Bone Deep (26 page)

“We did the inventory less than two years ago,” he said.

“I’m talking about the pieces your father claimed were stolen. Do you have a list?”

“Somewhere. I’ve never thrown anything away.”

“What I’m thinking,” I said, “is part of your collection might have been stolen twice—the second time when Finn Tovar’s house was robbed. If that’s true, and if your insurance company has a manifest list, it all still belongs to you. Including the things your father claimed were stolen.”

Tovar
—once again the name registered, but Leland let it go, saying, “Owning something doesn’t mean much if I don’t know where it is.”

“You will if the police make a recovery,” I replied.

Surprised, Leland cleared his throat but remained cautious. “But I don’t want the police involved. Not if it puts Owen at risk. First, I’ll sit him down and ask if he’s gambling again. If so, how much does he owe? To hell with what’s missing, I’m not going to send my own son to jail.”

“Leland,” I said, looking him in the eyes, “I know where your collection is.”

He stared back, a
Who are you?
moment. “I’d like to believe that.”

“It’s true. Part of your collection anyway.”

“How?”

“I can’t tell you,” I said.

“If Owen’s at risk, you’re going to have to do better than that.”

“He’s a grown man, Leland. That’s all I can say right now.”

Albright had already made up his mind to trust me, so it threw him. He started to say, “In that case—” but then stopped, surprised by a sudden thought. “Shit,” he muttered.

“What’s wrong?”

He headed for the door, saying, “I need to check on something. Stay here.” Then reconsidered. “No . . . you might as well come along and see for yourself.”

Owen and Harris Sanford were in a truck, watching us, as Leland exited the building, and I followed him across the pasture, past the pond, while Toby, in the citrus grove, shifted his weight from left to right.

I didn’t see or hear their vehicle. Maybe the elephant did.

Beyond the barn was a rise I hadn’t noticed yesterday, a rounded elevation that, beneath weeds, showed trenching scars as we neared. Leland walked fast but slowed when he got to the top and studied the area. He moved several times, his eyes snatching details from the ground.

“Thank god,” he said after a while.

“What’s the problem?”

“I was worried somebody had been out here digging.”

“Someone was,” I said. Trench scars were as orderly as graves at the top of the mound where weeds had taken over.

“Nothing fresh, though,” he said. He took a big breath and let it out, a man who wasn’t overweight but didn’t get much exercise. He
stood there, huffing after the long walk, and tugged at his shirt for air. “I was worried because of what’s missing from the safes. If someone knows the combinations, they might have found out about this place, too.”

“What’s special about it?” I asked. Tractors had harvested sod from the area, it looked like, but years ago.

Leland walked toward the pond, saying, “I hope I’m right about you,” which meant something. I watched him kick at an eroded spot, kneel, and sift through a matrix of sand and fossils. He tried two more spots, ignored a nice-looking meg tooth, before saying, “Okay . . . this is more like it.” He brushed off his slacks and handed me a pottery shard, then a wedge of black glass. “Hold it up to the sun,” he suggested.

Tiny air bubbles were gelled within. I said, “This was handblown,” then examined the pottery: charcoal gray on one side, sand-colored on the other, but not thick like the jar I’d found. “Could be early Indian,” I said, “but where’d the glass come from?”

He did a slow pan to the water, hands on his hips—a land baron savoring his property—while he tried to recover from his recent shock. “No one but my grandfather could have figured it out. In those days, men—the empire builder types—didn’t bother with college. They learned so much from their failures, they knew damn-near everything by the time they succeeded. I’ve walked archaeologists through this pasture but they never looked twice.”

I considered the hill’s contours and referenced a map of archaic rivers in my mind. I guessed, “Was this an Indian trading center?”

“In a way. It was a Paleolithic village, and that was a primary watering hole”—he looked toward the pond—“for god knows how many thousands of years. The early Spaniards were here, too. That was the confusing part. Maybe as early as the fifteen
hundreds, they had a camp here—that’s based on the glass we found. It’s everywhere.”

Aware that my attention vectored, Leland smiled. “You like history, I could tell the night we met. Go ahead, look for yourself.”

I squatted over the spot while he continued talking. “When I was ten, my grandfather brought me here almost every afternoon. Summer vacation. I’d made my parents mad, for some reason—boys’ camp, that was it. I hated camp, all the bullying crap that went on, and I didn’t like sports. Anyway . . . my Grandpa Henry would load up shovels and sifting screens, strung the area off in quadrants, and we did our own archaeological dig. But first he made me promise not to tell anyone and he meant it. By then, he already knew what this place was. He was another very straight guy. To him, a man’s word meant something. I don’t know how my father got so screwed up.”

Among fossil fragments and shell, I saw more pottery and another fleck of glass, but also kept watch on Toby. If not for the elephant, I might have seen a truck slowing among trees outside the electrified fence—Owen and Harris Sanford returning to dive the pond.

Leland talked on about his grandfather, then finally explained why he’d brought me. “A lot of the pieces missing from those safes we found right here. Same with some of the best stuff my father sold off . . . or whatever the hell he did with it.”

I asked, “Like what? And don’t tell me Ponce de León’s sword. You were testing me the other night.”

“It’s a way of smoking out kooks who’d kill their mothers to find what we found,” he said. “Those stories are just that—fairy tales. But we did recover the hilt from a sword—no idea who it belonged to, but it could have been De León’s, I suppose.”

“It was in the safe?”

“That, and other things my father didn’t bother with because they’d be harder to sell. Now that you bring it up, I like the idea of that rusty old thing being Ponce de León’s.”

“Or Pedro Menéndez,” I said. “Last night, I was reading about him.”

“Exactly.”
Albright, pleased I was interested, sounded enthused. “I’ve wondered the same thing. Menéndez spent two or three years searching for his son and he made probes inland. There was no way of knowing who it belonged to, though, from the piece we found. Steel with scrollwork, but in pretty bad shape. We didn’t find De Soto’s gold cross either, but that’s not the point. What we found was valuable to me. It was like solving a puzzle. Who was here? Why would a man go off and leave his sword? Like that. You know?”

I said, “Maybe the archaeologists could’ve helped if you hadn’t steered them in the wrong direction.”

He took that as a slight and walked to another spot. “I figured the first thing out of your mouth would be, ‘What did we find worth selling?’”

“Or worth stealing,” I said.

“I already told you that, too. Ivory from the Ice Age. Several very nice pieces.” Leland noted my reaction before continuing. “Ivory doesn’t hold up well in Florida unless from deep in the muck—or unless it was used as tools by the Ice Age people. I don’t know why that is.”

“It could have already mineralized by the time they found it,” I suggested.

“An
anaerobic environment
, the books say,” he replied, and used his hands to indicate the width of a trench. “We stripped away a layer at a time. Shovels; my grandfather wouldn’t use a tractor. I
think he was trying to build up my muscles without me knowing and I didn’t care because it was so interesting.

“We figured we traveled about five hundred years for every few feet after the topsoil was cleared away. But that varied. Paleolithic tools, the really primitive pieces, were close to the water table or deeper. Stone tools, some coral spearheads, most of them very rough. My mother was furious if I came home muddy, so I brought clean clothes every day. And kept my mouth shut about what we were doing.”

I probed again, saying, “I’m still surprised you didn’t go for a swim.”

Leland, grimacing at the pond, said, “With all the snakes? My grandfather wouldn’t allow it. He saw a cottonmouth, back when the barn was still standing, he said was the size of a small alligator. I don’t know how many times I heard him tell that story—a thirty-pound cottonmouth. And he wasn’t a talkative man.”

I didn’t doubt that but doubted the story. The first Henry L. Albright, I suspected, had been as cunning as he was secretive. Giant reptiles are better than fences when it comes to discouraging visitors. I said, “You two must have been close.”

“I wish to hell he was still alive. He was a tough businessman, but he lived by a code of ethics. A year later, we found the first burial, then what might have been a mass grave, and that was the end of it. For him, it wasn’t about money. It really bothered him, finding human bones. He made me promise never to dig here again and keep what I knew to myself. That was . . . fifty-one years ago. Aside from Mattie, you’re the first person I’ve brought here.”

Mattie—Albright’s second wife and Owen’s mother.

“Why me?”

The man shrugged and gazed, hollow-eyed, at the water.
Because he has no one else,
I thought, but he responded, “I’ll pay a reward if you help get our collection back. Why can’t you tell me the whole story?”

I dodged that, saying, “Do some more digging, you might find even better artifacts. It’s not illegal if you own the property. You’re not tempted?”

“Lately, yeah, with all the bullshit at home. You know, spend some alone time out here and sift for Spanish material—that’s my real interest. Possibly get a more exact date. Ivory and the burials are below water level, so I wouldn’t disturb any of that. But I’ve read so much about amateurs screwing up important sites . . .” He drifted off again, then focused on his feet. “Most of the Spanish stuff came from right where I’m standing. Pedro Menéndez, or one of them, could have stood on this exact spot.”

He’d used Menéndez to keep me interested, I guessed, but no need. “You told me the glass was everywhere,” I said.

“The most valuable pieces are what I’m talking about. My grandfather had a theory. He believed one of the early captains didn’t trust his crew—the men left guarding the ship—so he carried his valuables with him in a leather pouch. Then he was killed, or lost the pouch, because we found it all in one little heap about a yard deep. The pouch was long gone, of course.”

He searched for a moment, then kicked at the ground. “Right about here. I sifted out every piece myself.” He smiled, remembering, then realized he’d left me hanging.

“Oh! I found six Spanish coins and an uncut emerald. A beautiful thing about this big.” He used a thumb and index finger to create a circle. “And also . . . Do you know what a bezoar stone is?”

I was picturing the two gold doubloons I’d taken from Deon the petty thief when I answered, “I don’t think so.”

“They’re calcified stones from the bellies of wild goats. In those days, they believed bezoar stones could absorb arsenic from poison wine—which might be true. I found one attached to a gold chain. Only a ship’s captain would carry something like that, my grandpa said. They were popular with royalty.”

I asked, “It was all supposed to be in the gun vaults?”

Albright cleared his throat, the pleasant memory erased. “Nope. Like the leather bag, the stone, the emerald, the coins—lots of other nice pieces—they’re all long gone. Which is why I hate opening those damn things.”

He knelt and refocused on the ground, upset again. “What the hell. Truthfully, I was more interested in the old bottles anyway. Like that piece of glass. They were black unless you held them up to the sun. Or crockery that had fingerprints baked into it from some man or woman who died five hundred years ago in Spain. Not particularly valuable to your typical bone hunter but simple things that to me seemed pretty cool.”

“Bone hunters like Finn Tovar,” I suggested.

Leland was sifting dirt but stopped. “I was waiting for you to ask about him. If anyone has your artifacts from Montana, it’s him. Did Tovar tell you his house was robbed? If he did, don’t believe him.”

My turn to watch for a reaction. “Tovar died a week ago. Brain tumor.”

“Really?”
The troubled land baron brightened. He put his hands on his knees to stand, a tall man with lower-back problems. “Finally . . . some good news. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard that name. Are you sure he’s dead?”

“I want to show you something,” I said. My dive bag was behind us, and I went to get it while Leland continued talking.

“The last time I saw Tovar—he was such an offensive little prick, that guy—it was a few days before he was arrested for assaulting our night watchmen. That was twenty-some years ago. I was still in college but already working for the company.” He cast a look toward the cattails. “My foreman found the guard lying down there, the back of his head smashed in. They couldn’t make the charges stick, which was bullshit.”

“You seem pretty sure.” I was walking toward him, dive bag over my shoulder.

“What would you think? A few nights before it happened, I caught Tovar trespassing, and he threatened to kick my butt. Then threw his damn shovel at me when I didn’t back down.”

“Where was this?”

“There.”
He indicated the pond. “The shovel didn’t leave a mark, so I couldn’t prove it. And the guard never regained consciousness, so Tovar walked. But you know why I really think they let him off?”

I asked, “Tovar was near the pond but not in the water when this happened?”

“Yes, digging.” Irritated that I had interrupted. “It’s possible he got off because he was my father’s sometimes drinking buddy. People wouldn’t say it to my face, but that’s what I heard later. The Albright name carried a lot of weight back then . . . or maybe Tovar was blackmailing him. I’ve always suspected that, too. Along with the booze, my father supposedly had a lot of girlfriends. Tovar was a ruthless son of a bitch. He would have used something like that or even set him up. For ten years after my father died, I expected to
get an envelope full of sick nudie pictures in the mail with an extortion note.”

“Leland,” I said, “then it’s possible he did blackmail your father. Maybe your father had to pretend the collection was stolen to cover the truth—he used it to buy his way out.”

Men don’t release long-held convictions easily. He grumbled something and then said, “You didn’t know my father.”

“No, but I’m getting a pretty clear picture of Finn Tovar. You never saw him after that?”

“A glimpse every few years, but I always went the other way. We had just that one run-in.”

I placed the bag on the ground and opened it while he added, “What you said about Owen, that he might be repeating the same cycle . . . Well . . . that is possible. It really hit home.”

Should I show him the mastodon photos or press for water samples first? The sun was almost down, and diving visibility was fading with it. That’s what I was deciding when a couple of details sparked, then fused. I said, “Wait a minute. Why wasn’t Tovar afraid of your elephants? You had several from the photos I saw.”

The man was glad I asked. It allowed him to share his one small victory over the bone hunter. “Because after what happened to our night watchman, I figured out a way to stop that bastard. I had the elephants moved here. My father didn’t give a damn by then, and it solved the problem.”

I said, “You’re a clever guy,” which produced a smile that was unexpectedly shy.