Artifacts (16 page)
Faye worked outdoors. She ate outdoors, she showered outdoors, she brushed her teeth outdoors, but she slept indoors. She loved her bedroom. Looking at its walls, festooned with painted wisteria, made her happy and ready for sleep. It was a safe place to commune with a dead woman.
Faye waved a torch in the face of her guilt, driving it back into a corner. Abby was dead, she reminded herself. Abby’s father was dead, and her killer was long gone or reformed, for a forty-year crime wave would have been noticeable in this sleepy part of the world. It would be an injustice for Faye to lose everything tilting at an idealistic windmill. Even if her lance struck the mark, whom would it benefit?
Though she had renewed her resolve to keep secret her discovery of Abby’s body, she still suffered a curious fascination with the girl’s fate. It was likely that clues remained in the grave. She hadn’t found Abby’s silver necklace. She hadn’t even found the other earring. Who knew what else might remain?
Tomorrow, on the off chance a physical clue had survived years and years in the most hostile of environments, she would finish exhuming Abby’s bones. The idea would upset Joe, so she wouldn’t tell him her plans. Once she’d finished the ghoulish task and neatly reburied the corpse, she would confess her deed. Joe would come back with his ceremonial fire and herbs and tobacco, but he would be spared the grisly details of what she had done.
Adrenaline pumping, she was ready to dig right away, but she had to wait for daylight. She dug through her photocopied newspaper articles and yearbook pages instead. They yielded nothing. Where else could she look? She wasn’t a detective, just a black-market archaeologist; she delved into the lives of the long-ago dead and Abby had been gone a mere forty years.
The high-school yearbook gave her a handy list of people who had known Abby at the time of her death. The thought of cold-calling strangers to discuss murder made her introverted soul shiver, but perhaps it wouldn’t be necessary.
Douglass Everett would talk to her about Abby. The nature of their business relationship gave them a camaraderie beyond the ordinary shallow salesperson/client link. Their every transaction breached one law or another, but they took the risk, time and again, out of passion for the artifacts. Shared risk fosters trust. Yes, Douglass would tell her what he knew about Abby.
Having decided to speak with Douglass, she didn’t want to think about Abby any more, and she didn’t want to think about Cyril and, God, she didn’t want to think about money. She crawled into her bed, a simple but exquisitely wrought antique convent piece bought in Saint Augustine by her grandmother when the sisters’ dwindling numbers forced them to divest themselves of excess earthly possessions. God only knew how many of them had died in Faye’s bed. It was a good place to be haunted.
She thought of Sam and Krista. They’d been gone a week. What in the world was she thinking of, sleeping alone in this big empty house when there was a killer on the loose? And was Joe safe from the man who’d tried to lure him away that very morning?
Something, probably a squirrel, scampered over her roof. The house creaked around her, responding to the falling temperature.
Faye couldn’t stand it any more. She gathered the journal, her pillow, her sleeping bag, and the lantern and hurried outside. With the lantern’s help, she found her way down the lightly worn path to Joe’s shelter.
Joe wasn’t asleep. He was sitting on the ground watching the dying embers of his campfire hiss and collapse. He didn’t ask her why she’d come, but fear made her babble.
“I got to thinking about the murders and all, and I got scared. Can I just put my sleeping bag right here on the other side of your fire?”
Joe nodded.
“And look what I brought. I found this old journal hidden in the cupola and the stories are fascinating. Can I read some of them to you?”
Joe smiled and said, “Yeah.”
Faye knew that a killer with a gun could take them both out as easily as he had murdered Sam and Krista. There was no safety in numbers—not really. Still she felt safer here with Joe.
She opened the journal and carefully slid its ribbon bookmark from between the sheets. Turning the page, she was surprised to find that William Whitehall had put the journal aside without finishing his story. Someone else, with finer and more delicate penmanship, was reaching out to her across time.
William Whitehall had been dead more than a century when she began reading his journal. He was still dead, yet the fact that he had no more to say made her want to mourn him. First, though, she would see what his daughter had to say.
Joe watched Faye make herself comfortable. He was happy to watch over her tonight, just as he had every night since her friends had been killed. Tonight, though, she’d be in plain sight and his job would be easier.
***
Excerpt from the journal of Mariah Whitehall Lafourche, 27 April, 1824
I should not have given my son LaFourche’s name and I should not have assumed it myself. I most assuredly should never have created him a noble French father in exile from the post-Revolution Terror. I have made him arrogant.
My deepest regret is a sin of omission. My dear mother died when my son Andrew was but three. Neither I nor my father, also now departed, ever told Andrew of her Creek ancestry. It is incredible to me now, but I was ashamed of my mixed blood just as I was ashamed of Andrew’s bastardy. Now I am too much the coward to remedy my error. I fear nothing so much as losing my son’s love.
My pride has been my undoing, and my son’s. I can accept that. Our lives are our own to ruin. I cannot accept the misery of others.
My son has begun to buy people. People! He bought four families of Africans to help with this year’s planting. With their labor and God’s beneficence in the form of good weather (How can He smile on such sin?), the harvest was bountiful. With the profits, Andrew plans to enslave more souls here on Catspaw Island. I mean, of course, on Joyeuse. Andrew felt the name given the island by the old settlers was coarse, but anything French is most elegant, so he named his plantation and his house—with all the luxurious furbelows he is forcing his people to add to our old dwelling—after joy. Now he has the effrontery to make it a place of misery.
After weeks of argument over this issue, this morning I tried a different tack. I argued business with him. How could slave labor be so much more profitable than that of free workers? Both have the same needs for shelter, food, and clothing. Why not pay the workers to cover their own needs and avoid the cost of caring for them himself, while saving a significant purchase price?
My only child gave me a soulless smile and reminded me that there were profits to be made from increase. “Increase?” I asked in my ignorance. When he explained himself, I knew that I had lost him forever. By increase, he meant the increase in value of his holdings generated by the birth of slave children. He sees no wrong in using human beings as breeding stock.
After this conversation, I retired to my sleeping room and I have not come out since.
Excerpt from the journal of Mariah Whitehall Lafourche, 3 August, 1829
I am comfortably settled in my own home and my son is fit to be tied, but I could live no longer in a house built by prisoners and paid for by the profits earned on their labor. When I told Andrew that I wished to build a small cabin in the woods behind the kitchen, his response was kindly, even condescending. “And how will you do that? There is no one on the island to build it but the slaves. You may as well live in the Big House with me.”
I said I could pay them for their efforts. Andrew’s condescension dissolved into outright mockery. He laughed at me, saying, “You don’t own a thing in this world, Mother.”
The most galling thing is that he is right. The law does not recognize a woman’s right to own property. My father survived his last year by sheer obstinacy, determined to live until Andrew was of legal age. He managed to do so. He died believing that he had passed responsibility for my welfare to the one man he trusted with the job. The island, the crops, God help us, even the slaves, belong to Andrew. I am only his female dependent.
I removed a comb from my hair, and another, and another until my hair fell loose. I cupped my two hands together and held them out to him. The tortoiseshell ornaments glowed golden from inside. “Are these yours? And my jewelry? You can have that, too. Does nothing really belong to me?”
Andrew’s face flushed. “Of course, your personal items are your own. Do what you like with them. Build a house. Build a hotel. I don’t care.”
So I did. I built a house, that is, not a hotel. I paid the workers with my mother’s silver flatware, one fork at a time, until I saw that I had something they needed far more. Since May, I have paid them in learning. On Sundays, I sit on a slave cabin’s porch. Anyone who comes to me can learn their letters. Some are quite bright; I think they will be reading by spring.
I am touched by their gratitude. They bring me gifts that I try not to accept. I emphasize that
I
am paying
them
for their labor, but still they bring me things—fresh corn, hand-whittled figurines, aprons—that cost them time and goods I know they can scarcely spare.
My favorite gift rests on my desk even now, beside my hand as I write. It is a stone spearhead longer than the palm of my hand. I pulled many a warrior’s long-lost weapon from the soil during a childhood spent running wanton through the woods. This is like none I have seen. It is far larger. Its shape is more oval than the familiar three-cornered one and its coloring lacks the typical reddish sheen. My generous friend got it from a slave who found it while fishing on the far end of Last Isle. He says there are many such treasures to be found along the channel that last year’s storm cut through the island. He also described a clearing west of the channel where, after a heavy rain, pottery with curious ornamentation surfaces. The spot can be found by a landmark thirty paces west of the channel, an old cistern cut into the highest ground on the island. The cistern, too, is said to be filled with curiosities. Perhaps I shall go there and see for myself. It has been a long while since I got myself thoroughly covered with mud for no practical purpose.
It was Wednesday morning. Only a little more than half the work week lay ahead, and Kelly Bergdoll was glad.
Kelly had found that answering phone calls from people whose data didn’t say what they wished it said was the hardest part of running the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s forensics lab. Her life had gotten considerably harder when Sheriff Mike McKenzie discovered that she came to work very, very early.
Kelly came to work very, very early so that she could accomplish something before her coworkers came in anxious to share the joke-of-the-day and, certainly, before her clients started bugging her.
Beep
. On schedule. It was Sheriff Mike dialing in to her personal line, and damn the receptionist who let him bully that sensitive information out of her.
“Why is the fingerprint report blank?” he asked in lieu of saying hello.
“Because, Sheriff, no identifiable fingerprints were found, except those discussed in Appendix B.”
“On the whole island?”
Kelly’s voice rose a semi-tone. “The island is the
problem
. It’s a huge murder site, compared to the usual apartment or alleyway. Where were the technicians going to lift the prints? Off the sand?”
“What about the storage shed?”
“The shed is thoroughly discussed in our report. As I said, check Appendix B. There were loads of prints, all of them traceable to the archaeology team, and I understand that none of them are suspects. We think the killer may have helped himself to the rubber gloves stored in the shed. Or maybe he brought his own.” That was Kelly’s personal theory. Criminals, on the whole, tended to be dumb and lazy, but this guy seemed to be plenty smart enough to take the negligible trouble of sticking a pair of surgical gloves in his pocket before he set out to kill.
“What about the bodies? We did that thing where you put them in a tent and fumed them.”
“Glue fuming.”
“Yeah, I haven’t seen the glue fuming report yet.”
Kelly waited a heartbeat before replying to prepare herself for the explosion. “The results are still preliminary, but—”
“But they’re negative.” The explosion didn’t come. Sheriff Mike chose sarcasm for this rejoinder. “It was time-consuming and expensive. It put those poor kids’ bodies through another round of disrespectful poking and prodding. Of course, it didn’t work. I don’t think you ever thought it would.”
Pushed to the wall, Kelly said, “No, I didn’t. The odds were low. The bodies were damp, they’d been buried, it’s damn near impossible to get a print in those conditions. But we had to try.”
Finally, she had said something the crotchety old man could understand.
“Yeah,” he said. “We had to try. Thank you for trying.”
Then Kelly remembered that she liked Sheriff Mike. She wished he were in the room, so she could give him a comforting pat on the arm, but she just said, “At least we have the bullets. Maybe they’ll give us something we can use.”
Sheriff Mike grunted and hung up.
Skimming across calm dawn-blessed waters in her battered skiff, Faye could forget her every trouble, but she didn’t. Not this morning. She scanned the horizon constantly, because no one must see her today. She had an appointment with the remains of Abby Williford.
The sun had hauled itself above the horizon when Faye beached her skiff and unpacked her gear. Rain and wind had returned the sand to its untouched state and the tide was higher than it had been when she discovered Abby, but Faye’s instincts rarely failed her. She found Abby’s grave within ten minutes of beginning her search. Unfortunately, Abby was no longer there.
The smell of chlorine bleach was more nauseating than the grave had been when it was merely a pit of dried bones. The porous sand was saturated with it. Someone had pulled Abby out of the ground and made sure that no identifiable biological residue would remain.
Even Clorox couldn’t keep a real archaeologist from digging when there was something she wanted to find. Faye donned a pair of sunglasses to protect her eyes. She covered her mouth and nose with the toilet tissue she carried with her everywhere, wrapping it around her head again and again to hold the makeshift mask in place. Her hands were already well-protected, since she always dug in rubber gloves.
In this outlandish getup, she probed further into Abby’s violated resting place. The grave had been fairly shallow, so it didn’t take her long to penetrate the acrid sand and reach soil that hadn’t been touched recently, not by her and not by the bleach-wielding grave robber.
Faye was a finder, the sanctimonious child who found money dropped in grocery stores and handed it over to the lost-and-found department. This time, the finder hit pay dirt in a very real way, uncovering two disfigured lumps that looked vaguely unnatural.
Rinsing them gently, she found a heavily tarnished clump of metal that was barely recognizable as a medium-weight silver chain—surely it was Abby’s silver necklace, just as the papers had reported in 1964. There was no time to gloat over this victory, because she wouldn’t rest until she knew what the other lump of dirt contained.
It seemed big to be the missing earring. What else could have lain under Abby since she was buried, all those years ago? Perhaps her assailant had dropped something in the hole as he was digging. Or perhaps—well, there was no way to know until she cleaned the thing.
Layers of sand and gunk washed away, but a more thorough cleaning would have to wait until she got home. A good deal of corrosion remained, but the object’s identity could be discerned. It was a pocket watch. Its catch was inoperable but Faye burned to open the case. The answer to Abby’s mystery might lie inside.
Her impatience would not allow her to treat this artifact with due care. She took a tiny screwdriver, drove it between the watch and its cover, and wrenched the cover off. Picking up the pieces, she found that the inside of the watch was remarkably well-preserved. Much of the inscription was legible.
“D_ac_n Je__bo_m Ev__ett” had been presented this watch by the “B__s_d _ss___nc_ A_E C_u__h”. The number “25” was still legible beneath the inscription. Filling in the missing blanks was easy. It was no big trick to discern that the watch had been presented by the Blessed Assurance AME Church for twenty-five years of service as a deacon and that the recipient was Jereboam Everett. These facts were easy to determine but hard to swallow.
Faye sat on the sand and stretched her legs out in front of her. She was having trouble making sense of what she held in her hands. She knew that old Jeb Everett died before his son Douglass finished high school in June of 1964. One would have expected his only child to be in possession of the watch by the time Abby disappeared in July. How did Douglass’ watch get into Abby’s grave?
The primeval, neck-crawling certainty that someone was watching settled over Faye. She wished for the binoculars she’d left behind in Joyeuse’s cupola when the malfunctioning trapdoor had forced her to make a rooftop escape. Could someone with binoculars have lurked on one of the nearby islets and watched her dig up the old bones? Or might someone have been watching from a boat, maybe even the boat that had startled her and Joe into leaving Abby behind?
She’d been too obsessed with the empty grave to wonder why Abby’s bones had gone missing after all these years. Why? Nothing had changed…except that Faye had found her. And, apparently, somebody knew it.
Faye left Abby’s islet behind and radioed Wally’s. It was her habit to call or radio the marina to check her messages about mid-morning every day. Sometimes Wally was awake by then. When he wasn’t, Liz took a break from slinging hash and answered for him. Today, Faye got Wally. His hungover voice crackling over the airwaves did nothing to calm her nerves.
“Your rich friend, Douglass Everett, left an urgent message. He wants you to meet him at his beach house, right away. Watch yourself, Faye. He may be loaded, but he’s married.”
“Your vulgarity never ceases to amaze me, Wally. Out,” Faye said, turning her radio off as if it, too, had offended her.
What could Douglass possibly want? He’d just bought her entire inventory and he knew she hadn’t had time to dig up anything new. She fetched the watch from the pocket of her shorts and gripped it hard. Was it Douglass who killed Abby and desecrated her grave? And if he did do those things, and if he knew Faye knew about Abby, then was he calling her to his house to kill her, too?
That made no sense. Calling Wally to summon a prospective murder victim to his house, knowing that Wally was liable to blast the request over radio frequencies accessible to anyone, made no sense at all.
Something inside Faye rebelled at all the evidence. The Douglass she knew was not a murderer. He was her friend. The morning’s turn of events meant that Abby’s murderer was back in the area. She should notify the sheriff about what she’d found. But she couldn’t throw a heavy pall of suspicion over a friend without allowing him to defend himself.
She wheeled her skiff westward and headed for Douglass’ beach house.
Douglass paced the floor, clenching bad news in his hand. He had known that Faye needed money, but this was serious. He’d do all he could to help her, but his cash reserves were low. He couldn’t even tell his wife where all their money went. Being no fool, she had long ago observed that their income and their outgo did not match, even given their fabulous lifestyle. She had reached the conclusion that he was supporting one or more mistresses and he had never told her that her suspicions were unfounded. The truth was so much worse.
Faye tied up to Douglass’ spiffy dock, crossed the sprawling deck, and entered the living room where Douglass stood at a glass wall, gazing at the Gulf. Something was clenched in his left hand and there was a tall drink in his right hand. He gestured at the drink waiting for her at the wet bar. It was far stronger than sherry.
He greeted her with a blunt, “Are you crazy?” holding out the object in his left hand for her to see and explain.
It was a Clovis point. Faye didn’t grasp his intent, saying, “You told me you weren’t buying anything but slave artifacts.”
“I bought this to protect you. I bought everything the man had, just to protect you. If the law gets wind that you’ve been robbing a site that’s this old—spear points, mastodon bones, and all—they’ll put you under the jail.”