Findings (8 page)

She saw Chip’s tall, athletic shape and the portly profile of Herbie, the re-enactors’ natural leader. The faces of the crowd around him were indistinct, but they moved like people who looked to Herbie for guidance in all things.

Wayland and Nita separated themselves from the crowd, walking so directly toward the shadows where Faye and Joe stood that she was sure they’d been seen. Herbie continued moving through the group, shouting instructions Faye couldn’t understand because they were garbled by distance.

Wayland and Nita’s lean-hipped swagger was as different from Herbie’s brawny stride as a king cobra was from a diamondback rattler. They didn’t move like shrimpers. They moved like rock stars. She shrunk back into the inky shadow of a live oak.

“Does it matter if they see us?” Joe’s voice was as quiet as the running river water.

Faye tried to think through her kneejerk reaction to hide. The landowner was within his rights to dig on his own property, or to allow these people to dig there. She and Joe were trespassing, but they weren’t interrupting criminals in the act. Still, the landowner would obviously want to avoid trouble. Also, some of these people would recognize her, and it was no secret that she was an archaeologist. That might not be a good thing among this gathering of pothunters.

“We don’t want to be recognized.” She thought for a second, then added, “And that means we don’t want to be seen. We do stand out in a crowd, you know.”

There weren’t all that many women with
café-au-lait
complexions and short black hair wearing size-four Army pants roaming the Florida Panhandle, but Faye might have had a faint hope of anonymity. Joe, on the other hand, was…distinctive.

Joe reached up and untied the leather thong holding his ponytail back. Elbow-length hair spread itself over his shoulders.

Faye shook her head at his idea of a disguise. Joe was still wearing buckskin pants and moccasins, he was still memorably tall and broad, and he still had the face of a romance novel cover model. “Nice try. But it doesn’t help.”

Wayland and Nita kept coming. They stepped out of the clearing and into the trees, heading for the high and dry homesite as if they’d been there before. When Wayland pointed Nita toward the crumbling garden path, Faye understood that he, at least, knew where he was going.

“The house site is right over there,” he said.

“How come Herbie keeps us off this part of his land?” Nita asked.

When Nita and Wayland took a dozen more steps, they would stumble onto Faye and Joe huddling in the underbrush like two rabbits. They were going to be discovered. There was no help for it. Faye figured they might as well control the situation.

She made eye contact with Joe and he nodded. They rose together, interrupting Nita saying, “I always wondered about this place. I heard tell—”

Faye cursed her timing. Whenever a rural person says, “I heard tell—”, anyone interested in the past should shut up and listen. Stories live a long time in oral history. She wondered what Nita had heard told about Bachelder.

Sticking out her hand, she mumbled something inane like “Nice to see you two out here.”

Nita and Wayland looked back and forth from Joe’s face to Faye’s. She could tell that they did in fact recognize them. Despite Joe’s excellent disguise.

Nita looked at Wayland. “Do archaeologists spy?”

“Apparently.”

So these two scary-looking people knew who she was and what she did, and they were savvy enough to realize that she might pose a threat to their treasure-hunting escapade. Joe, with his uncanny intuitive sense, did just the right thing. He straightened up, displaying his full height and the machete in his hand, and glowered silently down at Wayland.

“We came out here to look at the old house,” Faye said with an ingratiating smile. “Just like you. Joe cleared the foundation, so we could see. Want a look?”

Nita cut her eyes in the direction of the piles of brick. She did indeed want a look.

Wayland turned out to be the kind of person who felt the need to bluster when faced with a larger man. “Wait. Where’d you two come from? You weren’t here on any of the other days. You didn’t drive out with us, and there wasn’t any cars around when we got here. I’m thinking you didn’t pay any two-hundred-and-fifty dollars, either.”

Two-hundred-and-fifty dollars? Coming out of the pockets of more than a hundred pothunters? Faye did the math, and the number was big. How often did the landowner—had Nita said it was Herbie?—throw these parties? A person could quit working on that kind of tax-free income…for as long as the artifacts lasted.

Her professional journals were full of articles cataloging the sordid details of these events. As soon as the paying customers went home, treasures would start turning up on EBay. They would start with common and cheap finds, like the stone points that were often offered by the dozen. The artifacts’ significance—and their prices—went up from there. In fact, they went up substantially.

The most disturbing thing Faye had ever seen being offered on the Internet was a complete set of buttons from a Civil-War-era Confederate uniform, ostensibly found at a battlefield located on private land in Tennessee. Now a man might conceivably lose a button in battle. He might lose two. But if a person considered how likely it was that a complete set would be unearthed, unless the jacket had been buried intact, the commercial offering of those buttons began to take on a new look. And if that person meditated for long on how likely it was that a jacket would be discarded by a soldier whose army was losing and whose government couldn’t provide him with another uniform, then there was only one conclusion to be drawn.

Those buttons came off a jacket that had lain in the ground and moldered with its fallen wearer. The person selling them had robbed a grave.

Faye’s own hands weren’t completely clean of the stain of illicit trading in artifacts, though it had been a long time since the need for money had backed her into that corner. One thing she didn’t do, however, was profit by stealing from the dead.

Nita gestured at Faye and Joe. “I think we need to ask Herbie why these two people are on his property.”

“Are we still on Herbie’s property?” Wayland asked. “Seems like he’d be taking us over here to dig, if he owned the home site. Bound to be a lot of interesting stuff laying around an old house like this.”

“Those guys don’t want bricks and old bottles and trash like that. Herbie knows it’s the battlefield they want. And he knows who’s paid their money, too.” Nita grabbed Faye by the elbow and bellowed, “Herbie!”

Joe took a big step forward.

Faye held up a hand to calm Joe. Nobody’d hurt her, not yet. Herbie was hustling in their direction. Behind him, she saw a sight that intrigued her and made her heart sink, all at the same time. Several treasure hunters were donning SCUBA gear. Some of the most intrepid were already in the river.

“What’s going on here?” Herbie asked. “My rules are simple, and here they are. I’ve nailed them to half the trees in these woods.”

He held out a sheet of paper with a heading that said
THESE ARE THE RULES. READ THEM!
As Faye reached out a hand and took it, recognition dawned on Herbie’s face. He knew who she was, so he knew there was an archaeologist crashing his pothunting party. He tried to snatch his sheet of rules back, but Faye already had it firmly in her grasp.

Faye could read uncertainty in Herbie’s eyes. For an instant, he wasn’t sure how to proceed. Recovering his equilibrium, he quickly adopted an attitude of arrogant bluster.

“I don’t have many rules,” he said, though the densely typed sheet in Faye’s hand put the lie to that claim. “You four people are already breaking the biggest one. I marked the boundaries as clear as I knew how.”

He pointed at two trees marked at breast-height with a ring of orange tape. Flashes of orange peeked through the woods in all directions. Herbie was telling the truth on that point. He’d marked his boundaries clearly, and she was on the wrong side of the line.

Suddenly, confusion erupted in the clearing, rather near the spot where Nita and Wayland had stepped into the woods and found them. People were running from all directions. Faye’s first impression was that a fight had broken out. Then some of the louder, clearer voices reached her ears over the general hubbub.

“Chip found a rifle. Look at that!

“Can you tell anything about it?”

“What’s that sticking out of the ground under it? Hey, Herbie! Get over here and tell us what this is.”

Then Wayland spoke in a voice so loud that it silenced the others. He took a few steps in the direction of the diggers, then pointed to the shadows where Faye and Joe stood. “Ask her. She’s an archaeologist. She’ll know what you’ve got there.”

The silence deepened. This was not a crowd to welcome an archaeologist who had crashed their party. Except for Chip. He rushed to her side, holding out the muddy remnants of an old rifle. “Faye—can you tell me anything about this? Do you think it’s from the Civil War?”

“’Course it’s from the Civil War,” Herbie rumbled, trying to get between them. “This is a battlefield, ain’t it?”

Chip was wiping at the metal barrel with a shirttail. “I don’t know. Could be a hunting rifle some hunter dropped last year. Could be from the Indian Wars, for all I know. It’s kinda cool to think maybe it belonged to Osceola or somebody like that. What do you think, Faye? Is it old?”

Liz had said that Chip was a history major. He sure acted like one. She reached for the gun barrel, but Herbie succeeded in getting between them.

The crowd was quiet…waiting. If Herbie wanted Faye and Joe gone, she wasn’t sure what these people would do.

Herbie clapped a pudgy hand on Chip’s shoulder. “I got somebody who’ll appraise that thing for you, Chip. You don’t need this trespasser to tell you what it’s worth.”

Chip hadn’t asked her what it was worth. He’d asked her how old it was.

Chip looked at Faye over Herbie’s head. “What
do
you think it’s worth?”

Her heart sank. If Chip, a known history buff, was willing to sell his prize, then the whole lot of them were. Well, there had been a time when she’d have been willing to sell it, too, if it would have helped save Joyeuse.

She opened her mouth to tell him she’d have to spend some time with it to assign an age or a value. Herbie stopped her. “I think it’s time for you to go home. We don’t want any trouble around here.”

Still, the crowd said nothing. More than a hundred faces were turned toward Herbie, waiting to follow his lead. She sure hoped he was sincere when he said he didn’t want any trouble. Joe was still bristling and holding his machete in plain view, so that was a point in their favor.

“We’ll walk her back to her car,” Wayland said. Nita was still holding Faye’s elbow. “We know how to keep a lady safe,” he added. “Safe enough.”

Was this guy anxious to display the chivalry that typified his romantic view of the Civil War era? Or was he dangerous?

Herbie considered the offer as if he himself wasn’t sure what Wayland’s motivation was. Finally, he said, “I think I’ll be the lady’s escort. Because I don’t want any trouble around here.”

Faye eyeballed Joe, wondering why no one had noticed that the lady had a perfectly good escort. Herbie didn’t take the hint.

“Where’s your car?” he demanded.

“We have a boat.” Faye noticed that Joe spoke in an appropriately dangerous tone of voice. The sheriff would approve. Ross might even approve, though Faye doubted it.

Faye could feel a hundred or more pairs of eyes boring into her back as Herbie marched them to the river bank where Joe’s boat waited. She amused herself by trying to calculate how many of those watchers were carrying a concealed weapon. A fascination with military history tended to go hand-in-hand with a passion for weapons.

A person shot and killed on this spot might never be found, not unless a witness came forward. Surely nobody in the crowd was so utterly confident in this motley crew of pothunters as to commit murder in front of dozens of them. For the first time, Faye was glad of the large crowd.

As if reading her thoughts, Herbie leaned close and murmured, “You should be careful where you go poking around, ma’am. I have friends here who’ve parlayed their finds into a nice little income. They live off those sales, some of them. And I do all right myself, charging people for the right to dig. There’s more than one here who’d kill you as soon as look at you, if you was to get between them and their money.”

Faye refrained from pointing out that he might consider looking for better friends.

Soon enough, they reached the boat. When Herbie saw them safely in it, he used his foot to push the boat away from the bank. Only when they had started the motor and begun to head downstream did he turn and walk away.

***

Joyeuse Island was a nice little boat ride from the ruins of Bachelder’s home, and Joe was at the helm, so Faye had plenty of time to read Herbie’s rules. They were:

1. You find it, you keep it.
   
2. No trespassing outside the boundaries marked in orange. I mean it.
   
3. No littering. I don’t feel like picking up after you. And pack your trash out with you when you go home.
   
4. Use the latrines provided and use the shovel afterwards. I’m serious.
   
5. No fighting. I will kick you out. I won’t refund your payment, either.
   
6. People who paid the camping fee should pitch their tents in the camping area only. People who didn’t pay the camping fee should go home at night. I know it’s a long way. Deal with it or pay the fee.
   
7. If you rented diving gear or a metal detector from me, take care of it, or I’ll keep your deposit.
   
8. If you find something worth selling, I know people with money who like old things. I can act as your broker. My fee is 25%. Take it or leave it.
   
9. If you mess with somebody else’s finds, you’ll get hurt. What are you going to do? Call the law?
   

At the bottom of the list of rules, Herbie had posted his fees for campsites, equipment rental, and food.

“Herbie’s making out like a bandit!” Joe said, looking over her shoulder. Faye wasn’t sure he should be trying to read while he steered the boat through these shallow waters. “I’m surprised he’s not charging for the latrine.”