Did you hear a boat?" I'd stopped on the crest of a high mound, my head tilted, listening.
She stopped ahead of me; waited for a moment in silence. "I can hear boats out on the Gulf. That's all." She pulled a bandanna out of her pocket and wiped her face. "Some view, huh?"
I touched an index finger to my lips. I could hear the buzz of cicadas… the ascending whistle of ospreys… the thoracic rhythm of a pile driver burying condo footings on Marco. I thought sure I'd heard an outboard, but it was gone now. "Maybe it was a boat coming out of Barfield Bay." Through limbs and vines, we could see the bay glittering Formica-like in noon sunlight. Beyond, on Marco Island, were rows of houses, then a high hill topped with trees. Indian Hill. What else could it be? I wondered if Teddy Bauerstock really was up there on the mounds looking out. I wondered if he really was thinking about Dorothy.
The thought keyed an unexpected mental portrait that was as dazzling as a camera strobe.
When an image has been deeply imbedded in the brain, our neurotransmitters can become potent, high-resolution cathodes. For a moment, Dorothy was gazing into my eyes once more. It was a familiar and knowing look. Her face was as pale as a mushroom. Dark pupils within her blue eyes burrowed into mine.
"We're almost there. Her dig site."
Nora didn't use a name. As if she knew Dorothy was in my thoughts.
I followed her across the mound.
On a couple of the mounds were bathtub-sized cisterns sunken into the shell. American setders had built them to catch and store fresh water.
There were raccoon skeletons in one of the cisterns. From the second, a rat the size of a dachshund flushed ahead of us while a red-shouldered hawk screamed overhead.
There were key lime trees flowered with ivory-yellow fruit; an avocado tree, a knarled grove of sour oranges, papaya on delicate, tuberous trunks, and a huge tamarind tree, too.
Survival food in a difficult land.
"Dorothy understood what all of these idiot treasure hunters never seem to realize. There are hundreds of stories about pirates burying treasure in this mound or that mound, and they are all absolute bull crap. There were no pirates in this area. Ever. You want to say to these dopes, 'Hey, dumbo, these islands weren't even on the trade routes, so what were the pirates going to steal? Oysters? Use your darn brain!"
I smiled at her indignation. The woman had a temper.
"Something else I think Dorothy understood was that the Calusa feared their dead. The more powerful the person, the more dangerous the spirit. The Calusa, to protect themselves from the dead, used water as a barrier."
I said, "You mean they floated the bodies out on funeral rafts?"
"No. What they did was… well, first you need to know that spirits can't cross water. That's an old, old belief. So they built moats around the burial areas. Back in archaic times, they actually buried individuals under water. Staked the bodies down or buried them in a low area and flooded it. There are water burials at Little Salt Spring near Sarasota; lots of places. You ever hear of the Windover site in Brevard? Same underwater burial system.
"Anyway, when it comes to power people, water's the key. People they feared, it made sense to bury them in water. Keep all those evil qualities from escaping. That's what I think, anyway. Which is one reason there's nothing to find in the mounds."
I mentioned that Tomlinson had me read something about a chief named Tocayo.
"Oh yeah, Tocayo was one of the really bad ones. According to the Jesuits, anyway. Tocayo lived right where we're standing now, or maybe Marco, we're not sure."
"You trust those accounts?"
"From the missionaries? Absolutely not. They were biased and self-serving hypocrites who were cruel as heck. But it's all we've got. What they wrote about Tocayo, though, is pretty consistent and comes from more than one source. For starters, they say that he made a sport of raping his own daughters; seemed to prefer sodomy. He cannibalized children because they were so tender. Columbus, on his second voyage, described how the Caribs would castrate boys because they tasted better when they got older. Tocayo supposedly did the same thing; that's why I think he was a Carib."
Nora had stopped at the base of the mound. She was peering down into the gloom of a mangrove swamp, black muck and shadows, comparing what she saw with the xeroxed map she carried. She said, "Here we are."
Meaning Dorothy's dig site.
"It all looks the same to me."
"Yeah. What we have to find is a real small area. What used to be a water court, but the shape is tough to see because of the mangroves. Even says in the notes that it's hard to find. What happened was, back when the state and developers drained the Everglades, it emptied some of the ancient lakes. The Calusa wouldn't have liked that. Expose the water burials, let all those evil spirits loose."
We'd gone so quickly from sunlight to shadow, that my eyes were having difficulty adjusting. I saw what looked to be a shallow creek bed, black muck spiked with mangrove roots. Lots of low brush and vines and some kind of fern growing up. There were shell inclines on each side: the basework of more mounds.
The creek bed looked exactly like a dozen other mucky areas we'd crossed, and Nora voiced the same question that was in my mind: "How could Dorothy have known? Out of all the places on this island, how could she have possibly known to dig here?"
I remembered Tomlinson saying, She didn'tfind things. Artifacts called to her…
Which made as little sense as the proposition that a teenage girl had found this place at random.
As we maneuvered through mangroves around the base of the mound, Nora stopped so abruptly that I nearly banged into her from behind. Heard her say, "Oh my God. Oh my God! You were right."
I said, "About what?" But then I saw what she meant.
Treasure hunters had found the place, too.