Artifacts (33 page)
Faye closed the journal and closed her eyes. She was so very tired and so very proud of Cally.
She was startled awake by noises downstairs that couldn’t possibly be Joe, because he never wore shoes with hard soles. It was over. No matter who owned the feet stomping up the sneak stair, those footsteps signaled the end. Joyeuse was gone. She had let the family down.
The door opened and Magda stood on the other side. She stood at the shelves of artifacts by Faye’s bed, each of them numbered, labeled, and cross-referenced with a dated field journal—except, of course, for the shelf that had its glass and all the treasures hiding behind it blown away by the storm. Lifting a rusty flatiron, Magda examined it, and said, “This is professional-quality work. It would be a shame for the archaeologist who did it to go to jail. What are we going to do about it?”
Sheriff Mike was amazed and grateful that he and Dr. Stockard had found Joe and Faye and Douglass Everett, all three of them alive and, as far as he was concerned, innocent of any serious crime. After a night of emergency room commotion and a course of intravenous antibiotics apiece, Douglass was out of intensive care and Faye was laid up at Dr. Stockard’s house, worrying over how she was going to pay the hospital bill.
Try as he might, Sheriff Mike had not been able to convince her to save her worries for later. Claypool was in the throes of organizing a county-wide fundraiser to pay her medical bills—an all-day bluegrass concert and fish fry, headlined by Claypool’s mandolin quartet. Everybody for miles around would turn out and the money would be found. That was the way of things in this neck of the woods.
Sheriff Mike had grown up along the Florida coast. He knew the people and he knew the currents. He had been pretty sure he knew where Senator Cyril Kirby would wash up. Sure enough, after a few days of waiting, he had found him, lying on his back, with Joe’s flint point still protruding from his throat.
It wouldn’t do to arrest young Joe for this killing. Senator Kirby’s deeds were already plastered all over the papers. Even if Joe were cleared of wrongdoing, as well he should be, the questioning, the lawyers, the reporters, the courtroom—well, it would kill the boy. Sheriff Mike had seen what a few hours in jail had done to him. Joe Wolf Mantooth could only thrive in fresh air. He didn’t deserve to be dragged into the maw of civilization.
Sheriff Mike reflected that this case had induced him to take an elastic view of upholding the law. Sometimes the law fell short of ensuring that justice was done. Sometimes, fate or God or something past his understanding took care of things instead. Right now, a man lay in a Tallahassee burn unit, missing a couple of fingers and most of the skin on his chest. When the doctors got through with him, the law would deal with him for carrying a concealed weapon and impersonating an officer of the law, but Sheriff Mike wagered that the punishment he had already received was more appropriate for the attempted murder of an innocent like Joe Wolf Mantooth than anything the law might be expected to hand out.
The sheriff had come to the beach today prepared to do what needed to be done to the body of Cyril—no, Cedrick—Kirby. A pair of gardening clippers were stuck in his hip pocket. He used them to cut easily through the shaft of the spear, just behind the point, and pocketed the arrowhead. Then he rolled the body over, planted a foot between its shoulder blades, and yanked the shaft out of its neck. The coroner might wonder how a hurricane had put a hole through Senator Kirby’s throat, but Sheriff Mike wagered the coroner had never seen a man killed by hand-knapped stone. He’d rule that the death had occurred by accident.
Now he could go home, burn the bloodied shaft, and return with witnesses to discover the body all over again—after he’d cleaned up Joe’s spearhead and respectfully placed it in a velvet-lined box alongside the relics of ancient heroes.
Where it belonged.
Faye took a stool at the lunch counter at Wally’s, waiting for Magda, who couldn’t wait to ride out to Joyeuse and tour what was left of the house. Liz had told her that Wally, the prince of self-preservation, had disappeared the day after the hurricane. Faye looked around the convenience store for evidence that the owner had been missing for a week, but found none. Liz was running the place as if nothing had changed.
“I’m waiting for the taxes to go into arrears,” Liz said, “then I’m going to buy this place at auction with the money I saved from my husband’s life insurance.”
Faye felt positively impish. “Listen close. Right before the auction, break this window and that one over there,” she said with a careless gesture. “Even if it rains, they won’t let much water in. Do you want to keep this floor?” Liz looked at the peeling linoleum and shook her head. “Then slop some hot grease on it. You know all about creative uses for hot grease, I hear. I can show you how to make the toilets leak and the doors stick. If we set our minds to it, I figure we can knock twenty percent off your purchase price. Maybe thirty.”
“Faye,” Liz said, “you have always got a place to park your boat. Count on it.”
“Good, because I’ll need one round-the-clock from now on. I think I’m going to be moving to town.”
Magda was already talking when she walked through the door. “One of my colleagues is a lithics specialist. He’s chomping at the bit to hire Joe as a lab tech, so Joe can teach him everything he knows about ancient toolmaking techniques. The pay is low, but how much does Joe need? And he’ll get the use of the school’s infirmary and catastrophic health insurance.”
“Joe’s going to have health insurance?” Faye asked, incredulous.
“Sure, as a student, you’ll qualify for the same deal. You are coming back to school, aren’t you?”
“I’m going to have health insurance?” Faye asked, the incredulity in her voice cranking up a notch.
Magda had taken on Faye’s future as a personal project. On the day after the hurricane, while they waited on Joyeuse for the Coast Guard to get paramedics to Douglass and Faye, she had sat cross-legged on Faye’s wet floor, brandishing a waterproof pen. The act of initialing every page of Faye’s field notes, sheltering years of pothunting under the umbrella of her Ph.D., had made Magda chuckle. No, cackle was the right word for the sounds that had come out of her sturdy chest.
“Now,” Magda had said, “you’ve got enough material for your dissertation and I’ve got fodder for years of academic publications. You have to come back to school now, Faye.”
Recklessly confident that the funding would materialize, Magda sat sipping cocoa at Liz’s lunch counter and chattering about Faye’s research assistantship.
Faye waited until Magda stopped to breathe, then broke in. “I won’t be needing the research assistantship. I’ll be able to fund my own studies. During the hurricane, Douglass offered me a job curating his Museum of American Slavery. He may have been delirious, but I’ve accepted the offer anyway.”
It felt good to know that she could pay her tuition, get an apartment in Tallahassee, go to the movies now and then, but these things would cost her dearly. No research assistantship or museum curatorship was going to generate enough income to allow her to keep Joyeuse.
The water birds were gathering in their rookery and Faye could hear their evening cries from the back porch of her ancestral home. Sheriff Mike, Magda, Douglass, and Douglass’ wife, Emma, were digging into heaping plates of Joe’s barbecue, and Faye felt quite the hostess. She had never thrown a party at Joyeuse and this first one would also be the last. She knew it was healthier to let the bitterness go, and she was trying.
Joe was sitting on his favorite stump and he looked comfortable, because he was outdoors. Douglass and his wife sat side by side on the ground, companionably together after thirty years of marriage. She noticed Sheriff Mike and Magda looking pretty comfortable, too, sitting next to each other on the porch steps and wolfing down Joe’s famous corn and crab soup. And Magda had thought she was too scary for any mortal man. All the coziness made Faye lonely, but a consolation lay buried beneath it all. If there was a man out there for Magda, there was surely a man somewhere who would love Faye.
She poured the sheriff a second glass of iced tea, then replaced the pitcher in her cooler. Sheriff Mike was a notorious history buff and that had given her the impetus to throw this party. She knew he’d get a charge out of touring the place, even in its current condition. She had talked Joe into showing the sheriff how to knap flint, and the older man’s effusive admiration for Joe’s skills had made him blush. A taste for mischief had prompted her to invite Douglass and Emma, because Douglass deserved an apology for living a lifetime under suspicion. Sheriff Mike delivered.
He raised his glass of tea and said, “Here’s to Abby, one last time. Her killer has found justice and there’s nothing more we can do for her but remember her beauty and her tender soul. And here’s hoping that everyone here can forgive me for all the mistakes I made during all the years I looked for the man who took sweet Abby away from us.”
After everyone drank to Abby, he said. “I guess you folks have heard about the bones that keep washing ashore on Seagreen Island.”
“Are they Abby’s?” Magda asked.
“Maybe. It’d be hard to prove. Maybe if we got some DNA out of them and if we could coerce some DNA samples from her fifth cousins in Austin. Not likely, I figure.”
“Do you have the arm bones? The right upper arm?” Douglass asked.
“Well, yeah,” Sheriff Mike drawled, interested. “Why do you ask?”
“Because I was there when she broke it. A compound fracture, right there,” he said, pointing to a spot just above his elbow. “I’ve got a picture of her in the cast.”
“It’s circumstantial,” the sheriff said. “Reckon it would be enough to get the trustee of Mr. Williford’s estate to release the reward money at this late date?”
“I imagine so,” Douglass responded, “considering that I’m the trustee.”
Sheriff Mike, who knew the answer to his question before he asked it, said, “Reckon who you’d be releasing the money to?”
Everybody looked at Faye, who didn’t want to be crass and ask, “How much?” She stifled the “how” with a loud exhalation.
“Don’t know how much, exactly,” Douglass said. “I don’t check regularly because it just sits in the bank and earns interest. The reward was twenty thousand dollars in 1964. Reckon it would make a regular person rich, but you’re gonna blow it on this house. Reckon it’ll just make you comfortable.”
Faye wondered how long it would be before she was able to breathe again.
