Maya Mound Mayhem (A Logan Dickerson Cozy Mystery Book 3)

  Maya Mound Mayhem Copyright © 2015 Shondra C. Longino

  All rights reserved.

  This eBook is intended for personal use only, and may not be reproduced, transmitted, or redistributed in any way without the express written consent of the author.

  Maya Mound Mayhem is a work of fiction. Any references or similarities to actual events, organizations, real people - living, or dead, or to real locales are intended to give the novel a sense of reality. All other events and characters portrayed are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  For more, visit my website: www.abbylvandiver.com

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  Cover Design by Shondra C. Longino

  Chapter One

  Gainesville, Georgia

  Track Rock Gap

  Oh Crap!

  The skeleton tumbled from its makeshift perch in the dirt wall and onto me. I watched out the side of my eyes as a jumble of bones, clanking and bouncing, fell to the ground. There was gooey stuff (not a very scientific word I know, but that is what it was) everywhere. That made me scream. Rather loudly.

  I jumped back, hands flailing around to keep the slime and bones from hitting me, feet slightly apart, I didn’t know if I should fight or flee. Up on my toes, I tiptoed backwards away from it after it all had settled and took in a breath. I tried to calm myself. I took my handheld flashlight and scanned the area to make sure nothing else was coming out of the walls, or walking up behind me. I exhaled and stood flat on my feet. And then I shook off my jitters.

  Geesh . . .

  I flashed the beam of light on it and stared at the jumble of calcified matrixes precariously. Some of the brown colored goo was still dripping off the stone slab area that it had fell from. I cautiously reached into the pile, careful not to get slimed. I picked up one of the larger bones. It was a femur.

  So definitely human.

  I dug a small hole in the dirt wall and propped the back end of my flashlight in it. Twisting the skull around in my hand, I held it in front of the beam and examined it. Of course I couldn’t tell too much of anything about it here . . . Other than this guy – or girl – was definitely dead.

  My eyes followed up the wall that had heaved the skeleton at me. The body appeared to have been on a chunk of smooth stone barely buried in the wall. When I’d dug into it, the coffee-colored goo had slid out bringing the bones with it.

  What is that stuff?

  I ran my hand along the side of the altar-like deathbed. Did the person just lie there, die and now was melting away?

  I looked down at the heap of bones. The goop just didn’t look like it was part of the decomposition of the body.

  And how would I know that? I scratched my head. I’ve never seen a decomposed body before. Just old mummified ones.

  I adjusted the flashlight in the wall to shine down to the dirt floor and stooped to study the rest of the remains.

  I wonder how long it’s has been here.

  I gingerly stuck the tip of my finger into the gunge and smelled it.

  Yuck . . .

  I glanced at the area where it had drained, and then straight up to see if it could have fell from the top of the mound I was in. I couldn’t see a source for it.

  Maybe it is the remains of the body.

  Flicking it off my finger, it hit the dirt floor with a plop. I scanned the rest of the pile. The bones didn’t look as dense as they should be, even more brittle than bones I’d seen on thousand-year-old skeletons. But with mushy, possible fleshy parts still hanging around, bones that old didn’t add up.

  I spotted the skull and picked it up. Standing, I adjusted the light upward. I studied it. Undulated mandible, flatter rear edge. The nasal aperture long and narrow with a high bridge and a sharp nasal sill. I flipped it over and fingered the narrow and pointed mastoid process – I nodded. In my estimation it consistent with a person of the Caucasian race.

  I cast an eye down around my feet and located the pelvic bone. Still holding the skull, I squatted and ran my fingers over the symphyseal surface. It had started to erode and was somewhat pitted and porous. I stuck my hand through the greater sciatic notch, and then used it to roughly measure the subpubic angle. Both areas were narrow. Male, I surmised. Older than thirty-five but less than fifty.

  I glanced back at the skull still in my hand. The jaw was closed shut. I opened it and looked inside. One of the molars had something black in it. I swiped my finger across it and looked at my finger and back at it. Nothing came off and whatever it was, was still in the tooth. I moved the skull up to one eye and peered in.

  It looked like a filling for a cavity.

  Soo, you’re a pretty recent skeleton, huh?

  “Hey are you alright in there?” I heard a voice coming my way.

  Oh crap!

  I dropped the skull, stood upright, grabbed my flashlight and shut off the light. Standing still, I took in a breath. I inched myself closer to the wall in the dark and hoped to become one with it to stay out of sight. My foot, on the way over, however, accidently hit a couple of the bones and I nearly tripped face first into the wall. Catching myself, I held onto the wall to get my balance then turned around to kick the stray bone out of the way just as a beam of light shined in my face.

  “Logan. What were you screaming about?” It was Riley Sinclair. But before I could answer, Bugs Reid pushed by her and came over to me.

  “Are you alright, Logan?” he asked. “Is something wrong?”

  I ducked out of the ray of light and flipped on my flashlight shining it down on the ground. “I’m fine,” I said standing out from the corner I’d tucked myself in. “Everything is fine.”

  “Were you hiding?” Riley asked, a smirk on her face.

  “No. She wasn’t hiding,” Bugs said. “Were you?”

  “Of course not,” I said as I side-stepped the bones. “Why would I be hiding?”

  Yeah, then what was I trying to do?

  “Well look what you found.” Bugs said noticing me angling around the pile. He looked at me and then down. “Bones.” He stooped down and glanced at them and back up at me. “Are they Maya bones?”

  “Are you placing bones in here?” Riley asked. She aimed her light down at the pile. “Trying to prove your worth by manufacturing evidence?”

  Man, I just want to wipe that smirk off her face.

  “No. I’m not. And they’re not Maya bones,” I said. “He’s got modern dental work.” I pointed at the skull and looked back up at Riley. Our eyes locking momentarily. “We need to go,” I directed my statement to Bugs. “We have to report this to the local authorities.”

  “Report it to the local authorities?” Bugs turned my statement into a question. “Aren’t we going to extract it ourselves and send it to the lab?”

  I took in a breath, but before I could answer Riley brought the stream of light back up to my face.

  “That body doesn’t belong here, does it?” she said, speaking slowly, seemingly understanding what I didn’t want to say out loud. “You really were hiding in here, weren’t you?” she said. “Were you going to try and cover this up?” She narrowed her eyes and looked at me.

  “Cover what up?” Bugs asked.

  “A murder.” Riley said, that stupid smirk growing into a mile-wide grin. “She thinks our skeleton here belonged to someone who was murdered.”

  Chapter Two

  It was my professional opinion, paying no heed to my negligible worth as a novice archaeologist, that there were Maya ruins along the steep mountains
ide inside Track Rock Gap in Gainesville, Georgia.

  Maya in the United States was a big deal. And it was something that most scientific people that had expertise in that area thought was likely improbable. I was one of those few people that thought it possible. And the U.S. Forest Service, an agency within the Department of Agriculture, had given me that opportunity to prove the majority wrong.

  But now with me finding a corpse inside my archaeological excavation site, I wasn’t so sure I would ever be able to prove my theory.

  Murder.

  Geesh . . .

  It seemed to follow me everywhere I went.

  It couldn’t be anything else but murder, I thought as I moved around my trailer one hundred yards out from where I had just three weeks earlier set up grid lines to map out the dig area.

  This was really just too much.

  In the last year I had been up close and personal with three dead bodies. Two of them in the last two months.

  This made the fourth.

  I peeked through the blinds in the living area of the trailer where I had taken refuge after I reported the body. I turned and walked over to the kitchenette to grab a bottle of water. Screwing the top off, I thought about those bones I’d unearthed and just couldn’t figure any other reason for them – especially with it housing modern dental work – to be tucked away inside a mound unless someone was trying to hide them there.

  I opened up the trailer door and went outside.

  It was midday, the sun was beating down as if I was in the middle of the desert instead of in northern Georgia. I had gotten up early, before six a.m. and gone into the mound to work. Still early, this day was not looking like it was going to turn out well.

  I pulled up the awning on the front of the trailer and sat in a folding chair. Waiting. All my excavating at a standstill until my “discovery” was dealt with.

  I watched men in dark jackets with FBI written on the back walk through my site. My archaeological camp consisted of a mess tent, a lab for immediate analysis and sampling packaging to send off to a larger lab, and three sleeper campers. I had a shed for equipment, a budget for incidentals, and 24-hour protection - Track Rock Gap had the full protection of the USDA Forest Service Law Enforcement Department.

  Today, evidently, the Forest Service officers weren’t enough.

  FBI agents marched across my grid lines with no regard of the sanctity for a dig or the history that laid beneath it. They brought out a black bag filled with the bones, and small plastic containers filled with the goo that had surrounded the body.

  I took a swig of my water.

  I had left the excavation on Stallings Island in Central Georgia at the invitation of the Forest Service – Director Steven McHutchinson’s request to be exact – to come to Track Rock Gap.

  Stallings Island was the home of Native Indians that built shell mounds instead of dirt ones, and produced pottery woven with fiber. Something very unusual for a people that lived more than four thousand years ago. And it was right next to Yasamee. A quaint little town of not even six hundred people that had now become almost like my second home. But the first thing I ran into when I got there was Gemma Burke. Dead in her bowl of bouillabaisse.

  That had been death number two.

  But things weren’t all bad. The Archaeological Conservancy, who was in charge of it, allowed me to be the first to excavate there in more than twenty years. So that was good. They gave me money and help. I believed I was making a name for myself. I even got recognition because I found a fish that had been previously thought to be extinct. I was moving up in the world. All without the help of my eminent archaeologist mother.

  Okay, so she did get me permission to dig on the island. But all the other stuff I did myself.

  That was before Oliver was killed.

  Death number three.

  It seemed like death was following me around.

  I swear. My life could be a weekly installment of Murder She Wrote.

  Still bitter with the sweet, I came full circle. Got to go to Track Rock Gap. It was an American ruin that carbon dating put at being last inhabited nearly a thousand years ago. It was comprised of more than a hundred and fifty stone masonry walls with – my favorite part – Mayan-like inscriptions. Early excavations had found evidence of agricultural terraces, and the remains of a potential sophisticated irrigation system. It was nearly identical to Maya sites excavated in the jungles of Mesoamerica.

  I had been chosen to come and check out those ruins. Given, again, an archaeological team, equipment, campers and volunteer amateur archaeologists. That was the reason I was on the other side of one of those stone masonry walls when I discovered the body.

  I had been very lucky to get the assignment to dig at the site. And it was a dream come true for me. I had found my niche in Belize – Maya archaeology – when I’d worked in the canopied jungles there. I had studied hard to become an expert in the field. I knew the history. The culture. And spoke the language. (Well, okay. Maybe not exactly speak it. Or know it as well as I knew Maya history and culture. But I could read Maya glyphs without too much difficulty and a little help from a couple of books.)

  And it was so surprising to me when the call came for the offer to come and excavate the ruins at Track Rock Gap because in recent years the United States government had been very tight with people getting in to do any studies, even forbidding the History Channel and the National Geography Channel access.

  I had trumped the History Channel. Go figure.

  But that advantage was quickly eroding away.

  I closed my eyes and shook my head. How was I going to prove my Maya invasion theory now? I took in a breath and when I opened my eyes I saw a uniform clad man standing in front of me. Tilting my head and squinting my eyes, I tried to get a better look at him.

  “Are you the one who was trying to hide bones?” he asked.

  Chapter Three

  The man standing before me in a light tan shirt and sporting a green shield-shaped emblem on his sleeve was a Federal Forest Service officer. I’d seen his kind before. When I had illegally trespassed on the very same property I was sitting (legally) on now, two of his counterparts had tried to chase me down . . .

  That’s another story, though.

  “No.” I scratched my forehead and then folded my arms across my chest.

  “Yep. That’s her,” a voice came from behind him. “Dr. Logan Dickerson. She’s the one.”

  I peered around him and there was Riley. With her words she moved forward and smiled at me.

  Oh no wonder . . .

  He took out a notebook and starting scribbling in it. “Dr. Logan Dickerson,” he repeated as he wrote. “Are you a medical doctor?”

  “No. She has a doctorate in history,” Riley answered.

  “And anthropology,” I said standing up. I squared my shoulders and tried to look important. “I have a doctorate in both. And I’m in charge of this site.” I waved my arm in an outward arc. “We’re here to look for Maya ruins.”

  “Here?” he asked and raised an eyebrow. “I’m sure that’s not why you’re here.”

  What?

  I looked at him and then over at Riley.

  What did he know?

  “Tell me about these bones you found,” he said before I had the chance to enlighten him on how wrong he was.

  “They belonged to a man. Male. Caucasian,” I said. “Probably around your age when he died.”

  “My age? And how old do you think I am?”

  “Around thirty-nine,” I said.

  “Hmph,” he muttered and wrote something in his notebook. “And how do you know all this? Race. Age. I thought it was a skeleton you found.”

  “I told you, I’m an anthropologist,” I said suddenly pretty proud of myself for being able to figure it out. “I study people for a living.”

  “How long has that body been there?”

  “I don’t know,” I said and hunched my shoulders. “Maybe a week. Maybe two.” I hunched
my shoulders again. “Maybe more.”

  “How long have you been here?” he looked up from his notebook.

  “About three weeks,” I said and licked my lips.

  Why was I all of sudden feeling nervous?

  He started writing in that notebook of his again. Taking down everything I said, his eyes darting from it back to me.

  Maybe that was why . . .

  “Why were you trying to get rid of those bones?” he asked.

  “What! Get rid of them?” My mouth dropped opened and my eyes got big. “No!” I said a little louder than necessary. “I found them.”

  “Then why were you trying to hide when . . . uh,” he looked down at his note, “Miss Sinclair,” he pointed to Riley, “found you?”

  “I wasn’t trying to hide,” I said. “And she only found me because I screamed.”

  “She’d cut off her flash light and was trying to dig her way into a hole in the wall,” Riley said.

  “I wouldn’t have screamed,” I looked at the officer, “if I was trying to hide the bones.” I turned and stared at Riley. “That wouldn’t make sense.”

  “She just said you were trying to hide yourself.”

  “Yeah. Well. I wasn’t doing that either.”

  “I think we just frightened her,” Bugs said walking over to the trailer. “Even more than she had already been.”

  Bugs was tall and good looking. His hair was blonde, almost white and he a cowlick that made a tuft of hair stand up at the top of head. He had big blue eyes and freckles across his nose.

  “And who are you?” the officer asked.

  “Jackson Reid,” he said and stuck out his hand. “But everyone calls me Bugs.”

  “Mr. Jackson Reid,” the officer said the name as he wrote it down. “You were there?” he asked and looked up at him.

  “Yes. I was. Those bones were pretty well hid,” Jackson looked over at me and smiled. “But Dr. Dickerson is good at digging up stuff. That’s why they put her in charge.”

  At least one person on my team isn’t trying to get me in trouble with the law.