Lovely In Her Bones Read online

  “I think I’ll fix a salad to go with the quiche. Would you rather have leaf lettuce or spinach?”

  “Whatever’s easier. I think it should be an interesting dig. I don’t have any data on Eastern Indians for my discriminate function chart, and this will give me a chance to get some.”

  “Spinach, then. Leaf lettuce isn’t really good unless you fry bacon to go with it, and there’s enough cholesterol in the eggs as it is.”

  “It shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks. I’d be back in time for term break in case you wanted to take the beach cottage again this year.”

  Tessa closed the refrigerator slowly. “Back?” she echoed. “Back from where?”

  “Sarvice Valley, the place is called. We’ll be camping, of course, but there’s a little town nearby with a tourist court, so we can rent a room there to hook up the computer in.”

  “You’re going away on a dig?” said Tessa, comprehending at last.

  “Just a minor one,” said Alex faintly.

  “I see.” Tessa’s voice was cold.

  “You won’t need me for anything around here, will you?”

  “What makes you think I don’t want to go, Alex?”

  He shrugged. “Precedent.”

  “Well, you’re right. I have too many commitments here to pick up and run to the mountains with you.” Tessa frowned as another thought occurred to her. “And I suppose you’ll be taking your graduate students with you?”

  “Yes, of course. It will be good experience for both of them. It will be the first time for Mary Clare.”

  “That,” said Tessa, “I find very difficult to believe.”

  It was well past five o’clock when Milo finished up in the lab and returned to his office. The light was still on and the door was open. Milo’s office mate, Mary Clare, was curled up in her swivel chair making notes on index cards.

  “Don’t you ever go home?” asked Milo.

  “Look who’s talking,” she answered without looking up.

  “What are you doing? Lecture prep?”

  “Yeah. Getting my facts straight. Somebody always asks me a question that requires an exact date or a statistic, and I can’t quote that stuff off the top of my head.”

  “Neither can I, but Alex sure can. I think he’s got that discriminate function chart memorized. But don’t worry; I’m sure you’re a good teacher.”

  “Good as I want to be,” said Mary Clare. “I don’t plan to be stuck on a campus all my life. I want to be a real anthropologist-out there doing fieldwork.”

  “Well, you’re going to get a taste of it pretty soon. This time next week we’ll be roughing it in Sarvice Valley.”

  Mary Clare’s jaw dropped. “We’re gonna be where?”

  “Sarvice Valley. Don’t you know where that is? I figured you would. Mr. Stecoah talks just like you do.”

  “I’ll bet he does!” snorted Mary Clare, momentarily distracted. “You and Alex couldn’t tell Loretta Lynn from Scarlett O’Hara! Where’s this guy from? Eastern Kentucky?”

  “No. Sarvice Valley is in the area where North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee all come together.”

  “That’s closer than I expected,” said Mary Clare grudgingly. “But y’all still don’t know your accents. Now what’s this about a dig? I thought we were going to be doing local work this summer while Alex finished up the discriminate function chart.”

  “So did I,” admitted Milo. “But all of a sudden he seems anxious to go. Maybe he’s just interested. The job is to authenticate an Indian tribe. Alex wants to meet with both of us in the morning, by the way. That’s why I wanted to talk to you first. Since you assisted him with the field archaeology course first session, we’ll probably get the diggers from that class.”

  “Probably. What about it?”

  “I was wondering: do you think we could use one more person?”

  Mary Clare sighed. “If he’s moving us clear to the Tennessee line, I expect we’ll need all the help we can get. A lot of my people are signed up for classes this session and won’t be able to go.” Her eyes narrowed. “Why?”

  Milo assumed his most unconcerned expression. “Oh, a friend of mine said she’d like to go on a dig sometime, that’s all.”

  “Oh, Lord. Why don’t you take your girlfriends to dances like everybody else? Stop blushing, Milo! I didn’t say no. It’s all right with me, but you’ll have to put up with her. I don’t want any Christmas tree angels on this dig not wanting to get dirty, not wanting to get sunburned, not-”

  “She’ll behave.” Milo grinned. “She’s not the delicate type. Did I tell you she brought a skull home last week?”

  “This makes the third time, Milo. Look, go ahead and ask her to come along. Make sure she has a trowel and a sleeping bag-”

  “I know, Mary Clare, I know.”

  “And remember, if she turns out to be a prima donna, she’s your problem. I don’t know why anthropologists always get tangled up with women who become millstones around their necks, like-” She caught herself and looked quickly at Milo.

  “I know,” said Milo quietly.

  When Milo left the office, it was past six o’clock but still sunny. He cut across the upper quad, avoiding the parameters of an impromptu softball game, and took the path that led past the duck pond, sheep barns, and across the highway to Brookwood. His apartment was a fifteen-minute walk from campus, but he was in no hurry to get there. He lingered near the duck pond watching the campus waterfowl, fat from begging, glide across pools of sunlight. At the water’s edge a boy in a football jersey was throwing a Frisbee over the head of a frantic Labrador retriever. Milo sat down at a concrete picnic table to think.

  Because he was a comfortable-looking fellow with a kind word for everyone, people tended to confide in Milo. Perhaps they meant to compliment him with their display of trust, but his uneasiness always outweighed his gratification. “If I wanted to hear personal problems, I’d have been a psychiatrist,” he told himself. “I’m a forensic anthropologist, for God’s sake! I don’t understand people who aren’t dead.” He had not mentioned the paper he found in the hall to Mary Clare, because he sensed the makings of a disaster in it. He didn’t even want to think about it himself. His greatest fear was that Lerche, knowing that he’d seen it, would feel obliged to give him some sort of explanation. This, Milo felt, would be very awkward for everyone. He had done his best to play dumb when he’d returned the paper; he hoped his show of innocence had convinced Lerche that he knew nothing. Mary Clare had been about to tell him something back in the office, but he had managed to forestall that, too. If this dig was going to be the backdrop for a soap opera, Milo didn’t want to know the details.

  Milo got up and started on the path toward the sheep barns. The sun was lower in the sky now, making the tin roofs glow red and turning the sheep into shadow pictures. He didn’t want to think about Lerche’s troubles any more. He wouldn’t blame the man for getting involved with Mary Clare, he decided. Anybody could see that Mrs. Lerche was the Junior League type, and probably a pain in the ass as a scientist’s wife, but all the same, Alex ought to be careful. Her idea of revenge might be to play the part of a woman scorned on the carpet in the dean’s office. He shook his head. Maybe Mary Clare was right; maybe he was crazy to be asking Elizabeth along on the dig, but at least he’d find out what type she was before they got too involved.

  Having made this resolution, Milo spent the rest of the walk home planning the fine points of inviting Elizabeth. Should he make her buy her own trowel or give her one of his old ones?

  When he reached the door to the apartment, his reverie had reached the stage of imaginary dialogue in which he said bright and clever things to which Elizabeth responded with dazed admiration. He was somewhat surprised to open the door and find that she was actually there.

  “Hello, Elizabeth!” he stammered. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  “You won’t be when you taste dinner,” Bill warned him.

  Milo sat dow
n on the couch beside his roommate thinking about the meals he would be having for the next few weeks in Sarvice Valley. “Maybe we could send out for a pizza.”

  “Very funny,” said Elizabeth, who had returned to the kitchen. “Why are you glad I’m here?”

  “Well, I have some interesting news. Can you leave that stuff and come in here?”

  “That’s right. Distract her.” Bill lunged for the telephone book. “Pizza… pizza.”

  Elizabeth adjusted the dial on the electric skillet and came back into the living room, making a dive for the phone book. Bill dodged the attack and called out Lombardi’s number to Milo.

  Milo picked up the phone, and then, remembering his manners, told Elizabeth: “I have a good excuse for this. I’m going to have to be eating garbage for the next couple of weeks, so I can’t afford to waste any meals right now.”

  “Very diplomatic,” Bill commented.

  Elizabeth glared at him. “Do as you please.” She had intended to make this her exit line, but as she turned to leave, the implication of Milo’s explanation struck her. “What do you mean you’ll be eating garbage for a couple of weeks?”

  “Prison, I expect,” said Bill. “He and Lerche are probably laundering bodies for the Mafia. I’ve suspected it for months.”

  “No, as a matter of fact, I’ve been captured by Indians,” said Milo.

  “Does this have to do with why you were glad to see me?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Yes. You remember when you found the skull in the woods, and you said that you’d like to go on a dig sometime? Well, today Dr. Lerche decided that we’re going on one up in the mountains, and I’ve arranged for you to be able to come along.”

  Elizabeth looked puzzled. “I don’t know anything about archaeology.”

  “You don’t have to. Only the supervisors have to be experts. You’ll be one of the field crew. It’s sort of like-”

  “Ditch digging,” suggested Bill.

  “I was going to say ‘gardening,’ ” said Milo. Elizabeth looked less than delighted, so he hurried into a more enthusiastic account of the project. He explained the Cullowhees’ problem, and the general assignment: to excavate the oldest section of the burial ground to gain clues about the tribe’s origin. “And besides that, Elizabeth, it will be a chance for you to be part of a team establishing new data for anthropologists. Remember the discriminate function chart I told you about?”

  She nodded. “The one that enables you to tell males from females and blacks from whites? The skeletal remains, I mean,” she said hastily to forestall Bill’s next remark.

  “That’s right. The point is: there is no discriminate function chart for Indians. That’s what Dr. Lerche is working on right now. It’s going to be a pretty major contribution to the field. Most of the data for the chart has already been compiled from Dr. Lerche’s work in the Southwest, but he’s going to add the Cullowhees in to widen the sample.”

  “How do you mean, add them in?”

  “We’re excavating the old burial ground, right? Okay, when we exhume a body, we take the skull measurements, and so on, and add the data to the statistics we already have.”

  “It sounds very exciting, Milo, but what’s the catch? I still haven’t forgotten your remark about the next couple of weeks being difficult.”

  “That’s right, Milo,” said Bill. “Skip the part about grave robbing and get down to the rough stuff.”

  Milo, who was used to his roommate’s repartee, ignored this remark. He had been about to give Elizabeth a carefully edited version of life on a dig, minimizing the discomforts and tedium, when he remembered what Mary Clare had said about anthropologists burdening themselves with unsuitable women. If he lied to Elizabeth about the rigors of fieldwork, surely he was inviting the same kind of maladjustment in the future. He wanted her to go very much, but it had to be for the right reasons. If she went merely to humor him, it might be all right this time, or even the next dozen times, but sooner or later problems would arise.

  Milo sighed. “Okay, here goes. We’ll be camping in the Sunday school room of a little Baptist church in Sarvice Valley, so we’ll have electricity and an indoor toilet, but the showers will be rigged up outdoors, and the cooking will be strictly hot plate or campfire. And you can forget about clean sheets: we’ll be in sleeping bags. We will usually work a ten-hour day, because there’s not much time left in the summer to do this job, and you’ll spend most of the day on your knees grubbing in hard red clay. There’s no salary, and you pay your own expenses. Now, do you want to come or not?”

  Elizabeth blinked. “Well, of course I want to come, Milo. I told you I wanted to learn how to read bones the way you do, besides, since you’ve made it sound so awful, if I don’t go, certain people will never let me hear the end of it.” She nodded meaningfully in Bill’s direction.

  “Just tell me where you want the Red Cross parcels sent,” Bill remarked.

  “Sarvice Valley,” said Milo. “In care of Mr. Stecoah, our host.”

  “Stecoah?” echoed Elizabeth. “Amelanchier Stecoah?”

  “No. I think this guy’s name is Humphrey. No, that’s not it. Comfrey, maybe.”

  “Comfrey! Hold on!” Elizabeth began to rummage through her tote bag from folk medicine class. She pulled out her spiral notebook and leafed through the pages, skimming her notes with her forefinger. “Comfrey is the name of a plant,” she told them. “That’s why I think… ah! Here it is: ‘One of the best-known Appalachian herbalists is an Indian woman, Amelanchier Stecoah, whose folk medicines and reputation as a storehouse of mountain lore have made her the subject of numerous articles and one documentary film.’ Why, she’s famous! And I’ll bet she’s one of the Cullowhees. Do you suppose I’ll actually get to meet her?”

  Bill, who had watched his sister’s outburst with weary amusement, turned to Milo and said, “Well, I know what I’m going to do while you’re gone.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Move. And leave no forwarding address.”

  Elizabeth laughed. “Don’t be silly, Bill. What would you do without letters from me to brighten up your tedious existence? Now, I haven’t got time to cook because I have to talk to Milo about the dig. Weren’t you going to order a pizza?”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SARVICE VALLEY, named for the white-flowered trees which covered the hillsides, had been optimistically named by its pioneer discoverers. Strictly speaking, the area was not large enough to be a valley; in local terms, it was merely a “run,” which is the bottomland carved out by a small creek. The encircling mountains formed the community’s boundaries, limiting its population to several dozen families farming a few acres of rocky hillside. A one-lane road turned off the main highway where tiny Sarvice Creek emptied into a stone-studded river, and it paralleled the creek up the run, turning to a dirt track long before it reached the creek’s source: a trickle from a spring in a wooded hollow six miles from the mouth. At the end of the run, where it joined the main road, the hills arched up on either side of the pavement, crowding road and creek into a sliver of land. There was no room to live or farm for the first mile of the run, but after a few rises and turns the land began to level out, revealing frame houses and cornfields on either side. In the widest stretch of bottomland at the center of the run, the community had built its main street: a one-room post office and a general store. Any less basic transactions would have to be carried out in the nearest incorporated town, Laurel Cove, which was eight miles up the highway.

  Although Sarvice Valley’s population was 98 percent Cullowhee, there were no souvenir shops or other concessions to tourists. The area was not on the path of the Appalachian Trail and was sufficiently remote to be largely ignored by the sightseers, who confined their interest to the Blue Ridge Parkway or the Great Smoky Mountains National Forest. Those in search of Eastern Indians found the Cherokees conveniently situated to both, so that few outlanders even bothered to investigate the Cullowhees. It was just as well: seekers of colorful India
n folkways would have been disappointed by the Cullowhees, who were indistinguishable from their Appalachian neighbors. Those tourists who did risk their cars’ suspension systems in Sarvice Valley were drawn there by the hand-lettered sign by the side of the main road.

  “There!” cried Elizabeth. “Did you see what that sign said?”

  “I’m not stopping at any more Antiques or Scenic Overlooks,” said Milo.

  Elizbeth pointed to the weathered board, marked in slanting free-form lettering: AMELANCHIER-WISE WOMAN OF THE WOODS-6 MI. An arrow pointed toward the Sarvice Valley Road. “I told you she lived around here,” said Elizabeth.

  “This is our turnoff,” nodded Milo. “Be on the lookout for a white frame church.”

  “I want to go and see her. She’s supposed to be over eighty, and she knows everything about root medicine. I brought my notebook. Do you suppose she’ll take me out gathering with her?”

  “Maybe. But first you’ve got to get moved into the Sunday school room, do your K.P. assignment, and go to the diggers’ meeting that Alex is having after supper. Remember, I’ve vouched for you on this dig. Don’t let me down.”

  Elizabeth was surprised at Milo’s serious tone. She had never heard him so businesslike. “I’ll do my job,” she said meekly.

  Milo didn’t answer. He seemed intent on the winding road in front of them. It lurched through oak groves and banks of mountain laurel, which parted now and then to provide a glimpse of the creek below. The only sign of human habitation was an occasional mailbox nailed to an upturned log and surounded by clumps of Queen Anne’s lace and tiger lilies. Milo, oblivious to the beauty of the summer woods, wondered why he was so edgy. This was a routine excavation, after all; surely there was less at stake here than there was when he assisted the medical examiner in criminal cases. Why should he be more nervous now? He told himself that it would turn out to be two weeks on a hot, dull job. The glamour of grave robbing was vastly overrated. With an effort of will, he made himself concentrate on the routine tasks ahead.

  After a few more miles of gradually broadening bottomland, the road opened up into fenced pastures, and finally to a cluster of houses comprising the community of Sarvice Valley. The church was easy to spot: it sat on a wooded hillside overlooking the village and was actually several miles farther off than it appeared.