Effigies (17 page)

As she and Oka Hofobi put their tools away, Faye seized the opportunity to wangle permission for another task that wasn’t billable to the client. “Our maps and photos don’t cover a big enough area for me to do that proposal justice. Do you mind if I spend tomorrow morning gathering up those documents?”

“Trying to get out of some good, honest back-breaking labor?”

Faye checked his face. He was smiling, so she said, “A minute ago, you called me a workaholic.”

“That’s because you are. If the governmental agencies that have those maps and photos were open at night, you’d be at their offices after supper. Then you’d go back to your hotel room and take them to bed with you. Fortunately for workaholics like you, government workers go home at night. Come eat some barbecue with us. You’ve got my permission to do your non-billable research tomorrow. Charge it to my overhead account.”

When Faye and Joe, completely stuffed with barbecue, reached the hotel, they found that Mr. Judd had been released from the hospital. He was happily ensconced in his room, enjoying a room service meal that looked a lot better than the box lunches that had been packed for the field crew by the self-same kitchen.

Faye felt a weird pang of guilt at finding out that he’d been released without her knowing about it. Why? She decided it was because Mrs. Judd had charged Faye with keeping her informed on his condition. Since he had just finished talking to his wife with his own lips, Faye figured her duty had been discharged. She hated to think about anybody leaving the hospital in a taxi, but the sight of Ross Donnelly’s solicitous figure at the sick man’s bedside suggested that maybe he’d been Judd’s ride home. This was nice of him, but it wasn’t a particularly selfless act when one remembered that Ross wanted the former congressman’s support in a major way.

Faye leaned over toward Ross, asking, “So what kind of business brings you here to Philadelphia?” He was as conspicuously well-dressed as he’d been the day before, though his knit polo shirt and khakis were far more casual than the business suit had been.

“I’m here for the Fair.”

“So this is a pleasure trip?”

“No, I work as a lobbyist for—well, you heard me tell Mr. Judd what our position is. Politicians hover over the Neshoba County Fair like vultures. It’s a good place for me to get the attention of people I need to know.”

Faye noticed that, like anyone in politics, he had kept certain key information close to his vest. Like, for instance, the name of the group for whom he lobbied.

“Ross,” Judd interjected. “I have some business I need to discuss with Faye. Do you mind?”

“Not a bit. Faye, I’m in Room 710. When you leave, let me know if you think he shouldn’t be alone. I’ll come back and sit with him.” His exit was deft and quick. Nobody would accuse Ross Donnelly of overstaying his welcome.

Now that she had a chance to really look at him without distractions, Faye could see that Congressman Judd looked terrible. Faye would guess that he’d lost five pounds that he couldn’t spare in the twenty-four hours since his collapse. His skin was gray, and when he reached out to shake her hand, she could see each finger tremble independently of the others. But he was, by God, ready to go do some cross-country trespassing.

“I think we should wait a day or two,” Faye began, but she wasn’t allowed to finish.

“If I recall correctly, we knew that Mrs. Calhoun was going to be out of the house on Monday evening because there was to be an open-casket viewing of her husband at the funeral home.”

Joe’s expression said that he found the idea distasteful, and Faye rather agreed. She much preferred his Creek-style funerary practices, which mostly consisted of washing himself with water and cleansing herbs, then burning stuff that smelled good. After that, Joe just sat and thought good thoughts about the deceased. All in all, Faye thought the process to be quite constructive.

“—and Mr. Calhoun’s funeral should be going on about now,” Mr. Judd was saying, “so we’ve missed today’s opportunity to go sneaking around on his widow’s land. Tomorrow’s Wednesday, and I hear that Mrs. Calhoun’s a big churchgoer, so she’ll be gone for hours. She’ll go to prayer meeting, for sure, where they’ll remember her husband. Then she’ll go to choir practice, because those little country churches can’t ever spare a single voice out of the choir. She’s probably part of some kind of women’s charitable group, and they always meet on Wednesday nights. Faye, tomorrow is our last safe day until she goes back to church on Sunday. I’m not in the mood to wait that long. As I was reminded yesterday, life’s short.”

Faye’s gaze wandered down to the older man’s legs, which were trembling as noticeably as his fingers. He noticed. “I’ve never been strong. This is not new. But no one has a stronger will than mine. Don’t you worry, I can haul my puny self down that creek and back. And if I can’t, this young man,” he pointed to Joe, “is more than big enough to carry me home. Tomorrow evening, I’ll meet you at the Nails’ house, just like we planned before. Somebody in Neshoba County knows the truth about what happened to me in 1965, but nobody has admitted it yet. Something tells me that you, young lady, have what it takes to get to the bottom of things.”

Chapter Seventeen

Faye had often found that fate was a matter of split-second timing. If she had followed through on her plan to walk straight into the shower—possibly while still wearing her nasty clothes—she would never have heard the phone ring. The only thing that stayed her rush to the bathroom was a vision of herself, fresh and clean, wrapped in her bathrobe and reclining on the bed.

This vision was achievable within fifteen minutes, with one tiny problem. In her daydream, Faye was languidly munching on a chocolate bar, and she had no such thing in her possession. Fortunately, she knew the gift shop downstairs to be well-stocked. Figuring that it was better to venture out in public in dirty clothes than to be seen in her pajamas, she grabbed her purse and went on a chocolate-stalking expedition.

The phone beside her bed rang as she stood outside her locked door, juggling her purse, her key, and the chocolate bar. By stuffing the candy into her purse, she was able to answer the phone on its fourth ring. The mellifluous baritone of Ross Donnelly wafted gently out of the receiver and into her ear.

“Hello, Faye. It’s Ross. Congressman Judd warned me that you were the kind of woman who didn’t quit work at dinnertime, so I’m not surprised that you’re so late getting back to your room. I’m guessing you’ve already eaten, which destroys my plan to ask you out for dinner. The selection of movies in Philadelphia isn’t great—”

“So I’ve been told.”

“That doesn’t leave us many entertainment options. You don’t seem like the gambling type.”

Faye reflected that the man was a good judge of character. “I’m too cheap to enjoy gambling. Too many years spent nursing an overloaded bank book will do that to a girl. The joy of winning a few dollars just can’t wipe out the fear of losing those dollars and more. I’d be a killjoy in the casino.”

“Okay, then gambling’s out. I’m not crazy about it, myself. The fact that casinos stay in business is proof-positive that the odds are stacked against you. My meticulous research tells me that we only have a few other entertainment options, this time of the evening. We could go frog-gigging.”

Faye made it a policy not to delve too deeply into where her fried frogs’ legs came from. “I’m not much into frog-gigging, but if you’re set on going, I’ll see if Joe’s in the mood. I swear the man can talk to frogs. He charms them right out of the water and into his boat.”

“I’m more interested in your company than I am in how we spend our time. So let me throw out a couple of other ideas. We could go out to the Fair—”

“It’s pretty late. What time does it close?”

“I have no idea. That’ll be part of the adventure. How many rides can we ride before they kick us out? We could even bet on it, except you don’t like to gamble. I say we can squeeze in the Ferris wheel and a couple of turns on the biggest roller coaster, then close down the evening on that giant pendulum thing. The one that swings back and forth about a dozen times before it works up the energy to flip all the way over.”

“Sounds enticing. If you’re into terror. But you said you had a couple more ideas. What’s the other one?”

“It’s not as exciting as the Fair, I’m afraid. I figured that if none of the other options suited you, we could just take a drive.”

Faye, who rarely turned down a spin on a Ferris wheel, was surprised at how attractive a simple drive sounded. The intensity of the past few days had left her drained, and she wasn’t cut out to live in a casino. The act of walking from her hotel room to her car required her to pass a zillion beeping, flashing, ringing slot machines, and the experience left her disoriented. Nighttime on her island home was black-dark and quiet, and she knew that kind of nurturing stillness waited for her on any number of lonely roads just a few miles from downtown Philadelphia.

When she was at home on Joyeuse Island, she didn’t have to tiptoe around egos. Career advancement was a faraway concern. She had no need to impress anyone there, mostly because no one lived there but her and Joe. If there were ever a person who expected nothing more from Faye than that she simply be herself, Joe was that person.

She made her decision. “A drive would be lovely. Give me ten minutes.”

Not for the first time, Faye was grateful that her short hair dried exceptionally fast.

The car and Ross were a perfect match. It was sleek and stylish. It was also small, as fabulous sports cars tend to be, yet it still managed to be perfectly proportioned to his substantial frame. It fit him as if it had been manufactured to his measurements, just like his clothes, and it was obvious that neither clothes nor car had come cheap.

Faye was relieved when he opened the passenger door for her, not because she required old-fashioned displays of chivalry, but because she was afraid she might leave a fingerprint on the door’s coal-black paint job. He bent over her solicitously as she lowered herself into the low-slung car, and she suffered a last-minute pang of apprehension.

What was she doing? What would she say to a woman friend who was prepared to crawl into a car with a man she hardly knew?

Probably nothing. No matter how many times a woman met a man for lunch, talked to him on the phone, or met him for drinks, there still came a moment when she chose to let herself be alone with him. Alone and vulnerable. It wasn’t necessarily a good plan, but the western world had a name for this risk-taking behavior. It was called “dating.”

She buckled her seat belt and waited to see where Ross intended to take her.

With a push of a button, he lowered the convertible top, and Faye’s animal instincts relaxed just a bit. She wasn’t actually going to be sealed up in a car with a man she didn’t know. If disaster loomed, she could just hurl herself out of the moving car. (Why did this thought cheer her?) Besides, it was her impression that serial killers rigged their car doors so that victims couldn’t open them from the inside. Lowering a convertible top would spoil that plan. It was time to put her paranoid thoughts away and simply enjoy the ride.

Ross drove with speed and control, and his car ate up the miles. Faye had never ridden on a toboggan, but she imagined it felt like this, skidding smoothly just above the surface of the land. When their speed suddenly slowed, Faye glanced over at Ross, who gestured out her car window. The curve of a Ferris wheel rose above the trees, and multicolored lights twinkled through their branches. A teeming hive of humanity milled among the colorful cabins that stood between them and the Midway.

“I thought it might be fun just to pull the car over and have a glass of wine while we watch the big wheel turn. But now I think that’s probably a bad idea. We’re too close to the Fair and all its traffic. Too many cars. And there’s no shoulder on any of these backroads.” A pickup truck whooshed past, proving his point. “Somebody might sideswipe us if we stopped here. Besides, we’d have no privacy at all.” He took his eyes off the road to look at her sidewise.

“I know just the place,” Faye said. “But we’ll need a flashlight. Do you have one?”

“Are you kidding? This thing has a trunk the size of a breadbox. The bottle of wine barely fits. But I’m sure we can scare up a flashlight somewhere.”

Two convenience stores later, Faye and Ross had acquired the necessary flashlight and she was giving him directions.

“Go slow. I think we’re getting close.”

“What are we looking for? Cows? I don’t see any cows, because this is the darkest road I’ve ever been on—”

“Hence the flashlight.”

“Praise God for the flashlight. And for my halogen headlights. Anyway, the cows may be hiding in the dark, but I recognize pastureland when I see it. Even in the black of night.”

“And I recognize a state park when I see it,” Faye said. “Pull over into that parking lot. Right there. See it?”

“Barely.” He shut off the engine and silent darkness dropped down on them. “I have never in my life seen stars like those.”

“Let’s see. You said you grew up in Brooklyn. Now you live in Atlanta. I’m surprised you’ve ever seen stars at all.”

“A few of the bright ones poke through the haze. Even in Atlanta.”

“The bright ones are usually planets, so we still can’t be sure you’ve ever seen an actual star.” Faye reclined her seat a couple of degrees. “Look there. See the three bright stars overhead? That’s the summer triangle. Vega. Deneb. Altair. Deneb’s part of Cygnus the Swan. See that cross? The long line is the body of a flying bird. The short line crossing it is the bird’s wings.”

Faye’s thoughts strayed to Mr. Calhoun’s mound. She had been so sure she saw wings stretching out on either side of it, but the human brain is conditioned to read patterns as familiar forms. Two dots and a line are invariably interpreted by a normal brain as the two eyes and mouth of a human face. Two lines of unequal length, crossing each other at right angles, could be interpreted as a bird or a human torso or a religious symbol, but those lines were rarely perceived as random. What had the builders of that mound intended it to be?

“Do all archaeologists know as much about stars as you do?”

“There’s actually a branch of the science called ‘archaeoastronomy.’ Ancient people often oriented their monumental architecture to the sun and moon and stars.”

“Like Stonehenge.”

“Right. And like those Mayan pyramids that do funky things on the solstice. Some of them make shadows that look like their snake god is slithering down the pyramids’ steps. I’d like to see that someday.”

“But I take it that archaeoastronomy isn’t your specialty?”

“Um, I’m still trying to choose a specialty. I just can’t seem to narrow down my interest in archaeology. All of it fascinates me. But to succeed in academia, I have to pick one thing and learn all I can about it. That won’t leave much time to explore all the wonderful questions that fall outside my specialty.”

Faye touched her finger to her lips, silencing herself. A first date was a poor time for a woman to parade all her insecurities. She redirected her musings toward something innocuous. “Astronomy, on the other hand, is just a hobby for me. I live on an island, so I’m in charge of all the lights. When I want it dark, I just turn off the generator. Some nights, there’s nothing to do but look at the stars. I keep thinking maybe I might get a telescope, but there’s always someplace else to spend my money. That’s the trouble with owning a two-hundred-year-old house.”

“Ouch. I bet my new townhouse is cheap by comparison.”

Faye would have bet her ancient Pontiac Bonneville that it wasn’t.

“You don’t live on that island all alone, do you?”

“No. Joe lives there, too.”

She thought of trying to explain her relationship with Joe, but she didn’t know how. Was he like a brother to her? No. More like an exceptionally hot first cousin—interesting to look at, but off-limits.

“But he’s okay that you’re here with me?”

“Oh, yeah. Sure. Actually, he dated someone seriously last winter, and he’s still getting over it.” Casting about for a less intense subject, she remembered why she’d brought Ross all the way out here. “I bet you’re wondering why we needed a flashlight.”

“And I bet you were wondering when I was going to haul out that bottle of wine.”

Ross retrieved the bottle from a trunk that was indeed about the size of a breadbox. Faye trained the flashlight on the bottle and saw that the writing on the label was in French.

“You seemed like a Bordeaux kind of woman,” he said, pouring a generous slosh into a glass and handing it to her.

Faye knew that if “Bordeaux” meant “expensive”—and she reckoned it did—then nary a drop of it had ever crossed her lips. She rolled a sip over her tongue and let it trickle down her throat. It sure tasted expensive.

She remembered something. “Hey! Did you bring this all the way from Atlanta? Neshoba County is dry.”

“Which calls into question whether I was lying when I said you looked like a Bordeaux kind of girl. You’re thinking maybe I just carry a bottle of the stuff around, then tell random unsuspecting women that they make me think of Bordeaux. Nope. I confess to buying the wine earlier in the evening, before I called you, because I was hoping I could convince you to see me tonight. But I promise I didn’t bring it with me all the way from Georgia. And I can prove it.”