Artifacts (31 page)
There was no light but the incessant lightning. No sound could rise above the wind. There was a locomotive riding in that wind, and a banshee and a siren and the bone-shaking grind of a wrecked car sliding on its roof down a gravel road. Tree trunks popped like firecrackers and the massive piers that had supported Joyeuse all those years groaned under the shearing force of the wind. What were the swirling waters doing to the sand around the old foundations?
Faye’s view of the ground below her was a shutterspeed illusion. Each lightning strike gave only a snapshot; the rapid flashes revealed a series of still scenes that blurred together like cinematic images, giving an illusion of motion.
It was less frightening to watch the world end this way, to see the storm surge approach in the jerky style of a music video, showing no discernible color other than shades of gray. The great wave was lit by strobe light as it crashed onto the land and through the trees and struck the long straight staircase that rose from the ground to the main floor, bypassing the ground floor service rooms where the slaves had tended their masters. Treads, risers, banisters, and balusters flew in the face of the wave, then fell to the water surface and were washed away. They did not fall far. In the aftermath of the storm surge, the water level was even with the main floor balcony, leaving the service rooms completely underwater.
The wind was loud enough to raise the dead and each wave lapped further up the walls of her home, but Joyeuse held.
Later, when the blasting wind suddenly ceased, Faye was wise enough to be wary. Many a soul had walked with desperate relief into the sudden eerie stillness of a hurricane’s quiet center, only to perish when the eyewall’s winds tore into them from a new direction. The setting sun added a faint glow as the gale died down and silence settled in, but only for a time.
Douglass was stirring and now, without the storm sounds to mask his moans, she needed to keep him quiet more than ever. Her voice quieted him. She should just talk, whisper anything to keep him still, but the storm had wiped her mind so clean that she could think of nothing to say.
“Have to tell you, Faye,” he said, his voice rising. “If I die…want you to know.”
She bent and whispered in his ear, hoping to quiet him. “What do I need to know?”
“Didn’t kill her. She was dead—beaten to death—when I got there.”
She gestured at the floor, pointing at their tormentor waiting below. “Was it him?”
Douglass nodded. “He made me help him bury her. Said he’d tell the sheriff I…killed…her. My word against his—”
“And he knew a jury would believe the white man.” She stroked the graying hair at his temples. “Oh, Douglass. And your watch?”
“He took it, prob’ly while I was layin’ her body in the grave.”
Faye hadn’t thought his breathing could get more ragged. She was going to let him say about two more sentences before she stopped him and made him rest.
“He put my watch in her grave…told me about it later. Said I could go ahead and talk to the sheriff, say as much as I wanted to, ’cause his testimony and my watch would put me in the electric chair. Then the hurricane came and we lost even her body, her grave…”
Douglass’ racking sobs were punctuated with wheezes. She put her hand over his mouth. He had to lie quietly or die.
Joe was rummaging through his bag again. He cradled a stone loosely in the palm of his hand and struck it sharply with another rock, flaking off a sliver of stone that he handed to Faye. Roughly the size of her index finger, it hooked to one side in the shape of the number seven. He guided her fingers along the blunt outer edge, then showed her the inner edge. It was as sharp as a scalpel.
“To defend yourself,” he said.
Faye tried to imagine getting close enough to the Senator to use this thing, but her brain wasn’t up to the challenge.
The wind came back and it was stronger, though Faye wasn’t sure how she could tell the difference. The flexible trees, palms and pines, had been blown out horizontal before. They were horizontal now. The booming reports of more rigid trees failing under the wind’s assault may have come more frequently, but it was hard to tell. Perhaps the velocity of the rain spewing through the broken windowpanes had increased. It came from all directions now, hitting her like bullets, like great sodden bedsheets striking her from head to foot, again and again.
She clutched William Whitehall’s journal, wrapped snugly in Joe’s tarp, layer after layer, bound with twine. She wanted it to survive as much as she wanted Joe, Douglass, herself, all of them, to live through this. She tucked the bundle into her shirt, because she would soon need both hands. She clutched at Joe and Douglass and the three of them were huddled into a tight ball when, one by one, the remaining windowpanes pulled away from their frames and shattered.
Faye hoped that the destruction would stop, that a few broken panes would equalize the internal and external pressure, protecting the remaining windows that, in turn, protected them. When the glass settled, she looked up and understood why the windows had failed. The gaping holes where they had been were no longer square. The wood framing of the cupola was flexing with the pressure of the wind and the glass panes could not rise to the occasion. The framing itself would fail within minutes, blowing the cupola away.
Faye put her mouth against Joe’s ear and screamed, “Trapdoor.”
Joe shook his head and bellowed back, “Sitting ducks. Roof.”
Perhaps he was right. She imagined dropping down through the trapdoor. Where would the Senator be? Huddled in a bedroom, deafened by the storm, unaware that they were moving through the house outside his door? Or standing, gun in hand, on the landing below, waiting to pick them off?
The roof was not inviting. She had been out there herself, quite recently. The pitch was steep and the tin roof was slick, even when it was dry and there was no wind. It wouldn’t take much to send her sliding down the roof into the waves.
Joe and the wind and the rapidly dying sunlight were giving her no time to think. He had draped Douglass’ good arm over his shoulder and walked him to a gaping window-hole. Faye was compelled to help him. Together, they sat on the roof facing downward, shoulder-to-shoulder and knees bent, working for traction against the ridges striping the tin roof. Douglass was half-lying behind them, resting most of his weight on their backs. When Joe gave the signal, they began inching downward.
Hardly capable of coherent thought in the face of the punishing wind, Faye was impressed that Joe had chosen the site of their descent so carefully. They crept downward till they reached a chimney to brace against, then they angled their path across the leeward side of the house until they reached a gable protruding through the roof. After draping Douglass across it, they straddled it themselves. This gable sheltered Faye’s bedroom window and even though she knew it didn’t lead to the warm, dry haven she had always loved, she believed that she would be safe if she could just get in there.
Impatient, she moved toward the gable, intending to crawl onto her windowsill. Joe grabbed her arm and shook his head, mouthing, “Check first.”
Checking would be hard. She lay belly-down on the roof of the dormer, then crawled forward by inches until she dangled from the hips down. With Joe holding her legs, she peeked in the window. Someone had lit her lantern. Their tormentor lay on her bed, booted feet crossed at the ankle, staring at the ceiling. She retreated quickly.
They sat straddling the dormer, gathering their strength for one more leg of their journey. There was another dormer a room away, twenty feet away, a lifetime away. Faye and Joe inched toward it, butts and soles to the tin and Douglass draped across their backs. The maneuver couldn’t be accomplished without sliding and Faye doubted they had the strength to raise Douglass higher up the incline. If they slid too far, too close to the edge, there would be no place to go.
They crept an inch toward the second dormer and slid an inch downward. An inch of slide was too much. They had to do better.
Creep. Creep. Slide. Creep. Slide. Stop and breathe and creep again. Slide.
The dormer window was an arm-length-and-a-half away, but they were too low. Faye looked up at the unattainable window and down over the eaves at the churning water. She wanted to shriek. She probably did shriek, but the wind was shrieking louder than she was.
Joe, who had been sitting next to her, shoulder-to-shoulder, suddenly wasn’t there. She was left to support Douglass’ weight alone, a situation that couldn’t last. She looked up and saw that Joe had managed to stretch his long arms and torso enough to touch the panes of the window they were striving to reach, but there was nothing for him to grip. He lowered his hand to his waist, groped inside his tool bag, and pulled out a sharp-pointed hand axe. Pulling his arm back, he whipped it forward, breaking the remaining windowpanes. He whipped it again, knocking the frame free of panes and dividers, and again, driving the axe blade into the wooden window frame.
Using the axe for leverage, he shimmied himself upward until he could grasp the windowsill with both hands, hoisting his torso over the sill and throwing himself headfirst into the open window.
Joe was safe and Faye was happy about that, but she and Douglass were still trapped on the roof.
It didn’t take Joe long to rip the sodden curtains from their frame and lower a rescue line toward them. It was only a sheet tied in a loop, weighted by shoes and lengthened by knotted curtains, but the loop fit nicely under Douglass’ armpits. Faye steadied Douglass while Joe hauled him up, leaving her behind, alone with the storm. Even if she were tall enough to reach the windowsill, which she wasn’t, she just didn’t have the muscle mass to lift herself that far using only the strength of her arms.
Was it her imagination or did the wind pick up speed when Joe left her alone? It flung water in her face, her mouth, her nose, so that she couldn’t even take the choking wet half-breaths that had sustained her since she crawled out onto the roof. Sitting there, twenty feet above the water, she was going to drown.
Afraid to raise her hands from the roof where they were bracing her against its sharp slope, Faye shook her head to drive the water out of her nose, her eyes, her mouth, but it was no use. Tucking her chin against her chest and hunching her shoulders forward, she used her own body to block just enough wind and water from her face to let her breathe a bit.
The tiny bit of oxygen fed her strength. Nothing but her brain could fight the panic, the racing pulse and heaving chest and trembling limbs that were adrenaline’s gift to humanity.
You are safe,
she told her adrenal gland.
Joe would never leave you out here to die.
Faye, who had always taken pride in her self-sufficiency, sat in the wind, talking to her autonomic nervous system and waiting for rescue. It would have been a humbling moment if she’d had a prideful piece of herself left to be humbled. In the first minute after she conquered the panic, three branches bigger than she was crashed into the tin roof and bounced off. When, not if, something similar hit her, it would knock her cold, shaking body into the heaving sea.
She could have kissed Joe when he reappeared and dangled the rescue line over the windowsill, reaching down to help her to safety. For a long while, she lay wet and spent on the floor of Joyeuse’s master bedroom, listening to the storm and the throb of her tortured leg.
The Senator lay on Faye’s bed and enjoyed the cheery light of her lantern. He had no idea how Faye had come to be outside his window, but he’d seen her there, peeking in, and he’d heard her struggle across the roof and crawl through the next window. She was right next door. This was going to be easy.
He had successfully contained his anger, bottling it up until he saw Faye again. So she was living with another man and seeing him on the side. She had been so sly and so good at hiding her duplicity. It was a relief to know that she and the Indian, the two people who posed the last remaining danger to him, and thus needed to die, were the same two people he most wanted to kill.
How strange that Faye would be the Indian’s companion, the one he had been chasing since he dispatched the two archaeology students. He’d been confounded by his inability to find the Indian, understandably, as it turned out. Wally had described him as a hermit, more or less, a hermit whose only companion was a boy named Faye.
His fabled luck had brought on a howling storm to cover his crimes. When he had stepped onto Faye’s boat that morning, he had planned to kill her and sink her body in the Gulf. Simple and neat. Given her secretive ways, it would be days before she was missed. With no body and no sign of a struggle, Sheriff Mike would, sooner or later, decide Faye had simply moved on. She did have a habit of making sure no one could find her.
The risk associated with killing Faye had been comfortably low when they had set out for Joyeuse that morning. Now that the hurricane had entered the picture, her murder carried no risk at all. After sinking her body, he could return to land and tell a harrowing story of survival with an unhappy ending. How tragic the headlines would be—Senator Risks Life in Futile Attempt to Save Woman.
