Effigies (29 page)

It took Faye only seconds to get her bearings, locating the creek on the far side of the cemetery mound and wading upstream to locate the tree where Neely had found them. She shouldn’t have been surprised to find that her day pack was gone. A sheriff knew all there was to know about eliminating evidence. Was it at the bottom of a lake far from here? Or would it be carefully planted someplace where Neely wanted the search parties to waste a few days?

The day pack mattered for just one reason. Faye’s car keys were in it. This narrowed her options, but it wasn’t a tragedy. Her first goal wasn’t to reach her car. She just needed to get to a phone, which could be had at the Nail house. Then she’d need a car, but Mrs. Nail would surely lend her one.

Faye pointed her face in the general direction of the road and ran. If she kept the creek on her right, she’d come out of the woods just a few steps from Oka Hofobi’s home.

Oka Hofobi wished he could crowd down into the passage that Faye had just traversed. His body would have still been soaking in springwater, but at least he could have stretched his face toward the warm sun. It was a ridiculous wish, because he could never fit through the narrow opening. And it was a selfish wish, because he would have been putting himself between his new friend Joe and the same warm sunshine that he craved.

So he couldn’t go forward. And he didn’t dare go back to the ledge where they had spent the long night. It wouldn’t do to be out of earshot when Faye brought their rescuers.

He and Joe hadn’t discussed the issue of where they should wait, because the answer was so obvious. Standing in this exact spot, they had heard Faye call back to them that she had freed herself. So the two of them were just going to stand in that spot until she came back with help.

The frenzied flight from Neely’s gun had sapped most of his strength. A night spent soaked with springwater had taken the rest. His trembling legs would fail him soon, but he knew he wouldn’t live until Faye came back if he collapsed into the cold water. He vowed to stand another minute. Then another. The faint light showed him that Joe’s legs were quivering just like his, so he vowed to hold him up, too, if need be.

He couldn’t do it for an hour, but he thought he could do it for sixty minutes, if he took those minutes one at a time.

Faye checked the sun. It must be higher in the sky than it looked, because Mrs. Nail had already gone to work. It couldn’t be too late, though, because her archaeological colleagues weren’t here yet.

She looked around for a rock. If anyone ever had an excuse for breaking a window, Faye knew she did, but she hesitated. It was going to be hard to call in a search-and-rescue team without alerting the sheriff to the situation, but Faye was developing a plan. She was sure she could get Joe and Oka Hofobi saved, and she was pretty sure she could corner the sheriff at the same time, but a simple phone wouldn’t be enough. Faye needed a car.

She looked across the road at the Calhoun house. Mrs. Calhoun’s ill temper had been gossiped over all week, but she’d never been ugly to Faye personally. There weren’t many people who would close their door on a life-or-death request. Not when they had recently lost a loved one to violent death.

It was time to face the formidable Mrs. Calhoun.

Chapter Thirty

A closed screen door separated Faye from Mrs. Calhoun. The widow stood impassively inside the door. She was a big woman, just as her husband had been a big man. Her dress was worn. Her apron was worn. Her face was worn. This was not a woman who had led an easy life.

Faye knew that her own bedraggled appearance was the only trump card that she held. Her tale of being trapped underground all night would ring true for anyone who got a good look at her. Her final escape had left abrasions on every bit of exposed skin. The mud smeared on her clothes was starting to stiffen and dry, and her body seemed shriveled from the night-long chill. Mrs. Calhoun had been called a racist by people who knew her, but Faye didn’t know it for a fact. Besides, compared to the blood and bruises and mud that covered her, her dark skin was fairly unobtrusive.

“People are in danger. I need help.”

Mrs. Calhoun opened the door without speaking a word.

“There are people trapped in a…a cave on your property,” Faye began, gesturing vaguely toward the back of the house. “We need to—”

“I’ll call Neely Rutland. She’ll have someone out here to—”

“No!”

Mrs. Calhoun blinked. Even Faye was surprised at the huge sound that came out of her own mouth at the sound of Neely’s name.

“My friends are in danger, and Neely Rutland put them there.”

“Why, I was Neely’s Girl Scout leader. A smarter, nicer girl I never hope to see.” Mrs. Calhoun’s hand was on the phone. Faye prepared herself to rip it out of the wall, rather than let this woman warn Neely.

“Neely killed your husband.”

Now the old woman’s hand was off the phone, and she was using her body to crowd Faye toward the door. “That’s crazy. How dare you even suggest—”

Faye gambled that Carroll Calhoun had been one of those men who told their wives everything. “She found out what her father did to Mr. Judd. And she was afraid your husband would tell his secret.”

The gamble paid off. Mrs. Calhoun took a step back, though she was nearer to the phone than Faye would have liked.

“Neely always did think her daddy hung the moon, but she never saw his mean streak. Carroll told me he thought Kenneth Rutland would have killed that young man, just for the sheer fun of it. And he knew he could get away with it, because the young man was black.” Mrs. Calhoun’s voice was uncertain, almost feeble. “What are we going to do? You and I can’t dig those people out of that cave with our bare hands.”

Faye’d had a long night to muse over the relationships between people and their lawgivers. Mrs. Calhoun would never have believed her, if she hadn’t offered the telling detail of Kenneth Rutland’s guilt. This county had elected Neely sheriff. Most people obviously liked her and trusted her. Who could be trusted to help Oka Hofobi and Joe without calling in their beloved sheriff for assistance?

Faye knew from her own family history that African-Americans could well believe that a person’s government might betray her. But she needed government-level help. She needed a search-and-rescue team with lots of training and equipment. Black people didn’t ordinarily keep that stuff lying around the house, no more than anybody else did.

How fortunate that there was a sovereign nation just a few miles away, one with a long memory that stretched back to a time when it had been betrayed by the United States of America. If anyone could be persuaded that an official of the government might lie and kill, it would be the Choctaws.

Chief Matt Hinnant of the Choctaw Fire Department felt his bad-news meter rise when his assistant Pete handed him the phone, saying only, “I think you’d better handle this one, Chief.”

At first, he’d thought the young woman wasn’t making any sense. She sounded like she might even be slipping into shock. “Are you warm enough, ma’am? Do you want to put down the phone and get a sweater? I’ll wait for you.”

Her outburst was so vociferous that he felt reasonably assured that she wasn’t in immediate danger. He just wished her story wasn’t so far-fetched.

“You’re not on the reservation, but you want our rescue team, not the county’s…because why? Because Neely Rutland tried to kill you?”

Chief Davis had dated Neely’s best friend, when they’d all been in high school. He had rarely met a straighter arrow. Neely never smoked a cigarette. She never sneaked an underage beer. She never even missed her father’s ridiculously early curfew. Not once. “Let me call Neely,” he said, “and we can get this straightened out.”

The word “No!” blasted out of the phone, darn near blowing out his eardrum. “I told you that Sheriff Rutland left us to die in a flooded cave. My friends, Joe Wolf Mantooth and Dr. Oka Hofobi Nail, are still there.”

The Chief straightened in his chair. Two of the firefighters on duty today were related to Oka Hofobi Nail. One of them was his brother, Davis. If Oka Hofobi was truly in trouble, Chief Hinnant knew he’d have some personnel who wouldn’t be at their most objective. Personal feelings got people killed. “I hear you, but we have a jurisdictional problem here. We can’t just go rushing willy-nilly onto non-reservation property. Other departments call us in for help all the time—our dive team was just out last week—but they have to ask us to come. If we go barging into Sheriff Rutland’s territory—”

“Why is it so hard for you to believe that an agent of the government might commit a crime? Haven’t you ever heard of broken treaties? Why are the rest of the Choctaws in Oklahoma today?”

This woman, whoever she was, knew how to deliver a sucker punch straight to the gut. Did Chief Hinnant believe that Neely Rutland was a cold-blooded killer? Not hardly. But could anybody raised by Choctaws believe that the government always had their best interests at heart? Hell, no.

“I hear you, ma’am. Tell me where you are, and everything you know about the condition of the victims. We’ll be right out.”

Chief Hinnant stood before a group of men and women who had been enjoying a hearty firehouse breakfast. He was hardly thirty seconds into his description of Faye Longchamp and her plight, but they were already gung-ho to violate the jurisdiction of the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Department. No, “violate” wasn’t the right word. “Annihilate” fit the situation much better.

“Now this isn’t an official action for us, not as I understand it,” he told them. “I can’t order you to go, but you can go as private citizens. Matter of fact, maybe you shouldn’t be in uniform.”

“Should we take our private vehicles?” asked Pete, a whip-smart 25-year-old.

“Good idea.” Chief Hinnant watched Davis Nail hit speed-dial on his cell phone. The family had been alerted. Now he
really
needed to put a crew on-site, before the Nails got out there with their shovels and brought a few tons of dirt down on those two boys.

“What about our equipment?”

The clock was ticking, and two people were in danger. They couldn’t go out there empty-handed. Their official vehicles were ready to go, and they were chock-full of the best equipment money could buy, thanks to all that casino money. It would be idiotic to leave their equipment behind. Taking the time to guess what they might need and throw it in the back of a convoy of pickup trucks would be silly. People could die while they were doing it. And what if they guessed wrong, and somebody died because a critical piece of equipment hadn’t made the trip?

This was nuts. He was the chief. He would make this decision and live with the consequences. “Tell you what. Why don’t we just keep wearing our uniforms? And why don’t we just get in the department’s trucks and get out there and save some people. We can let the Tribal Council deal with the politics of this thing.”

And so, on a sunny morning in late July at the very dawn of the twenty-first century, uniformed representatives of a sovereign nation invaded the United States of America.