Artifacts (27 page)
Douglass leaned against the doorjamb and said nothing.
“Did you hear? The sheriff’s coming for you. And we need to get Faye ashore while we still can. We can worry about the law when she’s safe.”
Douglass said, “It’ll be rough, what with the hurricane heading for Louisiana and all.”
“Might be bad,” Joe observed. He didn’t know that Douglass had spent the last thirty years indoors and had lost the connection to the natural world that he had once enjoyed.
Douglass didn’t know that Joe didn’t believe in wasting time on idle talk about the weather.
The undergrowth reached out for Faye and Cyril as they approached the big house. No, not Cyril. Cedrick? He hadn’t been Cedrick for decades. She couldn’t think about him rationally without an accurate name and she was going to need every scrap of her rationality to get through this. She would think of him as the Senator. His title, at least, was the truth, no matter what other lies he might have told about himself.
So what had happened to the real Cyril, after his brother stole his name? Was he farming quietly in a rural county somewhere in the south? Was he in prison? The truth struck her so suddenly that she forgot to watch her feet and tripped over a briar. Cyril was dead. He had lain beneath the sand on Seagreen Island between his mother and father ever since his brother buried them there. This possibility had never occurred to her before. Until a few minutes ago, she had thought the Senator’s missing family consisted of a man, a woman, and a grown son.
She remembered holding the broken femur. Coupled with the picture of young Cyril with a shattered nose and a missing tooth, it completed the picture of a short painful life quite different from the powerful destiny of his older brother.
In all these years, she had never brought a man out to Joyeuse, never revealed this part of herself to any lover. Now a man who had murdered many times over was walking up the grand staircase and into her home. Faye had always told herself that she chose to let people into her life based on cool, passionless skepticism. She had imagined herself as a woman who didn’t trust easily, yet whom had she chosen to trust? Shallow, vain Isaiah. Backstabbing Wally. This man beside her, a murderer whose very name was a lie.
And Joe, the only man who had ever deserved the trust she gave him, sat in jail, accused of this man’s crimes.
Faye knew she had to get back to shore in one piece. If she didn’t return from today’s outing with the murderous Senator, Joe would have no one to defend him. She had to survive this.
How was she going to do that? Her only plausible option was to pretend like nothing had changed. She’d have to carry on with her efforts to borrow money from this man, this killer, then hustle her butt back to land where she would be safe with Wally the smuggler and Joe the accused murderer.
Faye had showed the Senator almost her entire home, leaving out only the junk-cluttered cupola, the service rooms in the basement, and the sneak stairway built to bring slaves from the kitchen to the dining room without allowing the sight of them to offend anybody unnecessarily. He had made the correct admiring noises about the handblocked wallpaper and the handpainted bedroom walls and the handcarved railing running the length of the freestanding spiral staircase.
“I’m in trouble, Cyril.” She choked on the name, but the break in her voice only made her desperate plea sound more sincere. “I’ve been selling artifacts I dug out of my old family land on the Last Isles and I’m about to be busted for it.”
“You’ve been digging in the national wildlife refuge?”
She nodded.
“You know that’s a federal crime and they prosecute it more vigorously every day?”
She nodded again.
“Let’s walk out on the porch,” he said. “I enjoy the wind.”
There was a great deal of wind for him to enjoy. Each gust tore more Spanish moss out of the trees, rolling it across the ground like a southern version of tumbleweeds. The palms danced like windmills in the gale.
The Senator settled himself on the porch swing, patted the seat beside him, and said, “Come, sit down and tell me exactly what you need.”
Douglass had long since turned over the pilot’s duties to Joe. He knew where they were going and he handled the fifty-two-foot behemoth as if he owned one himself.
“Does Faye have a dock? Is the water deep enough for this thing?”
“She has a little dock way up in an inlet where nobody can see it. Her boat’s pretty big, but it’s got a shallow draft.” Joe looked over Douglass’ very expensive craft and said, “The tide is high. We can probably get it in there.”
Probably. Such an encouraging term. Douglass wished the weather were as encouraging. One moment the skies were clear. Then a great band of clouds would rush in from the south, drop some rain on their heads, then rush on northward.
“I’d say the hurricane is passing close,” Douglass said.
“Depends on what you mean by close,” Joe responded with his accustomed verbal economy.
If pressed, Joe might have said that a storm passing directly overhead could be called “close.”
“So,” the Senator said, “you need money. How much for the pretty necklace you’re wearing? I admired it when you wore it to the restaurant.”
Faye fingered the chain at her throat.
“You’re welcome to it,” she said, “but it’s worth no more than the silver in it. People don’t buy jewelry with other people’s monograms.”
“And you bought it at a flea market? It’s, what, a hundred years old?” He examined the pendant, front and back. “The woman who wore it is a mystery, isn’t she? We know her initials, they’re right here: CSS. But who remembers her name? Doesn’t it bother you to wear a dead woman’s treasure?”
Faye, leaning forward to get out of the swing, felt his left arm cinch around her neck while his right hand used the necklace to drag her face close to his. “She was wearing this when I put her in the ground. What kind of ghoul would dig her up and take her last possession, then throw dirt over what was left of her?”
“Her? Dig who up?” Faye sifted the possibilities. She was aware of only three dead women in the Senator’s wake—Krista, his mother, and Abby Williford. She had indeed dug all three of them up. But who wore a necklace like this one? The initials didn’t match any of the victims. Was it an heirloom?
The necklace had been stored in Faye’s jewelry box since she found it five years before. Krista was a happy high-school girl then. She couldn’t have been wearing it when she was put in the ground. Cyril and Cedrick Kirby’s mother didn’t come from an heirloom kind of family. That left only Abby.
It had never occurred to Faye that she already had Abby’s silver necklace because she had expected it to be as contemporary to the dead girl’s time as her earring had been. She had forgotten that Abby came from an heirloom-type family and might have had a grandmother or aunt with the initials CSS. She had also expected to find Abby’s necklace near her body, not on Seagreen Island.
Her mouth hung open and her eyes rolled back in her head when the silver dug into her throat. She had some reservations about whether the fine chain was strong enough to serve as a garrote, but the Senator had decided to try and no amount of clawing at the chain could keep it from burying itself further in her skin.
She had a vision of the necklace slipping broken from Abby’s breathless throat and falling to be trampled into the sand. She saw a rasp-voiced bird pluck it from the ground, adding it to the hoard of Christmas tinsel and soda pop tabs lining its nest. Later, much later, she watched as one too many tropical storms washed over Seagreen Island and a tiny islet was set free to safeguard Abby’s bones. Her great-grandmother’s necklace remained behind with the birds.
Reality had slipped so far from Faye that it was easy for her to believe that she had seen a vision through Abby’s dead eyes. She could actually see very little through her own eyes, because lack of oxygen was making the sun go dark.
Nguyen was an experienced pothunter, but he was a landlubber. He had learned to
SCUBA
dive for this job and he did it well, but learning to pilot a boat had seemed like a waste of time. He had figured Wally might as well make himself useful, but now there was a great deal of money to be made if he could figure out how to get himself, alone, to an island called Joyeuse. Well, if Wally could get himself from Point A to Point B in a boat, Nguyen was sure he could do it, too. How hard could it be?
He’d been surprised to hear from the boss, who must have called him just as soon as Wally left their little business meeting. Nguyen was no accountant, so he was usually happy to leave the business arrangements to others, but it seemed that the boss felt there were some tasks that couldn’t be entrusted to pea-brained Wally. He had offered Nguyen a small fortune to find two people hiding on Joyeuse and make sure they were never seen again.
From observation, Nguyen knew how to turn a boat key to crank the engine. He could steer the boat he “borrowed” from Wally because it had a steering wheel like a car. With the overconfidence of a man who did a lot of things well, he figured he could steer it east, find the secret island, do away with the boss’s enemies, then come home and collect his payment.
The boss had given him the island’s latitude and longitude, down to the last degree, minute, and second, but Nguyen had neglected to bring navigational charts, since he didn’t know how to read them. Besides, the long chain of barrier islands was perfectly visible on the map he kept in his car. In fact, they were visible on the horizon. How could he possibly get lost? Wally had said his friend lived east of the marina, and only one barrier island extended east of the marina, so Nguyen simply pointed the boat’s bow in that general direction. He would be a richer man by sundown.
He couldn’t have known that his idea of an island was limited, that he was headed for a windswept spit of sand that could never have supported plantation agriculture. His targets, Faye Longchamp and her friend Joe and their hidden home, were not out there. Joyeuse Island was surrounded by water and accessible only by boat, but it was snugged up so close to the swampy coastline that, from the Gulf, it didn’t look like a landlubber’s idea of an island. Nguyen would never have found Faye, even in favorable weather.
The crashing, rhythmic waves only began to worry Nguyen when the first one splashed over the gunwales of his low-slung craft. Even then his faith in the slab of fiberglass beneath him didn’t waver. Instead, he fretted over the wreck that still waited among the Last Isles to be looted. Who knew what this storm was doing to it? He would hate to think that the sunken drug-smuggler’s boat would be silted over before he and Wally could pull all that plastic-wrapped cocaine out of its hull.
