Artifacts (22 page)
How was he going to explain his dilemma to Nguyen? Faye’s live-in stud might make life peachy for her, but he complicated Wally’s life to no end. He needed to get into the shed on Joyeuse Island. He needed to get in there bad. But he needed to do it without anyone to witness what he pulled out of the shed and loaded on his boat. And as far as he could tell, the big Indian hadn’t left the island since Liz scalded the phony Park Services guy.
Fate was conspiring against Wally these days. First, there was the resort being built in the Last Isles. It would bring tourists and heavy pleasure boat traffic to his marina, but Wally’s more lucrative business thrived in the shade. It wouldn’t survive the onset of civilization, although thanks to those two dead kids, civilization was being delayed a bit.
But there’s never any rest for the wicked. The coming resort—and it would come, dead kids or not—filled Wally with an unaccustomed urgency. He needed to make money while he still could and that meant he had to get private access to Faye’s island, which didn’t used to be so hard.
For years, he had relied on Faye’s hermit tendencies. He should have realized that even hermits need sex, as evidenced by the big dumb brute haunting Faye’s island. Shit. He should have thought of it sooner. If it was sex she wanted, he could have given her that.
Nguyen’s steely voice sliced into his sexual fantasies. “And exactly where are our goods stored?”
Wally, who was shrewd enough to know that the man who has no valuable secrets is expendable, avoided giving him a precise location. “On an island east of here owned by somebody I know. She doesn’t know the stuff is there, but she comes ashore regularly. When she’s here, she can’t be there, so I get in my boat and pull some of our stock out of inventory. If I know the coast will be clear for a long time, sometimes I meet a client on the spot. They like that—it’s too easy to be seen here at the marina.”
“So why can’t we go out there, right now, and pick up something worth selling?”
Wally chose his words carefully, but it was hard for him. Nguyen was the deliberate one. “My friend has a roommate now. I can’t risk letting him know what we’ve got stored out there—he could clean us out—and he almost never comes ashore.”
“I say we bribe him. Or we hurt him.
“He doesn’t look like someone who cares much about money. And he’s big, so if we go to hurt him, we better do it right the first time. Look at the size of him.”
He fetched a stack of photographs from his liquor cabinet.
As Nguyen shuffled through the photos a second time, Wally said, “This guy’s no rocket scientist. I can figure out how to get rid of him. Just give me a little time.”
Faye’s first aid kit was not well stocked. Band-Aids, generic painkillers, antiseptic spray—if it wasn’t cheap and you couldn’t get it over-the-counter in a small-town drugstore, then she didn’t have it. She prodded at the wound on her thigh. It was surrounded by a hard red patch the size of her palm. No pus yet, but she’d bet the
Gopher
that it was infected.
Time to haul out the big guns. She reached for a tube of antibiotic ointment, the one with the label that said in huge print, “The strongest antibiotic you can buy without a prescription.” Well, being as how she had no insurance to cover a prescription
or
the doctor who prescribed it, she slathered the non-prescription stuff on thick.
Cyril had mentioned going dancing sometime soon. She sure hoped she was able to walk. Gangrene was not an attractive quality in a date.
Faye was old enough to recognize the single-mindedness of someone enjoying the earliest stages of an affair, but no one is old enough to resist slipping into that giddy state. She had spent an embarrassing amount of time that day reflecting on Cyril’s affable nature and fine intellect. She was thrilled that he enjoyed dancing.
Only someone very special could have risen so far above his miserable upbringing. Look what it had made of his brother: a probable killer. Her new friend’s rise out of poverty was admirable and she liked spending time with people she admired. Faye hoped he found something admirable in her, but she didn’t know what it might be.
She did have some admirable ancestors, no question. Thus reminded, she reached for the old journal, eager to continue Cally’s story.
***
Excerpt from Cally Stanton’s oral history, recorded 1935
Lots of folks said the second Missus was stupid, but I knew her better than they did. She wasn’t stupid. She was a Yankee.
She took to me from the start, saying I was pretty, and I had elegant bones. She said I was smart, too, and she wanted to teach me to dress and talk, so I could be a proper lady’s maid. Maybe I’m smart. I think I am. But only a Yankee could look at my skin and my hair and, yes, Lord, even my bones, without wondering who my daddy was. I don’t rightly know who my daddy was, but there was never but one white man on the place and that was her husband.
The new Missus kept herself busy by keeping me busy. I sponged her down with cool water—she didn’t take to our weather—and I fetched her drinks. A little bourbon made her forget how the heat made her corsets stick to her skin. A little more bourbon made her forget that the Master married her for her money.
It wasn’t hard work. The Big House felt cool to me, with the breezes coming in the tall windows and blowing the lace curtains around. There was just one bad thing about the Big House. The Master was there, and before long he noticed I was growing up.
I have lived a long ninety-six years. In all that time, I never hated anybody but one man: the Master, Andrew LaFourche. I never hated anybody in my life before the Master dragged me into an empty room and locked the door.
The Missus never noticed when my clothes was messed up and my mouth was bloody. Maybe my skin’s dark enough so the bruises don’t show. I don’t know. But she never noticed. Or she made like she didn’t notice.
Later on, he learned to hit me so he didn’t leave marks. And I learned not to feel anything much at all. Time and again, I dreamed that he was going to come to a bad end and that I was going to make it happen. There was a heap of comfort in that.
The Missus always chirked up when her son, Mister Courtney Stanton, came to see her. Mister Courtney was a fine-looking man. His hair was even prettier than the master’s, the color of sweet corn, more white than yellow. And shiny, good Lord.
Mister Courtney bought a fine plantation named Innisfree, slaves and all. It was near Quincy, right next door to one of the Master’s tobacco plantations. And he bought Last Isle, too. First thing Mister Courtney did was lease half the island to one of his Yankee friends to build a hotel on. Next thing he did was set to work on the Big House at Innisfree.
Nobody had lived in the house at Innisfree for nigh onto five years—nobody except for possums and bats—and the roof had taken to leaking. Folks said Mister Courtney waded into his new house—right beside the slaves—to help shoo out the possums and mop out the mud. It was a scandal the way he acted, the white folks said. And their house servants heard every word.
Some said Mr. Courtney had bought a cobbler who did nothing all day but make shoes for the field hands. Some said he’d torn down the old slave cabins and built new brick ones. If all the stories were true, then Mr. Courtney had invited the black folk to come in the Big House and make themselves at home. And to help themselves to all his money while they were at it.
No, those were tall tales, but I knew a true tale and I wasn’t telling. Mister Courtney was thinking about freeing his slaves. I heard him tell his Mama with my own ears. I didn’t believe he’d do it, but the idea of belonging to somebody who’d even give it a thought made me dizzy. Thinking about my own Master made me dizzy, and sick to my stomach, too. He wasn’t a man to set his slaves free. No, sir. I would belong to that man until I died, or he did.
Faye was glad to have paying work on a Saturday, which was not surprising for a woman with no money and no social life. Some people might have been surprised to learn that the entire work team had been reassembled on one day’s notice to resume the field survey on Seagreen Island—undergraduates usually plan their Saturdays around sleeping and beer—but not Faye. These kids loved their work, but it was more than that. Finishing this job and doing it well was something tangible that they could do to honor the memories of Krista and Sam.
Magda sat among them, hunched over her field notebook with her head cocked at an angle that suggested her shoulder was hurting again. Faye could sympathize. Field archaeology involved moving tons of earth and the first fact that young archaeologists learned was a simple one: dirt is heavy. And so is the equipment required to move it. And so are the artifacts of pre-plastic humans.
A single chip of pottery, a single stone spear point—these things are not heavy. But put them, carefully packaged, in a container for transport and you have a burden that will, over time, wreak havoc on the rotator cuff of the average shoulder. Neither Faye nor Magda was much over five feet tall in her stocking feet, so it was unreasonable to expect either of them to compete with the muscle mass and lever arm advantage of the full-grown men they worked with, but they were unreasonable women. Therefore, their shoulders were wrecked.
Faye laid a hand on the shoulder in question and said, “It’s paining you again, isn’t it?”
Magda looked up from her work with a weary nod.
“Naproxen sodium, over the counter. Double the recommended dose,” Faye said with the authoritative tone of the fellow sufferer. “Get the generic. It’s dirt cheap and Lord knows you’ll go through a pile of it.”
“What I need is a couple of Valium, but my doctor won’t prescribe it. She says I have a hard-charging personality—and what the hell does that mean?—and might be prone to addiction. She says I should just get more rest, eat better, do some yoga. I’d like to see her stare into Sam and Krista’s dead faces like you and I did. That’s not something you get over with a few hours of extra sleep and some dopey breathing exercises.”
Faye plopped onto the dirt beside Magda. She had not thought it was possible to be more depressed. “I can’t get it out of my mind that we’re here today because everybody’s given up on finding Krista and Sam’s killer,” Faye said. “How is it possible that they can be dead with no reasonable explanation? We knew them pretty well and we don’t have a clue to why they died. The sheriff knows criminals pretty well and he’s stumped, too.”
Magda doodled in the sand with a stick. “You want to know why this thing has left us feeling so off-balance? I mean besides the fact that we uncovered the dead bodies of two of our friends.”
“Yeah. I do.”
“Well, it’s not pretty. If Sam and Krista weren’t killed over drugs or some other kind of criminal activity, then it could happen to us. We’re not safe and we never will be again.”
Magda rose quickly, without giving Faye time to reply, without giving her time to think about it at all. “I want to go check on my crew. They’re not used to working without having my crooked nose in their business.”
Faye limped down the trail that surmounted the tallest part of Seagreen Island and descended toward the work site. She was glad nobody had asked what was wrong with her leg. Her prepared lie—that an old basketball injury had come back to haunt her—sounded weak even to Faye. She accompanied Magda, not just because she too needed to check on her workers, but because of Magda’s newest safety rule. No one was ever to be out of sight of at least one person while they were on Seagreen Island and no one was to be there after dark.
The deputy that Sheriff Mike had sent to watch over them was constantly audible, stomping through the underbrush. He made everybody feel more secure, but his presence reminded Faye of Magda’s premise: they were never really safe.
Faye and Magda stood in the shade of a tremendous live oak and looked down the line of the team’s sampling sites. The surveying flags marking each site were the peachy color of orange plastic that has been faded by weather. These were the flags that Sam and Krista had set out the night before they died. There had been no reason to remove them. It would have been senseless and disrespectful to undo their work and then do it over again. So they stood as a last monument until, one by one, they would be removed and discarded when the spot they marked had been properly excavated.
The silent team members were working terribly hard, as if they wanted to finish the job and quit this place forever. Faye could see no sign that they had uncovered anything of significance. They were Seagreen Island’s last hope. Unless they dug up something comparable to King Tut’s tomb or Machu Picchu, this tangled spot of wildness would soon be a tamely exotic vacation destination. It would be gone, just like Sam and Krista.
They were digging in the wrong place. Faye couldn’t have said how she knew it, but she was sure. Her intuitive sense—the one that told her where to dig when she was pothunting—said that the land beneath her feet was more interesting than the land her colleagues were excavating. The oak tree shading it had been there for centuries. It would have drawn human activity, simply by being there. There was no rule that said she couldn’t dig there and, since she pretty much always had a trowel in her hand when she was working, there was no reason not to start digging right away.
She stooped down and cleared away the fallen leaves and branches that always litter the ground under deciduous trees of that age. Her trowel had hardly turned over a bucket load of earth before Magda dropped to her knees next to her and joined her in digging.
“Can you tell anything about the strata?” Magda asked.
“There aren’t any. The layers of soil are all mixed up. Somebody’s been digging here. And it looks recent to me.”
Faye stopped digging and used her bare fingers to brush dirt away from a human femur. It was hardly longer than her forearm and a break near the knee had healed badly.
Magda made a choking sound. Faye looked up to see her uncovering an adult skull with an extensive, unhealed fracture.
“Somebody get the deputy,” Faye bellowed. Her voice, usually so soft-spoken, cracked under the strain, but she recovered herself well enough to bellow again. “Get him up here now.”
Faye stood with Magda on the floating dock that the university had installed to facilitate the project and watched Sheriff Mike and his forensic team disembark from their boat. Magda’s students were gathered on the beach behind them, shoulder to shoulder. Together, they drew a line in the sand. They
were
a line in the sand.
“We will have an agreement with you before you set foot on this beach,” Magda began.
“Let me list the laws you are breaking, right now,” Sheriff Mike rumbled.
Faye would have enjoyed his discomfort more if she weren’t having flashbacks. Sam and Krista’s faces. Abby’s bare skull. Now, another skull, shattered, and the remains of a wounded child.
Magda continued, undeterred. “We have uncovered bones that are clearly not recent. Do they constitute evidence of a crime that’s recent enough to prosecute? Or is the killer, if there even is one, long-dead, in which case this is an archaeological site that my team is trained and qualified to excavate?”
“I don’t want to arrest you and your co-conspirators—I mean students.”
“And we don’t want to tie this site up in court while a bunch of lawyers get rich. We have one demand and it’s simple. You will not exclude my team from the excavation of those bones.”
Flashbacks or not, Faye was getting a charge out of watching Sheriff Mike squirm.
The Supreme Court. Sheriff Mike couldn’t shake off the thought of nine black-garbed men and women peering over their reading glasses at him and asking, “You did what?”
What would he answer if this case survived appeal after appeal and reached the Supremes? “I was trying to expedite the investigation, Your Honors,” seemed feeble.
Perhaps if he hauled Dr. Magda Stockard and her implacable companion, Faye Longchamp, to Washington with him, Their Honors would see his point.
The negotiations had been interminable, but the two women weren’t entirely obstinate. They had agreed to his compromise and now they crouched just outside the yellow tape he had used to demarcate a ridiculously tiny crime scene. He crouched a few feet away from them, inside the tape with his forensic technicians. In a sense, he was supervising his technicians’ work, but Magda and Faye were supervising them all.
The women had two distinct approaches to making him miserable, but they achieved the same result. Faye would gesture at a technician, reach over the yellow tape, and hand him an ax, saying only, “For that root.”
Magda would squawk, “Jesus! If you pull that root any harder, the goddamn live oak’s going to fall on all our heads. Don’t you know what you’re doing to the stratigraphy?” Then she would hurl a machete or a shovel in the offender’s general direction.
How was he going to explain the sheer quantity of items that entered the crime scene from the hands of civilians, mere bystanders? And how would he explain the fact that those two civilians were making copious notes on every scrap of evidence he uncovered, all the while instructing his photographer on the precise angle from which she should shoot each bone?
For the evidence consisted entirely of bones, and there were a lot of them. They had been there a long time, maybe so long that the archaeologists were right to lay claim to the site. Maybe the Supremes would take that into account when they judged the detective work he was doing here.
A second small femur surfaced and he wondered again what had happened to the child. Everybody agreed that there was only one child in this hole, probably a boy of nine or ten. Nobody was willing to say yet that there was only one adult. The old tree had reached out for the bodies in the years since they were buried, entangling them in its roots, shoving them out of their original positions. And somebody, a human somebody, had come along later and dug the bodies up, reburying them and scrambling their remains even further.
The principal find of the day was a pelvis. When Sheriff Mike heard that it had belonged to a woman who had borne children, his first thought was
It’s not Abby
. Then he thought of the two small femurs and shuddered, because there is no easier prey than a mother. Nab the child, and she will follow you anywhere to get it back. Threaten the child, and she will hand over her own life just to save her baby. Even if her baby’s thirty years old.
Besides the adult skull and pelvis and the two little leg bones, a number of vertebrae and ribs had surfaced. People had lots of backbones and ribs, and it would take a practiced eye and skill with a cleaning brush to tell whether they’d uncovered one C4 vertebra or ten.
Early in the day, he’d assigned a technician to catalog those smaller bones and, for better or worse, the poor guy was getting plenty of help from Faye, who was leaning far into the crime scene to peer at the evidence. He had explained to both Faye and Magda that they should picture a humongous sheet of plate glass, starting at the ground, running through the crime scene tape, and extending toward the heavens. He told them to by God stay on their side of the glass. Faye seemed to have pictured in her mind a humongous sheet of Saran Wrap. She was stretching it with impunity.
Then somebody cried, “I’ve got another pelvis, but it’s in bad shape. I’m not sure I should uncover it any more.” Sheriff Mike watched in disbelief as Faye dropped to all fours and slithered under the tape. Magda hurdled it, crying, “Bless you for your responsible field technique. I want a look at that pelvis myself.”
Sheriff Mike joined the huddle around the half-excavated pelvis. As one, Faye, Magda, and the responsible field tech said, “Adult male,” and Magda looked the sheriff right in the eye. “You’ve got three bodies here.”