Isolation
Authors: Mary Anna Evans
Copyright © 2015 by Mary Anna Evans
First E-book Edition 2015
ISBN: 9781464204050 ebook
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
The historical characters and events portrayed in this book are inventions of the author or used fictitiously.
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Contents
For little Oliver
I'd like to thank all the people who helped make
Isolation
happen.
Tony Ain, Amanda Evans, Michael Garmon, Erin Garmon, and Rachel Broughten read it in manuscript and provided their customary astute observations. Faye's adventures wouldn't be the same without the thoughtful attention of those near and dear to me.
Nadia Lombardero, Kelly Bergdoll, and Jerry Steinberg were my consulting environmental scientists. Attentive readers will see that Nadia and Jerry have namesake environmental scientists in
Isolation
.
Very attentive readers will recall that Kelly had a namesake environmental scientist in
Artifacts.
I am deeply grateful for their generosity in sharing their expertise. They are responsible for the passages in which I got things right, and they are innocent of wrongdoing on any occasions when I did not.
As always, I am grateful for the wonderful people at Poisoned Pen Press. My agent, Anne Hawkins, and my editor, Barbara Peters, have been my partners in bringing Faye to life for a very long time now. My publicist, Maryglenn McCombs, does a masterful job at getting the attention of people who will enjoy Faye's stories.
And, of course, I am grateful for you, my readers.
Excerpt from the oral history of Cally Stanton,
Recorded in 1935 and preserved
as part of the WPA Slave Narratives
Secrets hold power. My mama told me so, more than ninety years back. The power of secrets holds true for everybody, I expect, but it holds a lot more true for people who ain't got power of their own.
Think about a young girl, born a slave. Try to imagine that she has any power over her Missus at all. You can't, can you?
Now, think about a young girl, almost a woman, who has been tending her Missus since she was big enough to carry a chamber pot. Maybe before that. Maybe she's been tending her Missus since she was old enough to carry a bottle of bourbon. Maybe she's spent her short life listening to the things her Missus says when she's been into the bourbon since noontime.
A young girl like that knows how much her Missus pines for her home up north. She knows how much her Missus wishes the Master remembered where her bedchamber was. She knows the thing that even the Missus can't know, because she can't think it when she's sober. Only after several goodly portions of bourbon can her Missus listen to herself say, “He married me for my money. Now it's his, and all I've got for company is you, Cally.”
So, yeah, you could say that I stepped out of my cradle knowing how to keep a secret. And I stepped into womanhood knowing how to use it to my advantage.
Maybe you're thinking that I'm heartless with my secrets, using them for my gain and for the ruin of others. No, that ain't so. Sometimes there is only one gift a body can give another person. Sometimes that gift is silence.
Fish know which docks are owned by people who are generous with their table scraps. In the evenings, they gather around wooden posts that vibrate with the footsteps of a human carrying food. They wait, knowing that potato peels and pork chop bones will soon rain from the sky. They race to skim the surface for floating bread crumbs. They dive, nibbling at each half-eaten hot dog as it sinks. When a restaurant, even a shabby dive where hungry people clean their plates, throws its detritus off one particular dock every night, fish for miles around know all about it.
On this night, the fish wait below a dock that has always offered a nightly feast. Tonight, they feel the vibrations of familiar feet. The food falls into the water, as always, and the sound of a stainless steel spoon scraping the bottom of a stainless steel pot passes from the air above to the water below. Everything is as it has been, until a sharp noise jabs into the water hard enough for the fish to hear it. The spoon falls.
The spoon is large, designed for a commercial kitchen, so it hits the water with a smack that can be heard both above and below the surface. A scream falls into the fishes' underworld along with the spoon.
A big pot, with food scraps still clinging to its inner surface, hits the water an instant later. Only creatures with the agility of the waiting fish could scatter quickly enough to avoid being hit.
After another heartbeat, something else falls among them, something bigger and softer. Soon there are two somethings, both with arms and legs and feet and hands, one that gurgles and another that leaves when the gurgling stops.
The thing that stays behind is a human body. As it settles in the water, tiny minnows nestle in the long hair that floats around it like seaweed. Catfish explore its ten long fingers with their tentacled mouths. None of them associate its two bare feet with the sprightly vibrations that had always signaled a rain of food.
Before long, predators appear, drawn by the smell of blood.
Joe Wolf Mantooth was worried about his wife.
Faye was neglecting their business. She was neglecting her health. He wanted to say she was neglecting her children, but it would kill her to think he believed such a thing, so he spent a lot of time telling that part of himself to be quiet. He also wanted to say she was neglecting him, but it would kill him to believe it, so he spent the rest of his time telling that other part of himself to be quiet. Or to shrivel up and die. Because if he ever lost Faye, that's what Joe intended to do. Shrivel up and die.
The children seemed oblivious to the changes in their mother. Michael, at two, saw nothing strange about her leaving the house every morning with her archaeological tools. She had always done that.
Amande was away from home, doing an immersion course in Spanish at a camp situated so high in the Appalachians that she'd asked for heavy sweaters long before Halloween. Faye had been too distracted to put them in the mail. Joe had shopped for them, boxed them up, and sent them off. Faye seemed to have forgotten that her daughter had ever said, “I'm cold.”
Amande was perceptive for seventeen. If she hadn't noticed that Joe had been doing all the talking for the last month, she would notice soon. Lately, when faced with a call from her daughter, Faye murmured a few distracted words before pretending that Michael needed a diaper change. If Faye didn't come up with another excuse to get off the phone, Amande might soon call 911 and ask the paramedics to go check out her brother's chronic diarrhea.
Though Joe did speak to Amande when she called, surely she had noticed by now that he said exactly nothing. What was he going to say?
The closest thing to the truth was “Your mother's heart fell into a deep hole when she miscarried your baby sister, and I'm starting to worry that we may never see it again,” but Joe was keeping his silence. Faye had forbidden him to tell Amande that there wasn't going to be a baby sister.
Was this rational? Did Faye think that her daughter was never going to fly home to Florida, bubbling with excitement over her Appalachian adventure and the coming baby?
If she did, it was yet more evidence supporting Joe's fear that Faye's mind wasn't right these days. Every morning brought fresh proof of that not-rightness as she walked away from himâ¦to do what? As best he could tell, she was carefully excavating random sites all over their island. If she'd found anything worth the effort, he sure didn't know about it.
In the meantime, Joe sat in the house, face-to-face with a serious problem. This problem was almost as tall and broad as Joe. His hair had once been as dark. His skin was the same red-brown, only deeper. This was a problem Joe had been trying to outrun since he was eighteen years old.
His father.
***
“Try this spot.”
Faye Longchamp-Mantooth believed in intuition. It had always guided her work as an archaeologist. After she'd gathered facts about a site's history, inspected the contours of the land, and scoured old photographs, she always checked her gut response before excavating. Her gut was often right. It was only recently, however, that her gut had begun speaking out loud and in English. Lately, her gut had been urging her to skip the boring research and go straight for the digging.
“Have you ever excavated here before?” its voice asked.
Faye's answer was no.
“Then try this spot.”
Every day, Joyeuse Island sported more shallow pits that had yielded nothing. Of course, they had yielded nothing. Faye had failed to do her homework. But going to the library or sitting at her computer would require her to be still and think. Thinking was painful these days, so she skipped it.
“Okay,” she said, not pleased to see that she'd begun answering the voice out loud, “I'll give it a shot. But I don't think there's anything here.”
Her hand was remarkably steady for the hand of a woman who'd been hearing voices for a month. She used it to guide her trowel, removing a thin layer of soil.
She would have known this old trowel in the dark. Her fingers had rubbed the finish off its wooden handle in a pattern that could match no hand but hers. Since God hadn't seen fit to let her grow the pointy metal hand she needed for her work, she'd chosen this one tool to mold into a part of herself.
Faye was working in sandy soil as familiar as the trowel. It was her own. She'd been uncovering the secrets of Joyeuse Island since she was old enough to walk, and she would never come to the end of them. As she grew older, she saw the need to mete out her time wisely, but she rebelled against it. The past would keep most of its secrets, and this made her angry.
Faye didn't know where to dig, because she didn't know what she was trying to find. It would help if the voice ever offered a less hazy rationale for ordering her out of the house. All it said was “You can find the truth. Don't let this island keep its secrets from you.”
Her frenetic busyness was an antidote for the times the voice tiptoed into ground that shook beneath her feet. It crept into dangerous territory and then beckoned her to follow. It asked her to believe that she was to blame for the baby's death, for the mute suffering in Joe's eyes, for every tear Michael shed.
This was craziness. Two-year-olds cried several times a day. Men who had lost babies suffered. And there was rarely any blame to be handed out in the wake of a miscarriage, even late miscarriages that carry away a child who has been bumping around in her mother's womb long enough for mother and daughter to get to know one another.
Still, the voice said Faye was to blame, so she believed it. And it told her that it was possible to dig up peace, so she dug.