Deeper Than the Grave (4 page)

Chapter Seven

As it turned out, Trey's boss granted him plenty of time for lunch. Or to be more specific, for the Amberdeckers. She'd immediately e-mailed him a file, which he was perusing on his phone as I drove us out of downtown Kennesaw.

“Marisa wants you to schmooze?” I said.

“That was not her exact word, but in essence, yes. She's been courting Rose Amberdecker for several months, she said, but the family has resisted hiring any outside security services.”

I clicked the windshield wipers into high. We were behind the storm's trailing edge, weaving though a road littered with debris. I slowed down to pass a tree limb blocking the right hand side, a gnarled mass that looked like the foreleg of some prehistoric raptor. The forest would have been beautiful with a clear blue sky behind it. Pines and oaks, ancient hardwoods, granite outcroppings running with rain. But the sky remained low and yellow, the oily hue of weak sunlight and thick humid air.

Trey checked his seatbelt—again—then pulled up the weather map on his phone—again. I couldn't tell which had him more nervous, the storm or my driving, but he'd grudgingly admitted the Ferrari wasn't the best vehicle for traveling into the wilds and joined me in the Camaro. The Z-28 was hardly ideal, but it rode higher off the ground and, most importantly, had trunk space for three metal detectors.

I downshifted through a particularly slick patch. “What makes Marisa think today is the day to make contact? On the morning Rose Amberdecker's cemetery gets ripped up by a tornado?”

“She wants me to be a presence. Her words.”

“Which means she wants you to show up and be helpful and then when she runs into the Amberdeckers ever-so-accidentally a week from now, she can say, ah yes, you remember Trey, my number one man, he who was so helpful during your recent unpleasantness, and then the Amberdeckers will throw money at her.”

Trey considered. “That sounds correct.”

A stray branch whipped across the road in a whirling dervish, and Trey tightened his grip on the seat. We had a ways to go, up through the winding roads of the Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park. During the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, the mountain had stood like a great wall between the Union army and their eventual war prize—Atlanta. I'd last visited the area back in June, the height of summer, when the park held its commemoration of the battle's sesquicentennial. Birds singing, grass greening, a sky so blue and bright it looked like it might crack open any second and candy fall out. People had told me the land was haunted, that I would sense darkness there, but I hadn't. I'd felt only the colorful violence of summer. Now the violence was more chaotic, destructive. Mother Nature's mean side showing.

“So tell me about these Amberdeckers,” I said.

“I thought you knew them personally?”

“No, I know Richard, their caretaker, the one who called this morning.”

“I've met him, haven't I?”

“Yeah. Burly guy, beard. He's in the shop at least once a week. But I know very little about the Amberdeckers.”

Trey swiped the screen. “Rose Amberdecker, formerly Rose Amberdecker Farwell, formerly married to John Farwell of Farwell Bank and Trust, Farwell Financial, Farwell Insurance and—”

“Got it. Filthy rich white people.”

“—mother of Evie and Chelsea Amberdecker, thirty and twenty-five respectively, both living and working downtown. The family is currently embroiled in a legal battle to separate the Amberdecker assets from her matrimonial ones, hence her return to her maiden name. And her daughters' legal adoption of it.”

“The kids took
her
name?”

“After their mother's divorce, yes. Which effectively extinguished any linkage to John Farwell. Or so they are arguing.”

“Who's coming for the family money?”

“The state. Before Farwell died, he was convicted of seven counts of fraud and ordered to pay eighteen million in restitution. He died in prison. Heart attack. Rose is arguing that the payback responsibilities died with him.”

I was a little confused. “Then why is Marisa so interested? There doesn't seem to be a lot of spare change floating around this family.”

“No, but thanks to the discovery of their ancestor's remains two years ago—the same remains you've been asked to find this morning—and the Amberdecker exhibit at the Atlanta History Center—opening this weekend—their social capital has, in Marisa's estimation, increased exponentially. Especially now that Evie, the older daughter, serves as assistant to the state archaeologist.”

“So they're the darling of the preservationist set.”

“Yes. But most importantly, Chelsea, the younger daughter, is engaged to Jeremy Pratchett.”

Trey pronounced the name with a decided emphasis. And it was familiar, in an oh-I-heard-that-on-the-news kind of way.

“And he is?”

“Vice president of marketing for Intercontinental Exchange, headquartered here in Atlanta.”

And then I remembered. It had been big news among those in Trey's circle, not so important to people like me, the rinky-dink owner of a rinky-dink gun shop.

“You mean the company that bought the New York Stock Exchange.”

Trey nodded. I whistled.

“I see why Marisa's interested. That's some tall cotton.”

Trey frowned. The metaphor puzzled him for a second, but he eventually got the gist. “Yes. Marisa sees this as an opportunity to make some valuable connections, and Rose Amberdecker is the…I need a word, two syllables, starts with L.”

“Linchpin.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

A wind shear bumped the car like an enormous invisible battering ram, and Trey whipped his attention out the window again. He stared belligerently at the passing wilderness, as if he were preparing for the trees themselves to leap out at us. He still had the road map open in his lap, but I didn't have the heart to tell him it wouldn't help. We were about to be off the grid, on Amberdecker land.

“Doesn't the Boss Lady remember what happened last time she pimped you out? Or the time before that?”

“What are you suggesting?”

“I'm suggesting bad things happen when Marisa gives you this kind of assignment. Fires, shootings, corpses.”

“Those things weren't
my
fault.”

“They weren't
mine
either.”

Trey clutched the dashboard. “Deer!”

I slammed on the brakes as the buck tossed its head and bounded into the road, nimbly dodging a branch toppled in the left hand lane. I looked over at Trey, who stared straight ahead, one hand braced against the dashboard, the other wrapped around the door handle. The deer stamped its foot, snorted once, and disappeared with a leap. Trey didn't let go of the door, though.

“Welcome to the jungle,” I said, and shifted the Camaro back into first with a growl of gears.

Chapter Eight

We passed through the first gate, a swinging fence post guarded by one of Richard's crew, only to be confounded by the second, an intricate wrought-iron barrier with no entrance that we could find. Eventually Trey realized we were supposed to follow it, not enter it.

“It's the boundary that protects the main house,” he said. Indeed, I could glimpse the Amberdeckers' white Greek Revival mansion through the black lines of the gate, behind rows of pine trees. Richard had told me it was an exact replica of the original, except that the current version had an elevator, and the slave quarters had been replaced by a sprawling greenhouse.

Trey pointed to the left. “Try that way.”

I followed his instructions. He kept his notepad open as I drove, his pencil in constant motion as he sketched and erased, the blank page unfolding into charted landscape. Eventually we found the path, a single-car dirt lane that curved and looped through the woods, finally ending at a clearing. White headstones and ghost-pale statuary dotted the terrain, bordered abruptly by deep woods.

I parked next to the chapel, a compact structure of quarried river rock twined with ivy, a flagstone path leading to its wooden door. As we got out of the car, I saw the path the twister had taken. The chapel looked unharmed, but a massive magnolia lay sprawled on top of gravestones, roots exposed. That wasn't the only damage. The corkscrew storm had gouged a channel through the woods, ripping shrubs into salad and saplings into toothpicks. Raindrops plop-plopped in sloppy mud puddles, thick as soup, and the air felt too heavy to breathe.

I buttoned my rain jacket and headed for the edge of the cemetery, leaving my car beside the chapel. Trey walked beside me, his umbrella over our heads.

“Damn,” I said.

Private Braxton Percival Amberdecker's tomb was a ruin. The Corinthian columns that had once guarded the Confederate soldier's final resting place lay cracked and split, the white marble dirt-pocked and filthy with scraps of vegetation. Stone blocks scattered like breadcrumbs across the rough grass, and the figure of a grieving angel had been toppled, one pale arm still curled around its head.

I pulled the rain hood over my head. “This used to be twelve feet tall. Stone Mountain granite over brick. Cement fortified.”

Trey didn't reply. He was a little overwhelmed. His dry-clean-only trousers and leather lace-ups weren't suited for slogging through mud and rain, neither of which he liked very much. Nor did he care for being in the woods with nature spilling its guts all around him. He was mustering through, though, probably because I'd seen his eyes light up at the words “search grid.”

He nodded toward the tree line. “That's Richard over there, yes?”

It was indeed. Dressed in workingman's jeans and a flannel shirt, Richard looked sweaty and hot despite the freezing temperatures, his thick sorrel curls hidden under a Ford truck hat. He had small eyes that held a cowboy squint, with high cheekbones and a sun-darkened complexion. The beard, however, was straight out of a Mathew Brady daguerreotype, even if his stocky frame wasn't.

He pulled his gloves off. “You got here fast. Considering.”

“It didn't get bad until we got past Barrett.” I nodded Trey's way. “You remember Trey, right?”

“Of course.”

He extended his hand, and the two men shook. Another man silently joined us. He wore overalls, and his lined forehead and mulish gaze gave him a look of profound contrariness. He ignored Trey and me, kept his eyes on the woods.

“What got hit besides the tomb?” I said.

Richard shoved his hat back. “The chapel lost some roof tiles, but that's fixable. That magnolia was over a hundred years old, though. Rose is gonna split her seams.”

“You haven't found her yet?”

“No. Best I can tell she took off for a walk this morning, probably down to the edge of the property.”

“Do you think she's all right?”

“I'm sure she is. But I want to have those bones safe and sound before she gets back.”

I looked around at the acres of pine and hardwoods, kudzu and meadow. “They could be anywhere.”

“So we'd best start figuring out where they ain't.” Richard pulled out a terrain map, which he'd marked with an approximation of the tornado's path. “There's a tally of the burial goods on the other side. I pulled it from your uncle's notes. Every button, every buckle accounted for.”

“Got it.”

Richard looked at me seriously as he handed me the map. “I need to warn you about the bones.”

“Don't worry, I've seen bones before.”

“Not like these. These are red, mottled like they've been dipped in blood. Evie—you know, Rose's daughter, the archeologist—she says it's from being buried on Amberdecker land for a hundred and fifty years. We got a peculiar kind of clay down by the ravine. Striated, Evie calls it.”

The old man made a noise and pulled his hat down low. “Or red from being cursed. Best leave him in the clay, I say.”

Richard didn't look up from the map. “Nobody asked you, Joe Ben.”

But Joe Ben was on a roll. His dentures didn't fit properly, giving him an odd lisp. I could smell the chewing tobacco on him, and saw the corner of a Red Man pouch peeking out from his overall bib. His eyes were pewter-gray and nail-sharp.

“The mountain wants those bones, and we'd best not interfere lest we pay the price too. It's eye for an eye out here.”

Richard's voice grew taut. “This ain't the End of Days. Our job is to find those bones, repair the tomb—”

“The mountain don't want no tomb. You mark my words—”

“Do your job, Joe Ben, or I'll find somebody who will. Now go get a radio and start hunting. And if you see Rose first, keep your mouth shut. I need to be the one to tell her about this.”

Joe Ben spat a thin stream of tobacco juice to the side, then headed for the chapel. He moved without hurry, as slowly as he could get away with without provoking Richard further.

Richard watched him, then turned to me, shaking his head. “Old men and their stories.”

“Stories sometimes have truth for a backbone, you know that.”

“I got real backbones to worry about.” He jutted his chin toward his pickup truck. “You ready to get started?”

***

Richard set Trey and me up with handheld radios. The plan was a simple quadrant search—clear one square, then move on to the next. Like a crime scene zone search, Trey had explained, although tornadoes didn't play by the same rules as human perpetrators. Humans tended to drop things in concentric circles. Tornadoes, however, had a peculiar logic all their own.

Trey stopped at the edge of the woods. “Richard said he needed a point person, so I'm staying here and coordinating.”

I pocketed the radio. “Where'd he go?”

“One of his men called and said he'd found something.”

“The bones?”

“He thought it was a piece of the coffin, but he needed Richard to make sure.” Trey hooked his own radio to his belt. “Call off when you've cleared an area, and I'll keep track on the main grid.”

I hoisted the metal detector and the accessory bag. “Got it.”

“Good. Channel nine. Keep to your quadrant.” He tilted his head, examined me thoroughly. “And be careful.”

***

The woods were dark this morning, and deep. I paced off the coordinates Trey had given me, which took me from the edge of the cemetery to a small ravine. Here, the anemic light grew thin and gray as dishwater. I was glad I'd worn heavy work boots. The red clay mud sucked at the soles like something from a horror movie.

I pulled the headphones from my pocket and plugged them into the detector. I also had a small trowel and handheld probe, but didn't expect I'd be needing them. Tornadoes flung things around, but they didn't bury them too deeply. The detector penetrated to three feet, definitely enough for this particular mission.

The detector wouldn't find bones. That would require a sharp eye, especially since I knew Private Amberdecker's might not be the only remains around, thanks to the nearby battlefield. The Battle of Kennesaw Mountain had claimed over four thousand Confederate and Union casualties, including hundreds of men missing in action, like the Private. And although the Piedmont soil of the Kennesaw area wasn't especially conducive to preserving body parts, the Amberdecker lands created an exception. With loamy soil and red clay deposits veining the earth, this particular landscape coddled bones like a cradle. It was private land, off-limits to looters. That didn't stop the relic-obsessed, however, a fact Richard knew all too well.

I settled the headphones on my ears, listened to the whine of the machine. No, bones would not register, but one of those buttons or buckles would. And if I found one of those things, with any luck, the bones would be nearby.

I straightened up, swung the detector left and right, then set off into the woods.

The tornado's initial impact was precise and obvious. After that, the damage grew more sporadic. There was a petulance to the destruction, like a temper tantrum, but I knew it was only physics at work. Here the trees stood, but the tumbled branches in the pine needles were proof that a lacerating wind had ripped through. I kept my eyes on the ground, swinging the detector back and forth in a neat arc.

Thirty minutes later, all I had found were pull tabs and broken tool parts. None of the private's burial goods, and not a sign of Rose. I was beginning to think Richard's faith was misplaced, that any second now I'd be stumbling on the unfortunate corpse of a little old lady, pearls clutched to her crushed chest…

The metal detector threw off a high-pitched whine, the signature of something big. I looked down. A muck-covered length of metal lay at my feet. I nudged it with my toe. A pry bar, probably from some unfortunate resident's toolshed. I marked an X on my map and kept searching.

I didn't have to search long. The detector whined again, this time in a short sharp burst. I knelt at the foot of a massive oak and parted the top layer of leaves with my fingers. They were cold and slimy and smelled of ripe decay, but they covered something solid underneath. I peered into the mulchy mess. Then I cursed and snatched my fingers back fast.

The brown-stained skull grinned up at me, dead leaves in its teeth, a chunk of its cranium caved in at the back. I didn't even try to brush the mud off. I reached for my radio.

“Trey? You there?”

It sputtered and crackled. “Ten two, Seaver here.”

He was in SWAT mode, all last name and ten codes. I pressed the talk button. “I found the skull. Bring the rest of the metal detectors, and we'll grid this area with an intensive.”

“Copy that. Text me the coordinates.”

“Will do.” I dropped my voice. “I love it when you talk cop, have I ever told you that?”

A tiny pause. “Copy and out, Tai.”

I tucked the radio back into my pocket and started to move some more leaves out of the way. But before I could, I heard a stomach-dropping noise to my left—the unmistakable “ka-chunk” of a pump action shotgun. And then a woman's voice, cold and authoritative.

“Hold it right there, you goddamned thief!”