“I have, and I was impressed. Please call me Faye.”
The woman took a wheezing breath, and Faye remembered the news article detailing her health problems. “What’s your story, Faye? Your e-mail didn’t give me the impression that you were one of those murder groupies that gets obsessed with a crime. I hear from a lot of those and I try to handle them with a quick e-mail. Something about your message made me want to pick up the phone.” She paused and Faye heard a cough. “If I’m wrong and you’re crazy, please tell me, so that I can hang up and go on with my day.”
“I’m not crazy. Truly.” Even as she said it, Faye realized that the words themselves made her sound unbalanced. “I have a personal interest in a case, and I don’t think the police are pursuing all their options.”
“Of course, you don’t. People who think the police are doing everything right don’t use my database to do an end run around them, now do they?” Faye heard a laugh so uninhibited that she would have called it a cackle. This made her wonder whether it was fair for this woman to be calling other people crazy.
“The victim’s name was Frida Stone and she died here in Memphis on Friday. One of her friends told me about similar cases of women beaten to death in north Mississippi and east Arkansas.”
“Easy drives from Memphis.”
“Exactly. The police here didn’t know about the Arkansas killing, which makes me wonder what else they don’t know. I’ve been poking around your database, but it’s going to take me some time to get up to speed, and I don’t have it. I’m starting a big contract today. Complicated. Big crew. Getting conversant with the software to search your database is going to take time.”
“What kind of crew?”
“Archaeology.”
“Oh, yeah. That’s what it said in the signature line of your email. Anyway, I’m not surprised to hear that you do archaeology. You sound like someone who takes a scientific approach. You also sound like a seeker. Seekers are always busy.”
Faye was stupidly flattered by praise from this woman who could apparently suss out her prideful weaknesses pretty darn fast. She could see Ayesha approaching with an I-have-a-question expression. “You have me pegged. I’m stupidly busy all the time. In fact, I don’t even have a lot of time to talk right now. Maybe thirty more seconds before I have to turn back into a boss. Can you help?”
“Give me thirty more seconds of information and I’ll try.”
“Frida was in her late twenties. African-American. So were the other two women. Great care was taken with the other two burials, but Frida was buried quickly. And alive, but that may be because I interrupted the murderer.”
“You do have a personal interest in this one. Wow.”
“No kidding. What else? Oh, yeah. All three victims were found in July. None were raped. All three were beaten to death. They think Frida was killed with a shovel but they don’t know about the other two.”
Ayesha arrived, looking expectant. Faye didn’t want her to hear this conversation, so her thirty seconds were up. She held up a hand to say, “Hang on just a second,” then told Phyllis Windom that she had to go.
“Can I text this number?” Windom asked.
“Yes. Please send me anything you find.”
“Will do. Have fun seeking, Madame Archaeologist.”
Davion, Stephanie, and their machetes had done a masterful job of hacking out the boundaries of the study area. There was more machete work to do as the team laid out a sampling grid, but only in a few places. Much of the area was shaded by trees that kept the underbrush down, and there was a sizeable flat area at the center that intrigued Faye. If she were the director of a CCC program who needed to house hundreds of workers, this is where she would have put them.
No pictures or descriptions of the workers’ quarters had survived, which was in itself noteworthy. Many CCC crews working together for months and years during the Depression had produced community newsletters, but the history of the Sweetgum State Park workers was lost in silence. Faye suspected this was because this crew, in the segregated 1930s, had been all African-American.
Other newsletters had pictures of large barracks used for housing. If a structure that size had been built here, Faye stood a decent chance of finding remnants of it. But maybe something ephemeral like rustic cabins or even tents had been considered good enough for a black crew, and there wouldn’t be much left of those for her to find.
Faye could hear her own African ancestors whispering in her ear. “You like a challenge. Find something that will bring those forgotten people back to the world’s memory.”
Their voices echoed in her head while she followed Davion and Stephanie, listening to them tell her about their machete work. Accompanying them all was a softer voice, and Faye was pretty sure that it was Frida’s voice in better days. It was a sweet voice, without the rasp of pain that Faye had heard in her groans, and it was saying, “Find the answers. Remember us. Remember us all.”
GPS receiver in hand, she walked the site boundaries with Stephanie and Davion, who were rightfully proud of their long, straight cuts through the underbrush. With such good machete work, the walking was easy until Faye felt her left ankle roll under her.
Her boots saved her from a broken ankle or even a sprained one, but nothing could save her from the inevitability of inertia. Her toe was caught on the edge of the depression that had turned her ankle, but her body was moving forward and Faye’s flailing arms weren’t going to stop it. She was going down.
Her right knee struck the ground, followed quickly by her left knee and the palms of both hands. The right one still held the GPS and she had a sick feeling that she was about to
