Burial Ground Page 12

  “Yes, Paul loved his wife. It was a hell of a thing the way she died.” He shook his head. “Just withered away. Lou Gehrig’s disease. Some linger for years, others go in a year or two. It took her seven years. It was no wonder the poor man starting drinking too much.”

  Libby returned and handed him his drink. He murmured thanks and sighed with pleasure as he tasted it.

  “Better. A whole lot better, dear. Did you know Phyllis Oldham, Pepper?”

  She shook her head quickly. “No.”

  “Beautiful woman. He was so dependent on her. Well … It was all tragic.” He set his glass down and got up. I thought some of his usual color was back and he moved with more energy than when we’d first seen him. He strode over to the bookcase for one of the volumes and I realized with a surprise that it was the Peabody monograph on the Polhugh site.

  “He sent this to me.” Sam weighed the book in his hand and I watched Pepper redden. “Has an inscription and all. Let’s see here, what did he say?” He opened the cover and leafed through the first few pages. “Oh, yes. To my friend Sam MacGregor with best wishes, Paul Oldham.” He handed the book to Pepper, who looked frantically for a way to avoid taking it, failed, and accepted it like a hot brick from the oven. Suddenly he was handing her a pen as well.

  “I wonder, my dear, would you be kind enough to enter another inscription? Whatever you like, but just spell my name right.” He cackled. “And add from the author. I think that’ll give it more value.”

  I watched her mouth fall open.

  “You … all along …”

  “I do try to read the literature of my profession,” Sam said modestly, “and ever since I took a one-year visiting appointment at Harvard twenty years ago, I’ve more or less kept up with the scuttlebutt.”

  Slick, I thought, very slick …

  “Of course, I didn’t need scuttlebutt to tell me Paul hadn’t done that report. The statistics were beyond him.” He shrugged. “I’ve never seen a better analysis. I’m not running Paul down, of course: He was from the old school, before they taught archaeologists statistics. Why, I can’t remember but one dissertation from our era that had any statistical analysis at all.”

  “I know,” Pepper said quietly. “That was a comparative analysis of cervidae bones from twenty sites in the South-east. You did it.”

  It was Sam’s turn to look surprised.

  “Alan, this young lady’s a real prize. By God, she’s right, too. It was a milestone, if I can blow my own horn. But so was hers.”

  Pepper was glowing now and I wanted to interrupt the love fest and tell him to cut the shit, but I knew better.

  “I thought the multivariate analysis brought out some interesting correlations,” she said primly. “The wear patterns on the chert knives suggested heavy usage as flaying implements used in the preparation of game.”

  “Considering all the deer bones around them,” I said. “I’d have thought that was obvious.”

  “It was obvious the speed of light depended on the speed of the object from which it was emitted,” she shot back. “Until Einstein, that is.”

  My turn to arch my brows. “Ever hear about the statistician who drowned in the creek with the average depth of three feet?” I asked blandly.

  A gleeful Sam rubbed his hands together.

  “Wonderful. I haven’t had this much fun since I attended my last doctoral defense.”

  I looked over at Pepper: The woman was laughing.

  “Oh, Dr. MacGregor …”

  “Sam, please …”

  I cleared my throat. “Well, we were just passing. I don’t want to tire you too much.” I set my nearly empty glass on the tray.

  “Don’t go,” Libby begged. “Sam’s having fun. If you leave I’ll have to listen to him moaning and complaining again.”

  “Me, complain?” Sam demanded. “Who lived a whole summer in a tent in the heat of the Louisiana rain forest? Who spent months as a castaway on a Caribbean island?”

  “On your sabbatical,” Libby said quietly. “On an island with seventy-two rum distilleries.”

  “It was an anthropological investigation.”

  Pepper spoke then:

  “Tell us, Sam, what do you know about the last Tunica village on the east bank of the Mississippi? There’s a rumor it’s been rediscovered.”

  Sam stroked his white beard. “I’ve heard those stories. Once, Stu Neitzel and I even went beating around up there trying to find it, but we didn’t have any luck. We finally figured it’d fallen in the river.”

  “We think so, too,” I said quickly. “We’re doing a survey on some land over on the east bank, just south of St. Francisville. I doubt there’s anything there that’s in situ.”

  “But, you know,” Sam suggested, “we could all be wrong. Hell, archaeologists make a habit of being wrong. Sometimes I think we’re lucky when things turn out right. We start with little fragments of pottery and pieces of bone and we try to make whole cultures come alive again. That’s asking a hell of a lot.” He held up his now empty glass, evinced surprise, and thrust it in Libby’s direction. His long-suffering wife came forward to whisk it away to the kitchen.

  “You watch,” Sam whispered. “There won’t be enough whiskey in there to taste. By the fourth drink I usually end up with tap water.”

  “When you get better,” P. E. offered, “you’ll have to come out with us.”

  Sam’s face lit up. “I wouldn’t miss it. Alan can make a gumbo. Did you know he’s quite an accomplished chef? He did a whole cochon d’lait out here once for the annual Christmas party.”

  “Really,” Pepper said, arching her brows at me. “I didn’t know.”

  Sam cackled again: “Alan, have you been holding out on Pepper?”

  “Right,” I said woodenly.

  Libby returned with a glass of what appeared, indeed, to be water. Sam held it to the light, sneered, and set it down on the tray. “There’s probably a fish in it,” he mumbled.

  “But Alan’s right,” his new friend commented. “We really ought to leave. We’ve scheduled some fieldwork tomorrow and I have to get my things packed.”

  “Going back to the survey area?” Sam asked.

  “I thought so,” she said. “But maybe we’ll try the riverside this time.” She gave me an innocent look. “What do you think?”

  “The riverside?” I managed.

  “You know, by boat.”

  “Well …”

  “We can rent one somewhere,” she said, but Sam waved a hand.

  “Alan, you’ve still got that john boat, don’t you?”

  I exhaled. “Yes, but it’s for bayous. You don’t want to put it in the river, for God’s sake.”

  Sam blinked. “We did when we had that survey over at Hog Point, in, when was it? Eighty-five? You remember that.”

  “That was different. We kept close to the bank and—”

  “That’s what we plan to do,” Pepper said, then turned to me. “Don’t we?”

  I felt my face go hot. “The motor’s only a thirty-five. In a river like the Mississippi …”

  “Oh, baloney,” Sam snorted. “Fred Quimby and I went across the damn thing in a canoe, in ’38.”

  “We really do have to go,” I said, getting up. I turned to give Libby a hug. “Thanks for having us.”

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “I can tell he’s better already.”

  “Yes,” I said. “It looks like it.”

  Sam took Pepper Courtney’s hands in both of his.

  “My dear, I hope you’ll be back. But make it soon. I’m not getting any younger.” He gave a loud sigh. “You may just keep an old man alive.”

  The recipient of this jollity laughed and hugged him. “You’ll outlive us all.”

  I was beginning to be afraid he would.

  “Well, Alan…” She turned to me. But Sam put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Before you go, there’s something I’ve been meaning to show you.” He drew me after him, through t
he parlor and the living room, to the kitchen.

  “So what is it?” I asked. “Is the drain stuck?”

  “No,” he hissed. “That was just an excuse. I only wanted to tell you I think you’ve finally done it.”

  I stared back, blankly.

  “Done what?”

  “Found the right one, of course. My God, Alan, after some of the women I’ve seen you with. That red-haired harridan who wanted to run your life, the fat one with piano legs …”

  “Marguerite was short, but piano legs …”

  “And then the few nice ones, you ran off. That’s why I wanted to tell you you’d better not do that this time, or I’ll rise from my grave to make your life miserable.”

  “You’re not in your grave,” I protested. “And as far as there being anything between this Courtney woman and myself …”

  “I know.” He patted my shoulder as you would a child. “But I’m telling you Alan, she’s the best one yet. Quality. Intelligence. A sense of humor. Beauty.”

  “Are we talking about the same person? Oh, she’s bright enough, and I guess if she dressed a little bit more like a, well, a woman, but her personality—”

  “—is delightful. She makes me feel young again. I tell you, Alan …”

  “Just because she flattered you …”

  He straightened his shoulders. “I didn’t hear any flattery.” He cleared his throat. “Well, she may be too good for you. I fully expect you’ll toss her away just like the others.” He threw up his hands.

  I started out of the kitchen, but he caught my arm.

  “By the way, who hired you for this survey? Anybody I know?”

  I told him about T-Joe Dupont and how he’d died mysteriously.

  “T-Joe Dupont?” Sam mulled over the name. “Late forties, in the oil field supply business?”

  “You know him?”

  “He was my student, a year or two after you. Nice boy. Loved archaeology but figured he couldn’t ever make a living at it, so he went into engineering. But we kept in touch.”

  “Strange he didn’t mention you.”

  “Well…” Sam ran a hand through his white mane. “Maybe he didn’t want to embarrass you by comparing you to a superior archaeologist.”

  “That’s probably it,” I said.

  “You know, he had a hell of a time with his son. The boy was into drugs, spent time in jail. Damn near broke T-Joe’s heart, to have to lock up his own son.”

  “It must’ve worked,” I said. “The boy’s sober now.”

  “Is he?”

  I thought of Willie’s drunken performance in David’s hospital room.

  “Well, more or less. Anyway, he loved his father.”

  “Really?”

  “Seems like it. Why? Is there something you aren’t telling me?”

  Sam sighed and shook his head.

  “Just something T-Joe told me the last time I saw him.”

  “Which was?”

  Sam cocked his head to the side and frowned.

  “He said his son was furious T-Joe didn’t bail him out. He said when he got out he was going to kill his father.”

  The drive home was silent, and when I stopped in her office parking lot she opened her door, then turned to me:

  “I can’t thank you enough for taking me to see Sam. He’s a wonderful person.” She flashed me a smile. “Good night.” She started to shut the door, then held up. “What time did you want to load up the boat tomorrow?”

  “I’ll let you know,” I said.

  The door slammed and I watched her walk over to the Integra. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have said she was humming. Maybe she wouldn’t have been if she’d heard what Sam had said about Willie’s threat against T-Joe.

  SIXTEEN

  I crept in late the next morning, hoping the visit to Sam MacGregor had been part of a dream. But when I saw the white Integra in front of our office, I knew better and groaned.

  “That woman is waiting for you,” Marilyn pronounced. “If I’d known you were going to be late, I’d have sent her on her way, but she kept insisting you were going out in the boat together and—”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll handle her.”

  Gator looked up from the table where he was sorting artifacts and gave me a gap-toothed leer.

  “You know what I mean,” I said.

  I walked into the room that had once been a bedroom but now served as our library.

  She was seated in one of our yard-sale chairs, staring up at the shelf.

  “Not bad,” she said, “but there are a few big holes. You don’t have a complete set of C. B. Moore …”

  She was wearing designer jeans, a khaki shirt, and a red bandanna around her neck.

  “Well, next time you’re up East maybe you can find one for us at a rare book store.”

  She ignored the jibe and pulled a map tube up from where it had been lying on the floor.

  “I thought we should decide where we’re going to put in,” she said. “We can either start upstream and then have to fight the current on the way back, or start downstream and fight it on the first leg.”

  “There’s another option,” I said, picking up the map and starting toward my office. She followed and I closed the door. “We might want to rethink going at all.”

  “What?”

  I told her then what I knew about T-Joe’s murder, the tooth, and what Sam had told me about Willie’s resentment against his father.

  “You have a right to know,” I said. “We could be walking into something.”

  “Well, it’s nice to know finally,” she said. “Though it would’ve been good to know before now.”

  “Sorry. I guess I held out, but I didn’t know you’d be going back with me.”

  She nodded. “I’m not about to let some maniac chase me away.”

  I shrugged. “Then here’s how I see it. There’s only one trail to the water so far as I can see, without going five extra miles, and that’s right here.” I pointed to a dashed line on the map that came out of the woods about a half-mile above the island and ended at the water’s edge. “We can try that.”

  And if we’re lucky, I thought, there won’t be anyplace to put in at all and we can stop this insanity.

  “Good.” She rolled the map up again and stuck it back in the tube. “I guess the boat is the metal one with a flat hull I saw behind the house?”

  So she’d even scoped out our backyard.

  “You didn’t see another one, did you?”

  I walked out of the room and called for Gator to help me load the boat.

  Fifteen minutes later the boat had been lifted onto the trailer and the trailer hitched to the Blazer. Normally, I didn’t like to pull loads that heavy, but most of the road was four-lane highway. I watched Dr. Pepper Courtney sling her little field bag into the back of my vehicle, then lean her head in.

  “I’ll go in mine,” she said. “Always safer to have two vehicles, right?”

  How could I complain about being deprived of her company?

  By the time we’d left the interstate and slid down onto U.S. 61 I’d entertained at least three different versions of the same daydream. In one, the Integra was lying astraddle a particularly vicious pothole in the gravel track, wheels still spinning, as its driver called out for help. In the second, she was standing up in the boat, against my earnest protestations, and then falling out, into the fast-moving current. And in the third version, which I especially liked, she was ignoring my warnings and leaping blithely onto the sand surface at the foot of the bluff, only to sink hip-deep. Atop the cliff, I was calling down to ask if she’d ever visited La Brea, in Los Angeles, where all the dead animals floated up from the tar.

  I was yanked from my dreaming by the sound of a horn. The Integra had slipped up beside me and she was honking, motioning for me to pull over.

  The vision of a smoking wheel bearing on the trailer replaced the images of her misfortune and I eased off the accelerator.

&n
bsp; But when I got out there was no burning smell and for a split second I thought maybe she’d been trying to point out a bulge in one of my tires. Then she opened her door and I saw she wanted me to walk up to where she’d halted, just ahead of me. We were beside the Exxon tank farm, just north of town. Not the best part of the city to stop in. The only folks who lived around here were those who the city didn’t care about and many of whom, consequently, figured they didn’t have a lot to lose.

  “It’s a phone call,” she explained, holding up her car phone for me to see. “Your office.”

  “My office?”

  “I left my cellular number with your secretary, just in case. She said you never keep yours on.”

  I took the receiver, wondering what could have made Marilyn call me here.

  “Hello?”

  Her words tumbled over themselves in the rush to get out: “I’m sorry to bother you, Alan, I really am, but she was so demanding, I didn’t know what to say, and then I remembered that woman had left a number for a car phone and … She isn’t listening, is she?”

  “No. Now who called? Who are you talking about?”

  “A woman.” Marilyn lowered her voice to a whisper. “She came right after you left. She’s in the next room. She said her name was Lesage. No, Lastrapes. Dominique Lastrapes. She was so rude I thought I better call you on the car phone.”

  Dominique … Of course: Willie’s sister.

  “Put her on,” I sighed.

  Pepper watched, interested, as I shifted the phone to my other ear.

  “Client’s sister,” I said.

  Pepper said something but the voice on the other end of the phone blotted it out.

  “Dr. Graham? This is Dominique Lastrapes, Joseph Dupont’s daughter. We need to talk.”

  “I’m here.”

  “You’ve been listening to my brother, Willie. I hear he’s got you looking for this Indian treasure.”

  “He’s asked me to do the work your father wanted done.”

  “Finding that treasure?”

  “It’s not really a treasure. I know it’s called that but—”

  “Dr. Graham, my brother does not speak for the family. He talked my mother into signing a power of attorney and used her money—our money—for this, and we know very well he doesn’t have any intention of sharing the treasure with us.”