Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

staircase that rose from the ground to the main floor, bypassing the ground floor service rooms where the slaves had tended their masters. Treads, risers, banisters, and balusters flew in the face of the wave, then fell to the water surface and were washed away. They did not fall far. In the aftermath of the storm surge, the water level was even with the main floor balcony, leaving the service rooms completely underwater.
    The wind was loud enough to raise the dead and each wave lapped further up the walls of her home, but Joyeuse held.
    Later, when the blasting wind suddenly ceased, Faye was wise enough to be wary. Many a soul had walked with desperate relief into the sudden eerie stillness of a hurricane’s quiet center, only to perish when the eyewall’s winds tore into them from a new direction. The setting sun added a faint glow as the gale died down and silence settled in, but only for a time.
    Douglass was stirring and now, without the storm sounds to mask his moans, she needed to keep him quiet more than ever. Her voice quieted him. She should just talk, whisper anything to keep him still, but the storm had wiped her mind so clean that she could think of nothing to say.
    “Have to tell you, Faye,” he said, his voice rising. “If I die…want you to know.”
    She bent and whispered in his ear, hoping to quiet him. “What do I need to know?”
    “Didn’t kill her. She was dead—beaten to death—when I got there.”
    She gestured at the floor, pointing at their tormentor waiting below. “Was it him?”
    Douglass nodded. “He made me help him bury her. Said he’d tell the sheriff I…killed…her. My word against his—”
    “And he knew a jury would believe the white man.” She stroked the graying hair at his temples. “Oh, Douglass. And your watch?”
    “He took it, prob’ly while I was layin’ her body in the grave.”
    Faye hadn’t thought his breathing could get more ragged. She was going to let him say about two more sentences before she stopped him and made him rest.
    “He put my watch in her grave…told me about it later. Said I could go ahead and talk to the sheriff, say as much as I wanted to, ’cause his testimony and my watch would put me in the electric chair. Then the hurricane came and we lost even her body, her grave…”
    Douglass’ racking sobs were punctuated with wheezes. She put her hand over his mouth. He had to lie quietly or die.
    Joe was rummaging through his bag again. He cradled a stone loosely in the palm of his hand and struck it sharply with another rock, flaking off a sliver of stone that he handed to Faye. Roughly the size of her index finger, it hooked to one side in the shape of the number seven. He guided her fingers along the blunt outer edge, then showed her the inner edge. It was as sharp as a scalpel.
    “To defend yourself,” he said.
    Faye tried to imagine getting close enough to the Senator to use this thing, but her brain wasn’t up to the challenge.
    The wind came back and it was stronger, though Faye wasn’t sure how she could tell the difference. The flexible trees, palms and pines, had been blown out horizontal before. They were horizontal now. The booming reports of more rigid trees failing under the wind’s assault may have come more frequently, but it was hard to tell. Perhaps the velocity of the rain spewing through the broken windowpanes had increased. It came from all directions now, hitting her like bullets, like great sodden bedsheets striking her from head to foot, again and again.
    She clutched William Whitehall’s journal, wrapped snugly in Joe’s tarp, layer after layer, bound with twine. She wanted it to survive as much as she wanted Joe, Douglass, herself, all of them, to live through this. She tucked the bundle into her shirt, because she would soon need both hands. She clutched at Joe and Douglass and the three of them were huddled into a tight ball when, one by one, the remaining windowpanes pulled away from their frames and shattered.
    Faye hoped that the destruction would stop, that a few broken panes would equalize the internal and external pressure, protecting the remaining windows that, in turn, protected them. When the glass settled, she looked up and understood why the windows had failed. The gaping holes where they had been were no longer square. The wood framing of the cupola was flexing with the pressure of the wind and the glass panes could not rise to the occasion. The framing itself would fail within