Ayesha and Davion were kneeling beside her in an instant, calling for help all the while.
Faye was more jolted than hurt, but she was moving slow as she gathered herself. Head swimming, she was able to rise to her hands and knees, but then she had to linger in that position until the trees stopped spinning around her.
She handed the GPS to Davion who said, “Stop worrying about the equipment. It’s fine.”
The uneven earth that had tripped her was palpable under her hands, a straight-edged raised line. Faye’s dazed eyes still weren’t working quite right, but she was perfectly capable of recognizing something this obviously man-made by touch. She groped to her left and right, following the line as it extended beside her and behind her. It made a perfect rectangle, long and narrow.
Faye reached for her pocket. By feel, she poked the button on her phone that would take her to Detective McDaniel and was quickly rewarded with his voice saying, “Hello, Faye.”
“I’ve found something. I’m in the woods, so far from the creek that I have to be well outside your crime scene, so your people didn’t check it out. You need to see this.”
The grave—and that is what it was, a grave—was old, and there was no evidence of recent activity associated with it. Faye and McDaniel had put their heads together and decided to wait the morning out before deciding if her project could continue. Faye was holding out hope.
“It only makes sense that you’ll want to focus on the area surrounding the old burial. We can start our survey far, far away,” she said to him. “You’ll hardly know we’re here.”
“I’ll think about it, Faye,” he had said. “But no promises.”
She looked at her crew, huddled around Jeremiah and looking like they needed to do something or explode. “I guess I’ll take them back to the motel and…oh, I don’t know…pony up a few bucks for pay-per-view.”
“Can you send them with Jeremiah?”
Her face must have spoken for her, and it must have said a resounding “Why?”, because he explained himself quickly. “I could use you here.”
Faye said, “Then I guess they can watch pay-per-view without me.” She called Jeremiah over and sent her workers away with instructions to make themselves a big pile of sandwiches to eat in front of the TV.
Standing in the parking lot and watching them go, McDaniel said, “Now that I have your undivided attention, how old is that grave?”
“Don’t know for sure, but I have some ideas.”
In her trunk was her briefcase packed with an extensive sequence of historical aerial photos of the area around Sweetgum State Park. She spread the photos across the hood of her car and gave him a visual tour of west Memphis history. The photos covered eighty years at varied intervals—1938, 1951, 1963, 1973, 1987, 1997, 2002, and 2010. Using a magnifier, she showed him what she’d learned while preparing for the project that she was apparently never going to get to start.
“Look right here. The grave was in an area that was wooded just after the CCC crew built the park. It stayed that way for a long time, but then see what happened in the late 1990s?”
“Somebody cut a lot of trees.”
“Yep. A good chunk of the study area was cleared and it stayed cleared until well into this century. I asked around and people tell me that those trees were cut in preparation for a lodge construction project that never happened.”
“Like now. You’re here because they want to build a lodge, right?”
“More like a campground with mostly cabins. Anyway, the park kept the area mowed for a while. People even put up some unauthorized volleyball nets, but the vegetation eventually came back in and they stopped coming here. It’s not much fun to play volleyball in a blackberry patch. Since then, the area has been slowly going back to nature. You can see the trees growing in over time on the later photos.”
“And this tells us what?”
“Not very much, from your standpoint. I’m thinking that this wasn’t the best place to hide a body when people were using it for recreation, so that’s something useful to know. I’m also thinking that if the grave had already been here while they were coming and going on a daily basis, somebody would have noticed it. It would have been sinking, and somebody besides me would have tripped over it.”
“If a volleyball player was running in to set the ball, and she took a fall like you did, she’d have broken every bone in her face.”
“Exactly.”
His eyes roamed over her face. “Speaking of that, how are you feeling? Bruises? Cuts? Do I need to get you to an emergency room?”
Faye waved the question away. “I’m fine. But let me finish telling you about the photos. My best guess is that the grave was dug after people stopped playing volleyball here. Say, maybe sometime after 2010 or so. But it wasn’t dug yesterday. It’s had time to sink, and it was covered with a thick layer of pine straw and leaf litter when I found it. Well, when my clumsy foot found it.”
“You did better than we did.”
She gave him another dismissive wave of her hand. “I got lucky. How were you supposed to find a shallow dent in the ground, covered in leaves and way outside your search area? You certainly defined a reasonably large piece of ground for your search. What were you going to do? Search the whole park? All of Memphis?”
“Maybe. If that’s what it takes. I should have searched more than I did.”
“We don’t even know if the bones your people found in that grave are related to Frida’s death.”
A woman approached them, stripping off her protective gloves and goggles. Her
