Artifacts (13 page)
When he arrived, the man was gone.
An anomalous low-pressure system hovered off the coast of Central America. It had dumped enough rain on Honduras and Nicaragua to generate localized mudslides but, because there was no loss of life, Americans had paid scarcely any attention.
When, at long last, the storm steeled itself for a move into the open waters, it was finally rewarded with an upgrade to tropical storm. Powerful things gestate slowly.
Faye had spent the last ten minutes perusing Wally’s candy aisle, far more time than she usually spent in the presence of forty million calories. It wasn’t that she never indulged in a little cocoa comfort; she just usually skated down the candy aisle and grabbed a Hershey bar as she passed. Anything more elaborate than a plain slab of milk chocolate was gilding the lily, as far as Faye was concerned.
But not today. Today, she needed to hide her face while Wally lied to the guy from the Park Service about the whereabouts of her friend Joe. So she listened to Wally swear he’d never seen a tall, dark man wearing traditional Indian clothing. Perhaps he wasn’t lying; she didn’t think Wally ever
had
met Joe.
The agent’s sources had told him that significant artifacts, possibly excavated in this area, had shown up on the black market. The Park Service wanted to question any suspicious characters they could find, and the sheriff had told him that this new guy Joe looked plenty suspicious. And he’d been seen piloting a johnboat around the Last Isles.
Wally played dumb, making the man explain— at least three times—what a pothunter was, even though he knew exactly how Faye spent her spare time. Wally then denied (again) that he’d ever seen the man in question, proclaiming that he was absolutely shocked that anyone would do such a craven thing. In this case, he was surely lying. Wally was impossible to shock. Besides, pothunting was the kind of victimless crime that Wally could really get behind.
It took Wally a long time to convince the man that he was honest—no surprise—and that he’d never seen anybody who resembled Joe in the least, so Faye had plenty of time to study the nutrition label on each brand of empty calories. She learned a lot: for instance, twelve bars of milk chocolate provide a full day’s quota of calcium.
Finally, the agent quit harassing Wally and left. Wally was in Faye’s face before she emerged from Hershey heaven.
“You’ve got to send that Indian guy on his way. Now the government’s looking for him. If they keep sniffing around, they’re gonna find
you
.”
So he
had
met Joe. Well, every once in a while, even nature boys like Joe got a hankering for junk food, and Wally’s was the closest candy and chips dealer to Joyeuse, by far.
Liz’s disembodied voice wafted out of the kitchen. “Hang the government. Goddamn taxes.”
“Listen to the cook in shining armor,” Wally said. “Did you know she saved your friend’s ass this morning?”
No, nobody had told her a thing. Faye wondered why that surprised her. “Joe can usually take care of himself.”
“Yeah, but he’s gullible. He believed some thug who claimed to be a Fish and Wildlife agent and nearly hopped in the man’s boat.”
“What could Joe have done to cross somebody like that?” Faye asked. “He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
Wally thrust himself back into the conversation. “Who knows what kind of trouble he was in before he ever showed up here? Women are stupid. You trust that man because he looks like a stud. He’s nothing more than a vagrant, Faye. If he’d showed up at Joyeuse missing half his teeth and all his hair, you wouldn’t have given him the time of day.”
Wally had a point, but she didn’t want to admit it, so she didn’t answer. She just glared at him.
“You’ve got to send him on his way, Faye. He’s not smart enough to keep your secrets. You’ve got a lot of them, you know.”
Liz wiped down the bar while she watched Faye walk out. She knew Faye, because Faye spent more time hanging around the marina and jawing with Wally than most women who had good sense. And now Liz had met Joe, the studly innocent who’d just escaped disaster, thanks to her. It seemed that Faye and Joe lived together and that Wally knew it.
Liz studied Faye’s back. She saw a slim body clad in a work shirt and khakis, topped with a head covered in short dark hair, and she remembered what she knew about the crook she had just scorched. He wasn’t just looking for Joe, he was looking for his friend, a small dark adolescent boy.
Liz wondered how long it was going to take Wally to realize that, just a minute ago, he was talking to the missing “boy.” She figured it wasn’t her business to tell him. She wasn’t sure he could be trusted with the information.
Faye’s Bonneville was a slow ride and the short drive to Sopchoppy would take her twenty minutes to accomplish, leaving her time to stew. She even got angry enough to talk to herself.
“A vagrant,” she fumed. “Who does Wally think he is, calling Joe a vagrant? He’s got a lot of nerve, considering that he’s the alcoholic owner of a business that’s going down the tubes. He’d better be nice to me, because someday he may need a place to sleep and I may not be taking any more vagrants at Joyeuse.”
As her car made its asthmatic way down the road, she worked at being objective. Was Joe a killer? No. Was he dangerous? Yes, in a way. Despite his personal loyalty, he was capable of serious lapses in judgment and, as Wally had pointed out, she had a lot of secrets.
Faye decided to deal with any problems Joe presented as they came. She’d sacrificed a lot to keep her home and she was probably going to lose it anyway. She drew the line at sacrificing Joe’s friendship.
She reminded herself that she had a lunch date with a charming and powerful man who, inexplicably, seemed to like her a lot. And he was interested in helping her regain what was rightfully hers.
She pulled into the four-slot parking lot of the Sopchoppy Library. It was housed in a tiny building but it had Internet access, so it wasn’t tiny at all.
Faye was proud her small-town library had Web access, but the Internet had proved to be singularly unhelpful in locating more information on Abby. There was no additional information to be had. The girl had simply vanished.
After a few months, the newspapers had dropped the story. Not a scrap of physical evidence had ever turned up. There had been plenty of news to report while the search was active, but it was all negative. The bloodhounds smelled nothing. The roadblocks uncovered nothing. Her father’s offer of a $20,000 reward for information generated hundreds of crank calls, but little else. Dragging the rivers and creeks, searching the coastal marshes and offshore islands—all yielded no trace of Abby or her clothing or the jewelry she always wore.
And there was nothing else to look for. Her beach house showed no signs of robbery or forced entry. Her brand-new convertible still sat where she parked it. The rest of her jewelry still lay in her childish jewelry box with its dancing ballerina. When, after fruitless months, the search was called off, there was nothing left for the newspapers to write about, so they stopped.
A collection of slender orange and black books caught her eye and she slid one off the shelf. This
was
a small-town library. The librarian allocated five feet of scarce shelf space to back issues of the yearbook for Micco County’s combined elementary and high school.
1964. Faye picked up the volume documenting Abby’s last year and enjoyed its old book smell. Individual pictures of the senior class were prominently displayed, the students’ accomplishments listed below each of their photographs. They were arranged alphabetically, so Abby’s “W” surname would have landed her near the end of the class. For the same reason, Douglass Everett was placed toward the front.
Faye read the list of honors beneath Douglass’ face. They were short but choice: Summa Cum Laude graduate, National Merit Finalist, valedictorian. It seemed strange that titles like “Most Intellectual” and “Most Likely to Succeed” were beneath other faces with far paler credentials until Faye realized that Douglass’ honors were all earned, not elected. His was the only black face on the page and any fool knew that, in that era, he would have won no popularity contests. Nobody could argue with his grades or his SATs, so he was, however grudgingly, allowed those honors.
Faye turned the page and found that Sheriff Mike had been class salutatorian, then turned it again and found that Abby, by contrast, was no scholar. Her achievements peaked when she was elected chaplain of the Future Homemakers of America. Apparently good at winning elections, Abby was also chosen Sweetest and Most Punctual. She peered at the camera over her shoulder in the same eerie senior portrait that Faye had seen on a hundred front pages, but this time it was uncropped. A single earring was visible and thirty-some-odd years in the ground hadn’t dimmed its loveliness. Here was proof that Faye had found the woman who had been the focus of the largest search for a missing person ever seen in western Florida.
She flipped the page back to get another look at Abby’s classmates. One of them, after all, might have murdered her but, to Faye, they all looked like children, not killers.
Then, dead in the center of the page, a face grabbed her attention. It was Cyril. Actually, it wasn’t. Cyril was several years younger than these kids. The face that drew Faye’s eye was Cyril’s older brother, Cedrick. The family resemblance was strong. Even in black-and-white, Faye recognized the thick, fine hair that was light but not blonde, the sharp eyes, the square jaw. Brains also ran in the family, because the yearbook credited Cedrick as a Cum Laude graduate. He had Cyril’s lean athletic masculinity, so she wasn’t surprised to read that he was captain of the baseball, football, and track teams.
She flipped forward in the yearbook and found something that made her smile: a candid shot of the entire senior class clowning around for the camera. Abby, eyes crossed and laughing, was holding two fingers behind Douglass’ dignified head in the age-old symbol for devil horns. Sheriff Mike stood behind a blonde girl who wore a bouffant hairdo and an effervescent smile. Grinning over her shoulder at the camera, he had both arms wrapped around her slender waist. Cedrick’s yo-yo was in orbit around his own head.