Artifacts (6 page)
Faye was glad to be home on Joyeuse, glad to leave Seagreen Island and its grisly secrets behind. She had picked a likely spot to dig and she was turning over spadeful after spadeful of Joyeuse’s dry, sandy soil. She found it amusing that her family had lived off the land, while she lived off the garbage they had buried under the land.
Come on
, she muttered to her dead ancestors,
you people were loaded. Why couldn’t you just accidentally throw away a ruby ring so I could dig it up and pay my property taxes?
Faye tended to talk to dead people when she was unemployed and she was indeed unemployed once more. The field survey on Seagreen Island was shut down while the murders were under investigation, so her itty-bitty paycheck wouldn’t be coming for a while.
Faye was accustomed to having less income than outgo. Her net worth had drifted downward ever since she abandoned the mainland and human society, ever since she decided not to marry Isaiah. It wasn’t that she didn’t like people. She did. Her friendships were few, but sturdy. She would face down an alligator for Joe and Wally, and she believed they would do the same for her. Magda and Magda’s archaeology kids were more than mere business associates; they were comfortable companions that she trusted.
And trust was the key word. Straddling the demilitarized zone of America’s race wars, Faye had been walloped time and again by people who just couldn’t get over their pigment phobia. Too much melanin. Too little melanin. Who really gave a damn?
On the day she had looked into Isaiah’s eyes and saw that he, too, assessed the shade of her skin as part of her worthiness to be his bride, the seeds of her flight to Joyeuse were planted. It had taken time. First she’d had to sell her mother’s house. Then she’d rolled a portion of that equity into a boat that she could live on, putting the rest of the money into CDs.
Actually, “subsist” was a more accurate verb than “live” for her life aboard the
Gopher
. It had the bare necessities—a head, a shower, a dinky and odorous refrigerator—and that was all. For two years, she’d camped on the
Gopher
while she patched Joyeuse’s roof, ripped out rotting floorboards, replaced vandalized doors and windows. She spent nothing beyond her outlay on building materials, fuel, groceries, and taxes. Still, the CDs dwindled.
Pothunting had been a golden opportunity. Selling heirlooms from Joyeuse and from other islands her family had once owned had saved Joyeuse, pure and simple. She gave not a second thought to the fact that digging on islands that weren’t precisely hers was legally unwise, particularly when some of them belonged to the federal government. The CDs continued to dwindle, but so far she’d staved off the end.
The sunlight faded, forcing her to quit digging for the day without uncovering the first salable find. The tree shadows reached for her like the specter of bankruptcy, but tonight there were other specters on the prowl.
Two days before, two young people alone on an island had met their end. And what were she and Joe? Two young—sort of young—people alone on an island. Was she a fool to stay? There was no way to know unless someone discovered why Sam and Krista were killed.
If the killer was motivated by theft, she felt fairly safe. She owned nothing worth stealing. The field survey had called attention to itself as a possible source of fenceable electronics in a way that Joyeuse did not.
Or maybe Magda was right. Maybe her black-eyed suspect Nguyen, or another antiquities poacher like him, had been rebuffed by Sam and Krista in his campaign to find someone who would sell him artifacts. This thought made her squeamish on several levels. She owned nothing that might attract an ordinary thief to Joyeuse, but an artifact poacher might find her home interesting enough to visit.
An uglier thought presented itself. If he had chosen to corrupt Faye, rather than Sam and Krista, she would have caved easily. No, she wouldn’t have stolen from Magda’s dig, but she would happily have sold him anything she dug up on her own. If he’d only approached her first, she’d have had a new customer and her more honorable friends would be alive.
Ugliest of all was the thought that there could be another pothunter in these waters, someone who didn’t shrink from murder—someone who might not be pleased to learn that somebody else was harvesting these islands. Denial reared its self-protective head and said,
Don’t be paranoid. There’s a simpler answer and, when faced with a choice between a fancy answer and a simple answer, take the simple one. It’s most likely to be true.
The simplest answer was, in a word, drugs. Gossip among some of the field crew said that this wasn’t the first time Sam and Krista had run afoul of a drug supplier. Other crew members denied it, saying that the two kids were straight arrows who wouldn’t recognize a controlled substance if it jumped up and bit them.
Faye found both positions extreme. She knew Sam and Krista and she wouldn’t have doubted that either of them were occasional pot smokers, but they were too serious about their studies, too gung-ho in their work ethic, to muddy their minds with any regularity. She couldn’t see them being so deeply involved in the drug culture that someone would boat out to Seagreen Island, stalk them, and kill them.
But the thought was so seductive. Blame the victims. If they had attracted their killer to them, then now he was gone. She was safe. Joe was safe. At least they were safe until the tax collector took Joyeuse and left them both homeless.
The battery-powered lantern shed a more-than-acceptable reading light, and the fact that it was still shining at midnight was a fair measure of Faye’s fascination with the journal in her hands. Faye wasted nothing: not batteries, not kerosene or gasoline or food. She had lived close to the economic edge for a long, long time. Sooner or later, she was bound to fall off but, when it happened, it would be through an act of God or through the malice of another human being. It would not be because she had failed to eke every bit of value out of everything she had.
Faye had yet to figure out who William Whitehall was. Finding his journal at Joyeuse suggested that he had some connection to her family, but she knew nothing about her ancestors prior to the Civil War, and two generations or more separated William from that period. Perhaps he was a friend of her ancestors or a business associate. She would not allow herself to assume that she was reading the words of her own flesh and blood until she knew it for certain.
She was scientist enough to ignore her romanticism—most of the time—but the act of reading a man’s heartfelt thoughts recorded while Florida was still a pawn in the hands of the British, the Spanish, and the upstart Americans charmed both the scientist and the romantic in her.
***
Excerpt from the diary of William Whitehall, 29 May, 1798
My Daughter Mariah has flourish’d these sixteen Years—her gracefull hands & expressive eyes would speak for her if she had not such skill at speaking for herself. God in Heaven forgive me, but she is the charming Woman that my Susan once was. Susan’s step has grown heavy. She looks at me so seldom that it is clear she would prefer not to see my face at all.
Failure at love is not the same thing as failure at Marriage. We have a good, compleat life. Most days, the daylight outlasts the chores. This is a wellcome happenstance, for at day’s end, we can rest while Susan stitches & I attend to Mariah’s lessons.
How I chafed at my own lessons! Mariah drinks hers up. As the fifth son of an English gentleman of reduced circumstance, I saw my future in America; I found booklearning superfluous. Father insisted, so study I did and, as is commonly the case, on achieving his age I found him to be right. In the hard years, reading to Susan was our only pleasure between getting up & going to bed and now, in better times, I share my learning with my daughter. Susan never joins us, but when I tell Mariah a funny story in French, my Susan laughs.
My greatest concern at the present revolves around Mariah’s future. She is in the peculiar position of being far better bred & educated than the few eligible young men in the area, yet they find her unsuitable because of her Creek blood. Susan has never once suggested that Mariah might marry a Creek man, but I see it in her eyes & there is contempt there, too. I cannot justify my preference for a White husband for Mariah. I wager there is no justification, but I desire it anyway. God has provided well for me in this life—I can only hope that He is as bountifull with my Daughter.
I have always believed in Divine Providence, because I was taught to believe in it. A fine man, educated & polish’d, knock’d at my door two weeks past, asking water for his horses & his servants. His name is Henri LaFourche & he says he is a Natural Scientist, who has come with a group of men to map the rivers & creeks in this Wilderness, while cataloguing the wilde beasts here. They seemed disappointed to see us, for I think they thought to find the land desolate of Humanity. Perhaps they forgot that the Indians live here & have done so for time out of mind.
I invited Henri LaFourche & his men to stay with us. I did not consult Susan before offering the invitation, but I knew without looking at her that she wish’d I had not. I do not comprehend her attitude. Hospitality is the unwritten Law in these wilde lands, for one who refuses to shelter a Stranger might someday find himself without shelter. Providence tends to repay a man in the coin that he hands to others.
After each meal, Susan persists in enumerating every bite that Henri and his men have consumed. Their rate of consumption is indeed prodigious, but there are weightier matters afoot. Henri and Mariah leave each morning on long walks with the ostensible purpose of furthering Henri’s knowledge of this Wilderness. He could have no better tutor than my Daughter.
No fool would believe that Nature is Henri’s only interest. I too was once a young man, & I am not blind. Susan says his intentions are dishonourable, but her Prejudice against Henri is plain. “I have heard what he says to his men about her,” she says, but she will not repeat what she has overheard. She only says, “He does not hide his words from me as he does from you. It does not occur to him that a Savage might speak French.”
But Susan is wrong, and tonight she will know it. Henri Lafourche, a cultured & educated Gentleman, has asked for a private audience with me after the women are abed. Our Blessed Lord’s Providence has provided Mariah with a Husband who is almost good enough for her.
Faye moved around Wally’s Marina as if she owned the place. She didn’t, but her friend Wally did, and praise the Lord for that. He gave her a place to park her car when she was on Joyeuse and a place to tie her boat when she was ashore, and refused any payment other than her friendship—and the occasional jar of green tomato pickle made by her grandmother’s recipe.
In gratitude, Faye had given him the use of an old tabby storehouse on her island, so he would have a place to keep the house goods salvaged from his divorce. It had been years, yet he’d never come back for them. Still, keeping Wally’s stuff was the least she could do, considering what he did for her. Faye had a half-million other household projects to do before she renovated Wally’s shed and she didn’t need it to store surplus possessions. She didn’t have any.
“Damn, Faye,” Wally bellowed as he emerged from the men’s room. “I didn’t think you knew what pantyhose were, and here you are filling out a pair so nice. And lipstick does great things for those lips. Shit.”
Faye blew him a kiss with the lips in question and said, “I didn’t think you’d be awake yet. It isn’t noon.”
“An emergency rousted me out of bed. Beer’s hell on the kidneys. Did you ride all the way over here in the skiff? Dressed like that?”
“Nope. I brought the
Gopher
. I gotta give it a shakedown cruise now and then.”
He grabbed her hand. “No nail polish? I guess they don’t make any that’ll hold up while you’re scratching around in the sand. At least you washed the dirt out from under your nails.”
Faye gave a worried glance over her shoulder, but Wally squeezed her hand. “Forget about it, Faye. Ain’t nobody in the room but us. You know I wouldn’t tell your secrets.”
Other than Joe, Wally was the only person who knew the particulars about where Faye lived and what she did for a living. He considered himself and his friends above the law—or beside the law or beneath the law, as the case might be. And that attitude appealed to Faye, whose relationship with the law was rocky at best.
Faye teetered toward the door in her unfamiliar dress pumps. “I gotta go, Wally, but how ’bout coming out to see me at Joyeuse sometime? You could visit your hide-a-bed. Say ‘hi,’ to your pots and pans. Relax. Go fishing. Dry out.”
“You been messing in my stuff, Faye? I know you’ve got your eye on my electric skillet.”
“Your electric skillet is safe with me. At least until I get electricity.”
She waved good-bye to Wally and hustled off to her car without giving him his usual hug. The smell of Wally’s breath didn’t bother her one whit, but she didn’t want to arrive in Tallahassee for a Friday morning meeting with a senator smelling of beer before the weekend even got underway.
She worried over Wally. Business was obviously slow. How else could he spare a boat slip reserved just for her? The grill did a decent business, but there was only so much money to be made on coffee, eggs, and grits. Maybe it was a good thing that Wally had few needs other than beer and a place to sleep, and maybe it wasn’t.
Faye crawled into her car, pumped the pedal, held it down, and turned the key. Praise God, all eight cylinders were still capable of internal combustion. The air conditioner might have blown its last breath sometime during the punk rock era, but Faye’s mother had known how to maintain an engine and she had passed her skills on to her daughter. The ugly rattletrap always cranked.
Faye’s old Bonneville could have found its way to Tallahassee with no driver behind its wheel. Its parsimonious owner wished it could find its way to Tallahassee with nothing in its gas-guzzling tank, but she continued to feed it. Now, if the beast could be cajoled into an approximation of the speed limit, she would arrive in time to make a detour to the university library. Given an hour in the newspaper archives, she laid odds that she could identify the mystery woman buried alone in the Last Isles.
The fact that its archives were not available on diskette or on the Web was a fair indication of the size and circulation of the
Micco Times
. Searching its archives was a matter of sliding one piece of plastic after another into a microfiche reader. Still, when one is single-minded, an amazing volume of drudgery can be accomplished in an hour.
It only took Faye half that time to find the name she sought. That was one of the benefits of fishing in the small pond of a weekly, as the
Times
was in those days. She could place the age of the body within six or eight years, given the style of the earring. An unsolved murder in small-town Florida would have been big news, plastered on the front page over a period of weeks. And the value of the earring suggested that this was no unlucky prostitute who would go unmissed and unmourned.
Every front page printed in the Florida Panhandle during the summer of 1964 had devoted space to the search for Abigail Williford. In the half-hour left to her, Faye printed out every article she could. The microfiche printer was so slow that she had time to skim each article as it printed. Column inch after column inch was devoted to informing readers exactly who the missing girl was, though it was apparent to Faye that most of the newspaper’s readership already knew more about her than the reporters themselves.
Abigail Williford was the eighteen-year-old daughter of the richest man in Micco County. He had inherited tracts of middling farmland so large that income from his sharecroppers and tenant farmers would have kept him comfortable for life, but he was not a man to be idly rich. He had built a thriving construction business and, by the time of his daughter’s disappearance, he was a widower employing a goodly percentage of the farmers and day laborers in the area.
Each article was adorned with the same close-up photograph of Abigail. Clearly a senior portrait intended for the school yearbook, it showed a smiling dark-haired girl glancing at the camera over a shoulder draped in chiffon. Every newspaper printed the same photo, week after week, all summer.
Faye imagined the grieving father sitting alone in his home with the life-sized original portrait on the wall until the day he ripped it down, shattered the glass that covered it, and splintered the wood frame rather than look at his missing daughter’s face any longer. Faye wished for a single glance at that original photograph, cursing the enthusiastic journalist who had cropped and enlarged the photo until Abby’s face filled nearly the entire rectangle.
She understood his motives—
make the face prominent and find the girl while she’s still wearing that untouched young smile
—but the search for the missing girl had been a failure. No one ever saw Abby again, not until Faye had dug her up. Even now, she couldn’t be sure. The overzealous photographer had trimmed away the girl’s earlobes.
The missing person’s report stated that Abby was believed to be wearing her customary jewelry, pearl earrings and a silver necklace, but it gave no further description. Where was the silver necklace? She figured it was wherever the other earring was. And a simple mention of pearl earrings wasn’t enough proof for Faye’s tough brand of logic. Every girl of means had owned a pair of simple pearl earrings in those days. The jewel she had found was much more than that.
She kept feeding microfiche into the rheumatic printer, hoping that she’d missed something, that one of the articles she took home would mention the platinum and diamond settings from which Abby’s pearls had dropped.
Right on time for her appointment, Faye wove through a warren of legislative offices. She brushed elbows with crowds of intense folks in expensive suits (lobbyists), busy folks who clearly had neither the money nor the time to dress that well (legislators’ staff), and the jovial few who missed no opportunity to bellow “Hey! How you doin’?” to total strangers who might be voters (the legislators themselves). She stopped at an office marked by a sign proclaiming that its occupant’s district was the zucchini capital of the world and asked for Cyril Kirby.
A big-haired blonde secretary pointed. “He’s right next door, honey.”
Entering Cyril’s suite was like being transported seven hundred miles north into the very shadow of the Washington monument. The atmosphere was quiet, cool, and not particularly welcoming. Behind the receptionist, Faye could see two other women filing and making calls. She had no idea where these women got their clothes, because no store between Atlanta and New Orleans sold anything so chic.
She was ushered into Cyril’s office, but he wasn’t there and she was left to study a very dignified vanity wall. No honorary trade school degrees. No folksy shots with visiting elementary students. Not a single picture of a Floridian, not even the governor, graced these walls. Instead, there was shot after shot of Cyril with congressmen, senators, ambassadors, cabinet secretaries. Every molecule in the room said that this man wanted to go to Washington and that he was likely to get there.
Cyril entered and Faye found that meeting him indoors was a different experience from seeing him on Seagreen Island. Nothing looms large out-of-doors, not compared to the sea and the sky. In Cyril’s office, his physical presence pressed against the walls.
The senator was older than Faye, but he moved like a man who didn’t realize that middle age was draping her cloak around his shoulders. Since he had forgotten his age, most people in his presence forgot it, too. His face was scored with rugged lines that photographed well, but it was equally appealing in the flesh. He was favored with a craggy profile and the real-person smile of a man who grew up before widespread orthodontia, but whose white, mostly straight teeth never needed fixing anyway.
He shook her hand with a knuckle-cracking grip and looked her in the eye. Faye—who trusted more or less nobody, particularly not politicians—heard him say, “What can I do for you?” as he had certainly said so many times to so many voters, yet she believed he wanted to help her.
“Thank you for taking the time to see me,” Faye began. She didn’t want to try his patience and she’d never been one to beat around the bush anyway, so she plunged directly to the point. “I’ve heard what you have to say about stopping the resort on Seagreen Island. I think I can help,” she began. An innate need for accuracy nagged her and she clarified herself. “I think we can help each other.”
“Please, sit down,” he said, and she turned toward the visitor’s chair situated the precisely correct distance from the senator’s desk. “No, no, no,” he said, gesturing toward the leather couch beside the window. “You have the face of someone with a more interesting tale than usual. Take a comfortable seat and take your time.”
The informal gesture was so much more effective in dignified surroundings than it would have been in the folksy office of Senator Zucchini. Faye took a seat and started talking before she lost her nerve.
“Seagreen Island is mine,” she said. “Well, it should be. My great-great-grandfather purchased Last Isle in the 1850s, back when it was all one island. Shortly after he bought it, the great hurricane of 1856 carried away most of the island, along with a few hundred planters and their families and slaves. There was a resort there at the time.”
“I’ve heard the story.”
The adrenaline was getting to Faye. She uncrossed her legs so he wouldn’t see her dangling foot tremble. “Most people haven’t,” she said. “If a bunch of rich Astors and Vanderbilts and Roosevelts had been swept off Cape Cod, it would be in the history books.”
“There was a war coming on in 1856, and the victors do write the history books.” His eyes were hazel and their sharp glance gave Faye the impression that he was cataloging every detail of her face, down to the last pore and final eyelash.
“Yeah, but if somebody had bothered to write about what happened on Last Isle,” she rattled on, “my great-grandmother might never have lost her land.”
“So tell me what happened on Last Isle.”
He was interested in her story. A second adrenaline rush threatened to give her the/shakes.
“My great-great-grandfather owned Last Isle and he was an investor in the Turkey Foot Hotel—”
“Quaint name,” Cyril interrupted. “I never knew the name of the hotel itself. I’ve always heard it referred to as the ‘Last Isle Disaster.’”
