When he was sure Anne wasn't going to keel over in a faint, David went back into the museum, to the vending machine he had seen down the one dark hall to the right, and slugged coins into it. He returned and handed Anne a can of Coke.
"Drink it," he said when she looked up questioningly. "You need the caffeine and the sugar."
"I thought I was the doctor in this road show," she said, but her smile was wan and her voice too weak to reassure him, in spite of her cheeky words, and she clutched the can like a lifeline.
Frances Collins leaned against the end of the table, not quite sitting, not quite hovering. He hadn't forgotten what she'd said, but only when he saw Annie's color returning to something approaching normal did he feel free to turn any attention to the guide.
"You say this happens often?"
"No," she said. "Not to this extent. Never to this extent. Are you all right now?"
Annie reached for his hand and squeezed it. Was she all right? He'd hoped getting her out of that house would get her away from the influence of whatever the hell they'd unlocked in that room. Obviously it hadn't.
"We need some answers," he said.
"Yes. I can see that. Would you like to go into my office?"
Annie glanced at the building. She'd go; he could see that in the determined lift of her shoulders. But she didn't want to.
"No," he said. The fog had lifted entirely. Winter sun warmed the air and the concrete table and benches. "It's pleasant out here, Ms. Collins."
"Frances," she told him, told both of them. "I have a feeling we've just progressed at least to first name status."
Anne managed a smile. "Probably farther than that," she said, extending her hand to the woman. "I'm Anne Locke."
They shook hands, and Frances turned to him.
"David Huerra," he told her, not at all sure they should be divulging any more than absolutely necessary, but recognizing in the sharing of their identities a trade of sorts. Information for information.
"That wasn't so bad, was it?" Frances asked. "Now, what is it you came to learn?"
"Were we that obvious?" Anne asked.
"Other than deliberately not signing the guest book? Other than not seeming surprised by the diversity of the exhibits even though you'd never been here before? Other than seeming to have a purpose in your search of them rather than the usual first-timers' meandering examination? Other than going directly to the book on copper and searching it as though looking for something specific? Well, no."
Frances counted off each point on her fingers and smiled as she said this, and, remarkably, David found himself smiling, too. "You'd make a good cop if you decide against archaeology."
"Thanks, but I'm afraid I'm still operating on classroom time. Sorry. So. What did you want to know?"
He glanced at Annie. She nodded. Hell, why not? "Are you familiar enough with Spiro artifacts to be able to identify something for us?"
"Maybe. Most of them are pretty distinctive. There are some designs that overlap with other Mississippian locations, but there are some that are uniquely Spiro."
He'd folded the tracing and stuck it in his windbreaker pocket before they left Anne's house. Now he pulled it out and handed it to Frances Collins.
"Oh."
Her fingers caressed the penciled outlines with a reverence he had seen only a few times before. Jack Townley had almost had it. An ancient man he had met in Mexico City definitely had.
Anne sighed. "I guess that's our answer, isn't it?"
"Yes." David dropped his hand onto her shoulder and left it there, gripping her with a tension he recognized but couldn't seem to subdue. "What would something like that be worth today?"
"Depends." Frances laughed. "Doesn't everything? I heard of a broken one going for twenty-five thousand. But that was probably a rumor. And there are reproductions now being sold as original, points, fragments, things like that." She studied the sketch. "It's original?"
Anne nodded.
"And it wasn't ceremonially killed?"
"No." David answered her this time. None of it had been. Not one item accompanying the warrior had been damaged. Only the slight nick on this piece, and it could have been done before the burial. "Is that significant?"
"Yes. In that it probably denotes a really high-status burial." She touched the drawing once more before returning it to him. "Conservatively, ten to fifteen thousand without documentation. Fifty to a hundred thousand with documentation."
He felt Anne tense beneath his hand. A fortune. A bleeding fortune. But hadn't they both already known that?
"Where are—" Anne smiled up at him before plunging onward. "You have only a few artifacts here. Where are the rest of them kept?"
"We have no originals here."
"What?"
Frances shook her head. "I guess you noticed this is not the most secure location in the world. We simply cannot afford to take the risk of losing another piece, and the insurance on the original of something like, well, like the basalt pipe you saw in the case is unbelievably expensive. The Resting Warrior pipe depicted in so much of the early literature is owned by the University of Arkansas. It's insured for a million and an half."
He felt the breath whoosh out of Annie.
"As for the rest of the artifacts, they're all over the world. During the commercial digging, before Oklahoma's antiquities laws were finally passed and took effect, there were buyers here at the site, literally snatching up everything the diggers brought out. It's been estimated that fully eighty percent of all high-status art in the U.S. was located in the mounds here at Spiro. There were more copper and conch items found here than at all other North American sites combined. And now it's scattered. France, England, Germany, South America. Even China."
"But surely some of it was—was—"
Again Frances shook her head, but this time she found a smile for Annie. "Sure. Some of it. After the W.P.A. and the University of Oklahoma took over the excavations. But by that time over four hundred burials, most of them high status, had already been disturbed. The commercial diggers had dug seven tunnels into Craig Mound—they called it the Great Temple Mound—and before they left, they dynamited all but one of their tunnels. Of course, by then, so much damage had already been done, the blasting probably didn't do that much additional damage. When the W.P.A. took over in June of '36 this place looked like a minefield. And much of the record that would have helped us understand a civilization as rich and powerful as the one that flourished here for—what? A thousand years or so, here and in the surrounding area—was gone. Scattered. Irretrievable."
Annie was getting ready to speak. He could sense it in the tension beneath his hand. Getting ready to say something that probably should never be said. "You recognized what was happening to Anne." If he was speaking, she couldn't. Not yet. "And you said you wouldn't have this job full time if your life depended on it."
Frances laughed softly. "I'd hoped you missed that. Now who's acting like a cop?"
David grinned at her, but he didn't relent. "Why, Frances?"
"Fair enough."
She'd said it easily, but now seemed at a loss for words. With a glance at Anne—for reassurance that she wasn't going to be scoffed at?—she began.
"I told you I'm interim only. I'm not the archaeologist in charge. I refused to be the archaeologist in charge. Winston Harris, my immediate predecessor, youngish—mid-thirties—a classmate of mine in undergrad studies, had a heart attack after only three months on the job. But why should he have been immune? Everyone in charge of this site has suffered some problem, mental, emotional, physical. Alcoholism, insanity, divorce, a bleeding ulcer—you name it, it's probably happened here.
"One not technically in charge, but closely connected had his dissertation on Spiro and all his notes go up in a fire in his tent while on another excavation.
"Three members of the W.P.A. crews died in cave-ins on this site.
"And that doesn't even begin to touch the things that happened to some of those involved in the commercial dig; drowning face down in a dry stream bed; being trapped in a cave-in while everyone else got out; crashing into a tree because the brake line was severed— forged, not cut or worn; painful, disfiguring cancer.
"And then there were those we only suspect were connected to the Spiro site. Collectors who were brutally murdered. One man who locked himself in a bank vault with a basket of Spiro pearls and was found dead the next morning—and the pearls were missing.
"I come out here sometimes at night, not because I want to, but because I can't seem to help myself. There's a heaviness here, after dark, that weighs down on me." She laughed self-consciously. "Even my stomach tingles. And concepts come so vividly—always, here—but more so at night.
"I can almost see . . .
"Some of this comes from growing up here, of hearing the rumors, even of seeing that damned huge feather cloak before the house where it was on display burned. But at night I can almost see that pair of big gold cats the old-timers talked about prowling the mounds.
"And I can almost—I can see the aura that seems to hover over the mounds."
She laughed again. "And of course we can't keep one blasted mechanical thing working for any length of time."
Annie had picked up on the word cats; hell he had too. But not yet. He couldn't let her get into that yet. "Cloak, you said? Feather cloak?"
She nodded. "Six, eight feet long. At least a hundred and twenty pounds. It was supposed to have come out of the central chamber in Craig Mound, the chamber that most experts claim didn't really exist, at least not as more than a collapsed area between litter-borne burials, certainly not as a separate chamber. But Gramps said it did, said that when they broke into it, it whooshed like a vacuum being opened, that big cedar poles making bins lined the walls, that there were boards painted with portraits that looked like Egyptians, and that there were maybe four burials there including the one with the cloak and the copper-covered giant that all the commercial diggers claim to have seen and no one knows what happened to. The experts say it probably didn't exist. My grandfather says it did."
"Who—" Now Annie spoke. "Who would wear a hundred and twenty pound feather cloak?"
"One heck of an important ruler. Maybe the priest, or the ruler. One thing for sure, he had to have had a fortune in grave goods with him, as well as a lot of faithful retainers and probably wives to follow him into the afterworld."
"Priest," David asked. "Not god?"
"No. Not god." Frances told them. "We think that these people had a naturalist religion that strove to control the forces of the spirits that inhabit animals, maybe even the elements. They probably worshipped to some degree, maybe only symbolically, the sun, moon, maybe the wind, rain, water, soil."
"And the giant?" Anne asked softly, intently. "Do you suppose he was one of the retainers of the priest?"
"No. I don't think so. From the way Gramps described him, he was—had to be—pretty powerful in his own right. He had to have been a high-status warrior who would have earned his own place in the hierarchy and would not accompany the priest in death. Instead he would be accompanied by his own attendants."
"And wives?" Annie asked.
"And wives," Frances said.
But he hadn't been. Or had he? How could they ever know now? How could Annie be so sure he had been alone?
"Can I talk with your grandfather?" Annie asked. "I need to talk to your grandfather."
For a moment Frances looked startled. "I'm sorry," she said finally. "He's had a stroke. That's why I'm home. To help my grandmother. He's recovering. But he still doesn't have his speech back. He may never have."
"No." Annie's voice softened and she reached for Frances's hand. "I'm the one who's sorry."
Frances shrugged off the dark mood that had momentarily claimed her. "You have more reason than just curiosity, don't you?"
Anne nodded. "Yes. You see my great uncle was probably at the dig at the same time as your grandfather was. He was a dealer. He—He was responsible for removing a great deal of material from—from here."
Frances cocked her head to one side and stared at the drawing, now anchored to the table by Annie's Coke can. "And that's where that piece came from?"
Annie nodded. "That. And—And others. That I can't understand why he didn't get rid of because I think he died, if not in poverty then at least close to it except for the money his wife's family provided. Your grandfather might know him. And why . . ."
"I can ask. Communication isn't impossible, just horribly difficult. What was his name?"
"Hansom," Annie told her. "Ralph Hansom."
"Oh, shit." Frances had started to rise. Now she sat down abruptly. "The curse. The damned curse. He didn't get rid of it and now you can't."
Anne turned to look up at David. He stepped closer, pulling her back against him. But that wouldn't protect her. Would anything? "You've heard of him, then?"
Frances looked at him, shook her head, and laughed weakly. "Yeah. You might say that. You see, my grandfather wasn't particularly happy with what he had done here. This was during the Depression, you remember, and this area had been depressed since before the Choctaw chose the losing side in the Civil War and had to free their slaves, then had to give them citizenship and a piece of the pie when the lands in the nation were allotted to individuals instead of being held in common title by the Choctaw Nation. Anyway, the commercial diggers were offering about the only jobs to be had. I heard Gramps say, more than once, that the items shipped out of the mounds were the major export for the county during that time.
"But, later, after his family was fed and clothed, he worried about his part in the grave-robbing. That's what he called it. The Choctaw had known these mounds were here for over a hundred years and not bothered them. And even though there had been some digging on the sly since—well, since God only knows when, probably since the first farmer managed to clear away the cane that covered most of these river-bottom lands by then and plowed up a conch shell or an ax, there wasn't any serious activity until 1933.
"And he helped. He took money to help desecrate a burial ground. At least that's how he looked at it after the fact. And that's how he told it to me while I was growing up. And when stories about curses and retribution crept in, so did your uncle's name.
"He bought something. Or stole it—Gramps was never very clear on that. And everyone who helped him died a brutal death. And everyone he tried to sell it to died a brutal death. And finally, he died a brutal death.
"Is that about what you'd heard?"
Annie closed her eyes and leaned against David, gathering strength. She reached into her jacket pocket and took out the folded brochure with the warrior's picture on the cover. "This image," she asked. "Where did it come from?"
Frances glanced at the cover; he could tell she didn't have to study it. "From an engraving on a copper plate we found in a burial when we made some trial excavations on the plaza. That's the area between Brown, the mound with the top gouged out of it—the commercial diggers did that, too—and Copple, the mound just barely visible at the back of these grounds. Actually, I'm not sure it was a burial. We trenched through a house mound. There was a great deal of material, so we decided to excavate it completely. We found three bodies, but they didn't fit any of the patterns of burial we know. It was almost as if they had died and the house had been allowed to fall in and cover them. One of them, a woman, was wearing this as a breastplate."
"Can I see it?" Anne asked. "No. I suppose what I mean is, where can I see it?"
"I wish I knew," Frances said. "It—You have to know that Spiro artifacts have a long history of just disappearing. From locked vaults, from archived collections. In recent days, these disappearances haven't been of major items, nothing like the Resting Warrior or Big Boy pipes, but little pieces—a little piece here, a little piece there. This breastplate is one of those pieces. Why?"
Anne reached for his hand. She was going to say it, and nothing he could say or do would stop her. He caught her hand in his and held tightly.
"Because we found the warrior he was modeled after. The one in the central chamber. The copper-clad giant that doesn't exist. And since we found him, two people have died brutal deaths."
They went back inside. Anne knew they would either have to do that, or leave, when a small but steady stream of visitors began arriving at the museum. Parked in Frances's cramped little office, surrounded by magazines, books, and articles about the Spiro people, about the artifacts, about the authorized excavations and the commercial digging, Anne sat with her eyes closed, listening as David paged through book after book. Looking for something. Looking for what? Answers? Did he honestly think he'd find answers to what faced them in those books?
He slammed one shut and scraped his chair as he stood and tried to pace in the crowded room. She opened her eyes and looked up. She'd seen him in many moods this past week, but never agitated like this.
"It's worth a fortune, Annie," he said from a temporary pause in his march at the corner of an overflowing bookcase. "We already suspected that, though, didn't we?"
She didn't answer; he didn't seem to need one.
"But not just in money," he went on. "Do you have any idea how much information can be gained from what your uncle hid in the dark fifty years ago?"
Frances opened the door and stepped into the room as David was speaking. She leaned against the doorjamb, silent, waiting.
"Him," Anne said, tired beyond belief. "He."
David shot her a sharp glance. "Why do I have the feeling I'm not going to like what you say?"
But maybe she wasn't too tired to smile. Just a little. "Probably because you won't. Probably because neither one of you will. He's not an it, David, or a what. He's a man who was buried with honor and dignity, then ripped from that grave. Aside from the fact that whatever is killing these people won't let us disturb him any more than he's already been disturbed, why on earth should we even want to? Why can't he be left alone? Why should he have to become some sort of encyclopedia? Is desecrating his grave for that purpose really any better than desecrating it for money?"
"You don't want the money?"
"Oh, God, no."
He threw his head back and twisted his neck and shoulders, easing tight muscles, before sighing. "Don't you think we have an obligation to science, or history, or even to the people who once lived at this very site, to share what knowledge can be gained from this . . . from his burial?"
"I don't know, David. I just don't know."
He walked to where she sat and leaned against the edge of the desk, taking her hand in his. "What do you want, Annie? The decision is up to you. He's yours, you know."
What did she want? What had she wanted last night when she knelt at the warrior's feet, crying. What had she wanted when she held the cedar box and miniatures in her hand and grieved for something and someone she had no way of understanding?
One thing she did understand.
"No, he isn't mine," she said. "If I think that, I'm no different from my uncle. What do I want? I think what I want is for him to be at peace. After all these hundreds of years since he died, is that too much to ask?"
"And if we can do both?" Frances asked softly. "Would you be willing to let me try to find a way to do both?"
Anne turned to face the woman, feeling the strength in David's touch flowing into her as he continued to grasp her hand. "Can you?"
"I don't know. I can only try."
Anne looked up at David, but he offered no opinion, telling her by his silence that this decision was hers alone to make. But was it? Wasn't he as deeply involved in everything that was happening, had happened, as she? But he gave her the decision, and she made it. She nodded. "Yes," she said. "Try. God knows we have to do something."
Anne remained silent during the drive to the highway, There, David hesitated at the stop sign. She'd seemed rested that morning. Had that only been an illusion? Because now she had shrunk back into herself, had shrunk into the corner of the Blazer, shutting him out. Damn it! Why was she shutting him out?
"What is it?" she asked when he remained stopped at the sign long after traffic had cleared.
"You didn't have breakfast," he said. "Frances said Fort Smith is only a few miles to the east. Why don't we find us a really good lunch?"
She dragged her head back and forth against the headrest. "Please. Could we just go home?"
Yeah. They could do that. Hell yes, they could do that. Why not? Leaving obviously hadn't done her one bit of good. Without speaking, he turned right and headed them toward the road that would eventually take them back to Allegro.
She slept. Not well. With little whimpers and a frown or a grimace of pain on her face. In the mountains just north of the Pitchlyn County line, he debated unsnapping her seat belt and pulling her closer, regardless of the built-in obstacle course of the bucket seats and small console, regardless of the slight risk to her safety. Until he saw emergency lights flashing ahead.
"Damnation." His hand froze on the seat belt release. Slight risk to her safety? In the mountains? On a road with more curves and bumps than a roller coaster?
She awoke as he slowed and eventually stopped in the line of traffic waiting to be directed around the clutter of cars and trucks a hundred yards downhill, but now out of sight behind a slight curve.
"What is it?" she asked.
"A wreck, I think," he told her. "Maybe a pretty bad one if the number of emergency vehicles is any indication."
She blanched. That was the only word to describe what happened. Already pale, already wan, her complexion took on the color of old, grayish parchment. And her eyes filled with a dread as old as the mountains that surrounded them. But when they reached the officer who was directing traffic, she leaned across David, to the window he had opened, and spoke clearly, with no sign of what he would have sworn was panic.
"I'm a doctor," she told the officer. "Can I be of help?"
"Thank God," the young deputy said. "Yes, ma'am, you sure can. Will you park over there, sir?"
David parked on the shoulder of the road, behind a sheriff's cruiser. "Are you up to this?" he asked her.
Anne just looked at him, without answering, but that one look was answer enough. She wasn't up to it. Not in any way, shape, form, or fashion—and why wasn't she? The thought nagged at him—but she was going to do it.
She almost spoke, almost reached for his hand, then she drew into herself, even as she seemed to draw on some inner source of strength, and opened the door instead.
"Annie, you don't have to do this."
She turned to look at him for only a second. "Don't I?" she asked. Then she stepped from the Blazer and walked toward the knot of people clustered on the narrow verge beside the pile of cars.
A baby was screaming. A young woman was sobbing and fighting against the restraint of an officer who held her away from the small boy on the shady shoulder of the highway. The boy wasn't crying. His eyes were closed, but his mouth was held in a tight grimace. His pant leg was split from groin to ankle, and a huge open gash exposed muscle on his thigh. A teenage boy knelt beside him, holding a bloody shirt as a makeshift compress against the wound. Once Anne saw the injured boy, she seemed to lose all awareness of anyone else. She shrugged out of her coat and draped it across the child's chest as she dropped to his side. "I'm a doctor," she said again.
"Oh, thank God." The teenager's words echoed the deputy's, and he scurried aside to give her room.
"My bag—" She looked up at David. "Would you—" She took the shirt and pressed it against the wound. "I didn't bring it. What am I going to do? I didn't bring it."
What was happening? This wasn't the Anne Locke he had spent the last week getting to know, the competent woman he had grown to respect. And it had nothing to do with Spiro or her uncle or skeletons in the closet.
"Annie."
His voice stopped her flow of words, thank God. "I have a couple of clean undershirts in my duffel. Will they work for a compress?"
She nodded and turned back to the boy on the ground. While she held pressure on the gaping wound with one hand, she tested the tourniquet on his thigh, sought and found a pulse in his throat, spoke soothingly to him as she lifted his eyelid to check his pupil, and shifted to move closer to him while she crooned words of encouragement and comfort. David watched her for a moment. Yes. This was Anne. Pale. Drawn. But the Anne he knew. And she would be all right.
But the boy wouldn't be, if he didn't hurry.
When he returned with the clean undershirts, Anne looked up at him long enough to smile and check to see how he had folded them before she nodded toward the boy's thigh where the makeshift pad had soaked through.
"Let me," he said. He dropped to his knees beside her and eased the clean pad of his shirt into place and held it there, freeing her to discard the other and hold the boy in both her arms. "Like this?" he asked.
She nodded and moved even closer to the boy, now lying on the rocky ground as she shared her body's warmth and her soft touch. "Yes. Thanks. His name is Wayne. He's ten. I was telling him we have a friend named Wayne who can track wild animals through the woods. Wayne, this is David. He's a police detective in Dallas. I'll bet that if you go to Dallas someday, he'll show you all through the police department and tell you about some of his really big cases. Won't you, David?"
She was crying. Crying like she had last night. Tears streamed unchecked down her cheeks as she held the boy and rocked slightly against him. The people around them were quiet, as though they suspected the doctor and her assistant were merely going through the motions, that the battle had already been lost. Even the baby had stopped screaming and the mother had stopped fighting to get to her son's side.
No, damn it! This boy wouldn't bleed to death while they waited for an ambulance, and he wouldn't surrender to the pain and give up. "I sure will, Wayne," David told him, with not a trace of his frustration evident in his voice. "One of the men I work with played college baseball, almost went pro before he decided he'd rather be a cop. He does a lot of work with the young people of Dallas, and he's been known to get an autographed ball every now and then. You come to see me, and I'll make sure he has one of those balls for you. Who's your favorite player?"
Wayne didn't answer. By then his grimace had faded. David shot a sharp glance at Anne.
"He's passed out," she told him. "But he's still alive."
The scream of the approaching ambulances broke the silence, but even after they screeched to a stop behind the pile-up, it seemed an eternity before one emergency med tech moved in to take David's place with the pressure compress, and another moved to take Anne's place to monitor vital signs.
Only then did David notice another ambulance crew working over another victim. Alive? Or dead? Suddenly he didn't want Annie to know that Wayne hadn't been the only patient. He helped her to her feet, took her ruined coat as their young helper handed it to him, and turned her toward the Blazer, away from the sight of that other crew.
"Where will you take him?" he asked the EMT who had replaced him.
"Saint Ed's in Fort Smith," the man told him.
David nodded and hugged Anne to his side. "We'll check later. Let's go now, Anne. Let's let these people do their job."
She didn't resist. Didn't argue. Didn't insist on following the boy to the hospital. And for that he was grateful. Because she looked just about one step from having to be taken there herself.
He loaded her into the passenger seat of the Blazer before he prowled through his duffel and found a T-shirt to sacrifice to the cleanup detail, then used it to wipe the blood from her hands and arms.
"So much blood," she said, not helping him, not fighting him. "So much blood." She looked straight ahead, out the opened door, not at him, not at the wrecked cars, not at the blood on her hands and his. "And I wasn't any more help today than I was then."