Simon Said (2 page)

Said belly was hanging over Morgan's belt, not repulsively, but noticeably. Too much fast food and beer. But the belly was just one part of the total picture. Morgan dressed in stained pants, a flannel shirt, and work boots even at the office. His dark hair and gray beard were untrimmed and untended. Morgan's house was a mess, too. Simon had learned never to go into the kitchen if he didn't want to lose his appetite, and that the two chocolate Labs had first dibs on the sofa. He wondered if the excessive neatness required of a professional archaeologist explained Morgan's personal messiness. Hours of exact notation on graph paper, painstaking photography of sites from dozens of angles, and lengthy cataloging may have left him no energy for bringing order into his personal life. Morgan had never married. He was a misogynist, but whether by birth or training, Simon didn't know.

Simon dug around in his pockets and came up with an antacid tablet. "It's probably too little, too late," Morgan said, popping it into his mouth.

"Are you sure this isn't a standard burial?" Simon said. "It wouldn't be extraordinary to find a grave on private property."

Morgan started shaking his head before Simon had even finished his sentence. "No way," he said. "There's no coffin, no marker, and besides, she was buried under the dirt floor of an unused outbuilding. Then there's the bullet hole."

"Oh, yeah." Simon said. "I forgot about the bullet hole."

Simon didn't usually forget anything. Morgan looked at his friend closely. The bags under Simon's eyes weren't quite as pronounced as they had been. Maybe he was getting some sleep.

The big black man Simon had noticed earlier joined them, and Morgan introduced him to Simon.

 

"This is Sergeant Otis Gates of the Raleigh Police Department. He's the head of the major-crime task force."

"I'm glad you were willing to join us, Professor," Gates said. His huge hand completely enclosed Simon's and covered his wrist. Simon looked up to just about everybody, but he actually had to crane his neck to talk to Gates. The man was immense. His nose had been broken more than once. Simon instantly thought, ex-football player, then dismissed the thought as stereotypic. Considering his size, Gates should have been forbidding. But his look was softened by grizzled gray hair cut short and reading glasses that dangled from his neck by a beaded chain that had to have been made by a kid in crafts class.

Gates gestured toward the man Simon had decided was a doctor, who was kneeling over a trench in the middle of the site. He had a tool, maybe forceps, in his hand and was poking at something in the ground. Simon felt the acid in his stomach bubble slightly. He should have forced some real breakfast into himself. "That is Dr. Philip Boyette, the medical examiner," Gates said. Simon had guessed correctly.

"We've got a situation here, Professor," said Gates. "This corpse is too recent to be an artifact and too old to know exactly what to do with. It's probably homicide."

The medical examiner joined the group. "She was shot in the head, no question," he said. "Bullet entered at the back of the head—there's a bullet hole in the occipital lobe. I wouldn't be surprised if the bullet is still rattling around in her braincase."

Simon's stomach turned again, and he began to wish he had been anywhere but in his office this morning.

 

"What exactly can I do, Sergeant?"

 

"We're hoping you can give us some idea of what we're dealing with here," Gates replied.

 

"I told them if anyone could give the police any useful information about this woman, or connect her to the house in some way, you could," Morgan said.

 

Dear heaven, Simon thought, they want me to look at the body!

"She's pretty well preserved," the medical examiner said. "She's wrapped in a quilt, and the good drainage of the site kept the body very dry. I won't really be able to say how long she's been in the ground until I get the body in the lab. But from the color of the bones, I'd guess fifty years at least."

Simon couldn't believe that he was being asked to look at an old corpse on the grounds of an historic house he had written a book about, on the theory he could tell these three men something about the victim. The woman couldn't possibly be recognizable. She could have come from anywhere and been buried by anybody. Besides, he did not want to look at her. He began to feel a little warm.

The medical examiner cocked his head and gave Simon a look of the skeptical sort Simon had become all too familiar with recently. Without saying a word, the doctor's manner questioned whether or not Simon was up to what was being asked of him. Simon didn't like the way the doctor looked. The man had practically no lips and his mustache looked as if it had been penciled on. Although he was thin, his body was soft and amorphous. Simon could believe this man spent his life under fluorescent lights in a sterile room, poking at dead people.

Simon felt as though he was on the verge of failing some kind of a manhood test. "Of course I'll take a look, if you think it would be helpful," Simon said.

They walked toward the excavation site. Simon's friend David Morgan was a proponent of the old-fashioned vertical method of archaeological excavation. That is, rather than remove the entire area of a site layer by layer, he believed in sinking trenches in careful patterns, leaving most of the site undisturbed. First, of course, he had used a metal detector and a magnetometer where he and Simon had deduced the old kitchen would be, and he had quickly revealed the stone foundations of the building.

Simon, Morgan, and Gates stepped over the pegs and string that marked off the site into grids. Simon could see that the first trench had been dug halfway across the site, until, he supposed, the body had been found. Picks and shovels lay scattered where they had been dropped. A sieve lay half in and half out of the trench.

"Watch it," David warned as he guided them around a large hole that was lined with stone. "That's an old cistern—Civil War era, maybe—and it's still holding water. We haven't got a secure cover on it yet."

As they approached the body, Simon remembered that David insisted on handdigging his trenches, much to his students' chagrin. He wouldn't permit a Bobcat anywhere near his digs. Simon wondered who had been wielding the shovel when it struck the corpse.

Gates leaned down to remove a tarpaulin covering one end of the trench. "You'd better take a deep breath," he said. "This is not pretty."

I'll bet, Simon thought. Uncharacteristically, David took his arm as Simon bent over the body.

 

Simon saw only the corpse's face for a few seconds before he looked away, but he would remember the minutest details for many days.

After all, the only dead people Simon had seen before were his parents laid out at a funeral home. Without the benefit of the embalmer's art, this creature in the ground in front of him could have auditioned for a part in a horror movie.

The body seemed to have been prepared for burial. It was shrouded neatly in a quilt of the wedding-ring pattern—he could just see the faded patches flowing in interlocking rings around her torso. Fingers that were mostly bone were crossed demurely over her chest. Most of the fleshy parts of the face, including the eyes, were gone, but some of the cartilage from her ears and nose still clung to the skull. Strands of short, curly black hair adhered to her head. He registered the miniature cameos in her ears and the larger matching one at her throat before he looked away.

"God," Simon said. He suppressed an intense urge to vomit. For a second, everything he could see was tinged with red and he was very hot. Morgan felt Simon quail and he tightened his grip on his arm. His friend's eyes looked out at him from deep inside dark sockets. Morgan mentally castigated himself.

"Take it easy," Morgan said. "You've had a shock—I should never have suggested that you look at her. I forgot you weren't experienced at this."

Gates was concerned by Simon's reaction, too.
"I'm just sorry as hell," Gates said. "What a stupid thing for me to do." "It's okay," Simon said. He took a deep breath and collected himself.

"No, it's not," Gates said. "Just because the three of us are used to looking at dead bodies of various descriptions doesn't mean we should go dragging a civilian into this situation. Can I get you anything?"

Something cold, Simon thought. "A Coke, please," Simon said. "There's a machine in the Preservation Society office at the back of the house."

With a gesture, Gates dispatched the policeman for the drink.
"No breakfast, huh?" Dr. Boyette said.
"Not much," Simon said. Not much sleep, either, he thought.

The policeman brought Simon his Coke and he drained it gratefully. Morgan was relieved to see that his color improved right away.

"It's going to be a lot of work to identify this woman after all this time," Gates said. "I was hoping you could give us a start. But she's not necessarily connected to the history of the house. She could have been brought here from somewhere else. She could be anyone."

"But she's not just anyone," Simon said.
The three men stared at him.
"What do you mean?" Gates said.
"I know who she is," Simon said.

Chapter Three
"I TOLD YOU," MORGAN SAID TRIUMPHANTLY.

 

Gates looked at Simon incredulously. "Excuse me?" he said. "I didn't hear you say you could identify this body, did I?"

"Yes, I think I can," Simon said.
"Well, then, who is it?" said Gates.

"She's Anne Haworth Bloodworth," Simon answered. "She disappeared on April ninth, 1926. The whole state was mobilized to look for her—later even the Pinkerton Detective Agency got involved. She was never found."

"You can't possibly know the corpse is this Bloodworth woman," Boyette said. "Believe me," David said. "If Simon says this is Anne Bloodworth, it's Anne Bloodworth. I've never known him to be wrong about something like this."

Gates shook his head in disbelief. "I have to say, son, that it doesn't seem reasonable to me that you could get a minute's look at a decomposed corpse and ... well, we'll have to have more tangible evidence to go on."

Simon felt much better. He was on his own ground now. He pulled his arm away from Morgan. "Come with me," he said.

Boyette broke off from the group. "Not me," he said. "I've got to get this lady out of the ground and into the frig. Let me know, Sergeant, what your mouthpiece says about an autopsy."

The three men walked toward the house. Simon was on the Bloodworth House's board of directors and had a set of keys. He let them into the original section of the house, the three rooms built in 1775. The rooms were narrow, dim, and the ceilings were low. Gates knocked his head on a doorjamb.

"They didn't grow them as big as you back then," Simon said. "The average person in the eighteenth century was around my size. But it was still crowded, with six or seven family members living in three rooms like this. Privacy is a twentieth-century invention."

He led them down a short, low hall, past a curving stair, and into a radically different atmosphere, the nineteenth-century addition. The Greek Revival drawing and dining rooms rose twelve feet in the air; the ceilings were covered with decorative moldings and the tall windows draped with yellow silk. Light poured in through the thick, rippled old glass.

"Still not a lot of rooms for a big family," Simon said, "but at least you don't feel you could suffocate in here."

He turned into the dining room. Except for repairs and some redecorating, the room had been left very much the same as when Adam Bloodworth had used it, and Simon's research showed he had altered very little in the house and its furniture. Neither had Charles Bloodworth, from whom Adam had inherited it, for that matter. The table was laid with dinnerware ordered from China and silver made in Boston. Some of it had the name Revere stamped on it. The buffet held a huge silver serving piece heaped with porcelain fruit and vegetables. A crystal chandelier was suspended over the table. It still held candles, but sconces positioned on the walls would have provided gaslight.

A display case holding a number of the Bloodworths' personal possessions stood against the wall. Charles's cigar humidor, pocket pistol, and fountain pen, together with Adam's silver cigarette case and mustache comb, were neatly labeled and locked inside.

"Look at this, Sergeant," Simon said, leading the men toward the fireplace. Over the mantel was the portrait of a young woman. Or rather, it was an enlarged photograph that had been touched with oils to simulate a color portrait. Simon suspected it was a high school graduation picture. The subject had a sweet face, framed by short, curly black hair and bangs—what they called "a bob and a fringe" back in the twenties. She was dressed in the unbecoming fashion of her time—a straight chemise with a dropped waist, which made everyone who was more than painfully thin look chunky. The dress was white and had a sailor collar, which contributed to Simon's conclusion that it was a graduation picture. The pose wasn't typical, though. She was sitting on a garden bench, leaning forward on her hands and smiling directly into the camera. Her gaze was eager and forceful. She looked as if she had a lot to look forward to.

"This is Anne Bloodworth," Simon said simply. "The portrait was done sometime after her eighteenth birthday. I believe it has hung here ever since."

Gates studied the picture carefully. "I agree there is some resemblance, if there can be a resemblance between a half-decayed corpse and a picture," Gates said. "But this is just a coincidence. I still say our body could be anybody."

"Look at the jewelry," Simon said.

 

The two miniature cameos in the young woman's ears and the larger one pinned to a ribbon at her throat seemed to jump out of the portrait.

"I'll be damned!" Gates exploded. Without another word, he turned and left the room. A few minutes later, David and Simon could see him out the back window, trotting toward the mortuary van.

"You're amazing," said David.

"No I'm not," Simon replied. "I just have a good memory. I studied this picture for a long time after I read about Anne Bloodworth's disappearance. Half of it's intuition, anyway—I just knew when I looked at the corpse that it was Anne."