Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

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