was laughable, and neither Faye’s headlights nor the cloud-obscured moon made much more than a dent in the inky night.

It was comforting to see that Miss Dovey had left the porch light on for her, until a shadowy figure that was too fleet-footed to be ninety-seven emerged from the house. The faceless person walked briskly toward the car where Faye waited and looked in through the open window. The car’s dome light played dimly on Ronya Smiley’s face.

“Miss Dovey’s asleep,” the Sujosa woman said.

“But I just spoke to her,” Faye said, making a move to get out of her car by sticking her leg out the open door. Ronya didn’t take the hint. “It couldn’t have been thirty minutes ago. She invited me for biscuits and coffee.”

“Miss Dovey’s been feeding everything on two legs for seventy-five years, but she’s old now. When she gets tired, she goes to sleep, whether she likes it or not. But she gave me a message for you.”

“I hope so. We were going to discuss something very important—”

“Yeah. Well, she said, she’d had second thoughts about your question. She’s not real sure she wants anybody digging on her land. What if somebody gets hurt?”

“Of course, she wouldn’t be liable—”

The expression on Ronya’s face moved past suspicion toward disdain. “A woman like Miss Dovey doesn’t worry about legal things like ‘liability.’ She frets over what she’d do if someone was out-of-work because they hurt themselves on her property. What if they had medical bills they couldn’t pay? She doesn’t have any money, so she couldn’t help them out, but she’d feel responsible forever. When you’re that old, you’ve got a pretty good idea of how long forever is. Nobody around here would put up with anybody fretting Miss Dovey.” Ronya helped Faye close her car door, then walked back into the house and shut the door.

As Faye was backing out of Miss Dovey’s driveway, her headlights raked the front of the old woman’s house. She could have sworn she saw a hand draw back the sheer curtains framing a window. A stooped figure stood silhouetted in the room’s dim lamplight.

Chapter Twelve

As Faye awoke on Tuesday morning, her newly conscious brain reminded her that Brent would be at his dermatology office through Wednesday, making sure the citizens of Birmingham were beautiful, so she likely wouldn’t see him for another couple of days. She wondered if there would be another football game at Alcaskaki High the following weekend and whether he would be looking for company. When she came to full consciousness, she felt a trifle sheepish for daydreaming over a man she barely knew, but such silliness was healthier than dwelling on her work or on the question of Carmen’s death and her own narrow escape.

Sitting up in bed, she hauled her briefcase into her lap and opened it. Her hands rested on the final work of Carmen’s tragically abbreviated career. One advantage to waking up early was the extra reading time she gained before work.

Faye turned the pages over, one by one. It was a miracle that Carmen’s work had survived. It could so easily have perished when the original copy was destroyed by fire. With that thought, she abruptly shut the binder and got out of bed, shucking her pajamas and throwing on her work clothes. She needed to get to a photocopier.

The original copy of Carmen’s work hadn’t perished in the fire. It had been in her briefcase, which had left no trace in the burned-out building. If Adam Strahan couldn’t find Carmen’s missing briefcase, he would have to agree with her suspicion that someone had stolen it. And he would be very glad to have a copy of material known to have been in that briefcase.

Jenny Hanahan had a photocopier in her store, and she’d agreed to let Raleigh’s workers use it at a highly inflated per-copy cost. Faye had a feeling that when Adam Strahan saw Carmen’s notes, he would be more than happy to let Jenny charge the Fire Marshal for the copying costs, inflated or not.

Faye loitered near the photocopier until the lone customer left in the store was standing at the checkout counter, chatting with Jenny. If someone had stolen Carmen’s original notes while in the process of committing arson, it would be dimwitted indeed to let word get around that Faye had a bootlegged copy or two.

***

Having finished her furtive photocopying, Faye returned to the bunkhouse and went to the long row of trays in the parlor that served as mailboxes for the project’s staff. Folding a piece of paper bearing the song Miss Dovey’s Papaw had taught her, she slid it into Dr. Amory’s in-box. Identifying an old folk song was not strictly within a linguist’s job description, but it was possible that he would recognize something in the lyrics—a turn of a phrase or the archaic use of a particular word—that would shed some light on its origins. That mission accomplished, she headed for Raleigh’s dig site, taking no pleasure in the prospect of the day’s work. It was depressing to think that even though she only had one employee left, she really had nothing useful for him to do.

An ancient Ford was parked just off the road. Entering the clearing, she was surprised to find that Joe wasn’t alone. As she approached, he and his helper grasped two corners of the tarp covering one pile of backdirt and folded it back neatly, accomplishing the task in a quarter of the time it would have taken Joe to do it by himself. Each of them began shoveling soil into a screen, pausing frequently to see what was left behind and working with efficient care. Joe must have cloned himself. There was no other explanation for what her eyes told her.

Then she came close enough to recognize Joe’s helper. Elliott removed the cap that kept the sun out of his face and the sweat out of his eyes. He approached her, hat in hand.

“I’m sorry about the trouble yesterday, Ms. Longchamp. I need this job, and I don’t go along with the things Jorge says when he’s mad. I’ll work hard for you, and I’ll do the job the way you want it done. That is, if you’ll take me back.”

Though taking Elliott back would require her to reverse herself on her very plain statement that leaving the site with Jorge would mean never working for her again, Faye could not turn her back on a chance to salvage the situation, especially when Elliott had apologized with such sincerity. She reached out and shook his hand. “I can use a good worker. If you’re ready to be one, you can work for me.”

In the absence of Jorge and Fred, Elliott proved to be as tireless a worker as Joe, which meant that Faye didn’t have to hound him every last second to keep working. This release from managerial hell allowed her the time to be productive herself. It was soothing to her soul to be working with good, honest dirt again. She plopped down on the ground and started running soil through an eighth-inch screen. The hypnotic repetition of scooping and sifting felt more like sandcastle construction than it did actual work, probably because she could do it with her brain turned off and her mind at rest.

The morning’s clouds pulled back, allowing the sun to light up a perfect Indian summer day. Faye shed her jacket, working comfortably in a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Elliott liked to talk more than she and Joe did, and he didn’t seem to mind talking mostly to himself, with little response other than an occasional nod from Faye or grunt from Joe. Yes, Elliott was going to be all right.

“Don’t know where Jorge and Fred get off,” he said, “quitting this job when they ain’t got another one to go to. Jorge has a little piddly part-time job driving a delivery van; he can’t get by on that. Fred ain’t even got that much money coming in. Margie and I can’t live like that. We don’t plan to live forever in her grandmother’s old house. If we lose one more board to dry rot, the whole thing’ll fall down around our ears. We’re holding off on having kids, so she can get her R.N. from the community college and work a few years. Maybe we might be able to afford satellite TV before they think up something else more expensive. We were finally saving something when the limerock mine laid me off. If Jorge and Fred won’t talk to me because I intend to work this job, with or without them, then they’ll just have to talk to each other.”

Excerpt from an Interview with Mr. Elliott Young and Mrs. Margie Young, November 2

Interviewer: Carmen J. Martinez, Ph.D.