Artifacts (20 page)
There was a figure on the opposite arm of the cross, but it was unfamiliar and its caption was indiscernible. The image on the top arm of the cross was obscured by tarnish, but she could make out a heart in the center and the Virgin Mary on the bottom arm.
Faye had known more than one Protestant with an attachment to a Saint Christopher’s medal that was more superstitious than religious, but this thing had the look of something that only the faithful would wear. It was unusual. Why hadn’t the newspapers described it?
Another question surfaced. Had Abby been Catholic? She’d never thought about Abby’s religion. Probably, she’d just assumed the girl was Baptist or Methodist or Presbyterian like just about everybody in that part of the world where the Bible Belt devoted itself to holding up the pants of a nation.
She flipped the medal over and found that its smooth back had yielded to cleaning much more readily than the front. As if in miraculous answer to the question she’d just asked herself, eight words appeared.
I am a Catholic. Please call a priest.
Faye recoiled. Abby could have had a mass said over her bones if she’d called a priest that first day. Her fuzzy knowledge of Catholicism suggested that Abby would have wanted that. Now her bones were gone, and Faye had a feeling that the Pope himself would be ashamed of her.
She peeled off her gloves and found Abby’s obituaries. The child in her felt like her sin of omission would be less severe if she proved to herself that the dead girl was just a Protestant whose faith didn’t particularly care what was done with her body.
So there!
that childish part of her exclaimed when she found the funeral notice crediting Rev. Devan Watts of the Panacea Springs United Methodist Church with Abby’s memorial service. How hard it must have been for him, eulogizing someone when no one knew for sure that she was even dead.
So why was there a medal in Abby’s grave that honored a religion that wasn’t even hers? Unless…
She remembered the spot where she’d found the medal, assuming it was the necklace Abby was thought to be wearing on the night she died. It was in the grave,
under
the body.
Had the killer dug a pit to receive Abby’s body, then brought her there to kill her so that her fresh corpse could fall neatly into its resting place? No muss, no fuss. Seeing the gaping pit, Abby would have had no doubt of his intentions. She would not have been granted the gift of denial, telling herself, “He only wants to rob me or rape me or beat me. I can survive this. I’m strong enough.”
No, she would have known the stakes as she stood on the sliding, sandy lip of her own grave and clawed at her attacker. Her necklace could have been torn free in the melée, dropping into its owner’s grave before she was even dead. That would explain its position beneath Abby’s remains.
Pure, clean scientific reasoning prevented her from settling into a maudlin weeping session over Abby’s long-lost necklace and her gut-freezing fate. No scientist worthy of the name seized on the first plausible theory that suggested itself without considering other options.
So how else might the necklace have come to be beneath Abby? Perhaps it was already there when her attacker shoveled a woman-sized hole in the sand and he didn’t see it. Perhaps he did see it, but left it there. Or perhaps he put it there on purpose. She couldn’t disprove those possibilities, but there was no evidence or human motivation to support them, either.
A more likely scenario insisted on replaying itself for her. She closed her eyes and saw Abby under attack, reaching up in panic and grabbing something, anything. Faye saw the chain snapping and the assailant’s broken necklace falling unnoticed into the pit he had dug to hold his victim.
The scene reminded Faye that premeditated violent murder wasn’t just a hypothesis to coolly examine and discard. It was a planned act that required the killer to disable key parts of a human body, stopping only when the body no longer functioned. Cries of pain, spurting blood, loosened bowels—these things had to be ignored until the deed was done.
Faye studied the religious medal in her hands. Perhaps Abby had indeed ripped it from her assailant’s neck as she struggled for life. She liked to think that the girl had fought back, and this scenario fit the facts as well as any other.
Only one detail of the crime scene, as she herself had observed it, didn’t fit. Douglass Everett’s watch was also in the grave, under the body, and she knew for a fact that he wasn’t Catholic. He was, in fact, a deacon of long standing in the Blessed Assurance AME Church in Panacea.
So what should she do? Turn over the watch and the medal to the sheriff? That would be tantamount to throwing Douglass to the wolves. The sheriff suspected him and he was handy, while the owner of the religious medal was nowhere to be found. She didn’t feel good inside herself about doing that, because finding the medal reinforced her gut feeling that Douglass was innocent of Abby’s death.
The sheriff didn’t need to know about these things, Faye decided, as she tucked them in the display cabinet with her other artifacts and hurried to her bedroom to see whether the August heat had rendered her makeup unusable.
Hurukan is the Mayan storm god and it is fitting that his fearsome name is attached to hurricanes, the greatest storms on Earth. For all the death and havoc they wreak, it is important to remember that they are only heat engines, necessary to transfer energy from the tropics to regions that receive far less of the sun’s heat. If humans didn’t exist, hurricanes would simply be Nature’s elegant means of taking from the energy-rich and giving to the energy-poor, wiping parts of the world down to a clean slate in the process.
But humans do exist and Hurukan recognizes that some of them desperately need to be wiped to a clean slate. And some places are just bad, provoking humans to be their worst selves. Last Isle was such a place. It was a haven for natives killing natives, then for Europeans killing natives and Africans and each other. Hurukan smiled when hurricane after hurricane took its toll on Last Isle, blasting it to pieces. Sometimes a place needs the cleansing only a mammoth storm can provide.
Sometimes, a lot of times, humanity needs cleansing, too. Evil can grip whole nations or it can nest comfortably in a single heart. In either case, human evil can only be cleansed by human beings. Even mighty Hurukan is impotent in the face of it, but somewhere south of Galveston a brewing storm waited for the chance, once again, to try to wipe the sullied world clean.
The Pirate’s Lair was one of those rare restaurants where patrons could arrive dressed elegantly, enjoy warmly efficient service and fine linen napkins, and dine well, yet leave completely relaxed. Housed in an actual refurbished pirate’s lair, its well-polished floors bore scars that spoke of treasure and skullduggery.
Cyril strode out of the restaurant before Faye finished parking, in plenty of time to open her door and extend his arm to help her out of the car. Had he been watching out the front window? That seemed undignified. More likely, a discreetly placed gratuity had made sure he was notified as soon as a certain well-used Pontiac rolled off the highway.
She had brought a shawl, partly because the evening was unusually cool and partly because her dress was rather bare. Faye, like any woman reared by a mother who sewed well, appreciated well-made clothes constructed of good fabric. These days, she was appalled by what such clothing cost. On her budget, when she wanted something nice, she was forced to make it herself.
Another thing her seamstress mother had taught her was to never, never expend the effort to make a dress in the trendiest style. When Mama put days and days into a sewing project, she intended for Faye to get years and years of wear out of it.
As usual, Mama was right. Faye remembered making this dress for a party celebrating her short-lived engagement to Isaiah. Every pintuck in its strapless bodice was an old friend. The bias-cut skirt still clung where it should and floated free where it should. Best of all, it was flame red, and Cyril obviously liked it.
His admiration was apparent in the way he cupped her elbow in his hand, the way he helped her wrap the shawl around her bare shoulders. She let him guide her through the historical part of the restaurant out onto a newer open-air deck, where he had secured a choice table. They sat in comfortable wicker chairs with their backs to the other diners, facing the Gulf. The sky to their left was silver-black. To their right, the water still glowed orange where the sun had melted into it like a crayon.
Conversation came easily over an eclectic meal that featured Ethiopian-style vegetables served authentically on flatbread and without silverware. The inclusion of some inauthentically grilled shrimp and bay scallops reminded them that they were not actually
in
Ethiopia but, rather, were perched on the rim of the Gulf of Mexico, which was a damn fine place to be.
Pinot noir suited the spicy vegetables, and though their waiter delicately tried to guide them toward a rich Chardonnay to complement the seafood, they insisted on their wine of choice. Swigging the pinot and eating with their hands, they swapped garrulous tales of growing up in rural Florida. Cyril, of course, had her trumped. He was older and drew on memories of a time when nobody he knew had air conditioning and even indoor plumbing hadn’t completed its conquest of the American South. He even remembered when saltine crackers came in big wooden barrels that sat next to grocery store cash registers for God-knew-how-long, yet the crackers never tasted stale.
Faye’s city-girl childhood in Tallahassee hadn’t been nearly so colorful, but she’d spent many a summer day at Joyeuse helping her grandmother make sure the old house didn’t rot to the ground. She didn’t bother to tell him about learning to replace termite-ridden clapboards at ten, then moving up to tin roof repair by age fourteen. Instead, they shared stories about cottonmouth sightings, and evaluated whether dewberries were best cooked in cobblers or eaten as soon as they were plucked ripe off the vine, if not before.
“But nothing could touch my mother’s blackberry jam, God rest her soul,” Cyril said, automatically tracing the sign of the cross on his body: forehead, sternum, shoulder, shoulder.
Faye was shaken to her bones. The pieces of the puzzle collided inside her skull and assembled themselves into a coherent, ugly whole.
If Cyril was Catholic then so, likely, was his whole family. Fragments of information leapt out of her subconscious. Criss-Kross, his brother Cedrick’s high school nickname—for sarcastic, sadistic high schoolers, there could be no more perfect nickname for a boy so religious that he wore a cross adorned with Saint Christopher, the Virgin Mary, and all that other stuff Faye couldn’t decipher.
Cedrick had been in Abby’s tiny high school class, so he clearly knew her. Cyril had said something about his brother’s last known whereabouts. What was it?
She fingered the necklace at her throat. Oh, yes, Cedrick went to work in the oil fields off the coast of Louisiana. She hadn’t remembered because it was such a common ambition for young men who weren’t college bound. The oil fields required no qualifications beyond the grit to work terribly hard for seven days at a stretch, spend a day driving home, enjoy five days there, then drive back and do it again. It was hard on wives and families, but it was a good living.
Cedrick had been gone from town for hardly more than a month when Abby was killed, but Faye was willing to bet that he had vanished from the radar of local law enforcement officers who were obsessed with proving Douglass Everett guilty. She would lay odds that no one had ever even bothered to find out who Cedrick worked for and whether Abby disappeared while he was working or during his week off. Seven days would give a man all the time he needed to cover his tracks.
She noticed Cyril studying her and she flushed, embarrassed by how she must have looked, staring off into space. She felt as if he somehow knew she was developing an elaborate scheme to prove his only brother guilty of murder. He reached across the table and took her necklace gently between his thumb and forefinger.
“Where did you find this?” he asked, turning the pendant over to examine the back.
“It’s amazing, the things you can find in junk shops. And they’re especially cheap when they’re marked with somebody else’s monogram,” she murmured in the voice women once used to say, “You like my dress? This old rag?”
“Those places always make me sad. People die and their treasures become worthless. Instantly. I especially hate all the old photographs staring down at me. There hangs the face of somebody’s grandfather, but nobody cares. Nobody even knows his name.”
He released his hold on her necklace and took her hand. “Somehow, I think the woman who owned that necklace, the one whose initials were CSS, would be glad to know someone appreciated it enough to rescue it from the junk shop.”
The moon had risen as they talked, and its calming light was telling Faye to keep her suspicions quiet. She could hardly give Cedrick’s religious medal to the sheriff without also turning over its companion piece, Douglass’ watch. The ensuing circus would hurt Douglass, who might not deserve it, and it would hurt Cyril, who assuredly did not. Why drag his family into the spotlight, with its violent father, runaway mother, and perhaps murderous brother? Abby was murdered when Cyril was a scrawny, undergrown little boy. His constituents shouldn’t hold her death against him, but they would. No district could be expected to send the product of such an upbringing to represent them in Washington.
She thought of the face in his fourth-grade yearbook picture. That face had suffered enough.
The waiter checked their water glasses and deferentially asked, “Is there anything else, Senator Kirby?”
Faye froze and looked her escort up and down. He wasn’t hiding behind a baseball cap or sitting incognito in a deserted, seedy park. He was in a public place, graciously nodding his head at other diners who felt that their social status was vicariously enhanced by the presence of someone a little bit famous.
He took her hand and she recovered herself.
He doesn’t mind being seen with me,
she realized.
No, it’s more than that. He likes being seen with me.
Cyril casually caressed her hand as he stared out over the Gulf. The music was live. The wine was red. The evening star was sliding helplessly toward a horizon that had already swallowed the sun.
Faye was a smart woman who was well aware that, having lost her father at such a young age, she was over-receptive to the attentions of authority figures. And she realized that being rejected for her skin color made her vulnerable to just about anyone who accepted her as she was. These facts made it wise for her to fall in love slowly, but facts and red wine do not mix.
For history buffs, the Historic American Buildings Survey—
HABS
for short—was one of
FDR
’s greatest New Deal investments. Jobless folk fanned out across the country, seeking old buildings, photographing them and sketching their floor plans. Many of the structures they recorded in the 1930s were caught in the act of falling down. Some of them were documented in no other place. Magda adored the photographs those nameless government employees took.
Magda used the
HABS
catalog frequently. It was useful, as far as it went, but it only told her which structures had been documented. Finding the documents—the photographs, the maps, the drawings—was a different story. It frustrated her that, to this day, no publication existed that gathered in one place photographs of all the structures documented by the
HABS
. Magda had never been one to accept the status quo. Over the course of her career, she had cobbled together her own compilation of
HABS
work in Florida. The resulting document was more of a scrapbook than a reference tome, chock-f of reprints and photocopies and scrawled marginal notes. She had pored over her collection of journals and exhausted the stores of more than one university library before ordering expensive photographic reprints. Compiling it had been costly work.
Those old buildings—houses, courthouses, general stores, barns—were hard-wired into her brain by now. She knew their front and rear elevations, their floor plans, every detail the
HABS
people saw fit to record. She loved them all, but she loved the houses the best.
It seemed like only minutes passed while she flipped through the scrapbook, searching for Faye’s mystery house, but time is relative. The clock on Magda’s wall stopped ticking when she opened the well-used book and its hands only rushed to their actual positions hours later when she smoothed her hand over a page and gave it a protective little pat.
The house itself told her she was right. There were no other candidates that met the criteria: early 19th-century design, never professionally restored, and within a reasonable driving or boating distance of the places Faye was known to frequent. Even in the faded photograph, she could tell that everything from the main floor up was of wood-frame construction, but the stuccoed ground floor could easily have been crafted of tabby. The ground floor looked old, relative to the style of the upper stories.
Magda guessed that a long-ago someone had built a one-room tabby structure on the site. Later, as his economic situation improved, he had built a second square structure next to it, roofing over the two tabby buildings and the space between them. This dogtrot configuration allowed for a covered breezeway that gave valuable outdoor living space in a hot climate, which was the prime reason why dogtrot houses dotted the American South almost until God created the air conditioner. The fact that this dogtrot was built of tabby made Faye’s house a curiosity, a beautiful example of the adaptation of traditional design and native materials to a harsh climate. And the ostentatious palace that rose above its tabby basement was a textbook illustration of how a newly rich man might adapt an existing home to reflect his improved circumstance.
There were other houses with plastered exteriors that might hide tabby, but even if there’d been five hundred houses that could plausibly belong to Faye, she would still know that this one, Joyeuse, was the one. Now that she held its photograph in her hands, she could draw no other conclusion.
The old
HABS
photos occasionally featured the inhabitants of the historic structures. Sometimes they were the owners, but frequently the photographers had immortalized renters or squatters who simply wanted to be part of the picture.
Magda couldn’t take her eyes off the figures posing on the front porch of Joyeuse. In two rocking chairs sat an old lady and another, truly ancient woman. Either of them might have been taken for white, but there was an obvious family resemblance between them and the darker-skinned woman standing between them. In this younger woman’s arms was a beautiful toddler with dark eyes and long ringlets. Every one of the women had Faye’s face, or the face she once wore, or the face she would someday wear.
Finally, Magda’s suspicions jibed with what she knew of Faye’s character. If Faye were indeed conducting digs on her own, even if she were selling the things she dug up, she, like Magda, would recognize a moral difference between doing it on your own land and doing it on someone else’s.
Everything made sense to Magda, except for one critical thing. The Faye that Magda knew would not desecrate an archaeologically significant site, nor would she make the amateur’s mistake of mixing artifacts of radically different dates. Maybe Faye wasn’t the only pothunter prowling around those islands.