Deceived (A Hannah Smith Novel) Read Online Free PDF Page A

showing above his lip, and I expected Deputy Tupplemeyer to put me in my place with something stern. Instead, she said, “I’ve never heard of Indian mounds in Florida,” sounding cop-like and cynical but also interested.
    “You’re standing on one,” I replied. “Pyramids made of shell before the Spaniards arrived.”
    The deputy turned to the little man. “She’s kidding, right? I thought they were hills.”
    He was remarking on the subject’s unimportance when his phone buzzed, which allowed the deputy to ask me a couple more questions before explaining, “I spent two weeks in Guatemala. The ruins there. Mayan—it was for a course I was taking. Copán, too. Three weeks, that trip, then a month when I was in college.” She had her hands on her hips, looking at the topography, maybe trying to imagine if what I’d told her was possible.
    I asked, “East-west pyramids, is that the way the Maya built their cities?”
    “You’d have to see for yourself to understand the attraction,” she replied as if mishearing. But then added, “Yeah, the Maya were astronomers.”
    “Same with the people here,” I said, then pointed to a distant island. “See the high trees? That’s the western pyramid. The first day of spring, the sun sets right over it. We’re standing on the eastern pyramid—what’s left of it anyway. Farther east, there’re three burial mounds.”
    The deputy looked at the man, who was putting his phone away, then at the house next door, her eyes taking in the terraced lawn, construction residue, insulation, broken stringers stacked by the road. The tracks of a bulldozer, too, used to flatten the mound and load dump trucks that had waited in a line. Then she asked him, “How could they get away with something like that?”
    The man shook his head, getting more nervous by the second. “Permits and variances don’t go through my department,” he responded, which was an attempt to distance himself, but it also confirmed the truth as far as the deputy was concerned.
    “A thousand years old,” she said, thinking about it.
    “Some artifacts, they’ve dated back four or five thousand years,” I told her.
    “Here?”
    “Right where we’re standing, pottery and shell tools—the artifacts the neighbors didn’t have hauled off to the dump, or wherever they took it. About fifteen or twenty tons of shell mound, just disappeared.”
    “There’s something
very
wrong about that,” Deputy Tupplemeyer told the little man. Then had to show her authority over me by adding, “You shouldn’t be digging a garden either. Like the law says. Not if this is an archaeological site.”
    I was explaining that my grandfather had raised pineapples on the plot where vegetables now grew, so it was too late to apologize, we couldn’t go back in time, but we had drawn the line at bulldozing history. That’s when I noticed that the neighbor woman had come outside and was watching. Alice Candor was her name, a medical doctor, local gossip claimed. She had a dog leash in one hand and was using the other to talk on a cell phone. A tall woman, bulky but not obese, with whom I’d never spoken but had seen a few times, distinctive in her appearance, always wearing dark baggy clothes. Often caftans, and she liked scarves. She was dressed that way now, whispering into the phone and watching, until she realized I’d spotted her, then spun her back to me.
    That’s when a little light went off in my head. “That’s who complained about the garden, isn’t it? The new neighbors reported us, that’s why you’re here.”
    “Who?” the deputy asked, then became official. “Doesn’t matter who did it, the names are confidential.”
    The man said, “Of course they are,” but gave it all away when the neighbor woman suddenly knelt to retrieve something off the ground, froze for an instant, then bolted away, shrieking, her screams so piercing they spooked crows from the trees.
    The man panicked and began to jog after