“I know which one you want,” Quinn says. “Take it down.”
She’s talking about Buck’s personal guitar, a baritone acoustic fashioned out of one-of-a-kind padauk, a reddish wood so rare it was harvested after a monsoon laid a whole stand low on the Andaman islands in the Bay of Bengal. Set into the ebony fret board is a beautiful b.f. logo in mother-of-pearl.
“I can’t take that, Quinn. That guitar’s worth more than any two of the others. Ten thousand, at least.”
“I’ll sleep better knowing you have it.”
“Let me pay you for it.”
“Don’t insult me. I’ll get the case.”
While she retrieves the hard-shell case from another room, I take down the baritone, put it on my knee, and pick out a haunting fingerstyle instrumental that Buck wrote when I was in high school.
“That’s why it’s your guitar,” she says. “Nobody else even knows that song. Just you and me.”
The notes of Buck’s song hang almost visibly in the air of his workshop, then die to make way for those that follow. When I finish playing, and the room is silent again, Quinn helps me pack the guitar into the case. After a last look around the shop, she walks me to the front door. The baritone is heavy, but it feels right in my hand, and the chisels in my other hand help balance the weight.
As we face each other across the threshold, Quinn says, “It’s wrong to kill a man for trying to do what’s right. The past matters, you know? Even if people don’t realize it. You’d think Southerners would get that.”
“Mississippians are pretty selective about what they like to remember.”
She laughs bitterly. “You say ‘they’ like you’re not one of them.”
“I left a long time ago, Quinn.”
“Most people from here, that doesn’t make any difference.”
“It did to me.”
“Promise me you’ll find out who killed him?”
I look back into her expectant eyes. Moments like this one have consequences. “I will. I won’t rest until I do.”
“And then what?”
I turn up my palms. “Get justice.”
“What does that look like, you think?”
“I can’t bring him back, Quinn.”
She tries to force a smile, but the result is an awful grimace. She reaches out and squeezes my shoulder. “Watch your back, okay? These fuckers are serious.”
“I know. You, too.”
She gives me a light kiss on the cheek, then turns away.
As I walk toward the Flex, the screen door slaps shut behind me, the main door closes, and I hear the bolt shoot home. Quinn doesn’t stand around waiting to smile and wave as I drive off, which is the Southern way. She feels more allegiance to her dead husband than to pointless folkways. Yet the guitar in my hand tells me she’s already begun the necessary process of letting him go. She will treasure Buck’s memory and avenge him if she can, but Quinn is a survivor.
And life is for the living.
I’m back on the Little Trace, headed west, when the coroner calls my cell phone. The dozen shades of green in the thick canopy give me the feeling of driving through a rain forest. I take the call on the Flex’s Bluetooth system.
“Hey, Byron. Thanks for getting back to me. What can you tell me?”
The coroner’s deep bass voice rattles the door speakers. “I only got a minute. And I feel a little funny about this.”
“I imagine you’re feeling some pressure down there. Certain influential people want this to go down as an accident?”
“You know it.” He lets out a cross between a sigh and a groan. “But between you and me . . . Buck was murdered.”
“Tell me how you know.”
“Shape of the wound, for one thing. Blunt force trauma by an object with linear edges, not something irregular like a rock. Second, I found dust down in the wound, in both the skin and the brain matter. All I had was my magnifying glass, now.”
“What kind of dust? Not sandstone?”
“Not sandstone. Brick dust, I’m pretty sure. Those old Natchez bricks. Reddish orange.”
I think about this. “You don’t think Buck could have fallen from a height onto one of those bricks?”
“Oh, he could have. Thing is, they ain’t got any bricks like that at that pirate cave. No bricks at all. Nothing ever got built out there. It’s just loess soil and Catahoula sandstone.”
“I guess there could be bricks out there, right? Taken out there by somebody? To bank a campfire or something?”
“Sure. But what are the odds that Buck would fall from a height onto one of the only couple of bricks at that whole place?”
“You’re right. I’m just playing devil’s advocate.”
Staticky silence stretches as I drive down the narrow asphalt line, which cuts like a cable through trees rising eighty feet on both sides of the road. “What are you thinking, Byron?”
“I been thinkin’ ’bout places where they do got them bricks. Lots of ’em.”
“I know one,” I tell him, remembering my childhood.
“The old electroplating factory, right? The paper mill site where Buck found that Indian pot you wrote about.”
“Yep. Have you told anybody about the brick dust?”
“Not yet. Autopsy’s not my job. That’s s’posed to be done in Jackson.”
“I hear something in your voice, Byron. What’s going on?”
“I don’t know if you know, but sometimes autopsies get done right here in Bienville, if the hospital has a pathologist on staff. That’s on and off in this town, but right now we got one. ‘Locum tenens,’ they call it. Temporary. I just got told he’s gonna do the autopsy.”
My pulse quickens. “Who told you that?”
“President of the county supervisors. I got the first call as I was driving the body up from the river. But I just got confirmation.”
“Jesus, Byron. You think they’re going to dictate the result they want? Or buy it?”
“Why else change regular procedure? They sure ain’t in no hurry to get the real result. So if they’re rushing it, they must already know what the report’s gonna say.”
“The fix is in.”
“Yeah. And I don’t know what I can do to stop it.”
“Nothing, if you want to keep your job. We’re going to need an independent autopsy. I just spoke to the widow. I don’t think it will be a problem, except for the cost. But I’ll cover that. The only problem is time. They’re moving fast.”
“Man, I hate to say this,” Byron says in a portentous tone, “but I been thinking ’bout something else.”
“Yeah?”
“This job means a lot to me. I’m the first black coroner in Tenisaw County. But it’s not just that. I like the work. The science of it, figuring things out. And I treat the dead with respect. Especially these kids that kill each other like it’s Sierra Leone. They deserve respect, even if it’s the only respect they’ll ever get.”
“I understand, Byron. You do great work. I’ve seen it.”
“Lemme finish. If I see things like this here today, and I don’t speak up—what does that say about me?”