Artifacts (24 page)

If she’d been speaking to a child she would have measured her words more carefully or said nothing at all. Joe’s gentle soul deserved the same consideration.

Joe posed another problem for her. Could she steer her life into a controlled dive without taking him down with her? When she lost Joyeuse, he would be rendered homeless. But he’d been homeless before.

It was more important to protect him from the federal charges she would face for digging on public lands. Joe had kept a low profile; it was his way. None of her customers had ever met him, so there would be no one to testify that he had profited from her pothunting activities. If nobody knew that he helped her excavate Abby, she could face the charges for withholding evidence all by her lonesome self. That was the way she wanted it.

It didn’t take long to box up the evidence supporting her suspicion that Cedrick Kirby killed Abby Williford. Sadly, it also didn’t take long to assemble her few remaining valuables. Faye owned nothing worth selling, nothing but Joyeuse. But she was never without a plan. In the morning, she would call Cyril from Wally’s and invite him out to see Joyeuse. He had money and good business sense, and he would understand the potential commercial value of her island. He would lend her the money she needed if she offered him Joyeuse as collateral.

There was no possibility that she’d ever be able to pay him back, but she preferred to lose Joyeuse to Cyril rather than to lose it for back taxes. She collapsed on her bed, surrounded by her gaily painted walls, and let failure hang in the air like a wet fog.

“I have failed,” she said aloud. “I have let Cally down.”

Her days as mistress of Joyeuse were winding down.

***

Excerpt from the oral history of Cally Stanton, recorded 1935

Chapter 21

If Joe Wolf Mantooth had been the kind of man who was in touch with his feelings, consulting them constantly in the self-conscious New Age manner, he would have known that, on this lovely morning, he was at peace in the world. This did not mean that everything in his world was perfect. He was troubled over the deaths of Faye’s two friends and his soul hurt for the woman whose lonely rest he and Faye had disturbed. He didn’t understand all of Faye’s problems, but he was well versed in the turmoil associated with money and its lack. If he’d had a cent to his name, he would have given it to Faye, although he suspected that money might ease her troubles but would not solve them.

These concerns frequently occupied Joe’s mind, but they didn’t disturb the peace at his core. As long as he could be alive in a place where he could feel the gentle morning sun on his face and enjoy watching it blaze overhead before it fell cool again into the sea, then he would be whole.

He stood on the seaward side of Joyeuse Island, watching the cartwheeling dives of the sea birds catching their fishy breakfast. His ears hissed with the noise of a stiff breeze or he might have heard the interlopers’ approach sooner, but instead an irate songbird was the one to tell the tale. At the unexpected sound, Joe wheeled around and saw what was bothering the tufted titmouse.

Two speedboats approached, hardly slowing to navigate the shallow waters ringing the island. Seven, eight, maybe nine teenagers hopped out in an area wholly unsuitable for landing boats and carelessly tied their crafts to some handy trees. Then they stomped into the marsh that dominated this side of the island, oblivious to lurking water moccasins, although they were making enough drunken noise to scare away any sensible predator.

“I been hearing about the Wild Man all my life and I’m ready to lay my eyes on him,” said the boy in the lead.

“Sharon said she saw him right here, right on this island. Do you think he’s really eighty years old, like they say?” said a younger boy, taking swig of his beer.

“Doubt it. Sharon said he was cute,” said the only girl in the group.

Joe the Wild Man, who was indeed cute, could travel through deep woods without making a sound. While his hunters were busy thrashing around in the swamp, he had retreated inland to his camp with a clear idea of what must happen. They must not find him. They must not find this camp. They must, under no circumstances, stumble upon Faye’s house.

His hands closed on his bow, laboriously crafted over a period of weeks out of wood he had gathered and bent and shaped. It was held together with sinew and glue made from the bodies of animals he killed himself. He fitted an arrow to the string, its arrowhead made of rock he’d chipped, held to its shaft with the same sinew and glue. He believed in fighting his own battles, using weapons that were integral parts of himself.

He watched the kids stumble forward. It had taken them a full night of drinking to get up the nerve for this sightseeing trip and the results were obvious. In this terrain, their gaits were uneven and unsteady, making it difficult to aim precisely. At last, he saw his chance and let the arrow fly.

It bit into a tree trunk after passing between the first two boys at shoulder height. They were walking so close to each other that they could have held hands if they’d been so inclined. The group turned in a single motion and fled, as Joe had intended. One of them paused and tugged at the arrow, as Joe had feared, but he couldn’t free it, so he escaped empty-handed.

He heard them crank their boats and head for open water as he pulled his arrow from the tree. He pondered his options and saw only one: he had to leave Joyeuse, as soon as possible. He was endangering Faye’s home with his presence. Unless he left, more thrill-seekers would come looking for the Wild Man and, one day, he might accidentally hurt somebody when he was just trying to get them to leave.

Being a man of action, not thought, Joe moved quickly to load his possessions onto his johnboat. Later, it occurred to him that he should have said good-bye to Faye.

The smell of smoke from Joe’s ceremonial fire assaulted the nostrils of Deputies Claypool and Thornton, who had dutifully prowled the island all night long aided only by their flashlights. While some young lawmen easily rush into peril for the thrill of taking their quarry on its own turf, others are more sensible. Claypool and Thornton were two of the sensible ones. They wanted to survive the night, assemble the evidence, figure out who the killer was and get a warrant, then corner the creep with enough manpower and firepower to minimize the risk to themselves and their colleagues. Each of them silently welcomed the sunrise as an omen that they’d be living another day.

The flickering light of Joe’s campfire was another omen, but not a welcome one.

Good training and a couple of years working side-by-side had eliminated useless verbiage. Communicating as much with a nod and a pointed finger as with words, they decided that Thornton would cover Claypool, and Claypool would do the talking.

Good training had not prepared them for the smell of herbs burning in a bonfire or for the torchlit sight of a dark-haired man sitting, eyes closed, beside the open grave. The man rose to his moccasined feet, and Claypool recognized him as the stranger who had appeared on Seagreen Island’s beach the day after Sam and Krista were killed.

He drew his sidearm, knowing that Thornton had already taken aim at the stranger’s sternum, and barked, “Drop everything and, very slowly, show me your hands.” The stranger did as he was told and Claypool was slightly relieved. This was bad, because the relief brought on the head rush that so often struck when a crisis was over. This crisis wasn’t over, but now Claypool would have to fight his own body chemistry—the muscle shakes that made his gun waggle, the cold sweat that dripped in his eyes, and the dry throat that made his voice squeaky when he yelled, “Did you do this?”

He gestured at the open hole where he’d watched people digging up pieces of a child, pieces of a man and a woman. “Did you do this?” he demanded again.

Joe was a simple man with a literal mind. He looked at the ceremonial talismans surrounding the grave and knew that he certainly made them, so he said, in front of Deputy Claypool and a witness, “Yes. I did.”

Deputy Claypool could have slapped himself, but his hands were busy. He had just failed, in front of a witness, to advise this guy of his Miranda rights.

He chanted the mantra, the rosary, the creed, the TV script, the ever-familiar
You have the right to remain silent
, and all the rest of it, and he did it quickly. Then he asked again, “Did you do this?”

Joe remained silent, not because he had just been advised that he had a right to do so, but because he was unutterably confused and he wasn’t sure exactly what the man in the uniform wanted him to say. He spent a quiet moment with his arms in the air, waiting for the men to put their guns away and tell him what to do. Even in such a situation, a part of him was aware of the wind’s strength and its direction. Some part of his ear was monitoring the pitch and rhythm of insect song and how frequently waves broke on the nearby shore. Joe wasn’t sure what the men with the guns were going to do with him, but his senses were telling him that something in the natural world was seriously off-kilter.

Faye had skipped breakfast and spent the first hour of the day combing her house for things to sell. The harvest was meager so she was taking her desperate inventory to the outbuildings scattered among the trees behind her home. She knew that Joyeuse’s service buildings had once been confined in a courtyard that was always kept fenced and swept clean, because her grandmother had told her so, but nature can take back a lot of land in fifty years. Sizeable trees hung over the old sheds, and damp shade was hard on buildings of any age.

The condition of Faye’s outbuildings depended heavily on their material of construction. Several small sheds that had served as corncribs and smokehouses were built of pine planks. They sagged at such discouraging angles that Faye had long since emptied them so that nothing would come to harm when they fell.

The kitchen, however, was stoutly built of cypress. Its long straight sills sat on cypress stumps. Cypress lasts well-nigh onto forever. Faye could have used the kitchen for its original purpose if she’d cared to cook in an immense iron cauldron suspended in a fireplace large enough to house her bed. Someone had years ago decided that the kitchen would make an excellent place to store old farm equipment. Faye looked it over. Some of the equipment might have value as scrap metal. She would ask Cyril if he knew anyone who would be interested in it.

Sturdier still than the kitchen was the barn she had lent Wally. It was constructed of tabby, the same shell-and-limestone cement that composed her house’s bottom level. She had long suspected that the first settlers on Joyeuse Island, perhaps William and Susan Whitehall, had built a simple dogtrot cabin of tabby that was later converted into a basement for the current house. The ornate and ostentatious upper floors suited Andrew LaFourche’s temperament perfectly. If her suspicions were correct, then the tabby barn would have been the original service building, so it was probably older than any other structure on the island, except for the first floor of the big house. That made it special, and she had been glad to lend it to Wally, whom she had long considered a special friend. Maybe he would miss her when she was in jail.