Findings (11 page)

In one jam-packed closet, he saw a camp stove, a large cooler, and a radio so old that it looked like something geeky boys had used to talk to faraway geeky boys back in the 1950s. She must be keeping these things as a defense against the day she lost the modern conveniences that she’d so recently acquired. If her range and her refrigerator and her cell phone evaporated, Faye would still survive, just as she had before she’d owned such things.

She fetched a long tool with a hook on the end, then led him onto the reconstructed landing, where an empty hole waited for the spiral staircase to be rebuilt. Using the tool to hook a metal loop in the ceiling, she yanked open a trap door, from which a ladder unfolded.

The ladder mechanism screeched in protest, and Ross couldn’t help himself. “I need to put some WD-40 on that.”

Faye grinned and scrambled up the ladder. He followed her up into a square room that was practically all windows.

“We’re in the cupola,” she said. “The mainland is that way.” She pointed to a vast expanse of deep green cypress swamp. “The Last Isles, including the site of the Turkey Foot Hotel, are over there.” She waved in the general direction of dark blotches in the crystalline water. “And out there is the open Gulf of Mexico.” Perfectly turquoise waves rolled under a perfectly blue sky.

“My ancestors built this place. With their own hands.” Faye waved a loving hand of her own over the sprawling roof below them.

Ross turned to look at the dark mainland, because he knew that way was north. Atlanta was a long, long way from this spot.

He could live here with Faye and be happy, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot of legal work to be had on a private island. Faye could certainly live with him in Atlanta and continue to go to school, but he wasn’t clear how happy she could be without this aged pile of wood beneath her feet.

All this time, he’d seen Joe as the one thing between him and the woman he wanted. Now he’d seen the face of his true rival, and her name was Joyeuse.

***

Faye took care to tie her boat properly for the night, as she always did. She missed Ross, but she understood his unspoken reason for going back to shore so soon. Emma would notice if he didn’t come in until morning. And there was the question of what Joe would do…would he stay the night at Emma’s, or come back to sleep at Joyeuse—which was, after all, his home—even though Faye had a guest and might wish for privacy?

Within the hour, she heard Joe as he dragged his johnboat onto the beach and tied it to a tree. She didn’t expect him to come upstairs to tell her good-night, and he didn’t.

Joe’s recording of Jedediah Bachelder’s letters was still trapped deep in the memory of her laptop computer. The analytical part of her brain, the part of her that belonged to the world of science, begged her to listen to another letter, but the emotional part of her brain said no.

She needed to grieve for Wally and Douglass. She needed to obsess over the problem of Ross. He radiated the confidence of a man who was always in charge. Could she be happy with that? And could she be happy in Atlanta, far from Joyeuse? It was obvious to anyone with a brain that Ross was not born to live on an island.

She banished Bachelder from her mind and cataloged her grief for Douglass and Wally, knowing that she would revisit it compulsively for years and years. Instead, she drifted off to sleep while thinking of Ross’ kindness and strength. Surely those things were enough for real happiness. Could it really matter so much where they lived or what either of them did for a living?

In her dreams that night, she was motherless, alone, and lost. She couldn’t find her way home, because she had no home. Her subconscious mind was screaming at her, trying to tell her what she knew already—that home would always matter to Faye. It mattered far more than her career. Maybe it even mattered more than love. When she was awake, she could argue with that part of herself. But not while she was asleep.

Chapter Twelve

Grief woke Faye early. She’d done this before, waking from a dream she longed to share with her mother, then realizing that her mother wasn’t there. And never would be again.

She knew Douglass would have enjoyed an afternoon like Joe had spent yesterday, talking baby talk to Rachel and sipping coffee with Emma. He would have enjoyed hearing about Bachelder’s letters and, like Faye, he would have burned to know the history behind the emerald he’d had in his hand on the night he died.

The sheriff agreed with her that she should continue to pursue the link between the emerald and Bachelder and Douglass’ death. It wasn’t traditional crimefighting, but he had people to do that. Also, she was a civilian and officially had no reason to stick her nose into the murder investigation.

But the emerald was her business. She’d found it on her own land, and she would have been scouring the countryside for the rest of the necklace, even if Douglass were where he belonged, snoring in bed beside Emma. If she could help find his killer by doing archaeological work that she’d be doing anyway, so much the better.

Today was the day that she went out and looked for that emerald’s brothers and sisters. Her heartbeat quickened. Faye knew that if the day ever came when her heart wasn’t stirred by the possibility of what she might find, that was the day she should hang up her trowel.

***

With field notes in hand, Faye stood in a weedy area between her house and the beach, trying to reconstruct her activities on the day she found the emerald. She remembered squinting through a break in the brushy vegetation, trying to get a glimpse of the Last Isles so that she could orient herself. Most of the trees in that area were gone, victims of the hurricane, so she’d pounded a metal stake into the sandy soil to give herself a reference point.

The stake was there, right where she’d left it. Finding any location listed in her field notes would be a simple matter of measuring its distance from the stake in the north-south direction, then doing the same thing in the east-west direction. Any sixth-grader could do it.

As she squatted to leaf through her notes, Joe walked into the underbrush, following a lizard and studying its movement. Some of the deepest silence on earth settled around them.

The beach was far away and the waves were calm. Their movement added a subtle bit of rhythmic background noise. Sometimes the wind stirred the palm fronds overhead or the hair over Faye’s ear. Those faint sounds only accentuated the lack of non-natural noise. Come sunset, the waterbirds would be diving for their supper, and their caws and splashes would seem earsplitting compared to the present hush.

Had they been anywhere else, the shushing grind of a shovel slicing through sandy dirt would have been drowned out by regular, everyday noise. Faye and Joe would never have heard it.

There had been treasure hunters on Joyeuse Island before, and there would be again. This did not mean that they would ever stop making Faye blindingly angry. Before any consideration of danger had time to reach her forebrain, she was running. The thought of someone else probing beneath the surface of her own island was as horrific to her as the idea of an amateur surgeon slicing open her mother.

Joe was stumbling out of the bushes and hollering at Faye to stop, but he was wasting precious time fumbling at the leather pouch hanging at his waist. Also, Faye had a head start. She just might manage to stay more than an arm’s-length ahead of Joe for as long as it took to track the source of the noise.

At the treeline where Faye’s beach met the tangled bushes, Nita the lady shrimper was perched on the edge of a sizeable hole, with her back to Faye. She was digging with a long-handled shovel, turning over great clumps of soil and scattering the backdirt hither-and-yon, as if it were of no importance. Since it had no monetary value, it
was
of no importance to Nita.

Faye was so angry that her brain was wiped clean of common sense. People had lived and died on this island, hundreds of them. No, their graves weren’t right there where Nita was digging, not that she knew of. But the things they’d made and used, the artifacts that still told the stories of their lives—those things might be.

Yes, Faye’s archaeological work disturbed the physical record of those lives, but she strove to minimize that disturbance. She thought of her work as a memorial to them. It was a way to reach across time. Learning about long-ago people put a face on them. It brought history to life.

There was a difference between what she did and what Nita was doing.

There
was
a difference.

Nita was doing nothing but destroying the bridges that bound humans to their past.

“Hey! You can’t do that on my property!”

Faye didn’t know how she’d thought Nita would respond to her challenge. Probably, she’d thought the artifact thief would just run away. Or maybe she’d expected the woman to make excuses for what she was doing. Later, Faye would tell herself she should stop expecting criminals to act like ordinary people.

Nita swung the shovel hard, blade out. Its corner caught Faye in the hip, the only fleshy part of her scrawny body. The blade drew blood and its impact would leave a magnificent bruise, but if such a blow had struck Faye anywhere else, it would have broken a bone.

Common sense returned. Faye’s immediate goal changed. She still wanted Nita gone, but first she intended to avoid getting hit with that shovel again.

The momentum of Nita’s powerful swing carried her torso around like a golfer with perfect follow-through. Faye took the opportunity to launch herself at Nita’s exposed back. The two women were about the same size, but Faye had an advantage: her opponent was off-balance. Her weight carried Nita to the ground on top of the shovel that was doing all that damage. Grasping its handle, one hand on either side of Nita’s neck, Faye pulled it back against her assailant’s throat to immobilize her.

Faye was ridiculously proud that Joe had not had to take down this particular criminal. She was a little tired of him saving her butt.

But where was Joe, anyway? She’d had a devil of a time staying out of his reach. He should have reached her at about the time Nita swung the shovel.

The sound of someone running in heavy boots stopped her breath in her throat. Joe didn’t wear boots.

The beginnings of a grin on Nita’s face prompted Faye to yell, “Joe! Watch out!”

Nita’s husband Wayland had been standing lookout, though he’d been expecting trouble to come by sea and had been looking in the wrong direction. His inattention had bought Faye and Joe a few seconds, but no more.

Wayland was running toward them with an evil-looking rifle in his hand. Faye knew that she would only be in control of this situation for as long as it took Wayland to stop running and take aim, but she wasn’t about to give Nita the satisfaction of letting her loose even a moment sooner than she had to.

There weren’t many things that would make Faye let go of Nita’s neck, but a bullet would be one of them. She wanted to close her eyes and hunker down, bracing herself for pain far beyond a bruised and bloody hip, but sight was one of the few things left that she had going for her. It would have been stupid to shut it down out of cowardice. She looked directly into Wayland’s face and tried to guess whether he’d really pull the trigger.

Then something alien flew through Faye’s peripheral vision and wrapped itself around Wayland’s legs, taking him down and sending the rifle flying from his hands. Joe had pulled a bolo out of his bag of tricks. While a bolo is a simple weapon made of weights attached to a leather thong, its operation isn’t simple at all. In Joe’s hands, it could drop a rhino.

It took forever for the sheriff and his crew to get out to Joyeuse Island, but Faye didn’t care much. With the judicious use of Joe’s bolo and some rope from her boat, and a few episodes of brandishing Wayland’s gun in their prisoners’ faces, she and Joe had managed to keep things under control until the law arrived.

***

When the sheriff arrived to take the prisoners’ off Faye’s and Joe’s hands, he didn’t say, “Hello.” He didn’t say, “Nice work.” All he said was, “My wife wants to have a word with you.” Then he handed Faye his cell phone and walked over to get a good look at Wayland and Nita. He looked amused at how thoroughly Joe and Faye had trussed the criminals up.

“I’ve been an archaeologist for twenty-five years,” Magda began, in a tone of voice that suggested that quite a bit more time would pass before she was through with this tirade. Faye held the phone out a couple of inches from her head. Her eardrum could only take so much of Magda when she was in full harangue. “A quarter-century. In all that time, nobody’s pointed any guns at me. Well, maybe once. And I don’t believe I’ve ever had to fist-fight anybody. Why do these things happen to you?”

“There were no fists involved. It was a shovel fight.”

“I heard that shovel drew blood. Where did she hurt you?”

“On my cheek.”

“Your face? Faye! You’re too pretty for that. You tell my husband to get you to a plastic surgeon right now and—”

“Magda. It was a butt cheek.”

“Oh. Well—but still—archaeology is not supposed to be a blood sport. I don’t like being worried about you all the time. Can you answer my question? Why do these things happen to you?”

Faye fought the urge to say,
I don’t know, ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am. It’ll never happen again.
Instead, she opted for, “I think it’s because I’m spending my career out here in the islands. There are a lot of out-of-the-way spots where people do bad things, because there’s no one to see them. And there’s a lot of valuable stuff to dig up—you know, from the hotel and the plantation and all—and the local people know it. It looked to me like Nita and Wayland were pothunting, planning to sell whatever they found. When people get caught breaking the law, they tend to point guns at people. Especially when there’s money involved.”

“But why were they there, Faye? There are a lot of islands out there. Yours is just one of the biggest. Why’d they pick your island, and why’d they pick that spot? And don’t tell me you presume it was random. Assuming that an important event has no explanation is the last refuge of people who don’t want to use their heads.”

Why were they there in the first place?
This was a question a scientist would ask. It had crossed Faye’s mind, but she’d really been too busy to deal with it. “I don’t know. It looked like she’d just picked a random spot and started shoveling.”

As it passed her lips, Faye realized that she’d just used Magda’s least favorite word: “random.” She kept talking fast, hoping Magda hadn’t noticed.

“We’ve had some problems lately with pothunters at the hotel site—nothing too serious yet—but it only makes sense that they’d come there. The newspapers all did stories on the Turkey Foot Hotel and Joyeuse after the hurricane. Treasure-hunters aren’t dumb. The plantation and hotel were full of rich people and they didn’t have a chance to get their valuables to shore before the 1857 hurricane. They’re high-probability places to look for the good stuff. Well, the expensive stuff, anyway. As far as pothunting on Joyeuse Island goes, though, I can’t think of a specific reason for Nita to pick the spot where she was digging.”

“Well, don’t let that question get away from you. It might be important. You sure don’t want to have my husband hauling trespassers off your island on a daily basis. I’m actually glad they were pothunting, instead of just prowling around. That means they weren’t necessarily looking for you.”

“I just happened to be here. That’s all.”

“You’re so sure? There’s no chance of a connection to the two killings?”

“Wayland and Nita wouldn’t be my first suspects, no. They’re way too small to be the people Emma saw after Douglass’ attack.”

“That doesn’t mean they couldn’t have killed you.”

It was true so there wasn’t much for Faye to say but, “Thank you. For worrying about me. For caring. For all that stuff.”

Magda said, “Hmmph,” and hung up.

The sheriff, seeing Faye thumb the phone’s off button, ambled over and said, “Let me count these criminals. One. Two.”

“Too bad they’re not the two people Emma saw the night Douglass died,” Faye said. “In the dark, Nita might pass for a man…a very, very delicate man. However, neither she nor Wayland would ever pass for large.

“My thoughts, exactly. I’ll put them in a lineup and show them to Emma, but these aren’t our killers.”

“Maybe they’re not Douglass’ killers—” Faye began.

“Yeah, I know they were around when Wally was stabbed. I’ll keep them in custody as long as I can, trying to get a lead on his killing. But if I can’t get anything on them besides trespassing and assault, I may not be able to keep them all that long.”

Faye knew a lot of large men. The sheriff. Joe. The only large men she remembered at Liz’s bar when Wally died were among the Civil War re-enactors. Certainly not Wayland. And Nita wasn’t big in the least. Emma would never have mistaken her for a man, even on the dark night her husband was killed. Nita’s sinuous body practically shouted femininity.

The sheriff knew those things as well as Faye did. He could hardly haul in everybody who was a certain size, just because they’d eaten too many plates of Liz’s eggs and grits.

Sheriff Mike leaned closer to Faye and lowered his voice. “We got a lead on Douglass’ murder today. It’s not much of a lead, but it’s something.” He motioned for Joe to come listen. “Emma was wrong about one thing. The thieves did go upstairs—probably after they were finished downstairs, and probably after Douglass was out of commission. That’s why the muddy footprints only went downstairs. They were down there long enough to wipe most of the dirt off their feet.”

“Did they take anything?” Faye figured it couldn’t be anything valuable, or Emma would have noticed by now.

“The original copy of your catalog of the museum’s entire collection.”

“That’s all?”

“It’s all Emma can come up with. I’ve got technicians in Douglass’ office, looking for evidence. So far, we’ve got no fingerprints, so I guess they were wearing gloves. There were a few fibers, mostly cotton, white and blue. Not much we can do with that, unless we get a specific pair of jeans of or a t-shirt or a pair of gloves to check them against. We did get a couple of hairs that look to be Caucasian, so they’re not Douglass’ or Emma’s—”