Satan's Angel

By Lee Pound

The discovery of the most ancient human tooth ever found in North America made archaeologist Angela Baxter famous and arounsed a smoldering undercurrent of family discord and hatred that threatened her life and her reputation. From the Mojave Desert to the Minnesota forests, a step ahead of the police and a hidden killer, she searches for the truth that will put the ghosts of her past to rest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Solutions Press
• Release date: May 10, 2010
• ISBN: 9780982764619

Lee Pound

I help entrepreneurs and professionals publish books and articles so that they become the recongnized experts in their markets. My career includes 15 years as a newspaper editor, 20 years as a chief financial officer. I have been a public speaker for 35 years, and and currently a book publisher, writing coach and seminar producer.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Angela Baxter

For me it began with a lie.

For Mick it began before I was born.

He acted from love. I acted from desperation. Others will determine who caused the worse consequences.

I was still an ethical woman at six o’clock the evening of the last Wednesday in October, when, with the shadows lengthening across our archaeological dig in the Mojave Desert, Rachel and I retreated to the field house to post-mortem another routine day.

She flopped onto the paisley sofa we had picked up third hand at a garage sale. When she pulled off her sweatband, her brown hair fell in thick strands around her tanned face.

Three fingernails cracked this afternoon, she said.

I collapsed into my executive chair, a wooden monstrosity with four wheels that skidded rather than rolled across the linoleum floor. Cut them short like mine, I said.

She held up her hand. How can I go to a movie with Marcus when my nails look like this?

You should worry about the important stuff.

And my hair’s a mess.

When are you going to get your priorities straight?

Angela, I can’t make the grant come through. The best I can do is drown myself in fun tonight. She propped the door open with a chunk of limestone. It’s too hot in here, she said.

The breeze gusted across my desk. I grabbed at a week’s worth of reports too late to keep them from scattering across the room. Close that door! Jesus, now look at what you’ve done.

Rachel kneeled. Each sheet she retrieved documented a day’s excavation. We’re failures, she said. She kicked the rock away from the door and flinched when it banged shut. Face it, she said. She deposited the papers on my desk.

They’ll renew the grant, I said.

She flopped onto the couch. The silence grew.

The phone rang. I sponged the moisture from my upper lip with a tissue and answered.

Hold for Dr. Fields, a woman said.

It’s the grant committee. Rachel sat up straight. I eased back in my chair. My damp jeans clung to the wood.

Hello, Angela, Dr. Fields said.

I didn’t expect you to call until next week.

Your application took less time than we expected.

I grinned at Rachel, who continued her pout. So the committee likes our project?

I didn’t say that.

I narrowed my brows. Rachel gripped the edge of the sofa with both hands as if straining to hear the conversation.

Dr. Fields said, Funds are tight this year.

We’ve survived cuts before.

Angela, at our last meeting the committee questioned the lack of results from your dig.

I can’t guarantee a find. Leakey dug in East Africa for thirty years without success.

He didn’t have a grant from us.

Six years is short, I said. What do they want?

The committee is leaning toward not renewing your grant, Dr. Fields said.

I took a sharp breath. Without notice?

Angela, we respect your work. However, we have a dozen applications from digs with more promise than yours. We have to distribute our money where it will do the most good.

Rachel communicated her awareness of the bad news through the tension in her eyes.

We’re close to a find, I said.

The committee needs more than promises. Can I be candid, Angela?

Go ahead.

Drop your obsession with outdoing Leakey’s dig down the road.

He challenged me.

When you were thirteen years old. We can’t spend money on dreams.

What do you want from me?

Only results can save your dig.

How long do I have?

The committee meets two weeks from today. I’m sorry, Angela. I know how hard you’ve worked.

Thanks for calling. I hung up.

What did you expect? Rachel bounced up from the couch. Look at this place. She swept one arm around the room. At least they found a scraper field down the road. What have you got? A few pretty rocks. She lowered her hand to her side. No wonder you got turned down.

It’s not final, I said.

Rachel tap-danced across the floor. Both her hands shook. Don’t be naive. Nothing’s going to save us.

We keep working, I said. Who knows what will turn up?

Rachel took two steps toward me, then hesitated. She shrugged. What’s the use? You’ve been living in never-never land for six years. She spun like a ballet dancer. I’ll be at Maggie’s when you wake up.

Hiding behind a wine bottle won’t help, I said.

Should I send out my resume?

Jesus, I said.

After she left, I closed my eyes. My dream might always be beyond reach. None of my colleagues had found human bones in the Mojave older than a few thousand years, not Leakey in his three seasons here in the late sixties, not his successor, still digging a few miles away.

Nor had I, despite Leakey’s challenge.

I brooded for two hours, long enough for Rachel to get to Maggie’s, sip her glass of Chablis and give up on me, then went home.

The next morning I drove to the Museum of the Southwest in San Bernardino, which houses an impressive collection of ancient artifacts from the western United States. They say writers haunt bookstores. Well, archaeologists haunt museums when they have nothing better to do. In the basement I nodded to two volunteers extracting dinosaur bones from plaster casings.

Hey, look who’s here, said the woman wearing a plaid blouse tucked into blue jeans.

What’s the latest? I asked.

Dinosaurs are all we find, the woman said. The odd Indian tooth too, few hundred years old, few of them worth keeping.

You do anyway, I said. When are you going to clean out the basement?

When you get the time.

Downstairs in the storage room, I browsed for hours, poking through drawers filled with excess bones, scrapers, dinosaur teeth, human teeth and unclassified rocks, dumped here after the completion of who knows how many digs, the items of value long since culled and put on display in museums from here to Seattle.

Most of it remained to be catalogued.

Such a mass of material, such a testimonial to the success of every other archaeologist in Southern California. Such a testimonial to my failure.

I wandered among the evidence of my friends’ successes, remembering the tales that accompanied each find, frustrated at my failure to add to the collection, embarrassed at the meaningless encouragement my friends gave me.

The staff evicted me at closing time. After a fast food dinner in Victorville, I drove home, exhausted less by hard work than by failure.

In my room that night, a piece of white rock fell from my pocket. I picked it up. A human tooth, the same tooth that caught my notice at the museum because of its apparent antiquity. Why did I have it in my pocket? I rolled it in my fingers. How wonderful that a fortunate few can build impressive reputations on such tiny bits of enamel. With a sigh, I set it on the night table intending to return it to the museum on my next visit.

The next day Rachel arrived at the dig half an hour late. She stopped at the shed to pick up her tools and walked to her quadrant without sending me her usual cheery hello. She worked through lunch.

Half an hour before quitting time, she packed up her gear and walked past my quadrant without speaking. Hey, where are you going? I asked.

Home.

I set my dental pick on the nearest rock. Wait a minute. We need to talk.

She opened her purse as if searching for keys. I ran across the clearing. She unlocked the car.

Rachel, I said, even if the grant ends we’ll find another dig.

Doing what?

We have a good reputation.

For failure. What grant committee is going to approve another application from you? Who will you work for? She dropped her keys into her purse. Maybe its time for me to move on. She leaned against the car with her arms crossed.

Don’t leave me now.

I can’t pay my rent with promises. She squeezed her eyes shut for an instant. Its best. I’ll stay until the grant runs out. After that . . .

The grant won’t run out. You’ll see.

She sighed. I’m tired of chasing shadows. She fished her keys out of her purse. See you in the morning.

That evening, Maggie served me sodas for two hours, pausing after each visit, her head cocked, an invitation to talk, an invitation I declined.

I removed the tooth from my pocket. A human molar. I set it on the counter and spun it with my finger, admiring the finish and brown stains.

Maggie returned. I placed my hand over the tooth. Refill? she asked.

I slipped the tooth into my pocket. It’s late. I rose from the stool. She nodded.

On the Needles Freeway, my route home to Newberry, with the radio playing easy jazz and the full moon casting a glow across the Newberry Valley, I let my mind drift in search of the young woman who had first chosen this dig site and predicted success with such confidence. That woman no longer existed. In her place stood a stubborn thirty-five-year-old who refused to admit failure.

At the exit, I turned left toward the dig instead of right toward home. The steady purr of the car lulled me. The surreal moon-glow transported me to a world that did not exist, a world that celebrated my skills as an archaeologist, a world that my numbed senses believed might exist one day.

At the dig I entered a world of delicate silver light, of canopies that shimmered against the mountains, of moon-glow that softened the stars.

I strolled to my quadrant. The moonlight made the rocks glow like silver and pebbles sparkle like clean teeth. I sat on the edge of my quadrant. Across the clearing, Rachel’s quadrant sat forlorn, as if we had already abandoned it. A breeze tugged at the canopy, raising the whipping sound associated with ghost towns.

The breeze led me to her quadrant. My left hand fingered the tooth in my pocket while I crossed her excavation, manicured with great care, where she worked a sand flow more than fifteen thousand years old.

My toe struck a rock. I reached down to rub away the ache and stared at the rock, which rested an inch away from a tiny depression.

I removed the tooth from my pocket. In the moonlight it looked less ancient than under Maggie’s fluorescent lights. With a sigh, I let it slip from my finger into the hole and slid the rock over it.

The next morning, I woke early, showered an extra ten minutes, washed my hair and blew it dry. I ate my cereal spoon by slow spoon.

I wanted to hurry to the dig to retrieve the tooth. Impossible. Rachel might arrive early.

So I arrived an hour late. Rachel waved when she heard my footsteps. After she disappeared into her hole, the dig proceeded under a clear sky. I didn’t need clouds to mar the day.

A few minutes before eleven, while I pretended to study the morning’s trove of rock, Rachel shrieked.

Chapter 2

Robert Baxter

Angela’s an archaeologist because I pointed her that way. I’d claim credit for her guts except she got none of her genes from me.

She calls me Grand-dad.

I never told her my son adopted her.

Neither did her parents.

So what does this have to do with anything? Not much except she’s all I have left of my son and daughter-in-law and after her the line stops.

What if she finds her real parents and leaves me?

So I pretend she’s my blood and she avoids giving me a great-grandson while she obsesses about digging up old bones.

It’s been so long now I can’t bring myself to tell her the truth and why bother. It will never come out anyway.

David and Sally wanted to tell her when she turned fifteen, advice they heard from some Los Angeles radio shrink I don’t get in Yermo. The damned drunk who ran him and Sally into a telephone pole twenty-two years ago turned that responsibility over to me and I flunked.

I so believed that I’d tell her that I insisted on raising her to make sure she heard it from me. My wife served up all the excuses she could against my plan and I batted them away. Too old? House too small? Can’t discipline a teenager?

Hell.

I dragged David out of his room when he was too yellow to pick up his first date. I drove him to football practice and cuffed his ears when he caught the pass that won the league championship. I stood up with him when he married Sally.

Is a girl so different?

Damned if her fifteenth birthday came and went and I never told her. Why? Hell, I don’t know. The right time never arrived. How could I disrupt her life again?

Like I said, David and Sally adopted her with so much privacy I figured she could never find out.

I’ll always remember the day David and Sally and I braved the Los Angeles jungle to collect Angela at the adoption agency. We found a tiny kid, not yet a year old. When I picked her up, she grabbed my collar with both fists and refused to let go. I held a bottle of milk to her lips. She gripped the bottle with both hands and sucked with eager gulps.

David and Sally settled into a two-story house hovering over the beach in Santa Monica and brought Angela to visit me in Yermo one weekend a month.

Her obsession with archaeology started during those visits. She sat at my feet in the living room for hours, her legs crossed, listening to tales of my dad and his silver mining days in Calico. One day when I showed her the slab of cement on the barren plateau where he lived, she poked into it while she asked me to describe his house.

The week before the accident began with me catching the flu, forcing cancellation of our cruise to Acapulco, and ended when my wife broke her hip and landed in the hospital.

So when the police called, they found me relaxing in my Morris chair with a box of nose tissue at my side.

At least Angie heard the bad news from me.

I splintered the speed limit and got to David’s house in Santa Monica ten minutes before Angela showed up after school.

She bounced through the door, her arm extended to hug her mother. She hugged me instead.

The image stuck in my head for good: excited eyes, sharp nose and chin, blonde hair rubbing the collar of her green and gold freshman cheerleader uniform, her books clutched to her heart.

Hey, what a surprise, she said. Where’s mom?

She dumped her books on the coffee table. I didn’t answer.

I made cheerleader. She spun to show off her costume. We start learning yells tomorrow.

I’ll sell the house, I thought. Where were the words I needed?

Her grin faded.

Aren’t you happy for me? she asked.

I bought the social ideal that men must be tough. Still, I’ve seen Marines cry after they tell a woman she’s a widow.

I came as soon . . .My words sounded hollow.

Cheerleader is big.

I avoided her eyes. Your mom and dad . . .

Did mom go shopping? She picked up her history text and thumbed through the pages. Isn’t my uniform cool?

Beautiful.

She put the book back on the coffee table. Mom didn’t mention you’d be here, she said.

Please, listen.

It’s not my birthday.

She must think I’m a fool. A drunk driver . . .

She crossed her arms. Where are mom and dad?

Oh, honey, I said. She stood like a statue beside the coffee table. They’re gone.

I know they’re gone. When are they coming home? Why are you here?

What could I say?

She stood still. Her mouth dropped open. A tear dripped from one eye.

We went home to Yermo.

The next Monday, she enrolled in the local high school to keep herself occupied while I arranged for the funeral. She munched raisin bran for breakfast, caught the school bus at the corner, and worked on her homework at my desk after dinner.

The first night I asked how she liked her new teacher.

She frowned.

Tuesday I hired a funeral home to hold a memorial service in Santa Monica and bought a plot near Yermo.

That night she nodded.

Wednesday night I plied her with stories from her father’s childhood.

She listened without the usual sparkle in her eyes.

Thursday, the day of the funeral, we occupied the front pew of the chapel with Sally’s mom and dad. The two white caskets rested on metal stands in front of the altar rail, close enough to touch. A forest of wreaths cast off a sweet aroma.

When the minister asked me to rise to give the eulogy, I said, I’m not much on speeches so this will come from the heart, not a piece of paper. David and Sally were my only children. I loved them. They came into this world with nothing; they found each other and united in love. They leave with what they brought into the world. I motioned to Angela. Angie, please come up here. Angela glanced up at me, her lips apart. She rose with great effort and joined me. I placed my arm around her. David and Sally left Angela to the world, a gift more precious than they could imagine. Honey, I said to Angie, your mother and father loved you. Tears sprang from my eyes. Thank you all for coming, I said. With my arm around Angela, I stepped from the platform and guided her to our seats.

The next morning, I dozed in my Morris chair with the Barstow daily draped across my lap. The back door banged shut. Slippered feet scuffed across the kitchen linoleum.

The scent of roses arrived with her.

Angie carried a covered shoebox. Please take me to the cemetery, she said.

I folded my paper.

Angie clutched her box while I opened the cemetery gates. We drove down the lane to the green hill of new sod where my son and his wife rested under a temporary marker that reflected silver sunlight through a rainbow of flowers.

Angie tucked her box under one arm, stepped out of the car and closed the door.

She didn’t invite me to join her.

She climbed the hill and kneeled in front of the stone. Her back hid the box.

I waited.

For five minutes she sat, a little Buddha.

Grand-dad?

A small hand waved for me to join her. The dew wetted my shoes as I climbed the hill on grass that smelled meadow fresh.

Angie resumed her vigil.

I kneeled. Her eyes glistened. The box lay open beside her with the lid underneath. She clutched four red roses.

I couldn’t let my friends see me cry, she said.

I nodded. I wanted to say that women can cry in public. I knew she didn’t care.

I cried yesterday, I said.

Her lips twitched with a hint of a smile.

Two for dad, two for mom, she said. She lay the roses in front of the marker. I . . .

With my hand on her shoulder, I said, I didn’t raise my son to die. Life made other plans. Goodbye, David. Goodbye, Sally.

Angela said, Goodbye . . . Dad. She shifted her knees. Goodbye Mom.

She pulled a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped her cheeks.

Grandpa?

She grasped my hand. Yes? We stood.

Can I stay with you?

I smiled and hugged her.

Mrs. Horton

Angela Baxter? What a case. Her first day in my last period freshman history class at Yermo High School, she claimed a front row seat with a smirk that said, Teach me a skill I don’t know. Her blonde hair hung straight to her shoulders, framing a face so thin I wondered if she ate right. She was allergic to dresses. The other girls chattered about boys. She disdained such trivia.

Angie knew her lessons though I seldom saw her study. She read books before I assigned them. She passed snap quizzes one hundred percent and grinned as if she enjoyed surprising me.

The kids teased her.

She ignored their taunts.

Don’t teachers want to work with such a precocious child?

Average teachers showered her with A’s.

I pushed her to work for her grades.

Angie lacked challenge. After class she sat in the wooden chair beside my desk and discussed Diderot and black holes, the Civil War and quarks. She debated with intelligence, without passion, as if she found such subjects elementary. She dared me to introduce her to a field she’d love.