Burial Ground Read online

  “Yes?”

  “This is Willie Dupont, T-Joe’s son. You talked to my dad Friday, about some work up near Greenbriar.”

  There was something oddly somber about his tone. “I remember.”

  There was a long silence and then he said: “My dad’s dead.”

  It took a moment for the news to sink in.

  “What?”

  “Yeah. He went out yesterday to talk to Carter Wascom, the man he bought the land from. When he left, his car ran off the road not a half-mile from our place. He hit a tree and it broke his neck.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. The words sounded pitifully inadequate. I’d liked T-Joe. And, insensitive as it seemed, there was the payroll to think about.

  “I’d like to go to the funeral,” I said.

  “No.” His determination took me by surprise. “The funeral’s Tuesday, in Breaux Bridge. You can’t do any good there. Your place is doing what my dad was hiring you to do.”

  Had I heard him right?

  “You mean…?”

  “I talked to Mama and my sister Dominique. This land meant a lot to Dad. It’s why he got killed, in a way. I mean, if he hadn’t bought the land, he wouldn’t have been on that road, would he? So we want to go ahead with it. We want to make the land the way he wanted it, just like he was here. Once a Dupont decides on something, ain’t nobody keeps it from happening.”

  There wasn’t anything for me to say.

  THREE

  Willie Dupont came in the next morning. He looked the way I figured his dad must’ve looked in his mid-twenties: stocky and muscular, with dark wavy hair and a square jaw. Despite his red eyes, his grief seemed to have been replaced by determination, as if he could will the death of his father away by becoming the agent of T-Joe’s dream. He was, however, thoroughly familiar with the project, having been involved at every step.

  We laid Willie’s map out on one of the lab tables, and David and I examined the terrain. It was rough, with steep, forested hills that fell away sharply to a floodplain about a half-mile wide. A finger formed by a dried-up bayou had cut a section of the floodplain away from the rest of the land, so that it became an island, though the only real water was that of the river, on its west side.

  “I’ll need some time to put together a budget,” I said, but Willie shook his head.

  “Tell me how much you need to start and you can figure out the budget later.”

  David and I exchanged glances. It would take a team of four to five archaeologists, armed with metal detectors, probes, and shovels, and we might want to do a more formal search with a magnetometer. Not to mention the archival research I’d throw in the lap of our historian, Esmerelda.

  “It won’t be cheap,” I hedged.

  “I don’t expect it to be. But my dad trusted you and I do, too.”

  David said, “We can’t promise success. All we can do is use the best methodology we have. The site could be there and we might still miss it. Or it might not even be there at all.”

  “Look, I’ve been around the oil business since I was a kid. Odds of hitting on an exploration well are about one in seven, and even a shallow well costs you thirty grand. Well, it’s our land and our money. Now, how much do you need to start today?”

  I calculated mentally. “Eight thousand to start,” I said. “If we have to go the whole route with magnetometry, it’ll probably cost another eight or nine. If we luck out and locate something with shovel testing, the whole job shouldn’t go over ten or twelve.”

  Willie pulled out a checkbook.

  “I’ll pay you eight now,” he said. “I have my mother’s power of attorney. You can call the bank if you want.”

  “Don’t you want to draw something up?”

  “My dad worked on handshakes all his life,” he said. “I don’t plan to change things now.”

  I hesitated, exchanged glances again with David, and then shrugged.

  “Done,” I said, giving him my hand. “We’ll get started today.”

  Willie wrote out a check, tore it out of his checkbook, and handed it to me. It had barely touched my fingers before Marilyn had whisked it away.

  “This is all new to me,” he said. “Before this, I’d’ve thought the best place to find an archaeologist was in the university.”

  “Used to be,” I told him. “But that was the old days. The environmental laws of the sixties and seventies created contract archaeology. It’s as much a business as a scientific discipline.”

  “Of course, the academic archaeologists look down on us,” David put in. “It’s easy with a guaranteed salary and all the time in the world to do your work. But the funny thing is there are more of us than there are of them.”

  “That’s America,” Willie said. He looked idly over at the bookshelf and lifted down a copy of Bass’s Human Osteology. “You fool with human bones much?”

  “Not anymore,” I said. “These days it’s mostly animals.”

  He grunted. “How many teeth a human being have?”

  David and I looked at each other.

  “Thirty-two,” we said together.

  Willie nodded glumly. “Never saw one with thirty-three?”

  I shook my head. “No. Why?”

  “My dad had thirty-three,” Willie said. “What do you think of that?”

  “Thirty-three teeth?” David asked. “You mean a mutation?”

  “I don’t know what I mean. All I know is when he hit the steering wheel a couple of his front teeth and an eyetooth got knocked out. They picked ’em up from the floor of the car. And a bicuspid, too.”

  “A bicuspid?” I said, not sure where he was going. “But that’s in the side of the mouth. A frontal blow …”

  “You don’t understand,” Willie said and turned to face me, pain showing in his face. “He had all his teeth: There wasn’t any bicuspid missing.”

  “That’s impossible,” David said.

  “Tell me about it,” Willie said. “But there it was, big as hell, filling and all. Coroner showed it to me. That’s why I’m having my own autopsy done. Rest of the family’s mad as hell. They want me to leave him in peace. But I want to know if this guy screwed up my father’s autopsy. Isn’t anything wrong with wanting to know how your father died, is there?”

  I shook my head. “No.”

  “I mean, maybe it wasn’t an accident. I know Carter Wascom’s got second thoughts about selling him the land. That’s why Dad went to talk to him. Or maybe there’s something about that treasure somebody doesn’t want to be found.”

  “You think Wascom could have murdered your father?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. But I’m damn sure gonna find out.”

  I took a deep breath.

  “Willie, are you hiring us to do a survey or find the truth about your father’s death?”

  Willie gave a lopsided smile. “Way I figure, Dr. Graham, you do one and you may end up doing the other. You ready to go?”

  “Now?”

  “Sure,” Willie said. “I can drive you up and show you where it happened and then I’ll take you around to see old Absalom.”

  “The man who found the artifacts?”

  “That’s him. He’s a slippery old rascal, but he keeps his eyes open. He won’t talk to a cop but maybe he’ll talk to an archaeologist.”

  “All right,” I said, turning around to get my notebook and a topographic map.

  Absalom wasn’t the only slippery person in this business, I thought, as we walked out to Willie’s Bronco. T-Joe’s son was a pretty slick character himself.

  St. Francisville, half an hour north of Baton Rouge, perches on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi. The first settlement, Bayou Sara, was long ago claimed by the river. The present town has a Gothic courthouse, an antebellum Episcopal cemetery, and several antique shops. The people are largely from English and Scottish stock, unlike the Cajuns spread out along the floodplain to the south.

  There’s also a nuclear reactor, about five miles south of t
he town itself. It was built in the seventies, when nuclear energy sounded like a good idea. The company’s customers have been paying for it ever since. Sensitive to the term nuclear, the utility company has posted signs describing it as an energy center, as if omitting the offensive word could change popular opinion or make utility rates go down.

  It was just south of the reactor plant that we turned, heading left, toward the river, in the shade of moss-bearded oaks and pecans. Willie tensed as we left the highway, and I knew he was thinking about returning to where his father had died.

  “We went horseback riding up here last Saturday,” he said. “Me, my mom and dad, my sisters, and some of our cousins. Then we had a cochon d’lait.” He exhaled, his eyes straight ahead. “My Dad was a good driver. No alcohol in his body. They said he wasn’t going more than fifty, but he hit the wheel hard enough to bust up his mouth.”

  He pulled to the side of the road and pointed to a telephone pole on the opposite side. The pole was new, but there was a scatter of glass on the roadway next to it.

  “He snapped the pole when he hit it,” Willie explained. “They put up a new one right afterward. I prowled around in the ditch when they were finished but I didn’t find anything.”

  I was staring at the roadway.

  “You see it, too, then,” Willie said.

  “What’s that?” I asked

  “Nothing.” He pointed down at the dark asphalt. “That’s the problem, see what I mean?”

  I heard David’s breath suck in, and I knew he was starting to doubt Willie’s sanity.

  Then I understood what Willie was talking about.

  “There aren’t any skid marks,” I said.

  “Right.” Willie nodded with a grim smile. “He just plowed right into it like it wasn’t even there.”

  He put the Bronco into gear and pulled back onto the roadway.

  “Why did the owner of Greenbriar sell your family the land?” David asked then. “Is the plantation on hard times?”

  “Sort of.” He slowed as we entered a turn. “Carter Wascom’s wife died a couple of years back. He blames the nuclear plant. Some kind of cancer he thinks came from dumping wastes. He hired all kinds of lawyers and private detectives but all they did was bleed him dry. The thing got thrown out of court and he ended up having to pay the expert witnesses and court costs. Then I hear the company sued him for defamation and got a judgment.

  “Our land’s just the other side of that fence.” Willie pointed. “I think we got the best acreage. He didn’t really want to let us have it all, but we made him a good offer.”

  “But you said he was having second thoughts,” I said.

  “My dad got a call from him right before he went up here. Carter wanted to talk to him, he said. He didn’t tell what it was about, just that he was being a pain in the ass.”

  We slowed at another gate. This one was open. Through the fence I saw a pasture, with a tree line a few hundred yards back.

  “Our land goes all the way to the river,” Willie said.

  The pasture ended with a fence line and on the other side of the fence was a big white house with columns, set back from the road, with a gazebo to one side and a lane of pecan trees leading to the front door. A sign on the front gate said GREENBRIAR. The gate was closed. Just the other side of the plantation was a low, white frame house with a screen porch, with a pickup truck out front, and a satellite dish in the yard. Probably the overseer’s place, I thought.

  A second house was just beyond this one, and it was there that we stopped. Little more than a shack, the structure was raised above the dirt on cast cement blocks. Chickens pecked in the yard, and a scrawny dog hoisted itself from beside the gate as we turned in. There was a little vegetable garden with a scarecrow off to the side.

  “Absalom’s place,” Willie said.

  As I opened my door an old man appeared on the front porch. Lanky, with red suspenders striping a checkered shirt, he had skin the color of coal. Deep-set, lively eyes considered us under a head of short, grizzled gray hair.

  “Morning, Absalom,” Willie greeted. “I brought a couple of fellows to talk to you about history.”

  Absalom Moon gave a little nod, his hands thrust deep into his pockets.

  “Bad ’bout your dad,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Willie agreed.

  Willie told him our names and the old man nodded again. “Well, come up on the porch,” he said in a high-pitched voice. “No good standing out in the sun.”

  We trooped up the rickety wooden steps and Absalom pointed to a couple of aluminum lawn chairs with plastic webbing that was about to fall through. He took a seat in a wooden swing, unconcerned about the fact that one of us would have to stand.

  “David, huh?” he said in a half-amused tone, then looked over at my companion: “You don’t look like my daddy.”

  Willie frowned but David, standing behind me, smiled at the biblical allusion: “And you don’t look like my son. If I had one …”

  Absalom chuckled with delight. “Bet you ain’t got no boy named Amon, neither.”

  “No, but my father’s name is Solomon,” David told him. “Only people call him Sol.”

  “I be jiggered,” Absalom said. “You not from ’round here, though.”

  “New Orleans.”

  “I be jiggered.”

  Willie leaned forward: “I told them about the Indian things you found.”

  I felt Absalom withdraw and wished Willie had kept quiet.

  “Lots of Indian things,” Absalom said vaguely, sitting back against the swing. “Arrowheads, mostly. Wash out after it rain.”

  “I’m talking about the beads,” Willie said. “And the copper bells.”

  Absalom’s eyes dropped away. “Arrowheads what most folks want,” he commented. “I got some big as your hand.”

  “Did you find the other stuff with the arrowheads, then?” Willie asked.

  “Arrowheads mostly alone,” the old man said. He looked over at David and me. “You hunt arrowheads?”

  We both nodded. “Whenever we can find them,” David told him.

  “Look, Absalom,” Willie broke in. “I’ll pay you to show me where that other stuff came from.”

  Absalom shook his head sadly. “Mr. Willie, I wants to help you, but I just plain have trouble remembering. Now them arrowheads …”

  Willie got up from the chair. “At least tell me if the stuff came from our land.”

  “Well, I think they comes from your land. But you know how it is, Mr. Willie. That river change everything. Back there in the woods there ain’t no fences. I probably couldn’t find the place again nohow.”

  Willie shrugged. “Fair enough. By the way, were you here when my father came up to see Mr. Wascom the other day?”

  Absalom looked away quickly. “Bad thing, ’bout Mr. Joe,” he said. “I didn’t see nothin’, though. Wasn’t here.”

  There was no mistaking his fear.

  Willie started down the steps, fanning himself with his baseball cap. “Okay, Absalom. We won’t bother you anymore.”

  “Ain’t no bother, suh.”

  I waited for David to step down ahead of me and then turned to the old man.

  “Were there bones with these Indian things, by any chance?”

  His eyes met mine and then fell away quickly.

  “Can’t say I wants to fool with no bones,” he said in a low voice.

  I understood then and nodded in agreement. We were out of the driveway and back on the tartop before Willie spoke.

  “See what I mean? He knows exactly where those things come from. And I’ll bet he saw Dad stop at Wascom’s place.” He slowed as he passed the plantation house, then muttered under his breath. There was no car in the drive, and I had a feeling he’d meant to call on Carter Wascom, with us for witnesses.

  Then his foot hit the brake and the Bronco slowed. We were passing his land now and he was looking through the fence at a blue pickup that hadn’t been in the field when we pas
sed the first time.

  “That’s strange,” he muttered and turned into the field through the open gate. “I wonder who’s back there.”

  We bumped along through the grass and jerked to a stop behind the truck. Willie’s door flew open and David and I got out behind him. The June sun hit me like a blast from a furnace.

  Willie reached under the seat and withdrew a long-barreled revolver, which he stuck down into his belt.

  “Can’t be too careful,” he said. “But it’s probably just somebody picking dewberries.”

  Even as his door shut two men emerged from the trees on the far side of the pasture, a black Labrador gamboling through the grass beside them.

  “It’s Carter Wascom,” he said.

  We followed as he walked toward the pair. As we got closer, I saw that one man was tall, with gray hair and a slight limp, while the other was on the chunky side and balding. The tall man wore jeans and an open-necked blue shirt and carried a short-barreled carbine in one hand, while the other man was dressed in khakis.

  “Something the matter, Mr. Wascom?” Willie asked.

  Carter Wascom offered Willie a hand and Willie introduced each of us. Wascom’s hand felt soft as silk, and when he spoke his lips barely moved. “It was terrible about your father. I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I found him, you know.”

  Willie nodded.

  “He came up here to see you, didn’t he?” Willie asked.

  “Why, yes. We were talking about another little piece of land your father wanted and I wasn’t sure I wanted to sell.” He chuckled.

  “What was the outcome?”

  “I told him I’d think about it. Then he went down the road to see old Absalom. An hour later I saw his car go by and then I heard the crash.”

  “Your truck?” Willie asked.

  Carter Wascom jerked his head toward his companion. “It’s Levi’s. I was taking him back to the bayou.” He lifted his rifle. “That’s why I have this. A .22 magnum makes a good argument with snakes.”

  The short man stuck out his hand then.

  “I’m Levi Goodeau.” He had a round, good-natured face, a contrast to the ascetic, almost suffering countenance of his companion. “I hope we weren’t trespassing. I’d hate to run up against that Smith.” He nodded at the revolver in Willie’s belt.