Relics (22 page)

“It’s for you, Faye,” she said.

Faye took the receiver reluctantly. “Hello?”

Adam, usually the soul of good manners, didn’t even bother with hello. “I got a preliminary lab report on the sample I collected from the second pillow for comparison.”

“And?”

“In both pillows, there was a wide spectrum of the chemicals produced when you burn kerosene or heat up a foam pillow, but at fairly low levels. But there were some fairly hefty spikes of chlorinated chemicals that only showed up in Carmen’s pillow—”

“I remember,” Faye said. “You said they could have been leftover cleaning compounds.”

“Yeah, but I talked to the lab director about that. She said the levels were too high to be cleaning residuals. She says someone must have put those chlorinated hydrocarbons on that pillow.”

“Were they used to set the fire?”

“They aren’t flammable enough. But they would do a good job of anesthetizing anyone who put her head on the pillow.”

Faye felt something crawling at the base of her skull. This changed everything. A missing briefcase and mysterious chemicals on a pillow had been interesting clues. They had intrigued her mentally, without making her think too much about the reality of Carmen’s death. But this…someone had made sure Carmen was unconscious so that she couldn’t possibly survive the fire. Faye hesitated, uncertain of what to say.

“Look, I’ve gotta go,” said Adam. “I’ve got a meeting with the sheriff. All hell is about to break loose. Stay safe. I’ll talk to you later.” With a click, the line went dead.

“Did you tell him?” asked Ronya, standing in the doorway.

“No,” said Faye.

“You’ll have to, sooner or later,” said Ronya. “We should go. I need to tell the others, and you’ve got things you have to do. I’d rather not be standing there when you tell Adam.”

Faye nodded and went to retrieve her coat. Adam wasn’t going to be happy when he found out how his high school buddies had been spending their time.

Chapter Twenty-four

The motion of the pale sun through a cold, sodden sky told Joe that hours had gone, but he’d paid no attention to their passing. Woodcraft required a man to remain in the moment. Otherwise, he would never smell the odor of a broken limb or a crushed leaf. The slight change in color of a dirt clod that had been scuffed by a hoof or a shoe or a hurtling phone would pass unnoticed.

The search had been easier without the distracting sounds and smells of Faye and Adam, both of whom were very smart and very well-intentioned but were more or less clueless when it came to woodcraft.

The phone eventually showed itself. He squatted down beside it and rested his elbows on his knees. It had struck three pine limbs on its way to earth, then bounced off a bare patch of ground and crash-landed on a fragrant sassafras seedling. A physicist would have said that each of the first three collisions had transferred some of its energy into a flexible branch, slowing its velocity to the point that the final collision with the soft clay soil had been survivable. Joe couldn’t have communicated such a thought in words or through mathematics, but he understood intuitively why the cell phone was still whole and functional. He wished Jimmie’s fall had ended so well.

Joe stood and put Jimmie’s cell phone in his pocket without much looking at it. He’d seen the innards of electronic gadgets before and he knew what this one looked like on the inside. It was chock-a-block full of many-legged rectangular chips crawling across a rectangular wafer, but it felt empty to Joe, filled with nothing but pain.

***

Leo Smiley wasn’t proud of what he was doing, but he was doing it. That was the problem that had confounded his life for four years now. He had found a way to get Ronya’s art into the hands of people who saw her for the genius she was and were willing to pay princely sums for her work. Except they didn’t actually know who she was. And the princely sums dwindled down to pennies before they reached rural Alabama.

The fact that people were being deceived into believing Ronya’s work was very old nagged at him some, but not much. On any given day, he could use a different technique to rationalize that problem away. For example, he truly believed that one of her pots was just as intrinsically valuable as one that was five hundred years old. Also, he held a certain degree of contempt for people willing to part with all that money for an antique when they couldn’t actually tell the difference when somebody sent them a modern reproduction instead. On one of his more resentful days, he could work up a lather of indignation over the prejudice the Sujosa had endured through history. Every dollar Ronya’s fakes brought in could be seen as a single reparation for segregated schools, biased courts, and poll taxes, if you looked at things the right way.

All of which meant nothing on that particular day, when his buyer had sent him word to stop next week’s shipment, and maybe the one after that, too. Leo felt sure that this was the beginning of the end. The news only compounded the soul-sickness he felt over the deaths of Carmen and Jimmie. He headed out into the chill morning to find Jorge. He didn’t know what he would say to Ronya.

He headed along the path to the clearing where Jorge ran his drum kiln, hoping to find him there. But the clearing was empty, and the fire was cold.
Just as well
, he thought, and turned down the path to Jorge’s house. He hadn’t gone far when something caught his eye a few feet into the woods: an orangey-red patch of disturbed soil. Something had been buried there, and it was the work of five minutes for Leo’s long arms and big hands to unearth it.

It took a moment for him to recognize the misshapen hunk of metal. It had been an aluminum briefcase before Jorge had crammed it in his kiln and tried to obliterate it. Leo knew that Adam Strahan had been looking for the dead woman’s briefcase ever since the fire. The whole settlement knew it. And anyone with half a brain knew that if Adam was looking for something stolen from a dead woman, then the odds were good that the thief was the one who had made her dead. Leo stalked through the woods and across Jorge’s back yard without troubling himself to use the footpath. Jorge met him in the driveway.

Leo hefted the chunk of aluminum and threw it at Jorge’s prized pickup. It bounced off, leaving a sizeable scrape in the metallic red paint job. Then he wrapped one raw-boned hand around Jorge’s neck and used the other hand to grab him under an armpit, lifting him up to his own eye level. “I would have never pegged you for evil, Jorge, but you killed a woman. You burned her to death, then you took…that. Why?”

Jorge’s red head sagged onto Leo’s hand. “I didn’t kill her, Leo. I didn’t do it.”

“Why should I believe that? Adam says somebody started that fire. He’s smart and he ain’t never learned how to lie. If somebody did it, then it might as well have been you.” He lifted Jorge higher, so that even the toes of his dangling boots didn’t touch the ground.

“I took the briefcase out of the burned-out building the day after the fire. I waited until the firemen went home, then I slipped under the yellow tape and took it.”

Leo dropped him to his feet, but he didn’t release his grip. “Tell me why you’d do something that stupid.”

“She had some potsherds in there. I saw them when she opened her briefcase at Hanahan’s the day before she died. I don’t know where she got ’em. Probably picked ’em up off the ground back behind the store. Some of them sherds were lustered. I just wanted to get rid of them, like the others. I didn’t think anybody’d notice.”

“Looks like you didn’t think at all.”

“I can’t risk losing the money! Can you?”

A shadow, tall and broad, spread its coolness on Leo’s back. He looked over his shoulder and saw Ronya standing behind him, her fists on her hips.

“The money’s already gone. They’ve found us out. It’s over—for better or worse, I’m not sure which. I’m sorry, Leo.”

“Don’t be,” said Leo, releasing Jorge’s throat. “In a way, I already knew.” In a few words, he told them about the buyer’s decision to pull out. Ronya, in her turn, told them how Faye Longchamp had put the pieces together—literally.

“Has she told anyone yet?” asked Leo, when she was finished.

“Not yet. She’s a good woman. I’m sorry I ever tried to cross her. We should have been friends.”

“Then we’ve got to get rid of the drum kiln and the merchandise we have on hand,” said Leo.

“Look what’s in front of your eyes!” Ronya pointed at the briefcase, lying by the truck. “We’ve been interfering with a murder investigation. Faye will tell them, and if she doesn’t, I will.”

“You’ll do no such thing. There’s got to be another way. Think of Zack!” Leo hardly recognized the woman in front of him. He had never noticed the frown lines running from her nostrils to her jaws. The circles under her eyes were dark as bruises. “Who’ll take care of him if we both go to jail?”

“I guess we should’ve thought of that before,” she said as she turned to walk away.

“No,” said Leo, determination showing in every inch of his weathered face. “We’ll think about it now. Jorge, get that truck of yours started up.”

***

Back at her office, Faye had only her unsettling thoughts for company. Joe was still nowhere to be found. Laurel was at the church, working with a student. And the other members of the project team were ensconced in their offices, doing whatever it is academics do.

She tried to cipher out who would have wanted Carmen dead. Was it one of Ronya’s co-conspirators, worried that Carmen would reveal their crime? Had Carmen uncovered the forgery ring? Or did she stumble onto something else? She had bounced around the settlement, talking to just about everybody.

What else might she have discovered? What was worth murdering for?

Faye turned to the interviews for guidance. Carmen had been in contact with all the conspirators shortly before her death, with the exception of Jorge. In her notes were documented conversations with Leo on October 26 and with both Jimmie and Irene on October 30. Also on November 5, the day of the fire, Carmen and Faye had gone together to talk to Ronya, before their uncomfortable visit to DeWayne and Kiki Montrose’s house. At the time, Ronya’s surliness had surprised her. Now she understood it. But what was DeWayne’s excuse? Ronya hadn’t mentioned him as one of her conspirators. DeWayne made an attractive suspect, but she could see no evidence pointing his way, other than his general bad attitude.

She wondered what Carmen’s colleagues knew about her last days. Bingham and Amory used another of Jenny’s converted storage rooms for office space, so Faye knocked on their door.

“I’ve been reviewing Carmen’s notes one last time,” she said. “Trying to get an idea of what she was doing in her last days. Do either of you know of any research she might have done, other than her interviews?”

Amory shook his head, but Bingham yanked open a file drawer and shuffled through his folders. “Yes. Yes, she and I talked the day before you arrived. I gave her a document that I found intriguing. It looked like an ordinary enough deed, but the marginal notes were fascinating.”

Faye went to his side. “I saw a mention of that in her interviews.”

“Yes. It seemed that two branches of a family were scuffling over a tract of land, and I wondered whether any stories about the conflict had survived in the oral tradition. She said she’d try and find out. I made her a photocopy, but here’s my original. Of course, it’s not
the
original. That’s in the library where I found it. But this is a very good copy.”

He handed her a legal-sized sheaf of paper. It was obvious that larger pieces of paper had been reduced in photocopying to fit the modern size. The first page was a will, with all the traditional declarations of the maker’s soundness of mind, that distributed the maker’s personal items between his two children. The second page was a map and a hand-written property description. Notes apparently written by several different people were scribbled in the margins. They had been faded and blurred by time and the limitations of the photocopier, but the gist seemed to be that everybody thought they’d gotten the short end of the stick when the property was divided.

The name of the will’s maker jangled in Faye’s head. Sam Leicester. There were no Leicesters in the settlement now.

“Why does the name Leicester make me think of Queen Elizabeth? The first one,” she mused aloud.

“Because she gave one of her favorite courtiers that particular earldom,” Bingham said. “Except you’re pronouncing it wrong, like an American—Lye-chester. The queen would have called her sweetheart the Earl of ‘Lester.’”

Faye hands tensed, nearly tearing the paper in two. The Lesters—also known as the Leicesters, apparently—had first settled in this valley when people didn’t trouble themselves much with spelling anything consistently, even including their own names. Regaining her composure, she carefully smoothed the deed out, squinting in an effort to make out the details of the map. Amory handed her a magnifying glass.

“It’s dated 1845,” she said. “And take a look at this property description. The life of a property owner must have gotten a lot simpler when someone finally opened a land surveying business in these parts.”

She scanned the description quickly.
Beginning on Leicester’s Hill at the source of Leicester’s Creek, travel downstream along the creekbed past the Leicester homestead until reaching the Injun mound that stands alongside said creek. Skirting the mound and the homestead so that they are contained within the property being surveyed, along with a fifty-foot right-of-way, travel due south until reaching Raccoon Branch and follow said branch upstream to the southeast corner of the fence marking the Leicester family cemetery. The source of Leicester’s Creek is visible by line-of-sight from this fencepost and the final boundary of the property deeded to Edwina traces this straight line. The remainder of my property shall pass to my daughter Mary Alice.

The map included the area of her new dig site, which was discouragingly far away from all the important landmarks like the family cemetery and the homestead, not to mention the mound she had heard so much about. Still, something didn’t add up. The description seemed to say that the mound and the homestead were both on the same property, but she knew from Amanda-Lynne and DeWayne that they were not. And if there was one discrepancy, there might be more. Wills were a good place to look to find out if there was money to be had anywhere, and, if so, where it had gone. And money was always a good motive for murder.

“Well, this’ll give me something to do with the rest of my day,” she told the two doctors. “I think I’ll take a trip to the property assessor’s office in Alcaskaki.”

***

Joe prowled from one of Faye’s haunts to another—from office to bunkhouse to Hanahan’s to excavation and back. He had something to tell her.

Adam had been so pleased when Joe brought him Jimmie’s cell phone. He would surely tell Faye the good news as soon as he saw her, but Joe wanted to get there first. Faye had been the one who knew that Joe could find it, and he planned to be the one who told her she was right.

Maybe she was with Brent, talking about medicine or genetics or world politics. Joe didn’t feel like interrupting such an intellectually high-powered discussion, so he decided to just lurk in the basement of the church where Brent ran his free clinic.

Twenty minutes passed with no sign of Faye, but the door to the left of Brent’s clinic opened and Laurel stepped out. She was leaning far forward, struggling to balance a torso weighted with an overstuffed backpack over her crutch tips.

Joe was incapable of letting this situation continue. He rushed to Laurel and stood in front of her, blocking her path. “You’re not going anywhere until you give me that backpack,” he said, holding out both hands.

Too smart to argue with him, Laurel leaned first on one crutch, then another, as she slipped the pack off her shoulders. “Come inside,” she said, turning back toward her office door. “I finished scoring your diagnostic tests and I want to show you the results.”

Joe would have preferred for her to say, “Come in here and wrestle this gator for me,” but he followed her, because she asked him so sweetly.