Indian Mound Murder (eBook)

Chapter One
Very Early Monday Morning, about 2:30.

The Soft and Noisy Darkness

She could hear the sounds in the darkness. It might be big: a bear? A deer? Someone moving about the camp? Of course, even small critters—possums, raccoons, rats—could make more noise than you’d think.

But noise or no noise, she had to pee, so she took the flashlight with her, scanned the ground carefully so she wasn’t squatting over poison oak or a cottonmouth. She wished there was a portolet, but there wasn’t one.

The dark was nearly complete out here. Once lights went out at the camp and everyone was asleep, the darkness closed in, absolute and stifling. It was almost a physical sensation, like weight or constriction. When the moon shone, there was some light, but the moon tonight was only the thinnest crescent, and she couldn’t have said whether it was waxing or waning. Wasn’t her thing. There were stars visible, but cloud cover and the thick humidity obscured most of them.

There was a noticeable rustle over by the Indian mound, and she shone her flashlight in that direction. An armadillo, caught by the light, froze for an instant and then scampered away far faster than she would have thought. That was slightly scary, she thought; but armadillos were harmless, though digging in the mound they were likely to disturb ancient remains. Nothing she could do about it in the middle of the night.

When she was far enough from her tent to make it sanitary, but not so far that she’d get lost in the woods or risk stepping on a cottonmouth in the middle of the night—who wants to get bitten in the bum by a snake in the middle of the night?—she scanned the ground carefully, squatted, and turned off the flashlight for privacy.

She could hear breathing. It was heavy and regular and slow. For an instant, she couldn’t tell whether it was hers or someone else’s. She was breathing hard herself because squatting to do your business was a little taxing, especially when, even at night, the temperatures were in the eighties and the September humidity was at least as high as the temperature. She wasn’t sure of her conversions, but wasn’t the low eighties Fahrenheit somewhere around thirty Celsius? She occupied her mind with such trivia as a matter of habit.

But thinking of temperatures didn’t obscure the breathing.

And it definitely wasn’t hers.

And it sounded human for certain.

“Hey, you, whoever you are. Mind if I do my business in peace?” She wiped and stood up and quickly pulled up her shorts. She was out here in the woods with a number of people, including at least two young men who might well be interested in her, Tuco and Stan. She hadn’t pegged either of them as the pervy sort, but, then, one never knew.

She swiveled around fast and aimed the flashlight at the sound of the breathing. Nobody, nothing. The flashlight just shone into darkness, illuminating only the trunks of tall old pines, fan-leafed palmettos as high as her head, and shadows in every shape imaginable, dancing in the flashlight beam against the green screen of palmetto fronds. She directed the light back and forth, but nobody was there. Okay, she thought, I was imagining it. There was no breathing.

Except, she couldn’t shake the feeling that indeed there had been breathing. And it wasn’t that silent, and it wasn’t hers.

One last careful three-sixty with the flashlight. She could see palmettos and pine trunks, the leaf litter on the ground, their big Toyota Land Cruiser with its wagon still attached. Then, the cluster of tents for herself and the other researchers and volunteer workers. One for Stan and Tuco, one for her and Becky, one for Professor Morgana. There’d be another for Professor Lavida when he arrived tomorrow. Then, the light shone on the mound where they’d be digging. On the side of that mound, obscured by night and intervening trees and palmettos, was a trench started months ago by Professor Lavida. She and Becky and the boys had visited it just yesterday; they’d be working to expand it today. Slow and painstaking work. Paleontological work.

It was exciting work, even if it was physically very hard and draining in this heat. Here in the remote pine woods of North Florida, an ancient group of PaleoIndians had set up camp. The team knew it was paleo because Lavida had discovered a mastodon tooth months ago, and fossilized bone fragments with clear cut marks on them. Early American Indians had penetrated this far east and south when the great, lumbering beasts still flourished in Florida, then a drier and cooler and grassier place. They all prayed for human remains, except none of them actually believed in prayer. This was a scientific outfit, and they approached the dig as scientists.

She walked toward her tent and switched off the light just before she got in, so as not to wake Becky. When she was in the tent, she could swear the breathing returned. And Becky wasn’t in the tent.

Within minutes, as she waited almost in a panic, she was about to go rouse the boys so they could search the camp. But just as she was about to go out again, here came a flashlight swinging back and forth, and Becky squatted before the tent flap and crawled in. There was barely room for the two of them.

“Hey, Beck, you have to go, too?”

“Nature’s just got this way of turning beer into urine, know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I know. Say, what direction did you just go?”

“Out behind the truck. Why? Don’t matter where you pee out here. Bears and deer do it on the ground all the time. I ain’t goin’ to that tiny shit-shed, not just to take a leak.” The “shit-shed” was their primitive toilet, where they had all agreed they’d do their poops. It was just a pit with a bench over it, and a big hole in the middle of the bench for the obvious purpose. Primitive, but without a portolet out here, it was the best they could rig up.

“Well, I could have sworn I heard breathing out there.” It wouldn’t have been Becky, though. She’d gone behind the truck, in exactly the opposite direction from her.

“Wooo! Creepy. Seriously?”

“Yeah, seriously. And I’m ninety percent sure it wasn’t me.”

“You don’t think one of the boys was spying on you? Creeper!”

“I don’t know. I shone my flashlight around, but I couldn’t see anything.”

“Well, you’re safe now. You’ve got me to protect you!” Then Becky giggled. She was all of five and a half feet tall with an athletic build—still, Regina thought, not a physically imposing presence. She was tough, though, and in fantastic shape. Regina had noticed this when they were digging.

“Yep. Appreciate that. Think I should broach the subject with the boys in the morning?”

“Sure, I guess so. You sure about this?”

“Ninety percent, yes.”

“I mean, nights out here are so damn dark, it makes you feel kind of closed in. You could have been hearing your own breathing, but, I don’t know, like projected back from the trees—no, reflected, that’s what I meant to say.”

“Maybe, Beck, but I don’t think so. Oh, well, g’night.”

“Yeah. Nighty-night. I’m not crawling down in my bag; it’s too damn hot.”

“Me neither. Let me check the zipper on the tent—keep out wandering armadillos and rattlesnakes.”

“Oh, God, please.”

In minute, she could hear Becky’s quiet, shallow breathing, with just a hint of a snore. The quintessential cute volunteer, all smiles freckles and pigtails. Learn a little about digging a mound, get out of the school environment for a bit, out of the musty hallways where specimens were kept, the labs where reconstructive work was done to restore fragments to their original shapes: pottery shards, scapulas, long bones, hip joints, skulls.

Except that Becky seemed to know more about anything they’d turned up on their preliminary, quick overview, than anybody else at the mound, even Doctor Morgana. And Becky, beneath her cuteness, seemed strangely wired for action. Regina felt that Becky must be hiding something, but what? She listened to Becky for a moment, but hers did not seem the breathing Regina had heard.

It took her a while to fall asleep, but she did. She fell asleep thinking: There was definitely breathing, and it was definitely human. Why the flashlight hadn’t shone anything she couldn’t make out. The dark was so thick, though, like the palmettos and the trees, maybe he—whoever it was—was there, but she just couldn’t see. It would be easy to hide, in the dark of night, amongst the broad-leaved palmettos. She couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to do that: snakes, spiders—God knew what would slither and crawl in the heavy bushes.

The next morning brought light and a camp breakfast: bacon, no eggs, and potatoes fried in the bacon grease. Coffee. No juice or milk. Somebody would have to take the truck into Seminole Pines, the little town nearby, in a day or two, for groceries. But they’d have to draw straws. Even if the work was sweaty and hot...