Artifacts (29 page)

Irvin Williford wasn’t cold in his grave when Douglass bought the old man’s beach house from his estate. Controlling the site of Abby’s death made him breathe easier. He remodeled the house before moving in—like any proud new owner who could afford it—and in the process sent the tiles from the patio to the landfill. He would never again look at them and remember the way her blood had looked, splashed across the gaily decorated floor. And he’d had the workmen demolish the outdoor wet bar with its wicked sharp corner. That corner had broken Abby’s fall, caved in her skull, and ended her life. It was gone now, along with the clothes he’d worn that night and his junky fishing boat. And Abby herself.

Douglass wondered whether the wound in his chest was mortal and if God would let him see Abby when he died just one more time.

Faye figured that she and the Senator each had an advantage in this life-and-death contest. He had a gun, and she was on her own turf. She would gladly trade her advantage for his. She’d even move this chase to Mars if it meant she could have a gun, too.

Maybe Douglass was still alive. She liked to think she’d bought him another moment of life, but that’s all she could give him. It was all she could give herself. She could only take one moment, then another one, all the while hoping for a miracle.

Joe, standing in the shadow of a pine tree, saw Faye jump and he saw Douglass fall. As soon as Faye, then Cyril, disappeared into the dense woods behind the big house, Joe stepped out of the shadows and pulled Douglass to his feet. The wounded man could stand, with help, but he couldn’t walk. Joe draped Douglass’ arms over his own shoulders, supporting him on his back. He hurried toward the house, with Douglass’ limp feet dragging in the dirt behind his moccasins. Hauling Douglass into the basement, he stashed him behind the secret door that led to the sneak stair.

“I’ll be back for you after I find Faye.”

“The bullet?” Douglass wheezed.

“It went straight through. Must have missed your heart.”

“I don’t think it missed but one of my lungs,” Douglass gasped, but Joe had already closed him behind a well-camouflaged door. If something happened to Faye and Joe, then he guessed he’d just become a grisly part of this grand house’s historical character.

Hiding in a palmetto thicket had seemed like a good idea to Faye at the time, because her pursuer would never expect it. No one in his right mind would hide there. Palmettos, waist-high miniature palms, had stalks like serrated kitchen knives.

She had slithered on her side deep into the thicket, trying to ooze around each jagged trunk without jostling it. Waggling palmetto fronds would look like fingers on a beckoning hand saying, “Shoot me, please shoot me.”

Every joint ached from her jump off the gallery but the old wound on her thigh was throbbing worse than that. The cool mud she ground into the wound with each movement was oddly soothing.

She had always believed she knew her island better than the markings on her own palm. She had eaten the squirrels and rabbits and birds Joe had shot here. She’d even eaten frog legs, fruits of his occasional frog-gigging ventures. Still, she’d had no idea that she lived in the midst of so many creatures.

Just since she’d crawled into this thicket, she’d seen a water rat, an armadillo, a lizard, and two snakes. She could hear the cries overhead of birds that should by rights have settled in for the fast-approaching evening. Could all this unusual activity be triggered by the Senator’s mere presence? Could animals sense the presence of evil? If so, they were clearly smarter than she was.

A possum ambled by and she silently thanked him for making noise and disturbing the vegetation. Faye’s critters were doing everything they could to make her hard to track.

A gunshot rang out and the possum dropped bloody to the ground, effectively removing any desire Faye might have to risk giving away her position by moving, ever again. There were no more shots. Faye realized that he was hoarding his ammunition, saving it for likely targets at close range. How much did he have? It only took one bullet to end a life. Could she wait him out?

The chittering screech of an enraged squirrel sounded in her right ear and she proved the power of the human mind over ancient animal reflexes by refusing to scream.

Then the squirrel whispered, “Faye.”

She inched her head gingerly toward the right and saw Joe lying on his belly just outside the palmetto patch. He crooked his finger and she inchwormed her way toward him, sliding around one treacherous stalk at a time.

By the time she reached Joe, her hands were pinned to her sides and all she could do was incline her head toward him. He leaned forward, lips against her ear and murmured, “He doesn’t know I’m here. I can lead him away. When it’s safe, run to the house, all the way to the little room up top. I’ll come for you.”

She opened her mouth to argue and he covered it with his hand. Then he slid snake-like back to the woods and the path that led through it. She saw him sprint silently along the path, away from the house and toward the far shore. He stopped, ruffled the branches along the path with his hands and stomped down hard on a dry branch before disappearing down the trail. Hardly a minute passed before the Senator passed the same spot in hot pursuit. When he was out of sight, she leapt up, running for Joyeuse like a child taking a skinned knee to her mother.

Her thigh was swelling. It jiggled every time her foot struck the ground. She told herself that it wasn’t infected. She told herself that Joe was younger and stronger than Cyril and that a fifty-five-second head start would negate the advantage of Cyril’s gun. She told herself that Joe had a good reason for sending her to the cupola rather than to her boat, but all she wanted to do was escape.

She reached Joyeuse and remembered something she’d forgotten to worry about. There was a bloody spot in the grass where Douglass had fallen, but where was Douglass? She saw no other blood anywhere. Had he crawled into the woods to hide? Maybe she could spot him if she climbed to the cupola.

She rushed inside, instinctively avoiding the spiral staircase. It was too exposed and it took too long to climb. Any fool with a gun could pick her off if he caught her halfway up the spiral. She rushed to the sneak staircase and flung open the hidden door.

There, behind it, was Douglass and all the rest of his blood. The carpet at the foot of the stairs was soaked with it. When he saw her, he tried to use the arm on his uninjured side to push himself into a sitting position, but it didn’t work. Bracing against the narrow walls of the closet-sized stairway for leverage, she wrestled him to his feet.

It took forever but she worked him up to the top floor and lowered the ladder to the cupola. With Douglass dragging himself upward one-handed and with her shoulder to his butt, she managed to get them both through the trapdoor, but she didn’t dare close it before Joe came. What if it stuck again?

And she didn’t dare let the sticky trail of Douglass’ blood lead the Senator to their hiding place. Leaving Douglass sprawled on the cupola floor, she grabbed some rags out of the storage bench in the cupola and hurried back down the stairs. It was important to clean up the blood in the basement and especially on the landing beneath the cupola. Their trail must not be found because, from the cupola, there was no place to retreat.

She was wiping the landing clean when Joe bounded up the stairs and climbed the ladder to the cupola, extending a hand down to help her up. She kept him waiting as she ducked into her bedroom to salvage William Whitehall’s journal. Armed with her most treasured possession, she climbed the ladder and helped drag it into the cupola after them. As the trapdoor closed, Faye watched a killer emerge from the woods and walk into her home, gun in hand.

The view from the cupola was surreal. It was her island, but it wasn’t. The sea had pulled away, leaving immense wet beaches on the Gulf side and isolated pools of abandoned water littering the narrow strait between Joyeuse and the mainland. Looking toward the Last Isles, she saw that the Gulf had pulled away from their shores, much further than at low tide. All the pieces of Last Isle were nearly one again.

She felt a time echo, as if she remembered standing there before, long ago, watching as the Turkey Foot Hotel rose on Last Isle. That was silly. The outline of Last Isle was barely visible. Nobody could see that degree of detail from here. The chilly sensation of
déja vu
arose again and she sat down, weak and shaken. The polished pieces of old glass that she’d pulled out of the very storage bench she was perched on—they were the broken lenses of a long-ago pair of opera glasses. On the windowsill sat the pair of binoculars she had left the last time she hid in this tiny room. She lifted them to her eyes and saw, for the first time, the original shape of Last Isle. Projecting from its near shore was a large peninsula, from which three smaller peninsulas jutted into the water, looking for all the world like a turkey foot. She knew where the old hotel had stood. She would bet the farm on it.

She let the binoculars drop into her lap and studied the scene. There was no mistaking what the decrease in water level meant. The water had to go somewhere. It was gathering offshore, getting ready to roll over the island and wash them all away.

Faye felt the words. “Joe. The water. My God,” leave her in a single breath, like a prayer.

She knelt beside Douglass, supporting him with her shoulder and her encircling arm so he could see out the window. He was too hot and his hands were dry. “What’s happening?” he asked, and Faye wasn’t sure whether delirium was speaking or whether he actually saw the landscape below them and wondered what it meant.

“The hurricane is coming,” Joe said patiently to Douglass, as if it were something he had repeatedly warned him about, because he thought he had.

Joe, who just that morning had seemed so helpless when faced with jail and civilization and the law, was back in the natural world where his intellectual shortcomings hardly mattered at all. He sat cross-legged atop the trapdoor and opened the leather pouch that always swung from his belt, neatly arranging its contents over the floor like a little boy’s bag of treasures. There were rocks and bits of leather. A skein of twine as fine as dental floss. A pocketknife. A handful of arrowheads, all different sizes.

“What are we going to do?” Faye whispered, afraid to speak aloud and risk giving away their hiding spot.

“We will wait for the storm to pass.” It was amazing how quietly Joe could speak without resorting to a whisper. “This house has seen hurricanes before. Maybe it will survive this one.”

Faye didn’t wail. She didn’t remind Joe that Joyeuse was old now, fragile. Faye herself had wounded her, just days ago. Windowpanes she had broken herself offered their toothy mouths to the storm. There would be water on the heart-pine floors, saturating the antique French wallpaper, dripping off the rosewood treads of the spiral staircase. These things would not be important tonight, when the only important thing in the world would be surviving the storm, but they were important now.

Could the old house stand the storm? The tabby foundation was solid. She’d found watermarks proving that floodwater had once risen a full story above the ground, completely submerging the aboveground basement, but the foundation had held. If the waves didn’t undermine the basement and the wind didn’t blow the hand-riven wallboards of the upper floors apart, they might survive.