Deeper Than the Grave (6 page)

Chapter Twelve

The coffee came courtesy of Richard, who had a giant metal urn set up in the back of his truck. It tasted like someone had stewed a rusty nail in creek water, but I didn't care. The warm cup felt good in my hands, and the caffeine went straight into my bloodstream.

Trey chose to stay at the edge of the police tape-enclosed area. He'd given over his sketches and grids to the police officers and watched as they used them to make notes, navigate the area. He stood stoically, arms folded, keen on their every move but unable to participate. I felt a pang for him.

Richard refilled my cup. “Your boyfriend did a good job.”

“Yeah. His heart beats for this stuff.”

I could see flashlights every now and then beyond the timberline, bobbing and weaving like giant fireflies. Detective Perez was finishing up her interviews. Dr. Evie Amberdecker remained apart from the cluster of people, talking on her cell phone. So far no one was telling her what she wanted to hear—that she could kick Perez and company off her land.

“Evie assisted with the first dig?”

“Yep. Almost two years ago.” Richard leaned closer. “Between you and me and the gatepost, Evie wants this whole place dug up and put on display. Rose, however, wants everything left exactly as it was two hundred years ago. But Evie's got that exhibit to think of.”

“The one at the History Center? It's opening this weekend, isn't it?”

Richard nodded. “In the new wing. Which Evie is hoping will soon become the Amberdecker Wing. All she has to do is convince the board to make the exhibit a permanent display.”

I remembered the History Center. Rico and I had spent an afternoon there the weekend of Uncle Dexter's funeral, during that blazingly bewildered time after I'd learned about his will, and my inheritance. Dexter had volunteered at the Center as a docent, dressing in his 1865-era working clothes, beating out metal on the blacksmith's forge. The new wing had been in process then, a mass of hammers and drills as noisy as the dark smith barn.

“It was under construction the last time I was there.”

“You should see it now. Evie's pulled together some serious donations, but the hardest part was convincing her mother to give up the family goods. Like I said, Rose wanted things to stay the same, and that included all the stuff in the house and all the relics buried out here. She wanted them in the dirt.”

Something in his voice caught my attention. “You disagree?”

He sipped his coffee, looked thoughtful. “Rose is a sensible woman, and I agree with her on most things, but leaving that stuff in the ground ain't right. Every soldier, no matter what side he fought on, deserves respect and honor. The dirt don't honor nobody.”

“So you support the exhibit?”

He shrugged. “Better than the dirt. But personal effects belong with the families, not in a museum. The swords and buckles need to go home the same way those boys needed to go home. Proper like.”

So he didn't support either approach one hundred percent. This was an interesting tug of war—Richard and Rose and Evie, all pulling hard on their own agendas. Across the field, Trey put his phone to his ear. Marisa again, I was betting, wanting an update on either his Amberdecker assignment or his progress with the resilient security systems report. I guessed the latter when he started back toward the chapel.

I wrapped my hands tighter around the coffee. “One of my favorite parts of my job is reuniting people with things that belonged to one of their kinfolk. It doesn't matter if it's valuable or not. Just being able to hold some real thing, no matter how small, matters.”

“It does. That's why I hate looters. Looters don't see nothing but price tags.”

“I suppose I look like a looter to Evie.”

“Everybody looks like a looter to Evie. And Rose.”

I laughed, but Richard's eyes were far away, and I knew what he was thinking about Dexter, and the last time they'd been on this soil together. As we gazed over the three hundred acres of Amberdecker land, I wondered how many stories remained under that dirt. How many women and men and children, with no stone to mark their graves? There had been slaves here, indentured servants too, and before them, the Cherokee and the Creek and the Muscogee, all the way back to the Stone Age. They had died and returned to the earth. But now they rested unmarked, uncherished, unknown.

Richard wiped his forehead. “As if looters weren't bad enough, now a tornado comes and tears up the place. Rose is gonna rip me a new one.”

“For what? Calling me in to help?”

He laughed. “For letting a tornado in.”

“You can't help a tornado.”

“No. And you can't help Rose, either. She's a force of nature herself.”

He said it with pride in his voice, the peculiar Southern appreciation for the rebellious and stubborn, but something else too. Something deeper. I was having a hard time sharing his appreciation. Having been in Rose's crosshairs, I was inclined to classify her as a cantankerous nut job with a possessive streak. But I didn't say such to Richard.

He jabbed his chin toward the chapel. “On the upside, there might be some restoration funds coming in now, especially for the roof and the gravestones. And the publicity would be good for Evie's exhibit. I may not agree with everything Evie's doing, but I gotta say, I was glad she got those windows taken care of.”

“You mean the stained glass ones?”

He nodded. “Evie got a restoration team down here to fix them up, and they look mighty nice now. She's right, that chapel is going to wreckage out here, and I don't know much that can save it, short of taking it apart stone by stone and rebuilding it someplace stable.” He shoved his hat back. “But Rose won't listen. She says she'd rather it crumble on Amberdecker land than stand forever on someone else's.”

I shook my head at him, suddenly confused. “Wait, those are the real windows?”

“Why wouldn't they be?”

I remembered the smooth sheened glass, free from bumps and occlusions. “I don't know, they seemed so…perfect.”

“They're restored. Evie got the team together herself.”

“But—”

“Tai. Don't be messing with the windows, you hear?”

He had an edge in his voice, and I realized I'd blundered into a minefield of some kind.

“I hear,” I said.

“Good.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “You'll figure it out later, all by yourself. I'm sure of it.”

Together, we looked out over the field, beautiful even in ruin. When the fog settled this way, wet from the mountain, the movements of the men shrouded in it, I could believe that the past rose from the ground like a slumbering beast, tangible and real. Like the ghosts might actually start talking.

“Dexter told me you were the one who found the bones the first time,” I said.

“Me and one of my workers, out near the park border. One of the oaks fell, and I found Braxton's skull tangled in the roots. I remember walking in the house that morning, bright summer day, everybody having lunch. Evie got on the phone in two seconds flat, started the whole process with the state.”

“And the rest of them?”

“Rose wasn't too happy about none of it, of course. She doesn't like the government messing around private affairs, and I don't blame her. But there's rules, you know, when you find bones. And she calmed down when Evie promised to return him to family soil as soon as possible. No labs, no exhibition. Bury him where he belongs, here, on his homeland.”

I remembered the photos of the reburial. Dexter and Richard in full dress grays, the cannon smoke rolling through these fields, brilliant with fall color. It had taken the family several months to work through the red tape surrounding the recovery of human remains, and to build the tomb. Much time and money, now all for naught.

“What did the other daughter think about the situation?”

“Chelsea?” Richard snorted. “She didn't have an opinion one way or the other. Just between you and me, that girl won't look at nothing what ain't wearing tight jeans and driving a fast car.”

“I thought she was engaged to what's-his-name? The guy whose family runs the New York Stock Exchange now.”

Richard thumbed a cigarette out of his pack. He offered me one, but I shook my head, and he stuck it between his lips, cupped his hands and lit it. I rubbed the nicotine patch harder, thought of England, France, Turkey, anything but the sweetly acrid hit of the smoke.

Richard held the cigarette at his side. “Chelsea snagged her a fine young man, that's for sure. Back in the day, though…She had a taste for wild game, that one.”

I filed that idea away. The older responsible daughter with a vested interest in the bones, the younger wild child who was bringing home some bacon in a completely different way. All of it riches for the Amberdecker coffers. All of it a nicely wrought life preserver made of wads and wads of money.

“You have any idea who the skull belongs to?” I said.

Richard shook his head. “Nope. But I'm betting that lady detective does.”

“She took my key ring. The one Dexter made me.”

“She took mine too.”

“How many did he make?”

“Don't know. But whoever that was in the woods, I bet he had one too, the poor bastard.” Richard took a long drag on his cigarette and blew a thin stream of smoke toward the trees. “Sometimes I think Joe Ben's right, that this place is haunted. It used to be peaceful and quiet, and then the day Braxton's bones saw the sun again…”

“You say that like a man who believes in ghosts.”

“I believe the other side ain't nothing to be getting definite opinions about.” His radio crackled, and he pulled it from his belt. “Yeah?”

The voice at the other end was raspy with static. “Detective Perez says everybody can go now. They've got the scene secured. She says it would be very helpful if nobody left town, though, especially not that girl from the gun shop.”

I sighed. Of course. Different corpse, same story.

Chapter Thirteen

The clouds fell away behind the departing storm, leaving a chilly wind and diamond-on-velvet sky to see us home. Trey hurried to the car without looking up, then belted himself in and submerged himself in paperwork. He was finishing up another call to Marisa when I climbed behind the wheel.

I managed to back out without ramming any of the dozen official cars parked willy-nilly at the gate, including an ambulance just arriving. “I hate to tell them, but it's way too late for an ambulance.”

Trey pulled a penlight from his pocket. “It's procedure.”

“Sometimes procedure makes no sense. Like when you stick a grotty skull in an ambulance.” Once we cleared the gate, I flipped on the high beams. “So what do you think happened?”

“About what?”

“About the skull. There was a crater in it, like somebody took a baseball bat it.”

Trey remained immersed in his papers, his penlight a slim focused beam as he read in the darkness. “I don't have enough evidence to theorize.”

“Then guess.”

“I'm not good at guessing.” He turned his attention to me. “Why are you asking?”

“Because it's looking like that skull's connected to Uncle Dexter in some way.”

Trey switched his penlight on me. His cranial lie detector didn't work very well in a dark Camaro, but it functioned well enough. He'd damaged several cognitive functions in the car accident, including the mechanism that let most people ignore verbal deceit. The “white lie shield,” my brother called it, explaining that after the accident, Trey didn't have one anymore. Lies hit him square between the eyes now. What this meant for me was that I had a devil of a time hiding anything from him. Every not-quite-factual word I spoke glowed like a road flare.

“Tai,” he said, “your part in this is over. This is a suspicious death investigation now, possibly a homicide.”

“I know. That's why I'm not getting involved.”

He reached up, flipping on the interior lights to better scrutinize my micro-emotive expressions, and I could tell by the tone of his voice that he was cranking his neurons into high gear. “If you're not getting involved, then why do you have notes written on your hand?”

“That's not murder-related. That's from the inscription below the stained glass. Latin.
Et tu Domini
something.”

“Et ut inhabitem in domo Domini in longitudinem dierum
.”

The words flowed from his tongue with practiced ease, lovely as a sonnet. They were a direct contrast to his expression which had all the softness of granite.

“How could you possibly remember that?” I said.

“I learned it in third grade. It's the Twenty-third Psalm, Twenty-second in the Latin Vulgate: ‘And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.'”

Sometimes I forgot that he'd gone to Catholic school. There was nothing of the religion in his present life, no Mass, no confession. He seemed to have escaped from the nuns without a single mystical bone in his body.

“So correct me if I'm wrong, Mr. Former Altar Boy, but that quote doesn't belong with the Prodigal Son story, right? That story ended with something about the brother who was dead being alive again, fatted calves, the whole forgiveness thing.”

“Correct.”

“Then why is a quote from the Psalms under there instead?”

“That I don't know.”

“Aha! See? Something weird. And it has nothing to do with the skull. This is my historical curiosity being stirred, nothing more.”

Trey shot me that look, the one that showed he didn't believe a word coming out of my mouth. I ignored the look.

“And while we're on the subject of those windows, did they look like the real thing to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Real antiques. Richard said they were, but they seemed awfully new to me.”

“I have no expertise in that area.”

“Neither do I. But still…” I finished up the last of Richard's awful coffee. “Windows, key rings, skulls. You gotta wonder how it's all connected.”

“Tai—”

“But like I said, I'm leaving this particular mess to the cops.”

His gaze tracked across my face, lingering around my mouth. He shook his head and narrowed his eyes. “No, you're not.”

***

Once we returned to the gun shop, I walked Trey to his Ferrari. “And it's not as if—”

“Tai. You explained. I heard you.”

“Yes, but you think I'm about to do something stupid.”

“I think you're becoming…I don't have the word.”

“Overly curious?”

“Overly something.” Trey opened the car door, slipped his briefcase behind the seat. “As for the rest of it, I've ordered a new video monitor for the safe room. It should be here tomorrow. But unless Brenda agrees to shared access on her property, the alley will always be a vulnerability.”

“I'll do my best with her, but she's not being cooperative.”

He turned to face me. The wind had died down, leaving a tenacious, heavy cold in its wake. I moved closer to him, but he kept his arms crossed. In the amber glow of the street lamp, his eyes were almost turquoise, his face a study of shadow and light.

“You did good out there today,” I said, “heading up the search team. You really miss it, don't you?”

“What, searches?”

“The whole cop thing.”

“That's not my job anymore.”

“Maybe. But you still miss it.”

He didn't reply. I burrowed under his coat, wrapping my arms around his waist, pressing myself into the circle of his warmth. He uncrossed his arms to let me in, but that was his only response. If I wanted a goodnight kiss, I'd have to take it. As usual.

I looked him in the eye. “Trey Seaver, what do I have to do to get you to make a move on me?”

He blinked in confusion. “I'm sorry, what?”

“You know. A move. A pass. Something—anything—that will end with us having sex.”

He cocked his head. “Are you asking me to seduce you?”

“Yep. That's it. Got it in one.”

“Oh. Okay. I can do that.” He leaned back against the car, pondering. “I'll need your help, of course. Because you're somewhat difficult to seduce.”

I resisted the urge to thump him between the eyes. “You've got to be kidding. You've never even tried, you jackass.”

His eyes flashed. “I've never had the chance. You're very…I need a word, multisyllabic, starts with A.”

“Assertive?”

He shook his head.

“Aggressive?”

“Fast. You're very fast.”

I glared at him. “Fast doesn't start with A.”

“Nonetheless.” He looked down at his shoes, a slight flush running warm along his cheekbones. “Fast isn't a bad thing, of course. I like fast. But I'm…”

“Slow?”

“Not slow.” He raised his head. “Just less fast.”

I caught his scent then—subtle, as always, carried on body heat and proximity, the mixture of that evergreen aftershave and the musk of skin. My fingers itched as I remembered the muscles camouflaged under the sleek Armani suit, the sure touch of his hands, the intense pleasure he could deliver…

I move my mouth closer to his. “I could take you now if I wanted.”

“I know.”

“Right up against this Ferrari. You wouldn't put up any resistance whatsoever.”

“None at all. But that would hardly count as a seduction on my part, now would it?”

I almost caved. The pull of him was gravitational, like planets circling into suns, ever closer, as reckless and heedless as physics. It was science, chemicals and laws and rules, and all I had to do was kiss him, and he'd kiss me back, and the chain reaction would begin…

I forced myself to take one step backwards. “There. That's me being less fast.”

He watched me. Considered long and hard. Then he got in the car, leaving me standing alone in the freezing solitary night. He started to close the door, but I stopped it with my hand.

“What the hell, Trey?”

He looked up at me. “What?”

“That's it?”

He nodded. “For now.”

“Are you serious?”

“Of course I'm serious.”

He said it calmly, softly. But his eyes gleamed, even in the low light. Yes, he was serious—he was always serious. But this was a new kind of serious.

I leaned forward into the car. “Trey. Boyfriend of mine. I don't know what you think seduction is, but this isn't it.”

I saw the quirk at the corner of his mouth, and a fresh desire flooded me like sap in the springtime, especially when the quirk deepened into one of his rare crooked smiles. He kept his eyes on me as he started the Ferrari, all four hundred horses under its hood leaping and snorting in a growly eight-liter rumble somewhere close to ninety decibels.

“Of course it is,” he said.