Ten Thousand Islands (15 page)

I was looking down into the hole, when she pulled what looked to be a flat brown rock from the wall and studied it closely for several seconds. “I wouldn’t have touched this, by the way, if the looters hadn’t already made such a mess.”

“What is it?”

“Pottery. You can see one side is black from being fired. Pottery’s not my specialty, but it looks like it could be from the Glades Plain Period, or maybe Glades Tooled. There’s not enough to say. It would date back a thousand years, maybe more. Here”—she handed the pottery to me—“the last person to touch that probably believed exactly what Dr. Tomlinson said. That she had three souls. That inanimate objects absorb energy. That’s why, when she was done with this pot, she intentionally broke it to free her own spirit. These mounds are littered with pottery.”

I was still looking at the shard. It was reddish-brown with a hint of a rim. “You and Tomlinson will have lots and lots in common.”

“Oh boy, there’s that tone again. Okay, most people think, hey, that’s stupid. Objects don’t have a spirit—bowls and rocks, metal and things. But stop to think about Saint Christopher medals and crosses, Rosary beads,
Stars of David. Those are the obvious ones. They’re not just symbols. People believe they have power. Tattoos and piercings? Same thing. The Nike swoosh mark—check out the ghetto gangs. Power objects.”

“Animism.”

“Yes, animism, you bet. It’s the most consistent connection between religions.”

She took the potsherd and fitted it back into the shell wall exactly where she’d found it. “Connective religions, that’s my specialty. I also happen to be one of those people who believes that the Calusa came from the Bahamas. Maybe South America. There’s not a bit of artifactual evidence, but I think we’ll find it.”

“So you’re one of the kooks.”

For the first time, I was favored with her endearing smile. “Actually, I said weirdos. Yep, I am a weirdo. A hundred-percent weirdo. I believe that ten thousand years ago, people were just as motivated to roam and explore and pass along their personal religion as people are today. Isn’t that crazy?”

“Quite the radical.”

She began to fight her way through the brush again. “That’s what my professors always thought.”

“Then how’d you end up assistant director of a museum so young? What are you twenty-two, twenty-three?”

She wagged her eyebrows as if she were being tricky. “Until there’s proof, I keep my weirdo opinions to myself.”

D
id you hear a boat?” I’d stopped on the crest of a high mound, my head tilted, listening.

She stopped ahead of me; waited for a moment in silence. “I can hear boats out on the Gulf. That’s all.” She pulled a bandanna out of her pocket and wiped her face. “Some view, huh?”

I touched an index finger to my lips. I could hear the buzz of cicadas … the ascending whistle of ospreys … the thoracic rhythm of a pile driver burying condo footings on Marco. I thought sure I’d heard an outboard, but it was gone now.

“Maybe it was a boat coming out of Barfield Bay.”

Through limbs and vines, we could see the bay glittering Formica-like in noon sunlight. Beyond, on Marco Island, were rows of houses, then a high hill topped with trees. Indian Hill. What else could it be? I wondered if Teddy Bauerstock really was up there on the mounds
looking out. I wondered if he really was thinking about Dorothy.

The thought keyed an unexpected mental portrait that was as dazzling as a camera strobe.

When an image has been deeply imbedded in the brain, our neurotransmitters can become potent, high-resolution cathodes. For a moment, Dorothy was gazing into my eyes once more. It was a familiar and knowing look. Her face was as pale as a mushroom. Dark pupils within her blue eyes burrowed into mine.

“We’re almost there. Her dig site.”

Nora didn’t use a name. As if she knew Dorothy was in my thoughts.

I followed her across the mound.

On a couple of the mounds were bathtub-sized cisterns sunken into the shell. American settlers had built them to catch and store fresh water.

There were raccoon skeletons in one of the cisterns. From the second, a rat the size of a dachshund flushed ahead of us while a red-shouldered hawk screamed overhead.

There were key lime trees flowered with ivory-yellow fruit; an avocado tree, a knarled grove of sour oranges, papaya on delicate, tuberous trunks, and a huge tamarind tree, too.

Survival food in a difficult land.

“Dorothy understood what all of these idiot treasure hunters never seem to realize. There are hundreds of stories about pirates burying treasure in this mound or that mound, and they are all absolute bull crap. There were no pirates in this area. Ever. You want to say to these dopes, ‘Hey, dumbo, these islands weren’t even
on
the trade
routes, so what were the pirates going to steal? Oysters? Use your darn brain!”

I smiled at her indignation. The woman had a temper.

“Something else I think Dorothy understood was that the Calusa feared their dead. The more powerful the person, the more dangerous the spirit. The Calusa, to protect themselves from the dead, used water as a barrier.”

I said, “You mean they floated the bodies out on funeral rafts?”

“No. What they did was … well, first you need to know that spirits can’t cross water. That’s an old, old belief. So they built moats around the burial areas. Back in archaic times, they actually buried individuals under water. Staked the bodies down or buried them in a low area and flooded it. There are water burials at Little Salt Spring near Sarasota; lots of places. You ever hear of the Windover site in Brevard? Same underwater burial system.

“Anyway, when it comes to power people, water’s the key. People they feared, it made sense to bury them in water. Keep all those evil qualities from escaping. That’s what I think, anyway. Which is one reason there’s nothing to find in the mounds.”

I mentioned that Tomlinson had me read something about a chief named Tocayo.

“Oh yeah, Tocayo was one of the really bad ones. According to the Jesuits, anyway. Tocayo lived right where we’re standing now, or maybe Marco, we’re not sure.”

“You trust those accounts?”

“From the missionaries? Absolutely not. They were biased and self-serving hypocrites who were cruel as heck. But it’s all we’ve got. What they wrote about Tocayo, though, is pretty consistent and comes from more than one source. For starters, they say that he made a sport of
raping his own daughters; seemed to prefer sodomy. He cannibalized children because they were so tender. Columbus, on his second voyage, described how the Caribs would castrate boys because they tasted better when they got older. Tocayo supposedly did the same thing; that’s why I think he was a Carib.”

Nora had stopped at the base of the mound. She was peering down into the gloom of a mangrove swamp, black muck and shadows, comparing what she saw with the xeroxed map she carried. She said, “Here we are.”

Meaning Dorothy’s dig site.

“It all looks the same to me.”

“Yeah. What we have to find is a real small area. What used to be a water court, but the shape is tough to see because of the mangroves. Even says in the notes that it’s hard to find. What happened was, back when the state and developers drained the Everglades, it emptied some of the ancient lakes. The Calusa wouldn’t have liked that. Expose the water burials, let all those evil spirits loose.”

We’d gone so quickly from sunlight to shadow, that my eyes were having difficulty adjusting. I saw what looked to be a shallow creek bed, black muck spiked with mangrove roots. Lots of low brush and vines and some kind of fern growing up. There were shell inclines on each side: the basework of more mounds.

The creek bed looked exactly like a dozen other mucky areas we’d crossed, and Nora voiced the same question that was in my mind: “How could Dorothy have
known
? Out of all the places on this island, how could she have possibly known to dig here?”

I remembered Tomlinson saying,
She didn’t find things. Artifacts called to her
….

Which made as little sense as the proposition that a teenage girl had found this place at random.

As we maneuvered through mangroves around the base of the mound, Nora stopped so abruptly that I nearly banged into her from behind. Heard her say, “Oh my God. Oh my God! You were right.”

I said, “About what?” But then I saw what she meant.

Treasure hunters had found the place, too.

W
ith all the equipment the looters had ferried out, the site looked more like a small construction area. It looked as if it were being cleared and plumbed for a sewage system and parking garage in preparation for condos.

Nora was moving from pit to pit, shaking her head. “These kind of people, they have no respect. It’s ruined. They have absolutely destroyed the entire site.”

Yes, they had.

This was a high-tech operation. A lot of time and expensive equipage had been invested.

There was a golf cart-sized backhoe with a metal cage over the driver’s seat and controls. The machine was painted blue on white with “Nokonia MX” in big black letters on the side. There were a couple of shovels propped against it.

The backhoe had been used to dig a hole as large as the foundation of an apartment complex. They’d squared it
off sloppily and dug down to sea level. The bottom was black muck, and water had seeped in, creating puddles.

Beside the pit was a troughlike flume made of plywood and aluminum. The flume was elevated shoulder-high at one end, was terminated by a screen sieve at the lower end. Near the high end of the flume was a stocky Honda generator and a portable pump with a fire department—sized hose running from it.

It is an old process; the same miners once used it to find gold: dump a bunch of mud in a sluice, jet some water, then watch the screen where the heaviest material separates naturally from the sludge.

It was an obvious and effective little operation. Use the backhoe to load the flume. Use the pump to hose the mud down the gutter. Use the shovels to clear the residual sludge while someone searched the filtering screen for artifacts.

“Know what I think we should do?” I could tell she was furious. Her movements had quickened; she couldn’t stand still.

I said, “This sort of thing’s against the law, correct?”

She was pacing now, looking at the generator, looking at the little backhoe. “Goddamn right it’s against the law! A thing called the National Antiquities Act!”

Profanity. The first time I’d heard her use it. I could tell she was unaccustomed to forming the words. They came out awkwardly; each syllable enunciated with the precision of a novice attempting to speak a foreign language.

“The goddamn son-of-a-bitches! They’re treating history like it’s … like it’s a piece of crappy junkyard!”

I took pains not to show that I was amused.

“Calm down, take a few slow breaths.”

“It makes me want to vomit what they’re doing here!”

“I know. I don’t blame you. But there’s something about this that doesn’t make any sense at all.”

“Goddamn right it doesn’t make any sense.”

“Now wait. Listen to what I’m saying. I’m talking about all this equipment. Think about it. I expected to find signs of fresh digging, sure, but nothing like this. Someone’s going to risk all this equipment to find a few artifacts? To get this gear out here, they had to use a barge. People would have seen them bring it ashore. We’re only a quarter mile from Marco. Sound travels over water. People would
hear
them. In other words, this is more like a public operation. I think they’ve probably got permits.”

“It’s
illegal
, I’m telling you. I don’t care if they used a helicopter to chopper it out. You can’t intentionally destroy an entire …” She stopped for a moment. “Jesus, you doubt what they’re doing out here? Look at
this
goddamn stuff. You know what this is?” She kicked the side of a five-gallon can. I had to stoop to read the label.
Carbowax
.

“This chemical, it’s what we use to preserve wooden artifacts found in mud. We call it PEG for short, polyethelene something. I can’t remember the rest of it. It prevents the wood cells from collapsing as they dry.” She tested the lid of the can. “At least it hasn’t been opened. Maybe they haven’t had a reason to use it.”

“The totem I took from Dorothy. That’s why it was so new-looking, it’d been treated?”

“No, the totem’s different. It was never touched. What she found is so darn rare. The wood it’s made from, it’s harder than most metals. Lignum vitae wood, you heard of it? It’s so hard and heavy, it won’t even float. Who knows how they carved it. Oh … God, look at this.”

She had knelt near the sluice screen over a pile of what appeared to be shells and calcified wood. As I got closer, I could see that I was mistaken.

“These are bones.
Human
bones. Thrown away like trash because it’s not what they’re looking for. It’s not gold. It’s not something the son-of-a-bitches can sell.”

I watched her touch the bones with a care that approached reverence: a piece of mandible, molars worn flat, presumably from chewing food in this sandy environment. A length of femur scarred with a black fissure: a leg that had broken and healed badly. There were cranial chunks the size of coconut shell, though no intact skulls. There were bones from fingers and feet and scattered rib cages, all dumped in a pile.

The size of some of the bones was distinctive.

I said, “These are the remains of more than one person. The pelvis, the narrow opening, that’s an adult male. A pretty big guy. But there’re also two, maybe three children.”

She was touching the bones one by one, trying to put them into some kind of order. The indifference with which they’d been thrown into a heap seemed to offend her. “That’s not normal. It’s not common. They could’ve done something like that, but they would’ve needed a reason.”

“For adults and children to be buried in the same grave?”

“They did it for royalty. Children to serve them in the afterlife. But underwater? A water burial, that’s what’s not common. Maybe if the guy who died was really powerful and his people feared him, it might make sense. They kill his children and bury them all together. They want to get rid of the whole line forever. I’m just guessing.
There’s nothing we’ve found to back me up on this. We’d have to do DNA to make sure.” She’d stopped to inspect something. “Oh, shit, look at this—”