Artifacts
Artifacts
Copyright © 2003 by Mary Ann Evans
First Edition 2003
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003106526
ISBN-10: 1-59058-079-6 Hardcover
ISBN-13: 978-1-59058-056-7 Hardcover
ISBN-13: 978-1-61552-231-1 Epub
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Poisoned Pen Press
6962 E. First Ave. Ste. 103
Scottsdale, AZ 85251
Artifacts
is dedicated to my family. They have never faltered in their faith in my work, even when it seemed that no one would ever read it but them.
This book is for my husband, David. Thank you for your blue eyes, your sweet voice, and your unwavering support.
It is for my children: Michael, who is always the first to read anything I write; Rachel, who is so generous with love and moral support; and, Amanda, the only seven-year-old I know who would even try to read a book like
Artifacts
.
It is also for my sister Suzanne. She has been my mainstay during so many crises, and, occasionally, she pays her older sister the compliment of asking her for advice. And it is for our parents, Irvin and Lillian Sellers, who gave us a home full of love, books, and music. Nothing on this earth could be any closer to heaven.
Contents
I’d like to thank those who were kind enough to review
Artifacts
in manuscript form: Michael Garmon, Rachel Garmon, David Evans, Lillian Sellers, Kelly Bergdoll, Bruce Bergdoll, Mary Anna Hovey, Leonard Beeghley, Nan Beesley, Tom Beesley, Brooke Beesley, Brenda Broaddus, Diane Howard, Bruce Evans, Toni Evans, Bette Halverstadt, Bill Hutchinson, Jennifer Johnson, Angie Stewart, David Reiser, Ned Stewart, and Rick Sapp. I am also grateful to James Hirsch for his insights into hands-on field archaeology; to James Dunbar for his underwater archaeological expertise; to Diana Tonnessen for her editing and marketing skills; to Chip Blackburn, captain of the
Miss Mary
, whose delightful tour gave this landlubber a notion of how a Gulf island dweller would live; and to Craig Ratzat, the flintknapper who told me how a stone tool might be used for close-range self-defense. All these people, reviewers and consultants alike, brought an array of expertise to the task, from bow hunting to sociology to boat handling, and the final book has been much improved by their comments. The remaining errors are all mine.
I’d also like to thank my agent, Anne Hawkins, for her gracious and able assistance; my editor, Ellen Larson, for her accurate and insightful contributions; the cover artist, Eleanor Blair, who had the talent and skill to bring Joyeuse to life; and to Barbara Peters and Robert Rosenwald, two publishers with the vision to try something new and the ability to make it succeed.
There is no record of the name that the island’s native inhabitants gave their home. The Spanish paused there only long enough to kill and plunder. Any name they gave it did not survive. The French stayed long enough to christen it appropriately—Isle Dernier. The English, though accomplished at empire building, were not original thinkers. They merely translated the French name into their own tongue. English-speaking Americans knew it only as Last Isle.
Nature was never kind to Last Isle. It was inundated by hurricanes time and again; each storm surge trenched further through the land, leaving it broken into pieces that over time acquired names of their own. Some of those pieces can no longer even be called islands.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, cartographers renamed the remains of Last Isle to acknowledge their plurality. Current sea charts no longer show a Last Isle. Instead, they warn mariners wishing to explore the crystalline waters off the Florida Panhandle to beware treacherous shallows around the Last Isles.
Long ago, life on Last Isle was idyllic. Its natives had no need of agriculture, given its abundance of fish and shellfish and waterfowl. Unfortunately, people whose lives are easy attract the attention of people whose lives are not. Their isolation had long protected the people of Last Isle from invasion, but the barrier of distance fell before the European conquerors in their tall ships. When they arrived, the massacres began in earnest.
Before the Americans finally wrested West Florida—and Last Isle with it—from the Spanish, the slaughter had tapered off. There was no one left to kill. Then the slavers auctioned their human wares to the local planters and misery returned. It took a great war to end it, one that touched even this tiny, remote spot. But despite the Last Isles’ primeval beauty, ugliness is not yet vanquished. Its old trees have presided over centuries of killing.
The Last Isles are even now an attractive haven for a killer looking for a place to conceal a crime. No witnesses to murder lurk there, so far from civilization. There could be no more convenient place to rid oneself of an inconvenient corpse. With such a history, it is not surprising that the past and its bones sometimes surface. It would be more surprising if they did not.
Faye Longchamp was digging like a pothunter and she hated herself for it. Pothunters were a bare notch above grave robbers. They were vultures. Once a pothunter defiled an ancient site, archaeologists could only hope to salvage a fraction of the information it had once held. And information, not artifacts, was the goal of legitimate archaeology.
Pothunters, on the other hand, only sought artifacts with a hefty street value, and to hell with egg-headed academics who condemned them for trashing history as they dug. There was no more precise description of what she was doing; therefore, she had sunk to the level of a pothunter. The fact that she was desperate for cold, hard cash did not absolve her.
A narrow beach to her left and a sparse stand of sea oats to her right were all that stood between Faye and the luminous turquoise of the Gulf of Mexico. Since pothunters couldn’t excavate in the open, in front of God and everybody, they worked in places like this, patches of sand too small to have names. Not a soul lived in the Last Isles, and the island chain paralleled a thinly populated stretch of Florida Panhandle coastline. It was a good place to do work that should not be seen.
Looking up from her lucrative but illegal hobby, she glanced furtively over her shoulder at Seagreen Island. Its silhouette loomed like a dark whale cresting in the distance.
She knew how to excavate properly. During her abortive college career, she had tried to learn everything about field technique that her idol, Dr. Magda Stockard, could teach her. Even ten years later, working as she did on Seagreen Island as a field supervisor under Magda’s watchful eye, she still learned something new every day. And she loved it. She loved sifting soil samples through a quarter-inch mesh and cataloging the seeds, beads, and bones that stayed behind. She loved the fact that every day was a treasure hunt. She would have worked for free, if she could have ignored her inconvenient need for food and shelter. The paycheck she received for painstaking work performed amid the heat and the humidity and the mosquitoes was always welcome, but it was insufficient.
Her work on Seagreen Island was legitimate, but it disturbed her nonetheless. Unless Magda’s archaeological survey turned up a culturally significant site, there would be nothing to stop the developers who wanted to build a resort there. The lush and tangled vegetation topping the island would be scraped off to make room for a hotel and tennis courts and a spa and a couple of swimming pools. As if Florida needed more swimming pools.
This islet where she stood was too tiny to interest developers, though the government had found it worth including in a national wildlife refuge. It was really no more than a sandbar sprinkled with scrubby vegetation, but Faye’s instincts had always been reliable. The Last Isles were once awash in wealth. The wind and waves couldn’t have carried it all away; they must have left some of it under the sand, ripe for discovery by a needy pothunter. A tiny bit of that dead glory would pay this year’s property taxes. A big, valuable chunk of the past would save her home forever.
Home. The thought of losing her home made Faye want to hurl her trowel to the ground in frustration, but doing so would require her to stop digging, and she couldn’t do that. Something in her blood would never let her quit. Faye did not intend to be the one who let the family down.
Two eager archaeology students had volunteered to stay behind the rest of their field crew on mosquito-infested Seagreen Island. Tomorrow would have been soon enough to catalog the day’s finds and mark the next swath of dig spots, but these two were too dedicated to their work for their own good. If the student archaeologists had cleared out on the stroke of five, they could have been enjoying Tuesday-night sitcoms and beer with their colleagues. Instead, they were conscientiously digging their own graves.
The sun kept sliding toward the Gulf of Mexico, and the red-haired girl kept squinting through the viewfinder of her surveyor’s transit. She barked directions to her partner as he slowly—so slowly—placed one flag after another in yet another nice neat row. They checked and rechecked the grid of sampling spots, careful to ensure that everything was exactly as their supervisor had recorded in the field notebook that the young woman clutched like a bible.
The young man, standing in the shade of an ancient tree, twisted the surveyor’s flag, yelling, “Hey, Krista, there’s so many roots here, I can hardly get it in the ground.”
The young man grunted as he pushed the flag into the soil, ignorant of what lay beneath his feet. The base probed deeper. It struck something horrible, but the young man and his companion remained unaware of it, so they were allowed to continue breathing.
Faye knelt at the edge of the evening’s excavation. She’d put in a full day on Seagreen Island. Then, after her colleagues’ boat was safely out of sight, she’d worked nearly another half-day here. It seemed like she had displaced half the little islet’s soil, and her biceps quivered from the strain. She had been so sure. Her instincts had screamed, “This is the spot,” the moment she dragged her skiff onto the bedraggled beach. This was a place for buried treasure, a place to dig up the find that would change her life. She still felt that electric anticipation, but her shovel had turned over nothing but sand.
The aluminum-on-sand groan of Joe’s flat-bottomed johnboat being dragged onto the beach caught her ear, but his presence didn’t disturb her dogged work. She hardly looked up when he said, “It’s about dark, Faye. If you ain’t already found anything worth digging up, you won’t be finding it tonight.”
Joe was right, so she ignored him.
He tried again. “Faye, the day’s gone. Come home and eat some supper. You can try again tomorrow.”
Faye continued to ignore him.
Joe sighed, glanced at the last scrap of sun melting into the Gulf and squatted on his haunches beside her. “Okay, you want to dig in the dark? Let’s dig in the dark. You got another one of those little hand-shovel things?”
Faye could steel herself against displaying her emotions, even on those occasions when outbursts were expected. At funerals, Faye was the competent one who made sure that the other mourners had comfortable chairs and fresh handkerchiefs. She grieved later, alone in her car, undone by the sight of a woman sitting at the bus stop with her head cocked at her mother’s angle.
Sometimes, when forced to carry on long past any sane person’s breaking point, she found herself weeping at dog food commercials. Now, since she no longer had a TV, she was denied even that cheap outlet, so she was defenseless in the face of Joe’s chivalrous offer. The sudden tears surprised her.
“Why are you crying? Don’t do that!” Joe cried.
Faye, in her state of emotional upheaval, found Joe’s panicked squeak uproarious. She dropped to the ground, laughing.
Joe bent over her with his brow furrowed in confusion and demanded, “Why are you laughing? What’s wrong?”
“I’m laughing because you think I’m an idiot for digging in the dark, but you’re willing to be an idiot, too, rather than leave me alone with the sand fleas.”
Joe put his hand on her shoulder. His solicitous tone did nothing to quench her giggles. “And why are you crying?”
Her giggles subsided. “Because you’re the best friend I ever had.”
Joe brushed his ponytail over his shoulder and looked at the few stars bright enough to penetrate the early evening haze. “Aw, Faye. Smart, pretty girl like you—you’re bound to have bunches of friends.”
“No, not many. You don’t know how hard it is…” She swallowed the suggestion that Joe wouldn’t understand how hard life could be for a child who wasn’t really white or black, who didn’t fit neatly into any racial pigeonhole at all, because she knew better. The bronze tint of the skin over his high cheekbones said that Joe Wolf Mantooth knew all about it.
Whether he knew what she was thinking or just sensed it was time to change the subject, Joe took the trowel from her hand. Humming in his monotone way, he aimlessly moved soil around the bottom of the pit Faye had excavated. They both heard the muted click when the trowel struck something that wasn’t rock, nor metal, nor plastic. On their hands and knees immediately, they saw the object at once. It was the color of the sand that nearly buried it, but its sleek, gleaming curve attracted the eye. Faye, instinctively falling back on her archaeological training, reached into her back pocket for a fine paintbrush to work the sand gently away from the surface of this human skull.
Joe jumped up, saying, “We have to go home and get my stuff, Faye. There’s a lot of things I need to do.”
Joe believed in the old ways from his skin-clad feet to his pony-tailed head and Faye respected his desire to consecrate this old grave. He fumbled in the large leather pouch that always hung from his belt. “I’ve got tobacco here, but nothing else. I need to go home and get some food, and a clay pot to put it in. And some coals from my fire and some cleansing herbs for washing. Faye—”
Faye held up a hand for him to be quiet, because she was busy assessing the skull’s archaeological context. It was unusual to find a burial like this one, one unassociated with other graves or signs of human habitation, but it wasn’t a complete aberration. She’d read that Choctaw warriors killed in battle were buried by their wives on the very spot where they fell. The burial had to be accomplished without disturbing the corpse, without even touching it. As Faye brushed sand away from a sizeable fracture radiating from the skull’s temple, she wondered whether she was the first person to touch this man since his killer had bashed his brains out.
“Faye, let’s go. This guy’s rested here a long time and we’ve disturbed him. We got to help him rest again. It’s the right thing to do. It ain’t respectful to wait.”
Faye didn’t answer Joe, because she was busy. She would discuss this with him in a minute; he’d just have to be patient with her. She was wholeheartedly glad he knew how to treat this burial with respect. She may have become a common pothunter, but she was no grave robber and disturbing the dead chilled her bones. Joe’s makeshift funeral rites assuaged her guilt a bit.
Still, she wished that he would hush for just a minute while she examined this skull.
The cabbage palms of Seagreen Island cast jagged shadows on the red-haired girl’s face as she initialed her field notebook with a flourish. She ran her fingers through an inch-long crop of spiky hair.
“Done,” she said. “I can’t believe we finished before dark.”
“Dr. Stockard would probably say ‘Quick work is imprecise work.’”
“I don’t care,” was the girl’s airy reply. “Let’s go check the sample bags so we can eat supper and go to bed.”
They crossed the crest of the small hill that ran down the spine of Seagreen Island. In their wake stood a tidy row of surveyor’s flags, each consisting of a simple length of wire topped with a rectangle of orange vinyl. The flags marched straight toward a mammoth live oak tree and the last one stood in the shade of the oak’s moss-draped branches.
Early the next morning, the rest of the field crew would arrive to dig a test pit at each spot marked by a flag. If they were to dig under the live oak, their shovels would turn over more than just dirt.