Lovely in Her Bones (11 page)

“I figured you put him up to it.”

Tessa’s smile faded. “No, dear,
you
did. You pushed.” Dismissing the matter, she turned to Jake, as if being the only male present made him the person in charge. She fished the computer disks out of her canvas purse and held them up. “I have brought these for the computer,” she announced brightly, in tones suggesting that the previous conversation with Mary Clare had not taken place. “My poor husband drove all the way back to campus to get them, and then he got so caught up with his mail and his laundry and whatnot, that he drove off without them.” She laughed fondly, inviting them all to share her amusement in her absentminded professor. She neglected to mention that she had unobtrusively moved the disks out of sight and had not reminded him to take them. “So he called me from a gas station somewhere and asked me to bring them up here. So here I am!”

“Yes, ma’am,” answered Jake warily. “Milo will be real glad to get them. Will you be staying the night? I mean, I’d be glad to bring your things up from the car.”

Tessa’s answer was addressed to Jake, but it was meant for Mary Clare. “Thank you, but that won’t be necessary. Alex and I will be staying at a motel room in Laurel Cove. We feel it will be safer that way.”

Nice double entendre, thought Elizabeth.

Jake shifted uncomfortably, sensing another outbreak of bickering. “Would you like me to take you up to the site? It’s past dark, so Dr. Lerche should be quitting pretty soon. He doesn’t like to work much by lantern light.”

“I’m quite aware of that,” said Tessa, courteously reinforcing her status as incumbent. “Yes, let’s go and see him.”

Outside a car horn honked.

Jake jumped up as if he had heard the bugle of the Seventh Cavalry. “That’s Milo! He’ll be happy to take
you up to the site. Dr. Lerche has been wanting to see him anyway.”

“Who hasn’t?” muttered Elizabeth.

    Milo was careful to shine the flashlight on the path in front of Tessa. She had asked nervously about snakes when they started out, and even though he assured her that they had not seen any, she still walked with the tentative steps of one who is expecting to be ambushed. She had not spoken, except to make a few polite inquiries about the project, which Milo had answered in monosyllables. He was glad of the silence, much preferring the crickets’ mindless chirp to Tessa’s. The tedium of a day with the bureaucracy and the wait at the bus station-general store had exhausted him more than digging trenches ever did. He had taken the monitor back to the motel room and made sure it was working before hurrying back to the church to spend the evening with Elizabeth. He had not anticipated the melodrama that awaited him: his boss’s wife and mistress staring each other down like angry cats.

Milo wondered what had transpired while he had been in Laurel Cove. It was embarrassing to see Alex entangled in such a situation. Detached and unemotional Alex! He wished he hadn’t brought Elizabeth along on this dig. It could not have given her a very good impression of anthropologists. The thought that he had not been Prince Charming, either, flickered through his mind, but was dismissed in a flood of justification.

“Are we almost there?” asked Tessa.

“Almost.”

“I don’t want to fall into an open grave.” She shuddered.

“There, see the light in the clearing? That’s the lantern in the tent.” Rather awkwardly, he took her wrist. “I’ll show you how to get there, so you won’t fall.”

Tessa hung back. “Milo, I know this is silly …”

The entire day had been a farce, Milo thought bitterly, but he waited for her to continue.

“Could you just ask Alex to put the skulls away before I go in? I know I sound terribly squeamish for an anthropologist’s wife, but it’s so dark and quiet out here.” Her voice shook. “I don’t think I could take much more.”

“Sure,” said Milo, relieved at being asked to do something that was merely stupid instead of embarrassing. “You wait here. I’ll come back for you.”

He walked the last fifteen feet across the cemetery to the tent. Whatever Alex had wanted to see him about would have to be postponed, he supposed. He wondered what it was, tempted to ask before he announced Tessa’s presence to her husband. Milo pulled back the tent flap. “Hey, Alex …”

Milo’s years of studying forensic anthropology compared to this as a grainy out-of-date war movie might resemble actual combat. The outlines were similar, but the emotions were so lacking as to render the actual event unrecognizable. Part of Milo’s mind noted the curious difference between the clinical reality of a deceased stranger on a stainless-steel table, and the newly murdered body of one’s friend and colleague.

Alex Lerche lay slumped over his worktable with outstretched arms. Milo looked at the back of his head, and thought, “A broken bowl of Jell-O,” wondering if the image made him less likely to throw up or more so. Beside Alex on the table lay a bloody stone tomahawk, the souvenir kind sold in Cherokee and made in Taiwan. It consisted of a real stone tied to a pine stick with red plastic threads, adorned with chicken feathers dyed lime green and orange. The sight would have been ridiculous but for the blood on the tomahawk and the line of Indian skulls jeering in the lantern light.

D
ANIEL
H
UNTER
C
OLTSFOOT
studied the wanted posters on the sheriff’s bulletin board, trying to decide which of them to cover up with his craft fair announcement. Surely some victimless, drug-related offense could be obscured for a few days for such a worthy notice as the Nunwati Nature-Friends Herb and Craft Day. Daniel enjoyed telling people that Nunwati was the Cherokee word for medicine, and that even though none of their members was actually a Native American, they liked to think that they were Indian in spirit, keeping the old traditions alive with pottery works and leathercraft shops.

Coltsfoot and his girlfriend, Patricia Elf, ran a health food store in Laurel Cove, doing a thriving business among tourists who mistook them for Indians, an error which they did not discourage. Actually, Coltsfoot and Patricia were not even picturesque locals: he was from Baltimore, and she was a New Yorker, but they managed to obscure this with homespun outfits and colonial hairstyles. Daniel had even added Coltsfoot to the end of his name in an effort to sound more “ethno-regional,” happily unaware that the coltsfoot plant went by another name in the eastern Appalachians. Behind his back the bemused locals referred to the plant and to Daniel himself as “Dummyweed.” In their health food store they spoke reverently of Amelanchier Stecoah, and they liked to be thought colleagues of hers, but in fact she had taken no notice of them. Once Daniel had gone to see her about purchasing some ginseng, but she had declined to do business
with them. That had been two years ago, when the Nunwati Nature-Friends were new to the area. Daniel thought that he might try again sometime, now that the group was more widely known. Their
Nunwati Newsletter
was selling well at the commercial campgrounds and from the lobby of the Cherokee Wigwam Motel. Futhermore, Daniel had attained a certain measure of respectability by becoming a deputy sheriff. He had not intended to join forces with the county law enforcement officials, but he was rather pleased at having had the honor thrust upon him. It had happened the previous fall when seven maximum-security prisoners overpowered a guard and escaped from a work detail across the mountains in East Tennessee. News of cars stolen and hostages taken had filled even the pages of the biweekly county newspaper, and the local radio station urged its listeners to take care, predicting that the convicts would soon be at their very doors.

Patricia Elf became so frightened at the thought of these marauders at large that she refused to work in the health food shop alone. After several days of confinement in the shop, Daniel decided that there must be a better way to pacify Patricia, a way that would enable him to sleep past eight in the morning without eliciting reproachful lectures on his disregard for her safety. Daniel decided to buy a gun. Marty at the Wampum Store (“Gold and Silver Bought and Sold”) offered him a Saturday night special that somebody had traded in for an I.D. bracelet, so Daniel bought the gun and went over to the sheriff’s office to apply for a permit. It was a first for Sheriff Duncan Johnson. Most of his constituents owned rifles and shotguns, which did not require permits, and he had never before been required to issue one.

After a futile search for pistol permit forms, Duncan Johnson mulled over the situation and hit upon a solution that seemed to him both simple and
practical: he appointed Coltsfoot deputy sheriff. Deputies were entitled to have sidearms without benefit of permit, so Johnson swore him in and sent him about his business. Of course, Daniel did not have a uniform, nor did he participate in any legal functions; it was understood that his appointment was merely a formality designed to foil the bureaucrats in charge of permits. Duncan Johnson would not have dreamed of allowing Dummyweed to patrol the county. The fact that Coltsfoot personified the law on the night of Alex Lerche’s murder was pure coincidence—or, as Milo considered it, the malevolence of fate.

Duncan Johnson had gone to the annual North Carolina Sheriffs’ Convention, which was being held in Wrightsville Beach. The prospect of ocean fishing had been the main factor in the sheriff’s decision to go, but he also hoped to get elected vice-president or perhaps treasurer of the organization. Running for office was a habit with Duncan Johnson. He left the county, peaceful after the early tourist invasion, in the hands of Deputy Pilot Barnes, who had the sense to do what had to be done and leave the rest alone until the boss returned.

Pilot Barnes was doing well in his second day of substitute sheriffing, until 8:00 p.m., when a call came in about a wreck on Whistle Creek, and Pilot had no one to dispatch but himself. He hated to disturb Hamp McKenna, who was his eleven-o’clock replacement. He was debating between calling Hamp and closing the office, when Daniel Hunter Coltsfoot wandered in, asking if he could post a craft fair notice among the wanted posters. Pilot decided that Dummyweed was the least of three evils (by a small margin) and left him in charge of the office, while he went to see about the wreck. After all, he reasoned, Dummyweed was a deputy, and how much trouble could he get into in one hour on a slow night?

*    *    *

It was a wonder he hadn’t wrecked the car, Milo thought. His hands were cold with sweat. Despite the shock, though, he thought he had things under control. He was in charge now, and he couldn’t worry about the personal side of what had happened. Later, maybe. He was glad he had driven the Sarvice Valley Road so many times. His hands moved the steering wheel at the curves without his conscious thought, and he anticipated the winding of the road, taking it as fast as he dared. He ought to be back in an hour, if they didn’t waste too much time at the sheriff’s office. He would tell Comfrey Stecoah when they got back, he decided; right now, he wanted to bring in the law.

Milo had left Jake alone at the dig site with the body, and Elizabeth in the church comforting Tessa Lerche and Mary Clare. Or perhaps guarding them. Milo wasn’t ready yet to separate mourners from suspects. Victor had turned up in the middle of it all—naturally—and proceeded to dramatize himself by having an asthma attack. Poor Elizabeth. If she could cope with this, she could handle anything.

Milo drove into Laurel Cove, wondering for the first time if he should have come at all. Perhaps he should have telephoned from Sarvice Valley. Surely someone there had a phone; he hadn’t thought to ask. They might even tell him that he should have reported this to Bevel Harkness, the Sarvice Valley deputy. Milo frowned. He was damned if he would. Bevel Harkness ranked high on Milo’s list of possible murderers, and he intended to tell them that, too. He swung the car into his usual parking place in front of the sheriff’s office. He had been in so much wrangling over the computer damage, that he was beginning to feel quite at home there. He wondered if Sheriff Johnson was back from the beach yet, and whether the county’s other emergency had come down from the tree of its own accord. The man behind the desk
was not Pilot Barnes; after a long look at his outfit, Milo decided that it couldn’t possibly be Sheriff Johnson, either. The person on duty was a well-built young man in his mid-twenties, wearing a full-sleeved colonial shirt, burlap trousers, and black moccasins fastened with silver conchos. Milo wondered if this person was a guide who gave tours of “A Backwoods Jail.” He glanced about in search of more reliable assistance.

“May I help you?” asked Dummyweed pleasantly.

Milo hesitated. “Are you a deputy?”

“Sure am. Deputy Coltsfoot,” he declared, warming to his role. “What’s up?”

“I’m here to report a murder.”

“Oh, wow!” breathed Coltsfood. “No shit? Who?”

Milo told him.

“Oh, wow!” said Coltsfoot again. “With a
tomahawk?
That’s unreal! Well, I’ll tell you what to do. Do you drink coffee?”

Milo relaxed a little. “I guess I could use a cup now,” he admitted.

“No, man, that’s just the point. You’ve got to cut down on stimulants for the next couple of days—coffee’s out of the question. And you ought to increase your intake of vitamins, too. That’s to combat stress. Murders are really stressful, man, so you need to watch your metabolism. Got that?”

“Look,” said Milo with an edge to his voice, “a man is dead in Sarvice Valley, and I’ve left him being guarded by a college kid, with a bunch of hysterical possible suspects in the common room of the church. Now where the hell is somebody who knows what to do?”

Coltsfoot sighed. “Pilot
said
he’d be back pretty soon; I guess he’d know what to do.”

“Fine. Can you call him?”

“In the patrol car, you mean? I guess so. Do you know how to use the radio there?”

“No,” said Milo wearily. “I don’t know how to use the radio. Isn’t there somebody else we could call?”

Coltsfoot stood up, beaming happily with a new idea. “I tell you what. I’ll go along with you to the scene of the crime, so you’ll have somebody official there, and I’ll leave a note for Pilot on the desk here, and he’ll be along when he gets back. Okay?”