Effigies (19 page)
Faye returned from a morning spent chasing paper trails, only to find an unsettled work crew. An after-lunch thundercloud had chased them into the cramped quarters of the trailer. They unquestionably had plenty of work to do in there, and after Faye arrived, they passed a chatty hour cleaning and cataloging their finds. A particularly well-shaped stone point had made the rounds, passing from hand to hand so its fine workmanship could be appreciated by people who knew it when they saw it. Faye enjoyed the feel of the finely worked stone.
It had been a productive way to spend the weather-enforced time indoors, but these were not people who enjoyed standing shoulder-to-shoulder and breathing stale air. All six of them cast the occasional glance out the window, but it was Toneisha who noticed that the storm had blown through.
“Would you look at the sun shine?” she said. “All that wind and thunder, and not the first drop of rain ever hit the ground.” She looked expectantly at Dr. Mailer, and so did everybody else. He was staring distractedly at the door, probably because he (and all the rest of them) knew that there were supposed to be seven people working in the cramped trailer. Not six. Chuck had now been missing for a protracted period during working hours for the second day in a row. Not late. Missing. Dr. Mailer was going to have to do something.
Belatedly responding to Toneisha’s comment, Dr. Mailer looked around the room as if he’d just come back from a faraway place. “Yes. Yes, let’s get back outside where we can have some fun.”
Faye was still gathering her tools when she saw Chuck walking up the driveway. He was almost completely wet, except for his head and upper trunk, even though it hadn’t rained. Thundershowers were spotty propositions. Chuck might have been rained on if he’d been far enough away, and his upper body might have stayed dry if he’d draped a newspaper or something over his head, but Faye didn’t think so. The brownish-red tint of the water soaking his socks suggested that he’d been just as dirty as she’d seen him the day before. If he’d waded into the creek in a clumsy attempt to clean off the mud, then he’d look just like he did now.
Where did he go on these mysterious jaunts? He could only get so far on foot, even with his long legs. Judging by what she’d learned from the property assessor’s files, he’d been on the Nails’ land if he had stayed south of the highway, or he’d been on the Calhouns’ land if he’d wandered north of the highway. It was a fifty-fifty shot. Well, she was planning to stray onto the Calhouns’ land that very evening, so she couldn’t judge Chuck too harshly, but Dr. Mailer could. And he probably should.
Faye and Joe were uncharacteristically swift in leaving work, slipping into their car just as fast as Toneisha hopped into Bodie’s passenger seat. Mr. Judd was waiting for them at the hotel.
As she left the trailer, she brushed past Oka Hofobi’s desk. She caught his eye, then, feeling a bit flustered, she looked away. He’d mentioned a movie and invited her to dinner with his family, but there had been no more advances on his part. And Faye hadn’t made any either.
It was true that Ross was more classically handsome than Oka Hofobi, but Faye found the young archaeologist attractive, too. She liked his quiet calm, which belied the intensity in his black eyes. But was she interested in developing that initial attraction? Apparently not, because she wasn’t pursuing it and neither was he.
Perhaps he’d lost interest because his mother liked her. That could be a romantic kiss of death for some men.
She gave him a friendly wave and backed out the door. It was time to fetch Lawrence Judd.
Faye drove out of Philadelphia with Joe riding shotgun and Mr. Judd resting in the back seat. A single sentence kept running through her brain.
This is a really bad idea.
Her mother’s and grandmother’s childrearing tactics had left her constitutionally incapable of talking back to her elders, though she’d tried to rise above that handicap repeatedly as Mr. Judd herded them toward the car.
“I want to do this,” he had insisted repeatedly. “I don’t even care if I die doing it. If there’s a chance that I can learn something about what happened to me all those years ago, then I’m taking a walk in the woods. Right now.”
In the midst of the discussion, Faye’s cell phone had rung and, heart sinking, she’d seen the caller’s number and its faraway area code.
“Hello, Mrs. Judd.”
Mr. Judd had begun a series of frantic gesticulations that appeared to mean, “Whatever you do, don’t tell her where we’re going!” The man wasn’t afraid of death, but he was absolutely afraid of Sallie Judd.
Faye knew that she held his fate in her cell-phone-wielding hand, but she didn’t have the heart to press her advantage. If Mr. Judd wanted to take a walk in the woods, she guessed she’d help him. Because if she wouldn’t, she suspected Ross Donnelly would. Or he’d try. He didn’t look like a man who’d been slogging down any creekbeds lately, so Mr. Judd’s chances of survival might be better with Faye and Joe.
“Oh, he’s looking just great, Mrs. Judd,” she cooed. It was almost true. Anticipation of the afternoon’s discoveries had brought the warm color back to his face. What was more, his urgent gestures in her direction showed that he retained quite a lot of agility. Maybe they could get him to Faye’s suspected cemetery mound without Joe having to haul his unconscious form back to the car.
At least he had bowed to her insistence that they amend their original plan enough to spare him the drive out to the work site. Faye and Joe had driven into town to fetch him, but the extra few minutes of waiting had made him still more anxious to go wading in a Water of the State.
Faye parked her car by the project trailer, knowing that the Nails wouldn’t think twice about seeing it there at any time of the day or night. Oka Hofobi had his workaholic tendencies, too. Of course, if he walked back to the trailer to see what she was up to, only to find her missing, she’d eventually have to explain herself. Knowing that the Nails were as devoted to Wednesday night prayer meeting as Mrs. Calhoun, Faye felt fairly sure that they’d never know she’d been there. She intended to be out of the woods and way up the road before prayer meeting was finished.
The Nail house was deserted. The Calhoun house was deserted. No cars were in sight in either direction. There would be no better time. Faye and Joe stood on either side of Judd, each steadying him with a hand resting lightly on his back, just in case.
Faye took a deep breath and said, “Let’s go.” The three of them were across the street and concealed in the creekbank foliage within minutes. Faye and Joe each tied their laces together and hung their boots around their necks. Mr. Judd, who hadn’t packed his suitcase for an outing like this, just slipped off his loafers and carried them in one hand. A brief tussle ensued when Joe tried to carry them for him. Mr. Judd won.
Rolling their pants legs above their knees, the three of them crossed a broad sand bar and stepped into a creek that was gloriously cool on Faye’s bare feet and legs. Fine sand shifted under her feet, and gravel poked into her soles. Remembering Mrs. Nail’s story, Faye smiled to think that she was stomping on the Devil’s body. She remembered now that she had been looking forward to this jaunt.
“There’s a lot more water today than there was on…that day,” Mr. Judd said, stepping back into the shallows.
The creek deepened sharply as Faye stepped further from the sandy bank. Within a few steps, the water was lapping at her rolled-up pants legs. The tea-colored murkiness on the far side suggested that the creek was chest-deep or deeper there. Being the shortest, Faye stepped out in front. If she kept her pants dry, then Mr. Judd surely would. Long-legged Joe, whose knees seemed to be roughly level with Faye’s hips, would stay practically dry, if he followed in her footsteps.
“I hear they’ve had a wet summer, so it makes sense that the water’s high,” Faye observed, picking her way around a small patch of gravel. “What time of year was it when you were attacked?”
“Early spring. I remember running past dogwoods and redbuds. They were blooming so pretty, and it didn’t seem right for the natural world to be beautiful, because I was so scared. It had been a dry winter, I’m sure of that. So I guess that’s why there’s such a difference in the water level. Remember, I told you that I saw the cemetery and the marijuana field because I had to go looking for someplace with enough water where I could fish.”
Faye reached out, again, to brush away overhanging vegetation. This place would look very different in the springtime, when most plants hadn’t started leafing out yet. She was keeping a close eye on the creek’s banks. They rose high, first on one side of the water, then on the other, and years of rushing water had deeply eroded the base of each small bluff. It wouldn’t be smart to stand on top of those overhanging banks.
Faye studied the exposed soil of each bank as she passed it. Were any of them—or all of them—altered by humans? Maybe. If so, the soil had been built up in places, one basketload at a time, by an endless procession of workers.
Faye had seen photos of mounds in cross-section, where a slice through the earth revealed the pattern of those basketloads, still distinguishable as a separate “hunk” of dirt after so many years. Try as she might, she couldn’t make out anything that obvious. Grass grew over much of the banks’ surfaces. Erosion had washed dirt down from the top, covering the original surface of these bluffs or mounds or fortifications or whatever you wanted to call them. Or maybe they were just natural creek banks. She couldn’t be sure without taking a trowel and cutting a slice down through the grass and debris, right into the original pile of dirt.
Mr. Judd seemed to find the creek water invigorating. He was walking along, scuffing his feet now and then to kick up a spray, looking for all the world like the nineteen-year-old boy who had once fled this place in terror. Joe didn’t look like he was suffering much, either.
Faye was getting worried that they might walk past an important landmark, so every time the bluffs dipped down to a manageable height, she climbed up and looked around. Technically, she was leaving the Waters of the State when she did that, but neither Joe nor Mr. Judd seemed willing to call her on it.
“Okay,” she said, on the fourth or fifth try, “I can see the marijuana field from here. We must be getting close to your cemetery hill. We’ll walk a little way further and check again.”
The water grew slightly deeper as they progressed. Faye had given up trying to keep her pants dry. A late afternoon ray of sunlight pierced the trees overhead and lit up a silver-sided fish swimming past her ankle. She remembered that Mr. Judd had been holding a fishing pole the last time he walked through these woods as a free man.
It seemed like it was about time to crawl up the bank and look around again, but Faye’s attention was caught by a dark spot on the bank ahead.
“Oh, sweet Jesus.” Mr. Judd had stopped dead in his tracks, staring dull-eyed at the dark thing that had captured Faye’s attention. “It’s my cave. The place where I hid from my kidnapper.” He slogged through the water to take a closer look. The carefree young man had disappeared, and now he simply looked old.
The three of them gathered around the mouth of the cave, though upon close inspection, Faye wasn’t sure that’s exactly what she’d call it. It just looked like a hole in the bank, partially obscured by soils that had washed down from above. Using her hands to rake away some of that soil, she could see a smooth-walled corridor that extended far back into the earth.
Was it a natural feature? Caves weren’t common in Mississippi, but they existed, and one of the most well-known could be found a few miles away in one of the mounds at Nanih Waiya State Park. Some people thought that Nanih Waiya Cave had been enlarged and extended by prehistoric humans. She wondered whether this cave, too, was a remnant of the moundbuilding culture that she was coming to believe had altered the course of the creek. She knew that there were surviving drains at Ohio’s Fort Ancient site, which only made sense when you realized how important water control was to unmechanized agricultural societies. This cave—Hole? Structure? She hardly knew what to call it—would bear closer inspection.