Burial Ground Read online

  She must have seen them, too, because she looked up and called something back to me, but her words were taken by the wind.

  Water slapped the aluminum sides and once the prow slammed into a submerged limb, sending shudders vibrating back along the hull. I was thinking about the convicts now, braving these currents. The river was forty-five feet deep at Baton Rouge, and they hadn’t found their bodies yet…

  The island was just ahead of us now and I thought for a second of the little brass bell pressing into my thigh from its place in my pocket. I was beginning to feel sorry I’d ever found it.

  She was pointing and I nodded: The place where we’d stood when the chase team had descended on us was ahead of us now, and I guided us toward the white beach. The nose of the boat gave a bump and P. E. jumped out onto the sand and grabbed the painter line, holding us steady as I cut the engine. The boat sloughed around like a big clock hand going backward until it came to rest against the shore, stern downstream, and I jumped onto the land and ran to help her pull the line and nudge the hull up onto the beach so that the boat was secured from the current.

  “You’ve been in boats before,” I said.

  She brushed blond hair out of her face. “I did a marine survey of the Ohio River in my second year,” she said. “And I’ve had some experience since then.”

  I should have known.

  “Where are you going?” she called, as I started up the eroded sand slope.

  I didn’t answer, just scrambled to the top and waited as she followed. I stuck out a hand and she hesitated, then took it and let me pull her up. It wasn’t far from where I’d found the little bell.

  “Well, how do you want to search?” she asked. I noticed a single drop of perspiration on her forehead and watched it roll down until she reached up and wiped it away.

  “Each take an area?” I suggested, setting my GPS unit on the ground to take a reading of our position for future reference.

  “Fine. I’ll take this area right here,” she said.

  I blinked. “I was thinking I’d take this one.”

  “That’s all right. I think you’d be happier over in the woods,” she said. “And I’m just a woman, so right here’s fine, where it’s clear, along the bank.”

  “I thought you’d want to have the woods, so you could prove you’re up to it,” I said.

  She folded her arms. “Of course, there’s another option.”

  “Oh?”

  “You could show me what you picked up the other day,” she said. “You know, what you called a cartridge case.”

  My mouth must have come open because there was a smug look on her face.

  “I—” But she cut me off:

  “You probably have it on you now, don’t you? Was it really a brass casing or was it something else?”

  Eagle eye.

  “I never said it was a brass casing,” I protested. “You did.”

  “Well, whatever it was, you seemed in a hurry to get it into your pocket, so you must have thought it was important.”

  I managed an exaggerated shrug. “It wasn’t in situ, I mean, it could have gotten here all kinds of ways. The water, somebody dropping it, somebody reburying it in the sand …”

  “Can I see this it?”

  With a sigh I reached into my pants pocket and brought out the little paper-wrapped object. “No big deal,” I said, handing it to her.

  She unwrapped it and her eyes went wide. “No. Of course not. Just an eighteenth-century trade bell. The kind the French gave to the Tunica. Just the kind that popped up in a hundred burials twenty miles north of here. No, nothing much. Might as well throw it in the river.”

  “Sarcasm is unnecessary.”

  “Oh, was I being sarcastic?” She handed back the artifact. “Excuse me. Maybe I don’t like having data held out on me. Maybe it’s just that I don’t like being treated like a first-year graduate student, by the all-wise professor, the …”

  I ignored her and went over to the place in the bank where I’d found the bell. I squatted and examined the surface. There was no evidence of recent rooting by animals or people, but it was sand, which meant after a few days any marks would be gone. The ground was littered with brass shell casings, mostly .22s, but a few .30-30s and two or three plastic shotgun shells. I went down to the boat and got my trowel out of my pack and began to probe the ground with the sharp point.

  A shadow fell over my shoulder and I looked up.

  “Try the metal detector,” she said, pointing to the boat.

  I shook my head. “It’ll pick up every shell casing for three feet around.”

  She said nothing, just went down to the boat for her own pack and came back with a trowel of her own. She got down on hands and knees a few yards away and, wordlessly, began to probe the ground methodically, working in a square about three feet on a side.

  I stood up. “We’d better divide this up,” I said resignedly, and began to draw lines in the sand, marking off rough squares. “You take the ones south of there…” I indicated one of the lines I’d drawn. “I’ll take the others.”

  And don’t, I started to add, cross over my line.

  By noon our search had turned up nothing and all I had for my own trouble was sore knees. The sky showed no sign of clearing and I sensed that the temperature had dropped a few degrees.

  “We can go back to my vehicle and eat,” I suggested.

  “You didn’t bring your lunch?” she responded. “I thought that was what was in the cooler.”

  “It is. I was thinking about if there was rain,” I said.

  “I can stand rain,” she said. “I have—”

  “I know,” I broke in. “A fold-up poncho in your pack and an inflatable house.”

  “No house, but you were right about the poncho.”

  I went to the cooler, got out my sandwich and a Dr. Pepper, and watched her dig in her pack. She came out with a can of sardines and some crackers. Probably very healthy, I reflected, as I searched for some shade so I could eat my ham and cheese. She came over and sat down on the ground across from me.

  “Kind of reminds me of Huckleberry Finn,” she said.

  I looked up. “The river, you mean.”

  “The river, me, you, looking for something buried. It’s the kind of thing Huck and Tom and Jim would do.”

  “Right. Well, it’s the same river and I guess people are pretty much the same.”

  “If it wasn’t Briney who killed T-Joe, it had to be either Willie Dupont or Wascom,” she said suddenly. “They both have guns. You said Willie had one when he took you and David onto the property the first time.”

  I shrugged. “I’m not sure about Willie. The pistol he had wasn’t a .22, but that doesn’t mean much. Almost everybody down here has an arsenal with a .22 in it somewhere. Besides, why pay us money to do a survey?”

  “So we can find whatever’s really buried here and he can get his hands on it, maybe.”

  “I thought about that. But I keep thinking about what he told me in the office when he came to meet us: He said he figured if we did the survey, we’d find out who killed his father. Doesn’t sound like a murderer to me.”

  “Wascom then?”

  I nodded. “Wascom’s definitely a quart low. Whether he’d shoot anybody with that rifle of his, I don’t know.” I finished my sandwich and bit into my apple.

  “Do you think he’s the one who chased us in the woods?”

  “Hard to say. But offhand he doesn’t look the type. I can’t see Carter Wascom getting all hot and sweaty back in the hills, for one thing.”

  “Not if he knew what he was doing. But what if it was in some kind of, well, trance?”

  “All things are possible.” I got up and dusted off my clothes. “Maybe we ought to search the beach ridges,” I suggested.

  She digested the notion and then hopped up. “Good idea.”

  We went to the sloping bank, where the sands stretched down to the water’s edge in deep, eroded valleys where water h
ad run from the top of the bluff down into the river. It was always possible something had fallen out of the sand, into one of the three-foot-deep ravines.

  It was tough work, because we had to stand straddling each valley and examine the ground under us visually. The only progress was to hop from one sand valley to the next, and after nearly an hour my legs were losing their spring.

  At just after two the first raindrops spattered against the sand. I glanced at the low, heavy clouds. There was no thunder and maybe the rain would pass over, but I wouldn’t bet on it. We’d moved down the beach about a quarter of a mile south of the boat, to a place where the willows had died away, leaving an open spot, and I began to think it was time to get back. The pace of the raindrops quickened and I looked over at my companion.

  But P. E. Courtney appeared oblivious to the weather.

  I knew then that she was a fanatic.

  She finally produced a flimsy plastic poncho and I went back to the boat and dug my own poncho out of my pack. I hoped the rain would pass quickly, because visibility was down and the river was no place to be when you were running blind.

  I walked back to where she was down on hands and knees, peering into one of the crevasses.

  “I think it was a fluke,” I said.

  She peered up at me through rain-streaked glasses.

  “A fluke?”

  “The little bell. I think it washed up here from somewhere else, because there isn’t anything else where it was found and this island is new.”

  She pondered for a few seconds. “Then that means it came from someplace upstream.”

  “Someplace,” I said.

  “Maybe we should look for that place.”

  “Where?” I asked. “There’s a thousand miles of river.”

  “Realistically, though, there’s only a few miles,” she said. “For that kind of artifact, for the time period, it must have been between where the Red River enters the Mississippi and here. That’s only thirty river miles.”

  “Only?” I shook my head. “Besides, there’s another possibility.”

  “Oh?”

  “Somebody dropped it.”

  “Who? Absalom?”

  “He’d be a good bet.”

  “Then where did he get it?” She stood up slowly. “I mean, you don’t walk around with things like that. Maybe he found it inland, closer to the bluffs, where we were.”

  It had occurred to me. If true, it meant the main burial spot was on the highlands, closer to Greenbriar itself.

  “Let’s look a little more,” she said. “I want to be very sure about this. Sometimes geomorphologists make mistakes. And not all maps are accurate.”

  I gave a little head shake. We were here now, so what the hell?

  As I walked transects, with her on my right and the river fifty yards to her right, I thought about the time at Fort Polk, in western Louisiana, when I’d had to cut my way through a solid briar thicket in the middle of July. When I’d come out of the thicket, there’d been a clearcut in front of me three hundred yards across, full of fallen trees, burned stumps, and mud. I often told people that job was the most miserable I’d ever experienced. But now, in the sauna of the poncho, with wet fronds brushing my face, water seeping down into my boots, and a crazy woman goading me on, I thought maybe this would be my pet war story for the future.

  All it would take now to complete the experience would be to step on a snake.

  I checked my watch again. It was three-thirty.

  I halted in my tracks.

  “Enough.”

  She crashed through a stand of ferns fifty feet away, a woman with a mission.

  “Enough,” I said again, this time in a loud voice.

  She emerged from the ferns and turned a hooded head in my direction.

  “Say something?” she called above the dripping of the forest.

  “I said it’s time to get the hell out of here,” I yelled back. “It’ll be too dark to see in the woods in a couple of hours. With the rain it’s already dark. Back to the boat.”

  “One more transect?” she suggested.

  “No. It’s going to be a bitch enough getting upstream. We go now.”

  I saw her shoulders sag slightly. “All right.”

  I slopped my way through the trees toward the gray sheet that was the river. The rain was steady now, a light spatter of drops that pocked the water and hung a cloud over the far bank.

  The tip of the island, where the boat was, a quarter-mile away, blurred into a gray haze. I couldn’t see the boat at all.

  The waves lapped at the beach, ten feet below, and a log with a red rope around it nudged the shore.

  A red rope. I blinked.

  “Look.” She was pointing, because she saw it, too.

  We scrambled down the sandy slope together and stood looking down at the object before us.

  It wasn’t a log at all, but the body of a man. The rope wasn’t a rope, but red suspenders. And I knew where I’d seen those red suspenders last: They’d been worn by the man we were searching for, Absalom Moon.

  EIGHTEEN

  “He must have fallen in or been dumped someplace upstream,” I said.

  She stared up at me. “What do you think we should do?”

  “Drag him up on the bank and then call the sheriff.”

  She nodded. “Right.”

  I reached down, found his belt loops, and tugged while she pulled at his shoulders. Between us, we got him half onto the beach and then managed with our next effort to pull him the rest of the way. The body was waterlogged, paler than it had been in life, and when I turned him over I saw the river creatures had done a job on his face. Or maybe he’d been hit by a ship’s propeller. It didn’t much matter at this point.

  She stooped and washed her hands in the river and I knelt beside her.

  “It’s murder, isn’t it?” she said.

  I shrugged. “Probably. But he could’ve fallen in. It’ll take an autopsy. Let’s see your phone.”

  She pulled it out of her pocket and punched the on button.

  Nothing happened.

  She gave me a guilty look.

  “I forgot to charge it last night.”

  “Then I reckon we’d better get back to the boat.”

  We made our way to the top of the bank and then started toward the point of the island. I knew the temperature hadn’t changed but it suddenly felt colder and a chill passed over me.

  When we reached the point the chill became a deep freeze.

  The boat was gone.

  “Could it have slid back down into the river and floated away?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Not likely. I think somebody pushed it.”

  We stared at each other.

  “Then whoever killed Absalom is nearby.”

  “Maybe,” I said and bent to look at the ground. The sand was a confusion of boot tracks and drag marks from the boat and it was hard for me to tell if there were any tracks besides our own.

  I thought of the frequent river traffic: tugboats with barges, launches, dredge boats. They could all generate waves that could lift a small boat. But nothing had passed since we’d been out here, unless it had been on the far side of the river, during the rain. A wave traveling from that distance would have weakened too much to do anything, though.

  I stood up and looked at the misty hills. It would be a long trek, in near darkness. My pack had been left in the boat, with my compass, GPS, and flip phone.

  “What now?” she asked and for only the second time since I’d known her I thought I noticed hesitancy.

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. She started down the slope toward me and all of a sudden the sand slid out from under her and she gave a little cry of pain. When I got to her she was sitting on the beach, holding her ankle.

  “Damn, damn, damn,” she swore softly. “I think I sprained it.”

  I bent down beside her. “Did you feel something pop?”

  “No, but it hurts like hell. Let me sit h
ere for a minute.”

  I nodded. “I’ve twisted my ankle before,” I said. “I know how it feels.”

  “That doesn’t help.” She reached out to me: “Here, give me a hand up.”

  I bent and put my hand under her arm, and she struggled to her feet. For a few seconds she hesitated and then she slowly transferred her weight back to the injured ankle.

  She gave a little yelp and raised her hurt leg.

  “It’s no good,” she said. “Lower me back down.”

  I let her settle slowly onto the sand. She sat there for a moment, rubbing her ankle and then she uttered a little cry of despair.

  “Well, I’ve made a real mess of it,” she lamented. “Now we’re stuck.”

  “It can’t be helped,” I said.

  “Aren’t you mad at me?”

  “Did you do it on purpose?”

  “Of course not. But I acted like such a b—”

  “Yes?”

  “Anyway, I’m sorry.”

  I nodded, then reached down and grabbed her arm again. “Come on, I’ll help you to the top of the bank.”

  She gave me her arm and grabbed me around the waist. Together we struggled up the west bank, my knees sinking into the sand, until we were both crawling our way upward. When we got there we sat side by side, panting.

  “You’ll have to leave me here,” she said.

  “No way we’ll stay until morning. Together.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” I spotted her pack a few feet away, on the ground. “Do you by any chance have any matches in there?”

  “Sure. And a penlight.”

  “Good. I’ll get some wood. Do you have a knife or anything we can scrape off the wet bark with?”

  “A hunting knife,” she said. “Are you going to try to make a fire?”

  “No, I’m going to make a fire.” I checked my watch. Four o’clock and the rain was still falling.

  I went to the trees and began to hunt for dry wood. I wished I felt as confident about being able to make a fire as I’d sounded. Here and there, though, where sticks and branches lay facedown on the ground, I was able to feel a dry side and I dragged the bits and pieces out to where she sat and took off my poncho and covered them.