they required that I use an unfamiliar app on my phone to exploit them. I felt like a World War I soldier crossing no-man’s-land with a lighted cigarette as I carried that phone around the mill site. The whole time, I wished I’d stuck my father’s Walther into my waistband instead of leaving it under the seat of the Flex, but I didn’t want some sheriff’s deputy catching me out there carrying. Eventually I figured out the GPS app, and I ended my search by sliding down into a trench beside the exposed concrete footing of a foundation pier.
I know nothing about archaeology, but with the LED light from my phone, I saw what looked like defined soil strata on the face of the five-foot-deep hole. As quickly as I could, I scraped shovelfuls of dirt from the lowest two feet of the trench and dumped them into doubled Hefty yard bags. After collecting about twenty pounds of dirt, I hauled that bag over to the Flex and loaded it into the back. Then we drove to the next set of coordinates, which turned out to be two plots of turned earth in the middle of a patch of Johnsongrass. I figured this work would be in vain, but for Buck’s sake I dug up another thirty pounds of dirt and bagged it.
As I started back to the Flex, my right foot kicked something hard, and I cursed. Shining my light down, I saw a brick protruding from the soil. On closer inspection, it appeared to be one of the reddish-orange bricks that Byron Ellis had referred to as “Natchez brick.” Turning in a circle with my phone light, I saw three more—fragments rather than whole bricks. Setting down my Heftys, I untwisted one plastic neck and dropped in the bricks. Then I slung the heavy bags over my shoulder and humped them back to the Flex, which was parked thirty yards away, on a strip of Johnsongrass.
“Somebody’s coming down Port Road,” Nadine hissed as I tossed the bags under the hatchback. “Headlights just hit the bottom of the hill.”
Looking up, I saw the lights, and my pulse kicked into overdrive. I started to hide my shovel under the trash bags, but on impulse I shut the hatchback, took the shovel by its handle, and hurled it as far into the dark as I could. By the time the sheriff’s cruiser pulled up beside us with its red lights flashing, Nadine was lying across my chest, kissing me deeply. The shock of her cool tongue in my mouth blanked the cruiser from my mind, until I heard a male voice over a PA ordering us out of the vee-hickle.
Nadine broke the kiss, squeezed my shoulder, and said, “Play it cool.” Then she winked.
I got out, holding both hands up in clear sight. A flashlight beam blinded me, and my heart began to pound as I remembered the ghastly wound in Buck’s skull. Then Nadine got out, making a show of straightening her cocktail dress.
I didn’t know the deputy, but after he got a look at Nadine, it didn’t take much effort to sell our story. Once he recognized my name, he felt compelled to tell me about the murder at the Matheson house. I feigned ignorance to give him the pleasure of shocking me with a bloody tale. We were lucky. If we’d gotten a different deputy—or, worse, a private security guard who knew my connection to Buck—things would have gone differently. This deputy did shine his flashlight into the Flex, but he didn’t question the trash bags. I wondered if the shovel would have triggered more suspicion or if I’d made a mistake by tossing it into the dark. But since the deputy let us go, I made myself forget about it.
As we drove up the face of the bluff—ten car lengths ahead of the cruiser—Nadine joked about the deputy staring a hole through her chest. I wasn’t quite ready to laugh. If he called in my plate to the wrong person, he might still pull us over and arrest us for trespassing. But when I peeled off eastward at the top of the bluff, he continued north into the city, and my pulse returned to normal. Nadine and I went back to my house and took a cursory look at the soil samples I’d collected. They were full of fragments, some of which were clearly charcoal, while others appeared to be pebbles. In the bag of dirt taken