Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery #7 (Faye Longchamp Series) (4 page)

The foot struck Hebert’s side hard and repeatedly, shoving him toward the dock’s edge. As he dropped into the water, a weak breath and a few words passed his lips. These last words were a curse, one that his mother had taught him.

***

The girl’s response to Faye’s offered handshake was impressively confident for a teenager. “You’re an archaeologist? That is just so cool. I’m Amande Landreneau, and you would not believe some of the stuff I’ve dug up around here. Here. Look…”

She fumbled in her pocket and pulled out a quarter. “This is from 1968. That’s more than forty years ago!”

Having been born in 1968, Faye knew exactly how long ago the coin had been minted. She had to take Amande’s word for the date, though, because she couldn’t make out the numbers on the quarter without her reading glasses.

“If it were just a few years older, it would’ve been silver and I could’ve sold it. I could sure use that money.”

“I hear you,” said Faye, who had sold more artifacts than she cared to think about, back before she scraped up enough money to finish her PhD and reinvent herself as a legitimate archaeologist. “We’re looking for an old dock that’s supposed to be around here somewhere. It goes all the way back to steamboat days. You know where it is?”

“Sure I do. But you’re in the wrong place.” She pointed out across the marsh grass, cut with ditches and canals. “It’s out there in open water, maybe fifty feet from here.”

Faye followed the pointing finger. The water line was hardly twenty feet away…now. Who knew where it would be when the tide was low, nor where it had been when boats ran on steam?

In the years since then, people had strangled the river and sent its silt out into the Gulf. At times like this, Faye got a good hard look at something that was hard to imagine—solid and useable land simply sinking into the swamp. If the shoreline had retreated this far, she wondered how long it would be before the marina buildings and their surrounding cabins were claimed by open water. Maybe Amande and her grandmother were smart to live on a houseboat.

“I cut my toe on one of the dock’s timbers when I was a kid, and Grandmère told me she remembered when it used to poke out of the water at low tide. I’ll wade out there with you. I bet we can find it.”

She buffed the old quarter on her shirt and held it out for Faye to see again, with the friendly enthusiasm of someone who has never before met anyone else interested in old dirty things and broken rocks.

A tiny feminine form approached, wrapped in shawls despite the heat. Amande’s voice dropped, as if there were things she must say before her grandmother got close enough to hear.

“I know some islands where we can find arrowheads and stuff, too. Want me to show you? I haven’t been out there since my grandmother sold my boat. God, I miss that boat.”

Faye lowered her own voice. “You should’ve known my grandmother. She would’ve yelled at me or grounded me or maybe even spanked me if I broke one of her rules, but she’d never have taken away my skiff.” Faye grinned, as she always did when she remembered Grammy. “When she got old and sick, I used to push her wheelchair to the end of the pier and help her into the boat. Once I got her settled at the tiller, she wasn’t frail and sickly anymore. She was back in charge. But she wouldn’t have wanted to go looking for arrowheads. Grammy only ever wanted to fish. If she couldn’t eat it, she didn’t want to waste her time on it.”

Amande’s grandmother was moving slowly in their direction, looking intently at Amande as if to say, “Don’t you dare move before I get there.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Faye saw a tiny boy clad in shorts but no shirt, toddling fast on his muscular legs and sturdy feet. Michael caught up with Amande’s grandmother from behind, flinging his wet arms around one of her legs and bleating “Pick me up!” noises.

The old woman staggered but didn’t fall. She glared down at Michael, who fell back onto his diapered bottom and burst into tears.

Faye was at her son’s side in seconds, scooping him onto her hip.

Dauphine was two steps behind her. “Oh, excuse me, ma’am, I tried to stop him,” she said as she reached out a hand to steady the older woman. Dauphine was panting, and Faye could see that her scarf was damp where it crossed her forehead.

Amande’s grandmother’s angry face did not soften.

“Grandmère,” Amande said as she leaned down to kiss the weatherbeaten cheek, “I think he thought you were
his
grandmother. You’re wearing the same color scarf.” She tucked the fuchsia chiffon behind the old lady’s ear. “Faye, this is my grandmother, Miranda Landreneau.”

Faye didn’t even bother to butt in and say, “No, Dauphine isn’t his grandmother. She’s his babysitter.” She was too busy watching Amande charm a crabby old woman.

She was pretty sure that the girl was right. Both Miranda and Dauphine dressed like they’d fallen into a gypsy’s washbasket. Michael only knew one woman whose clothes flowed behind her like a wet watercolor painting, and he associated that woman with cookies and kisses and unconditional love. Looking up to find Miranda’s timeworn scowl, instead of Dauphine’s soft smile, must have turned his tiny world upside down.

Faye nuzzled the back of Michael’s neck, trying to get him to stop squalling. No dice. Then Miranda reached out an arthritic hand and touched the child on his shoulder. Her touch was neither loving nor violent, but it silenced the child. Instantly.

Faye stifled the urge to draw her son to her breast and take two steps back. She could tell by Dauphine’s reaction that the babysitter was not amused, but she
was
intimidated. Faye herself was hard to intimidate, but she found herself wanting to leave Miranda’s presence. Immediately.

“It’s very nice to meet you. You have a lovely granddaughter. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to—”

Amande, standing behind her grandmother, had embarked on violent headshaking. She was also mouthing the word “No,” repeatedly. It did not take a genius to see that she didn’t want her grandmother to know about their plans to go arrowhead hunting. Faye had no intention of taking the girl anywhere without her grandmother’s permission, but she followed Amande’s lead.

“—um…I’d like to talk to her about archaeological sites in the area. Actually, I think both of you may be able to help us.”

Joe had joined them, and she could tell he was wondering just how these two people could be any help to them at all. She raised an eyebrow in his direction that signaled,
I’ll tell you later.
Then she nodded at Miranda and Amande and said, “Right now, though, we should really get back to our cabin. You two have a good—”

Amande interrupted Faye, and the girl’s bad manners caused Miranda’s disapproving black eyes to swivel in her direction.

“But I wanted to show you my silver coins. And all those arrowheads. Can you come now…please?”

Chapter Four

Faye counted heads. Miranda, Amande, Michael, Joe, Dauphine…counting Faye, there were six people crowded into the houseboat’s tiny dining room. The dinette table was built to seat two.

Michael sat on Joe’s lap. Amande was perched on a stool in the corner, blowing into a cup to cool her tea. The others crowded around as Miranda handed teacups out. Faye felt the need to watch the old woman’s every move, though she couldn’t have said why.

Perhaps it was because she’d had experience of her own with Dauphine’s voodoo chants and potions and powders, but some primitive part of her believed Miranda could slip something into her tea that would silence Faye as effectively as Miranda’s withered hand on Michael’s shoulder had silenced him. She noticed that Dauphine was watching their hostess just as intently.

Then Miranda pulled a (thankfully) clean dishrag out of a kitchen drawer and laid it on the counter beside a bowl of sugar and the bottle of rum. “I shall make the boy a sugar tit. He’ll be happy, and we can talk.”

Her shriveled but competent hands twisted the dishrag into a point. Dipping it first into her tea cup and then into the sugar bowl, Miranda was already poised to drizzle rum over the twisted rag and pop it into Michael’s mouth before Faye could act.

Hastily grabbing a teething ring out of Michael’s diaper bag, Faye said, “Oh, don’t go to any trouble. He just loves this thing.” Then she stuck it into his mouth so that there would be no room for a rum-spiked sugar tit.

He accepted the toy happily and she was absurdly grateful. They would need to leave when he got fussy, because sometime in the twentieth century it had stopped being okay to quiet a crying child with a dose of liquor. But not in Miranda’s world.

“You are a mambo, yes?” Miranda’s black eyes raked Dauphine from head to toe

Faye hadn’t heard Dauphine say so, but maybe voodoo practitioners had their ways of recognizing each other. Dauphine’s quirky clothing could be a clue, but anybody could wrap a robin’s-egg-blue shawl around her hips. Maybe there was a secret handshake or a sign…sort of like the Masons or the Shriners. Or maybe voodoo ladies could
feel
each other, the way that Darth Vader could sense a disturbance in The Force whenever Luke Skywalker was around.

Dauphine said only, “Yes,” but Faye noticed that she cradled her cup close to her chest, with her free hand draped over it. Did she think that Miranda could magically fling a hexing powder into her tea?

“Faye, did you find anything really old yet? When are you going to start digging? Can I help? What’s the oldest and coolest thing you ever found?”

Amande showed no sign that she noticed the voodoo duel happening at the table, probably because teenagers routinely ignored their parents and grandparents. Amande surely found Miranda’s in-your-face eccentricity profoundly boring.

Faye shook her head. “We just got started so, no, we haven’t found anything exciting yet. And there won’t be any digging. The client only wants preliminary work.”

Amande’s disappointed face said that she was expecting Hollywood-style archaeology with armies of workers carrying shovels. And a pith helmet for Faye.

Faye felt compelled to deliver some really exciting archaeology, but she was having trouble competing with Indiana Jones. “Hmmm…I’ve found some Paleolithic points near my house, underwater. They’re thousands and thousands of years old.”

Amande was still looking expectant. Faye had been enjoying the girl’s hero worship more than she realized. She looked to Joe for help. He held up the hand that wasn’t tickling Michael’s belly. Opening it wide, he slowly squeezed his long and slender fingers shut, as if he were gripping a baseball.

“Oh, yeah! The PPOs. Poverty Point Objects. We’ve found a lot of those.” She leaned closer to Amande and said, “The PPOs we found are maybe three thousand five hundred years old, so they’re not nearly as old as the Paleolithic stuff, but they’re just so cool. The Poverty Point people cooked by heating clay balls, then throwing the hot balls into the food they wanted to cook. They did that every time they cooked a meal, so when you’re at a Poverty Point site they’re just…everywhere.”

Faye flung her hands as wide as the close quarters allowed, trying to convey acres and acres of land, peppered with ancient wads of clay. “To make them, people reached down, scooped up some clay, squeezed, and threw the balls in the fire.” Her own fist clenched and opened. “The really cool part comes when you can still see the shape of somebody’s fingers in the fired clay, and you know that the person has been dead for
thirty-five hundred years
. I wish you could see one.”

Amande gave a geeky little sigh that made both Joe and Faye grin. “Me, too.”

Miranda snorted, wordlessly communicating that Faye’s pointless stories about ancient trash would now stop, in favor of something interesting.

“Fetch a doll,” Miranda said, flinging out an open hand as if she expected the doll to drop right into it.

Amande seemed accustomed to receiving abrupt orders, because she disappeared into the next room and came back with a naked doll, woven out of basket straw. It was too large to rest on Miranda’s palm, but Amande laid it across the old lady’s lap, with its head rested in the outstretched hand. The doll’s face was blank, with no features adorning the smooth straw. Its bald head wasn’t simply round. It was carefully modeled to the oval shape of a human head. The body, pear-shaped, sprouted unnaturally tubular arms and legs that were much less lifelike but, when dressed, this life-sized doll would look a great deal like a young toddler.