Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

attract an ordinary thief to Joyeuse, but an artifact poacher might find her home interesting enough to visit.
    An uglier thought presented itself. If he had chosen to corrupt Faye, rather than Sam and Krista, she would have caved easily. No, she wouldn’t have stolen from Magda’s dig, but she would happily have sold him anything she dug up on her own. If he’d only approached her first, she’d have had a new customer and her more honorable friends would be alive.
    Ugliest of all was the thought that there could be another pothunter in these waters, someone who didn’t shrink from murder—someone who might not be pleased to learn that somebody else was harvesting these islands. Denial reared its self-protective head and said, Don’t be paranoid. There’s a simpler answer and, when faced with a choice between a fancy answer and a simple answer, take the simple one. It’s most likely to be true.
    The simplest answer was, in a word, drugs. Gossip among some of the field crew said that this wasn’t the first time Sam and Krista had run afoul of a drug supplier. Other crew members denied it, saying that the two kids were straight arrows who wouldn’t recognize a controlled substance if it jumped up and bit them.
    Faye found both positions extreme. She knew Sam and Krista and she wouldn’t have doubted that either of them were occasional pot smokers, but they were too serious about their studies, too gung-ho in their work ethic, to muddy their minds with any regularity. She couldn’t see them being so deeply involved in the drug culture that someone would boat out to Seagreen Island, stalk them, and kill them.
    But the thought was so seductive. Blame the victims. If they had attracted their killer to them, then now he was gone. She was safe. Joe was safe. At least they were safe until the tax collector took Joyeuse and left them both homeless.

    The battery-powered lantern shed a more-than-acceptable reading light, and the fact that it was still shining at midnight was a fair measure of Faye’s fascination with the journal in her hands. Faye wasted nothing: not batteries, not kerosene or gasoline or food. She had lived close to the economic edge for a long, long time. Sooner or later, she was bound to fall off but, when it happened, it would be through an act of God or through the malice of another human being. It would not be because she had failed to eke every bit of value out of everything she had.
    Faye had yet to figure out who William Whitehall was. Finding his journal at Joyeuse suggested that he had some connection to her family, but she knew nothing about her ancestors prior to the Civil War, and two generations or more separated William from that period. Perhaps he was a friend of her ancestors or a business associate. She would not allow herself to assume that she was reading the words of her own flesh and blood until she knew it for certain.
    She was scientist enough to ignore her romanticism—most of the time—but the act of reading a man’s heartfelt thoughts recorded while Florida was still a pawn in the hands of the British, the Spanish, and the upstart Americans charmed both the scientist and the romantic in her.
    ***
    Excerpt from the diary of William Whitehall, 29 May, 1798
    My Daughter Mariah has flourish’d these sixteen Years—her gracefull hands & expressive eyes would speak for her if she had not such skill at speaking for herself. God in Heaven forgive me, but she is the charming Woman that my Susan once was. Susan’s step has grown heavy. She looks at me so seldom that it is clear she would prefer not to see my face at all.
    Failure at love is not the same thing as failure at Marriage. We have a good, compleat life. Most days, the daylight outlasts the chores. This is a wellcome happenstance, for at day’s end, we can rest while Susan stitches & I attend to Mariah’s lessons.
    How I chafed at my own lessons! Mariah drinks hers up. As the fifth son of an English gentleman of reduced circumstance, I saw my future in America; I found booklearning superfluous. Father insisted, so study I did and, as is commonly the case, on achieving his age I found him to be right. In the hard years, reading to Susan was our only pleasure between getting up & going to bed and now, in better times, I share my learning with my daughter. Susan never joins us, but when I tell Mariah a funny story in French, my Susan laughs.
    My greatest concern at the present revolves around Mariah’s future. She