Trey glanced at Emma, his brown eyes soft. “I’m glad he didn’t hit you,” he said.
“Thanks. Me too.” She hugged her arms to her waist. Trey could be caring, and he wasn’t really a bad guy, but she just didn’t see a future for them.
His eyes narrowed. “We’ll catch whoever did it, I promise you that.”
Sometimes Trey even surprised her. As he walked toward the live oak, Emma caught sight of a man approaching them. “I think this is my GPR operator,” she said. If it was, he was early.
Nate turned toward the man. “Good. I’d like him to run the machine over the pit. See if he can tell if anything is buried there.”
She met the older man at the front steps of the inn. “Randy Gibson?”
“That’d be me,” the lanky Gibson replied.
“I’m glad you didn’t get my message about waiting until later,” she said.
“I did, but I was already on my way. What’s going on?”
Emma explained the situation. “Before we get started on my project, the sheriff wants you to explore the site where the intruder was digging when I interrupted him.”
“I can do that. I assume my machine arrived.”
“Yes. It’s chained to a steel post at the tractor shed over there.”
She pointed him in the right direction and then handed him the key to the lock. While he went after the machine, Emma joined the sheriff and Sam at the backhoe, where Chris was photographing the hole the intruder had dug. It was about a hundred feet from the only marker in the cemetery, but not near any of the flags that marked the slave graves. Turning, she took in the split-rail fence that had been knocked down to get the machine in place.
“What do you suppose the intruder was digging for?” she asked.
“Good question,” Nate said.
Emma looked around. “Did the metal detector alert to anything?”
“A couple of bottle caps,” Sam replied. “Probably your teenagers drinking beer.”
Once boards were placed over the pit, Randy started the GPR machine, which resembled an oversized lawnmower with a screen attached to the handle. He slowly worked his way across the site and repeated the action two more times. “Do you have a plot diagram of the cemetery?”
She had grabbed the folder for the project earlier and leafed through it. “Here,” she said, handing him a map from the archeological project. “This is from the University of Southern Mississippi research project in 2000. The flags you see correspond to the graves they recorded.”
Ground penetrating radar hadn’t been available to the students who conducted the cemetery survey. Instead, steel probes had been used to identify the randomly scattered graves. Randy ran the machine over the grave nearest them, then returned to the pit and repeated the process.
“Definitely something here.” Randy turned the paper so that the arrow pointing north lined up. After studying it, he checked his screen. “According to this paper, there shouldn’t be anything buried here, but take a look at this.”
Sam and Emma and Nate crowded next to him. “What do you have?” Sam asked.
“Let me bring up both screens,” Randy said. “The bottom screen shows the burial plot from over there,” he said, pointing about fifty feet away. “The top screen is where the pit is—let’s call it Section A. See these? They’re called anomalies.” He pointed out rounded lines on the screen. “This is the known grave. Compare it to Section A.”
“It looks the same,” Emma said.
“Yes, but look at the difference in depth,” he replied. “According to the screen, whatever is in Section A is only buried a little over four feet deep. That’s much shallower than the six feet for the older grave.”
Emma examined the squiggly lines on the screens. A chill chased over her. What if someone had recently buried a body? And what if they had returned last night to move it? She tried to think if anyone had gone missing recently.
Ryan.
No. It’d been ten years, and she refused to believe her brother was dead. She looked up. “Maybe it’s from the Civil War time and a landowner buried their gold or silver here.”
“Not impossible,” Randy said. “But wouldn’t it have been found in 2000?”
9
Can you tell how long ago the ground was disturbed?” Sam asked, staring at the screen on the GPR machine. He’d like to believe gold or silver was buried in the pit, but he had a bad feeling about the site.
“I’d say there were a lot of years between the slave graves and this one.”
“Can you tell if there’s a body in it?” Nate asked.
“Afraid not, but the disturbance matches the size of the graves,” he said. “It’ll take excavating to know for sure what’s down there.”
“Something we’ll start this afternoon,” Nate said.
Randy nodded. “I have an appointment in Jackson later this afternoon, but you have the equipment assigned to you for a week.” He turned to Emma. “Would you like me to show you how to operate it?”
“That would be great,” Emma said. “But how will we know when we reach the bottom?”
“You’ll have to keep checking the screen. When you reach compacted ground, it will look like this.” He pointed to the fairly straight lines below the pit.
Sam listened in as Randy explained how to operate the GPR machine. When he finished, Randy handed Emma a sheet of paper. “These are step-by-step instructions if you forget, but if you need to, give me a call,” he said.
“Thanks.” Emma studied the sheet of paper as Randy walked away.
Nate turned to Sam. “Do you think we need to get a court order since this is National Park Service property?”
Sam rubbed the back of his neck. The only other time he’d had to excavate on park service land was when a dog had dug up a human bone, making a court order unnecessary. But this wasn’t as cut and dried. “What do you think?” he asked, glancing at Emma.
She looked up from the instruction sheet. “Since someone hot-wired the backhoe and excavated this area, I believe my superintendent will view it as a crime scene and give the go-ahead. Nate, do you want to check? Or do you want me to do it?”
“Since it’s your site and your supervisor, why don’t you,” he said.
While Emma walked a short distance away until she was out of the trees and made the phone call, Sam brought up the flowers again.
“And she doesn’t have a clue who they’re from?” Nate asked.
Sam shook his head. “There’re no security cameras unless a neighbor has one, and even then, I doubt it’d capture anything at the apartment building.”
“Flowers. And a message with no name.” Nate rubbed his jaw. “My suspicious nature makes me think the shooting could be connected to her receiving flowers—the shooter pointing out that she can’t hide from him?”
A real possibility. “That makes sense.”
“I heard you talking to Trey about it. If he’d sent the flowers, he would’ve wanted credit.” The sheriff checked his watch. “I’m leaving for the jail shortly. I’ll follow up with him on this.”