Lovely In Her Bones

CHAPTER TWELVE

IT WAS GOING to be another hot day. The sky was blazing blue by eight o’clock, not a breath of air stirring. The parched clay in the clearing was dead land, like a scar surrounded by the living forest. Elizabeth and Jake sat on a fallen log at the edge of the clearing, less than enthusiastic about the day’s work ahead.

“This place is going to be an oven,” said Elizabeth, tossing a pebble past her sneakered foot. “Can’t we pack it in?”

“Hey,” Jake protested. “This is my first day as site manager and already half my crew is mutinying.”

“Make it unanimous,” said Victor, flopping down beside him. “I just filled up the water jug, but don’t expect it to last past nine o’clock.”

“It’ll probably evaporate from the heat,” said Elizabeth. “What if we pass out from sunstroke?”

“Oh, come on! We’re in the mountains! I’ll bet it isn’t even ninety. You’re feeling the humidity, that’s all. Anyway, we said we were going to finish this project, remember?”

“But the sheriff’s department took my skulls!” said Elizabeth. “What am I supposed to do?”

“I’ll assign you to something else. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of work to be done-especially if the day people don’t show up.”

Victor took a swig from the water jug. “Mary Clare’s gone, Milo’s back in a nice air-conditioned motel room, and we’re stuck out here-”

“Like birds in the wilderness,” Elizabeth nodded.

“Look,” said Jake in tones of strained patience. “If you want to go back to the church, fine. But I’m going to stay up here and work, particularly since I think this site ought to be guarded. Now, if you want to risk being down there alone, go ahead.”

“I’ll stay,” said Elizabeth in a small voice.

“I suppose somebody has to keep an eye on things here,” said Victor grudgingly. “But if I get sun poisoning…”

“We’ll just add you to the sample,” smiled Jake. “You did say you were part Indian, didn’t you?”

They worked in silence for most of the next hour, troweling, measuring, and marking various points about the site. Elizabeth stopped periodically to apply more baby oil to her arms and face, saying that she had no desire to look like a radish in the interests of science. A little after nine, when the sun had sharpened the angle of its rays on the clearing, they heard voices in the woods. Elizabeth looked questioningly at Jake, but he motioned for her to keep working. A moment later he heard the rustle of underbrush near the tent, and Comfrey Stecoah emerged, holding a hunting rifle.

“Y’all just go on with what you were doing,” he said softly, fading back into the bush.

Elizabeth went on tying string to a wooden stake in what seemed to her like slow motion, as the indistinguishable babble of voices grew louder. Suddenly the words became distinct, and she recognized one of the speakers. “Jake!” she called out loudly for Comfrey’s benefit. “It’s the day workers! And we’re very glad to see them, aren’t we?”

“Yes!” Jake called back. “They-are-our-friends.” He glanced over his shoulder to see if the message had been received.

Five diggers from the local archaeological group came straggling in from the trail. Jake and Elizabeth greeted them effusively, casting anxious glances back toward the underbrush. Victor unscrewed the water jug and peered into it, frowning.

As soon as the workers had been settled into their usual tasks, Jake excused himself and headed for the bush. “What are you doing here?” he hissed.

Comfrey Stecoah emerged from behind a tree to the right of him. “I’m over here,” he said.

“Yeah-with a gun. Why?”

“Why, I’m just looking out for you, Little Beaver,” said Comfrey with an easy smile.

Jake scowled. “Look, Mr. Stecoah, I think that gun could cause more problems than it solves. I think we’re safe up here in broad daylight.”

“Do you, now?” Comfrey rubbed his finger speculatively along the line of his jaw. “Seems to me like I snuck up on y’all with a loaded rifle. If my intentions had been evil, I reckon I could’a blowed you all to kingdom come, with nobody being the wiser.”

Jake had to admit he had a point. The killer was still loose in the woods, presumably. What could it hurt to have some volunteer protection? The sheriff’s department certainly hadn’t offered any. “Okay,” he said. “I guess it would be okay for you to stick around.” He eyed the rifle nervously. “Just don’t wave that thing around. You’ll make us feel like a chain gang.”

Comfrey nodded. “I don’t want to scare you folks, but somebody has to protect my people’s stake in this land. Somebody wants us to lose this land, and he won’t stop at killing just one of you. Not for the money this land is worth.”

“Well… why don’t you come out there and sit down?”

“I don’t want to be a target, boy,” Comfrey said in a pitying voice. “I’m your guard.” He looked serious. “I wanted to tell you’uns how sorry I am that the doctor got killed. He was a good man, and he was trying to help us.”

“Yeah,” said Jake softly. “He was okay.”

“I don’t reckon he’d want any harm to come to the rest of you’uns, so you go on back out there, and I’ll see that it don’t.”

Jake blinked. “Okay. Just be careful with that thing!”

Comfrey smiled. “I ain’t never killed anything by accident.”

Victor troweled away, careful not to expose his upturned buttocks to the “loaded bush.” He was sweating profusely. How long had it been since his last trip to the water jug? Last time he had drawn some meaningful looks from the trenches, and he was sure that if he approached the water jug again, something caustic would be said. Naturally, no one understood his delicate metabolism, or the nature of his sensitive skin. He oughtn’t to be out in the hot sun at all really, he told himself. Victor had long been convinced that discomfort was a bona fide illness. Unfortunately, most people did not subscribe to this theory, so for their benefit, he usually attributed his indisposition to something more acceptable, such as a migraine. It was nearly hot enough to warrant one, but Victor was determined to stick it out. He saw himself as second-in-command at the site now, and the increased feeling of self-importance compensated for the discomfort of the work. Perhaps after the next development (he allowed himself to fantasize Jake’s arrest and departure in leg-irons) he might become site manager himself.

Victor began to plan a letter to his parents informing them of his new, exalted position. He considered himself the intellectual hope of his hopelessly bourgeois family. His mother’s emotional life centered around the characters on the one-o’clock soap opera, and his father’s imagination was limited to believing that the Reds would someday win the world series. Victor considered it his duty to shock them with bizarre opinions whether he believed them or not. By the time he had finished seventh grade, his parents had decided that he was a genius. They were now waiting, a little nervously, to see what he would make of himself. The archaeological dig was a perfect example of something Victor would do for a summer, instead of going home and getting a job to earn tuition money. He had announced his plans by saying that he would spend the summer robbing graves. Victor smiled, thinking of his parents’ reaction to the news of his promotion: he doubted if they would know what he was talking about.

“We’re out of water!” called one of the day crew.

“Well, go and get some,” someone shot back.

“Hey, I didn’t even get any yet!” the digger protested, upturning the empty jug. “I’d probably drop in my tracks.”

“I’ll go,” Victor heard himself saying. His reverie about becoming site manager had put him in a good mood, and besides, if he went back to the church he could drink all the water he wanted before refilling the jug. The walk in the woods would be cooler, too, than grubbing in the hot sun in the clearing. “You go on back to what you were doing, and I’ll bring the water. No trouble.” He managed to sound as if he were making a gallant sacrifice for the welfare of his troops.

The troops sneered. “You used most of it anyway!”

He ambled out of the clearing to catcalls and demands that he hurry back.

The woods were somewhat cooler, but that was the limit of Victor’s aesthetic appreciation of nature. Everything green looked like poison ivy, and everything flowering was an allergy suspect. To Victor, a simple woodland walk took on the proportions of a minefield crossing. Victor patted his pockets. Maybe he should take an antihistamine when he got back to the church. Where were they? He must have left them back in his toilet articles kit with his green pills, sunscreen, asthma medicine, and the other antidotes to the immediate world. He sneezed, and glared suspiciously at a small yellow flower blooming beside the path. He advanced toward it, intending to grind it into the dirt, but then he remembered the pollen that would be sent into the air from shaking it and turned aside.

Someone was watching him.

“Hello,” stammered Victor to the vaguely human outline concealed in shrubbery. “Are you walking toward the church? I’m going back to get water.” He held up the water jug. “It’s empty. Oh, you have one too,” he said upon seeing his companion more clearly. “Oh? It isn’t water? What’s in there? Nothing alcoholic, I trust. Oh. Cider. I’ve heard that cider is good for allergies. Oh, no, really I couldn’t. It’s very kind of you to offer, but… well, if you’re sure. Perhaps just a taste. It’s an oven out there in the clearing.”

He took the stoneware jug, hooking his thumb through the circular handle, and held it up to drink from, in what he imagined to be mountaineer fashion. The uncorked jug sent a great wave of cider down Victor’s throat, so that he felt something feathery hit his throat, but not in time to spit it out. He was just opening his mouth to ask what it was when he felt his throat being stabbed from within, and cold ripples of numbness began to encircle the ache.

“It’s a bee,” he rasped. “I’m allergic.” He opened his eyes and found himself alone on the path. The trees around him began a slow horizontal rotation, as if they, too, were walking away.

Victor’s heart thudded against his ribs. His sweat was cold. “… Have to take a shot,” he mumbled to himself. “Bee kit…” Was this the way to the church? He couldn’t tell because the path was spinning. Nothing was clear except the pinging little pain in his throat. He listened to the pain for a while.

A new sensation, seeming to come from far away, penetrated his consciousness. He could not swallow. Victor gasped for breath, tugging at the neck of his T-shirt. Dimly he realized that the bee sting in his throat was causing the tissue to swell and closing the air passage to his lungs. It felt a bit like an asthma attack. You strained and strained but nothing reached your lungs. Victor tried to think of a way to breathe without using his throat. He was still puzzling over this riddle in physiology when the spinning path became a blur, and he fell facedown into the weeds, clutching at them to keep from being swept away. He shut his eyes until the darkness filled his brain, and then he was still.

“Where is Victor?” asked Elizabeth, looking around. “He’s certainly taking his time with that water.”

“He’ll come strolling in about lunchtime with some story about a headache,” grumbled Jake. “I should have known better than to let him go for water.”

“I wonder what possessed him to study archaeology?”

“It sounds a lot more romantic than it is,” said Jake. “He probably has visions of strolling through a well-landscaped jungle and coming upon an abandoned Mayan temple just waiting to be discovered.”

One of the day crew shook his head. “Nah. He figures that when he’s the head man, he’ll get somebody else to do the spade work.”

The work continued for another hour, as the sun rose higher in the sky. It cleared the tops of the surrounding trees and blazed at them with white heat. Elizabeth dabbed at her forehead with a tissue. “Gosh, it’s hot out here,” she remarked to Jake. “I’m getting nearly as brown as you are.”

Jake had taken off his shirt and was troweling in the trench next to her. He had wrapped his red bandanna around his head for a sweatband, but a few trickles slipped past it and slid down the sides of his face. He held his arm up against Elizabeth’s to compare tans. “I’ve got a considerable head start, Blue-Eyes,” he grinned.

Elizabeth giggled. “With that thing around your head, you look like an Apache.”

He grunted. “You mean I look like Jeff Chandler, I suppose?”

“What?”

“Jeff Chandler played Cochise in the movie Broken Arrow. When most people say Apache, that’s what they mean.”

Elizabeth thought about it. “Was Jimmy Stewart in it?”

“Yep. He was the Indian agent.”

“I guess you’re right then. It’s too hot to think. Where is Victor?”

“Where’s the water? you mean.”

She sighed. “Well, he is a pig to leave us without any. Especially since he drank most of it to begin with.”

“That’s Victor. What are our problems compared to millions of his?”

Elizabeth threw down her trowel. “I give up! I’ll go after the water myself!”

“Victor took the jug,” one of the diggers pointed out.

“Well, I’ll find him and bring it back. Or I’ll get a milk jug from the church. I am going to get some water up here. And when I find Victor, I’m going to tell him exactly what I think of him.” She scrambled up the clay bank and dusted off the legs of her jeans.

“Elizabeth! Wait!” Jake looked worried. “Remember what we said about not getting separated.”

“Oh, stop it! Victor is goofing off. I won’t give him the satisfaction of getting worried about him! If I’m not back in twenty minutes, you can send the cavalry after me.”

“Wait! Wait!” he called as she stalked off. “Don’t you want to take… er…” He pointed to the shrubbery. “Him with you?”

Elizabeth gave him a look of complete exasperation. “Twenty minutes, okay?” And she was gone.

Elizabeth was careful where she walked, trying to make as little noise as possible. She was not trying to sneak past some monster lurking in the woods; her thoughts were on the deer they had glimpsed that morning on the way to the site. “There are lots of animals in the woods,” Jake told her, “but unless you’re quiet, you won’t see them.” She had followed his instructions and watched the underbrush carefully, delighted when a log turned out to be a fat groundhog having his breakfast. Now she tried to concentrate on sighting a rabbit or a fawn in order to keep her mind off lower forms of life, such as insects, snakes, and Victor.

He really was impossible, she thought. He had no more sense of responsibility than a groundhog. Was that a groundhog? She bent down to inspect a clump of bushes; no, it really was a log this time. She heard a skittering a few feet from the path and decided that it was a rabbit running for cover. At least the plants didn’t hide. She spent the next hundred yards trying to identify the plants along the path, and mentally rehearsing the tongue-lashing she was going to give Victor.

“… Selfish, infantile, neurotic…” Elizabeth stopped short.

In the weeds ahead she saw a patch of bright blue. Victor’s trousers? What a funny place to sleep, Elizabeth thought, as the truth registered farther back in her mind. “Oh, no,” she whispered.

Victor lay facedown in the weeds, still clutching at a stalk of broom sedge. His legs were spread at a convulsive angle, but he was quite still. Elizabeth was glad that she could not see his face.

“Victor,” she said softly, edging closer to the body. She wondered what had happened; there didn’t seem to be any blood. A stroke? Tentatively, she stretched out her hand. He might still be alive. His cheek felt cool, though. Elizabeth knelt and peered into Victor’s swollen face, and then she was sure.

To Elizabeth, shocked into slow motion by the sight of the body, it seemed that she stood for hours in the clearing contemplating the stubble on Victor’s chin, the water jug resting in a clump of knotweed, and the sound of birds far above her. Actually, only a few minutes passed before fear snapped her out of her reverie and sent her running back toward the site.

Jake looked up as she came crashing through a patch of thistles. “Will you be quiet? Do you want Mr. Stecoah to mistake you for a buffalo?” He saw her face and his smile faded. “What’s wrong?”

“Victor’s dead,” gasped Elizabeth, sinking down on the log.

“How? Same as Alex?”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t tell. There’s no sign of a wound.”

Jake turned away. “Okay. That’s it,” he muttered. He turned to the diggers staring up at him from the trenches. “Listen up!” he said, unnecessarily, for he had their full attention. “There has been an accident, and I’m stopping the dig. Everybody go back to the church, but don’t leave. The police may need to talk to you.”

“Stopping the dig?” someone said. “What’s Milo going to say?”

“I don’t much care,” said Jake. “As long as there is someone left for him to say it to.”

Elizabeth looked around. “Where is Comfrey Stecoah?”

“I haven’t seen him since before you left. Let’s find out.”

They searched down the hill, away from the path, in the direction they had last seen Comfrey Stecoah. “We’d better yell for him,” said Elizabeth. “I want to make sure he knows it’s us.”

After a few intervals of hoarse shouting, Comfrey Stecoah appeared, carrying his rifle in the crook of his arm and fastening his belt.

“Where were you?” Jake demanded.

“Call of nature. Didn’t want to go so close to the burying ground. What are you’uns making such a racket about?”

“Something has happened to one of our diggers,” said Elizabeth.

“That fat boy that went for water?” They nodded. “Ambush?”

“I don’t think so,” said Elizabeth. “I didn’t see any blood or anything. He’s just… dead.”

“We’re all going back to the church now,” said Jake firmly. “Would you come with us, please?”

“Have you reported it?”

They both looked at Elizabeth. “Not yet,” she said. “I came back as soon as I found him. Shouldn’t someone stay with the body?”

“I will,” said Jake.

“Not by yourself, you won’t!” said Elizabeth indignantly. “Look, why don’t I go back with the day crew, and you and Mr. Stecoah guard the body. There are so many of us that I’m sure we’ll be safe. I can get Randall to drive me to a phone so that I can report this.”

Jake hesitated.

“You don’t know that it was murder,” Elizabeth reminded him. “Victor wasn’t all that healthy.”

“Okay, okay. Get out of here before I come to my senses. We’ll stay with the body. Go on.”

Elizabeth looked back. “Jake, should I call Milo?”

“Ask Mr. Barnes to stop by and tell him. I don’t want us split up for any longer than we have to be. I think you’ll be safe in the church with the diggers. Anyway, we can all walk back together as far as…”

As far as the body, Elizabeth thought. “I wish there were another way back.”

They filed past the body in silence, most of the diggers averting their eyes, respecting the privacy of the dead. Elizabeth looked again at Victor and tried to think of something kind, something that she would miss. When this proved futile, she fell back upon the hope that he had not suffered.

When they were out of sight of the death scene, they began to talk in low voices about what they would do when they got back to the church, and about Milo’s plans for the excavation. Finally the speculation trailed off into a despondent silence. As they emerged from the woods into the churchyard, one of the diggers gasped and pointed to a man walking toward them.

“It’s all right,” said Elizabeth after a moment’s scrutiny. “He’s a deputy.”

What a solemn bunch these archaeologists are, thought Daniel Hunter Coltsfoot as he studied their grim faces. Mentally he prescribed an herb tonic for the lot of them. “Hi!” he said with professional friendliness. “I was hoping I’d catch you on lunch break.”

“Who called you?” asked Elizabeth, looking around for the squad car.

“Nobody,” said Dummyweed. “I just dropped in on the off chance of catching you here, and-” The implication of her question struck him. “Why?” he asked hoarsely.

“There’s been another death.”

The erstwhile deputy took a step back. “Now look, I just came up to invite you guys to our craft fair. I’m not… I mean-”

Elizabeth wasn’t listening. “Randall will show you where the body is while the rest of us go to a phone to report it. I’ll tell Mr. Barnes you’re here.”

“But I don’t like bodies!” Dummyweed was protesting as Randall led him away.

“All right, which car are we taking?” asked Elizabeth briskly. “I think three of us should stay here in the church. One of you can go with me to telephone. Where’s Robin?”

“She went inside the church-oh, there she is.”

A slender girl in olive khaki slacks appeared on the porch. “I found this on the table,” she told Elizabeth, handing her a piece of notebook paper.

Elizabeth unfolded the note and read it aloud: “Sorry I missed you. I came back for my guitar. I’d stay to lunch, but I want to get back to MacDowell because Special Collections closes at five. And anyway, I’ve tasted y’all’s cooking. Best, Mary Clare.” Elizabeth lowered the note. “So she was here today too.”

“Are you going to tell the sheriff?” asked Robin.

Elizabeth nodded. “If Victor wasn’t murdered, it won’t matter. And if he was-I’d better!”