Artifacts (11 page)

Praying no one had painted the windows shut, she knelt by one and pushed up the sash. It rose easily and she leaned out to plan her escape. The roof descended at a sharp slant, but the tin roof’s ridges and her rubber-soled boots would give her traction. Wrapping the still-sharp edges of the Clovis point in the silk remains of a seventy-year-old dress and tucking it inside her shirt, she stepped out of the window. It was a simple traverse, across the roof and down a little to the gable of her own bedroom window, which should be easy to open, considering that she’d smashed half of its panes.

Faye was in good shape and she was wearing boots with good traction. She should have had no difficulty sidling down the slanted roof. It would have been a lot easier if she’d made the trip in a single motion without pausing to think about the distance to the ground, and what a human body would look like once it had made that long trip. Three days ago, she’d seen two people with the life snuffed out of them. They’d been shot, whereas, if she fell, she’d merely break every bone in her body. Still, dead is dead.

Faye’s crawl down the roof resumed, but her progress was painful. She successfully negotiated the roof and raised the window, then fell through the open bedroom window directly onto her bed. Very old swans and wisteria watched over her as she slept through the rest of the afternoon and into the night.

Nguyen had been watching the news and keeping an eye on boat traffic out of Wally’s Marina. He and Wally had made a few scouting trips through the Last Isles. The coast was unquestionably clear.

The Marine Patrol boats and the Sheriff’s Office boats and the Park Service boats had gone back where they came from, except for a few that carried investigators back and forth to the crime site on Seagreen Island. Nguyen’s dig site was on Water Island, another of the Last Isles, miles away, and the cops hadn’t been near it in days. Nguyen judged that it was safe to begin digging again.

It would take time to ferry their equipment back out to the island, but Nguyen figured that the rewards outweighed the effort. The riches buried under the sand and sea were more than sufficient to drive a man to extreme measures.

When Faye crawled out of bed on Sunday morning, she stumbled over a stack of papers. She had almost forgotten the newspaper articles about Abigail Williford’s disappearance. Now that the government was off her back for the moment, she had time to read them.

She began with the earliest articles, which uniformly read: “Teenage Heiress Missing.” Several of the newspapers printed special midweek editions, to avoid being scooped by their competitors who published on more fortuitous schedules.

As the weeks passed, the focus had shifted away from looking for a missing person or waiting for a ransom note. There were stories of human chains slogging through swamps, pictures of the girl’s widowed father looking utterly alone, advertisements promising a sizeable reward for word of her whereabouts.

Bloodhounds were given Abigail’s dainty silk slippers to sniff. Known ne’er-do-wells were brought in for questioning. As always in these cases, it was shocking to realize that, within twenty-four hours of a violent crime, investigators could list a few dozen people currently walking free whom they considered capable of a crime of any magnitude. And, it being 1964, a disproportionate share of those under suspicion were black men.

Faye’s heart broke when she read that a young Douglass Everett was questioned repeatedly. His only crime was being employed by Abigail’s father, who vigorously supported Douglass’ claims of innocence. With no evidence and no support from the victim’s father, who also happened to be the most powerful man in Micco County, the sheriff wasn’t able to hold Douglass. But Faye was transfixed by a blurry newspaper photo of Douglass and a young deputy who would become Sheriff Mike McKenzie.

They were standing eyeball-to-eyeball, and Douglass was conspicuously not giving Deputy McKenzie the deferential gaze expected from black men. Deputy McKenzie was glaring at Douglass with the ferocity of a man who believes he is faced with a beast capable of slaying a fragile young girl.

Chapter 11

Nguyen considered himself a professional artifact poacher. He didn’t mess around with peddling trinkets to hobbyists. Nguyen only worked for people who knew who the serious collectors were. His shadowy boss must be one of them since he had unloaded some powerfully expensive pieces.

The very fact that Nguyen was on tiny little Water Island signified that big things were afoot. Few non-archaeologists knew or cared that some of the very first Americans, known today as the Clovis culture, had spread all the way to Florida, and nobody knew that they’d been in this particular spot. So nobody would miss the spear points and bones that he was shipping to customers all over the world.

And there were more riches to be reaped under the Gulf’s blood-warm waters. Not far from the beach where he stood lay a shipwreck reputed to be filled with uncommon treasure, and he’d found it. Retrieving those riches would be tricky, but with specialized diving gear, another diver, and a well-manned vessel to provide surface support, he’d have plenty of time to empty the wreck before the water cooled for the winter.

After fifteen years in the business, Nguyen had little fear of being caught, especially out here halfway to Timbuktu, but there was an additional layer of safety in this job. Wally said some chick, a real amateur, was working these islands. If the Feds started poking around, it would be easy to set her up to take the fall for their crimes. Nguyen felt it was always wise to have an emergency plan.

Because she was such a convenient part of that plan, Nguyen was willing to allow the amateur to continue burrowing for scraps in the sand for a while longer, but only as long as she stayed away from his dig site. If she came within binocular range of it, he would permanently remove her from the picture by any means necessary. There was that much money to be made.

“Listen closely,” Magda said to a room that echoed with the racket of shuffling feet, whispered conversations, and giggles. Teaching freshmen was hard enough, but these guys weren’t even freshmen yet. They were eighteen-year-old prospective archaeology majors, fresh out of high school, and this Monday morning lecture was the opening salvo of the university’s week-long orientation program. Her assignment was to deliver an orientation speech that would enflame their desire to learn. It was probably not a good idea to tell them the truth, but, every year, she did it anyway.

“Nobody in this room, myself included, will ever discover a royal tomb like King Tut’s or stumble onto a lost city like Machu Picchu. Few archaeologists are so lucky. We will spend our careers in the trash heaps, the wastepiles, even the latrines, of dead people. Among the waste, we will find the ordinary junk of day-to-day life, things that we will call artifacts. When we guess their purpose, we will be wrong.”

They weren’t listening. They were never listening, but she felt obligated to strip the profession of its pseudo-glamour. The students that remained would be worth keeping.

She forged ahead. “I see that you don’t believe me. Consider this. About the time that you were born, soda and beer companies stopped making cans with detachable pull tabs. When I was in school, my friends and I tossed our soda tabs on the ground outside this very building. One day, archaeologists will find distinctive metal artifacts surrounding every door to every public building that was standing during the mid-twentieth century.”

They were muttering among themselves, interested but still missing the point. “Soda tabs used to come off the can? Why?”

“Mark my words,” she said, looking directly at the one student who appeared to be looking at her. “They will declare those pull tabs to be an integral part of our religious practices. How else will they explain the inexplicable? Remember this and be humble when you try to piece together the lives of people you have never met.”

She dismissed the orientation class early so they could rush to the student union and confirm that beer was, indeed, actually for sale on campus before noon. Returning to her office, she found a soul-killing pile of administrative drudgery still festering on the far corner of her desk. It could stay there, even if Dr. Raleigh came and stood in the room so that he could watch her do precisely nothing. She had no stomach for academic tedium, not any more. She had had no stomach for much of anything since Sam and Krista died.

The telephone rang and she forced herself to let it ring twice so that the extent of her idleness wouldn’t be obvious to the caller.

A cultured female voice said, “Please hold for Senator Cyril Kirby,” and Magda did as she was told.

“Dr. Stockard?” the senator said in a low voice that commanded attention without resorting to the booming hyperemphasis used by most politicians.

“Yes, Senator, what can I do for you?”

“I called to offer my condolences on the loss of your students. I have already spoken with their parents but, having through coincidence shared the incidents of that terrible day with you, I felt that you, too, had suffered bereavement.”

“Why, thank you, Senator, that’s very thoughtful.”

“Rest assured that I’ve spoken with the sheriff. He knows that if I have access to any resources that might help him solve this crime, then he should consider those resources his.”

Magda thought that the senator displayed more social finesse than the typical backslapping politician, but, lacking a corresponding level of grace, she could think of nothing more intelligent to say than, “Thank you. I appreciate that and I know the families do, too.”

“It’s the least I can do. Now, I’d like to ask you a question about a tangentially related matter.”

“Certainly.”

“I’ve been doing business with a woman who, I believe, is an employee of yours. Attractive, petite, thirty-ish, dark-skinned—her name is Faye Longchamp. I’ve been trying to get in touch with her, but she forgot to leave me her address or phone number.”

“Oh, she didn’t forget. She lives on her boat and keeps to herself. You can’t reach Faye unless she wants to be reached.” Even if Magda had known Faye’s address, she would not have given it to anyone without her permission—not a colleague, not a minister, and certainly not a minor-league politician. It didn’t occur to her that she was giving out sensitive information when she said, “Faye will be in here to see me this afternoon. I’ll ask her to get in touch with you.”

He thanked her and hung up, and Magda didn’t think about the conversation again for an hour, not until she saw the senator himself in the departmental library.

Faye sat across a library table from Senator Cyril Kirby. She would hardly have been more surprised if she had walked in and found a woolly mammoth awaiting her.

“Hello, Senator Kirby,” she began. “I—”

He interrupted her with a warm, “Call me Cyril. Please. I had some questions about your property dispute, but my secretary said you wouldn’t give her a phone number.”

“I was going to check back in a week to see if you’d made any progress. I didn’t expect such fast action. Or such personal attention.”

“Your problem is an interesting and important one. If your claims prove true, then your family was defrauded of a piece of property whose value has appreciated significantly in the past few years.”

Faye liked his smile. That fact unnerved her, because it was important that she develop a successful business relationship with this man and she had a distinct feeling that he had more than business on his mind.

“So what was the question you forgot to ask me?” she asked quickly, too uncomfortable to let silence linger long while he sat across the table and smiled at her.

“Do you know where the old Turkey Foot Hotel stood on Last Isle?” he asked. “No, that’s not the real question. Do you know where its ruins are now? Last Isle is in pieces now, but it might be possible to find proof of your family’s financial interest in the hotel. Then you could reclaim at least the piece of Last Isle where the hotel’s ruins stand.”

Faye shook her head. “I’ve thought of that, but no one I’ve talked to has ever seen even a trace of the foundation. It may be underwater.”

Cyril looked disappointed. “It was worth a shot.” He ran his fingers through his hair and she noticed that it was less stiff today, as if he’d left off the telegenic coat of hair spray. In his shirt sleeves, Cyril himself looked less stiff, more approachable. She wasn’t surprised when he said, “I may be out of line, but would you like to have dinner with me?” but she was shaken all the same.

Surely his help with her legal problems didn’t depend on her sexual acquiescence. Her female instincts were signaling a soft but insistent, “No,” but she held back from turning him down cold. He was attractive and intelligent. He was also wealthy and influential, but those things didn’t mean so much to Faye. She weighed the pros and cons for a minute, then came up with an inspired compromise.

“Why don’t we meet somewhere tomorrow for lunch? I know a place that’s charming. Unusual, too.”