Greg Iles - Cemetery Road

Nadine says people gossip about us because until I showed up, the word around town was that she’s gay. That rumor started after she rejected just about every single man in Bienville, plus a lot of the married strays. Her target status is no mystery. Bienville is brimming with fake blondes with fake tits. Nadine, on the other hand, is a natural blonde with a sharp wit and a mischievous twinkle in her eye. Two years shy of forty, her body remains well distributed and finely calibrated when it moves, which alone would draw men to her. She’s assured me that her constant rejections have less to do with her sexual orientation than her strict standards when it comes to men. When she wants sex, she goes out of town. I don’t know where, and I don’t ask. Nor has Nadine volunteered the information. I must admit that, despite our familiarity, I find myself intrigued by the air of mystery that surrounds that part of her life.

A brass bell clangs as I step into the shop, and the scent of hot coffee pulls me through the bookselling area like a rope around my neck. The café tables in back are empty but for a young couple who have the look of French tourists. Nadine stands behind the counter, cleaning her espresso machine. She smiles over her shoulder, then says sotto voce, “Is it true about Buck?”

I move up to the counter before answering. “What did you hear?”

“They found him in the river. Dead.”

I nod, then shiver as the air-conditioning chills my sweaty shirt. “I just watched them pull him out.”

She shakes her head, then drops her rag and turns away from the gleaming machine. “Accident?”

“Between you and me? No way.”

She sucks in her lips and looks down at her counter, absorbing the news. “Was it the Indian artifacts? The threat to the paper mill?”

“I think so. Which, if you include residents of the county, gives us about thirty-six thousand suspects.”

“That sounds about right. You want coffee? I figured you’d be out at the groundbreaking.”

“I’m going, but I needed my caffeine.”

Her eyes probe mine with almost physical thoroughness. “You need something stronger than that. Are you okay? Seriously.”

I look down at the oversized muffins under the glass. “That scene at the river … no good for me.”

She reaches over the counter and squeezes my hand, then turns to prepare my coffee. “You going to sit? Or you in too much of a hurry?”

“Do you have time to sit?”

She looks around the store and smiles again. “Be there in a sec. How’s your dad doing?”

“’Bout the same,” I lie, from habit.

As I survey the eight café tables, I hear the couple speaking French while consulting a guidebook. On the round table before them lie copies of Richard Grant’s Dispatches from Pluto and Richard Wright’s Native Son . Anticipating the conversation Nadine and I will have, I detour into the book-signing nook, a C-shaped banquette set on a large dais raised two feet above the rest of the café.

The walls above the banquette are covered with signed author photos, most black-and-white. Facing me as I take a seat are Rick Bragg, Chris Offutt, Kathryn Stockett, John Grisham, and Pat Conroy (that one signed shortly before his death). Above these, a dozen more photos climb toward the ceiling. Behind me hangs a collection of signed photos given to Nadine by loyal customers. These include Eudora Welty, James Dickey, and Donna Tartt, as well as Mississippi blues singers Sam Chatmon and Son Thomas. Placed side by side to my left are signed publicity shots of the young Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, wearing their 1950s duds. Jerry Lee is considered practically a native son, since he hails from Ferriday, Louisiana, just forty miles down the river. Rarest of all is a signed photo of Bobbie Gentry, the reclusive singer of “Ode to Billie Joe.”

Waiting for Nadine, I recall a weekend when Buck recruited a group of musician friends from around the South to play this store. Despite the superior musicianship, Buck included me both nights. We had two guitars, a mandolin, a fiddle, a bass, a harmonica, and a trap kit. After one set, the crowd got so big that people spilled out into the street, and rather than interfere, the cops closed Second Street to auto traffic and gave us a block party. Sometimes living in a small town is cool.

Nadine walks lightly up the steps to the nook and sets a heavy china mug in front of me. She joins me at the table with a cup of green tea and gives me a smile designed to buck up my spirits.

“No avoidance today,” she says. “The river, I mean. It was bad, huh?”

“Bad enough. To tell you the truth, I feel like I killed Buck.”

Her eyes darken. “Oh, come on. That’s bullshit.”

“Is it? I knew when I published that story it would make people furious. I tried to argue him out of it, but Buck wanted it in the paper. It was so unlike him to stir up controversy. All the years he lived here, he never did anything like that. He went out of his way not to. But this was like a mission for him. A life quest.”

“Why was it so important to him? I’m guessing you know a lot more than you put in the paper.”

“Some. But I hadn’t talked to him in a couple of days. I was really sort of waiting for the next shoe to drop.”

“I guess it has.” Nadine blows air across her tea. “Just not the way you were hoping.”

“I was hoping the Department of Archives and History would come in here and take over the site. They’ve got a lot of power in these situations. They appoint their own board, and in theory are immune to political pressure. They can place a preservation easement on public land—which the mill site is—and that would give them control of the site. At least while they survey and assess it.”

“That’s exactly what people are afraid of, right? It would have delayed construction?”

“No doubt.”

“Possibly even ended it?”

“If the site is what Buck believed it was.”

“Which is what? A site like Poverty Point? A potential UNESCO World Heritage site?”

“Yep. And I think it is. Poverty Point is only forty miles from here, as the crow flies. And there are remnants of that same culture down at Anna’s Bottom, north of Natchez. Buck believed that a deeper strata might hold evidence of an even older culture, like the one at Watson Brake, Louisiana. That’s only seventy miles from here, and it predates both the Giza pyramids and Stonehenge.”

Nadine is smiling with what looks like wistfulness. “My dad took me to Poverty Point when I was a little girl. I never told you that. It’s one of my few good memories of him. We had a picnic there. When you think about people living along the river before the pyramids, that’s pretty mind-blowing.”

“If only Buck had made his finds in the middle of nowhere, rather than an industrial park.”

Nadine pulls a wry face. “One that was nearly awarded Superfund status for its toxic sludge. What did you leave out of your article?”

“Mostly Buck’s persistence. About thirty years back, some small clues got him thinking there might have been an ancient civilization near here, one that vastly predated the known tribes. The Indians we’re famous for—the Natchez, mainly—were relative latecomers. They’re fascinating because they were sun-worshipping, corn-growing mound-builders, like the Maya. Buck first made his reputation by documenting their involvement with the French and English in slave trading.”

“The Indians were involved in the slave trade?”

“Big time. Anyway, the electroplating factory that used to sit on the paper mill site was built during World War Two. Buck had heard rumors that the construction workers turned over artifacts every day with their bulldozers. He tracked down a few old-timers, checked out the relics they’d given to their kids. But it was all later-era stuff—1500 to 1730. A lot of guys would have quit there, but Buck had seen descriptions of the site that predated even its agricultural use. Before that land was plowed up during the early 1800s by tobacco and cotton farmers, there were supposedly semicircular rings on the ground—raised concentric ridges facing the river, possibly built up on an older bend where the river used to flow. That’s exactly how Poverty Point is oriented.”