Slave Graves (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 1) (23 page)

“He’s cleaning up his place for the afternoon reception,” said Spyder, his words like bullets.

“You heard my friend,” said Jake.

Frank stared at him, dropping his hand from Jake’s arm.

“This is my land, my place, to do with as I wish,” said Jake.

“We should handle our disagreement professionally, Jake.” said Frank, motioning to the Pastor to stand back. Maggie had come over to the pit and was standing near Jake and Spyder.

“I think that’s a great idea,” said Jake. “I knew I could reason with you, Frank. You just continue to be an archaeologist.”

“I am being an archaeologist.”

The cat reappeared and perched on the edge of the pit near the Pastor, The Pastor picked him up and held him in his arms as he watched Jake bend over and pry at another of the bones in the floor of the pit.

“Past catching up to you, Jake? Worried about what we are finding?” the Pastor said. Then the Pastor let the cat drop. The cat landed near Jake with a snarl.

“God damn you,” shouted Jake as he jumped back from the cat which then hissed, leaped up on the edge of the pit and then ran away from the site into the hedge.

Jake tottered then lost his balance and dropped into a sitting position, ungracefully on his backside, his feet in front of him. He raised himself, his face furious. He brushed at the wet soil on his trouser seat.

Frank said, “We all have to be careful around the pits. The walls are so soft. Anyone can have a pretty bad fall, maybe hurt themselves.”

Jake ignored him. “What are you going to do next, Jefferson? You going to pull a razor on me?” Then, composing himself, Jake smiled at Frank and Maggie and said, “I hate cats.”

“He just jumped out of my arms,” said the Pastor.

“No, Jefferson, no, I’m not worried about what you folks find up here. I just want you out of here.”

“Then we see this as equals, Jake,” said the Pastor.

“What do you mean?”

“We both just want the truth,” said the Pastor.

“I want a bridge and I want to put a lot of your friends and mine to work building it,” said Jake.

“Those friends, are they all white?” asked the Pastor.

“There are many black people involved with the project,” said Jake.

“Who?”

Jake did not answer him. At this moment, three green station wagons, one after the other entered the small lane going to the farmhouse and moved up the road, bouncing with much noise as they did so.

“Caterers are here,” said Spyder.

“Frank, can I talk to you privately for a minute?” Maggie said, pulling at his arm. When they were a few feet away from Jake and Spyder, she looked at him. “You’re not going to compromise with him? This field is important. You can’t allow this to be wrecked. You are going to have a tough time explaining this to other archaeologists. You and I know people who would give anything to work on a field like this.”

“Maybe there is a solution,” said Frank, scratching the back of his neck.

“Jake,” Frank turned and walked toward him. Jake was handing some more of the bones to Spyder.

“What is it, Frank?”

“I have an idea.”

“Hurry up. I haven’t much time.”

“I think it will be a liability for your company to have folks walking around these open pits, with the possibility that they could trip on the surveyors twine. Maybe some of them might have a little too much to drink, you know what I mean.”

“What do you suggest, Frank?”

“Well, when we’ve had this before at other sites I have worked on, we just roped off the area. You don’t want people out seeing the bones anyway so that will solve your problem without your having to pick up all the skeletons. Besides, it would take a long time to find all of the bones especially the small ones. We’ll just cordon off the area. I’ll personally stand by the rope and tell the folks what they want to know about the archaeology. You can say something about what we are doing too, how we hope to be finished soon. Your investors don’t have to see any of it.”

Jake looked at the rest of the bones at his feet. He looked at the soil on his hands and trousers. “All right. I want this pit covered up though. It looks like a massacre up here. That’s not good for business.”

Maggie turned to Frank as Jake walked off with Spyder to see the caterers.

He said, looking at her, “You think that I didn’t stand up to Jake, that I’m quitting on you and the Pastor. I’m not. I’m just trying to figure all this out, figure out what is best to do with the time we have left.”

“You should understand what is best to do. There’s a lot to be found and we have to find it. Our purpose here is being lost in all your figuring. That’s your problem. You think too much,” said Maggie, turning away from him and walking back to her dig, her bare feet leaving small puddles in the muck.

“You got to have it in your heart to do the right thing without thinking. There’s just not enough time to do it any other way,” she called back over her shoulder.

The grid stakes cast shadows, daubing the field with black smears. Frank and Maggie rigged a barrier rope. The rope was suspended from pine posts quickly struck into the soft ground. At the center of each rope span Frank hung a small sign on which he printed, with Jake’s approval, the words “Restricted Area. State of Maryland Archaeology Site.” Jake had made him add the additional words “Do Not Enter.”

Frank had managed to keep most of the discoveries out of sight in deference to Jake. A large piece of canvas taken from the cover of one of the farm implements was stretched over the Q location to hide the crew skeletons. However, he could not disguise the large cannon which was still off to the side of the excavated area. Also, the sword parts were still embedded in the spot where they had been found, waiting on additional careful and patient work to fully uncover them.

Meanwhile, Jake and Spyder were busy supervising the catering staff near the farmhouse where the tables were being set up. Two young women in white dresses were occupied arranging flowers and food trays on white tablecloths. A small folding table had been set up with rows of name tags arranged alphabetically for the attendees. Two refrigerated trucks from the Chesapeake Hotel arrived and disgorged great quantities of liquor and cooked food.

The Pastor had gone home and returned, attired in the dark clothes of his ministry. Frank kidded him that this was the first time he had seen him dressed up; he did not recognize him standing on the porch in his black suit. Frank and Maggie remained in their work clothes, such as they were. They planned to stay behind the rope barrier, away from most of the guests, and to return to archeological work the instant the visitors left. Maggie did brush out her long blonde hair.

Several waiters and serving persons were bustling also with the setup work. Men dressed in white coats were assembling the beer kegs. Along the back of one table were neatly arranged bottles of various whiskeys, gins, and mixers. One of the black waiters waved to the Pastor.

“Terment pays pretty good, doesn’t he?” observed the Pastor.

“Yes, Pastor,” the man said, almost in a whisper. “It’s not like the General Store days though, is it?”

“No,” said the Pastor.

“We all got to eat.”

“Yes.”

“You find them graves yet, Pastor?” the man asked.

“No, but I’m going to keep myself at it.”

“We’re all praying for you,” the man said as he arranged the liquor bottles.

Out in the yard, a young waitress put down her tray on a table and pointed at the river.

“My God, look at that,” she said.

“Jake, something’s wrong,” someone else said.

Over the tops of the tall trees at the edge of the riverbank they could see the great arm of the crane, its black pulley wheel stark, the spokes outlined. The boom was wavering, moving slowly then more quickly, back and forth. A turkey buzzard, looking for dead animal carcasses, circled above the moving crane, while steel cables began to slap at the pile driver hammer resting on the barge deck.

“Looks like that bird has found something. That bird bothering your crane, Jake?” said one of the early guests, laughing. He was a big man in a white tennis shirt, pencils and pens stuck in the tiny pocket on his huge chest.

“Seems like it, doesn’t it?” said Jake, trying to grin. He started towards the shoreline, first walking, his eyes following the moving sprocket tip of the crane, then running as the crane began to wobble even more. The buzzard suddenly flared straight up and flew off. The crane moved faster, slipping back and forth in a wide arc.

“It’s as if a giant is shaking it from below,” said Frank.

The crane arm steadied to a vertical position, then began to head downward towards the water surface. It creaked, an ugly noise, as it went, its wire cables reeling forward into the water, the barge itself showing a decided list. The hammer mechanism tipped forward starting to collapse.

Jake and Spyder had reached the shoreline. The cabin and caterpillar tracks of the great crane were at such an angle that the whole rig began to slip and slide slowly across the deck of the canted barge, the great arm and tip closer to the water. Then with a lurch and creak, the long arm stopped not more than fifty feet above the water and stretching well towards the middle of the channel, cables looped into the water like tangled fishing lines. At this moment, with the strained pile driver braces bending, the hammer restraint broke and, metal screeching, the huge hammer crashed into the river causing a massive geyser of brown water.

Jake’s face was taut, his mouth halfway between his usual smile and a new look that Frank had not seen. It was a look of cunning laced with intense hatred, like that of a cornered beast. Jake was at the same time trying to determine who did this to him and how he could punish that person. He must have been thinking that the culprit would be hard to find and that was making him all the more angry.

“I guess that barge musta sprung a leak,” said the man with the ball point pens in his shirt pocket. “Happens to the old barges all the time. All that weight of the crane and the pile driving equipment.”

He continued, “Over in Baltimore the crews always try to put off the worn out equipment for jobs down here in the country.” As the man spoke two large oil drums toppled off the raised side of the barge and rolled from the high point to the low corner, splashing their complement of diesel fuel all over the deck as they tumbled, finally jumping the small restraining barrier at the edge and falling into the Nanticoke River with a splash of dark water. The drums quickly righted and floated next to the half sunk barge in the weak current, diesel fuel and hydraulic oil colliding in a rainbow of water hues, the color patterns drifting out from the large letters spelling Terment across the rusty barge steel siding.

The cable that had been hanging from the tip of the crane let go and roared out on the sprocket wheel, the tail of the steel cable whipping through the air towards the shoreline where Jake and the others were watching. The oncoming missile caused screams and several people put their arms up in defense as the cable hit the water surface, fortunately far short of the beach. Like a stone that a child skips at the seashore, the cable crashed against the water surface and sent a great spray of river water into the group drenching two or three persons closest to the river. After the cable had left the crane, the sprocket on the crane arm spun furiously for a few moments, then slowly creaked to a stop. Finally the noise was over and the afternoon river quiet returned. In a few minutes the buzzard came back and returned to its incessant circling.

Frank scratched the back of his neck and pulled his hat forward.

“Well, that was a real nice show, nice welcome, Jake,” said one of the guests. “How long you figure that’s going to hold things up?”

“I don’t know,” he said, as he trudged back up to the party from the shoreline. “We’ll have to pump out the barge, steady up the crane. Not long I guess.”

Spyder immediately went to the station wagon and made a call, the imperturbable grin still on his face as he talked. More guests were arriving. The lane from the road to the farmhouse was filled on one side with station wagons and pickup trucks. Cars, tilted crazily with the high round crown of the road, were left on the highway outside the gate, wheels perilously close to the ditches.

From the road, Frank heard a new sound. The human butterflies had started chanting at the side of the road. The song interspersed with the murmur of the cocktail party. He could not see the butterflies but knew they were there, wings moving in rhythm, lined up along the road, the old woman cheering them on again from her perch behind the yard full of birdfeeders.

The Pastor had mentioned to Frank that the African visitor was leaving River Sunday, was going back to London. His visit to River Sunday had been short and was spent only with Mrs. Pond. The Pastor said that his church elders had invited the butterfly expert to dinner thinking that because he was African he might be interested in some of the black issues of the town. The man declined the invitation saying to the elders only a quick ‘no’ and nothing else.

As soon as Jake heard the human butterflies, he became very agitated and went to the station wagon to talk with Spyder. From what Frank could observe, Jake talked excitedly with the guards. Spyder shrugged his shoulders several times. Then, as Jake grabbed his arm and shook it, Spyder finally nodded. Right afterward Spyder and the guards, there were three of them at the gate checking in the visitors, walked off to their left and out of Frank’s sight.

Jake stood at the gate, ignoring the incoming guests as he watched Spyder walk away. Then, rubbing his hands, Jake seemed to calm himself. Frank saw a change come over Jake, his smiling personality returned, as he began to talk and joke with his investor guests.

A small cloud covered the sun for a moment and a whisper of cold swept across the site. Frank shivered and for a moment held his arms around his body. He was almost naked in his work shorts. He had not shaved and his face itched.

More than a hundred came to the party. The guests followed a routine. They arrived, were served a drink, and walked over to look at the wrecked barge and pile driver. Some walked quickly by the excavation, most not even looking at it. Frank was sure they had been prompted by Jake’s staff to show no interest. Many simply stood in small groups, talking, drinking and partaking of the many refreshments which the Terment Company employees carried around on small shiny silver trays.