Burial Ground (12 page)

“Yeah?”

“What if we don’t find squat?”

“Oh, I think we’ll find
something
,” I said.

“How the hell can you promise that?”

And that was when I reached into my pocket and showed him the little brass trade bell.

E
LEVEN

When I left David I drove back to the office and parked outside with my motor running, thinking. I hadn’t mentioned the brass bell to Willie because I didn’t want to create false hope. It’s one thing to find a few artifacts and another to find a whole cemetery. Besides, I’d seen projects where the archaeologist had to perform with his client looking over his shoulder and it doesn’t work for anybody, believe me.

So I checked in at the office, was relieved there were no calls, and made a call of my own. Then I walked across the street to the university, a map cylinder under my arm.

The Italianate buildings, sand-colored with tile roofs, fronted a parade ground, where the cadet corps marched twice a week. In the seventy years since the campus had moved here from the old location downtown, it had come to fill an area of about six hundred acres, and many of the grassy vistas I remembered from childhood had become parking lots.

By the time I reached the shade on the far side of the parade ground I was soaked as well as parched. I sucked in the cool air of the geology building and took the elevator to the third floor. I passed under an emblem that said
LOUISIANA, GEOLOGICAL SURVEY
, 1934, and down a hallway. Lars Kjelgard had his office door half-open when I stopped outside.

“Alan, come in and tell me what brings you to calling me after you don’t come up here in so long,” Lars cried, rising to give me a two-handed shake. A solidly built man in his late thirties, Lars had longish, prematurely gray hair, and a way of killing the king’s English when he spoke.

“A question,” I said. “The kind I only trust you to answer.”

“Somebody trusts me?” Lars snorted. “You know I’m on the Corps of Engineers shit book after I told them they can’t put that canal north of the city without they run into sand before they got the bore holes drilled good.” He made a face of mock pain. “They say I made them all kinds of embarrassment.”

“I bet you did.”

“So what is it now?” he demanded. “They sent you to offer me money to recant?”

“Not exactly.” I laughed. “It’s just a little problem of alluvial geomorphology.”

He nodded gravely. “We do that here,” he said.

I took the topographic map out of the map tube and he made a place for it on his study table. Over the table, on the wall, was a framed certificate from some South Louisiana mayor, declaring Dr. Lars Kjelgard an honorary Cajun.

“You see this island?” I asked, indicating the strip where P. E. and I had ended up.

“Yah, I see it.” He turned his head to give me a puzzled look.

“Any thoughts as to when it was formed?”

“Yah, I got thoughts on that.” He squinted at me. “But why you want to know?”

“Just a project I’m doing,” I said. “I need to know if the place is worth checking for sites earlier than, say, the middle of the last century.”

Lars sighed. “This island is part of an old river meander. I think if you check your Mississippi River Commission maps from the last century you see that until 1886, the river was right against the hills there. Then it meandered west after that, during the flood of ’87. That left this area exposed.”

He pulled out some blue-line maps and put them on the table, over my topographic sheet. I’d seen the maps before. They were issued by the Mississippi River Commission on a periodic basis, and I’d meant to check them before we went to the field again.

I watched him compare two of the maps and saw that what he was saying was true: The island and the floodplain leading to the island had been part of the river until 1887.

“Well,” I said, looking up. “I’m impressed.”

“Yah, it’s kinda like I read your mind, yah?”

“Kind of.”

“Like I see you coming, I know from the map tube you got a project, but the right half your face is sunburned, so I know you been facing north in the afternoon. Now, from the scratches on your arms, I know you’re in briars, but the kind of scratches only match the kind that grows in a certain place in West Feliciana Parish. So, putting three and two together …”

“How did you know, Lars?”

He shrugged. “Because somebody else was in here right before, asking the same questions. That’s how I got the commission maps right here still: I was going over it with her.”

“Her?”

“Yah, pretty girl she was, too, and not married. I look for the fingers, you know, to see rings. None.”

I took a deep breath. “This girl …”

But Lars was fumbling in his desk drawer.

“She give me a card. Here.”

I didn’t have to look at it, because I already knew what it would say:

Courtney & Associates
.

It took me ten minutes to make my way back through the body-melting heat so that by the time I got to my car it was just after four. I’d need another quarter of an hour to reach her office and I didn’t know if she’d still be there.

I was too irked not to try.

I took the road between the lakes, with the raised freeway on my left, and caught Perkins Road just before Stanford. On the maps of the last century, the road was shown as a track to Dr. Perkins’s Plantation. Today it’s a clogged ar tery leading east, from the outskirts of the Garden District to the new suburbs on the city’s eastern edge. About a mile along, on the right, in some land I remembered as woods when I was a little boy, an enterprising developer had built a small park of gray, wooden buildings that housed suites of offices. According to the sign, there was a home improvement service, an insurance office, and a clinical psychologist. I didn’t see any shingle for Courtney & Associates, but then I reminded myself that she was new. If she stayed more than a month she’d probably get around to it.

As I pulled into the parking lot I glimpsed the white Integra a few doors down. I stopped next to it and saw that Suite 107 was the door in front of me. I took a deep breath and pushed it open.

I found myself in a carpeted room with a front desk and a couple of plastic basket chairs. The paintings on the wall were generic rivers and mountains—only a step up from black felt Elvis. There was no one at the desk and no sign that anyone had ever worked there. To the left of the desk a door led into the rear of the complex.

“Hello,” I said. “Is anybody here?”

I heard a shuffling from somewhere in the rear, then steps padding toward me.

“Who is it?” She materialized in the doorway, a manila folder in her hand, and froze as she saw me.

“Oh. It’s you.”

“Who did you think it was?” I asked acidly. “The world beating a path to your door?”

“No, I thought it was the insurance salesman down the way,” she said coolly. “He keeps finding excuses to come in and
orientate
me.”

“And you don’t like him.”

“I don’t like the word
orientate
. And I don’t like being slobbered over by married men.”

“I’d think you were safe,” I said and got a withering look in return.

“So what do you want?” she demanded, folding her arms.

“I want to know why you went to Lars Kjelgard,” I said.

She stared at me for a second, as if trying to decide whether to retreat or brazen it out. Finally she shrugged.

“I was curious about the landform,” she said. “I was wondering if there could possibly be anything old on that island or whether it would have to be recent.”

“I see. You don’t understand yet that this isn’t your project?”

“It seems to me that almost getting killed out there gives me some rights,” she said.

“Our workers’ comp and general liability cover accidents to our people. When somebody else invites themselves along, it throws our legal situation into a cocked hat.”

P. E. Courtney shook her head slowly and tsked.

“I would have thought you could do better than trot out insurance technicalities. You sound like a lawyer, not an archaeologist.”

I folded my arms.

“Speaking of that, where are these famous
associates
that you’ve got on your business card? All I see here is a rental office with a nameplate on the door. Where’s your lab? Where’s your equipment? And don’t reach for your pack. I mean your
real
equipment, like your flotation tank, your water screens, your magnetometer?”

Her lips pursed. “I can get all those things,” she said tightly. “But that isn’t all there is to archaeology. Without theory, without knowing what paradigm you’re trying to falsify, you’re just an antiquarian.”

“Paradigm? Falsify? If you’d been out of graduate school long enough to get rid of that gobbledygook they foist on you, you’d know none of it’s worth Confederate money without fieldwork, without knowing how to handle yourself in the woods, to—”

She pinioned me with her eyes. “I seem to have handled myself well enough today,” she said quietly.

She had me there.

“Look,” I said, carefully changing the subject. “You’ll probably do very well down here. I’m just saying you need some tempering, so to speak—some real fieldwork.”

She nodded, turned suddenly, and started for the back. “Come back,” she said in a voice almost too low to hear. Curious, I followed.

“Since you’re here, I’d like to get your opinion of something,” she said.

I stared, nonplussed. “Sure,” I said finally.

I followed her down the hallway to her private office, on the right. Once inside, I saw a big poster of the sarcophagus lid from the tomb of Pacal at Palenque. On the other wall was a framed photo of an excavation in progress, the earth neatly staked off into squares and people bent over in the half-excavated units. And below this photograph was a small bookshelf, within easy reach of the Formica desk. She took a volume from the shelf. I saw that it was one of the Peabody Museum reports, from Harvard.

“What do you think of this?” she asked.

I turned the work over in my hands.

Excavations at the Polhugh Site, Kentucky (1992–1994)
, the title said.

“I think everybody holds Paul Oldham in high regard,” I said, referring to the author. “I don’t know him well, but he does damn fine work. Why? Did you work with him?”

“You might say that,” she said dryly. “I wrote the book.”

“You what?”

She nodded at the book I was holding. “I wrote it. I also ran the field crew. If you look at the acknowledgments, you’ll see my name.”

I turned to the first part of the book, which listed the people who had participated in the project.

The author especially wishes to thank Miss P. E. Courtney, who ably supervised field operations and contributed both to the analysis and to the writing of the final report
.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“No? It’s easy. Paul Oldham told me I could have this as a doctoral project. He got the funds and then came down maybe twice the whole time to visit the excavation. I did most of the analysis and wrote the manuscript, but when I saw the finished product it had his name on it. I was just the
field supervisor
.”

“Christ.”

She shrugged. “It happens all the time, professors stealing their students’ work. Only this was worse than most, because he was drinking himself into retirement after his wife died and all the other faculty wanted to ease him out without a big flap. So they asked me to go easy, not say anything, and one of them helped me change my dissertation to ceramic analysis, using the same data and bringing in some data from a few other sites.”

I thought of all the times I’d seen Paul Oldham at meetings, giving papers to hushed and admiring audiences. Once I’d even been in the same bar with him, listened to his anecdotes about fieldwork.

I frowned. “But I thought your dissertation had to do with contact period sites in the Yazoo Basin.”

“My M.A. thesis,” she corrected.

Leave it to Freddie St. Ambrose to get it all wrong
, I thought.

“So now you’re pissed at Harvard,” I said.

“Some people there,” she agreed. “But that’s not why I’m here. I’m down here for the reasons I told you, and some personal ones.”

I started to say something, but I had a feeling she wasn’t about to open up any further.

“Okay,” I said, keeping my voice low. “But it’s still going to take more than a rented suite. You’ve got to understand: You can’t just show up one day and expect to get a slice of things. It’s nothing personal—”

“Isn’t it?”

“No. I mean, what…?”

“You Southerners don’t much like independent women,” she said. “Well, I knew it would take some effort to crash the good old boy network. I’m willing to take a few knocks. But don’t expect me not to knock back.”

“Knock back? Seems to me all you’ve been doing is knocking, ever since you’ve been down here. You act like the world is going to open up and welcome you. Well, the profession we’re in isn’t glamorous, like being a university archaeologist. No slide shows to impress students. We make our living from clients that mostly consider us a nuisance. They don’t give a damn if you’ve got an office in Doctor’s Plaza, or if you dress like Panama Jack …”