Artifacts (2 page)

Faye picked up a twig and rested it on the bone that had once underlain somebody’s upper lip. She tried to slide it into the skull’s former nostril, but the twig butted up against a bony ridge.

“You’re off the hook, Joe. There’s no need for any mystic tobacco-and-corn ceremony. This is a Caucasian skull. I’ll just cover him up and say a Christian prayer over him. If he was a European invader of the rape-and-pillage variety, even my puny prayer would be too good for him.”

Faye traced her fingertips over the soil surface, looking for artifacts she might have disturbed while digging, and was rewarded with a clod of soil that was too heavy for its size. She worked the dirt away from the solid center of the clod while she listened to Joe argue his point.

“Everybody deserves a comfortable grave, Faye. Just let me go get my—”

Somewhere in the direction of Seagreen Island, Faye heard a boat motor turn over. Pointing at the sound, she barked, “Help me cover her up. Somebody’s coming.”

Joe tended to obey authoritative voices, so he dropped his argument and began shoveling dirt back into the excavation, but he didn’t stop talking. “Why did you say ‘her’? I thought you said ‘him’ before. How do you know that this was a girl?”

Faye kept shoving dirt over the skull without answering Joe. Getting caught would be an outright disaster. First, she was digging in a national wildlife preserve and removing archaeological materials from federal lands was a felony. Second, a brush with the law—and the fines and legal expenses that would accompany such trouble—would hasten the inevitable loss of her home. And third, the artifact in her hand suggested that she might be treading on legal quicksand far more serious than simple pothunting.

As they sprinted toward their boats, she held out her hand to show Joe the single item she had removed from the grave. “This is how I knew she was a girl.”

A corroded pearl dangled from an ornate diamond-studded platinum earring. Her practiced eye saw that it was machine-made and recent, but no archaeological knowledge was required to date this artifact. Any woman alive who ever played in her mother’s jewelry box could guess its age. The delicate screw-back apparatus dated it to the mid-twentieth century and the style pinpointed the period still further. The woman who wore this earring had wished very much to look like Jackie Kennedy.

Somebody had buried her in a spot where she was unlikely to ever be found. Most likely, that somebody had killed her.

Walking up the wooden stairs and onto the broad porch of her home never failed to settle Faye’s soul. Even tonight, after violating her professional ethics, breaking several laws, and disturbing the dead, she was soothed by the gentle sea breeze that blew through the open front door.

The old house and its island had both been named Joyeuse by one of Faye’s ancestors whose name she didn’t know. The old plantation house on Joyeuse Island was more than home to her. It was a treasure entrusted to her by her mother and her grandmother and her grandmother’s mother and, most of all, by her great-great-grandmother Cally, the former slave who had somehow come to own the remnants of a great plantation.

Cally’s story was lost to time. No one remembered how a woman of color had acquired Joyeuse Island and held onto it for seventy years, but Cally had done it, and her descendants had preserved her legacy and her bloodline. Something of Cally lived on in Faye, maybe in her dark eyes or her darker hair, but another, essential, part of Cally survived in the home she fought to keep. Joyeuse was a decrepit relic of antebellum plantation culture, built by human beings laboring for people who believed they owned them. Even so, it was a calm, beautiful place and Faye had learned to live with the ambiguity of that. Sometimes Faye thought Ambiguity should have been her middle name.

If race is the abiding conflict of the Americas, then Faye considered herself the physical embodiment of that conflict. Her great-great-grandmother Cally had been born a slave on Joyeuse plantation, the product of the master’s assault on her mother. Unprovable family lore said that the master himself was not as white as he might have believed; his grandmother was half-Creek. There were surely people who died on the Trail of Tears with no more Native American blood than he.

Faye’s ancestors had sprung from Europe and the Americas and Africa and God-knew-where-else. The casual observer, noting her darker-than-olive skin, tiny build, delicate features, and stick-straight black hair, would be hard-pressed to name her racial affiliation. Faye was never too sure herself.

Settling herself on a ramshackle porch swing, she studied the earring in her hand. She couldn’t call the law. How would she explain why she was digging on federal land?

Faye tucked one foot under her and pushed against the floor’s cypress boards with the other, ever careful to maintain her balance. How many times in her childhood had she leaned back too far and felt the old swing dump her onto her head? Then, once she’d learned the trick, how many times had she done it on purpose because it was fun to fall, heels over ears, into a giggling heap of little girl? All those memories would be sand under the feet of anyone but Faye. There was no way in hell she was going to let Joyeuse go.

She swung herself gently back and forth. What harm would it do to forget she’d ever seen those bones? One more good hurricane and they would be swept away, anyway. She hated to think about someone getting away with murder but, in reality, someone already had. What was the likelihood that a critical clue had survived for decades under damp, wet sand? Still, her sense of right and wrong said that she ought to tell somebody. The dead woman’s family would derive some comfort in knowing, with certainty, that she was never coming home.

Her sense of self-preservation wouldn’t let her go to the police, but her conscience wasn’t quite ready to let her destroy evidence of a murder. Keeping the earring at least gave her the option of doing the right thing someday. But where could she hide the evidence? There was no available nook in Joyeuse’s above-ground basement. It was built of tabby, a durable concrete concocted of oyster shells, lime, and sand, and it would survive a direct atomic strike. After more than a hundred and fifty years, there were still no crevices large enough to serve as a hiding place in its rock-like surface.

She climbed the staircase tucked under the back porch roof, leaving the service rooms in the basement behind. The main floor sat a full story above ground level, a form of house design that was prudent in a hurricane zone. Faye wandered around the main floor, poking around in the ladies’ parlor and the gentlemen’s parlor and the vast room that had served as both dining room and ballroom. The fine furnishings and draperies were long gone and the cavernous empty chambers offered no nook to house the old pearl earring. There was really only one place in the whole house that offered hiding places which she didn’t already use to store her everyday necessities, and it was two stories above her.

She climbed the porch staircase to the next level, which had housed the bedchambers and music room back when the house served as a home for a family and its servants. She’d converted the two largest bedrooms into her temple to legitimate archaeology, two treasure rooms where she stored artifacts that made her black-market customers sneer.

The walls of her own bedroom and the adjacent master bedroom were lined with glass-fronted shelves loaded with unsalable finds. Cracked pottery, broken bone tools, the bones and shell of a turtle—the discovery of each of these things was described in waterproof ink on the pages of the field notebooks stacked on the topmost shelf. Any of these shelves could have served as a hiding place for the earring, but Faye had another spot in mind. She reached in a broom closet for a long-handled implement tipped with a metal hook, but before she could use it, she heard Joe coming.

Faye listened to Joe climbing the spiral staircase that rose through the precise center of the old house, piercing the square landing that provided access to the rooms on this level. Joe’s footfalls were quiet and fast. The ordinary listener wouldn’t have heard him coming. His moccasined feet made no percussive tap as they hit the treads, but there was a faint creaking in the old wood that Faye, attuned to any disturbance in her cherished home, couldn’t ignore.

Joe rose through the floor and stepped onto the landing, saying, “I made something for you, Faye. I was saving it for later, but I think you’ve had a hard day.”

She took Joe’s gift and turned it over in her hands, unable to think of an appropriate response other than, “You shouldn’t have gone to so much trouble for me.”

The workmanship couldn’t be criticized. Joe was very, very clever with his hands. There was no way to tell him that it was wrong to alter something thousands of years old; she didn’t intend to try.

Joe had used new materials to reconstruct fragments of an
atlatl
made by west Florida’s Deptford people before the birth of Christ. Starting with a stone weight and a shell trigger that he’d taken from her display case, Joe had whittled and chipped the missing pieces of the
atlatl
, an archaic type of spear that was thrown by slinging its hinged spearthrower in a whiplash motion. The crowning glory of Joe’s gift was a finely flaked stone point crafted out of chert, the same native stone Florida’s original inhabitants had used in their tools. Given his penchant for stone tools and homemade glue, she couldn’t hazard a guess as to how much of Joe’s time she held in her hands. There was nothing Faye could do but thank him sincerely and resolve to keep her artifact cases locked in the future.

Joe, embarrassed by the encounter, disappeared down the stairs. Faye hefted the
atlatl
, choosing a prominent place for it in a display case in her bedroom, then she returned to the landing and lifted the hooked tool above her head. It grabbed hold of a recessed ring in the ceiling and she pulled hard. A hidden trapdoor opened, and she unfolded the rickety wooden ladder that dangled from the door. This was why she rarely ventured into Joyeuse’s cupola. It was so dang hard to get up there.

Once she had struggled up through the trapdoor, she saw the cranny she’d had in mind. By standing on a windowsill and stretching upward, she could reach her hand into a gap between the top of the wall and the rafters. It was the perfect hiding place…

…And someone had found it before. There was a wooden box there, about the size of a shoebox, and she gingerly lifted it down to her eye level. Aside from an inch-thick layer of matted dust, the box was in good shape. Carefully dovetailed together without a visible nail, the box itself was an exciting find. She tucked the earring atop a rafter and sat down to study the box.

Faye knew how Howard Carter must have felt, clearing rubble day after day from the staircase leading to King Tut’s tomb, knowing that wonderful things awaited him, but savoring the anticipation. She hefted the box in her hands a moment—it wasn’t empty, she could tell—then she lifted the lid and her breath faltered.

It was an old book bound in leather and canvas, and handwritten across the cover were the words, “Journal of Wm. Whitehall, begun on 15 May, 1782, to commemorate the Birth of his Daughter, Mariah.” William Whitehall had formed each
f
with a long, vertical curve shaped like an
s
. Time wrought changes in everything, even the alphabet, and that sometimes made manuscripts of this age devilish to interpret.

The penmanship made Faye think of John Hancock’s unrepentant signature on the Declaration of Independence, and her breath left her again. A man who was an adult in 1782 was a contemporary of John Hancock and his revolutionary friends.

The journal was stuffed full of stray sheets of paper. A palm-sized portrait of a man in a powdered wig slipped free and drifted toward the dusty floor, but Faye, who had the instincts of a museum curator, caught it without so much as crinkling the yellowed paper.

She opened the journal and saw that William, like others of a time when paper was hard to come by, had inscribed each page in the normal left-to-right fashion, then turned the book a quarter-turn to the right and written another full page of text atop the first. No wonder neat penmanship was so valued in those days. It was going to take her quite awhile to decipher what William had to tell her.