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

  I flipped back over on my stomach and peeked around the cart.

  “What a pleasant surprise,” she was saying. “When you suggested that this was a good place to golf and that you golfed here, I never thought I see you!”

  That little trickster.

  “Oh no?” the Detective-Two-Name said. “I thought I told you I was golfing here today.”

  “Did you now?” Miss Vivee said. “I don’t remember.”

  She smiled at him sweetly. “I was wondering if you’d found anything else about the case. I’m so worried about our little Logan.”

  I saw that smirk come over his face.

  “Is there a reason to be worried about her?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Miss Vivee said. “You tell me. You haul her in when all she did was find bones.”

  Why doesn’t she stop talking to that man?

  “She was hiding them so I heard,” he said.

  “They’d already been hidden. By someone else,” she said. “I’m sure someone who’s buried bones don’t go back to check on them.”

  “Then she left town,” he said.

  “She had to come and see about me,” she said. “I’m an old woman, you know.” She eyed him. “You don’t know anything about who could have left those bones there, do you?”

  “That’s nothing I can speak on ma’am,” he said.

  She took in a breath, and let her shoulders droop. Rubbing the back of her hand across her forehead, she said, “I’m not feeling too well right now. Too much exertion, I think.” She licked her lips and fanned her face with her hand. “Maybe playing golf was too much for me,” she said, “I’m feeling a little faint.” She drooped in her knees like she was going down.

  You can’t fool me, Miss Vivee. I stayed in hiding. I know you’re faking that fainting act.

  “Let me help you,” Charlie Cecil said, falling for her dubious declarations.

  “Oh, Logan’s here,” Miss Vivee said. “She can help me.” She looked my way. “Logan, dear. Where are you?”

  Mac turned around and looked for me, the same time the detective and Miss Vivee’s eyes landed on me lying practically underneath the back of the cart.

  I hopped up, brushing myself off, I put on an awkward smile and trotted over to Miss Vivee.”

  “I have her,” I said.

  “Nice to see you again,” he said in a way that told me he knew I didn’t feel the same way. “And lucky for you, I saw you. I just got word that they’ve identified the body. You and your team are free to go back in although I heard that you’ll have to speak to McHutchinson about starting back up on your research out there.”

  “Oh really?” I tried to not let my excitement show. I was getting to go back in. “Good,” I said. “Thank you. So. Who was it?”

  “Excuse me?” he said and put his ear up as if he couldn’t hear me.

  “Who was the dead guy?” I said. “His name.”

  “We’re not releasing that information just yet. But I’m sure you’ll find it interesting when we do.” A smirk spread across his face. “And I’m sure we’ll have you in to speak to you further about it.” He looked at Miss Vivee. “Take good care of your grandmother.”

  I looked down at Miss Vivee still pretending she had the vapors and wondered what the heck he meant.

  We left the golf course post haste, even though Miss Vivee, after miraculously recovering, wanted to finish her game. I wouldn’t let her, and after fussing at her sufficiently, I called Bay. If the detective wasn’t going to give me the information and just use it as a teaser to upset me more, maybe my boyfriend would know who the dead guy was. He wasn’t on the case, but I figured he must have privy to it and he, I’m sure, didn’t want to see me suffer.

  Miss Vivee kept yelling into the phone once I got him on the line. She wanted to know how he could let them harass me about a murder. Trying to tell him what a horrid man that Charlie Cecil was. All the while, he tried to explain to her that no one was harassing me. They were just doing their job. Of course, she didn’t see it that way, not that she was understanding much at that point. She didn’t even seem to understand the concept of the mobile phone. She’d spoke so loudly that people a hundred feet away could’ve probably heard her.

  “Miss Vivee,” I said. “You can talk as soon I as I get off the phone.”

  “I don’t want to talk to him,” she said. “I said everything I have to say. He just needs to fix it.”

  “Tell my grandmother I’ll fix it,” he said.

  “Can you really?” I asked. “Because I don’t want to have to deal with that Charlie Cecil ever again.”

  “I do,” Miss Vivee said. “I want to beat him out there on that golf course.” She looked at me. “I could do it, you know.”

  “Bay,” I said and took in a breath. “I also need you to fix it so your grandmother will calm down.”

  He laughed. “I got you.”

  “What about a name? You got that?” Miss Vivee yelled into the phone.

  “Sure do. Looked it up while Logan and you were going back and forth,” he said.

  “That is not my doing,” I said. He knew no one could control Miss Vivee.

  “You want to write it down?” he asked.

  “No. I’ll remember. Just tell me.”

  “Just like you said, he was a Caucasian male. Age forty. His name was Aaron Coulter,” he said. “He was an archaeologist.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  That detective had acted like I would know who Aaron Coulter was once I found out his name. But I didn’t. And that made me even more upset. It had worried me all the rest of the day.

  Miss Vivee said that I should have just slapped that smirk off the detective’s face. That, she said, would have made me feel better.

  When Bay told me the dead guy’s name it did sound vaguely familiar. But I didn’t know if that was because I had actually heard of him before, or because Bay had told me that he was an archaeologist and I thought I should know him.

  I decided to call my mother and find out if she knew who he was. I glanced at the clock and then over at Miss Vivee asleep in the other bed. It wasn’t very late to me, but I knew late enough for Miss Vivee to be sleep, and probably my parents. They had started acting so old.

  I grabbed my cell phone and went into the bathroom, closed the door and called my parents’ house. My dad answered the phone. Unfortunate for me, because even though he sounded as if I had woken him, I had to go through a barrage of questions about my new boyfriend and when he was going to be able to meet him before he’d relinquish the phone

  What about the important work I’m doing down here, Daddy? Aren’t you interested in that?

  And then I thought about the predicament I was in. If my dad knew that I was a murder suspect, betcha’ then he wouldn’t be so concerned about my love life.

  “Hi, Mommy,” I said when I finally got my father to pass the phone to her.

  “Hey, little girl,” she said. “You’re up late. You doing okay?”

  “Yep. I’m good,” I lied. I drew out the words thinking whether I should tell her how I was really feeling.

  “Have you outed your Maya connection with North America yet?” she asked. “If you want, I can come down and help you. We make a good team.”

  I almost chuckled. Yeah, Mommy you coming might just be a good idea. In fact, I was thinking, you and Daddy might have to come and bail me out of jail. Oh, and be sure to bring Uncle Greg because I’m going to need a good lawyer.

  “No, Mommy,” I said instead. “Thanks though. I just had a quick question.”

  “What?”

  “Do you know an archaeologist by the name of Aaron Coulter?”

  “Why do you ask me that?” she said with a sudden panic in her voice. “Have you seen him? Did he say something to you?”

  “No.”

  “Look stop beating around the bush, Logan,” her voice had gone up two octaves and three decibels. “Come out with it. Tell me why you asked me about hi
m.”

  “Because he was at my site-”

  “Your site. You need to leave there,” she said before I could finish.

  “Mommy. Calm down. His bones were at my site. He’s dead. Evidently murdered.”

  She didn’t say anything for a long minute. I felt uncomfortable as the silence hung in the air. I had upset her and I wasn’t sure why. Maybe I needed to be upset, too. “Mommy. Are you there,” I asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Aaron Coulter was the man Simon Melas called into Belize to take over your site. We met him in Panama. I don’t know how you could forget that. He is the man that tried to kill you. Tried to kill the both of us.” She took in a breath. “The man that did kill Jairo.”

  I gasped.

  Jairo Zacapa had been murder number one. The first murder I’d witnessed. Shot down. He had died right before my eyes.

  Chapter Nineteen

  My mother was the master crier. She cried so much that my father once said he didn’t know how she could have any tears left. But now I think I had her beat.

  After I hung up from her, I sat on the floor of the bathroom and pulled my knees up to my chest, and I just let loose. The tears were rolling out without any effort on my part. No pulling my eyes tight, turning up my face, they just gushed.

  The man that was dead was a man who had tried in the past to kill me.

  Had he been there to kill me now?

  I didn’t know if I was more scared of that – maybe even after death he still be able to carry it out because he had a plan in place. Or what the police would say when they found out that I knew Aaron and how.

  Maybe it was a good thing for me that he was dead.

  The reason I’d come to Georgia in the first place was because I had excavated Maya ruins in Belize with my mother and found not only tunnels that ran under most of Central America, but the possible America/Maya connection I had become obsessed with.

  My mother, Dr. Justin Dickerson, biblical archaeologist extraordinaire, and keeper of the secret of man’s true origin came because I’d needed her help in deciphering the inscription on a stone slab I’d found in the jungle right outside of my excavation site. It was my first time being in charge of an archaeological site and I’d felt a bit overwhelmed. I knew the inscription on the slab meant something significant, but I just couldn’t seem to figure it out. And like any mom she came right away to offer her expertise.

  And her expertise led us to Track Rock Gap. But the federal government wasn’t letting people in to see it and our search for American Maya was stalled. I thought only temporarily.

  But everything just keep tripping me up.

  Like murder.

  What we didn’t know was that the person that hired me, Simon Melas, an old nemesis of my mother’s had surreptitiously gotten me on to run the dig. But what he really wanted was my mother. He was counting on me to need her and get her down to Belize. So he could kill her. And me too, I guess. But when he realized that my mother and I had found out something big, he didn’t want to lose recognition for the find. So he brought in Aaron Coulter.

  The dead man I found at Track Rock Gap.

  How could I have forgotten about him?

  Aaron wanted to find us, take over the site by force, and it turned out by any force necessary. Simon told Aaron that he’d given him the ability to track me on the GPS on the satellite phone he’d given me as part of the equipment issued for the dig. But so Simon could still exact his revenge on my mother, he gave Aaron the GPS to Jairo’s phone, the liaison between me and my benefactor. And soon an asset to me and my mother getting to the bottom of my find.

  When Aaron followed Jairo’s GPS, he found him outside of the cave we were in and shot him. In cold blood. My mother and I were able to get away and Aaron, his girlfriend, and another man chased us, but we lost them.

  Wait . . .

  His girlfriend. That woman I saw at the police station. The blonde who was eyeing me. I think that was her.

  Why were there here in Gainesville? Why was Aaron Coulter at Track Rock Gap?

  What am I going to do? I started sobbing and buried my head in my pillow.

  Are they out to kill me?

  I stretched out on the floor, lying on my back, I stared up at the ceiling and tried to sniff back tears that threatened to fall. I stayed like that for a long while. Thinking.

  Then I thought, am I just going to just lie here, do nothing and let someone come and kill me?

  I sprang up, a sudden bravado shot through my body. I wasn’t just going to sit back and find out if I was in danger of being the next body upturned. Or, if Detective Davis had his way, the prime suspect. I needed to find out what was going on. What they were doing there.

  Somehow I had gotten away from Aaron and Simon when they had set out to kill me. And even though I had had a little help, I had been in charge of three excavation sites. I was only twenty-eight. But I was strong, I told myself.

  I can do this.

  Be strong. Use my experience to get out of this and not just cry and cry “Woe is me.”

  Yeah, but you don’t know how or where to start.

  I laughed at that thought because I knew someone who did.

  I had been with Miss Vivee when she solved two murders. She already wanted me to let her solve this one.

  I glanced at the screen of my iPhone. Four a.m. I took in a breath. Now is a good of time as any.

  I jumped up from the bathroom floor and stared at myself in the mirror. My light-brown skin damp and eyes red from crying.

  Pitiful.

  I shook my head and narrowed my eyes at my reflection. “Stop being so pitiful. You can do this,” I told myself. I splashed cold water on my face and grabbed a towel on my way out of the bathroom.

  “Yoo-hoo, Miss Vivee,” I said gently shaking her. “Wake up. We need to solve a murder.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Miss Vivee was so excited that I wanted her to help me. Although I knew me saying before she couldn’t, never would have stopped her. She didn’t listen to me.

  She wanted to go to a diner. She had been trying to get me to take her to one since we’d got to Gainesville. I knew (just like Viola Rose and Mac) that it was where she always started her murder investigations. Even if it wasn’t Jellybean Café, the atmosphere must hold some magical aura for her.

  Although I had told her I didn’t know where a diner was that we could go to get information, I really did. It was a place that people from around Track Rock Gap, including my team, went often to eat. I’d never gone, but I knew just where it was located. It was in Itza.

  How apropos.

  “May I help you?” an older woman, maybe in her mid-forties stood at our table after we arrived and was seated said to us. A Viola Rose she was not. No sparkle. No sass. She seemed not too happy to take our order either. Her black straight hair was pulled back into ponytail at the nape of her neck. A rectangle-shaped plastic pin with the name Talisa in bold black lettering pierced the strap of her uniform.

  “We’ll all take a glass of iced tea,” Miss Vivee said. “Do you have egg salad?”

  “No,” she said, head down.

  “Okay then, well give us a minute to go over the menu.”

  “Be right back,” she said.

  “You think you’re going to find out anything from her,” I asked with a grin. “I don’t think so.”

  Mac had a beam in his eye. “You should know better than to underestimate Vivienne Pennywell,” he said.

  The forlorn looking waitress came back over and sat down our drinks. I usually don’t drink the iced tea Miss Vivee always orders for me. I drink Pepsi, but I didn’t want to interrupt while she was supposedly working her magic.

  “Hard day, honey?” Miss Vivee asked.

  “No more than any other day?” the waitress said staring down at her order pad.

  “People coming in to eat thinking ‘bout their own needs. Never thinking about how their server might feel,” Miss Vivee said. “Never makes for p
utting anybody in a good mood.” Talisa didn’t say anything in response to Miss Vivee’s words.

  “But it must be nice to have a rough day, and still look as pretty as you do,” Mac said following Miss Vivee’s lead.

  Talisa looked up after Mac complimented her.

  “My hair used to be just the color of yours,” Miss Vivee said. “You remember that, Mac?”

  “Yes, I do, Vivienne. Beautiful.” He smiled his eyes beaming. I wasn’t sure if it was part of their act, or he was actually remembering. I looked at Miss Vivee’s long gray braid that was slung over her shoulder, strands of dark hair still showing.

  “Her hair’s beautiful.” Miss Vivee said. They spoke to each other, but they had her attention.

  “Yes it is,” Mac said.

  “How lucky you are!” Miss Vivee looked up at our now interested server. “I wish my hair was still that color.”

  “It isn’t anything,” Talisa said, but blushed. She ran her hand over her hair. “It’s my heritage.”

  “Yes. I know,” Miss Vivee said. “We’re just passing through. We’re from Ohio. Beautiful country down here.”

  That made Talisa look up. “I know you,” she said and looked at me. “Don’t you work over at that archeological site over at Track Rock Gap?”

  “Yes, she does,” Miss Vivee didn’t let me answer. “She’s our granddaughter.” She pointed her finger to Mac and back to her. “Smart as a whip.” Miss Vivee let a sickly sweet smile curl up her lips. “She’s actually in charge of that dig. We came down for a visit.”

  Funny, she only says good things about me when she’s lying.

  Talisa eyed me. A smile appearing up the side of her mouth.

  “She’s your granddaughter?” she asked noting the obvious color difference.

  “Yes,” Miss Vivee said. “And she is the apple of our eye.” Miss Vivee looked down at the menu. “Now what do you recommend?” she asked Talisa.

  “If you like egg salad you might like our tuna. We put egg in that. And we have the best apple pie around.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll have. Tuna sandwiches on white toast. Lettuce. Tomato and just a touch of mayo.”