Findings (23 page)

Decency demanded that she try to retrieve a woman who was drowning, if she wasn’t already dead, but Faye was still leaving a trail of her own blood everywhere she went. The shock of seeing the boat explode had dropped her sprawling into the sand, and she wasn’t sure she would ever stand again. The boat that had been Joe’s only lifeline was gone, and she needed a doctor pretty bad herself. Faye decided to let Elizabeth Slater stay where she was.

If she only had a radio…but that would have meant having one of the boats, in which case she would have a cell phone, obviating the need for a radio, so her futile wishes were circular. If she had one floating boat or one working cell phone or one functional radio, then she and Joe might live. Since her boats and radios were together—and since they weren’t here—her only other chance was a cell phone, and they were all at the bottom of the channel with Ms. Slater and Chip.

Joe’s survival, Faye’s survival—everything depended on getting help fast, but there was no way to do it. Faye would have traded anything on earth for a cell phone. Even Joyeuse.

There had been a time when she couldn’t afford a cell phone. Before that, there had been a time when cell phones didn’t even exist. Cally had made do with an occasional mail boat, but she had lived in a time when a wound like Joe’s would have been mortal, unquestionably. Faye’s grandmother had used a radio to talk to shore when she visited the island, and so had Faye, back when she couldn’t afford to keep a phone in her pocket.

She’d been so poor that she’d cleaned layers of grime off the connections on her grandmother’s old radio and kept it functional through sheer willpower and a soldering iron. Did she still have it?

Of course, she still had it. Faye was not one to get rid of something that still worked. But did it work? She remembered disassembling it, hoping to cannibalize some parts so that she could avoid spending money to fix one of her boat radios…but that salvage effort had failed. Her grandmother’s radio was just too old to have any parts that were useable in a modern set. Sort of modern. Faye didn’t buy many things new.

But could she get it functional? Oh, yes, indeed, she could. If she had access to a screwdriver and a soldering iron—and she did—Faye knew she could fix damn near anything.

Chapter Twenty-six

A cracked collarbone and extensive soft tissue injuries can hurt like hell, but they don’t do much to keep a patient in the hospital. Faye received nothing more than a battery of x-rays and CAT scans and MRIs that proved she wasn’t at death’s door. Then she was handed some tape to stabilize the shoulder, a sling, and some woefully inadequate painkillers, and she was told to go home. This was the only time in her life that she ever expected to
want
to stay in the hospital, but nobody asked her opinion.

Ms. Slater and Chip had been fished off the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, and Faye reckoned they’d both been buried by now. She hadn’t asked. She didn’t have a clue what she would say when she next laid eyes on Liz.

Under questioning, Herbie had told the sheriff that, months before, his re-enactor friends had told him of old rumors that the Confederate treasury had been hidden somewhere nearby, and that a man named Jedediah Bachelder was said to have known what happened to it. When pressed, Herbie said that he was certain that Chip had been part of those conversations. Shortly after that, Chip had quit school and moved in with his mother, probably so he could be closer to the loot’s reputed hiding place. And busboys have a lot more free time to go treasure-hunting than serious students do.

Having spent his childhood listening to his mother tell people how smart he was, Chip would have been certain that he was plenty smart enough to find a treasure that had eluded the world for nearly 150 years. More scholarly than the jocular but aimless re-enactors, he wouldn’t have been willing to rely on rumors. It only made sense that he would have gone to a reference librarian known to specialize in local Civil War history—someone like Elizabeth Slater. In the rare book room, he’d found the trail of the Confederate Gold, and he’d found love. As it turned out, he’d also found death.

Either he or Ms. Slater would have seen the newspaper article describing Jedediah Bachelder’s hip flask, and either would have known that it might be a critical piece of the puzzle. Ms. Slater would, by nature, have been the one who did the planning, carefully keeping her hands clean. Gullible Chip would have done the out-of-the-library legwork, which ultimately included two murders.

Faye wished she were Christian enough to forgive those two and to let the past go. It was what her grandmother would have told her to do. And it was what her mother would have told her to do. Cally, on the other hand…Faye had a feeling that Cally would have known that some grudges have to be nursed a little while before they’re set free, and she had a feeling that Cally would have known exactly how to nurse one.

Joe deserved for Faye to hate those people. He didn’t deserve what they did to him. Neither did Douglass. And neither did Wally.

Today, she was carrying a plastic bag as she walked down the familiar hall to Joe’s hospital room. She’d carried it every day that week, and she was going to keep on carrying it until his extensive medical staff gave her a few minutes alone with him.

She found him alone, praise God, but his eyes were closed, so she just laid her gift on his bedside table. It was the book of Jedediah Bachelder’s letters, and there was a round hole squarely through its middle, surrounded by copious amounts of dried blood. She saw no need to return it to the rare book room, not in its current condition. Libraries lose materials all the time, even rare books like this one. Besides, she figured Joe had earned it.

His eyes flickered, so she took the opportunity to say, “I brought you a present.” She waved the book at him.

“I’m real sorry. I meant to take care of it, Faye,” Joe murmured. His eyes opened a little more. They were so green. “I stuck it in my waistband before we left the library, so Ms. Slater wouldn’t see that I had it. I thought you might need it.”

“Oh, I did need it. Very much.”

Joe closed his eyes again and drifted off to sleep.

The hardbound volume had taken the first impact of Chip’s shot, and it was just possible that it had diverted the bullet’s path a very providential millimeter or two. It had burrowed through the ropy muscles of Joe’s lower back and exited from his side, nicking his colon and narrowly missing his spine. There had been an operation to repair the damage to his internal organs, and he had received massive amounts of antibiotics and other miracle drugs to deal with the infection that sprang up in the surgery’s aftermath, but the doctors were finally talking about sending him home.

She picked up the old book and paged through it, as she’d been doing for weeks now. Time and again, she returned to two letters written in early 1865. The first was written by Jedediah Bachelder, and the second was written by his wife Viola. Faye felt Jedediah’s presence every time that she saw that Viola’s letter had been bound out of sequence. A whole month had passed before he received her response to his letter, a whole month in which he’d continued to write her almost daily.

There were no more letters from Viola after this one. Faye felt like she knew Jedediah Bachelder after reading so much of his most personal correspondence, and she believed she knew why this last letter was misplaced in time. It was because he’d asked his true love a question, and she’d given him her answer.

***

***

Faye closed the book and settled back into the chair that sat beside Joe’s bed. She tried not to dwell on how pale he was, and she failed. To distract them both, she began spinning fanciful stories, the way a loving parent dreams up tales to soothe a child who isn’t ready for bed. Her tales always involved animals and magic and spirits who lived in trees. Sometimes the thunder rumbled through her stories. Once, a hurricane even blasted its way into her imagination. But all the stories began in the same way, just as a parent’s stories always begin with “Once upon a time…”

Faye leaned back in the uncomfortable visitor’s chair and let the story roll out of her. It began, as all of her stories did, with the words, “When I get you back home to Joyeuse…”

Chapter Twenty-seven

When the hospital finally decided to let Joe go home, they didn’t give Faye much warning. One of his battery of doctors simply announced one morning, “He’s ready to go home. I’ll sign the paperwork, and we can have him out of there before noon.” A cynical part of her presumed that his student insurance, which was adequate but not generous, had reached the limit of what it would pay, so the doctors had hurriedly pronounced him ready to go home and be cared for by somebody cheap like Faye.

Except Faye hadn’t had time to go home and get the place ready for a convalescent who would need a lot of care. She hadn’t gone home at all, not in weeks. She’d just camped in Mike and Magda’s guest room whenever the hospital staff announced that she was abusing the concept of “visiting hours.”

She needed to put fresh, clean linens on Joe’s bed. For all she knew, Chip had slept there. Germs, evil karma, bad smells…Faye planned to scrub all invisible threats to Joe’s health right out of the house. If the timing worked out right, then she would dry the sheets on the clothesline and his bed could smell like all outdoors.

There was so much she needed to do, but she had friends to help her, and they knew that there was no chance that Faye could be convinced to let Joe go anywhere but to Joyeuse when he was finally sprung from the hospital. Sheriff Mike volunteered to wait with Joe until he was discharged, then trundle him onto the
Gopher
and give him a slow smooth boat ride out to the island. Magda volunteered to raid her own pantry for the groceries Faye needed and meet her on the dock at Liz’s with the goods.

Faye was afraid to ask Magda how Liz was dealing with Chip’s death, and Magda didn’t offer her any information. The answer to that question was so obvious: Liz was assuredly not taking it well.

When Faye arrived at the marina, she found not one but two of her dearest women friends waiting for her. Three sacks of food sat on the dock at Magda’s feet. Standing beside her were Emma and one of the sleek and luxurious lounge chairs that adorned her patio.

“Joe’s not going to be happy lolling around indoors all day. You’ll need to get the man outside. Put this thing on the porch where he can feel the sun and listen to the birds. He’ll get well right quick.”

***

The boat ride out to Joyeuse Island had been…interesting…with Emma’s lounge chair aboard. Even folded, it crowded Faye’s skiff significantly. Now it sat on the back porch of the big house, overlooking the deep green woods. A tray table and a coaster sat beside it, because Joe’s doctors wanted him hydrated. Faye figured she could pour water down his throat, if he refused to drink.

The soup was simmering. The laundry was done and the sheets were drying. Magda had tucked a stack of the sheriff’s hunting and fishing magazines among the groceries, so Joe had easy access to his preferred reading material. And a pile of rocks had been moved from the corner of his room to the floor of the porch, so Joe could chip stone any time he felt like it. Faye was way past ready for her patient to arrive. But she was being thwarted by hospital bureaucracy.

The doctor who had said Joe would be home by lunch had neglected to sign a piece of paper that must have been very important, because the staff was trying to track him down for that signature. Sheriff Mike had been calling Faye with regularity, keeping her posted on their status, but even if Joe were released right now, by the time he was taken to the car, driven to the dock, helped onto the
Gopher
, and hauled out to the island, hours would have passed. Faye was not prepared to spend all that time staring at the walls.

There was still a question to be answered, and Faye was not the type to tolerate that. Jedediah Bachelder had hidden a fabulous necklace on her island. She knew this to be true, because he’d left behind an emerald and a tiny bit of gold, and she’d found it. She didn’t get that same sense of resolution when she thought of the legendary Confederate Gold.

Her gut told her that a ghost of a chance remained that the Confederate Gold had left a shred of physical evidence behind. Faye would not be Faye if she didn’t look for it.

The sun was shining, Faye had no more housework to do, and she was a worthless ball of nervous energy. Maybe a little exploratory digging was in order.

***

Faye had dug in this spot once, and she’d found an emerald. She’d dug here again, and she’d found nothing but dirt. Now she was back a third time. Why was she wasting energy on this thing?

Because she’d thought of one more place to look. Not left. Not right. Not east, nor west. She had realized that she needed to look down. She needed to go deeper.

On her previous visit to this spot, she’d located the coordinates where the emerald had been found, then she’d looked laterally, excavating a pit that was wide but shallow. It hadn’t seemed logical for Bachelder to have buried something small like a necklace very far beneath the surface, so Faye had never looked there.

But several trunks full of gold? He would have had to go deep to bury that much treasure. Faye intended to start where she’d found the emerald and dig until she couldn’t dig any more. She’d dig until she hit water, and further, if that was what it took to be sure that no trace of the Confederate Gold had been left for her to find.

The irony of the situation was that, though the treasure was long-gone, it was still wreaking havoc. Gold-lust had driven Elizabeth Slater and Chip to murder, and it would likely make Faye’s own home life miserable for quite some time to come.

They were gone now, so they wouldn’t be skulking around her island looking for gold, but every history buff within three counties had heard rumors that the hiding place of the Confederate Gold had been found on Joyeuse Island…but the gold had not. Yet. Faye was bracing for a blitzkrieg of trespassers.

She peeled back the soil, layer by layer, looking for a treasure that she knew wasn’t there. It was clear that Jedediah Bachelder had returned and retrieved his necklace, leaving behind a single stray jewel and a broken finding. And she believed he’d retrieved the Confederate Gold, too.

Or maybe she was wrong about everything. Maybe his necklace had never been here at all, and she had found only the remnants of one of her ancestors’ jewels. French historians were even now scouring records of the royal family’s possessions for her, hoping to find something that matched the paltry evidence she’d uncovered so far. The sentimental part of her would rather have found Mariah’s necklace than Marie Antoinette’s, but a newsmagazine article detailing the connection between her island and the executed queen had assured that popular culture would always recognize the green-and-gold fragments in Douglass’ museum as belonging to Marie Antoinette.

She hopped down into the pit to clear a layer of loose soil off its bottom. Even though she was half-expecting it, she was startled to hear her trowel strike metal. Carefully peeling back the earth, she found a single rusted hinge and a layer of discolored soil left behind by rotting wood. Try though she might to find it, there was nothing else.

There were many ways to interpret this find, but there was one interpretation that she particularly liked: Jedediah Bachelder came here on two separate occasions, first burying the necklace and then the Confederate Gold. He retrieved them later, on a third visit, leaving behind only an emerald, a gold finding, and a hinged wooden box that had once enclosed the fabulous lost treasure of the Confederacy.

When the Confederate government finally collapsed, Jedediah Bachelder had been left holding a treasure that he was too ethical to spend on himself. He would no doubt have sold the necklace and used the proceeds to make himself comfortably rich. But the Confederate Gold…that was a different matter. It would have made him ridiculously rich. What better use for that money than to relieve the suffering left behind by a ruinous war?

No one would ever convince Faye that the man who wrote those tender letters to Viola could have done anything else. It could be no coincidence that Jedediah’s final bequest had given everything he owned to a home for penniless Confederate veterans.

It was time to call that reporter to come back for a follow-up story. If word got out that she’d found the treasure chest, and that its gold was long-gone, maybe she could keep some of her cherished privacy. Particularly if she could get the paper to print of a picture of Joe, taken before a bullet laid him low. Her extremely intimidating security guard should keep the riff-raff away. Most people would think twice about stealing from her if they knew they’d be tangling with Joe.