Effigies (15 page)

Neely’s voice was warm, even after it had been bounced off a few cell towers and filtered through the electronic guts of Faye’s phone. “I guess I could get somebody he doesn’t know to go in there wearing a recorder, and get some hard evidence but, Faye, I’m a little busy. I’m in the middle of a murder investigation. I wish people would vote with their feet and with their dollars. If people would shop somewhere else, then Preston could be prejudiced all by his lonesome self. Well, I guess he’ll always have me, as long as I’m buying Daddy’s medicine.”

“Do you really think he’s harmless enough to ignore? You said yourself that he was a known Klansman. Doesn’t it worry you that Lawrence Judd collapsed shortly after taking pills from Silver’s Pharmacy?”

The silence on Neely’s end of the line was so complete that Faye checked her phone’s display to see whether their connection had been broken. After a few long seconds, the sheriff spoke. “I heard Mr. Judd had been sick. I spoke with the doctor about his condition, but not as the sheriff and not because I thought there was a crime involved. I just felt…”

“Sympathetic?”

“Yeah, sympathetic. Because of Daddy. I know how hard it is to be sick. I was going to call his wife this evening, because I have an even better idea of what she’s going through. Anyway, the doctor didn’t give me even a breath of suspicion that there might be anything criminal about Mr. Judd’s collapse.”

Feeling sheepish, Faye said, “I guess I’m just the suspicious type.”

“Well…” The phone was silent again for awhile, presumably because Neely was thinking. Faye congratulated herself for getting this far. Most law enforcement types would have dismissed her tenuous suspicions out of hand. She was grateful to Neely for taking her seriously.

“Well,” Neely said again. “I’m supposed to talk to Preston Silver this afternoon. Nothing dramatic, just a conversation about his friendship with Carroll Calhoun, concluding with a discussion of why Preston thinks the man turned up dead. I had hoped to press him for information on Mr. Judd’s attack, since I feel like there’s is a decent chance that his attacker was in the Klan. Maybe he bragged to the Klavern about what he’d done. While I’m at it, I’ll try to find out what he knows about why Judd collapsed yesterday, but I need something besides, ‘I think you slipped him a bad pill because everybody knows you’re a racist.’ I’ll do my best, Faye, but don’t get your hopes up. Preston Silver has had more than forty years of practice in keeping his mouth shut.”

Chapter Fifteen

Faye and Joe had slinked in late to work. Granted, they were hardly ten minutes late, but there were bosses in the world who would have chewed them up and spit them out for much less serious transgressions. Dr. Mailer was not one of those bosses.

Twenty minutes later, Toneisha and Bodie had arrived. Dr. Mailer had missed their arrival, having been in his office at the time, but Faye knew that he was aware of their tardiness. He said nothing.

Faye caught Joe’s eye, then cast a knowing glance in the direction of the two tardy archaeologists. Joe just grinned. Faye hadn’t mentioned to him that Toneisha had been out all night, figuring that her roommate’s business was her own. Joe had apparently taken the same position regarding Bodie’s whereabouts.

Privacy was tough to achieve under their close working conditions, but Bodie and Toneisha might as well have broadcast their budding relationship on the Internet. If they’d just managed to be on time for work (and if they’d been discreet enough to arrive in separate cars), the rest of the crew would still be wondering. Faye harbored naughty thoughts of buying Toneisha a travel alarm.

The morning passed uneventfully. At eleven o’clock, Dr. Mailer looked at his watch and said, “Would you look at that? We’ve been out here three hours and nobody’s threatened anybody with a bulldozer. No law enforcement officers have driven out here to check our alibis for anything. No aging politicians have had any medical crises today. Nobody’s been killed with a weapon that looks a lot like the stuff we’ve got stored in the trailer. And every last one of you has a dirty trowel in your hand. Even Faye.”

Faye looked up from her excavation unit. “Hey. It’s not my fault that the sheriff came all the way out here to talk to me. Or that Mr. Judd needed a ride.”

“Sounds like slacker talk to me,” said Toneisha, secure in the knowledge that, though she’d arrived late, she’d made up for it by moving more dirt than anybody on that particular morning.

“Folks that are talking are folks that aren’t working,” observed Bodie.

Faye tossed a rock in his general direction.

Mailer lifted his head from the potsherd he was measuring, and raised his reading glasses up onto his forehead so that he could focus on the car turning into the Nails’ driveway. A spiffy-looking logo on the door proclaimed that it was owned by SGM&T. Their client had arrived.

Mailer muttered, “Well, I’ll be John Brown,” which was as close to cursing as he ever got. “Looks like my big mouth has conjured up a client visit. I won’t be getting much more accomplished today, but if you people keep your heads down, maybe he’ll ignore you and let you work.” He rose and brushed the dirt from his knees. “Tell you what. If he tries to bother any of you, I’ll tally up how much his project is paying, per minute, for this team’s time.”

“It’s not all that much,” Oka Hofobi said.

“Yeah,” Mailer said as he walked toward the car, “but he’s cheap. If you’re on the clock, then he’ll want you working. I’ll deal with him on my own.”

Mailer, as good as his word, had kept the contractor as far from his team as possible, but sound travels far and fast, so the team had heard every word of their client’s diatribe. He was unquestionably unhappy. His client, the state department of transportation, was unhappy, too, and he was happy to pass that dissatisfaction down to his lowly archaeological subcontractors. To hear him talk, anybody who had ever driven a car on Mississippi highways, not to mention everyone who ever hoped to drive a car on those highways, was extremely unhappy with Dr. Mailer and his management of this project.

His opening salvo went right to the heart of the problem. “Do you know how quickly you people could stop this project if you tell the whole world that there might be Indian artifacts here?”

“Sir,” Dr. Mailer began, taking the obsequiously respectful approach, “you hired us to look for cultural artifacts, and that’s what we’re doing. Not just Native American artifacts, but anything of cultural value that could be destroyed by road construction. That’s not a secret.”

It’s also the law
, Faye was tempted to interject, but there was no point in antagonizing the man. Also, he was standing quite some distance away, so she would have had to express her opinion at a significant decibel level. This was not the way to win friends and influence people.

“Of course it’s not a secret. It’s the law, and I run all my projects according to the law,” the man said, redeeming himself a trifle in Faye’s eyes, by echoing her thoughts. “But was there any need to go on television and shout it out to the countryside?”

And here was the crux of the problem. Their client was worried about bad PR. It was entirely possible that a road project could be completed within the law, by excavating any cultural materials and removing them, yet still be politically impossible. If the public rose up and protested the destruction of an archaeological site, then a road project through that spot could be dead in the water.

Here, in the Choctaws’ literal back yard, winning approval for construction was even more perilous. The Choctaws absolutely possessed the financial and political clout to make themselves heard. Considering past history, Faye found it refreshing on those rare occasions when the government had to tiptoe around the sensibilities of Native Americans.

From their client’s point of view, the archaeologists they hired should do their work, turn in their report quietly, then let the engineers decide where the new road should go. Heaven forbid that the public should get any more information than the law required.

“You’ve got a Ph.D., so I guess you’re not stupid,” ranted the client, who clearly enjoyed having his subcontractors by the financial scruff of the neck, “but I’ll tell you SGM&T’s position one more time. You are here because our client, the highway department, needs a permit to build this road. You are not here to make trouble. You are not here to find any reason
not
to build this road. And you are certainly not here to be on television talking about murdered farmers. Not when we’ll be coming back next year to work on a much bigger project right across the road.”

Dr. Mailer listened, nervously rubbing his palms together with his hands clasped in front of him. Faye wondered whether the client thought Dr. Mailer had killed Carroll Calhoun himself, just to antagonize SGM&T. She also wondered whether the red-faced agent was going to be the second person in two days to have a cardiac event right here in the Nails’ driveway.

It seemed to her that Dr. Mailer needed a little moral support. And he needed someone to help him gather his wits so that he could jump on the insider information his client had just handed him. Somebody was going to do the archaeology work next year for that big project across the street. Why not Dr. Mailer and his job-hungry students? More to the point, why not Oka Hofobi? Here was a chance for him to get paid, again, for pursuing the questions he’d asked all his life. What were his ancestors’ lives like when they lived here, all those years ago?

She wiped her hands on the seat of her jeans and reached into the cooler that Dr. Mailer kept stocked with bottled water for his team. His team might have preferred beer, but they appreciated the gesture. He was a good boss and he deserved for Faye to go to bat for him.

Wiping the bottle dry, she handed it to the client. “It’s pretty hot out here. Would you like a drink?”

He thanked her, cracked the bottle’s seal, and took a healthy swig. He even smiled. Offering food to placate an angry enemy was a human custom that went back…how far? Faye would have bet that the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons did the self-same thing.

“Do you know when the contract for next year’s project will go out for bid?” she asked. “The one that you just mentioned?”

“Oh, the contracts people at the highway department will keep fiddling with it until the end of this fiscal year, but then they’ll be in a big rush to hire somebody. If we get the job, we’ll be looking to hire some archaeologists again. You folks interested?” His fury seemed to have spent itself when he realized that Dr. Mailer wasn’t going to respond in kind, and that he wasn’t going to cower, either. A soft answer does indeed turn away wrath.

Faye looked at Dr. Mailer, inviting him to take this opportunity and run with it.

“Yes,” he said, shoving a white shock of hair off his high forehead, “we definitely are interested, and we’d be the obvious choice. We’re gaining more site-specific knowledge every day, which we could use to help you write the proposal. And, of course, we have young Dr. Nail, who lives right here. He’s a huge asset to getting the work done cost-effectively.”

Good job
, Faye thought.
Get him in the pocketbook.
Out loud, she only said, “Can you tell us anything about the proposed location of the road?”

“Right over there,” the man said, gesturing across the street to the left of the Calhoun house. He didn’t seem to be pointing at Calhoun’s mound, which was a relief to Faye. She’d hate to see it standing in the median of a four-lane highway.

Their client pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped at the sweat on his neck. “The traffic engineers are still running the numbers, but I imagine the road’ll go down one side of the creek. If they can avoid crossing the creek, then maybe they can avoid messing up the wetlands. Not to mention avoiding the permitting that would go along with that. Also, staying on one side of the creek will avoid the expense of building a bridge. Of course, that all presumes that you people don’t find evidence that Columbus himself camped here in 1492. Then we’d have to map out a road that preserved what’s left of his privy.”

Mailer wisely let that comment slide. “And the road will go…”

“It’ll go right straight through to town. Probably cut the drive time to Philadelphia in half. It’s a popular project. I sure hope Columbus and his outhouse don’t mess it up.”

Peach pie was an excellent chaser for the undistinguished box lunches that the hotel had packed for the archaeology team. They had dragged as many chairs into Dr. Mailer’s office as they could manage, so everyone could eat together. All that body heat overwhelmed the air conditioning that had drawn them indoors in the first place, but anything was cooler than a Neshoba County summer noon.

“Is your mom going to cook us dessert every day, Oke?” Bodie asked, licking peach juice off his fork. “Please say yes.”

“That’s an awful lot of work,” Faye said, also hoping Oka Hofobi would say yes.

“Ma cooks the way other people meditate. It calms her mind. But don’t worry that we’re taking too much advantage of her. Dr. Mailer just had twenty pounds of shrimp delivered to her kitchen door. And he told her that if she tried to serve it to the work team, that he wouldn’t let us eat it.”

Mailer hid his sheepish face behind a forkful of flaky crust. “Just seemed like the mannerly thing to do.”

Five bottles of water were raised in his honor. The sixth bottle was somewhere out of sight, in Chuck’s hand. He never ate with the others, so he invariably missed Mrs. Nail’s desserts, since his colleagues weren’t quite mannerly enough to save him a piece.

“About that project across the street—” Faye began.

“Business, business, business,” Toneisha groused. “Is it always business with you?”

“If we get that project, we’ll be back here next summer, eating whatever Mrs. Nail decides she wants to cook for us,” Faye observed.

Toneisha saw her point.

“So, Dr. Mailer, would you like me to look over the aerial photographs we’re using for this site, so that I can start thinking about next year’s project? I got the impression that the proposal will have a tight deadline, but we’re in a good position to be ahead of the competition. It wouldn’t hurt to do some of the legwork now, before the request for proposals hits the streets.”

“I think Faye just wants to work in the air conditioning this afternoon,” Bodie declared. “I think we should keep her outside until she’s moved as much dirt as me and Toneisha.”

“That won’t take long,” Faye said, setting aside her plate and heading for the door.

“Leave Faye alone,” Mailer said.