Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

to stay out of this conversation, but apparently her grandmother was right. She felt compelled to cackle.
    “Maybe he’s wrong to ask us to procure artifacts illegally, but look at the good his museum has done. He doesn’t profit from his Museum of American Slavery, and think of the history he’s passing on to people who’ll never read an archaeology journal.”
    No one could refute her statement but, comfortable on the moral high ground, they resumed their condemnation of pothunters in general and Douglass Everett in particular. Ears burning, Faye picked up a paintbrush and concentrated on brushing sand from the design stamped into a pottery sherd, whether the task required her undivided attention or not.
    Ignoring the discussion didn’t help. Every comment jangled a different nerve.
    “What kind of museum would display unprovenanced artifacts, anyway?”
    “How could anybody buy a piece of somebody else’s culture?”
    The comment that drove Faye to the edge came from the privileged lips of a girl who drove a BMW to class. When she stated that some things were just more important than mere money , Faye, who had taken her first after-school job at fourteen to help pay her mother’s medical bills, found that she needed to take a walk.
    Seagreen Island lay shrouded in the canopy of an oak hammock, and the Gulf of Mexico was a stroke of seafoam green, barely visible through the trees. It drew her like a melody. Within seconds, Faye could no longer hear the students’ incessant yammering, only the wind rushing through live oaks and cabbage palms. Someone had slashed a path to the water through the lush undergrowth just days before, but already the greenbrier reached for Faye as she passed. Intent on drawing peace from the ever-present Gulf, she pushed on.
    Before she fought her way to the turquoise water she craved, she caught a glimpse of something hard, reflective, magenta. It was the color of Magda’s workboat, and there was nothing that shade to be found in the natural world. Beached on a sandbar about a hundred and fifty yards off the coast of Seagreen Island, it rocked slightly with each passing wave. There were no passengers that she could see, although who knew what was lying out of sight on the bottom of the boat. Faye began to run before she let that thought crystallize.

    Anthony Perez was renowned as a reporter with a knack for being in the right place when news broke. He never tried to figure out how he did it, because dissecting his gift of intuition felt rather like cutting open the goose that laid the golden egg, just to see what was inside.
    His cameraman was working hard, knocking down the equipment and loading it onto a small boat that Senator Kirby had provided for the press. Anthony could have helped him, probably should have helped him, but he felt like taking a walk on this unspoiled island before somebody built a resort and spoiled it.
    He paused under a tremendous oak tree to study how its dripping Spanish moss absorbed the sunlight. The stuff would be hell to photograph. The fact that he was standing still and alone and making absolutely no sound made the sudden frenzied crashing even more shocking.
    It did not take a newsman of his celebrated intuition and undisputed good looks to infer that anything stimulating such activity might be newsworthy, so he followed his ears. A small, dark woman, dressed like one of the archaeologists, was running full-tilt for the water. His instincts were so good that he had already noted her singularly photogenic bone structure before he turned and ran for his cameraman.

    Faye slogged through the swampy muck separating Seagreen Island from the Gulf, trying to come up with a happy ending that fit the facts. There, beached on a sand bar and surrounded by calm water dappled in more shades of aquamarine than even Monet knew, was the boat that should have been carrying Krista and Sam back from their pancake breakfast. If they were in it, then they were lying out of sight in the bottom of the boat.
    Not liking that image, Faye tried another. Sam had fallen overboard, Krista jumped in after him, and the boat sped away out of control until it beached itself here. Two needles floating in a saltwater haystack—Faye liked that image even less.
    The boat wasn’t far away. She could swim that far. Hell, she could probably walk that far on the submerged sandbars peppering the waters around the Last Isles. Again, this did not bode well for Sam and Krista; they