Artifacts (5 page)

Stuart circled through the parking lot at Wally’s Marina, scoping out the territory. His new client had suggested that he begin his search for Mr. Ponytail and his young friend at Wally’s. It was highly likely that the distinguished clientele would have information on every shady character in a thirty-mile radius. Oddly, the man had told him to scrupulously avoid Wally himself, describing him as both crooked and dull-witted. This was a combination that Stuart found useful in errand boys, but dangerous when the stakes were high.

It was nearly ten. Since fishermen like to have their bait in the water before dawn, perhaps to surprise sleepy fish, the marina parking lot was almost deserted. Left behind was a handful of cars belonging to people asleep on their boats or to the die-hard drinkers lingering at the bar and grill.

Stuart parked and went inside, ostensibly to take a piss but actually to see if anybody at the grill looked like a big Indian or a scrawny boy. Nobody did, and nobody would admit to ever seeing them, either, so he crawled back into his car and headed for the Panacea Palace. On his way out, he passed a parked car with a middle-aged, cranky-looking woman at the wheel. A younger woman, slightly built and dark, maybe foreign, leaned in the driver’s window to speak to the driver. Stuart drove right past them.

Magda watched Faye use her last French fry to sop special sauce off the hamburger wrapper. Refilling their glasses out of a jug of cheap but decent wine, she blurted out a question that had bugged her for years.

“You were my best student. Why did you leave school?”

Faye looked thunderstruck. Magda saw that she had hit a nerve and, as usual, had done so with the delicacy of a butcher wielding a meat cleaver.

“What do you mean, I was your best student?”

This was not the nerve Magda thought she had struck.

“You were good in the lab. You came to class prepared and, judging from your essays, you read lots more material than I assigned. Speaking of your essays, they were grammatical—something that grows more unusual every day—and they were thoughtful. Occasionally, they were almost poetic. You loved the subject. My subject.”

“But I struggled constantly to keep an A.”

“Faye. Part of your grade came from class participation and you never made a peep. It made me mad. You had a lot to offer the class, but you kept it to yourself.”

Faye wore the face of a snake digesting a mouse swallowed whole. “I’m glad to know I was a good student.”

“So.” The meat cleaver descended again. “Why did you leave school?”

“My mother was sick. My grandmother was sick. I took care of them until they died.”

“I’m sorry, Faye. Don’t you know they would have wanted you to finish your education?”

“Oh, yes. Yes. From the day I was born, Mama saved for my college. But it took me five years to pay all the medical bills. I think I’ll always be behind on the bills I neglected so I could pay the hospital. School just isn’t possible now. It may never be.”

Magda respected the finality in Faye’s voice enough to resist touting the possibility of grants and student loans. She said, “I understand, but I have always respected your drive to learn on your own.”

Magda’s office door opened directly across from the departmental library, giving her the poignant opportunity to watch Faye doggedly pursue the education she couldn’t afford. She couldn’t count the times she’d seen Faye in there, poring over the books. Not every day and not every week, but steadily, Faye was there, making better use of the school’s resources than the students whose activity fees actually entitled them to the privilege.

After a time, Faye began requesting inter-library loans, apparently unaware that she didn’t have official library access. Magda diverted the requests, approved them under her own account, and routed the books to Faye, who seemed oblivious to her machinations. One day, while cleaning her own bookshelves to make room for more stuff, Magda had a revelation. The armloads of journals she was casting aside were a few years old, but most of the material was still solid. She asked Faye if she would like to have them and was amused by how quickly the journals disappeared into the young woman’s ancient Pontiac.

Years passed before Magda got her next opportunity to help Faye, but it came. The labor budget for the survey of Seagreen Island was generous. It would support fifteen field techs and she didn’t have that many students. Faye had three years’ credit toward an archaeology degree and her subsequent reading would have earned her a master’s if she’d actually been a student. Faye was overqualified in some respects for the job Magda offered, but she accepted the temporary, no-benefits minimum-wage job in a heartbeat. Magda understood her passion to get in the field and do some real science. After all these years, she still felt it herself.

The cliché says that no good deed goes unpunished, but Faye proved it wrong. She was the best employee Magda ever hired. She had the life skills the younger students didn’t, so she arrived on time, did what she promised, and gave some thought to her work. She was management material. Before the first week was done, Magda divided her staff into two groups, putting Faye in charge of the second team.

Magda managed her people by prowling constantly among them, silent unless she needed to chew somebody out for sloppiness or inefficiency. Almost immediately, Magda noticed Faye’s comfort with the tools of the trade: shovel, trowel, brush, and sieve. Magda doubted skills like that could be gained from books, but she knew Faye’s resumé was heavy on burger-flipping and retail sales, and absolutely bare of relevant experience. She began to wonder where Faye had been digging.

Soon after that, she began to wonder where Faye lived. She gave Wally’s Marina as her mailing address, saying that she lived on her boat. Well, Magda had seen Faye’s boats, both of them. One was a tiny mullet skiff that she used to get around in. Once, when the weather was too bad to trust her life to the skiff, Faye had arrived at work in a twenty-four-foot Trojan that she called the
Gopher
. Magda had seen it in a slip at Wally’s a couple of times since, but she had no idea where Faye kept it ordinarily. While the
Gopher
was certainly bigger than the skiff, it was no more comfortable and much more mildewed. Magda refused to believe Faye’s claim that she lived aboard the
Gopher
, but she had yet to catch her in an inconsistent statement that would reveal where she did live. Perhaps it was time to try again.

“So, you’ll probably need to get home before you go to work tomorrow. Your car’s at Wally’s. Do you have much of a drive?” There. That was fairly subtle, for Magda.

“My skiff’s at Seagreen Island, and I can’t get to my real boat without it, so I’ll have to hitch a ride with you. Can I borrow a tee-shirt and shorts and wash my work clothes here?”

Faye was smooth. She’d deflected Magda’s question easily, without even saying where her “real” boat was, then ended the conversation by flicking on the TV, but she wasn’t smooth enough to watch what the local news was broadcasting without flinching. Together, they watched Faye run, slog, and swim out to the empty boat, then they watched themselves stand half-dressed by a makeshift grave. The only good thing about this edition of the eleven o’clock news was the absence of Sam and Krista’s dirt-encrusted faces. Faye and Magda had, through quick action, spared them that much of their dignity. When the newscast was over, Magda went to bed, saying nothing more to Faye but a simple, “Good night.”

Chapter 6

Island dwellers sleep lightly. Some part of their conscious mind never switches completely off. Their dreams are littered with references to wind and water and wave. On the ordinary night, they rise out of sleep only enough to listen for an unexpected squall or the steady bumping of a boat whose moorings are no match for the weather. They toss around in bed. They disturb their sleeping partners.

But on the other nights, the not-ordinary nights, their hyperactive senses might register a drop in air pressure or a damp breath of wind through an open window or the electric smell of lightning. On those nights, islanders might owe the safety of their boats, their property, their very lives to their light sleeping habits.

Faye, who had lain awake on Magda’s couch all night, customarily slept like an islander, but tonight she didn’t sleep at all. This insomnia had nothing to do with an islander’s alert senses and everything to do with her imagination. She was acutely aware that twenty-four hours before, one day before, Sam and Krista were still alive. As the night ticked away, she wondered,
What were they doing last night at midnight? At two?
Her imagination, being sly and malicious, let her dwell on impending death until she got used to it, then struck her with a sucker punch.

What were they doing last night at four?
it asked.
And what would they be doing differently if they were aware that they would be dead by six?

With that thought rankling in her psyche, she got up and fetched the morning newspaper off Magda’s porch. The front page was blanketed with facts, near-facts, and rumors about the Seagreen Island murders. Her name and her picture leapt off the page. So she was to be denied the mindless daily escape of perusing the paper. She found a deck of cards in a kitchen drawer and played solitaire until the sound of riffling cards brought Magda from the room where she, too, wasn’t sleeping. They played gin until it was time to go to work.

Faye and Magda walked into Wally’s, where they found the rest of their crew sitting in the grill, each of them finishing up a plate of Liz’s widely renowned eggs and grits. Faye was surprised to see Wally awake and sober. He was even working. He looked up from the
SCUBA
tank he was filling for an impatient-looking customer and sent a friendly half-wave in Faye’s direction.

“I know that guy,” Magda said under her breath.

“Wally?” Faye asked. “I know Wally. Everybody knows him.”

“No,” Magda said, “not Wally. His friend.” She studied the patched linoleum floor, as if she hoped the impatient
SCUBA
diver wouldn’t notice that she’d seen him.

“Who is he?” Faye said, trying not to stare. It was the grimly silent black-eyed man she’d seen brooding in the checkout line the day before. The day Sam and Krista died.

“I don’t know his name, but I’ve seen him twice before, both times when I was working on a field survey way out in the sticks. It seemed odd to see the same guy hanging around the big towns of Vernon and Cross Creek. Especially since those two sites had something else in common.”

“What?”

“Significant artifact losses. We never tracked down the culprit, but it was an inside job. One of my workers stole from both digs.”

Faye frankly stared at the innocent-looking faces around them. “One of these kids—” she began.

“No, it happened years ago. But whoever the thief or thieves were, I’m sure they didn’t have the connections to get rid of the loot. They needed a middleman, a fence. I’ve got no evidence, but we’re looking at the only common denominator I ever came up with.”

Faye gave the diver another corner-of-the-eye squint.

“Sam and Krista wouldn’t steal,” Faye said nonsensically.

“Maybe that’s why they’re dead,” Magda said as she stepped into Wally’s office without permission and flipped open her cell phone.

Magda was mightily tired of doing her civic duty. She’d kept her crew hanging around Wally’s until an investigator arrived to talk to the suspect she’d turned up for him. Then she’d loaded her students onto the workboat and hauled them to Seagreen Island, all the while in touch with the Micco County Sheriff’s Office by cell phone.

“His name is Nguyen Hanh and he’s got an alibi,” her new buddy, the sheriff’s receptionist, told her. “He had breakfast yesterday at a diner way on the other side of Tallahassee. He’s got witnesses, even a credit card receipt.”

Magda, who was not easily convinced of anything, couldn’t get her brain around the fact that they had let her suspect go. If the sheriff’s people couldn’t be persuaded to do her bidding, then why was she out here on Seagreen Island doing theirs? How could they possibly ask her to shut down her field survey?

She and her crew had spent the morning packing up the equipment that the undersheriff had deemed unnecessary to the investigation, trying not to think about what was going on behind the crime scene tape. At least the bodies were gone, taken ashore for autopsy. They were trying not to think about that, too.

Her workers, headed home to seek jobs at the mall or to do nothing, looked as gloomy as she felt. And Faye, who likely needed this menial, low-paying job more than any of them, still wore her usual serene expression, but her shoulders drooped.

Magda hurled a box of sample bags into the workboat. She had been packing up fragile, expensive equipment all morning and half the afternoon. Tomorrow—Friday, a perfectly good workday—would be wasted, and so would all the other perfectly good workdays between now and the beginning of the fall semester. Dr. Raleigh, who would be happy to see her production of journal articles dwindle to his own piddly rate, would make her time in the office insufferable. It felt good to use her pent-up anger to just throw something.

She would never get over Sam’s and Krista’s deaths. Alongside that enormity, her other concerns were, like Seagreen Island’s remarkable population of mosquitoes, pesky but not catastrophic. Still, she hated shutting down her project so that the crime scene investigators could comb the island for clues. It had to be done, but what was she going to do with herself now, relegated to desk work in an antiquated building devoted to the study of a not-very-lucrative science?

Magda, while flinging another box of nonbreakable junk into the boat, caught a glimpse of something that surprised her ever-moving body into stillness. Striding toward the group of archaeologists was a huge, well-formed man who, in a single fluid motion, had navigated his johnboat close to the water’s edge, cut the motor, hopped out, and hauled the boat onto the sand. Beneath his worn cutoffs, wet sand clung to muscled legs from his upper thighs down to his bare feet. Bulky arms hung easily at his sides and even his fingers looked muscular. His torso traced the triangle of the idealized male form and at the nape of his neck hung a long, black ponytail, carelessly tied.

Her entire work party was silent. The men assumed the head-cocked, puffed-chest stance of a flock of pigeons whose roost has been invaded. The women just stood like deer caught in the headlights of a Mack truck.

The man hesitated for a moment and let the sun glitter on the drops of water in his hair, then he said a single word. “Faye?”

Two students dropped what they were doing and rushed to find her. The rest of them continued to stare.

In the four months since Joe Wolf Mantooth had showed up at Joyeuse and, in a moment of weakness, Faye had let him stay, she had never seen him angry. She’d also never heard him string so many sentences together.

“You’re always home by dark. I worried about you all night. Faye, you made me really mad. Why didn’t you call me? Then I wouldn’t have been so—”

Faye, growing ever more uncomfortable, said, “Joe. We don’t have a phone. Besides—”

Logic was not Joe’s strong point. He waved both hands, trying to quiet her because, even in this state, he was too polite to interrupt.

“I was worried about you after what happened to those students.”

“How did you know about the students? We don’t have a TV, either.”

Joe continued talking with his hands. “I went to the
Gopher
and tried to raise you on the radio. You didn’t answer, but I heard lots of people talking about a killer on the loose. Faye, I couldn’t sleep all night.”

Joe stirred the same tender spot in Faye that he always did. He was a simple man who would likely register borderline normal on an intelligence test, but he was the truest person she’d ever known. Joe could read a little and he could add a little. He was an expert boat pilot, but he couldn’t drive a car. He could catch fish when they weren’t biting, he could drop a deer with a homemade bow and arrow, and he could predict the weather simply by listening to birdsong and evening winds.

Had Joe been born two hundred years earlier, he would have been a man among men. In his own time, he was stymied by the intricacies of retrieving money from an ATM. Faye was glad that Joyeuse provided Joe a small piece of wilderness where he could thrive.

She took his hand, both to settle his mind and to lead him away for a private talk before he said more than he should about where they lived. They left behind them a crowd of young adults who would never ever have predicted that Faye—old, over thirty, and staid, in their eyes—went home every day to this half-crazed, fully-sexed hunk of man.

Sheriff McKenzie watched Joe’s performance from his side of the yellow crime scene tape. This guy Joe had a temper. He was linked to the archaeologists and Seagreen Island, however tenuously, through Faye. And a crowd of witnesses had just heard him say that he had learned of the two students’ deaths without benefit of telephone or television. Sheriff Mike wondered what he was doing the morning they were killed.

Deputy Claypool sprinted over the low hill separating the island into two distinct portions. Sheriff McKenzie could tell he had news that he wanted to deliver immediately, by shouting if necessary, and he was impetuous enough to do it. McKenzie took off running at a decent clip for a man sliding rapidly toward sixty, but nobody was quicker than Claypool’s mouth.

“We found a campsite,” the young man hollered. “Somebody was there all night, probably watching the kids. I bet the coroner says they died early yesterday morning.”

McKenzie closed in on his loose-lipped underling, wrapped a big arm around the deputy’s shoulders, and put his mouth directly on the young man’s ear. “The coroner already did say so, you big-mouthed doofus.”

Joe, Faye, Magda, and her students stood staring on their side of the crime scene tape. They were too shell-shocked to even pretend that they hadn’t heard one of their public servants spilling sensitive information within earshot of the considerable crowd inhabiting Seagreen Island that day.