Slave Graves (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 1) (7 page)

HELP US SAVE OUR FUTURE

THE BRIDGE WILL BE THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF OUR HERITAGE

OF OUR ENVIRONMENT, OF OUR LIFE.

RED ALERT RED ALERT .

“It’s just signed ‘BUTTERFLIES’,” she said.

“How did it get here?” said Frank, looking out at the road.

“Maybe she came over when we were up at the porch,” said Maggie.

“At least her coming here brought in a breeze,” said Frank, smiling, his hand up in the cooler air.

“A breeze is strange coming this time of day,” observed Maggie. “There’re no clouds.”

“Maybe that guy brought it,” said Frank pointing out at the river.

The leaves of the trees and bushes around the edges of the site area rustled slightly . Out on the river they could see a small section of ripples move across the surface and disappear into the shore reeds. Then, through the leaves of the riverbank trees, they saw a white work boat approaching. It was almost forty feet long, low to the water, narrow with a cuddy cabin in the bow. A long white wooden awning extended part of the length of the craft suspended on iron plumbing pipes built into the side of the boat. In the center was a rectangular engine box, its top resting partly open to cool the engine running under it in the bright afternoon heat. A rusting exhaust pipe extended up through a hole in the awning, For all its fast lines the craft moved slowly, its engine barely turning revolutions, with each chug a small puff of gray smoke coming from the stack. The craft inched toward a mooring on a crooked tree limb snag staggering from the shallow water about fifty feet from shore.

A lanky muscular man, old and deeply tanned with a white beard, in canvas colored shorts and bare-chested, stood at the side of the boat, steering with a vertical shaft device attached to pulleys and cables along the gunwales of the boat to the open tiller in the stern. The man reached down inside the boat, threw a switch and the engine idled. Then he went to the stern and, watching carefully the drift of the boat, anticipated his best spot and threw out his anchor. He moved to the bow and when the boat glided to the tree limb, he expertly tied a loop of his mooring line. The man snugged the anchor line and shut down the engine. He opened a can of beer and, observing them on the shoreline, stood silently, drinking.

“You’re going to meet Soldado.” said the Pastor.

Frank turned from watching the visitor and moved back toward the bow end of the shipwreck.

“I’m going to start working on the starboard side at location I. That is where the side of the ship starts to straighten out on an eighty foot ship. If we can find her width, her beam, we’ll estimate her potential length.”

“Pastor, help me get this pump working,” said Maggie.

Soldado came ashore a half hour later. He was a towering man, of advanced age. His full white hair and muscular body proclaimed robust health. He walked up to the Pastor and nodded a greeting. Then he looked around at Frank and Maggie.

“So you two are Jake’s experts.” There was a slight accent to his words, perhaps Spanish, perhaps French, Frank could not be sure.

Frank held out his hand, “I’m Frank Light and this is Maggie Davis.”

“Jake Terment, he send you here?” asked Soldado as he shook hands with Frank.

“He asked me to come in and look at the site, yes,” said Frank.

Soldado looked at him, holding his head slightly at an angle to the left side so that his eyes were tilted and the tip of his beard folded slightly.

“You look honest.” He continued, his voice having a slight Hispanic accent. “Let me tell you something for your own good.”

“What’s that?” said Frank.

“That Jake, he’s up to something.”

“Speaking of Jake, he was just here,” said the Pastor.

“I can smell him. The New York perfume he and that runt Spyder put on themselves.”

“He told Frank to keep you off the property,” said the Pastor.

Soldado glanced at Frank. “I want no trouble with you, Doctor. I’ll leave.”

“No,” said Frank. “Whether you leave or stay is none of my business. I’m just here to look for parts of an old shipwreck. Nothing else.”

“Maybe you are all right,” said the Pastor, smiling at Frank.

Soldado said, “There’s wrecks beached up on the river. You might learn something looking them over.”

“We’d like to see them,” said Frank.

“I’ll come by tomorrow midday. Take you out on my boat.” He started to walk away, then stopped. “Maybe I can help you in some other ways.” He paused as if he were going to speak again, then walked back to his boat.

The Pastor was already beginning to dig. ‘‘Maggie, tell me something,” asked Frank, as he prepared his digging gear.

“What’s that?”

“What really happened on that site in Southern Maryland?”

“It wasn’t the problem everyone thought it was. I was never upset. I simply made a decision and stood by it.”

“I read it was a site of a Confederate spy ring. Their artifacts were discovered right in the middle of the parking lot of a new shopping center.”

“The artifacts needed attention, needed to be preserved, needed study. I stood up for the history, that’s all. I said the local businessman had to stop his paving machine until I finished.”

She went on, “Then the Maryland state legislator from that area called my department and I was moved from the job. The paving machine started up an hour after I left.”

“I heard you were kept at a desk in Baltimore.”

“There have not been many field assignments since that one, that’s true.”

“We miss your work in the journals.”

“I got this assignment only because the Pastor requested me personally.”

“Look,” Frank said, “Jake Terment just wants to build his bridge. He has a right to do that.”

“I guess what I’d like to understand is what you’re going to do here. This may be a good site, something we can all be excited about.”

“You think I’ll just let Jake Terment concrete it over?”

“Will you? Maybe your school needs one of those big Terment Company contributions.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll do my job.”

“That’s what I was hoping you’d say.” She paused, “There’s something I haven’t told you.”

“OK.”

“There’s not going to be any help from my office on this one.”

“No backup, no analysis, no conservation lab?”

“Right. My boss told me before I came down here. She said, ‘Don’t bother to send over for any remote sensing equipment. You’re on your own. It’s in all use on other jobs.’”

“I’m afraid,” said Frank, “That I can’t get anything from the university here in time.”

“The problem is that our department is small,” said Maggie.” My boss is a political appointee and unfortunately, knows more about how to get votes for the Governor.”

“The work will just take a little longer, that’s all,” said Frank.

“You and I both realize the work will take a whole lot longer without the instruments. As a result, we’ll probably overlook a good portion of the history here,” said Maggie.

She stared at Frank, and he felt the pressure of that stare. “Let’s see what we find before we get too excited,” said Frank.

Maggie walked away without another word.

A slight cracking noise woke Frank. His habit, learned during the war, was still there. He could wake up with the slightest noise. He looked at his watch. Three in the morning. The night was black. In patches of sky through the overhanging trees, he could see some of the late night summer constellations. Only a bit of starlight filtered through the leafy overhang of branches and into the side of the porch where he had put an old mattress from the house. Maggie’s light on the second floor was off. She was still asleep. Strangely, there was no insect noise. Something had interrupted their night talk. As his eyes adjusted to the starlight, he could see shapes of bushes and shrubs. Then he heard the noise again. He recognized the sound. Dry twigs snapping. He saw light flicker off the leaves of a large tree far by the riverbank. He could not see the ground beneath the tree because the great boxwoods were in the way.

He remembered the paper they had found yesterday. He decided to investigate quickly, to see if he could catch someone tampering with the excavation. He stepped off the porch into the darkness, making no noise. He was dressed only in his thin underwear shorts. The dew felt cool under his bare feet as he moved carefully towards the site, toes feeling the way, slugging against the blades of the tall grass. As he drew close to the box bushes, he smelled burning wood. He saw a few sparks of light traveling into the night and coming from the riverbank at the far end of the site. He dropped to his knees and crawled, gradually pushing his head through the tall grass until he saw the campfire. It was a tiny blaze, flickering, crackling. The fire was fueled with twigs and small branches, with only enough energy to send weak shadows. A man stepped from the dark behind the fire. Even in the darkness and the distance of more than a hundred yards, he could recognize Soldado’s tall figure.

The old man faced the site and raised his hands in an arc from his thighs until his fingers touched over his head. He was silent, wordless. The firelight flickered across his body, naked except for a short cape drawn over his shoulders. A strange metal shield designed in the shape of an orange jaguar’s face hung by a gold chain across his groin. For a few moments he moved slowly towards the wreck. Then he stopped and stared directly at the spot where Frank was hidden in the tall grass. Sweat suddenly ran down Frank’s face. Frank did not move, trembling slightly with the fear of the unknown, an anxiety he had not felt since long ago nights in Vietnam. Frank could see Soldado’s face, the intensity, and he could see brilliant colors on the man’s chest and face. There were streaks of shining paint, wide swaths of brilliant yellow, black and white, changing in the shimmering light from moment to moment as the small fire sparked.

Then the old man looked away. Frank could not tell from the man’s movements whether he had been detected. Soldado held two small wires, one in each hand. He brought these wires down to a level with his waist and slightly in front of his body. He moved ahead. With the fire directly behind him, he cast a long shadow out in front. He was black against the fire and Frank could not see the details of his face anymore.

Soldado held the wires in his hands pointed forward, his multicolored body glistening at the edges where the firelight reflected from it, his feet finding their way without error among the tiny stretched white surveyor twines that Maggie had so carefully measured over the wreck. The tempo of his walk followed a rhythm that Frank easily sensed, the footprints in the earth like soft animal paw prints brushing a taut drum skin, yet without noise. Frank recognized the costume, ancient Mayan. His mind sensed the primitive unsung music, like a beat he might have studied that derived from Africa or early America, even Asia. He thought of Soldado as an improbable yet very much in the flesh witch doctor, like an ancient native making his prayer or magic with fire and nakedness and shadows.

After a few steps the rods trembled in Soldado’s hands and crossed each other. Soldado stopped and with the toe of his right foot drew a mark of crossed lines on the muddy soil. Soldado then continued moving forward. In a few minutes the rods moved again. He repeated the marking with his foot at another spot. Soldado reached a far point in the site area, turned and raised his hands again to the sky, the rods pointed directly over his head. He remained this way for a few moments, very still, the firelight illuminating the front of his body, luminescent with the multicolored paint, terrifying in the power he seemed to exude.

Soldado dropped his arms and returned to the fire. He sat down cross-legged, his back to Frank. He stayed in this position for another half hour, swaying from side to side. Then Soldado stood up and pushed some earth into the small flames with the side of his foot. The fire sparked and died and the night was dark again. The weak starlight was unable to penetrate the blackness of the overhanging great trees around the site.

Frank felt an insect crawling under his stomach as he lay flat on the ground. He twisted his back silently. He did not want to scratch for the bug, did not want to alert Soldado. Eventually the insect found its way back into the earth and the irritation ceased.

Frank listened. In a few moments he heard Soldado wading through the shallow river water towards his boat moored out in the darkness. The footsteps in the water made a wet sound like fish jumping. Finally he heard creaking wooden floorboards in Soldado’s boat. There began the slow throb of a workboat engine, and Frank heard the craft rippling the river water as it eased into the channel. The night quiet returned. He stood up and began to walk slowly back to the porch. His exhausted mind tossed with images of orange and black butterflies dancing with yellow witchdoctors as he drifted off to the few hours of sleep he had left before the summer heat began again.

At six AM the noise of Maggie and Pastor working at the site woke him up. Frank pulled on his shorts and walked over. The Pastor had brought some food, prepared by the people at his church. While he sipped a cup of coffee Frank glanced out at the river. Soldado’s boat was nowhere in sight.

“Soldado woke me up out here last night,” he said, “The old guy was out by the site, singing and walking around naked carrying dousing rods.”

The Pastor grinned. “He calls his ritual the song of a thousand men. I’m acquainted with folks who tell me he has talked to their dead family members. Myself, I’ve seen him sit up all night saying his Mexican words,” said the Pastor. “Nobody around here can understand what he’s saying.”

“His body was painted and he had a cape over his shoulders.”

“His mother made up that Mexican costume for him. He says it’s from the Yucatan. You’re right. He’s close to naked in that rig. Soldado makes a little money finding water. When a person wants to dig a new well, they get Soldado to come up to their farm and locate the best spot for the well. ‘Course he don’t get painted up for that.”

“I’ve never seen dousing rods,” said Maggie.