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  “What are you doing?”

  “Cell phone,” said Faye.

  “Don’t bother. No coverage, too remote. They’re building a tower but it won’t be ready till the spring.”

  Faye put the phone away. “Let’s hope we’re not sitting in this tree until then.”

  The rhythmic slapping of small feet running down the hard-packed footpath caught Faye’s ear. Someone small was running toward them. Please, God, don’t let it be a child, Faye prayed.

  Irene Montrose was no longer a child, but she was far too slightly built to overpower even one of the beasts baying for Faye’s and Carmen’s blood. “Go back,” Faye yelled. “Get some help! These dogs will eat you alive!”

  “Come, Bull!” Irene called. “You, too, Boss! Get away from that tree, Bruce! You boys should be ashamed of yourselves.”

  The three brutes turned shame-faced so quickly, whining and whinkering as they slinked toward the slender young woman, that Faye would have laughed had her adrenaline level been a shade lower. The hound Irene called Boss reared up on his hind legs, planted two ham-sized paws on her shoulders, and slobbered all over his mistress’ face. “No kisses, Boss,” she said, pushing him away roughly. “You’ve been very bad.”

  “Sometimes Daddy forgets to close the gate good,” Irene said. “He forgets how scary the boys look to someone who doesn’t know them.”

  “What are they? Pit bulls?” Carmen asked.

  “Bull is half pit bull and half Rottweiler. Boss is mostly German Shepherd and part bloodhound. Bruce is part Doberman and I don’t know what else. Something big.”

  Well, yeah, Faye thought. Something big and mean. Could anyone who owned dogs like Bull, Bruce, and Boss ever “forget” to keep them in their pen?

  “You can come down,” Irene said. “I won’t let them hurt you.”

  “That’s okay,” Carmen said from her perch on the limb above Faye. “We like it here. We’ll just hang out in this tree until you take the boys home. And don’t forget to lock the gate good, okay?”

  Irene smiled up at them and turned to go home. Walking along the woodland path among the huge animals, she looked like Red Riding Hood out for a stroll with three Big Bad Wolves.

  Faye and Carmen gave Irene ample time to get the “boys” in their pen. The cold dry air carried the clank of a heavy gate being closed, but they waited a while longer, just in case, listening to the pitiable baying of three hunters deprived of their kill.

  “The Sujosa sure have a peculiar way of saying, ‘Welcome, stranger,’” said Faye, as she swung down from the tree.

  Chapter Six

  Faye climbed the porch steps of the women’s bunkhouse and found Joe waiting there, whistling whippoorwill calls. She dropped into the rocker next to his, hoping that birdsong would chase DeWayne Montrose’s dogs out of her head.

  Carmen had recovered her good humor more quickly than Faye. She leapt onto the porch in a single stride and slid her briefcase through the house’s open door into its broad central hall. Thrusting both arms out in front of her, she staggered past them, Frankenstein-style, bellowing, “Must. Have. Shower.”

  “I made beef stew,” Joe offered as she passed.

  “Shower. Then beef stew. Good.” Carmen disappeared through the front door.

  Faye looked up at the porch ceiling. It had once been painted blue.

  “How you doing?”

  “Okay, Joe,” she said. “Ready to get to work.”

  “On Monday, you’ll get your chance.”

  “Joe, what am I going to do? Raleigh’s messed things up so badly.”

  “You’ll figure something out. Raleigh may have a few more college degrees in back of his name, but you’re worth ten of him. He couldn’t dig up a dead skunk buried in a sandbox.”

  Faye laughed until she snorted.

  It was cool but pleasant there on the porch. Carmen must have showered quickly, because Faye could see her moving around the parlor, setting flatware and paper napkins and steaming bowls of stew on a card table. It was not yet six, but it was full dark outside, and the brightly lit window illuminated the porch and most of the front yard, but it didn’t reach as far as the road. Only the crunching sound of tires on gravel announced the arrival of Faye’s second housemate. It took a little time for the young woman to make her way from the darkened drive and into the light, but she moved well, considering her obstacles.

  Laurel Cook had skipped the Friday night meeting to squeeze in a few extra tutoring sessions, and she’d been asleep when Faye had returned to the bunkhouse, so this was Faye’s first sight of the education specialist. Laurel could have passed for a fifteen-year-old, but she was in reality a college graduate who merely looked like a child. She had waxy white skin, and her large dark eyes peered from beneath wispy bangs the color of ash. Her right leg was encased in a knee-high brace which, according to Carmen, had been part of Laurel’s life since she was a child. Several weeks before, she’d had surgery intended to partially correct the congenital defect that had left her lame in both legs. Her new-and-improved left leg wore a walking cast that would support it while it healed and while Laurel re-learned how to use it. Laurel’s gait could best be described as a slow hobble, but her delicate movements had their own grace. She reminded Faye of a wren with an injured wing.

  Faye rose to help Laurel navigate the porch steps, peering into the darkness to see who had driven her this far only to throw her out of the car and let her make her way without help.

  Joe, who was quicker than Faye, reached Laurel in two huge steps. Standing behind her and cupping his hands under both elbows, he practically lifted her onto the porch.

  Someone slammed a car door in the darkness. Faye knew it was Dr. Brent Harbison before he stepped into the light, by the way his light hair reflected the moon.

  He bellowed, “Joe,” to get the younger man’s attention. “She’ll never get better if you pick her up and carry her over every obstacle she encounters.”

  “My mama would roll over in her grave if I didn’t help a lady who needed me.”

  “Your mama,” the doctor said, “is not here.”

  Joe just grinned at him. After brief introductions, he opened the front door and took hold of Laurel’s nearest elbow to guide her over the threshold.

  “Turn her loose and let her walk,” Dr. Harbison barked in the general direction of the closing door.

  He settled himself on the rocker that Joe had abandoned. “So, we get a chance to talk at last. You’re Faye, the phantom archaeologist.”

  “I understand that I have you to thank for this job.”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “Do what?”

  “You wrote the paper that started all this.”

  “Oh, that,” he said. “Don’t thank me. Thank Jimmie Lavelle for not getting chicken pox.”

  “Run that by me again?”

  “Lean over here close to me,” he said, taking Faye’s chin in his hands and giving her skin more scrutiny than any woman over thirty should have to endure. “There,” he said, pointing to a spot above her left eyebrow. He pointed to another spot beside her nose. “And there. Chicken pox scars. We’ve all got ’em. There’s a vaccine now, but Jimmie Lavelle is too old to have gotten it as a child. When there was an outbreak at Alcaskaki High, I waited for him to break out in spots, but he never did.”

  “So he was your smoking gun? I wondered what set you on the trail.”

  “I started keeping track of how many Sujosa adults were free of chicken pox scars. There were quite a lot of them. I know—it was a bizarre hobby, but I’m a dermatologist. Skin is my life.”

  He let go of her chin. Faye had a powerful urge to run her fingers over her face, looking for pockmarks. She willed herself to keep her hands in her lap. “I’ve known people who never got chicken pox.”

  “Yeah, me too, and who knows why? Usually, you can’t predict who might have an unusually potent immune system. But if an isolated culture like the Sujosa
is passing a trait like that along, then maybe we can find a genetic marker. I thought it might rate a short article in an insignificant journal.”

  “When did you know you had something more than that?” Faye asked, reflecting that Health was hardly an insignificant journal.

  “You’re really interested?”

  “I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t.”

  “I was sitting in my examining room, telling yet another married couple that one of them had AIDS. One of them. Somehow, the virus had failed to pass from husband to wife. And I realized that I’d delivered the same bad news before, more than once. On the day I gave Charles Lavelle the bad news about his HIV status, I looked into his wife Amanda-Lynne’s beautiful blue-green eyes and watched her struggle with the fact that she was going to be a young widow.”

  He rocked his chair back and looked out at the night sky. “I flashed back to the day I looked into Jenny Hanahan’s eyes, the same color as Amanda-Lynne’s, and told her that her Barney was going to die. There’s nobody in the settlement with more classic Sujosa looks than Jenny and Amanda-Lynne and their blood kin. They’re healthy as horses. I thought of them, and I began to wonder.”

  “Your paper referenced an incredibly detailed sexual history of this community, tracing the path HIV traveled through the settlement,” Faye said. “How on earth did you collect that data? I can’t imagine, say, Ronya Smiley, whom I had the pleasure of meeting today, giving you an itemized list of every man she’s slept with.”

  “Well…actually, she did. In her case, it’s short. She started dating Leo when she was fourteen and married him a week after he got home from the university.”

  Faye eyed Brent Harbison with some respect. Only the most diplomatic of men could have extracted enough information on his patients’ sexual histories to trace the couplings that had spread the virus and, more interestingly, the couplings that had not. She knew his genealogical information went back at least four generations for every family and, as with most things related to human relationships, the results were murky. Nevertheless, his evidence suggested that the more Sujosa ancestry a person had, the less likely that person was to contract HIV, even when exposed many times. This information had thrust the Sujosa, who had been shunned for generations, abruptly into the spotlight. If the secret to their resistance to HIV could be teased out of their DNA, scientists would be a big step closer to defeating AIDS. It had suddenly become incredibly important for the rest of the world to figure out who the Sujosa were and how they came to live in backwoods Alabama.

  “I’ve read all the follow-up letters and articles to your paper, written by people who couldn’t believe a rural doctor was doing such sophisticated epidemiology. I have to wonder why you aren’t raking in the bucks in private practice some place where people have money. Or doing full-time research. That paper could be your ticket into academic medicine—if that’s what you want.”

  “I grew up in Alcaskaki. I’ve known Ronya Smiley since we were in middle school. Hell. I didn’t have to ask Ronya about her sex life. I already knew she’d never slept with anybody but Leo. And Leo, for all his other shortcomings, has always been faithful to her.”

  He ran his fingers through his short blonde hair. “I went to medical school because I wanted out of Alcaskaki. I wanted to see the world and I wanted to see it in style, with more money than a plain old family doctor would pull in.” He spoke slowly, as if it were important that she understand the extent of his greed. “I was leery of a specialty like surgery. Can you imagine holding someone’s life in your hands every blessed day? Dermatology was perfect. Acne and botox patients don’t have emergencies. You just set your office hours, do your job, and go home. And people will pay a lot to be beautiful.”

  The light was too dim to make out his expression. Faye said, “Oh, come on. Dermatologists do more than that. They treat cancer. They cure disfiguring diseases.”

  “I had a partner for that. He loved challenging cases and he loved me, because I referred anything remotely challenging to him.”

  “Sounds…perfect, I guess.”

  “Yeah. Perfect.”

  “So why are you still around?” Faye asked for the second time.

  “First, my father died. Then, a year later, my mother. And the house I’d bought them—the finest house in Alcaskaki—was empty. I was standing in the kitchen, listening to the realtor tell me what she thought the place was worth, but I couldn’t stop staring at the walls. Mama had hung family photos and some pretty plates and some pictures she’d cross-stitched. The head of a deer my father shot was still hanging over the TV. And it struck me that I’d bought my house in Birmingham at about the same time I bought them their house. Yet my parents’ house looked like a home, and mine looked like a furniture store. There wasn’t anything in my own home that proved I lived there. There wasn’t anybody in Birmingham who cared whether I ever came back—certainly not my patients and, as it turned out, not even my girlfriend. I couldn’t make myself sell my parents’ home. So I sold my house in Birmingham instead.”

  “You retired?”

  Brent laughed. “No. It’s better than that. Monday through Wednesday, most weeks, I’m in Birmingham, sleeping on my office sofa and seeing as many patients as my receptionist can squeeze into three days. Then, having made a disgusting wad of money, I drive back to Alcaskaki…to my home. On Thursdays and Fridays and sometimes on Saturdays and Sundays, I’m at my office in Alcaskaki, or here at my free clinic in the settlement, taking care of people who know me and like me. People who’ll miss me when I’m gone.”

  “Supper’s waiting,” sang out Carmen from the front room. Through the window, Faye could see the other three gathering around the table. Carmen beckoned to them, while Joe helped Laurel into her seat. The aroma of Joe’s beef stew wafted past her nose.

  “So, Doctor,” Faye said, rising. “Sounds like you have a busy life. When you’re not saving the world, what do you do for fun?”

  “How long’s it been since you went to a high school football game?”

  Faye tried to remember. “Not since I was in high school, I guess.” She’d never missed a game in those days, though she’d been more interested in how Butch Sullivan looked in his hip pads than in whether he made a first down. Whatever a “first down” might be.

  “Ordinarily, there’s absolutely nothing to do in Alcaskaki on a Saturday night—trust me—but tonight’s the big conference championship. Want to go to the game with me?”

  “Sure,” Faye said, hoping she could ditch Brent just long enough to find Joe and ask him precisely what a “down” was, and why it was important to get yours first.

  Chapter Seven

  Joe’s last-minute coaching on the vagaries of football had been surprisingly effective. Faye was able to follow the game reasonably well. She found that it had a strong statistical basis. If a team hadn’t achieved its goal of ten yards after three tries, the coach had to decide whether they had a reasonable chance of succeeding on the fourth try. Sadly, Alcaskaki’s boys rarely covered the magic ten yards, so the home team punted an awful lot.

  The Alcaskaki fans sitting around her found their enjoyment of the game further dimmed by the sheer skill of the opposing team’s running back. Faye got a lot of pleasure from simply watching the graceful boy run, but she kept this pleasure to herself because she doubted the Alcaskakians would understand.

  Turning off the statistical science part of her brain and focusing on a subject even closer to her heart, anthropology, she studied the crowd. Intentionally or not, the spectators had segregated themselves by color, and the grandstand was divided into one great swath of brown Sujosa faces alongside a second, bigger, splash of white Alcaskakians. Clumps of dark African-American faces punctuated the scene.

  Faye had wondered where in hell she was supposed to park her brown-skinned, non-Sujosa self, but as Brent had settled in amongst the Alcaskaki folk, she’d sat beside him. Nobody had snubbed her or told her to go away, so she presumed
the segregation was ruled by custom, not prejudice. Everybody sat where they’d always sat and never gave the matter another thought, except for those few people who, like Faye, didn’t fit easily into any category.

  She was nonetheless gratified to see that, unlike their parents, the high school kids mixed easily. Most of them never sat down, preferring to stand around with heads and hips cocked at very cool angles, so they never had to declare an ethnic category by sitting in, say, the Sujosa section.

  Having grown up poor, Faye was all too aware that the Alcaskaki kids sported the kind of jeans that are fashionably worn out when brand-new, while the Sujosa kids’ jeans had the unfashionable signs of wear-and-tear that show up on hand-me-downs. Several of the Alcaskaki teens were huddled over little teeny cell phones, whispering and laughing over messages being bounced off the nearest tower and beamed to kids standing three feet away. Alcaskaki apparently was a big enough town to rate cell coverage. She noticed that only two Sujosa kids had cell phones. These days, lack of money was more of a social kiss-of-death than skin color.

  She eyed the two Sujosa teenagers who had somehow acquired the coveted phones, a possession made even more frivolous by the fact that the hilly terrain and remote location made them useless in the Sujosa’s valley. Body language and pheromones advertised their love. Watching them stand hip-to-hip, the girl’s head resting on the boy’s collarbone, made Faye smile. The girl’s honeyed hair was familiar. Faye finally recognized her as Irene Montrose.

  Faye was glad to see Irene out of the house. The light in the girl’s amber eyes said that her sad responsibilities as her mother’s caregiver hadn’t completely snuffed out her youth. Those eyes gazed upward at a tall slim young man with dark hair. When he turned his head to whisper in Irene’s ear, Faye got her first good look at his face. His eyes were an impossible color of turquoise. And they were set in the dusky face that had watched Faye and her car skidding down a deserted gravel road the day before. This was Jimmie Lavelle.