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“The FBI’s a big place,” she retorted. “Besides, he’s in DC, not Quantico. Not that I’m keeping track of him. But yeah, maybe I will. If I’m lucky enough to get the job.”
“So you’re pretty serious about it? You think you’d take it, if they offered it to you?”
“Well, duh,” she said. “I’d be crazy not to, don’t you think?” She studied my face. “What?” She sighed. “I hoped you’d be excited for me.”
“I am,” I insisted. “It’s a great opportunity. It’s just . . . well, you know, we’ve talked about your staying on here—running the bone lab, running the body donation program. You know, as a real job, a faculty job, not an assistantship.”
“Isn’t that a bit like the plantation owner offering to pay his house slave actual wages, after she’s been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation?” She smiled to pass it off as a joke, but her words had an edge, and I felt myself flinch as they cut into me. “I’m sorry, Dr. B. I didn’t mean that. I’ve loved my time here—my course work, my assistantship, the forensic cases. I can’t imagine a better way to learn forensic anthropology. But don’t you see? If I stay here, I’ll always be your assistant. And that’s been great, but it’s time for me to leave the nest. To be a grown-up. To be the professor or the professional that you’ve trained me to be.” Her eyes seemed to be pleading now, and I thought I saw moisture welling up in her lower eyelids. “Besides, you can’t offer me a tenure-track faculty job. UT won’t allow it.”
“That’s true,” I admitted. To make sure that the university didn’t become too inbred, UT policy required that our doctoral graduates hold faculty positions at other schools for at least five years before we could hire them.
“If you create a job for me,” she persisted, “I can never get tenure here—which means I can never get tenure anywhere. I’d always, only, be the hired help.”
“That’s not necessarily true,” I protested. But it was a weak protest, and we both knew it. Academics are notoriously snobby. If you start out in the ivory tower’s minor leagues—the leagues that don’t dangle the possibility of tenure after seven grueling years of teaching, research, and service—your chances of ever playing in the tenured league are slim. Skeletally slim, in fact. “I know, it’s a gamble. But if anybody can do it—if anybody can make the jump from nontenured to tenured—it’s you, Miranda.”
“I appreciate your faith in me, boss,” she said. “But it’s not the way things work.”
“Just don’t rule out staying here,” I said. “Not yet.”
Our discussion was interrupted by a knock. A nanosecond after the knock, Peggy appeared in the open door looking astonished and amused.
“Excuse me, Dr. Brockton,” she said, “but there’s a sheriff’s deputy from Cooke County here to see you. A very large deputy.”
I grinned. “Waylon,” I called through the doorway. “This is a nice surprise. Come on in.”
He loomed into view, his immense bulk dwarfing Peggy. She backed out of the doorway to let him enter, but the space between her desk and the front wall wasn’t designed to allow two people to pass—not, at least, if one of them was Waylon. Miranda and I watched as Peggy flattened herself against the wall and Waylon squeezed past, mumbling a red-faced “’scuse me, sorry ma’am,” as his broad back rubbed across her chest, her eyes widening in . . . discomfort? dismay? delight? I shot a quick glance at Miranda, who met my gaze. Then, in unspoken agreement, we quickly looked away from each other, lest we both burst into guffaws.
I reached out and gave him a handshake. “Waylon, what brings you all the way to UT?”
“Wellsir, you asked me about going back up yonder to the scene with a metal detector,” he said, “so I did. Got lucky, too.” He began fishing a pair of large fingers into his shirt pocket.
I felt a rush of excitement. “A bullet? Did you find a bullet?” But even as I said it, I doubted it. I had taken the bones to the hospital’s radiology department for x-rays the prior afternoon, after I finished cleaning them, and the films hadn’t shown any traces of lead.
“Nah, it ain’t no bullet,” Waylon said. “But it’s kindly interestin’ all the same.” He held out his hand to reveal a clear plastic sleeve that contained a silver coin, its rim ridged all the way around. In Waylon’s palm, it appeared tiny—a dime, I thought at first, but then I realized it was much larger. “It’s a ol’ half-dollar,” he said. “Almost a hunnerd years old.” He handed it to me.
“I’ll be,” I said, examining the back. Indeed, it looked antique. Instead of the Great Seal—the stylized eagle clutching arrows in one set of talons and an olive branch in the other—this one was embossed with an eagle that looked like an Audubon engraving, wild and predatory, its wings half spread and its gaze fierce. The detail remained sharp, and the coin was virtually free of tarnish.
Miranda leaned in to look. “It’s in re
ally good shape, to’ve been layin’ out there for all these years,” she said.
Waylon looked puzzled. “Come again?”
“I said it looks great, considering how long it’s been out there. Didn’t you say the town shut down in the 1930s, when the government bought up all the land?”
“Yes’m, I did say that—’cause it’s true—but I don’t b’lieve this has been a-layin’ out there all this time. Not on account of what it is. Take a closer look.”
Miranda plucked the coin from my palm and held it up, angling it to catch the light. “Memorial to the Courage of the Soldier of the South,” she read. She looked at Waylon. “Huh?” She flipped it over to look at the front. “And who are these guys on horseback?”
“Them’s Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson,” he said. “The most famous generals of the Army of the Confederacy. You see that inscription right there above the year, 1925?”
She squinted. “Stone Mountain. What’s that about?”
“This here’s a special coin that was sold to raise money for that big monument carved in the side of Stone Mountain. Right outside Atlanta.”
“Oh, right,” she said. “I’ve actually seen it from an airplane. Huge. It’s like the Mount Rushmore of the Confederacy, right?”
“Yes’m. I reckon so.”
“But I thought there were three guys carved in that mountainside?”
“That’s right.” He nodded approvingly. “Somebody kicked up a fuss, so Jeff Davis, the president of the Confederacy, ended up getting hisself a piece of the rock, too.”
My mind was still processing Waylon’s suggestion—his guess that the coin wasn’t a relic from the heyday of Wasp, the mountain hamlet that had been abandoned in the 1930s. If the coin was a collector’s item, it seemed unlikely that it had belonged to the victim, since he’d been chained to the tree naked—stripped of even his clothes, much less something of value. Could it have belonged to the killer? I took it back from Miranda and studied it closely. It was in near-mint condition, that was true, so clearly it couldn’t have been weathering for the past eighty years. As I shifted my grip to the coin’s rim, I felt an odd sharpness, like a splinter or sliver, projecting beyond the regular ridges. Looking closer, I saw what appeared to be a bit of silver solder there, with a sharp line suggesting that a piece of it had broken off. “Hmm,” I said. “Waylon, did you notice this piece of solder?”
