Artifacts (15 page)

“Sometime, we should revert to childhood and come back here to wade up the creek, just to see whether all those springs are still there,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “But first, let’s do something more grown-up. Let me take you to dinner at The Pirate’s Lair. How about Thursday?”

“I’ll meet you there at eight o’clock,” Faye said with a smile she didn’t have to force. She could just hear her mama saying, “You’re so pretty, Faye, when you remember to smile.”

He rose and helped her to her feet. Older men had their good points. They remembered little courtesies that were unnecessary but pleasant. As if reading her mind, he opened her car door for her and extended a hand to help her in.

Faye used her car as a home away from home when she was ashore, and she was embarrassed for him to see its accumulation of junk. Predictably, the stack of photocopies she’d just made at the library reached its limit of stability as Cyril walked away, and the whole pile slumped over onto the passenger-side floorboard, leaving a single sheet on the seat.

Abby’s face, looking coyly over one shoulder for all eternity, stared up at Faye as if to remind her that everyone turned to dust sooner or later. She might as well gather some good times, some friends, a lover, a family, something worthwhile to occupy her mind until the dust called her home.

Cyril shouldn’t have been surprised to find Alice sitting at his breakfast table in his kitchen. The woman knew no boundaries, and he supposed that was a good thing in a campaign manager. She was a superlative predictor of human behavior and that was a campaign manager’s single most important quality. She could predict how any given event would sway the voting populace and, apparently, she could also predict that, after two hours outdoors in August and an hour in the car driving back to Tallahassee, he would go home for a shower before putting in a late night at the office. The key question was how she knew that he’d been sitting outside sweating, when he’d been doing it in a miniscule town’s deserted park, many miles away.

On cue, Alice said, “There are a negligible number of voters in the big city of Panacea, and they’re all very, very loyal to you. Why waste your time there?”

Good old, single-minded Alice. No thought, no action, no breath was to be taken without considering its effect on the next campaign. And this time she was looking toward the United States House of Representatives. If Alice lacked a sense of humor before, she was positively funereal now.

“I felt like taking a drive. I think better behind the wheel.”

“Do you think better in the company of a woman who could, with a single inopportune photograph, ruin everything? Being seen with Faye Longchamp could sink your campaign.”

“Do you ferret out the names of all my dates?”

Alice gave him her patented you-idiot look. “Of course. And their addresses and phone numbers. But Faye doesn’t seem to have those things. My investigator—”

“The one you hired to tail me, so you can make sure I date ‘appropriate’ women? Alice, that’s sick.”

Alice, who knew no shame, kept talking. “My investigator tried to follow her home, but it didn’t occur to him that he might need a boat, so he had to watch her ride off into the Gulf without him.”

Cyril opened his refrigerator and pulled out a beer. He didn’t offer one to Alice. His rude gesture would have carried more weight, but for the fact that Alice didn’t drink. “So she outmaneuvered your private eye. Big deal. You hire cheap help,” he said, swigging a tremendous gulp of brew. Maybe if he made this bottle of hop juice look as completely satisfying as the beer commercials did, Alice would learn to drink and lighten up a little. “Why don’t you go ahead and say it out loud? Why don’t you want me to date Faye?”

“Come on, Cyril. It’s hasn’t been forty years since the Civil Rights Act passed. The bad old days aren’t that long gone. Those people are not all dead yet. They’re still out there and they still vote. You cannot date a woman of color and be elected. Not in Florida and not in most states in the union.”

He had known from the outset that Faye was the kind of woman who would cause Alice to blanch. Actually, Alice herself would object to neither Faye’s character nor her skin color, but she wouldn’t hesitate to point out that he had constituents who would. Well, bullshit. A lot of his constituents
were
black, thanks to Douglass Everett’s efforts. And another large fraction of his voters wouldn’t bat an eye when their Congressman was sworn in with a woman of color on his arm.

“You love it when I’m seen with Douglass Everett. How is Faye different?”

“A black friend makes you look worldly and broadminded. A black girlfriend—” Alice responded to his impatient gesture, saying, “All right, a biracial girlfriend, then. It’s immaterial. An inappropriate girlfriend—whether she be the wrong color or too young or married or an ex-convict—makes you look like a man who thinks with his penis.”

Cyril didn’t call her a racist, because he didn’t think she was one. Alice judged people by only one criterion: whether they were useful or detrimental to the campaign she was currently masterminding. And she was probably right. Faye would not be an asset in an election. A relationship with her would cost him votes but, in his judgment, not enough votes to lose. And, if that relationship should evolve into something more, Faye had the beauty, the brains and, yes, the cunning, to be the toast of Washington.

Alice could natter on about this issue until the cows came home, and she was working on it, but Cyril wasn’t listening. He knew she was too cheap to have him tailed indefinitely. Even if she did, he’d dodged her private eyes before. He refused to give up his dreams of electoral glory and he refused to give up a chance with the first woman he’d ever met who didn’t make him impatient merely by the way she shifted her hips in her chair. When the voters of Florida saw Faye in a sweeping ballgown at the next presidential inauguration, they would be glad they sent Cyril and his inappropriate woman to Congress.

Faye’s mind was chasing its tail as she sat down to supper with Joe. She’d had a day that left her with plenty to think about. Liz and Wally had been deliberately vague about Joe’s trouble with the Fish and Game agent that morning. Joe himself wouldn’t talk to her about it at all. And her library trip confirmed that she had indeed found Abby Williford’s remains, but the question of who killed her was still wide open.

Her lunch with Cyril would also require some thought. Dating anyone seriously would, sooner or later, mean divulging the secret of where she lived, and she balked at going down that road. But the alternative was to spend her life alone. Was that what she wanted?

To clear her thoughts of that knotty question, she had spent the rest of the afternoon in her map room, a converted butler’s pantry in Joyeuse’s aboveground basement. It was one of her favorite spots. The thick tabby walls held out the heat and the casement windows funneled every breeze inside. Its walls were covered with built-in cabinets, drawers, and countertops designed as a staging area for serving tremendous numbers of partygoers in the ballroom overhead.

In this creaky old cabinetry, Faye stored maps of the area surrounding Joyeuse and the Last Isles. She had aerial photographs and topographic maps dating back to the 1940s. She even had copies of hand-drawn sketches from the latter half of the 19th century, but she had nothing that showed how Last Isle had looked before the 1856 hurricane blew it apart and washed away the Turkey Foot Hotel.

Faye adored poring over the raggedy old documents. They always gave her fresh ideas of where to go pothunting, but they never unveiled their big secret. Where did her great-great-grandfather build his hotel? If she knew that, maybe she could get his land back. Faye played with her maps until the scent of fish frying atop Joe’s camp stove called her to supper.

Joe’s plate was resting untouched in his lap. It was heaped with a working man’s portion of food but, being well brought up, he was waiting for her to sit down before he lifted his fork. Sitting on a stump while he waited, he studied Joyeuse’s back façade. She stood beside him for a minute, enjoying the sight of it. The house was impressive from any angle but the rear view, shaded by trees and protected by porches on two stories, had a homey feel. The dozens of wooden jalousies sheltering those porches added an air of privacy, even secrecy.

“How’d you come to own Joyeuse?” Joe asked, digging into his butterbeans as soon as her behind hit the porch step.

It was a reasonable question. She was surprised Joe hadn’t asked it before. “My grandmother said that her grandmother was a quadroon slave girl named Cally and that Cally was the master’s common-law wife. Remember, this is just family talk. I can’t prove much of anything that happened in the 1800s. The master died young and, after the war, Cally raised their daughter and managed Joyeuse all by herself. Grandma said that Cally’s daughter, Miss Courtney Stanton, was a great beauty with dark hair and blue eyes and dead-white skin, and that Cally sent her off to pass for white at a finishing school up north.”

Joe chewed for a while, then said, “Did the master have any other kids?”

“Just Courtney.”

“So if she went up north to live with white people, then how’d Joyeuse pass from Cally all the way down to you?”

Faye reminded herself never to underestimate Joe’s deductive powers. Fishers and hunters aren’t verbose people, but every day they outwit wild animals with millions of years of evolution on their side. “Courtney came home, duly educated, but adamant that she’d rather be who she was than sip tea with a bunch of vain, useless women. She married a field hand and they ran Joyeuse together until he died in the 1918 flu epidemic. With my grandmother’s help, she carried on without him another thirty years, but they say she really died that day in 1934 when the judge took the Last Isles away from her.”

“Judging from the size of those trees out back, this land ain’t been farmed since then.”

“My grandmother said the land was just worn out. When her mother died, she and Mama moved to Tallahassee and, being Cally’s and Courtney’s blood, they did just fine. Grandma was a secretary and Mama was a nurse, and we never had any extra money, but we never did without.”

“Your father and grandfather—”

Faye smiled down at her plate and chewed a minute. Once Joe started asking questions, he didn’t stop.

“Daddy died in Vietnam. My grandfather just left.”

Faye picked at her food silently and Joe stopped asking questions. Whether through death or abandonment, the men in her family had only stayed long enough to give their women a single child, then they left. Her mother had never hidden her craving for more children. Faye tried to imagine living as a family with a man who didn’t leave. How would she know when to stop having children? Sometimes her own baby-hunger was so bad she thought only menopause would end it.

“You come from a long line of strong lonely women, Faye. No wonder you…”

“No wonder, what?”

“Nothing. Just nothing.”

Joe stared at the old house, though there was hardly enough light to see it. His eyes narrowed and his lips moved for quite a while. Finally, though Faye was still mad at him for his “strong, lonely women” comment, she couldn’t stand it any longer.

“What on earth are you doing?” she snapped.

“I’m not good at arithmetic. I’m trying to figure out how much of your blood is white and how much is black.”

“Cally’s mother was mulatto. Her father was white and so was her so-called husband. That makes Great-grandmother Courtney almost all white. All my other great-grandparents were black, as far as I know. That makes me about one-eighth Caucasian.”

“You look whiter than that, Faye.”

“Probably my father had some mixed ancestry, too. And my grandfather. Who knows? And who cares? I can’t reliably trace my ancestry back four measly generations and I’m an archaeologist. I live off the past. I have to think that it doesn’t really matter.”

Joe leaned toward her with a conspiratorial look. “Faye. I’m not a hundred percent Creek.”

Touched by Joe’s confidence, she stifled her amusement at his heart-baring revelation. Joe Wolf Mantooth’s eyes were as green as the clear Gulf waters lapping at the shores of what remained of Last Isle.