Crying Blood - An Alafair Tucker Mystery Page 2

  Yet there it was. A snake wrapped around a bone, giving him the eye. Shaw fought off a flood of superstitious dread.

  Buttercup reappeared from the woods and emitted a wuff. Are you coming? Shaw looked at her, then back at the rock. The bone was still there but the snake had gone.

  Shaw blinked. Had he actually seen what he thought he saw, or had it been a trick of the shadows? He shook himself.

  “Come on, Buttercup. Let’s see what you’ve found.”

  Chapter Two

  Shaw stood next to his brother James and pondered the grinning visage that looked back at them from the ground. It was getting colder and a damp mist was forming close to the ground. There would be a frost before morning. Shaw’s mustache felt stiff. He wondered if his breath was freezing into icicles above his lip.

  Buttercup had led him several yards into the woods to a small, open area where a large tree had probably stood once, but was now overgrown with tall chokecherry bushes interspersed with fiery red sumac. After he had seen the leg bones protruding from the small mound under the bushes, he had walked back to the clearing and waved at James to join him. After a brief consultation the men sent the boys back to their campsite with the dogs and the day’s kill, leaving the two of them to excavate the body. It had taken them nearly an hour to remove the rocks, dirt, and weeds from the makeshift grave, by which time dusk was pressing in on them and the woods were so gloomy that they were no longer able to make out much detail.

  “Looks like he’s been here a good long time,” Shaw observed. “Five, ten years, at least, maybe longer.”

  James cocked an eyebrow. “Being as he’s good and well reduced to bones I would reckon so.” He glanced toward the clearing, barely visible through the thicket of scrub oak and sassafras trees.

  Shaw bit his lip. “This looks like an old Indian burial. See how it was once piled over with rocks? Not deep, though. I’m guessing that the flooding we had back in January and February washed it out enough to finally expose that foot. He was more’n likely buried good enough to thwart any critters who might have been interested in him, until lately. These bones would have been dug up and scattered all over creation before long.” He squatted down to get a better look. The body was stretched out on its back. The left foot, shod in a tall leather boot, protruded below. The similarly booted right foot was now standing sentinel at the side of its previous owner.

  Dirt clogged the empty eye sockets and the lower jaw had been crushed and fallen over at an odd angle. Shaw dug his hands deeper into the pockets of his coat. “He was probably a Creek.”

  His brother’s eyebrows peaked. “You expect so?”

  “Well, look, James. He’s been here a long time and this is Muscogee Creek country.”

  “Those look like army boots to me,” James pointed out.

  Shaw stood up. “That don’t mean anything. Plenty of Creeks fought in the War between the States, on both sides. Can’t tell by looking, though. He might just as well have been yu-ne-ga.” He used their Cherokee mother’s word for “White man.”

  “What do you figure happened to him, Shaw?”

  “Who knows? Not a well-done burial. Maybe it was done in haste.” Shaw removed his bandanna from his back pocket and knelt back down. He leaned over the body and carefully began to brush dirt away from the skull. A long crack across the forehead began to reveal itself, growing wider as Shaw worked his way across the brow. A dark clot of dirt fell away from a perfectly round hole at the point above the nose cavity.

  Shaw’s mouth quirked up on one side and he looked up at James, who was leaning over his shoulder. “Right between the eyes.”

  “I’ll be switched!” James exclaimed. “Done to death! Now what do we do?”

  Shaw stood, shook his head. “It’s too late to make it into town before dark. Let’s cover him up with one of them old blankets we have back at the camp and put some of these rocks back on top of him for the night. In the morning I can ride into Oktaha and see if I can rustle up a telephone, call the sheriff in Muskogee. Somebody around here may know all about this poor fellow. Let’s see what the sheriff wants us to do. You and the boys stay and keep an eye on Slim, here, until I get back. Y’all can pack up the campsite.”

  James gave him a dry smile. “You expect our hunting trip is over?”

  “I fear so, James.”

  James walked back to the clearing to send one of the boys for a blanket, leaving Shaw squatted down beside the grave.

  Who were you, he wondered, without hope of an answer. His gaze wandered over the open hole, looking for a clue as to the identity of its occupant. There wasn’t much to see; brownish-grey bones with shreds of degraded clothing still clinging here and there. A boot. The shallowness of the grave had at first led Shaw to think this was a hasty burial, but the bony hands had been arranged over the place the heart had once been. Perhaps the dead man had simply been interred by someone who didn’t know how deep to make a grave.

  He spotted something at the skeleton’s side, something of a slightly different color than the surrounding soil. He leaned forward to dig it out with his fingers, then held it up to the fast-fading light. It looked like a small leather saddlebag with a short fringe on the flap. Years in the ground had done it no good, but it had held together better than its owner had.

  The flap was stiff and cracked when he lifted it, but he was curious enough not to care. Water had seeped in over time, and frost, and all manner of things that live under the ground. Whatever the bag’s contents had been they appeared to have melted together into a single mottled beige entity. Except for something white on top.

  He drew it out. A necklace, it looked like, made of the vertebrae of a snake strung together on a stiff and degraded leather thong. He stared at it in the palm of his hand, mesmerized, until he heard James coming back toward him, crunching through the leaves on the ground.

  Shaw often wondered in later years what possessed him at that moment. It seemed urgently important to him that this artifact not be seen by anyone. Not yet. He stuffed the necklace in his coat pocket and dropped the bag back into the hole as James came up behind him.

  “Look at that!” James said. “Is that his medicine bag?”

  Shaw’s heart was thumping, but when he spoke he sounded nonchalant. “Could be. Kind of big. Maybe it’s a saddle bag.”

  “Did you look inside?”

  “I did. It’s been in the ground too long. There’s nothing in there but a waterlogged mess.” A guilty thought arose. True, now that I’ve taken out the one thing I could identify.

  Chapter Three

  Their camp was set up at an old homesite. No one had lived on the property for many years, so even though the split log cabin had been fairly large and comfortable in its day, it had long since fallen into such disrepair that it was in danger of collapse. The boys had been eager to explore the house but were forbidden to go inside. So the Tuckers were camping rough, with three canvas pup-tents and blanket bedrolls around a fire in the forest clearing that once was a farm yard.

  It had been a poor farm. A few sticks remained of a pig sty and a chicken coop. There had never been a barn, but there was a debris-filled well that if dug out and cleaned would probably be serviceable. The homesite was no more than a cleared circle in the middle of the woods. There had once been a path out through the woods to the main road that was now overgrown.

  By the time Shaw and James had left the forlorn grave, it was so dark that they had some trouble navigating through the woods to find their way back. Shaw was in the midst of cursing himself for not keeping at least one of the dogs with them when James spotted the light of the boys’ campfire through the trees. The mouth-watering smell of roasting rabbit hastened them along.

  Fifteen-year-old Jerry stood up when the men crashed through the brush into the open. “There they are! What did y’all find? Was it a man buried up in the woods?”

  They stacked their shotguns and made themselves comfortable next to the fire before James sated the boy
s’ curiosity. “Some poor old devil passed into eternity back there in the woods, all right. Whatever happened to him happened a long time ago, but it looks like somebody helped him leave this life before God could call him.”

  Shaw took up the story so that James could stuff his mouth with rabbit. “We figured we’d better let the sheriff know what we dug up in case Slim’s kin have been wondering about him all this time, so I’ll ride into Oktaha in the morning. I don’t know whether the sheriff will send somebody right out or not, or whether he’ll want us to stay and answer questions or clear out. But I’m betting our hunting trip is done, boys.”

  A collective groan greeted this announcement and Shaw laughed. “I reckon the sheriff will want us out of the way eventually. Course, if y’all want to bag a few more birds before I return with with law in tow, help yourself.”

  They feasted on wild rabbit, saving the quail for the superior cooking skills of the womenfolk at home, then crawled into their pup tents, two by two, bunking together by age—the two youngest, Charlie and Jerry, the two eldest sons, Gee Dub and Jimmy, and the two patriarchs, Shaw and James. As he slid into his bedroll, Shaw could hear the boys’ excited whispering about the intriguing twist their hunting trip had taken.

  In good time, silence fell. Shaw was drifting between wake and sleep when James spoke.

  “I’m sorry we have to cut this trip short, Shaw. I look forward to it every year. This a real good hunting spot. I’m glad you thought of it.”

  “I spent some time out here years ago, before Papa even bought it. The fellow who owned it before gave me a job helping him clear land.”

  “Well, we’ll have to come back for sure. All these trees around here, this country reminds me of back home.”

  “Not so hilly as Arkansas,” Shaw noted.

  “Still. Makes me think of how our pa used to take us boys out hunting every fall. Sometimes we’d be out for days. Now, them woods back around Mountain Home are deep. Full of deer and bear.”

  Shaw smiled at the memory. “Never used any tents, either. Pa could whip up a shelter out of a couple of saplings and a bunch of branches quicker’n you could spit. All four of us would hunker down together in that lean-to, all wrapped in Ma’s quilts, and Pa would scare the wadding out of us with tales about panthers dragging off little children and haints walking the hills.”

  James chuckled in the dark. “You and Charles told me that if a panther came he’d always go after the youngest ’cause they was the best eatin’. I bawled, so Pa gave me an unloaded pistol and said I was to shoot any panthers I caught sight of. I’d sit there pointing that pistol out the door until I couldn’t keep my eyes open and fell over asleep!”

  “You remember that? You were just a little feller when that happened.”

  “Well, shoot, y’all about scared me to death. I like to never got over it.”

  “Sorry!” Shaw’s apology lacked conviction. “I reckon that’s what you get when you have two older brothers.”

  James laughed. “I ought to thank you, I expect. It’s one of the only things I remember very clear about Pa.”

  “I’m glad of that, then. We always came home with about as much game as we could carry. ’Coons and possums, rabbits and squirrels, all kinds of birds. One year we brought home a big old snapping turtle and Ma made the best soup out of it. Pa always took one deer every autumn.”

  “Oh, I had forgot how he’d dress that deer and smoke it in a hollow log!”

  “You remember the razorback?”

  James barked a laugh. “Ugh! Charles still has the scar on his leg to bear witness to that little scrape! Tasted like boiled shoes, too.”

  “Well, Mama made a passel of brushes out of its bristles and got a bunch of shoe soles and straps and hinges out of its hide.”

  “I’d rather eat one of my own pigs any day.” James murmured. His voice was muffled by his arm.

  “You know, there’s a rime on the grass tonight. I figure it’ll be butchering time pretty soon after we get home.” Shaw waited a long moment for a reply that didn’t come. James had fallen asleep.

  Chapter Four

  Shaw sighed and turned over. It always made him a bit sad to think about his father. He wasn’t sure why. He had only been eight years old when Jim Tucker died. Over thirty-five years ago.

  It had happened so fast. Jim fell ill one day and three days later he was dead. That sort of thing happened a lot in the Arkansas backwoods in those days. That didn’t make it any easier, though. Shaw had felt like the bottom had fallen out of the world.

  Shaw’s mother had reacted with her usual Cherokee stoicism. She hadn’t indulged in any hysterics, or even cried much that Shaw had seen. She hadn’t done much of anything, in fact. It was as though she had turned to stone.

  At the time Shaw had been too young and concerned with his own loss to have much compassion for his mother’s feelings. He remembered long periods of time after that when she wasn’t at home. To this day, he occasionally wondered how she could have left her six young children alone to cope with the loss. He had never asked her why she disappeared for days on end, or where she had gone. No one in the family ever talked about it.

  His oldest sister Josie had mothered her younger siblings through that first dark year, feeding them and keeping them clean. Shaw smiled to himself. Her three little brothers hadn’t helped her much in that department. The two littlest girls had been not much more than toddlers. Of course Josie had been not quite twelve years old herself. That realization filled him with awe.

  His mother had slowly returned to this earth and resumed her life, even though there were still periods of absence. But she never smiled, never laughed, never played and teased like she had before Jim died.

  Not until a carrot-topped, blue eyed, elfin Irishman by the name of Peter McBride showed up and brought light into the world again.

  Shaw had never for one minute resented his stepfather. Peter had brought his mother back to life and had filled a void in the lives of her children. He had even added two more boys to the family. Even so, to this day Shaw felt a peculiar ache when he thought about his father. He pillowed his head on his arm, drifting again, and made an effort to remember the details of his father’s face. He had had shaggy dark hair and green eyes. A ready smile that quirked up at one corner. He hugged his children a lot and his ill-shaven face was always scratchy. He had been twenty-nine years old when he died.

  Come on, boys, y’all think you can rassle me? I’ll take you all on at onest! Oh, no! Oh, no! He’p me, Ma! All these boys is got me pinned!

  Chapter Five

  Shaw blinked at the blackness over his head and wondered briefly where he was. Wherever it was, it was cold and dark. The inside of a tent, and his sleeping companion was his brother James instead of his wife, Alafair. It only took a moment for him to realize that a noise had awakened him. Something that didn’t belong with the normal sounds of an autumn night in the woods.

  He listened to his brother’s even breathing. Whatever it was hadn’t disturbed James. Shaw wondered if he had been dreaming. He had just turned over on his side when he heard it again. His eyes popped open. A rustling noise. He raised up on his elbow, not alarmed, yet wanting to place the unfamiliar sound before dismissing it.

  He could see the glow of the banked fire pit through the slit in the tent flap. Nothing was stirring. He could see the tops of the heads of two black haired boys, Gee Dub’s curly and Jerry’s straight, in the tent directly across the clearing. Both were sound asleep.

  He could hear the dogs snuffling and muttering to each other, and a soft woof. That’s it, he told himself. Just the dogs moving around. But as logical as this explanation was he didn’t lie down. If I can hear it one more time I’ll know for sure what it is.

  Something dark and noiseless passed between the tent flap and the light of the fire. Shaw froze. Had he imagined it? He reached out to shake James when a speckled dog brushed by the entrance, panting loudly. Shaw let out a breath he hadn’t realized he
had been holding. His relief was short lived. Following close behind the four trotting dog legs were two creeping human legs, shod in tall muleskin moccasins. Shaw yelped and sat up so quickly that his head scraped against the canvas.

  James started awake as Shaw sat up. “What…?”

  Shaw hushed him with a gesture and was outside in a fraction of a second, standing in front of his tent glancing wildly around the clearing and poised to bolt for the tripod of shotguns stacked nearby. Crook and Buttercup were lying next to one another by the fire, nibbling and worrying something on the ground between them. They lifted their heads and gave him a quizzical look. Happy was sitting on his haunches beside the younger boys’ tent with his usual brainless grin on his face and what appeared to be a stick in his mouth. No human legs, attached or otherwise, were to be seen. James crawled out next to him and got to his feet.

  “What’d you hear?” he whispered, still bleary with sleep.

  “I thought I heard somebody moving around.”

  James yawned. “Look at Happy. He’s got a squirrel or a rabbit haunch in his mouth. And your two hounds over there have the rest of it. You heard the dogs after a critter.”

  Shaw gave a tight shake of his head. “That’s what I thought, ’til I saw a set of legs go strolling by the tent.”

  That woke James up. “Legs? Not one of the young’uns?”

  “Not unless they took to wearing moccasins in the last few hours.” Shaw kept his voice low so as not to disturb the boys.

  “I don’t see anybody. The dogs don’t seem fretted.”

  Shaw was stalking around the clearing with James in his wake, taking inventory, listening and looking for anything amiss. “I don’t see anybody either. He couldn’t have got into the woods so fast without being seen.”

  “You more than likely just dreamed it.”

  Shaw looked up at the sky. The positions of the crisp, bright, points of light in the blackness on either side of the blanket of the Milky Way told him it was around two o’clock in the morning. “Must be,” he mumbled. What else? Either that or their stealthy visitor had disappeared into thin air.