Relics (16 page)

Leo Smiley waded into the tangled kudzu and began to gently disengage Jimmie’s body from the broken vines that cradled it. It seemed that as Leo forced one tendril to release the boy, another one materialized to grip him more tightly.

“Shouldn’t we wait for the coroner?” Faye said.

Leo finished freeing the body. He pulled Jimmie’s limp arm around his neck and squatted slightly. Then with one arm under the dead boy’s knees and the other supporting his back, he stood. He was even taller than Ronya, but without his wife’s heavy build. The hollow cheeks beneath his beard were visible even in the moonlight, and heavy brow bones shaded his deep-set eyes. “If the coroner needs to be here,” Leo said, “Brent will call him. What I want to know is this—why are
you
here?”

Taken aback by Leo’s in-your-face question, she answered truthfully, “I just want to help.”

“An outsider who wants to help. That’s something I haven’t heard before.”

Leo took a step closer to her, Jimmie’s broken body still resting in his arms. Faye’s throat tightened. She had never met Jimmie, but she had heard so much about him, so many good things about such a young man.

He was so young. Her hand reached out of its own volition, to brush her fingers against Jimmie’s dark hair, to smooth his ripped jacket into place so that it could keep him warm. Leo stepped back, snatching the boy in his arms away from Faye’s caring gesture.

“Outsiders like to send our men to war. They sent my daddy to Vietnam. He never came home, and he was hardly older than Jimmie here. They like to collect taxes from us, but they don’t like to spend the money on our roads or on our children. And what have they given us in return?” He bent his head over Jimmie’s for a second. When he looked up, the glimmery moonlight reflected in every tear rolling down his cheeks, and nothing came out of his mouth but a faint choking noise.

Jorge stepped into the breach. He covered the ground between him and Faye in two steps, his face distorted by the faint light of the lantern in his hand. He stood a foot taller than Faye, but he leaned down close to her ear, so she couldn’t miss what he had to say. “Outsiders ain’t never brought us nothing but kudzu and AIDS and—” He looked up at the steel girders tracing a geometric outline against the sky. “—and goddamn cell phones. You need to go home. And you can take all the other outsiders and their so-called rural assistance with you when you go.”

Faye had never in her life been lumped together with the powers-that-be who carelessly exploited anyone who was handy. Her first impulse was to say, “My great-great-grandmother was born a slave,” as if that fact would set her apart from anyone who had ever oppressed the Sujosa. She surprised herself by saying something else entirely.

“My daddy died in Vietnam, too,” she said. “I never met him.”

She met Leo’s eyes, then Jorge’s, then turned and walked away.

Excerpt from an Interview with Jimmie Lavelle, October 30, 2004

Interviewer: Carmen Martinez, Ph.D.

Chapter Seventeen

The coroner came and went before midnight, and Jimmie’s body went with him. The security people hired by the cell phone company arrived nearly three hours after Jimmie tripped the tower’s silent intruder alarm. The delay was hardly surprising, since the nearest security company was in Gadsden, down a hundred miles of bad road. Once there, they got busy and found the crowbar used to break the lock on the ladder.

Thursday morning, the sheriff and a couple of technicians from the medical examiner’s office arrived in the settlement to interview Irene and every person present when Jimmie’s body was found. Another team went out to the hilltop to lift prints from the metal ladder and scale the tower to see if they could determine where the boy had been standing when he took his fatal dive.

Faye, drawn back to the tower as she had been drawn back to the scene of Carmen’s death, had driven out after them. Though the sheriff wasn’t as forthcoming with information as Adam had been, he let her stand near the base of the tower and watch his team work. As far as she knew, no evidence had been gathered that could tell them whether Jimmie’s death had been accident or foul play. The word “suicide” had been mentioned by the cell phone people, but nothing she had heard about Jimmie supported that thought. Indeed, the stunned Sujosa were as affronted by the word as Faye.

But what could have happened? The general consensus was that it must have been an accident, just a drunken kid looking for excitement. Maybe Jimmie hadn’t climbed the ladder alone. Maybe two or three drunken kids had climbed the tower and the survivors were afraid to talk. If so, then surely they would have left behind fingerprints or footprints, and alcohol would show up in Jimmie’s bloodstream.

And if it had been foul play? The ladder was narrow and, though it occasionally widened into a landing as it crept up the tower, it was hard to imagine someone forcing Jimmie to climb the ladder, then pushing him off. Maybe they could have done it if they were holding a gun on him, but they would have to be very nimble on the ladder.

Faye knew that, if she’d been in that situation, she would have watched for an opportunity to stomp on the hand of the person forcing her up the ladder. She would have made her pursuer shoot her, or she would have grabbed the arm holding the gun and taken her assailant to the ground with her. Jimmie hadn’t done either of those things.

All will be revealed in time
, Faye’s grandmother had always said, and she clung to that, though her more cynical side revised the old truism to say,
All will be revealed in time—or it won’t.
It galled her to think that the truth about Jimmie’s death might always remain a mystery. Her sense of justice demanded something, anything, that would explain what had happened to turn a gifted young man into the empty shell Leo had held in his arms the night before. Even a suicide note would have lifted the pall hanging over the community, if only a bit, by answering the question, “Why?”

She looked through the barren trees toward the hills on the other side of the Broad River. It was a beautiful view, lonely, yet serene, with one or two Alcaskaki farmsteads dotting the gray landscape beneath a blue sky. Was this the last thing Jimmie saw? She turned away.

Upon her return to the bunkhouse, Faye was surprised to find Joe, Elliott, and Ronya waiting for her. Half the morning was already gone. She’d had no intention of asking her crew to work on the day after such a horrific event.

“You can’t have gotten any sleep,” said Faye.

“Working is better than thinking,” Elliott said, and Joe nodded in agreement.

Ronya, gripping her son by the hand, said, “I can work all day, if you don’t mind having Zack on the site. He’s promised me that he’ll be good while I’m working. I—” She looked Faye in the face, trying to communicate something she couldn’t say in front of a four-year-old. “I just couldn’t leave him. Not today.”

Faye made a quick decision. She knew they were all too bleary to do any work that required conscious thought, so work on the Lester site was out. Instead, she had them set up their equipment at Raleigh’s site, where they could sift soil looking for previously overlooked artifacts as long as they felt up to it. If lack of sleep caught up with them, they could go home and go to bed. Tomorrow, or Monday at the latest, they would all move over to the Lester site and start excavating for real.

Watching Ronya stoop over her work, Faye noticed that Zack hadn’t budged from his seat on the ground about five feet behind his mother. His lips were set and his eyes were big. Zack might not know what had happened to upset his mother and every grownup he’d seen since dawn, but he was smart enough to know that it was something bad.

“Let me show you where you can play,” Faye said, sticking out a hand and helping Zack to his feet. Pointing to a pile of screened soil that was waiting to be returned to one of the excavations, she said, “You can climb on that and dig in it and slide down the side of it. You can make mud pies with it, if you like. Just don’t play on any of the other dirt piles, and don’t go anywhere near any of the holes, okay?”

Zack responded by running to the top of the little pile of dirt and rolling down it, pressing dark, loose soil into every fiber of his sweatsuit. Faye looked at his mother and shrugged a wordless apology, but Ronya only smiled and kept working.

***

The morning wore away slowly. A couple of times, someone turned up a fragment of the common gray pottery that the Sujosa had been making for generations, renewing Faye’s consternation over how she could be expected to put a date on the stuff. For all Faye knew, they came from pots Ronya had thrown within the last year. When asked, Ronya said that she couldn’t tell a broken sliver of her own work from a broken bit of one of her mother’s pots, or her grandmother’s, for that matter. The piles of unscreened soil dwindled, and Faye had to admit that finding something significant there had been an idea doomed from the start. As it often is, fate was poised to reward stubbornness. When Joe rose up from his screen, cradling something in his palm, and yelled, “Faye! Get over here,” she knew what he’d found.

“You did it. Oh, Joe, look at this. You did it.”

“You were the one that kept us looking for it when anybody with good sense would’ve quit.” Joe’s teeth showed white in his dark handsome face.

Ronya and Elliott gathered around for a glimpse of the tiny, broken thing that they had worked so hard to find.

The potsherd was tin-glazed and ornamented with luster painting, but Faye didn’t think it came from the same piece of pottery as Jorge’s sherd. It was shaped like a slice of pie, and one curved edge had been part of the rim of a plate or shallow bowl. The bottom surface was white, adorned with scattered blue flourishes, while the top had been underpainted in a deep blue pigment, probably cobalt. Luster in a reddish-gold hue had been painted on the rim and dotted in a random pattern across the blue ground like stars in a midnight sky. Even broken, it was lovely. Faye hoped that the laboratory could tease a date out of it without marring its beauty too badly.

***

Faye stood under an ice-blue sky and watched her crew work. It was nearly eleven o’clock and she felt like spoiling a little boy’s lunch. Walking over to a heavily trampled pile of soil, she noticed that it looked much smaller than it had when she left. Zack, who was practicing crawling like a snake, seemed to be wearing most of the missing dirt.

“Come with me,” she said, extending her hand. “I need some help with my grocery shopping.”

Zack grabbed her hand and looked over his shoulder at his mother. She waved them away, saying, “Go ahead. Miss Faye won’t let anything happen to you.”

Miss Faye
. The nickname made her feel like she was on her way to Miss Dovey’s stature. She’d be there in, oh, sixty years or so.

Zack ran toward Hanahan’s so fast that Faye had to jog to keep up. A grimy little gentleman, he opened the screen door for her so she could enter first.

“Jenny,” Faye called, walking down the candy aisle and snagging five Hershey bars, “do you by any chance sell cold Cokes?”

Jenny nodded. “Yeah. You’re not the only idiot around here that likes cold drinks in the wintertime.”

“In the bottle?”

“Do they come any other way?” Jenny pointed at a cooler, packed with ice, that sat near the checkout counter.

Faye fished five bottles out of the cooler and set them on the counter.

“You must be powerfully short on caffeine.”

“And sugar,” Faye said, piling the chocolate bars on the counter and laying a ten-dollar bill beside them.

Jenny gave Faye her change, then reached under the cash register and pulled out a cardboard six-pack carrier. After opening each bottle, she loaded the Cokes into the carrier.

She handed Faye the carrier, then put the candy bars in a small paper bag. “Faye will need help carrying these.” She dropped a piece of bubble gum in the bag and handed it to Zack. “There you go. Enjoy your nice nutritious lunch.” Zack laughed until they walked out of the store, highly entertained by the notion that there might be vitamins in his candy.

***

Faye’s crew, powered by a late morning jolt of sugar, carbonation, caffeine, and cocoa butter, worked straight through the noon hour. Every few minutes, Joe or Elliott stood up and unconsciously started the field archaeologist’s stretching routine—rolling his head, shrugging his shoulders, and twisting his back this way and that, trying to counteract a long morning of stooping over his work. Faye ached in all the same places they did, and her head hurt, too. She hoped Brent would take her stitches out soon.

When Adam’s truck pulled into the parking lot behind Hanahan’s, Faye rounded up the troops and barked, “Get some lunch. Those candy bars won’t keep you going forever.”

Elliott and Ronya headed to the concrete picnic table behind Jenny’s grocery store while Faye hurried to greet Adam, with Joe on her heels. When they reached him, though, she found herself awkward and tongue-tied, unwilling to just blurt out, “What are the odds that two people would die in this tiny settlement within four days?” Joe, taciturn as always, was no help.

“I heard about Jimmie,” were the first words out of Adam’s mouth.

“Already?”

“I live in Alcaskaki, the gossip capital of the Southeast. I heard about Jimmie before the coroner left home. And I heard that Leo and Jorge really laid into you last night, out by the cell phone tower. Do you think you could try to stay away from people who don’t like you, just once? At least until we figure out what’s going on here in the settlement to cause people to drop out of the sky or to burn to death? Have you had words with anybody else?” Adam leaned up against his truck’s fender and drummed his fingers on the hood.

Faye followed his lead, leaning up against the truck while she considered his question. The hood was still warm, which was a nice antidote to the afternoon’s chill wind. “Well, I fired Jorge and Fred and Elliott Monday afternoon. That wasn’t a real cordial conversation.”

“People don’t appreciate getting fired, even when they deserve it.”

Adam nodded to acknowledge the truth of Joe’s observation.

Feeling compelled to confess every unpleasant conversation, Faye added, “And a couple of days ago, Jorge and Leo talked like they might want to set DeWayne’s dogs on me. Again.”

“Woman, don’t you have enough sense to get scared now and then?” Adam demanded.

Joe emitted a snicker.

“Will you please try to stay close to people you trust?” Adam went on. “People like Joe, here. He’s big enough to look out for you. I don’t want to find myself picking pieces of you out of DeWayne’s dogs’ teeth.” Adam tried for a smile, but he didn’t quite manage it. “Why does Jimmie’s death make me think that somebody wanted Carmen dead?”

“Does it?” Faye asked. “I think so, too, but I couldn’t tell you why.”

“Then I’ll tell you why. Two violent deaths in one week goes against the grain of the Sujosa’s history: hundreds of years of peaceful, uneventful poverty. Not that my boss will be impressed by that as a rationale to keep this case active.”

“Surely your boss won’t take you off this case until you’re finished?” Faye was surprised at how abandoned she felt by the thought of Adam driving his truck into the sunset.

“Don’t worry. I don’t have to close the case, ever—though I might get a nasty call from the state Fire Marshal or the insurance commissioner, wanting to know when I’m gonna get back to work on one of the multi-million-dollar insurance fraud cases sitting on my desk. There’s no statute of limitations on arson. I’m not about to walk away and worry about leaving people at the mercy of a killer. People like you.”

“I’ve been wondering if Jimmie might have set the fire,” she said, looking down at her feet. “I noticed he was wearing boots a lot like mine when he died.”

“You have good eyes. We got a positive match on those boot prints this morning. I think we can conclude that Jimmie was walking in the woods near the women’s bunkhouse when it caught fire Saturday night. But that doesn’t mean he set the fire.”

“There’s something else. I know from personal experience that Jimmie was capable of pulling pea-brained stunts,” Faye said. “He strung a life-sized dummy over the road near his high school, with a sign on it saying ‘Devils Go Home.’ I nearly drove my car into a ravine. At first, I assumed the message was aimed at me, since a lot of folks in the settlement don’t care for outsiders—particularly the Rural Assistance team. Then I thought the effigy was probably one that he made for a pep rally, and I decided to give him a pass. But now…do you think he hung that effigy, then set the fire the next night, thinking that he could scare us outsiders away? Maybe he didn’t consider the possibility someone might actually die. Accidentally killing Carmen might be enough to drive a conscientious young man to suicide.”

“Nope.” Adam pulled out a pack of gum and offered it to Faye and Joe. “You’re contradicting your own theory. An act of arson that results in an unplanned death doesn’t fit with your observations of the heater and the briefcase. In fact, the evidence coming in supports the notion that Carmen’s bed was set on fire, with her still in it. Do you really think Jimmie did something that…well, evil is what I’d call it. Do you think someone who did something so evil would have such a drastic change of heart that he’d commit suicide a few days later?”