Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

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