“Right,” he replied. “The unlawful entry.”
“The good instinct,” she quipped.
He raised his head to look her in the eyes. “Okay, Nurse Franklin,” he said in a conciliatory tone. “A medical emergency.”
She smiled. “Hey, did you find out who the guy is?” She stopped abruptly. “I mean was.”
“Not yet,” he replied. “But we did contact the police in Gallup, New Mexico, where the truck is registered. We should hear something by the end of the day, I imagine.” He placed the written statement back in front of Rose.
“Finish this up and then bring it over to my office.” He nodded with his chin to the far side of the station.
Rose peered behind her and saw the door to the corner office. She had not noticed the space before. She nodded and then asked, “Is there a large Native American population in West Memphis?” She was still thinking about the man she had just seen, wondering if he was local or was visiting.
“Not a population at all,” he responded. “Not since the Europeans arrived in the 1400s. The Mississippi valley used to be home to a great many Indian tribes,” he noted, “but that all changed once Columbus and those other celebrated explorers found the shores of these United States.”
Rose considered the sheriff's words. She realized she knew only very little about the Indians in the southeastern part of the country. The stranger at the reception desk still had her interest.
“Are there any groups still around here?” she asked, wondering if the man she had seen and the dead camper were related in any way.
“Not really organized,” he replied. “Even though we're west of the Mississippi, which is where they were all sent at the time of the Indian Removal Act, they marched them on past us into Oklahoma. So there are not too many tribes around here. It's strange that they've all gone, since geographically we aren't too far from Poverty Point and the Hopewell societies.”
Rose was puzzled.
“You never heard of Poverty Point?” he asked. Then he waved his hand in front of himself. “I forget that most folks don't know the Indians' story in this part of the country. It's not usually discussed in the history books.”
He sat forward in his chair. “I started reading about the cultures after I found an old fossil when I was hunting near Hot Springs. It turned out to be a carving, a shell gorget with a strange figure on it. I took it to the museum director at the state capital and he told me it was from around 1300, a ceremonial piece from the early tribes somewhere in the Southeast, maybe Mississippi. Anyway, it got me interested in that part of history. Turns out that the river used to be a big gathering spot for Indians all across the country.”
He stopped and took a deep breath, realizing he was more than likely boring Rose. “It's a hobby for me.”
Rose thought about the bracelet, how Sheriff Montgomery could probably explain a lot about it, that it might even generate some warm feelings between them, but then she remembered that she had not told him about it when he asked her at the murder scene if she had any other information. She hadn't included it in her statement. She decided not to say anything about it, since she worried that telling him now might ultimately make things worse.
“You suddenly interested in Indian history because of the dead man?” he asked, pulling Rose from her thoughts.
“Sure,” she said. “And then I just saw a guy at your front desk, not more than ten minutes ago. He was definitely Indian,” she said. “I just wondered where he might have been from, if he might have known the deceased.”
Sheriff Montgomery turned to look at the front entry. He turned back to Rose. “Wouldn't know,” he said. “I came in from the side, so I haven't checked my messages.” He focused again on the uncompleted pages in front of Rose.
“Well, finish this up and drop it on my desk on your way out,” he said as he stood up from his chair. “That will be all we need from you for now. I'll be over at Shady Grove again tomorrow morning to check things out again.”
He moved to the conference room door, then turned around. “You're not going to involve yourself any further in this, are you?” he asked, giving her a suspicious look.
“Not unless I uncover another medical emergency,” she replied. She waited a moment, then smiled innocently.
The sheriff made a huffing noise and shook his head. “I'm asking you nicely, Rose. Stay out of my investigation.” Then he turned and walked out of the conference room.
Rose watched him as he went to the front desk and spoke to the receptionist. He took a handful of notes, which Rose assumed were his messages, and then headed into his office. She took a drink of water and finished her report.
SEVEN
Rose left the sheriff's office and headed straight to the library. She planned to go to the history section to search for a book that could help her decipher the symbols on the dead man's bracelet. She thought Ms. Lou Ellen had given her good advice about identifying them, but instead of drawing the symbols on a piece of paper and taking that to the library, she'd just decided to take the piece of jewelry along with her. She figured that she would be able to find a private place where no one would see her and where she could do the research without being discovered.
Having visited the library a few times during her stay in West Memphis, she knew that on a Tuesday afternoon the place would be mostly unoccupied, and she was right. The library was empty of people except for an older woman who appeared to be studying recipes from magazines, two teenaged boys at the computers, a young woman with a small child in the children's section, and two librarians. One of them was leaving when Rose walked in.
The younger woman, the librarian Rose had seen in the building before, held open the door, offering a polite greeting to Rose and waving good-bye to the woman standing behind the desk. This one, a round woman of middle age, was only vaguely familiar to Rose. She was busy on the phone when Rose stepped to the desk to ask her a question.
She dropped the receiver by her chin and pointed Rose to the reference section when she asked the location of books on Native American tribes.
The librarian was patiently giving information about an upcoming seminar that the library was offering, some sort of job fair or career counseling. Rose heard part of the conversation but quit paying attention when she found her way to the sought-after stacks.
Rose grabbed a couple of books from a shelf and then walked to a long table at the rear of the library. It was positioned against a wall, with chairs arranged around it. There were shelves of books on one side, and from where she sat, her back against the far wall, she was facing only a narrow hallway that led to a rear entrance. She glanced around, and, seeing no one around, decided this was a good place where she could do her work without being noticed.
She had taken a few extra pieces of paper from the pad she had been given when she made her statement for Sheriff Montgomery. And when she took these out of her purse, along with a pen, she wondered if she should have asked the deputy before she took them.
Too late, she thought to herself, and placed them in front of her. She pushed her purse under the table and then, just to be safe, reached inside her coat pocket and touched the bracelet. She chose to keep the piece of jewelry out of sight. She removed her jacket, however, since it was warm in the library, and hung it on the back of her chair.
Once she'd located the reference section, she found that there were not many books that she considered would be helpful. She hadn't been specific with the librarian when she'd asked for assistance, because the woman had been preoccupied with the person on the phone and because she didn't want to give any clues about why she was there. She had only requested information about southeastern Indian tribes, hoping she could find what she was looking for once she was directed to the proper section.
She'd found an encyclopedia of North American Indian tribes and a large book about Indian history published by Reader's Digest. She opened up the encyclopedia first and searched for anything resembling what she had seen on the jewelry. She looked up the tribes from New Mexico as well as tribes around the Mississippi River.
She began to read. She took in the information before her, soon realizing that she had never known that there were so many different tribes of Indians in America, nor had she ever really heard the harsh stories of massacre and eradication that happened to so many once the Europeans arrived.
Like most everyone else, Rose held a Hollywood version of native people. First, there was the savage image of Indians chasing the pioneers, stealing the women, and then there was the mythical one, the image of a people deeply connected to the earth, the image that the New Agers seemed particularly interested in. Even though she had read sympathetic accounts, those that spoke of the stories of the smallpox blankets and the introduction of alcohol, Rose had never read the stories of the complete destruction of tribes, the vast genocide that had occurred in this country.
After reading a few chapters, she closed the first book and opened the next one. There was only more of the same: epidemics, enslavement, death, and forced removal. She stopped reading and reached inside her pocket and pulled out the bracelet. She held it in her hands, thinking about the old man, about his history, his family, about dying alone in a strange place, about his violent end and how it now seemed to resemble the violent ends of so many of his ancestors.
She searched the book again, then turned to the index and searched for the word
symbols.
She flipped to the pages listed and found an entire section discussing symbols of different tribes. These symbols, she discovered, had been carved on cave and canyon walls, near the villages and pueblos, and along migration routes. They had been recorded and deciphered by scores of anthropologists and other persons interested in petroglyphs. She found some of the ones Ms. Lou Ellen had mentioned, as well as a couple that she recognized from the bracelet.
One of the symbols, the two circles, one inside the other, she learned, was a sign for the sun. The small square, completely dark inside, was considered to be a sign of death. The parallel lines had been correctly identified by Ms. Lou Ellen. According to the book Rose read, this was a sign for a trail or a map. She pulled the bracelet from her pocket and studied it again. Three other symbols remained that she hadn't found.
There was one with a parallel set of dotted lines running vertically, connected with small horizontal lines. There was a circle with half of it darkened, the other half bearing a few dots. Finally, there was one with several characters carved, with lines above the tops of them. Rose inspected the bracelet and then placed it back in her pocket. She wrote down the symbols that she had identified.
“We don't have a copier for the public. Well, we had one, but it's broken.”
Rose glanced up from her research when she heard the librarian talking. It was the same woman who had guided her to the reference section. She recognized her voice from the telephone conversation.
“You can try the post office,” the woman added. “They've got one that uses credit cards.”
“And where is your post office?” a man asked, and the voice caught Rose's attention. It was deep, with a slowed articulation of words. It wasn't exactly familiar, but it was interesting. She listened.
“It's on the next corner,” the librarian told him. Then there was a pause. Rose figured the librarian was pointing the post office out to the stranger, who was probably looking down the street in the direction of the building with a public copier.
“Where are you from?” the woman asked, appearing to make an effort to sound cheerful and hospitable instead of nosy, which was how Rose thought the line of questioning was more clearly interpreted.
“Louisiana,” the man replied hesitantly. “Natchez,” he added softly. “Natchez, Louisiana.”
“Oh, Natchez,” the woman responded, as if he had just named her hometown and he was some long-lost cousin. “My neighbor is from Natchez.”
Rose rolled her eyes. She could tell from the silence that the stranger probably wished he hadn't stopped in the library for assistance.
“Isn't that south from here, straight down the river?” she asked even more cheerfully than before.
There was a pause. Rose listened.
“You're thinking of Natchez, Mississippi,” he replied, his tone flat and bored.
“There's two Natchezes?” the librarian asked, drawing out the city's name into more than a few syllables.
“Yes, ma'am,” the man replied.
“Well, I need to find out which Natchez she's from. Maybe she hails from Louisiana, too.”
There was another moment of silence.
“Okay, thank you,” the man said.
“Shug,” the woman said sweetly and in more of a hushed tone, though everyone in the library could certainly hear her, “just give me what you need copied and I'll do it in the office for you.”
Rose thought that the librarian was probably trying to make up for her geographical blunder. By this time, she had quit researching and was listening intently.
“No,” the man replied curtly, then added, “I will take care of it.”
“Really, the chief librarian is gone today. He's in Little Rock, trying to get us more money.” The librarian's voice got softer but remained audible. “We've overspent the budget,” she said. “It's the computers.”
“I'll just go to the post office.”
Rose leaned forward to hear more clearly.
“Honey, I don't mind. Just give me your papers and I'll do it for you.” She sounded insistent.
“No” came the stern reply. And with that, Rose heard a shuffle and then the library door opened and closed.
She got up from her seat at the back table and walked around the corner to see the man, whose voice she had found so interesting, departing.