Beverly Connor - Dust to Dust

To Robbie.

This one’s for you.

Thanks to Charles Connor, as always, for his unlimited support and patience.

Thanks to Kristen Weber for her hard work, expertise, and kindness.

Marcella Payden straightened the silverware beside the two cobalt blue dinner plates, then lit the fat cinnamon-scented candle in the middle of her small oak dining table. A breeze from the open window carried the tinkling sound of ceramic wind chimes and made the candle flame dance. Nice, she thought as she surveyed the table, smiling at herself and the giddy feeling in her stomach. How long had it been since she’d had a date?

Marcella smoothed her cotton Navajo-style skirt and ran a hand over her hair, tucking stray tendrils back into the beaded barrette that loosely bound her graying locks. She felt like a teenager. It felt good.

She looked at her calloused hands-deeply tanned, a few wrinkles. Much like her tanned and lined face. It was a good face. She liked the way she looked-the roughness was the mark of what she was.

The woman next door back in Arizona had smooth, unlined skin and soft, manicured hands that Marcella’s husband had found more to his liking. It hurt, of course, when he left her, but the strongest emotion was surprise. She was astonished that her husband would find someone who sold lipstick for a living more interesting than an archaeologist.

“No accounting for taste,” she muttered to herself. That was what she got for marrying a philosopher. It would serve him right if he had to drive around in that lilac convertible for the rest of his life.

The wind picked up and the napkins fluttered on the table. Marcella walked to the window to close it. Outside was already dark, even though it was still early by her reckoning. Along with the rustling of leaves and the ringing of wind chimes, the wind carried a chill. She stood for a moment, taking in the cool fresh air. North Georgia was so much cooler than Arizona. It was very pleasant.

But the chill… or something else… brought a sudden shift in mood. Marcella’s hair stood up on the back of her neck and her heart beat faster. She clutched at her silver squash-blossom necklace.

What brought that on? she wondered, squinting and looking out into the darkness through the open window. She saw nothing but the silhouettes of trees moving in the wind, and heard no sound but the rustling leaves, wind chimes, and distant road noise.

It was a Lewis moment.

Lewis was a cognitive archaeologist in Arizona, a colleague and intellectual sparring partner. He had a keen interest in how Paleo-Indians managed to survive among lightning-fast sabertoothed tigers and other giant predators of stealth and speed. His research into the functioning of the human brain led to the interesting discovery that the subconscious can perceive a movement or a threat and the body can respond several seconds before the conscious mind even becomes aware. A nice little brain function that helped early humans survive at a time when animals were bigger, faster, and had way sharper teeth.

Marcella agreed with this idea because she had experienced the phenomenon firsthand. It happened while she was walking through an overgrown field surveying for signs of prehistoric inhabitants-looking for arrowheads, actually. She found herself suddenly breathing rapidly, her heart pounding… and inexplicably she was standing more than three feet to the side of where she had been a moment before. She had no idea what had happened or why she had jumped to the side. But her eyes were fixed on the spot where her next step would have been. There, hidden in the grass, lay a rattlesnake. Subconscious awareness and involuntary response had kicked in. A prehistoric survival function had saved her from harm.

Marcella called such moments of subconscious wariness “Lewis moments.” She looked through the open window again but saw no sabertooths in the shadows. She wondered whether such automated responses could really have been that effective. With snakes maybe, but tigers?

Silly woman , she thought. It’s probably all those towering trees waving in the wind . Marcella missed the desert colors: earth tones, red rock. There was just too much giant, vivid green here.

She closed the window and walked across to the living room to turn on the light. Her eye stopped on the desk where the light sat and she realized that it was the desk-or rather what she had found in it-that was nagging at the back of her mind. That must be it.

Marcella had cleaned out the ramshackle potter’s shed behind her house. Among miscellaneous pieces of broken furniture and weathered plywood, under a piece of old linoleum long ago ripped up from the kitchen floor, with myriad items littering its top, she had found the old desk. A rough pearl constructed of distressed maple, it had three drawers down each side and one long drawer in the middle. Although it was not an extraordinary desk, she liked its solid promise.

When she was cleaning the layers of dust and grime from the desk, she found writing on the bottom of the middle drawer. The house had been a treasure trove of nice surprises, but this surprise was disturbing. It was also old; too old to do anything about. Still, she intended to speak with Jonas about it and ask him to mention it to Diane Fallon.

Marcella partially pulled out the drawer as she turned on the banker’s lamp on top of the desk. The fluorescent bulb had a second’s delay before the light came on. Just as it brightened, she felt another Lewis-moment shiver and the world went black.

Another bright shining light appeared and Marcella wondered whether she should crawl to it. It shouldn’t be this hard, she thought, as she struggled to move across the floor.

Diane Fallon parked her car well out of the way alongside the narrow drive. She closed her car door and stood looking at the old farmhouse illuminated by the headlights of a police car and the forensics van already there. Diane was director of the RiverTrail Museum of Natural History and director of the Rosewood Crime Lab, which was housed in the museum. It was in her role as crime lab director that she was here, but she suspected on this occasion she would be wearing both hats. That was because the house belonged to Dr. Marcella Payden, whom the museum’s archaeology curator, Jonas Briggs, had hired to create a reference collection of prehistoric potsherds for the museum’s archaeology department.

It was an old house, perhaps from the early 1900s, set among trees that looked old enough to be original to the place. The two-story white wooden structure had a blue tin roof and long open porches on the first and second floors that stretched across the front of the house. There was a redbrick chimney on each end. At one end of the house a metal carport contained a light-colored SUV. Large square-cut stones lined the gravel driveway.

The yard was mainly dirt with rock-bordered areas that had once been flower beds. Broken concrete yard ornaments-statuary, fountains, vases-littered the yard. From its appearance, the place could have been an archaeological dig. In reality, it was just an old farmhouse yard containing an odd assortment of disused items.

Diane changed from her heels to comfortable loafers and slipped a flannel shirt over her dark metallic burgundy cocktail dress. She held the shirt tight around her as she walked toward the house to shield herself from the wind, which was becoming chilly.

Neva Hurley and Izzy Wallace were taking their kits from the crime scene van as they spoke with a patrolman. Diane waved to them.