Artifacts (30 page)

“What about him?” she hissed pointing through the floor, down to where a predator was waiting.

“Is he a smart man?”

“Yes, very.”

“Then he will think to search the house. We are well hidden here. Perhaps he won’t find us before the storm strikes.”

“And when the hurricane passes?”

Joe continued handling his treasures, holding each talisman up to the light. “Perhaps the storm will kill him for us. If he survives, we have an advantage.”

“What advantage? Wherever he is in this house, he’s still blocking our way out. And he has a gun.”

“Yes. But he thinks you’re alone.”

Faye only had one talisman to comfort her. She hugged the journal to her chest.

Douglass was lying on the floor at her feet, stirring, moaning. If he cried out, they were lost. She laid her clammy hand on his hot brow and wished she knew the end to Cally’s story. She was a mere four pages from the end of Cally’s oral history, but she might not survive to read them.

***

Excerpt from the oral history of Cally Stanton, recorded 1935

Chapter 26

In 1975, Hurricane Eloise was headed for Mobile Bay and, by midday on the last day before landfall, all precautions for a hurricane of middling strength had been taken. Most residents of the Florida Panhandle went to bed that night and slept soundly, unaware that the storm was strengthening and veering sharply to the northeast. By dawn, they were awakened by rescuers roaming the streets with bullhorns, urging coastal dwellers to seek high ground. Later that day, Eloise leveled their deserted homes with winds gusting to one hundred fifty-six miles per hour.

As recently as 1995, emergency personnel were caught flat-footed when Hurricane Opal, a mere Category 2 storm, blossomed over the brief course of an afternoon into a tremendous storm nearing the Category 5 mark. Its forward speed doubled during that time, bringing disaster closer, faster. The evacuation order came late, after most residents were in bed. As the warning spread, highway gridlock set in; the storm was moving faster than the traffic. Only a last-minute weakening of the storm—an act of God unattributable to science—averted great loss of life.

Since 1960, satellites and computers have decreased the National Hurricane Center’s average twenty-four-hour forecast error only from one hundred twenty nautical miles to one hundred. Meanwhile, Florida’s population has metastasized. One day, a freak of nature will wipe a stretch of shoreline clean of its condominium fringe, and Nature will not deign to warn us.

Faye, Joe, Douglass, Cyril—not one of them had been in earshot of a radio since early morning. It was near sundown and, on a whim, the hurricane had spent that time churning their way.

The wind threw the first punch, slamming over the vulnerable Gulf islands and sweeping away anything that wasn’t fastened to the ground. It erased large chunks of the sand dunes that protected the luckier islands, using the sand to fill the mouths of random inlets, leaving their waters cut off from the sea.

On a tiny piece of long-gone Last Isle, the wind scoured away the sand that had covered the foundation of the Turkey Foot Hotel for so long. The island under them held, for a little while, but the sea had its plans. Sooner or later, all the pieces of Last Isle would go under the waves, but for now the old hotel would have its time in the sun.

Sheriff Mike’s late wife had dearly hated his job when hurricane season rolled around. He rode out every storm at his desk, because it was his job to be available in an emergency. She had known that, but it always griped her to think that if the house blew away, she’d have to call 911 to let him know. And she never let him forget it.

The phone rang and he snatched it up. It was Dr. Magda Stockard. “You’ve got to help me save Faye.”

The events of the past couple weeks had eroded Sheriff Mike’s people skills. He bellowed, “How’d you get through to this phone? Did you call 911?”

“I did what I had to,” was the cryptic answer. “So listen to me. I know where Faye lives. She owns an island that hardly sticks up out of the Gulf, and she’s out there in the storm. She has to be. I’m at Wally’s looking for her right now. Neither of her boats is here, and one of them would be if she were ashore. I tried to get that bastard Wally to tell me where she was. He won’t talk, but he knows. She’s out there on her island. He’s easy to read, for a dishonest S.O.B. So hurry over here so we can take one of your big official boats out to get Faye before it gets dark.”

“The department has one boat, a small one. We work with the Marine Patrol for search and rescue.”

“So call them,” she said, and he would have been disappointed in her if she hadn’t.

“You’re aware there’s a hurricane out there. Category 5.”

“Yes, I know there’s a hurricane coming. That’s why we have to hurry.”

Sheriff Mike’s people skills were slowly returning. He fed her the bad news gently.

“This isn’t an ordinary hurricane, Magda. It wasn’t supposed to hit here, but the goddamn thing took a right turn at New Orleans and came up fast as blazes. And those extra few hours over warm water made it into a monster. I don’t know many people level-headed enough to hear what I’m fixing to tell you. This is the big one, and we’re not ready.”

“So let’s go get Faye.”

“We’d have to swim. The Marine Patrol office in Tampa has suspended rescue operations in this area for the duration of—”

“Why? Because they don’t work on Sunday?”

Sheriff Mike excused the interruption because he understood how she felt. “—For the duration of the storm,” he continued. “In their judgment, and I think they’re probably right, the risk of losing personnel and equipment is too high, and we’re going to need every officer and every rescue craft they have when the storm passes.”

“Cowards,” Magda observed tartly.

“Be that as it may. And by the way—you’re aware that Faye’s friend, Joe Wolf Mantooth, escaped from my custody today?”

Magda sputtered. “Actually, no. But—”

“Well, I’d bet my arrowhead collection that he’s with Faye. If you’d called me with Faye’s location earlier, then I might be questioning Joe Wolf right this minute and Faye might be safe. Not many people play me for a fool. Believe me, I’ll go get Joe Wolf Mantooth personally, just as soon as the storm passes.”

“We’ll go get them,” Magda said.

Only then did Sheriff Mike realize his position. The deceitful woman had never given him the exact location of Faye’s home.

“I can’t take a civilian on a manhunt,” he said flatly.

“How dangerous do you think Mr. Mantooth is?”

Silence erupted.

“That’s what I thought. I’ll be at your office as soon as the wind dies down. On second thought, I may have trouble getting there. There’ll be trees in the road, power lines, things like that. Send an emergency vehicle to the hurricane shelter in Sopchoppy—that’ll be my luxury suite for the night—and we’ll head out to Faye’s from there. And make sure you get a Marine Patrol vessel, not your little boat. God knows what’ll be floating in the water. Their boats—ships, whatever—will be more suitable than anything you’ve got. No offense.”

“None taken, ma’am.”

“I’ll be waiting for my ride.”

“Yes, ma’am, Dr. Stockard.”

Faye watched as great trees surrendered to the wind all over her island, taking down wide swathes of smaller trees as they fell. Pine trees rarely suffered the fate of less deeply rooted, less flexible trees. They swayed and bent at unnatural angles in the face of the hurricane’s unremitting wind but they were bred to survive and most did. Still, more than once, a great crack echoed over the island as even the resilience of a pine tree was pushed past its limit. She wondered how much force it took to snap a tree trunk like a strand of dried pasta. How much could a tree endure?

And how much could a man endure? In the hour since he was shot, Douglass had slid rapidly downhill. He had been intermittently conscious for the past half-hour. When she pressed her ear to his chest, the sound was wheezy and wet. Was he developing pneumonia? Heart failure? Had his entire lung collapsed? She had no idea, but she was heartened to see him cling to life with the stubborn will that had turned a poor black boy into a wealthy and dignified man.

She huddled beside him and watched the sky. It was a luminescent gray-green, shading to orange in the west. When the sun set, they would be left with no light but the shimmering, ever-present lightning.

She wondered where the Senator was. Somewhere in the house below them, he was waiting, hoping that she was floating in the waters covering her island, hoping she was dead. He must wonder what had happened to Douglass. She hoped he believed that the wounded man had crawled into the bushes where he had bled to death or lay there still, waiting for the storm to drown him.

Wishing someone dead is powerful magic. She wished the Senator dead. He wished her dead, and Douglass too, but he thought Joe was safely imprisoned. Perhaps Joe was safe from the insistent magic pulling at her, at Douglass, at the man downstairs. Perhaps he was the one to free them from their interlaced bonds, from the net of hatred. Or perhaps the unremitting roll of thunder was affecting her mind.

She watched Joe work. She had left the shutters hanging by one nail apiece in her quest to make Joyeuse look uninhabitable but, with the windows broken, they would need the shutters to fulfill their original purpose: keeping the weather out when the windows were open.

With no hammer or nails, Joe couldn’t restore the shutters to their original positions, so he leaned out each window, yanked each shutter free, and hauled it inside. They were just barely taller than the cramped room, so he rested the bottom of each shutter on the floor, slightly away from the wall surrounding its corresponding window. Slanting each shutter back toward the wall, he jammed their tops, one by one, into the angle where wall and ceiling meet. The makeshift screens wouldn’t keep the water out, but they would provide some protection against broken glass and wind-blown debris.

Finished with the shutters, Joe spread the contents of his leather tool bag over a piece of plastic tarpaulin roughly the size of a desktop. Faye saw nothing among the twine, raw stone, and arrowheads that might save them from their pursuer or from the storm.

“When you get finished, Joe, can I have that piece of plastic? To protect the journal?”

Without a word, he nodded.

Douglass mumbled, “I’m cold, Faye.”

She went to the storage bench and fetched the dresses she’d found on the day she discovered the Clovis point. She guessed by their style that they’d been made in the 1930s. Perhaps they had been Cally’s or Courtney’s or her grandmother’s. She spread one over Douglass and let its wide skirt flare out over the floor. Then she wrapped another one around her shoulders, hoping that Joyeuse’s ghosts would protect them.

***

Excerpt from the oral history of Cally Stanton, recorded 1935