Artifacts (26 page)

“You have the hands of a flintknapper. I wish I had your skill,” the sheriff said before getting down to business. “Now here’s what I want to know. Explain to me what you were doing on Seagreen Island this morning.”

“It hurt my heart to think of those poor people lying for years and years in unholy graves. And your people left some of their bones in the cold ground and took some of them away. That can’t be comfortable for them.”

“And you know how to help them rest comfortably?” the sheriff asked.

“I do the best I know how, but I didn’t get the feeling that I helped much this morning. Their spirits were just too stirred up.”

The sheriff heard Claypool shift in his chair and, without turning to look at him, said, “Wipe that cynical look off your face, son.”

“I didn’t get a good feeling last week, either,” Joe added.

Sheriff Mike considered this cryptic comment. “What happened last week?”

“Same thing. I tried to help a poor girl buried all by herself. I tried to consecrate her grave, too, but her spirit wasn’t all stirred up. It just wasn’t there.”

The sheriff heard Claypool slide to the edge of his seat and hold his breath. Trying to keep the casual tone in his voice, Sheriff Mike asked, “What girl?”

“Don’t know. Just saw her bones and a tiny little earring. That’s how you could tell she was a girl.”

Old tears rose in the sheriff’s eyes, tears older than Claypool and Joe. “Tell me about the earring.”

“It was silvery, with a screw on the back to hold it on and a little ball dangling off the bottom.”

Sheriff Mike closed his eyes, to get a better look at his memory of Abby Williford’s young face with her favorite pearl earrings dancing on either side of it. “Can you take me to her body? Please?”

Chapter 23

The sky was still clear, but the waves were rolling ever higher, complicating Faye’s efforts to get Cyril to Joyeuse as quickly as possible. She needed to ask him for the loan before her dignity reasserted itself. She could not afford to be proud today.

The
Gopher
refused to slice through waves this size and the repetitive
thwap
as its hull hit the water after each swell passed jarred her wounded leg painfully. The windscreen wasn’t doing its job, either. She could barely keep her eyes open in the face of the hot wind.

Faye was perversely happy to be uncomfortable. She was poised to use Cyril, then lay a pointy finger of suspicion on his long-lost brother. She hoped, for his sake, that the voters could be trusted to remember that being the brother of a murderer didn’t make a man any less electable.

As if to make her feel even more like dirt, Cyril hadn’t even asked her what her troubles were. He’d just cancelled his appointments for the day—appointments that probably included
CEO
s, other legislators, maybe even the governor. He was letting her take him into her confidence in her own time and she was grateful.

His concern was evident in the way he stood behind her as she piloted the
Gopher
, hands resting on the wheel beside hers, arms encircling her. It was a tender gesture but, damn her keen eyesight, it wasn’t the most romantic position he could have put himself in. As she looked up at him in gratitude, she saw right to his hairline where the bright sunlight exposed the nearly invisible scar left by the plastic surgeon who had repaired the vestiges of child abuse.

She thought of Isaiah and his mother and their noses and the sad yearbook photo of little Cyril’s battered face. Cyril was lucky that repairing his broken nose had left no scar. In fact, the adult Cyril had a nice nose, although the little asymmetric bump at its bridge perplexed her. She’d never heard of a plastic surgeon willing to give a patient a nose that wasn’t movie-star perfect. Perhaps he’d broken it again.

She focused on the water and the image of Cyril’s fourth-grade picture returned. The busted nose, the waifish smile, and the missing tooth tugged at her heart. There was no question that the man was a survivor.

She looked up at him again and he flashed her a smile. His teeth. They weren’t unattractive. They weren’t tobacco-stained and they didn’t protrude. It was just that one incisor angled out ever so slightly, crossing the other incisor by the barest millimeter. They were the teeth of a real person, one whose mouth had never been perfected by dental science.

All the admiring observations she had made—how amazing it was that an abused child could have become the strong, graceful, competent, savvy Cyril that she knew—came back to her. There was no possibility that this man was the same human being she had seen in Cyril Kirby’s fourth-grade photo.

There were no bones on the desolate islet where Joe claimed to have seen a woman’s skeleton. Not even a fingernail. Sheriff Mike shrugged at the forensics tech leaning on his shovel and waiting for instructions.

“She was here,” Joe said, the fear of returning to jail shadowing his eyes.

“Oh, I believe you, son. This soil’s been turned over lately. More than once, probably. And don’t you think it smells like bleach?”

Joe nodded.

“Well, somebody’s been here trying to cover their trail and that’s mighty interesting, because I’m thinking it’s a real old trail. Looks to me like they somehow know you found this woman. Maybe they even watched you find her. Then they came and took her away, throwing a bottle of bleach in the hole to cover up the evidence.”

“Do you have a suspect?” the technician broke in.

“Sort of. I wish to God I knew his name. I don’t. But here’s what I think I know. Years and years ago, somebody killed three people and buried them on Seagreen Island, right over there,” he said, gesturing toward the horizon.

“A few days ago,” he continued, “that person killed two people to keep them from uncovering that crime. He played it smart, manipulating the scene and the victims’ record book to cover up his motive. And the forensics lab says he was smart enough to do it without leaving fingerprints on the record book, dammit.”

He paced around the empty hole. “Now we have another person who was killed years and years ago and buried here. Did either of you know that this glorified sandbar used to be connected to Seagreen Island?”

Joe and the technician shook their heads.

“Well, it was. A big hurricane back in the Sixties rearranged everything in these parts.” He jingled the key ring strapped to his belt. “So we have this body here and somebody, probably the killer, was smart enough to move her when people started getting too close. Six bodies is a lot of dead people for one little island. I’m thinking one person killed them all. Let’s fill the goddamn hole and get back to land before this wind blows our heads off.”

And the wind indeed was coming uncomfortably close to blowing their heads off.

“Radio says the hurricane’s headed for Louisiana,” the sheriff said, leaning back in his seat and letting the technician pilot the boat. “You can sure tell there’s a storm in the Gulf. Look at them whitecaps.” Wally’s Marina was visible in the distance and, judging by the number of boats being maneuvered into slips, tropical storms generated a major peak in business. “We’ll be lucky to get back in one piece.”

Joe, who was sitting in the rear of the boat, directly behind Sheriff Mike, leaned forward and made a slashing motion across his throat. The sheriff gestured for the tech to cut the engine. The suspect—well, he wasn’t a suspect any more, just a witness. The witness had something to say.

“You know I didn’t kill those people,” he began.

“I believe you, but we’re going to have to keep you for a while longer. Murder cases have to be handled just so. You don’t even have any identification. I need to talk to you about the body you found. Maybe you have information that you don’t even know is important. Bear with me for a few more hours.”

Joe was already shaking his head, but the sheriff held up a hand, determined to finish speaking his piece. “Mr. Mantooth, you and I both know that you withheld evidence important to a murder case. You’re not in the best legal position here. By tomorrow, I may have helped your situation substantially. Today, right now, I’m going to talk to everybody I questioned in 1964 about the disappearance of Abby Williford, starting with Douglass Everett. I’ll check them for alibis, then we’ll see if they’ve been buying unusual quantities of Clorox. By the time I finish, the question of your innocence may be a moot point.”

“But Faye needs me. She needs me now.”

“How do you know?”

Joe leaned forward and pointed to the marina. “You know which boat slip is hers. Look. It’s empty. That means she’s not ashore. I’ve got to find her before this weather gets worse.”

“That hurricane’s headed for Grand Isle. This is probably as much wind as we’ll get. Being east of the eye, we might see some rain. It depends. Faye’s a smart girl. She’ll be fine.”

Joe gave a disgusted grunt and flopped back in his seat.

The sheriff had learned not to argue with a twenty-five-year-old wearing a sullen expression, so he told the technician to crank the boat. Nothing happened. He stood up, leaning over the tech, and opened the choke to offer the engine more gas. He was rewarded with a sound, but not the sound he was expecting.

It was the sound of Joe leaving the boat headfirst, diving into the five-foot waves. The purloined fuel lines tucked in the waistband of his pants flapped in the wind.

The sheriff would have feared for anyone’s life but Joe’s. His long arms and legs ate up the water as if the waves weren’t there, as if he were enjoying his morning laps at the country club.

The technician rose from his seat and began ripping off his shirt.

“Sit down, son. Look at that water. Would you like to drown today?”

Sheriff Mike raised his dispatcher on the radio, saying, “I have an escapee and I’m floating in a disabled craft just offshore of Wally’s Marina. Send some officers to patrol the swamp west of the marina. He may wash ashore there. And send somebody to pick me up.”

Joe had already swum into the distance, swallowed by the rising and falling water.

The feel of Cyril’s arms around her made Faye’s breath shiver in her throat. No, not Cyril. This man was not Cyril. Could he feel her skin shrinking away from his touch?

What had happened to Cyril and his family? The official story, the one this man had told her, said the family had detonated in the mid-Sixties, flinging parents and children in all directions. The mother had left her abusive husband, taking the youngest son with her. The father, a renowned scoundrel, had run off, leaving older brother Cedrick to carry on alone until he finished school and took a job working offshore. Except maybe he’d come back long enough to kill Abby Williford.

So who was this man pretending to be Cyril Kirby? She’d never doubted he was who he said he was, because he looked so much like the pictures of Cyril and his brother, Cedrick. The plastic surgery scar now told her the tale. In 1964, Cyril was ten and Cedrick was eighteen. If Cedrick was masquerading as his younger brother, then he was now well over fifty. With every year, it had to be harder to hide his real age.

She tried not to moan as the man standing behind her leaned forward and brushed her back with his body. If she were only big enough, strong enough to throw him overboard, she would do it in a heartbeat, because she knew why he’d stolen his little brother’s name. Suppose a man has committed a celebrated crime, a crime that every soul for miles around took to heart. What better way to evade retribution than to become simply too young to be a plausible suspect?

Say Cedrick killed Abby and fled with few possessions other than his brother’s birth certificate, waiting for his alter ego to grow up. How long would it take? A decade? Could most people tell the difference between a twenty-nine-year-old and a twenty-one-year-old? Could she right now, today, distinguish between a fifty-seven-year-old and a forty-nine-year-old, especially if the older man had had a facelift? Apparently not.

A lean, powerful man strode along Douglass Everett’s dock, dripping wet. Douglass watched him cross the very deck where Abby was beaten to death. He had the powerful sense that time was a circle, a carousel that no one ever got off. The man banged on the back door and Douglass felt he had to answer it. Otherwise the carousel would swing round again and again until the unfinished business of Abby’s death was settled.

“Douglass Everett?” the young man asked.

“Who are you and why are you here?

“My name is Joe Wolf Mantooth. I’m here because Faye Longchamp showed me this house once and told me her friend Douglass lived in it. Well, Faye’s my friend, too, and she’s in danger. I need you to help me save her.” He turned and pointed to a shiny white luxury cruiser resting on a mammoth boat lift. “What I really need is your boat.”

“Faye thinks I’m a murderer. She doesn’t want me to save her.”

Joe cocked his head. “I don’t think that’s right. Faye goes by her own laws, but she wouldn’t watch a murderer live this high on the hog.” He gestured at the sprawling beach house. “If Faye really thought you killed somebody, she woulda taken her story to the sheriff, but she didn’t. Besides, the sheriff don’t need Faye’s help to suspect you. First thing he said after finding Abby Williford’s grave was that he wanted to talk to you.”