Findings (17 page)
Faye was intensely proud of reclaiming that land. When the most recent hurricane washed away the sand covering the ruined foundations of the Turkey Foot Hotel, she had been able to produce a document showing that her family had owned it. Those ruins had given her physical proof that she was the heir to what was left of the hotel…and thus the island—now islands—that it had stood on. Procuring funding for excavating those foundations was a particularly sweet victory, since she would have done the work, regardless.
There wasn’t much left of the old hotel but, from a witness’ description of its layout, she thought she’d located the kitchen. Thinking like a busy cook who needed to dump her trash quickly and get back to work, she’d used that information to intuit the location of a garbage pit.
A garbage pit. A hole full of hundred-and-fifty-year-old kitchen refuse…Faye might as well have been in heaven. The only thing better than a garbage pit would have been an outhouse. Overdressed Victorians had dropped the most interesting things into latrines back when getting dressed had meant fastening a plethora of buttons and pins. She hadn’t had time to completely plumb the depths of the garbage pit, and the time she’d spent on Bachelder’s history was time she could have spent shoveling old trash. The pit was calling her. She prayed Nita and Wayland hadn’t ruined it.
Faye’s skiff had eaten up the short distance between Joyeuse Island and the piece of Last Island where the hotel had stood. Joe was in his john boat, not because they had packed so heavily that it took two boats to carry their stuff, but because they might be ashore for quite a while, and they might both need water transportation while they were staying with Emma. Faye’s skiff was fast, but Joe’s john boat had kept pace with her. They’d no sooner dragged their boats up on the beach, than Faye felt a sick feeling wash over her. Drag marks on the sand told her that someone else had beached a boat lately, probably since the last high tide. Footprints pointing in the direction of her excavation told an even worse story.
Self-preservation reminded her that there could still be bad guys around. A bruised abdomen and a throbbing butt cheek reminded her of the damage those bad guys could do. A glance up and down the shoreline told her that no criminals were lurking on this side of the tiny fragment of an island. No one with a gram of sense would try to land a boat on the other side of this island, where mosquito-infested swamps predominated, so if anyone nasty was here, then they were very good swimmers. She judged that it was safe to proceed, and Joe must have agreed, because he didn’t try to stop her.
Bad news greeted them at the hotel site. Randomly placed piles of earth and a few shattered sherds of white-glazed pottery gave evidence that somebody—probably Nita and Wayland—had been treasure-hunting smack in the middle of her neat and scientifically designed project.
Joe held out a hand, as if to quiet her inevitable outburst. “Don’t fly off the handle. Let’s just see what they did.”
She found three or four pits randomly placed alongside the more well-preserved stretches of the hotel’s foundations. Rectangular depressions in those areas showed that the pothunters had pried up some of the bricks and hauled them away. She didn’t imagine they’d found much else besides bricks in that area. She didn’t even want to think about the other parts of the site they could have messed up
Joe’s voice, which said only, “Faye,” came from the direction of the old garbage pit. She hurried over.
When she’d last been on this island, she had left a neat rectangular excavation with straight, sharp, vertical sides. There was nothing left now but a formless pit, surrounded by soil that looked like it had been plowed. Badly plowed. She’d had trouble with pothunters out here a time or two before, but it had never been anything like this.
The sheriff might have recovered the artifacts scavenged from this place. But how much information had been destroyed? Could she still sift through this churned-up soil and uncover the things she’d hoped to learn about the diet of the hotel’s guests and employees? Or the kitchen help’s cooking techniques? Maybe. Maybe not.
“Shit.”
“I’ll call the sheriff.” Joe whipped out his cell phone and started punching buttons.
Faye couldn’t think of any way to express her anger that wouldn’t hurt more than it helped. She couldn’t pick up a brick and hurl it at a tree. The handmade bricks, molded and burnt on-site, were artifacts in their own right. There wasn’t a rock in sight, so she couldn’t even chunk a rock at a tree. Besides, the trees never did anything to her, so there was no point in hurting them. She certainly couldn’t yell at Joe, who never did anything to her, either, so she just stomped across the dunes and climbed in the skiff.
Soon enough, Joe appeared, folding his cell phone shut. They cranked their boats and pointed them toward shore, where the stuff Nita and Wayland had stolen from this site—from her, personally—was waiting for her to inspect it. She and Joe didn’t talk, because there was nothing to say.
***
“I don’t get it,” Faye said, sorting through the pile of dirty junk.
Besides the broken plate the sheriff had mentioned, there wasn’t much to see. A piece of a bottle that had probably held vinegar. A plain metal button. The corroded blade of a butcher knife. The green neck of a wine bottle. She balanced the green chunk of glass on her palm, holding it up to the light. Nothing could have been less like the enigmatic emerald. The only things the two things had in common were that they were clear, smooth, cool to the touch, and green.
“Nobody’s going to buy this stuff,” she said to the sheriff and his friend, the man who was paying her a considerable consulting fee. The contract, hastily drawn up, rested comfortably in her purse. Given the chance, she could really get into this consultant gig.
She sighed. “I could’ve done something academic with all this trash. Maybe. I could’ve researched the wine to determine the country of origin and learn something about import patterns of the day. It makes sense that a large kitchen would have bought vinegar, even though housewives at that time generally made their own, so that broken bottle is mildly interesting. The button and the knife…I can’t think of anything exciting to learn from them, but I might eventually come up with something. But collectors? They wouldn’t give this junk a second look, much less pay good money for it.”
“That begs the question of why Nita and Wayland are doing this.” The sheriff held the knife blade, gently fingering its corroded cutting edge. “They could make more money per hour doing just about anything else.”
Faye turned the broken plate over in her hands. The Turkey Foot Hotel’s crest left no doubt that it had once graced a table at her ancestors’ hotel, many years before. She studied the restrained but beautiful pattern of leaves that ran around its rim. “Maybe they’ve found better stuff in the past. Do you have a computer handy?”
She brought up the EBay home page. Just for laughs, she typed in “Turkey Foot Hotel” in the search box. She got no hits, but she hadn’t expected to. Next, she pulled down the Categories menu and read over it for a while. After a thoughtful moment, she dropped down the “Antiques” menu and selected “Antiquities,” then “The Americas.”
An eyebrow-raising assortment of precolumbian artifacts filled the screen. Faye wondered how many of them were real, and whether any of those had been obtained legally or ethically. That question, however, was not pertinent to the problem at hand. She was looking for artifacts dating to the Civil War era and found in Florida.
She went back to the “Antiquities” menu and typed in “Civil War” and “Florida.” No useful results appeared.
As a shot in the dark, she went all the way back to the home page and reset the search categories to search the whole site. She typed in the same search terms then hit “return”…and she also hit paydirt.
Buried within two pages offering fake Civil War uniforms and authentic Civil War musket balls and books on all kinds of Civil War artifacts, she saw a battered rifle being sold “as is.” The description read:
GENUINE AUTHENTIC ANTIQUE RIFLE FROM THE CIVIL WAR ERA, DUG UP ON AN ACTUAL CIVIL WAR BATTLEFIELD. ALL ORIGINAL. NEVER RESTORED. STOCK LOOKS TO BE MAHOGANY OR RED MAPLE.
Faye wasted a moment pondering the notion of a “genuine authentic antique.” Was it possible for an antique to be genuine but not authentic? Or vice versa?
Then she saw the name of the store offering this rifle, and she actually squealed. “Herb’s Place! The outfit selling this rifle calls itself ‘Herb’s Place!’ This just has to be the rifle we saw Chip dig up, and now Herbie’s selling it online.”
Joe leaned over her shoulder, so he could see the screen better. “Didn’t he say he knew rich people and could be a broker for his customers?”
“Yeah. For a twenty-five percent cut.”
“Is ‘brokering a deal’ the same thing as listing something on EBay?”
“Technically, I guess you could say that. But any of those people could sell their finds online without giving Herbie a quarter of the sale price.”
She clicked on the “Meet the Seller” link, saying, “Let’s see what else Herbie has in stock.”
Herbie’s virtual store listed belt buckles from the uniforms of both armies, as well as an assortment of buttons and military insignia. He had a couple of bayonets, in various states of preservation, and piles of rifle bullets. More interesting to Faye was a bullet mold that actually looked pretty good in the photo, despite long years in the ground and a hasty excavation by amateurs. She’d like to get a look at that.
She had sorted Herbie’s store by price, from highest to lowest, so she’d scrolled through several pages before she saw the teacup. It was only slightly chipped, though its white glaze had been dulled by years buried in sand. There was no crest to label it conclusively, but the restrained and elegant garland of leaves around the rim was too familiar for coincidence.
Faye ran a finger along the leaves that rimmed the broken plate from the Turkey Foot Hotel. “Sheriff Mike?”
The sheriff closed the file drawer he was pawing through. “Found something?”
“I believe I have. Ask Nita and Wayland, one more time, who’s buying their stuff. And get Herbie Canton in here. It’s very possible that he’s using his online store to sell things that belong to me.”
Being forced to live with Emma Everett wasn’t all bad. Faye coveted the long, lightly populated beach that curved in both directions from Emma’s dock. Her own beach was private and lovely, but very small. It wasn’t made for leisurely sunset strolls. This one was.
Ross strolled beside her, looking significantly less like a city boy than he had when he arrived. He’d acquired some canvas shorts that were new but rumpled. His deck shoes no longer looked like he’d just pulled them from the shoebox. He looked so much more like an island man and so little like his usual persona that she half-expected him to start singing Jimmy Buffett tunes.
At first, she’d had no idea where he’d gotten the stained and goofy-looking hat shielding his face from the last of the sun’s rays. When she realized that it had probably belonged to Douglass, her heart contracted with the pain of it. She took Ross by the hand, and the feel of his warm flesh helped some.
“We could come here on weekends,” he said. “If you decided to move to Atlanta, I mean.”
She didn’t know what to say, so she just kept walking, looking at her feet and appreciating the way the sugar-white sand stuck to her dark feet.
Ross was a smart man. He shouldn’t have pressed his luck. But love tends to make people behave as if they’re brainless. He kept talking.
“I’ve looked into graduate programs for you in Atlanta. Emory has a top-notch anthropology department with an interdisciplinary approach—”
“I’m pretty sure they don’t do field archaeology, and I—”
“But it’s interdisciplinary, Faye. You can draw from the field work you’ve already done, and branch out into some fascinating topics. They even have an emphasis in race and racism. Think what you could do with the work you’ve already done, excavating the slave cabins behind Joyeuse.”
“My work is here.” She let go of his hand. For some reason, she felt like she needed both her hands to think clearly. She didn’t know why she felt that way, but she did. “My home is here.”
“But it’s too dangerous. Think, Faye. Douglass is dead. Wally is dead. You’ve been attacked with a shovel and rifle—”
“Joe took those bad guys out with some string and a few rocks. I’m safe enough.”
“The next bad guy cut your brake lines, and Joe didn’t even see him coming. You need to be with me, where you’ll be safe. I love you, Faye.”
She couldn’t speak. She couldn’t say she loved him. And she couldn’t say she didn’t.
“Joe’s a nice guy, but you need somebody to remind you that you’re not invincible. You’re huge on the inside, Faye, but on the outside, you’re a dainty thing. Fragile, even. Joe can’t protect you here, and he can’t take you any place safe. I can. We’d have a good life in Atlanta.”
She knew he was right. Life with Ross would be good indeed. She would be comfortable every minute of the day. Emory was a fine school, and she could study everything that suited her fancy. She’d never have to stop learning, because Ross wouldn’t care whether she ever graduated and did anything useful. He wasn’t asking her to be useful. He just wanted her with him.
“You love me. I know you do. When you’re with me, Faye, I feel…complete.”
Again, she couldn’t answer him, because she felt complete already. She’d never thought about it before, but now Faye realized that she’d never felt anything but complete—not even when her house was in ruins and she didn’t have two pennies to rub together.
“What will Joe do if I go?”
It was the wrong thing to say. As soon as the words floated out of her mouth and into the air, it was clear to her that those were not the words she should have been using. She didn’t know why she said such a thing, but Ross had the good grace not to be angry. He said, gently, “You’ll need somebody to look after the place. And we’ll see him when we come to stay at Joyeuse on weekends. I like Joe. He’s growing on me.”
She looked out across the water, but she couldn’t see Joyeuse Island from where they were standing. Again, she couldn’t speak.
“You know you have to do this. Joyeuse is beautiful. It’s perfect. But you can’t live out your life there. You need someone to love, someone like me. You need to live in the real world. You need people around you.”
Why was he saying this? Was her home not real? Weren’t Emma and Magda and the sheriff and Liz and Joe people? Did she really have to leave them?
“You’ve got to do this, Faye, for your own happiness.”
But she was already happy. His words,
You’ve got to do this
, echoed in her head, and finally she knew what she needed to say.
“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, but I can’t let you tell me what to do.”
When he was gone and her head cleared, she was able to finish her thought.
I can’t let you tell me what to do.
Joe would never tell me what to do.
***
There would be no sleep tonight. She’d hurt Ross, and she’d hurt herself in the process. Why couldn’t she just go to Atlanta and let herself be happy about it?
If she was going to lie awake in Emma’s luxurious guest room, then she was going to need something to read. She’d chosen Cally’s reminiscences to get her through this long night, because her guts told her that there was concrete information—information she could use—buried in the old woman’s meandering stories. She knew Cally had met Jedediah Bachelder, probably more than once. Had she remembered him well enough to mention him when the government people came to record her oral history?
When she finally found that Cally
had
remembered Faye’s new friend, Jedediah Bachelder, she learned that Cally had met him more than once, more than twice, in a day and age when visits spanned weeks, not hours. Cally appeared to have known Bachelder well, and she spoke of him with affection.
Faye was struck by the reason she’d overlooked Cally’s reference to Bachelder during her first quick pass through the oral history. When he had visited Joyeuse Island the second time to ask permission to bury his treasure, Cally was no slave nor even a meek, submissive free person of color. She’d been in charge of the whole plantation ever since her common-law husband, Courtney Stanton, had died. Even before that, she’d been in charge of a large household.
It went without saying that a woman of Cally’s dignity would never refer to the man she’d known for years as “Master Bachelder” or even “Mister Jedediah.” As it turned out, she didn’t even call him “Jedediah.” Her references to Bachelder had been so familiar that they’d slipped right past Faye’s sharp eyes.
***
Excerpt from the oral history of former slave Cally Stanton, recorded 1935
The war years passed us by here at Joyeuse, mostly. Not that keeping everybody fed was easy when we couldn’t count on buying much of nothing, but the fields made us enough food to get by, as long as I kept a sharp eye on how my money was being spent and kept a tight hand on my purse. So the war years went by quiet. We never had any armies trailing through the place, tearing things up and taking all our food, and we certainly never saw nor heard any shooting. Out here on the island, we didn’t see much of anybody at all. Every time I thought I might be lonely, I recollected what things must be like on the mainland. That made quiet times on Joyeuse Island look pretty fine.
The Yankees did come, right before the war got over, but I talked them into leaving us be. I spoke good sense to them, and I did it politely, but the herd of strong, well-fed, well-armed field hands standing behind me didn’t hurt our cause any, either. The Yankees paid their respects, we gave them a little food, then they went away.
The only visitor I recollect in all those years, other than the Yankee army, was my Courtney’s dear friend Jed. I’d met him once before, when he brought his wife for a long visit, right before the war. By that time, I was a free woman, and I ate my meals a-sitting at the dinner table across from Courtney, like the lady of the house. I guess I was the lady of the house, considering that I ran everything but the farm, and I did my share of sticking my nose into Courtney’s farm business, too.
He introduced me to Jed and Vee like he always did when we met people who might wonder why Courtney was living with a young lady who wasn’t his wife. He told ’em I was “a cousin who came from Georgia to help me maintain my household.” Him and his long blonde curls. We looked no more alike than a dog and an alligator, but I looked white—you can see I still do—so people swallowed whatever he told them. It didn’t hurt any that my Courtney was known far and wide as an honest man. When you only tell one lie in your whole life, it’s not terrible hard to make it stick.
Now, Vee was the kind of lady who saw things like they really were, and she usually said so. She was like me in that way. I always had a suspicion that Vee knew things weren’t quite the way Courtney said, but she never opened her mouth. And she was my friend. I loved her for that.
As for Jed…I loved him, too, for being happy and jolly and kind and a loyal friend to Courtney, but he wasn’t all that deep. He pretty much believed everything he was told. Courtney told him I was his spinster cousin, so he figured it must be true.
Jed came back one time during the war, without Vee. I was so glad to see him. I can’t tell you how glad.
I had lost my Courtney by that time, and I was so lonely for someone who remembered him, someone who’d loved him, too. If I’d been a great lady, I would’ve sent a houseboy out to the dock to meet his boat while I waited inside for him, but I’m just me. I was there when the steamboat captain unloaded Jed and all his trunks, and I greeted him with more of what the great ladies of the day called “fervor” than I probably should’ve. It was sisterly fervor, but it was real, because I was feeling awful shut off from the world by that time.
I made sure his room was fitted out with comfortable, fresh linens, ‘cause I could tell by the state of his shirt collar that he hadn’t had anybody to wash his clothes for a good long time. And no other help, neither. His secretary, Daniel, had left him a while before that, and he just laughed when I asked him where his valet Philip was.
He said, “I can’t let anybody know where I am these days, not even Daniel or Philip. But I warrant that there are people who are damn anxious to find me.”
I remembered him saying that, after all these years, because Jed was not a man who cursed, at least not in front of ladies. And Jed always treated me like a lady. I told him to stay as long as he liked at Joyeuse. I said he could stay, if he wanted to, till the war got over and he could go home to Vee. I didn’t like to think of people chasing him across the countryside, but I reckon that’s what happens when you’re in a war and your side’s losing.
I’d brought some field hands to the dock to help him get his bags to the house and I had to send for more. I told Jed he traveled powerful heavy for a man who had people chasing after him, but he just laughed. That was the only time I ever saw him laugh when Vee wasn’t in the room. Lord, even now I remember how the field hands groused. They swore they never saw a woman travel with so many trunks, and all of them heavy.
I had a word with Jed after that. A man that’s always had somebody to wait on him doesn’t exactly live in the real, actual world, but I do. Always have. I told him that he’d do well to lighten his load, since it would probably be a good long time before he had enough cash laying around to pay a valet.
He said, “The war can’t go on forever.”
I said, “Just because the war gets over, it doesn’t mean you’ll live like you used to. Not at first. And maybe never.”
Then, he said, “Cally, I plan to land on my feet. My wife deserves a life as gracious as she is.”
I allowed as how that was true, then I said, “Still. Until that time, I’d lighten my load.”
So he did. He left here with just one trunk that he could carry all by himself.
I only saw Jed one more time, after the war was over. After he lost Vee. He didn’t smile much, and he didn’t laugh at all. He talked about her pretty much the whole time he was here. But as the days passed, I saw him stand up straighter. He’d stand on the beach and look out over the water, like a man plotting a course to…somewhere.
I don’t often go out to the beach without thinking of my friend Jed, and he’s been dead these thirty years.
***
Faye laid a writing pad in her lap and tried to summarize what she’d learned from Cally’s story. The most important information was the record of Jedediah Bachelder’s trips to Joyeuse Island.
First, he’d visited before the Civil War with his wife. One of his letters provided independent confirmation of that trip, which was a nice bonus.
Second, he’d visited during the war, alone. This must have been when he buried the necklace. If so, this visit, too, tracked with a story told in Bachelder’s letters. As an added touch, Cally’s narrative provided Faye with independent confirmation of Captain Eubank’s assertion that Bachelder’s secretary left him before the war ended. The captain would be tickled to hear that.
And third, Bachelder had visited one more time, after the war and after Viola’s death. She knew he’d always planned to come back to retrieve the necklace, so this last visit added one more bit of evidence supporting her theory of the emerald’s history.
Cally’s retelling of her conversation with a man who was confident of “landing on his feet” in the wake of the total destruction of his civilization rang true. Jedediah Bachelder had left his future on Joyeuse Island. After the war, he came back to reclaim it, as he had always planned to do. Was he successful?
Faye knew that he’d spent the rest of his life building hospitals and giving money to widows and children. That sounded like a man who did indeed land on his feet. In the absence of more evidence, she’d have to say that Jedediah Bachelder had successfully retrieved the emerald necklace and used it as the basis for his post-war fortunes.
He would surely have buried the necklace in a sturdy box. It would have been made of wood or metal in those pre-plastic days, but perhaps it had rotted or corroded by the time he returned. Maybe a stray shovel blade had destroyed the box and broken the necklace, so that Bachelder lost track of one emerald and a stray gold finding.
