Relics (6 page)

Carmen nodded at the window, where Joe could be seen ambling away. “There aren’t many women lucky enough to have one good-looking man to take her out and show her a good time, and another one waiting at home to make sure her date brings her back safe.”

“Did he sit out there all this time?”

“Do you think Laurel and I would let your studly friend sit alone on our porch? Oh, no. We invited him in. It was
such
a sacrifice on our part.” Carmen laid the back of her hand across her forehead, trying for the dramatic pose of a silent-movie damsel. The winged pigs flying across the chest of her pajamas detracted from the effect.

“Did he talk?” Faye asked. “Joe can get a little tongue-tied around strangers.”

“Did the man talk? Our friend Laurel could talk to a brick wall and get it to answer back. First, she told him she just
loved
his shoes. I’ve only seen him in his work boots, but he comes in here in these cute little leather shoes—”

“They’re moccasins. He makes them himself.”

“That’s what he said. And leather pants—”

“He makes them, too.”

“Well, neither of us wanted to talk about the pants, because he looked just a little too damn good in them, so Laurel asked him about the leather pouch hanging off his belt—”

Faye opened her mouth to speak, but Carmen waved the interruption away. “I know. He made that, too. And it was full of the coolest things. Arrowheads and stuff. Before I knew it, he’d spent two hours helping Laurel chip a little lopsided pointy thing. It doesn’t look much like an arrowhead, but she’s real proud of it.”

“She should be,” Faye said. “Flintknapping isn’t easy.”

“He was in the middle of telling us how he lived on an island with you—but not
with
you—when he realized how late it was. He got all flustered and said he had to hurry home, because Laurel needed to rest so her leg could heal. And he pretended to go, but I saw him sneak back to the porch so he could wait up for you.”

Faye knew Carmen was hoping she’d confess to being the apex of a budding romantic triangle with Joe and Brent at the other two corners. The truth was so prosaic—Joe had never been more nor less than her friend and, counting this evening with Brent, she’d had exactly three dates since Christmas. Christmas of 1997. Changing the subject was less humiliating than telling the truth.

“I believe I’m ready for bed,” she said, retreating in the direction of her bedroom.

“Take an extra blanket,” Carmen said, following her. “It’s supposed to get cold tonight.”

Faye, who’d been cold since she’d arrived, said, “I don’t suppose there’s central heating.”

“Nope. Only the kerosene space heater here in the parlor. I’m sure it works fine, but I hate the smell of kerosene, so I’ve put off lighting it till I just couldn’t stand the cold.”

“That’s okay. Blankets will do.” Faye was freezing, but she was too proud to be the first one who lit the bad-smelling heater. Maybe her Florida-bred bones would be warmer once she got in bed.

Soon enough, Faye decided that maybe it wasn’t all that cold. She curled up under thick blankets that smelled like they had been dried in the sun, and her sleep was full of gentle seaside winds and blood-warm gulf waters. For a few hours, she was home.

***

It was hot. Faye rolled over, throwing off her blankets and letting them slide to the floor. That was better; she’d be able to get back to sleep if she could just cool off a little, but shedding the blankets hadn’t helped. She was still too hot. There was a ceiling fan in the room, but starting it would have required her to find the cord and yank it. And that would have meant opening her eyes and getting up.

The word “help” cut through her drowsiness.

A voice that wasn’t Carmen’s called out again. “Help! Wake up, somebody! The house is on fire!”

Laurel. The house was on fire and Laurel could barely walk.

Faye opened her eyes to find the room flickering with a light that had nothing to do with dawn. The air above her was a smoky haze that reflected the light in a dark, ruddy glow. She rolled off the bed onto the floor, hoping to find some cooler, cleaner air that her lungs could tolerate. Where to go? There were two doors to her room and two windows. One of the doors led to the house’s central hall, but it was part of a wall that was already on fire, so it was best to leave it closed. The windows appealed to her as the quickest and easiest way out, and Faye instinctively wanted to jump out the window and run, but she couldn’t leave Laurel.

“Somebody help me! I can’t reach my crutches.”

On all fours, Faye lunged across the floor and reached up for the old-fashioned iron doorknob of the door that connected her room to Laurel’s. It was hot, but not so hot that she couldn’t turn it. The opening door revealed Laurel, cowering on the floor against the room’s outside wall. Her crutches were propped against the wall on the far side of her bed, and that wall was on fire. Flames licked at the crutches and reached out for the bed where Laurel had been sleeping. The younger woman’s hands scrabbled at the wall, trying to find something sturdy enough to help her pull herself onto her feet.

Faye crawled to the window nearest Laurel and tried to lift it. It was locked, and the locks were four feet above her head. She didn’t dare stand up into the toxic smoke that might blind her or scald her lungs. Instead, she grabbed the bedside table with one hand, slinging a lamp and a paperback book to the floor. The table was old and crafted of solid walnut, so it had a satisfying heft as Faye hurled it at the window. It crashed easily through the old, rippled glass.

Using the base of the lamp, she knocked the broken glass out of the window frame, then dragged in a lungful of decent air and closed her eyes. Raising herself just enough to sit, crouched over, in the open window, she grasped Laurel under both armpits and lifted the younger woman to her lap. Then she let herself fall backward, and the two women toppled out.

Faye’s head hit the ground with far more force than she would have preferred. The impact drove the air from her lungs and, as she struggled for breath, her field of vision collapsed into a narrow tunnel focused only on the hypnotic dance of the uncontrolled fire. It frightened her to watch the tunnel narrow, snuffing the orange and red flames, bit by bit. She needed to get them further away, but she was losing consciousness and there was nothing she could do about it.

Where was Carmen? Why wasn’t she screaming for help? Had she escaped? Faye did her best to fight off the encroaching darkness, but she failed.

***

Faye felt two small hands grasp her under the arms, then pull her a yard or so in the proper direction, which was away from the burning house. She opened her eyes to see Laurel crawl another few feet, grab Faye under her arms, and pull her again. Laurel might not have the full use of her legs, but she was doggedly stubborn. While Faye was unconscious, Laurel had managed to drag her a safe distance from the house.

From Faye’s flat-on-her-back viewpoint, the fire was spectacular. Flames burst out of the walls beneath a tin roof supported by rafters that must soon fail. The fire reached for them out of every window of the all-wood structure that had been seasoning for a hundred years or more. It would burn fast and hot, and it would leave almost nothing behind.

Her head clearing, Faye sat up. “Have you seen Carmen? Did she get out?”

The firelight illuminated Laurel’s terrified eyes. “I don’t know. Maybe she got out her window. She’s on the other side of the house. I can’t…”

“I’ll go look,” Faye said, rolling over onto all fours, shifting her weight onto her legs, then kneeling for a moment. She pushed off the ground and managed to stand up and take a wobbly step.

Staggering and weaving like a drunkard, she made her way around the house. Before she rounded the first corner, she was forced to drop to her knees. This was going to be hard. She tried to rise again but, instead, fell on her face and laid there. Maybe, if she rested a minute…

She heard Joe’s voice crying her name and raised her torso, hoping to find enough breath to answer him. He was a shadow, silhouetted against the burning building, and he was charging the dragon’s flaming breath to look for her.

“Joe.” Her voice was barely a whisper against the fire’s crackling roar. “Over here. I’m over here.”

Joe could track wild animals by the sound of their paws hitting the ground as they fled through the forest, and his acute hearing picked up her faint voice.

“Who else is here?” he bellowed. “Is there anyone else in the house?” He stood ready to throw himself into the furnace and Faye couldn’t answer him. She’d intended to take the same risk herself, but she couldn’t make herself say the words that would spur Joe into the flames.

Laurel did it for her. She crept toward them, dragging her wounded foot. “Carmen’s in there. She was sleeping in the back room on the other side of the house.”

Joe bolted past them. Faye reached out to stop him, but she had no strength. Oblivion was sneaking up behind her, ready to throw his black hood over her head again, ready to make her sleep.

Before Joe had taken three steps, an earsplitting blast knocked him to the ground. “The LP tank,” whispered Faye. “The fire got to the LP tank.” She watched two of the exterior weight-bearing walls collapse, taking the tin roof to the ground with them. If Carmen was still under that roof, even Joe couldn’t save her now.

Chapter Eight

For Faye, watching the fire was like taking a slide-show tour of hell. She slid in and out of awareness, watching flames rise out of the old house’s windows. The tremendous updraft of hot air flung sparks so high that they blended with the stars in the sky and the stars in her dazzled eyes. Then her conscious mind flicked off completely and she slept for a time.

When she was aware of her surroundings again, firefighters—with the help of a steady drizzle of rain—were dousing the grass fires that had spread like cancers from the smoking heap that sat where a house had once been. She saw no sign of Carmen. Brent had arrived at some point, and he sat between her and Laurel. He seemed to be devoting all his efforts to tending their minor injuries, which struck Faye as an ill omen. If Carmen had been pulled from the flames, she surely would need a doctor’s care more than Faye and Laurel. She tried to ask Brent about Carmen, but nothing escaped her lips but a sigh. Putting her hand up to touch the jangling ache on the back of her head, she found a lump that felt as big as her bony fist. The lump and the hair around it were crusted with something that could only be dried blood. She slept again.

***

Someone standing very close to her was talking. “The place was a black hole before I got here. We’re cooling things down now. I’ve called for an arson dog and handler. A couple of deputies, too. Should be able to retrieve the victim’s body soon.”

Faye tried to focus on the man’s face. His voice was so calm and his words were so ugly. She would have thought that familiarity would have made him calloused to sudden death, but his face said something different. There were tears in his eyes and sweat in his reddish-blonde hair. His uniform told her that he was Fire Marshal Adam Strahan, but the tears said that he was a human being, too. Faye let sleep take her again, because it made her feel safe to know that someone like Adam Strahan was in charge.

Chapter Nine

“…seems obvious. Happens every year on the first cold night. Somebody puts an old space heater that worked just fine last year too close to their bedclothes. When it happens in a house this old, the whole thing goes up. Ain’t nothing burns quicker than hundred-year-old heart pine.”

The fire marshal was speaking to Brent. Faye’s disoriented brain focused on the odd contrast between his ruddy, freckled complexion and Brent’s smooth tan.

She was lying on a couch in a strange room. The light streaming through the window told her it was late morning. She could see the church through that window, which meant she must be in the house assigned to the men working on the Sujosa project. The church steeple pierced a sky that was the peculiar blue of an Alabama winter.

A neatly folded pile of someone else’s clothes lay on the coffee table in front of her, topped with a new toothbrush, still in its wrapper. It took her a moment to realize that these things were for her. She turned her head away. The fire had taken everything but the pajamas on her back.

Seeing that she was awake, Brent came to her side. “Irene Montrose brought some of her mother’s clothes to you, and some of her own clothes to Laurel. When you’re up to it, I’ll help you make a list of things you need, and we’ll send someone to Alcaskaki to pick them up.”

Faye found her voice. The smoke had left it raspy and faint. “Heater.”

Fire Marshal Strahan’s eyes were kind. “Dr. Martinez must have been very sleepy when she lit it, because it was way too close to her bed. Lord knows how old the thing was. It set her bedclothes on fire, then…well, you know what happened to the house.”

“Carmen?” If only she could clean her mouth and throat of a long night’s worth of smoke and pent-up tears, she would be able to manage sentences of more than one word.

“We found her. I’m sorry. She didn’t make it.”

The defeat in his voice set Faye’s cleansing tears loose. She found her voice. It was raspy, but it worked. “That was the only heater we had. Carmen wouldn’t have done that—put it in her room.” A shuddering cough and more tears interrupted her, but she pressed on. “She wouldn’t have made herself warm and left Laurel and me in the cold.”

“People don’t think straight when they’re sleepy,” Brent offered.

A chill breeze brought the sound of tires on gravel and slamming car doors through the open window. An old man pushed open the church’s double doors, welcoming men in suits and women in sober dresses into the sanctuary.

Faye, overwhelmed, looked out the window and took refuge in the vagaries of others. “It seems strange for people to be going about their business so soon,” she said reproachfully.

“Death puts people in mind of prayer,” Fire Marshal Strahan said.

Faye picked Ronya Smiley out of the group, recognizing her by her size. The defiant air was gone, and her jeans had been replaced by a simple dress in a cobalt blue the color of her eyes. Holding little Zack’s hand, she walked quietly beside a bearded man as big as she was.

“I thought I was going to have to fight Leo Smiley to keep him from walking into that fire,” the marshal said. “Your friend Mr. Mantooth was just as bad. It was all I could do to convince them that Dr. Martinez was already dead by the time you hauled yourself and Laurel Cook out that window. Five more minutes, and you would’ve been dead, too.”

The last of the Sujosa filed into the church—a young mother with her baby and an elderly man, his feeble steps steadied by a sturdy young boy.

“I feel like I should be in church today, too,” said Faye, who wasn’t sure whether she wanted to thank God for her deliverance or challenge Him to explain the mystical purpose behind Carmen’s ugly death.

“We wouldn’t be welcome,” Brent said as the church’s double doors swung shut and separated the Sujosa from the rest of the world.

***

After spending the morning sleeping, Faye awakened at noon and headed out for the fire site. The fire marshal tolerated her kibitzing presence fairly well. She obediently stayed out of the way and outside the footprint of the ruined house. Her questions about the cause of the fire and the role of the kerosene heater were short, infrequent, and to the point. In return for her good behavior, she learned a great deal about how investigations into the origins and causes of fires were conducted. Also, she was invited to call the Fire Marshal by his given name, Adam. It was a productive Sunday afternoon, particularly for someone whose head had been banged hard on the ground about twelve hours before.

The bright afternoon sun belied the cold wind whipping through the valley. It numbed the neat, tiny stitches that Brent had embroidered across the back of her head. Pulling the hood of her borrowed parka over her head to leave as little of her face exposed as possible, she wished for a grown-up-sized pair of mittens like the ones her grandmother used to knit. Adam and his crew were working in their shirtsleeves. They must wonder why she was dressed for an Arctic expedition.

Let them wonder,
she thought.
I’d like to see them survive a Florida summer. In cold weather, you can always put more clothes on. Hot weather’s different. There’s a limit to how much you can take off.

Adam’s deputies had removed the remains of the tin roof from the debris. There were so few standing walls left in the vicinity of Carmen’s bedroom, she could observe them at work as easily as if they were standing outside. Watching an origin-and-cause investigation put her in mind of her own work.

“Fire leaves a trail of evidence, just like any other killer,” Adam said. “It burns up and out, so you have to peel the debris back little by little, starting with the last thing to burn and working backward through time. If you get in a hurry, you can miss something important, and there’s no way to get it back.”

“Just like archaeology,” Faye said. Adam nodded in assent, then went back to work.

The arson dog, however, was a remarkably useful tool with no analog in archaeology. The clues Faye uncovered in her work rarely retained enough odor to tickle even a dog’s sensitive nose, which was probably a good thing, considering the amount of time she spent digging up garbage dumps and privies. Samson, a sleek black Labrador retriever, was trained to identify twenty common fuels used to set fires. These fuels, known to arson investigators as “accelerants,” included gasoline, diesel, kerosene, and more than a dozen other esoteric chemicals. Samson could find them all.

“This fire may be a tough one for Samson,” Adam said. “The tin roof held the heat in for a long time, so there won’t be a whole lot of accelerant left behind for him to smell.”

But Samson performed magnificently. He yanked his handler across what was left of Carmen’s bedroom, sniffed the remains of the kerosene heater immediately, and sat down.

Adam, who had stepped outside the charred footprint of the house to give Samson room to work, said, “That’s how he tells us he’s found something—he sits down. And let me tell you, Charlotte better be quick with the doggie treats, because Samson knows when he’s been a good boy.”

While Samson’s handler, Charlotte, retrieved a handful of treats from the bag at her waist and doled them out to the happy dog, a deputy collected samples from the area around the heater.

“Your best bet in this kind of fire is to find accelerant residue in the cracks between the floorboards. It burns off the surface of the floor, but the stuff in the cracks is protected,” Adam said as the deputy sealed his samples first in glass jars, then put the jars inside unused paint cans for transport.

Samson sniffed around the room for other fascinating smells, but he was unrewarded. He returned twice to the bed where Carmen had lain, sniffing what was left of her pillow, then looking at his handler for guidance.

“Do you smell something, Samson?” she said. “Make up your mind, boy.”

Samson sniffed the pillow one more time, then moved on.

In the end, the handler abandoned the search. Nothing in the whole house tickled Samson’s arson-detecting nose except the area around the heater.

“Looks to me like she lit the heater and set it down at the foot of the bed on the bedspread, where it was dragging on the floor,” Adam said. “Then she turned over in her sleep and knocked the heater on its side, spilling the kerosene. It wouldn’t take much for a heater that old to light a fire.”

Faye didn’t like to think that such a simple mistake could end a life. Carmen deserved better.

As they turned to leave, Samson went back one more time to sniff what was left of Carmen’s pillow.

“Okay,” Adam said, “I’m going to collect a sample of that pillow Samson likes so well.”

Having collected the sample and added it to the chain-of-custody form that would track it through the forensic lab’s labyrinthine storage system, Adam shook the ashes from his boots, nodded good-bye to Faye, and walked away from the ruined house, saying, “Now I’ve got to go watch the damned autopsy. It’s not my favorite way to spend a Sunday afternoon, but it’s better than waiting for the coroner to send me a written report. The man’s slower than Christmas.”

***

A room was found for Faye and Laurel in the tall green house where the men slept, so she had a place to lay her head. Brent had taken Laurel to Alcaskaki to shop for both of them, so Faye would soon have deodorant and all the other necessities of life. Feeling drained and sad, she wandered over to the office she had shared with Carmen and sat at her desk. Work would bring more solace than the questions and comments of her colleagues.

Using a magnifying glass, she studied a series of aerial photographs that dated back as far as the 1930s. She and Magda had spent the past month poring over these photos in search of the perfect spot to excavate, but that was before Faye had set foot on the site. Maybe she should spend some time ground-truthing the theories she and Magda had developed from afar.

There was remarkably little change from one photo to the next. Nearly every house in the settlement had been built before the first shot was taken in 1930. The photo series told her that a house trailer had stood behind DeWayne Montrose’s house in the 1970s and that the pole barn where Ronya Smiley stored her pottery supplies was built after 2001. The grocery store was of recent construction—for the Sujosa—having been built sometime in the late 1940s. She could tell that the road into the settlement had first been paved in the 1940s, but many of the peripheral roads that meandered over the countryside weren’t paved even yet.

From the pattern of footpaths that led into an open area behind the grocery store, Faye and Magda had, at first glance, judged that there was a good chance some kind of a garbage dump had once been there. This had been Raleigh’s stated rationale for beginning the archaeological portion of the Sujosa project in that area, but he’d missed the critical clues that had made Magda reject the notion of excavating the supposed dump site. First, closer scrutiny had failed to reveal the type of debris and disturbed soil that should have been visible if someone had operated an unauthorized dump of any size. Second, and more telling, the site was situated on land that had been heavily treed in 1939, so it was doubtful that anything was dumped there before World War II. Eyewitness accounts placed the Sujosa in this valley in the mid-1700s. Only God knew where they had thrown their trash back then, but Faye was fairly certain that this wasn’t the spot.

To Faye’s mind, there was only one way for an archaeologist to contribute to the search for the Sujosa’s heritage. She needed to uncover an artifact that was datable to the earliest years of the Sujosa settlement, either by laboratory testing or archaeological context,
and
could be linked to the material culture of a particular group of people. A piece of Delftware, for instance, would fairly well scream “Holland!” to a knowledgeable observer.

The remains of a very early Sujosa structure would be helpful in much the same way. Even if she found only darkened soil and a few splinters of wood marking the site, she could glean an amazing amount of useful information from the residue. The wood could be radiocarbon-dated, and information about the building’s construction methods could be gleaned from patterns in the soil. These data points might point a finger at its builders and where they came from and when they lived.

Uncovering both a structure and, on the same stratum, implements that had survived the Sujosa’s ocean crossing and centuries in the ground would be like winning the archaeological lottery. But she and her small crew could turn over only so many trowels full of soil in a day. Where should they dig?

The Broad River, named by a pioneer with no imagination, had carved the Sujosa’s valley, and it dominated Faye’s collection of photos. The river’s breadth suggested that it had not been bridged until fairly recent times. The Sujosa had lived on the east bank of the river, self-sufficient, a hundred years or more before Alcaskaki, ten miles west, was founded, so they wouldn’t have needed to travel there regularly. Once Alcaskaki was built, though, surely they would have visited on occasion to trade or to post mail, most likely crossing the river by ferry.

There were several hundred people in the Sujosa community now. How many had there been two hundred years ago? Three hundred years ago? No one knew. Faye couldn’t even hazard a guess—yet. An abandoned ferry site, presumably at the current site of the bridge, where the banks were low and the river was shallow, would be a good place to look for signs of early settlement. She stood up to tack the photos up on the wall.

The door opened and Joe stuck his head in. “Playing with your pictures again?”

“Yeah,” she said, trying to push a thumbtack into the rough wood that paneled the office’s walls.

Joe set a package on her desk and brushed her puny hand aside. His thumb, roughened and calloused by work and years of flintknapping, mashed the tack into submission. “You making plans for a dig? I thought Raleigh already picked the place.”

“Well, he picked wrong.”

“He seems like such a smart man,” Joe said, running his fingers over a photo that showed a high river bluff upstream from the bridge.