Artifacts (17 page)
“I don’t understand,” she said, taking the point from his hand and examining it, muttering aloud about the kind of stone, its place of origin, the distinctive flutings, its probable age.
She looked up to find Douglass watching her with keen, assessing eyes.
“You’ve really never seen it before,” he said.
“Why would you think that I had? I’ve never sold you anything pre-Columbian. Nothing in your museum is anywhere near this old.”
“This is why,” Douglass said, reaching into his shirt pocket and pulling out a tortoiseshell comb. It was smaller and flatter than the two combs she’d tried to sell him, but it was carved in the same lacy pattern.
Faye took it and cradled it in her hand. “Mariah would have worn it in back, to hold the hair too short to pin up. The other two combs were side combs. They would have held her hair out of her face.”
“Who the hell’s Mariah?”
Faye shook her head. “Never mind. Who sold you these things and where did they come from?”
“I don’t think he knows where they came from. He was just an imbecile somebody hired to fence their goods for them, because it would be damn dangerous to be caught with all this stuff.”
“All what stuff?”
He twirled the combination lock on a closet-sized safe hidden behind the wet bar. “I told you. I bought the man’s entire inventory to get it out of circulation before someone else besides me connected it to you.”
“I can’t let you do that.”
“You have no choice,” he said, swinging the safe door open. “I’ve already done it and there’s no safe way to get rid of it now.”
They perused the things Douglass had bought and Faye saw his point. From the safe, he retrieved one fluted stone point after another. Mixed in among a number of much newer artifacts was a beveled ivory foreshaft, part of a composite spear point made from the tusk of a mammoth. And perhaps most significantly, there was a tortoise carapace with a Clovis spearhead protruding from its surface. A stone artifact in a datable context. Faye was thrilled, then the anger penetrated everything. These items might have taken proof of human occupation in Florida back thousands of years, if they’d been documented in context. As it was, they were a pile of really cool junk.
“You could give it to a museum and take a tax deduction.”
“Fat lot of good a tax deduction would do me when they find out where this stuff came from. They’ll put
me
under the jail.”
“With me.”
“Yes, with you.”
It seemed a fitting moment to broach another issue that might well land them both in jail. She pulled the watch from her pocket.
“Tell me about Abby Williford.”
Faye had never seen a black man’s skin turn the color of ash.
“You’ve found her, after all this time,” he whispered.
Faye noticed that he didn’t ask where Abby had been all these years. She waited.
“I was a sharecropper’s only son, his only child,” Douglass said. He paused to drain the last of his drink. “My father farmed all his life for Irvin Williford. We lived in a house not a quarter-mile from the house where he raised Abby after her mother died.” He retrieved a fistful of change from his pocket and worked the coins around in his hands like worry beads.
“It was a strange world,” he went on, still clicking the coins. “In town, Abby and I couldn’t swim in the same pool or drink from the same fountain. But at home, we played like brother and sister and nobody batted an eye. She taught me to ride a horse and how to swim. I hauled her home from the swimming hole the day she slipped off the swinging rope and broke her arm. When her father got me admitted to the white high school, Abby shadowed me for weeks, protecting me from her buffoonish classmates. I would have dropped out without her support. I will never stop missing Abby.”
“What do you know about her disappearance? Oh, let’s not mince words. What do you know about her death?”
Douglass answered without a moment’s reflection. “I didn’t do it, but a lot of people thought I did. Her father protected me.”
Faye raised an eyebrow.
“He’d known me all my life and he knew I would never hurt Abby. He gave me an alibi. Nobody believed him, but when the victim’s father is a rich, upstanding member of the community, nobody is inclined to argue with him, either. He was a good, fine man.”
“Who did kill her?”
“Let her rest. She has no family to be glad you found her. Her friends have forgotten her. You stand to lose a lot if people know you’ve been digging around the Last Isles. Leave her where she is and protect yourself, Faye.”
Faye almost believed him. After all, he had believed her about the Clovis artifacts.
The more she thought about those artifacts, the madder she got. There was nothing she could do for Abby. If Douglass was guilty, then he’d have to save his own soul. A Clovis habitation site—if that was where the artifacts had come from—was different. Such a site would be irreplaceable, but it was still possible that what was left of it could be saved if it could be found.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” she mumbled.
“Can I have my father’s watch?”
“I think I’ll keep it for now,” Faye said, and slammed the door shut behind her.
Running down Douglass’ dock, Faye felt she couldn’t get to her boat fast enough. Anyone watching her skim across the water in her mullet skiff would be astonished by how fast the ugly little boat could go. Faye enjoyed the hypnotic
slam
,
slam
,
slam
of its hull crashing into one wave after another. They were only low swells, hardly ripples, but riding roughshod over her obstacles suited Faye’s mood. She was maddeningly, blindingly, angry.
This was personal.
Somebody was trespassing on land that belonged to her by whatever definition she chose. It was hers by inheritance, if one ignored the thievery that took it from her great-grandmother. Even if she acknowledged that she had lost sole legal title to the land forever, it was still hers as a citizen of the United States, a country willing to purchase and maintain national seashores and wildlife refuges for the sheer beauty of them.
Sure, she’d skirted the laws protecting public lands to retrieve things she considered her family’s buried heirlooms, but she’d done no great harm, not to the islands themselves and not to the archaeological record. She had dug up nothing of great intrinsic cultural value. She had seen to it that her most interesting finds were housed in a museum. And she had documented her every step in field notebooks, just in case she was wrong about a site’s importance.
No, she had broken the letter of the law and the archaeologist’s code, but she had preserved their intent, and she was hopping mad that someone else was raping the past.
On her skiff, Faye kept navigational charts, current topographic maps, and copies of the oldest topographic maps she could find, all stored in a watertight cooler, since nothing stayed reliably dry in a boat so small. She killed the motor and dried off a portion of the deck big enough to spread out her maps.
In her journal, Mariah had described a Clovis point brought to her by a grateful slave—maybe the very point Faye had found hidden in the cupola at Joyeuse—and she had described a cistern that marked the spot where it was found. Mariah had said the cistern was on the far end of Last Isle, presumably meaning the end farthest from Joyeuse. She had also said that the artifacts were found along a trench cut through the island by a hurricane.
Faye compared her copy of the topographical map printed by the United States Geological Survey in 1940 to a current one, pinpointing on the new map the location of the westernmost island pass in 1940. What were the odds that Mariah’s landmark still survived? The map in Faye’s hands depicted changes in elevation as small as five feet. She prayed that the old pit hadn’t silted up completely, that there was at least five feet of topographic relief remaining in 1940.
And there was. The westernmost Last Isle was named “Water Island,” probably a reference to the cistern dug so long ago. A small depression so nearly circular that Faye wondered why she’d never noticed it before decorated the east end of Water Island. It was visible on both maps.
She cranked the boat and pointed it southwest. The waves slapped the hull of her boat with even more jarring force, because now Faye had a destination and she needed to get there fast.
Faye beached her skiff and struggled through the dunes of soft sand that kept Water Island from washing away with every wave. They were dazzling white in the noonday sun. Beyond the dunes, she saw the treetops of a small grove of sizeable live oaks and was encouraged. Their presence suggested that this spot of ground had poked out of the water for decades, possibly long enough to have been Mariah’s high ground. Perhaps Mariah had made good on her ambition to come here and dig for curiosities. She would have worn her oldest clothes although, ever a lady, Mariah never would have allowed herself to be seen with her hair hanging loose. In the excitement and exertion of her amateur archaeological dig, however, she might not have noticed when a tiny comb dropped out of the hair at the nape of her neck.
Faye crested the dunes that Mariah might once have crossed and looked over a shallow lagoon separating them from the main part of the island. The destruction there sucked the breath out of her lungs. Litter-strewn pits dotted a clearing that was at least an acre in extent. In the center of the clearing, crude dikes and drainage ditches kept the old cistern dry and easy to loot.
Faye slogged across the narrow lagoon and picked up a good-sized chunk of pottery incised with lines and dots. It was of the type made by the Fort Walton culture in late pre-Columbian times. If she remembered right, artifacts found on some barrier islands in the Panhandle were as old as eighteen hundred years, long before the appearance of the Fort Walton culture, so the dates were plausible. But Fort Walton sites were typically pretty far inland. Did they live here on the islands too, or did this shattered pot belong to a member of another culture, someone who traded with the Fort Walton people for it?
She tossed the sherd to the ground. The artifacts, the soil, the strata of this site were completely churned, robbed of any useful information. She would never know how the Fort Walton pot got there.
The cistern’s slopes had been chewed up by idiots armed with shovels, and the land around it was littered with sherds that were evidently too plain or too broken-up to bring a good price.
Faye guessed that this cistern had served as somebody’s trash pit for many a day.
Here and there were pieces of bone. Outside of a laboratory, it was impossible to tell whether they had supported human or animal bodies, but a sloppy pile of
SCUBA
gear resting beside a crate of butchered mastodon bones, uniface stone tools, fluted stone points—virtually the entire Clovis tool kit—told her that the biggest tragedy lay beneath the water. It was the only place artifacts of that age
could
be. In the twelve thousand years since they were made, Florida had become a wetter place and the sea had crept in to inundate evidence of its coastal cultures.
But even the sea couldn’t hide everything, not forever. Fishermen still found stone tools with distinctive Clovis fluting atop sandbars, their unchanged stone faces contrasting sharply with the mutable sand. And divers found them lying on the Gulf floor, their slender points aping roadsigns that might direct their finder to someplace yet unknown. Perhaps they pointed back to their source, the very spot where their makers lived, ate, slept.
Paleolithic occupation sites were notoriously hard to find, since humans in that era had lived biodegradable lives, leaving behind almost nothing but their stone tools and the bones of their prey. They even burned their own bones, leaving nearly nothing of themselves for their descendants to find.
Finding artifacts in such quantity and variety suggested that an occupation site was close enough to taste and smell. It might lie under the silty sediments of the Gulf. It might even lie underneath her feet. The island she stood on was thousands of years younger than the looted artifacts in the crate.
Maybe there was a drowned river bed beneath the silent, sunlit waters surrounding the island. Clovis people would have preferred to live on a bluff above such a river. Perhaps their home had been overtaken by water, then by sediments, waiting for the hurricane that peeled away a slice of the island and left the ancient site exposed to looting by anybody with a
SCUBA
tank. Maybe the looters had destroyed any chance of ever finding it.
Not three feet from her right foot, a gasoline-powered pump sat in a puddle of water, waiting for the perpetrators to return. The rainbow-slick of leaking fuel covering the puddle put Faye over the edge. She kicked the pump. She kicked it hard but, still, she was taken aback when it exploded.
A second ear-splitting noise corrected her misapprehension. The pump had been destroyed by a bullet, and there were other bullets on the way. She flung herself into the muck at the bottom of the nearest drainage ditch and lay there on her belly, listening to the nerves in her right leg scream and listening for another shot that might tell her where her assailant hid.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. It was stupid to come to a site of criminal activity and not expect to find criminals. Then, when she did find the place temporarily free of criminal activity, it was stupid of her to assume that criminals would leave their valuables unguarded. And that’s what this site was to them: a repository of salable goods with a real dollar value, and nothing more.
Where was the gun? Faye had no idea of the actual orientation of the trench she was lying in so, for reference sake, she assumed that her head was north. She could tilt her head back ever so slightly and get a good line-of-sight up the trench all the way to its end at the lagoon, but she saw nobody and no tree or rock for anybody to hide behind.
Everything seemed clear to the north. She would try another direction. There were only three more.
She rolled carefully onto her back and the motion triggered another shot. Apparently, her nemesis was not worried about conserving ammunition. She lay there for a while, trying to discern motion or a human form in the woods south of her. There was none, but the clear view of the trees atop the lip of the far side of the pit was instructive. If someone were concealed there, he could see her just as well as she could see the trees, and he could shoot her just as easily. She wasn’t dead yet, so he wasn’t there. That left only west and east.
Faye considered a Hollywood approach, holding up a large object that wasn’t attached to her body—a boot or a rock—and waiting to see which direction the shot came from, but she couldn’t reach her boots without rising up out of the narrow ditch and there wasn’t a rock in the ditch bigger than a grain of sand. Florida just wasn’t a rocky place.
Then the sound of voices wafted out of the woods to her right. Slowly, she lifted her head, trying to raise an eye over the lip of the ditch without exposing any of the rest of her head. No shot erupted. The sniper was sitting high in an oak tree in a camouflaged deer stand and he had company. It was a tiny venue for a fistfight, but they were managing pretty well.
The gunman was as distracted as he would ever be, but Faye hesitated. It would take just about forever to heave herself out of the ditch, run across the lagoon and over the dunes, cross the beach, get into her skiff, and get out of range. The moment she cleared the dunes, she would be silhouetted against the sky. It would be a miracle if he didn’t shoot her squarely in the middle of the back.
When she saw the rifle falling out of the tree, she found that she had underestimated her own speed. She was out of the ditch and running before the gun hit the ground.
Wally fell back under the power of a fist to his jaw, but he didn’t quit. He was unaccustomed to playing the role of hero, but he had a vague idea of how it was done.
“Put down the gun,” he barked. “Do you want to kill her?”
Nguyen’s fist fell again. “Frankly, yes. I do. I like the money I’m making here and I don’t think I would like prison. You’ve let her get away. Now she’ll talk and this place’ll be crawling with people who will want to lock our asses up.”
Wally grabbed the other man by the shoulders and used his body weight to pin him against the trunk supporting the rickety tree stand. “And nobody will want to lock our asses up for murder?”
“
If
they found this babe’s body, and
if
they traced it here, they would think the pothunter did it. The one who’s going to jail instead of us for digging up this site. Hey, maybe they’ll decide the pothunter killed those two students, too.”
“You idiot. This babe
is
our pothunter. If you kill her, we lose our cover.”
Wally released his partner and watched him yank a .38 out of his shoulder holster and brace his shooting arm against the railing of the tree stand. “Let her go. Even if we have to leave this site, it’s nothing compared to the wreck. Besides, she won’t turn us in. She has too much to lose. Either way, keeping her alive leaves us with a scapegoat if this thing goes sour.”
Faye was still running for the dunes. Wally reached in his pants pocket and held up a small yellow box—a throwaway camera. “I’d shot nearly a full roll documenting Faye’s tour of our island before you started throwing bullets at her. If we ever need a cover, a few of these handed over anonymously to the Park Service will make her their prime suspect.”
Nguyen lowered his handgun and watched Faye sprint over the dunes, silhouetted against the sky. Wally breathed a sigh of relief.
Wally genuinely liked Faye, but he would let her take the fall for his crimes without a qualm, because that’s the kind of guy he was. In the end, Wally looked out for Wally and no one else, but that didn’t mean he wanted Faye dead.
His cut lip throbbed and his ears rang. Taking a beating from Nguyen just to save Faye’s hide was the noblest hour in a life devoid of morality. He felt both proud and stupid.
Magda knew that the brave new cyber-world had finished dawning when archaeologists went on-line. A more hidebound, old-fashioned, technology-hating band of reactionaries than her colleagues was never born, but they had finally discovered the wonders of the Web. Some of them had been forced to give up their quill pens and learn to type.
Every day, Magda found that the chore of winnowing through her e-mail grew more difficult. No topic was so esoteric that it had no proponents to put on a conference and invite Magda to submit a paper. No academic rivalry could be allowed to fester on its own without both sides convening in private chat rooms to trash the reputations of their opponents.
But then, some of the information was useful, and so current that telephone and traditional mail were truly too slow to disseminate the message. Today, Magda’s virtual mailbox was full, and much of its content was actually urgent.
Her colleagues were abuzz over a strange mixture of Native American artifacts, some ancient and maybe Clovis, and some far more recent, that had suddenly gone up for auction on eBay. The newer pieces were probably from west Florida, suggesting a similar origin for the Clovis artifacts, but none of her colleagues on the Internet could pinpoint a likely location.
The consensus was that someone had looted Paleo-Indian artifacts found in a datable context, maybe even in an actual occupation site. Humans lived lightly on the land twelve thousand years ago. No wonder the Internet was alight with archaeological gossip.
Magda signed off and brooded for a while. For years, she had overlooked her suspicions of Faye. Frankly, she couldn’t believe that the woman she knew would loot a site of such importance. And the unsophisticated mixing of artifacts of such varied age didn’t sound like Faye’s work. Still, when solving a problem, she had to follow every possibility, no matter how unlikely, to its logical end. It was the scientific method in action. For years, she’d had clues to where Faye was digging. It was time to investigate them.