Burial Ground Page 4

  “No problem,” Willie said. “Only person has to worry about this is the one that killed my father.”

  “Killed?” Wascom asked. “You don’t think it was accidental?”

  “No.”

  “Dear me. Well, don’t do anything rash. You don’t want to end up as Levi’s guest.”

  And I remembered where I’d heard Goodeau’s name.

  “You’re the warden at Angola,” I said.

  Levi Goodeau shrugged. “That’s me. I took a few hours off to come down and see Carter. We’re cousins, you know.”

  Carter Wascom nodded. “I was going to show him what’s flowing in the bayou. I was trying to prove I’m not the only one that’s affected.”

  “What are you talking about?” Willie asked.

  “Come on back. I’ll show you,” Wascom said and we followed him out of the pasture and into the woods, the dog bounding along beside us.

  The sun’s glare abated, but the humidity was high, so that rivers of sweat were streaming down my arms and I felt my shirt sticking to my back. The ground smelled of decayed vegetation and my feet sank into the soft leaves. Out of habit, I kept my eyes down, looking for snakes.

  We were on a finger ridge, an ancient plateau of finely ground clay that jutted out into the floodplain of a small bayou which, in its turn, joined the Mississippi River a mile or so to the west. When we threaded our way through the last red oaks and stood on the edge of the bluff, Carter Wascom pointed at the area below.

  “Can’t see it from here, but down there’s the bayou. You game to go look?”

  “Why not?” Willie asked and we followed down the bank, grabbing at vines and tree roots as we went. The bottom, twenty feet below the bluff, was sand, deposited from endless cycles of flooding. Wascom was already at the water’s edge, pointing, and when I came even with him I saw what he was talking about. There was a sudsy-looking residue on top of the water, floating gently toward the river.

  “This bayou goes right past that damn nuclear plant,” he accused. “You can’t tell me they aren’t dumping something into it.”

  I stared down at the suds. Wherever it was coming from, it was a stain on what would otherwise have been a primeval setting.

  “It couldn’t have come from some other place, say another house, or maybe a dump?” I asked.

  Carter Wascom withered me with his stare.

  “My wife died, sir, and it wasn’t from some other place or house or dump. She was a beautiful woman and she died a cruel, agonizing death. Cancer of the liver. It spread.” He took a deep breath and went on: “For several years, before the disease was diagnosed, there was this scum on the surface of the bayou. Only none of us knew what it was then. It was the first year that abomination they call a nuclear plant was in operation. After I raised enough hell with them, the stuff stopped for a while. Now…” He pointed down like an Old Testament prophet. “It’s started again.” He turned on Willie. “That’s what I told your father, that anything he bought now was ruined anyway, I didn’t want to take his money that way.”

  I saw Willie shoot a questioning look at Levi Goodeau. The warden put a hand on his cousin’s shoulder. “Well, Carter, I think you’re right to have some samples taken. Maybe that’ll get to the bottom once and for all.”

  Wascom gave his kinsman a skeptical look. “Like it did before? They ruined the samples at the lab. Those people got to them, had them say the samples were innocuous, if you can believe that. Levi, you’re too decent a man for your job. How can you run a farm full of cutthroats when you can’t even see how deeply the corruption has reached into every part of this state?”

  “Oh, Carter, it’s not that bad,” Goodeau said. “Come on. Let’s get back and have some lemonade.”

  I thought Wascom was going to argue, but suddenly the fight seemed to have gone out of him. His shoulders slumped and I saw confusion in his face.

  “Lemonade,” he said. “Yes, I suppose we ought to. I…” He looked from one of us to the other. “I’m sorry if I involved you in my private problems. I just think…” He raised his hands in supplication. “This has to be everybody’s problem. Doesn’t it?”

  “Of course, Carter.” Goodeau helped his cousin to the base of the bluff and waited patiently while the tall man scrambled to the top. When Wascom was halfway up, the warden turned to us and shrugged apologetically.

  He needn’t have, though. I’d seen the suds, and wherever they were from, they’d ruined the bayou.

  FOUR

  It was early afternoon when we got back to the office. There were three message slips from Bertha Bomberg on my desk. The first one said Urgent, the second said Extremely urgent, and the third said Call before two!!! It was now one-fifty-six. With a sigh, I dialed her number at the Corps of Engineers and hoped that she’d still be out to lunch and the call would switch over to one of her less obnoxious office mates.

  But when I heard the line click on the second ring I knew there would be no further reprieves.

  “Bomberg, Planning.”

  “Hi, Bertha, this is Alan.” I tried to put some cheer in my voice. “Looks like we’ve been missing each other.”

  “Have you been avoiding me, Alan?”

  “Not at all. I tried you Friday and I was out all this morning.”

  “I was sick Friday. I went home early. I’m still sick. I shouldn’t even be in the office at all.”

  “I’m sorry.” I tried to sound as if I really was.

  “Thank you. Alan, I have some questions about the report you did for us on the Plaquemine Revetment.”

  “The one we did three years ago.”

  “Is that a criticism?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Good. Because I am the government.”

  A bad sign, I thought: She usually saved that part for last and now she was sticking it in at the beginning.

  “Is there a problem with the report, Bertha?”

  “If there wasn’t, would I be calling?”

  I made an indecipherable sound.

  I heard papers rustling on her desk.

  “Now,” she said. “I have a lot of corrections, and I’m going to send them all to you, with the marked draft copy, but there was one, I guess I should say, glaring problem.”

  I entertained a vision of having to send a crew back into the field and taking a ten-thousand-dollar loss.

  “A problem?” I swallowed.

  “Yes. I’m surprised you didn’t find it yourself. You do read over these things, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, then, why didn’t anybody catch the problem of the levee?”

  “The levee?” A cold shudder ran through me. Had one of our maps put it in the wrong place?

  “The levee,” she repeated. “You didn’t look under it.”

  “Under it? Fifty tons of dirt?”

  “Your history section clearly states that the levee wasn’t built until the 1920s. That was thirty years after Darling Plantation was divided up after a sheriff’s sale.”

  “So?”

  Her voice took on an air of impatience as she instructed her wayward child:

  “So there may be cultural resources under the present levee. Did you look for them?”

  Silence as I visualized the levee, a thirty-foot-tall pile of dirt.

  “How do you look under a levee?” I said.

  “That’s not the point,” she shot back.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Evidently. And that’s why we may have to have a meeting.”

  “A meeting?”

  “To address this kind of inadequacy. You’ll get the report by FedEx tomorrow. I expect to hear from you as soon as you’ve read the comments.” There was an audible sigh. “Alan, I can promise you, when the next contracts are bid, this issue will come up.”

  “So what do you want us to do?”

  “You’ll have my comments in writing. I see no purpose in talking on the phone about it. That only leads to misunderstan
dings.”

  “Goodbye, Bertha.”

  “Goodbye.” The line went dead and I replaced the receiver.

  David appeared in the doorway. “So what was all that about?”

  “Looking under levees,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. “The same-old, same-old.”

  I got up from my desk and made two fists. “Someday that goddamn woman …”

  “Now you know why they had the flood of ’27,” he said. I didn’t think Bombast was that old, but I wasn’t going to dispute it.

  Understand: I am not against women. I find them wonderful and intriguing creatures, and once I even married one. But there are times when it seems that I, a poor male, am beset by the worst the other sex has to offer. First P. E. Courtney, offering to take away my business, and now Bombast, the corps battle-ax, feeding her neuroses.

  Give me two miles of briars to walk through any day.

  I picked up my morning paper, telling myself that gnashing my teeth accomplished nothing. If I looked through the news I’d find people with far worse trials to endure than a gauntlet of harpies. Not that Courtney was a harpy, exactly. Stripped of the power clothing, she might look pretty good. Stripped…

  CONTRACTOR ACCUSED OF CHEATING GOVERNMENT.

  I sighed as my eye picked out the headline. I already felt sorry for the poor bastard. Why didn’t headlines ever say DRONES CHEAT GOVERNMENT, and detail the endless meetings, coffee breaks, and training sessions that gobbled the taxpayers’ money? But no, it was always some poor devil trying to keep his company’s head above water.

  Okay, so I’m biased.

  Then my eye fell on a headline in the “People” section: ANGOLA WARDEN BELIEVES IN REHABILITATION.

  And there was a photo of a smiling Levi Goodeau. I skimmed the story, picking out the facts that Goodeau had a doctorate in sociology and was the first warden of the penitentiary ever to hold such a credential. He’d worked his way up, serving as a counselor and an assistant warden, while attending graduate school at night, and all along he’d retained his faith in humankind. I wondered how that was possible, but graduate school has a way of warping people. He’d held his post for only a few months and he’d made a number of substantial changes: increasing educational opportunities and hiring more counselors. I sympathized with the sentiments, but I hoped he wasn’t a fool; the warden’s job was no place for somebody with a weak stomach. Three thousand hardcore convicts could shake Mother Teresa’s faith in humanity.

  I was folding the newspaper when David walked in.

  “I finished the Allison report,” he said. “So I’ve got some time.”

  “Time for what?” I asked.

  He grinned in his little-boy way.

  “Well, I thought maybe if I went back and talked to old Absalom, I might get a little more out of him. He seemed to be interested in the fact that we were connected by our first names. If he’s a Bible reader, I figure I can hold my own.”

  It was my turn to smile: David was a Talmudic scholar and could hold his own in a room full of Jesuits. More importantly, though, he had a way of talking to people, and I’d seen him succeed in gaining rapport more than once where others, including me, had failed.

  “Take the cell phone,” I said.

  “Keep it,” he replied. “I’m just going up for a couple of hours.”

  I shrugged. “Then call me tonight. If we have to put a team into the field, we’re going to have to call some folks in a hurry.”

  I watched him leave, wishing I could go, too. But being away all morning had left me with a stack of paperwork and some letters to write. My progress, however, was desultory. I couldn’t stop thinking of T-Joe, dead at the wheel of a car that had left no skid marks. A dead man with more teeth than nature allows. Finally, I succumbed and called the forensics anthropology lab at the university. I was in luck: The phone was picked up by the lab head herself, an intense young woman named Chloe Messner. She pronounced on the skeletons that turned up in weed-grown lots and sorted out the victims of plant explosions. She loved the outré, so I didn’t waste time:

  “Ever worked with the coroner of West Feliciana?”

  “Once or twice. Why, Alan? You have something for me?”

  “Sorry, not quite.”

  “Oh.” The disappointment was clear in her tone.

  “I was just curious about what kind of job they do up there.”

  “Depends. I think they send most of their clients to Baton Rouge. Better facilities.”

  It conjured the image of a hotel with a spa for the dead and hot and cold running formaldehyde, and I shuddered.

  “So the pathologist here would find out if an accident wasn’t an accident.”

  “Theoretically. But it isn’t always easy to tell. I saw a hit-and-run victim once, beautiful girl, from her picture; she’d been lying in a field for a month and the insects had done their work, so—”

  “I get the idea,” I said, cutting her off before I gagged. “And he’d figure out if a body had too many teeth.”

  “Come again?”

  “If the victim had thirty-three teeth instead of your government-issue thirty-two.”

  “Alan, do you know somebody like that?” The excitement was back in her voice and I knew she was visualizing a research publication.

  “I don’t know. I just know of a case where the victim in a car accident had some teeth knocked out and when they scooped them up from the floor of the car he had an extra premolar, filling and all.”

  “That’s impossible. There must’ve been somebody else in the car.”

  “Who got their tooth knocked out and then ran away?”

  “Stranger things have happened. I remember the case of a woman they found burned up in her bedroom and there was a wooden leg in the bathtub. They went back through the rubble a second time looking for another body. Turned out she was killed by her husband, who set the house on fire while she was with her one-legged lover. He was taking a shower and when the place went up he took off, hopping, I guess.”

  “Must’ve been a hell of a case,” I muttered. “What I’m saying, Chloe, is what if the extra tooth didn’t belong to the victim?”

  “What are you saying, there’s a tooth fairy?”

  “All his premolars were in place. Even after he hit the steering wheel.”

  “Of course they were. Your premolars are in the side of your mouth. They don’t get knocked out like a canine or incisor. It only takes a moderately strong frontal blow. But your premolars and molars …”

  “Exactly. So I’m asking, what will they do with the extra tooth?”

  “I hope they send it to me. You can tell a lot from a tooth. Different materials have been used for fillings over the years. And as far as tooth morphology goes, American Indians—”

  “—have shovel-shaped incisors. I know. You’ll look at the tooth?”

  “Sure. As soon as we finish with this body from the train wreck. The tank car exploded and—”

  “Right. I’ll see if I can get them to send it along.”

  “Great. Later, Alan.”

  I hung up and then called Willie Dupont and told him to try to get the pathologist to send the odd tooth to Chloe. When I’d finished talking to him I sat back in my chair and stared idly through my open door and into the next room, where I saw David’s briefcase on the floor next to the sorting table. I wondered if he’d come back for it. Two hours later, when he hadn’t returned, I called his house to see if he wanted me to drop it by on my way home, but his wife told me he hadn’t come home. Maybe, I thought, he’d hit pay dirt with Absalom. At least I hoped so, because it would save us a lot of work. I closed the office and set the alarm, thinking of the empty house on Park Boulevard where I’d grown up and where I now lived.

  Since returning to Baton Rouge I’d dated many women, and been serious about several. Some were taken by the old house with its antique furniture, but a few had told me how they’d change the decor. The latter I’d given short shrift, and as for the form
er, well, I’d managed to find something wrong with them, too. In a word, I was used to being alone, but sometimes—just sometimes—as when I spoke to David’s wife, Elizabeth, and sensed the happiness of their relationship, I felt hollow.

  It had been ten years since the dig at Oxmul, in Mexico. Ten years since I’d been a rising young archaeologist at the University of New Mexico. Ten years since Felicia and I had worked at one of the most important Maya sites ever discovered. Ten years since things with Felicia had gone to hell.

  There was only one thing to do in such circumstances: I went home, changed into my shorts, put Digger on a chain, and after a few nominal stretching exercises, set out with Digger by my side to make the four-mile run around the lakes.

  As we thudded down the hill on the bicycle path, and alongside the golf course, other joggers passed us. Most were younger than I, a few older. Some gave me a nod, others gazed straight ahead with that transfixed stare of the True Runner. They were the kind who jogged in thunderstorms and in the midday heat of summer. Even now, they were oblivious to the sweat soaking their shirts and running down their limbs.

  I would never be like them: I was well into my forties and my brown hair was thinning. I had long ago accepted that I would only be average in height, and it was a constant struggle to keep my weight in the acceptable range. I wore glasses, and the prescription had been getting stronger over the years. For me, jogging was a duty, something I did both to get my mind off things I didn’t want to think about, and to keep my weight under control. I got no joy from this mortification of the body, and had little regard for those fanatics who raced by in states of altered reality. It was, I told myself, a cult, and as a freethinker—

  My stomach tightened as I saw a figure headed toward us, easily loping at about half the speed of sound.

  A woman, long-legged, blond, in yellow shorts and a white jogging tank top with the number 12 on it. No glasses, no attaché case, but there was no doubt…

  P. E. Courtney.

  I increased my pace without thinking, and as we closed she gave me a friendly wave. I nodded, painfully aware of my snaillike speed. I gritted my teeth until she was past and then allowed myself to slow down, gulping air. Digger, meanwhile, had taken to the stepped-up pace and was tugging me forward. I started to give his chain a jerk and then heard steps bearing down on me from behind.