He sounded eager, even ingratiating, like he was hoping she’d stop being mad at him now.
Was she mad at him? Not particularly. He merely made her uncomfortable, unsure, as if the world could shift under her feet and leave her talking again to a man who didn’t believe her when she spoke.
Faye couldn’t shake the drowsiness. She really needed to sleep all the way through the night sometime soon. “You’re saying we can work at the site today? In—” She squinted at her phone. It was six o’clock. “In two hours?”
“Whenever you want to start. You can wait until tomorrow, if it’s better to stick to the original plan, but the site is yours when you’re ready.”
Faye thought through her disorganized plan for the day, which had been to take her crew to the university library and then to…well, honestly, she had been planning to give them Sunday afternoon off. She didn’t know about the others, but she would be going to Frida’s funeral, and she knew that Jeremiah would want to be there. It made her nervous to leave the group unsupervised after Richard’s drunken display, but it wasn’t right to require them to go to the funeral of somebody they didn’t know.
She was walking a fine line with managing this team. She couldn’t work them around the clock because that would put her afoul of about a million labor laws. There was just no way around the fact that they were going to spend a lot of hours unsupervised. Richard’s drunken trip to Armand’s barbecue joint was evidence that idle hands were an open invitation to Lucifer, but it couldn’t be helped.
“Wait until tomorrow? No, I don’t want to waste the day. We can get a lot done before I turn them loose so I can go to Frida’s funeral,” she said to McDaniel. “Tell your forensics people I said thank you for giving today back to us.” Then she told him good-bye and dialed Jeremiah to tell him that they had work to do.
Mobilizing the crew had gone smoothly, because everybody was anxious to start the project. Faye and Jeremiah had rousted them out of bed. They’d gotten dressed. Everybody was loaded in the vehicles.
Faye was patting herself on the back for her efficiency, until Jeremiah pulled her aside.
“We need to feed them and I didn’t make a grocery run.”
Food. Faye knew she was stressed when she forgot about food.
“Oh, yeah. Food. Hmmm.”
She tried to picture the state park and the area surrounding it. She couldn’t remember any fast food, nor a grocery store, but she knew there was a shabby convenience store, staffed by an unpleasant man. It would have to do.
“I know a place, just a few miles away from the site, and they have a big sign advertising their chicken biscuits. We can stop there and buy chicken biscuits for breakfast, plus some bread and some sandwich meat that should cover lunches for several days.”
“Bread. Meat. Ice for the cooler, water, chips. I’ve got mayonnaise and mustard. That’ll make lunch, and it won’t cost all that much.”
Faye nodded her agreement and they got underway. She hoped they weren’t going to be buying their supplies from the sullen and creepy Linton, but even if he had the day off, the odds were good that his replacement would be Mayfield, who didn’t seem much better.
Creepy cashier or not, the store was convenient and she didn’t have time to waste on looking for another one. If luck completely eluded her, one of Frida’s unpleasant exes would be on duty, and the other would be waiting for his shift to start, so that she could enjoy spending time with both of them.
And, because she’d burned all her good luck that day when she received access to the site a day early, that’s exactly what she got. Frida’s two exes were waiting for them. Mayfield was sitting inside, waiting at a table near the store’s lunch counter, and Linton was working the cash register.
Stone-faced and silent, Mayfield watched each of Faye’s workers, one by one, as they passed in front of him. She was pretty sure that his eyes lingered longer on the women than the men, which pissed her off and scared her, all at the same time, but he studied the men, too. Jeremiah passed in front of him last and received the same treatment—no talking and lots of looking, despite the fact that Faye was pretty sure that they knew each other.
When Jeremiah proved her right by nodding and saying, “How you doin’, Mayfield?”, Faye sensed that he wasn’t just passing the time of day. He was trying to provoke the silent man.
Mayfield didn’t say a thing.
Faye passed him last and she received even more scrutiny than the younger women had. He had looked their bodies up and down, but he kept his eyes only on her face. His aggressive body language—forward-leaning with hands flat on his thighs—made her jumpy. She wondered why he’d chosen her as the target of his intimidating glare. Was it just because she was an outsider?
Linton, on the other hand, seemed to have grown a personality since Faye first saw him. Maybe she’d just caught him on a bad day. He assumed his place at the food counter and began taking orders for breakfast biscuits.
“So that’s one bacon-and-egg biscuit for you,” he said, pointing at Yvonna, “and chicken biscuits for everybody else but Yogurt Girl.”
He pointed to Stephanie, who seemed to have offended Linton by ordering yogurt instead of something he cooked.
“Two chicken biscuits for you,” he said, pointing to Davion, “and three for the big dude.” He pointed at Richard. “Good job, Big Dude. You’re gonna like my biscuits. What about your boss lady and ol’ Jeremiah? Where are they at? Do you think they should they get to eat?”
Faye stepped
