“With so much money at stake, it’s possible. Quinn, why didn’t you report Buck missing when he didn’t come home last night?”
She closes her eyes with obvious pain. “Because I knew he was trespassing, and he would stay out there all night if he could. I also knew he’d cache any finds somewhere other than here, to protect me. That would take time. I’ve cursed myself a thousand times for not saying to hell with it and calling the police. Buck might still be alive—”
“No,” I tell her. “The local police and sheriff’s department wouldn’t have been a source of aid for Buck. Not at the industrial park.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Do you know if Buck was in contact with anyone outside the city? Other archaeologists? Academics? The government?”
She shrugs again. “You know Buck. He was always talking to friends around the country. I don’t know how much he told them about this specific find. He was so excited, but also secretive about it. I think he saw this as his legacy, the great work of his life. By the way, the sheriff told me they didn’t find Buck’s cell phone. So I don’t know who he might have called.”
“If they found his phone, they wouldn’t have entered it into evidence. Do you know whether Buck dug up anything else at the site? You said he would be caching his finds somewhere other than here. Why?”
Quinn studies me as though making some difficult judgment. “Buck got pretty paranoid over the past four weeks, especially the last two. One night he decided to move some stuff, so it wouldn’t be lost if our house happened to catch fire or something. We own a small rental house. He’s worked there most nights for the past week.”
Before I can even ask, Quinn reaches into the pocket of her jeans and takes out a brass key. “This will get you in, if you want to look.”
“Address?”
“Three-two-five Dogwood. There’s a renter there, but he’s an old friend of Buck’s. Jim’s gone a lot, but I’ll let him know you’re coming, just in case. Buck’s stuff is in a back bedroom. Should be easy to find. He worked at a drafting table.”
“Got it,” I say, getting up and taking the key from her.
“Don’t go yet,” she says, reaching out and touching my arm. “Let’s step into Buck’s workshop.”
We walk out to the garage Buck enclosed after his lutherie work outgrew the extra bedroom where he’d begun it a decade before. It smells of glue and sealer and freshly sawn wood. Some of Buck’s finest instruments hang from pegs on the walls. A padded worktable with a sheet of rare Brazilian rosewood still on it dominates the center of the room. Against one wall stands a heating unit and some electric blankets used for bending wood, while the remainder of the space is filled by barrels, stands, and shelves containing wood, tools, fret wire, electric pickups, and machine heads. I can’t stand in this room and believe Buck is dead.
“You feel it?” Quinn asks, opening her hands like someone trying to catch raindrops. “His spirit is still in here.”
Another person saying this might sound like some new-age flake. Not Quinn Ferris, who’s practical to a fault. “I do feel it. I feel him.”
“I hope it lasts. But I feel like he’s hovering here, trying to say goodbye.”
Less than twelve hours ago the man who built the guitars in this room was still walking the earth. Unable to fill the void his loss has opened in me, I turn and pull Quinn to me. She hesitates at first, then relents and lets me crush her in my arms. Her chest heaves a couple of times, but she doesn’t sob. After half a minute, she pulls back and wipes her eyes. Then she goes to a drawer and takes out a dark leather bag, which she carries over to me.
“I want you to have these,” she says.
“Buck’s chisels? These were his prize tools.”
“And he’d want you to have them. I want you to take a guitar, too. I’m going to have to sell the rest, but I want you to take one. Any one you want.”
“Quinn—”
“Don’t argue with me.”
I look around the workshop, my gaze moving across the instruments. They’re so different from one another. Buck loved to learn about new woods, and he did that by working with them. In this small space I see macassar ebony, East Indian rosewood, American swamp ash, koa, quilted maple, bird’s-eye maple, figured sapele, Sitka spruce, pau ferro. The variation in design shapes equals the selection of woods. Buck built parlor guitars, concert models, dreadnoughts—
“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.”