Findings (7 page)
***
In his basement bedroom, Joe lay staring at the ceiling. He worried about Faye most of the time, but the worries spoke louder in his ear these days.
Was she safe? Was she happy? If she wasn’t safe or if she wasn’t happy, was there anything he could do about it?
He knew she wasn’t sleeping, though an entire floor of the vast old mansion separated them. He knew this because he knew Faye, and he had recognized the signs that she had an obsessive fit coming on. Her eyes were bright. Her voice was tense. She had a knotty problem in her sights—solving the murders of Douglass and Wally—and nothing so unnecessary as sleep would interfere with her efforts to unravel it.
He didn’t know how to help her in that quest, but he did know how to lie still and think calming thoughts. He’d always believed that an undisturbed mind sees straight to the heart of a problem. For the time being, the best thing he could do for Faye was to help her comb the tangles out of her mind. He meditated on the problem and, when he thought Faye was finally asleep, he slept, too.
“So you went to Tallahassee yesterday? You took Joe with you?”
Faye took exception to the implication that she was dim-witted or a liar. “I told you I would, and I did. I need to go back and finish yesterday’s research and I’m going the first chance I get. I’ll take Joe then, too. I’m not planning to take a bodyguard everywhere I go for the rest of my life, but I’ll keep him around for the time being, if you think it’s important. Do you really think I’m in so much danger?”
Sheriff Mike glanced around his office as if he’d rather do just about anything than argue with Faye. Such an argument would be a losing proposition, and Faye knew he lost pretty much all of the arguments at his house. He shifted in his desk chair and sighed. “I haven’t the slightest idea. You could’ve been hurt if you’d still been with Douglass when the burglars arrived, but I don’t think you were their target. Since I don’t know who stabbed Wally or why, I can’t say whether the killer would have gone after you if big, strong Joe hadn’t been standing there.”
“Why would they?”
“Well, I don’t know. But it sure doesn’t hurt to have a six-and-a-half-foot-tall man standing next to you when there’s bad guys afoot. Joe’s not complaining. I think he kinda likes looking after you. And having Joe be your bodyguard gives me something to tell your friend Ross when he calls me up, worrying about your safety. Which he does on a daily basis.” He reached in his desk drawer for his cigarettes, which weren’t there and hadn’t been there since Magda made him quit. “You have an interesting effect on men, sugar. I never met a woman who needed a male protector less—other than my wife—yet you’ve got guys fighting for the privilege. I say let them look after you, until we figure out what’s going on. After that…if they get on your nerves, I say you should kick ’em both in the butt. That’s what my charming bride would do.”
Faye pulled a file folder out of her briefcase and tapped its corner on the sheriff’s desk. “Let’s forget about my bodyguard problem. Do you want to hear what I learned in Tallahassee?”
“You bet.”
“Remember I told you that Wally gave me a note on the night he died? Well, it took me straight to an old book—a collection of letters from a Confederate official named Jedediah Bachelder.”
Sheriff Mike leaned forward to hear, reaching for the desk drawer at the same time. He drew his hand back with a sigh and pulled a stick of gum out of his shirt pocket. “What did the letters say? Did they give you any clue about why Wally got killed?”
“Nope. But there
was
a connection to Douglass’ murder. Remember that newspaper feature? The one that ran the morning before he was killed? Well, the picture that ran with the article was of Douglass holding a silver hip flask…that was engraved with the name J.L. Bachelder. And when I got my hands on the book of his letters…surprise! One of those letters mentioned an emerald necklace.”
“And that triggered the attack on Douglass? How? Nobody knew about the necklace, not unless Douglass called somebody and told them as soon as you left. And I still don’t think they’d have had time to get to his house and kill him, even if he was so foolheaded as to do that.”
“Haven’t got a clue. The flask wasn’t worth enough to be a motive for murder, and nobody knew about the emerald. Yet they’re both linked through Jedediah Bachelder to two people who wound up dead. Now do you understand why I’m going back to Tallahassee, first chance I get, for another look at that book?”
“You can’t just check it out?”
“Not a rare book. And the librarian says it’s too fragile for me to get permission to photocopy it, not until I jump through a few more bureaucratic hoops. One day, somebody’ll transcribe the text and post it on the Internet, and I’ll be able to peruse Mr. Bachelder’s deepest thoughts from the privacy of my own home. But not now. So I’m going back to Tallahassee, but not today or tomorrow. The rare book collection keeps short hours.”
“If I know you, you’ve got some other plans that involve dirt. Library work is so…clean.”
Faye checked her fingernails. She scrubbed them every time she brushed her teeth and every time she went to the bathroom and every time she showered, yet dirt still collected there, even when she couldn’t recall doing any digging. Today, they looked presentable. “It only makes sense for me to go back to the spot where I found the emerald and see what else I can find. And I’d like to lay eyes on Bachelder’s homesite. I’ve got the property records and an aerial photograph, so I’m pretty sure I can find it. Best I can tell, the house is long-gone, and I don’t really know what I hope to accomplish, but it’s something my gut tells me I need to do.”
She left her real reason for visiting Bachelder’s home unsaid. Archaeologists do what they do because they crave a physical connection to the past. If they’d been happy learning out of books, then they would have majored in history and spent the rest of their lives in libraries, museums, and classrooms, all of which are blessed with air conditioning and functional heaters.
Faye felt a bond with Bachelder when she held his hip flask and when she read his personal letters. She knew he’d been a plantation owner, which was just a glorified farmer. He himself had said as much. There could be no closer connection to him than walking over the land that he’d worked. And that his slaves had worked. She could never forget them. Bachelder had owned slaves, and then he had set them free. She needed to understand a man capable of doing both those things in a single lifetime.
“Wherever you wind up going, Bachelder’s land, Joyeuse, the library—I don’t care. Just promise me you’ll take Joe.”
Faye blew an exasperated breath through pursed lips. “I’m not dim-witted and I’m not a liar. I told you I’d take Joe.”
“Speaking of dim-witted, here’s a little something you might want to know. When Ross calls me up—every day—he lets me know exactly why he thinks he should be your bodyguard, and not Joe.”
“And his reason would be…”
“He doesn’t think Joe’s smart enough.”
Faye leaned back in the chair and crossed her arms. “I’d like to see Mr. High-falutin’ Lawyer shoot a rabbit with an arrow he made himself. Shot from a bow that he’d also made himself. I’d like to see him track that rabbit all the way across Joyeuse Island. I’d like to see him tell time by the sun and predict the weather by the sounds the birds make. I’d—”
“I hear you, Faye. I know what Joe can do, and I know what he can’t do. I just thought you might want to know what’s going on.”
“I thank you. And when the time is right, I’m planning to explain to Ross Donnelly exactly what’s going on, too.”
Faye woke up with three goals driving her. She liked it when she had goals. She could control her approach to reaching those milestones. Focusing on concrete goals distracted her from those messy elements of her life where she had no control.
She couldn’t bring her friends back from the dead, but she could by God do all she could to help the sheriff track down their killers.
Her conversation with the sheriff had solidified in her mind the three things she needed to do. She needed to continue sifting through Bachelder’s letters, trying to find the information Wally had wanted her to have. She couldn’t say why, but she also felt like she needed to go to Bachelder’s homestead, just to get a feel for the man. And, though the search might prove fruitless, she burned to go back to the spot where she found the emerald.
Maybe there were more priceless jewels waiting for her there. Or maybe Jedediah Bachelder had left a letter buried with the emerald, conveniently explaining why his name kept cropping up in connection to murders committed a hundred years after his death. Of course, he’d have had to write it in waterproof ink on paper capable of staying underground for a century without rotting, but hey…stranger things had happened.
So which of these windmills was she tilting at today? Or rather, which of these windmills were she and Joe tilting at today? Because the sheriff had made her promise to keep Joe around as a bodyguard, and Faye kept her promises.
The library kept short hours. The drive to Tallahassee made book research a lot less efficient on Saturday and Sunday. It made more sense to wait until Monday to go to the library. So should she strike out into the unknown and pursue Bachelder’s homeplace today, or should she dig for buried treasure in her own back yard? Faye knew from soggy experience that the weather in April could be iffy, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky today.
She stuck her head out the window and squinted at the clear blue dome above her. There was always a chance in this climate that a roiling black thundercloud would blow in and drench her world in rain, but that prospect was as unlikely today as it ever would be. It made sense to attack the goal that would require her to venture farthest from home on this cloudless morning. If she had to, she could dig for an emerald in her back yard on any old blustery day.
Faye had a long history of working frenetically while a thunderhead loomed on the horizon, only dashing indoors when the deluge hit, and she hadn’t been struck by lightning yet. When she thought about being caught in a deluge in the swamp in a metal johnboat under a forest of trees shaped like lightning rods—and she had been in just that precarious situation on many occasions—Faye considered working at home, even in bad weather, a comparative piece of cake.
Having come to her decision rationally, Faye started gathering her maps of the area around Jedediah Bachelder’s old home place. She also started packing food. Joe could go all day out in the woods without eating, but she most certainly couldn’t.
***
Their destination had been so clear-cut on the maps. Who would have expected Faye and Joe to still be poking fruitlessly around in the swamp, after spending most of the morning in the boat?
The springtime air was warm, promising that the gators and mosquitoes and snakes would be out soon, if they weren’t already. Property records had shown her where Jedediah Bachelder’s plantation had been, acres and acres of it. Existing documents gave her his property boundaries, but they didn’t tell her where the house had been located. This was not a trivial problem when you considered the hundreds of acres Bachelder had owned.
Without overt information on his home site, Faye had gone looking for indirect evidence, and she’d found some. Topographic maps showed a small area of high ground on the margin of a broad, flat area that would have been perfect for large-scale agriculture.
Faye would have bet money that Bachelder chose the high ground for his homesite. It would have been a typical choice for his historical period. Besides, a good-sized river snaked past the presumed house site. In an era before UPS and highways and big rigs, Bachelder would have needed a way to get his crops to a port or a railroad, so that they could be shipped to market.
Conversely, without access to a river, he would have had a devilish time getting supplies. Bachelder’s slaves could have grown food for everyone on the plantation, but they couldn’t have conjured up the mechanical equipment that was, even then, growing more critical to a successful farm every day. And they certainly couldn’t have provided the luxuries that wealthy planters expected: oysters on ice, rosewood furniture, velvet window hangings, pianofortes…
In Faye’s search for Bachelder’s home, the river had been a dead giveaway. Too bad it looked a lot different from a boat than it did on the map. She and Joe had been puttering around in the swamp for quite some time now. Fortunately, Faye rather liked cypress trees and tea-colored water and heavy draperies of Spanish moss.
The shallow draft of Joe’s johnboat meant that they weren’t constrained by the river channel. They could explore the creeks and bayous and wetlands that fed the river and kept it healthy, and they could do it legally. A landowner can throw a trespasser off private property, but the waters of the state belong to everybody. At the moment, Faye and Joe were perfectly legal, although she hadn’t promised herself that they would remain that way. Being this deep in the swamp more or less guaranteed that trespassing could be accomplished without consequence.
The sight of a crumbling brick foundation, topped with the leaning remnant of a single column, pulled her right out of the boat. Sometimes trespassing just had to be done.
***
Joe was handy with a machete, but Faye had known that for years. He had already cleared much of the undergrowth away from the old foundations of Bachelder’s house, enough for Faye to see its layout. There were no surprises. It had been a big square house with porches, front and back. Sturdy piers as tall as Joe had lifted its bulk off the ground so that cool breezes and periodic floods could pass beneath the floors. A broad hallway had split the house in two, and each half had been split into just two tremendous chambers. People liked their rooms spacious in those days.
The length of a toppled brick column told her that the house had been at least two stories tall. This had been a lot of house for a childless couple who owned several other homes. Standing within its walls made Faye feel a connection to Jedediah and Viola Bachelder. It made them real.
The ground within the foundations was pocked with holes. Faye could see dozens more pits scattered around the house site in all directions. One or two of them looked new, with fresh dirt piled at their edge. The rest of them had been eroded into a shallow dish shape. Were pothunters really this active out here, so far from everything?
She sighed and said, “Let’s look out back.”
Joe brandished the machete, ready to clear her a path before she even told him why.
Faye started wading through the weeds, heading for the rear of the old house. “I want to find the family cemetery.”
***
More bricks. They were handmade and they were everywhere. They lay where they had fallen when the house collapsed, one wall at a time. They protruded from the earth, scattered relics of a garden path. And a low ridge of them enclosed a rectangular spot of earth dotted with leaning tombstones that were as chipped and stained as an old man’s teeth.
The graves had not been desecrated. Faye thanked heaven for small miracles. Some of the markers were so old that their faces had been smoothed by wind and rain. One of the less ancient ones, a tall marble obelisk, still bore most of the name that had been carved on it, long ago. Many of the letters were lost to time, but the capital letters had been carved large and bold. There was no mistaking the J and the L and the B. The letters following the B were blurred, but Faye could make out an “a” and an “l” and two “e”s, all of them in the right positions. She felt sure that this was Jedediah L. Bachelder’s final resting place.
She looked around for Viola, but realized that Mrs. Bachelder would have been buried where she died, in Alabama. Their brief biographies had told Faye that Viola’s husband survived her by thirty years. He might even have remarried. When the government Bachelder had served lost its war, he had become less worthy of a biography, so the information in the book of biographical notes was sketchy in the post-war period.
There might or might not be any useful reason for Faye to know the rest of Jedediah’s story, but she knew she’d keep looking for the Bachelders and their history. The man’s letters had spoken to her. If she neglected his story, it would have been like abandoning a friend.
“Faye.”
She realized that Joe had been repeating her name quietly, trying to get her attention.
“Faye,” he murmured in a voice just loud enough to be heard over the wind through the swamp grasses. “There’s somebody out there. We’re not alone.”
***
Joe belonged in the swamp, with its palpable air and mucky soil. Many are frightened by the hard-edged black shadows of thick-chested oaks, or by the blurry Spanish moss that drifts down from their branches like a soft collection of wraiths, but not Joe. The ruined house held no ghosts for him; it was nothing but a pile of bricks that time had brought to its knees.
He might have been chilled by the cemetery, being Creek and thus aware of the need to respect the dead. But this graveyard had been undisturbed so long that the air around it felt untroubled. The dead here truly slept.
No, the intruder did not disturb these dead ones, only Joe and Faye. Joe could almost feel the vibrations of the man’s footfalls through the soles of his moccasins. The man’s labored breathing stirred the air, and Joe could sense that disruption. Like a wild beast, Joe’s hearing was keen, and his senses went beyond mere sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. When he heard a change in a blue jay’s cry, he knew there had been a sound to upset the bird, even if he couldn’t hear that sound himself.
During his recent studies, he’d learned that sound waves could be thought of as a disruption in air. This made sense to Joe. Sometimes it seemed to him that he detected faint sounds as a breath of wind on the skin of his face. He inclined his head toward the subtle sound that had caught his attention, pointing with his chin, so that Faye would know where the trouble lay.
A buzzing noise that even Faye could hear struck their ears, and they both smiled. It was the sound of a zipper, followed by the rustling of a man adjusting his fly so that the cloth would be out of the line of fire, so to speak. Somebody had stepped out of the open field that lay just inside Joe’s field of vision and into the woods to relieve himself. A second’s thought made this situation more troubling. If the man had been alone, he wouldn’t have bothered to step into the woods for privacy.
Who was out there in this empty wilderness? And why?
If Joe intended to live up to his job as Faye’s protector—and he did—then he needed the answers to those questions.
***
Faye and Joe didn’t have to lurk long in the dark, quiet swamp, wondering how much to worry over being detected by their new companion. Before long, he had walked out of the trees and back into the sunny clearing beyond.
Within a few minutes, any noise they might have made would have been drowned out by the racket of large trucks using four-wheel-drive to navigate rough and rutted woodland trails. Periodically, the ringing impact of hammer on nail echoed through the air.
“We’re mighty far out in the woods for a camp-out,” Joe observed. “And they’re not here to hunt, or they wouldn’t be making so much noise.”
“Even if they were hunters—isn’t deer season over? What’s left? Squirrels?”
Joe grunted, which said pretty much all he had to say about the need to honor governmental hunting restrictions out here on the edge of civilization. “Doesn’t matter about the season. Like I said, these noisy folks aren’t hunters.”
***
Joe counted twenty-two trucks and jeeps in the grassy clearing, and at least that many ATVs, all fully loaded with passengers. Ten minutes ago, he and Faye had been alone. Now the population of a small town had burst into the pristine wilderness. Well, not so pristine, he guessed, since somebody’d had a big farm out here a hundred-and-fifty years ago. But it was fixing to get a whole lot worse, now that these guys were out here scaring the wildlife and just generally making nuisances of themselves. The birds had made a big ruckus when the invasion had first begun, but they’d quickly gone silent.
Metal detectors began emerging from pickup beds, and Faye swore. Joe was a little surprised. She didn’t swear much. For a woman who shopped for clothes at the Army surplus store, Faye’s habits were remarkably ladylike.
“They’re having a pothunting party,” she whispered.
Joe raised an eyebrow. No sense talking when it wasn’t necessary. Not until he figured out how important it was to stay hidden from these people.
“Landowners who own property where artifacts are common can make a good little profit by charging people to dig there.” Faye was whispering, but she sure was talking a lot. “Pay a flat fee, pitch a tent, and go home with a piece of history. These are people who would be willing to strip mine a battlefield to find a new prize for their collections.”
Joe had crept a few feet forward to get a better look at the jovial newcomers as they fanned out with their shovels and their metal detectors. “We know some of these people.”
***
The crowd was so far away that Faye could barely make them out as individuals but, after a few minutes of squinting, she realized that Joe was right. They did know some of the people gathered in the clearing. She saw the small wiry form of Wayland. His wife Nita stood beside him with the posture of a dancer. Her graceful carriage should have been incongruous with her near-bald head and violent tattoos, but the look somehow worked for her.
They stood close to each other, almost shoulder to shoulder. Faye realized that she’d never seen them more than an arms’-length apart, as if their marriage bond was extraordinarily strong. Or as if they didn’t trust each other.