Relics (19 page)

“Next week.”

“Then let’s talk about this next week.”

She walked into the house before he had time to answer, and shut the door behind her.

She wanted to be alone for a while, but the bunkhouse provided few options for that luxury. Every horizontal surface in the parlor was festooned with Raleigh’s budgetary paperwork. The kitchen, the only other public area, was chock-full of domestic bliss, for Joe was elbow-deep in the sink, washing grit out of a mess of collards, and Laurel was chopping pickles for the potato salad that would be accompanying Joe’s greens. Faye might have given their relationship her blessing, but that didn’t mean she wanted to give herself diabetes by watching it develop, step by sugary step.

Her bedroom offered certain attractions. She was assured of privacy, since her roommate was in the kitchen making cow eyes at Joe. Thanks to her recent purchase, she was assured of warmth, too. Though the thought of putting on those ugly pajamas and crawling into bed warmed her Florida-bred bones, it smacked of clinical depression.

Checking to make sure that Brent was out of sight, she slipped back outside. She would spend the hour before the meeting at her office. Jenny would sell her some Vienna sausages and saltines for supper. If the atmosphere at the bunkhouse didn’t improve, Faye was pretty sure she could subsist on nothing but canned tubes of mystery meat for the duration of the project. Unless she got scurvy.

Interview with Brent Harbison, October 29, 2004

Interviewer: Carmen Martinez, Ph.D.

Chapter Twenty

The Sujosa church was of a spare and unadorned design. Simple beams supported the vaulted roof, and clear windows let in dim moonlight that stained glass would have obscured. Pendant light fixtures that put Faye in mind of 1950s schoolrooms radiated brightness throughout the sanctuary, as if to make sure that God’s truth never languished, unseen, in an unlit corner. There were worse places to conduct a meeting of academics who were, as always, torn between their pursuit of pure truth and their need to build their reputations and their careers.

Faye’s presentation of the lustered potsherd received a quiet response from her peers. They agreed that the sherd was aesthetically interesting, but even Faye had to admit that its historical value was questionable, at least until the laboratory put a date on it.

Then Faye and Dr. Amory presented their interpretation of Miss Dovey’s song, with remarkable success, considering that they hadn’t rehearsed the presentation. Faye began by briefing the group on the transcript of Carmen’s work that had survived the fire, then Dr. Amory stepped in with his interpretation of the origin of the song and with a cogent explanation of what could be inferred from the dates of the two verses that had served as source material.

“So, as you can see,” he concluded, “Miss Dovey’s songs and stories give us a direct connection between the Sujosa’s oral history and datable European texts. If our interpretation of the texts is correct, the Sujosa are descended from seamen who left England shortly after the reign of Henry VIII, in the mid-1500s. Oral tradition, buttressed by these texts, suggests that they kidnapped a group of dark-skinned women—maybe from the Mediterranean region or from Africa—whom they later came to love, perhaps even considering them their wives. So far, we have no information on how they came to Alabama.”

Faye was gratified to see one or two of the support staff taking notes on Amory’s interpretation of the song’s text.

“Interesting,” Raleigh said in a tone that dampened her gratification considerably. “Of course, a huge percentage of people of all races now living in North America have at least one ancestor who was living in England in the 1500s. And it’s a pretty good assumption that the Sujosa’s forebears didn’t leave for the Americas until sometime after 1492. So you’ve narrowed our time frame by, oh, fifty years or so.”

Somehow, Raleigh had managed to make their exciting news—the first evidence connecting the Sujosa with their Old World roots—sound puny.

“Good work,” he added, relegating his faint praise to an afterthought.

“Now, Ms. Longchamp,” said Raleigh. His change in tone signaled a new topic for which he felt more enthusiasm, “there is the question of Dr. Martinez’s notes. She passed away five days ago. Her notes were not found among the papers in her office, so I had assumed that they perished with her. How is it possible that you failed to tell me that you had them?”

Faye felt the edge of the pew bite into her thighs. Its hard seat pressed against her legs, effectively preventing her from sinking through the floor and away from the accusing eyes of Raleigh, who was finally right.

There was no excuse for her failure to bring him Carmen’s notes.

Her negligence made perfect sense when considered in the context in which Carmen had given them to her. Raleigh had belittled her choice to do in-depth interviews with Miss Dovey, so she’d arranged with Faye to look her notes over while she altered her work plan to suit him. Eventually, she would have incorporated all her work into her final report, but her raw notes were never meant for Raleigh’s eyes.

But Carmen’s death had changed that. Raleigh had every right to expect Faye to help him gather any surviving remnants of data that his project had paid to gather, and she had simply forgotten to do it. There was only one possible response. She stood up and handed him the sheaf of papers in her lap and said, “You’re right. I’m sorry for my oversight.”

Silence settled into the old church. Her coworkers sat quiet and still, like soldiers unwilling to peek out of their foxholes for fear of attracting enemy fire.

In the silence of Faye’s defeat, Joe unfolded his lanky frame from the pew beside her and stood, his muscled arms relaxed at his sides.

Raleigh glared at him, as if wondering what on earth a mere assistant might be able to add to the discussion.

Joe waited a moment, then appeared to interpret Raleigh’s silence as permission to speak. “We haven’t been together like this since Carmen passed,” he said quietly. “Some of us knew her better than others, but we all liked her. She was friendly and generous, and she was too young to die. None of us knew Jimmie Lavelle, but he was too young to die, too. We would have done anything to help them, if we could. This seems like a good place to remember them.” He gestured at the old church’s hand-wrought beams. “Would anybody like to join me in a moment of silence?”

The pews creaked as the project team rose as one to honor Joe’s request. Everyone present, except Joe, knew that his usurpation of Raleigh’s role was unforgivably presumptuous, but their quick response spoke their relief that this uneducated technician had done what needed doing.

***

Faye went back to her office to call Magda after the meeting, despite the fact that a pregnant woman should be asleep at that hour. Magda sounded tired, but stronger; it was good to hear her voice. They talked for an hour about Faye’s work plan for the Lester excavation, and Magda’s enthusiasm shored up Faye’s flagging confidence. Focusing on science and nothing else cleared Faye’s mind until, finally, she thought she might be able to sleep. The bunkhouse lights were out when Faye walked home in the weak moonlight and climbed wearily onto the porch.

She paused, one hand on the front doorknob, to wipe her boots on the welcome mat. The sound of the sisal mat rubbing against her rubber boot soles brushed loud against the evening’s cool silence. When Amory spoke, his whisper rising from the dark in the direction of the porch swing, she was as startled as if he’d hailed her with a full-voiced shout.

“Faye. I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Dr. Amory?”

“Come sit with me. I have some interesting news.”

Faye reflected that it had been a week for interesting news—none of it good. She made her way toward Amory’s silhouette and settled herself beside him on the swing.

“I found the origin of the name ‘Carmo,’” he said with an excitement most people would have reserved for statements like,
My rich uncle died and left me his 1953 Corvette.

“It’s Portuguese. And you know what else?” he continued. The excitement in his voice escalated, as if he were preparing to tell her that his uncle’s Corvette had 30,000 original miles.

“Portuguese?” Faye’s heartbeat quickened, reminding her that she, like Amory, was just geeky enough to prefer unraveling a knotty historical question to owning a low-mileage sportscar. “What else did you find out?”

“You know how Jorge pronounces his name? He doesn’t pronounce it the Spanish way, ‘HOR-hay,’ even though he spells it like the Spanish do. But he doesn’t pronounce it like the English ‘George,’ either. His pronunciation is very distinct: ‘ZHOR-zhay.’”

“And he’s very ticky about having people pronounce it right, too,” Faye said.

“Guess who else pronounces ‘Jorge’ his way?”

“The Portuguese.”

“Yes, indeed.”

Faye did a little historical math. Moors from northern African had occupied the Iberian Peninsula, including Spain and Portugal, for more than seven hundred years before their final stronghold fell in 1492. Miss Dovey’s song and stories suggested that British sailors had kidnapped a group of dark-skinned women about a half-century later. Could they have stolen Portuguese women who were descended from African Moors?

She smiled at Amory, though she couldn’t be sure he could see that smile in the dark. “We can work with this,” she said. “We’ll have to get Bingham to check Jorge’s genealogy, to see how far back the name goes in his family.”

“Trust me. I’ll sic him on this lead before he’s finished with his breakfast cereal.”

“‘Sic’? Aren’t you from Massachusetts? I never heard a Bostonian use that particular colloquialism.”

“Maybe I’ve been in Alabama too long.”

***

Leaving Amory on the front porch to savor the results of his research, Faye groped her way through the bunkhouse. After four days’ residence, she was familiar enough with the floor plan to find the way to her bedroom and into her nightclothes without flipping on a light that might awaken Laurel. Sliding under the chilly bedcovers, she curled up into a tight ball.

But sleep didn’t come easily. She couldn’t quit sifting through her questions about the two deaths. Shoving those questions aside, she found that her nervous anticipation of starting the Lester excavation, compounded by the damp cold slowly penetrating her bones, threatened to keep her up all night. Had she chosen the right site? Were her workers sufficiently trained to get the job done?

Having exhausted the possibilities of her job worries, Faye’s mind looped back to the mysterious deaths. Was there a reason they hadn’t found Jimmie’s cell phone? Was Carmen’s death related to her professional work? What was to be done about the decision to keep the much-needed project money out of the pockets of the land-poor Sujosa? Was Carmen really part of that ill-conceived plan?

Faye frowned at the ceiling. Years of living on a pittance had honed her financial skills to the point that she had an instinctive feel for balancing income and outgo. Now that she had a moment to think about it, she realized that something was seriously out of balance in the settlement. The signs of poverty were everywhere, but…some people seemed to be doing better than others, for no reason that was obvious to Faye. Her eyes widened in the dark. That was it!

How had the Smileys been able to afford a new satellite dish? Leo worked at the limerock mine, where there had been a recent round of layoffs. She doubted he’d had a raise, and Ronya had said she made very little from her pottery. Yet they’d paid an upfront fee for the dish and assumed a monthly satellite service bill that would go on forever. And, she remembered, there was that pole barn, which hadn’t been there four years before.

How had Jorge managed to buy that brand-new delivery van—when he already had a late-model pickup? And how could she explain Fred’s souped-up motorcycle? Even Jimmie—where had he gotten the cash to buy near-useless cell phones for himself and Irene, not to mention a “pretty decent telescope”? In teenager-speak, “pretty decent” meant top-of-the-line.

The Sujosa’s income didn’t meet their outgo. Faye knew she was going to waste the rest of a night’s sleep trying to figure out where they were getting all that extra money.