Artifacts (28 page)

He was quite near the barrier island he had his sights on, the one that wasn’t Faye’s, when he steered broadside to the pounding waves and one of them tossed his boat belly-side-up. It would have been better if Nguyen had been knocked unconscious when the boat capsized. Then he could have drowned quickly rather than using his diving skills to fight through the debris trapped with him. He wouldn’t have had to try, time and again, to overcome the powerful wave action slamming him into the wreck, so that he could swim down and escape his prison. He could have died easily rather than clinging to the upturned hull as it rose high on each approaching wave, then crashed into the trough that signaled another wave curling toward him.

Nguyen’s death proved to be painful and protracted. Providence tends to repay people in the coin they hand to others.

“Here we are,” Joe shouted above the wind. He cut the engine and let the boat drift into a shallow inlet.

Douglass saw that Faye’s island was large enough to be heavily treed. It wasn’t so very far from land, but the nearest shore was a long stretch of uninhabitable swamp. Besides, the true descriptor of an island’s remoteness was the distance its residents had to travel to swap water transportation for ground travel. An island dweller didn’t measure distance to land. No wonder Wally’s Marina played such a central role in Faye’s life.

Still, no matter how remote, this island was surely well-known to fishers and boaters plying these waters. That would explain the “No Trespassing” signs that decorated half the trees along the shoreline. At this moment, though, the thing that Douglass appreciated most about Faye’s island was its solidity. He figured he could have withstood the bucking and swaying of about seven more waves, then he would have been forced to vomit.

“Do you think we’d be safer sleeping out here, rather than fighting this weather all the way back to shore?” he asked, thinking of his rebellious stomach.

He assumed he was wrong, because Joe’s glare said he thought Douglass was a fool who didn’t understand English.

Chapter 25

The necklace broke, as Faye had hoped it would.

She suspected the Senator had known it would, because he said, “I never looked forward to killing anybody before.”

Faye tried to stop her head from lolling as she gasped for the breath he’d choked out of her. She refused to die until she understood. Why her? Why Krista and Sam? Why anybody?

“Never looked forward…” she wheezed. “You’ve killed six—” She let a long whistling breath interrupt her. “Maybe more. Should be enjoying yourself by now.”

“No.” He spoke quickly and precisely. “Only four.”

“Only four?” Now Faye could breathe. She could almost think. “Does that mean the devil will assign you a cooler spot in hell? Are you trying to tell me you didn’t kill Krista and Sam?”

“No, I did that. I had to do that. I couldn’t let them—”

He hadn’t let go of her neck and his face was a centimeter away from hers. She needed, really needed, for him to get out of her face, so she intentionally sprayed saliva as she hissed, “You couldn’t let us dig up your family? Well, we already did that. Yesterday.”

“No one will ever figure out who they are. My parents disappeared within two months of each other and the sheriff and his Deputy Mike McKenzie never doubted my story. They just figured that two no-account rednecks had shucked their responsibilities and run off to fornicate and birth another crop of mental defectives like themselves.”

The anger boiled out of him and he shook her until the breath rattled in her throat again. Submission seemed appropriate, so she said, “You’re right. Somebody should’ve looked for your missing parents. Nothing but prejudice prevented it.”

“Of course, it was prejudice. I counted on it to cover up the killings, and I knew what I was doing. And I’m still safe. Nobody’s going to suspect that those bones on Seagreen Island belong to my family. My parents were buried with a ten-year-old and, by golly, here I am. Cyril Kirby is all grown up. There is no missing ten-year-old. I’m not worried.”

“You were worried enough to shoot two kids.”

The Senator did not respond.

“You say you’ve killed four people. I know of six bodies. Why don’t we take an inventory?”

Her challenge, to provide an accurate accounting of what he’d done, seemed to clear his mind.

“Abby was an accident,” he said in a rational tone. “I’d just gotten paid for my first month on the oil rig, and I’d never had cash, folding money, to spend in my life. I wanted to spend it on Abby, because she was pretty and—all through high school—none of the boys had managed to get her attention.”

The Senator’s grip tightened on her arm when she taunted him with, “So your idea of getting her attention was to beat her to death?”

“No. No. I knew she was living alone for the summer at her daddy’s beach house. When I knocked on her door, she didn’t answer, so I walked around back to the patio and there she was at the wet bar, fixing herself a drink. She was dressed in a lacy dress with a tight waist and wide skirt. I didn’t do anything wrong. I just asked her out to dinner. I was rough around the edges in those days, but my manners weren’t so bad. I asked her nicely.”

He didn’t go on and Faye was compelled to prod him to finish his story. Somebody, finally, needed to know what happened to Abby that night and she was glad it would be her, even if she didn’t live to pass the truth on.

“Did she laugh at you?” Faye asked. “Was she cruel? Is that why—?”

“Abby? Cruel? No. She was sweet about it. She said, ‘You see I’m already dressed. Daddy and I are having dinner in Tallahassee. I’m going to college there in September, you know.’ Then she offered me a drink.”

“I’m not understanding this story,” Faye said, feeling that the Senator had far better reasons to kill her than he had to kill Abby.

“You wouldn’t. It’s just this: At that moment, I understood that money wasn’t going to fix what was wrong with me. The wad of money in my pocket was worthless. I could never have Abby or any woman like her, because they were going to colleges and cities and places where they could find husbands just like their daddies. The only women who would ever have me were cringing, stupid cows like my mother. I would have no choice other than to beat them, just like my father beat my mother, because what else can you do with a woman like that?”

He waited until Faye looked him in the face. “So I slugged her. That was how my father dealt with balky women. It seemed like the thing to do. Except, as she fell, she hit her head on the corner of the wet bar. It gashed her scalp to the bone and fractured her skull. There was blood everywhere and that nigra Everett came walking up her dock carrying a fishing pole while I was trying to wipe it up. He said he was going to kill me, but he changed his mind when I told him how things were going to be. Sometime while I was explaining why he needed to keep his mouth shut, she stopped breathing.”

“How—” Faye groped for a word to describe a debutante with a bashed-in skull, overdressed and dead beside the patio wet bar of her father’s beach house. “How ghastly.”

“Yes. How do you like that? It took twenty years of beatings for my father to kill my mother, but I managed it on the first try. But then I always knew I was twice the man Daddy ever was.”

“And little Cyril?”

“Oh, he killed him, too, same day as Mama. He beat my mother and brother forever, but if he ever beat me, I don’t remember it. I don’t know why not. Probably because I have never in my life looked or smelled like a victim. One day, I came home from football practice and found that he’d gone too far. I think he killed Cyril first. It was probably easy—there wasn’t much to him in body or spirit—but then he had to contend with Mama. God, what a scene I walked in on.”

“How ghastly,” Faye said again.

“Yeah. I’d hated Daddy all my life, but that was the first and only time he ever scared me. He scared me enough to make me help him bury them, out in the Last Isles, then he told everybody nasty tales about where my mama was and people believed him.”

Faye was doing the math. The Senator had confessed to killing four of the six bodies she’d found. If he didn’t kill his mother or his brother, then he was responsible for all the others.

“When did you kill your father?” she asked.

“Baseball season. I came home from practice one day, still carrying my bat, and saw him sitting at the kitchen table. My hands just swung at his head without consulting my brain. One good lick upside the head with my baseball bat and Daddy wasn’t ever going to bother anybody again. I buried him with Mama and Cyril, because I knew it would have made him mad.”

“It was that easy?”

The Senator nodded. “I told the same story he told about my mama, that he’d run off with some drunken slut. Everybody was happy to believe me. I left town the day after I graduated and only came back to see Abby the one time. When Cyril was old enough, I went to Auburn under his name. By the time I came back to this part of the world, fifteen years had passed and I had been Cyril for more than seven of them.”

Faye knew it was unwise to bait a confessed killer, but felt she had nothing to lose. “And you’re going to enjoy killing me to cover your tracks?”

“No, covering my tracks is just a necessary evil, just like killing the archaeology students. I’m going to enjoy killing you because you betrayed me. I cared for you, Faye. And all the time you were seeing me, you were carrying on with the young Indian, stealing from Abby, disturbing her rest, disturbing my mother.”

Oh, Jesus, the garroting was just for fun. There was a bulge in the pocket of his khakis and he was going for it. Faye rammed the porch floor with her feet and achieved liftoff. The swing flipped backward, just as it had ever since she was a little girl. Faye hit the ground in a shoulder roll, just as she had done ever since she was a little girl. The Senator fell in a heap.

Joe led Douglass up the path to Faye’s house. It was, as always, a faint trail through Joyeuse’s lush undergrowth, but Faye liked it that way. She said it kept the paparazzi away, but she just laughed when he asked her what paparazzi were.

There was an odd rustling in the bushes to either side of the path, as if all the mammals on the island—squirrels, rabbits, rats, and more—were seeking cover at once. The birds and insects had been dead silent. Now, suddenly, they were making noise as loud and random as city traffic.

Joe stepped off the path, pushing vines aside and stepping under them. Something was bothering the animals. Perhaps it was just the weather, because the weather was certainly bothering Joe. But perhaps it was something more, and Joe wanted to know what it was. He pushed further into the tangled bushes, letting Douglass move ahead of him on the path, alone.

Douglass worked his way down an overgrown trail that Joe claimed led to Faye’s house, shuddering to think what kind of tumbledown, vermin-infested cabin might lie at the end of such a path. He had known that Faye’s monetary problems were mighty—that fact had been obvious in their every business transaction—but if he’d known she was virtually homeless, he would have adopted her and taken her home with him.

Joe turned aside, presumably to answer the call of nature. Not wanting to hover too close while the poor guy peed, Douglass plunged ahead. The path was faint, but it was clearly there. How lost could he get?

The trail ended in a clearing that was far too small for the building it enclosed. Faye assuredly did not live in a cabin. Her house might be tumbledown and it might be vermin-infested, but it was not a cabin. It had once been a mansion.

Massive columns supported a massive roof on all sides, their white paint fading to silver. A sweeping staircase rose a full story to a double door flanked with sidelights and topped with a graceful Palladian window that was miraculously unbroken. Sadly, many of the other windows had not been so lucky. The great house’s decline was most evident in the corroding tin roof that capped its glorious bulk. No wonder Faye never had any cash. She lived in a money sink.

The house was too big to take in at a single glance. As he swept his gaze to the far right end of the main floor gallery, he saw color and motion. Faye was rising to her feet and somebody else was lying beside her with his arm upraised. As she bounded over the gallery railing, Douglass shouted, “Faye, no!” because she was headed for a twelve-foot drop. She hit the ground and scuttled on all fours into the open breezeway that divided the ground floor into two parts.

Her assailant was running down the staircase, which was wise. He would have been foolish at his age to take the fall Faye just took. Bones grow brittle with time. Besides, no one in their right mind would take such a risk while carrying a handgun.

Douglass stepped backward toward the well-camouflaged footpath, trying to reach cover before the gunman saw him, but he never had a chance. The man looked him bold in the eyes and Douglass recognized the face of his blackmailer, who coolly aimed and fired.

The bullet’s momentum threw him to the ground. It had struck him somewhere in the chest. Shock blocked the pain, but he could tell that much. The shooter was coming toward him, coming to finish him off. Lord, he didn’t want to take another bullet, but he’d been dying by degrees for forty years.

His vision was fading but he could see Faye hiding behind the house, peeking through the breezeway. His hearing was fading, too, but he heard what she did for him.

She cried, “Hey, Senator, you lousy son-of-a-bitch. I’m the one you’re going to enjoy killing. Leave him to bleed to death, because you’re going to have a devil of a time catching me.”

And his blackmailer ran after her, taking his bullets with him.

How much money had he paid the man he’d known first as Cedrick Kirby, then as Senator Cyril Kirby? He’d looked Abby’s father in the face every day, taken a paycheck from him every Friday, and stolen from him every chance he got, all because he was afraid of this man. Mr. Williford was never right in his mind after Abby’s disappearance and he had trusted Douglass with his affairs. When the old man’s will revealed that he’d left the construction business to Douglass, it eased a portion of the guilt. All the embezzlements that his blackmailer had forced him to execute were finally wiped away. Douglass had only been stealing from himself.