The Fresco by Sheri S. Tepper Read Free Book Online Page B

back in the fifties. It was plenty big enough for a small motel, and there were no recent changes of ownership papers floating around, requiring surveys or confusing things. The permit to dig a foundation that was posted on the road had been issued for a dry piece of land a half mile away. The permit had a mistake on it indicating that other piece of property. Just two numbers twisted around was all. Nobody’s fault, if anybody caught onto it. It just happened that way.
    So, Bubba and his brother Quentin, who had fallen heir to the twelve acres along with their cousin Josh, all of whom had agreed to throw in their shares for the Waving Palms project, had Bubba’s front loader and a backhoe they’d rented, and they were digging a nice big pond at the lower, western end of the ten acres and running a good-sized ditch into it along the swamp on the north. Bubba didn’t own the ground on the north or the south side, where another good-sized ditch led into the swamp. Everything the backhoe dug out of the pond and the ditches got dumped on the eastern edge of the property, along the road, to raise it up. It’d be muddy as hell for a few weeks, fulla dead frogs and snakes and all the stuff that squirmed around down in that muck, but when the eastern end had a chance to dry out a little, they’d dump a few loads of fill dirt and gravel on it, grade it out and really dig the foundations. By that time, they’d be able to fool with the ditches some, make them look more natural, and plant some other stuff around.
    â€œHey, Bubba,” yelled Quentin, when Bubba cut the engine for a minute to clear some brush from the bucket-teeth. “C’mon over here. See what Josh found!”
    Trampling through a patch of rare and endangered orchids, Bubba stomped over to the other two men who were standing in a patch of ferns on a little hillock, one they hadn’t planned to touch.
    â€œWhy the hell’d ya smash it?” he asked, more interested than irate. The patch of ferns looked as flat as a pool table, though it might be very slightly dished at the center.
    â€œC’mon,” Quentin admonished. “Look addit! We din do that.”
    It seemed to Bubba likely they hadn’t. The general flatness had been accomplished through repeated pounding by something large, like a section of log, like the heavy tampers used to settle fill dirt around drainpipes, or foundations, stuff like that. Must be a big man or more’n one did it. Something that size would be a heavy ole bitch of a thing, almost two feet across.
    â€œWhaddaya think?” asked Quentin.
    â€œI think somuddy buried somethin,” Bubba replied. “And when he set them ferns back on top, he smooshed the whole thing down tight. Probly, just did it. A week from now, they’d all be growed up again, and we wouldn’a seen it.”
    â€œYou think maybe money?” asked Josh, thoughtfully.
    Bubba looked around. “Nah. I think more likely a body. It’s too wet here for money or paper. Most likely a body.”
    â€œWe gonna dig it up?” asked Quentin.
    â€œWhy’n hell we do that?” his brother replied. “Get all messed up in somethin none of our binness! Let dead bodies lie, that’s what I say.”
    They returned to their work, making considerable progress by early afternoon, when they stopped work, parked the machines, and got into Bubba’s pickup to drive to the nearest town for sandwiches and beer. After some jollity between them and Dolly, the clerk at the convenience store, they took an extra sixpack, got into their car and drove back the way they’d come. At least so Dolly told the police when they came asking, having found a receipt with the store’s name on it in the empty seat of the pickup.
    That was the last she saw of them, she said, driving off down the road, waving at her.
    â€œThey were okay?” asked the police, “not fighting among