Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

a living. He considered himself and his friends above the law—or beside the law or beneath the law, as the case might be. And that attitude appealed to Faye, whose relationship with the law was rocky at best.
    Faye teetered toward the door in her unfamiliar dress pumps. “I gotta go, Wally, but how ’bout coming out to see me at Joyeuse sometime? You could visit your hide-a-bed. Say ‘hi,’ to your pots and pans. Relax. Go fishing. Dry out.”
    “You been messing in my stuff, Faye? I know you’ve got your eye on my electric skillet.”
    “Your electric skillet is safe with me. At least until I get electricity.”
    She waved good-bye to Wally and hustled off to her car without giving him his usual hug. The smell of Wally’s breath didn’t bother her one whit, but she didn’t want to arrive in Tallahassee for a Friday morning meeting with a senator smelling of beer before the weekend even got underway.
    She worried over Wally. Business was obviously slow. How else could he spare a boat slip reserved just for her? The grill did a decent business, but there was only so much money to be made on coffee, eggs, and grits. Maybe it was a good thing that Wally had few needs other than beer and a place to sleep, and maybe it wasn’t.
    Faye crawled into her car, pumped the pedal, held it down, and turned the key. Praise God, all eight cylinders were still capable of internal combustion. The air conditioner might have blown its last breath sometime during the punk rock era, but Faye’s mother had known how to maintain an engine and she had passed her skills on to her daughter. The ugly rattletrap always cranked.
    Faye’s old Bonneville could have found its way to Tallahassee with no driver behind its wheel. Its parsimonious owner wished it could find its way to Tallahassee with nothing in its gas-guzzling tank, but she continued to feed it. Now, if the beast could be cajoled into an approximation of the speed limit, she would arrive in time to make a detour to the university library. Given an hour in the newspaper archives, she laid odds that she could identify the mystery woman buried alone in the Last Isles.

    The fact that its archives were not available on diskette or on the Web was a fair indication of the size and circulation of the Micco Times . Searching its archives was a matter of sliding one piece of plastic after another into a microfiche reader. Still, when one is single-minded, an amazing volume of drudgery can be accomplished in an hour.
    It only took Faye half that time to find the name she sought. That was one of the benefits of fishing in the small pond of a weekly, as the Times was in those days. She could place the age of the body within six or eight years, given the style of the earring. An unsolved murder in small-town Florida would have been big news, plastered on the front page over a period of weeks. And the value of the earring suggested that this was no unlucky prostitute who would go unmissed and unmourned.
    Every front page printed in the Florida Panhandle during the summer of 1964 had devoted space to the search for Abigail Williford. In the half-hour left to her, Faye printed out every article she could. The microfiche printer was so slow that she had time to skim each article as it printed. Column inch after column inch was devoted to informing readers exactly who the missing girl was, though it was apparent to Faye that most of the newspaper’s readership already knew more about her than the reporters themselves.
    Abigail Williford was the eighteen-year-old daughter of the richest man in Micco County. He had inherited tracts of middling farmland so large that income from his sharecroppers and tenant farmers would have kept him comfortable for life, but he was not a man to be idly rich. He had built a thriving construction business and, by the time of his daughter’s disappearance, he was a widower employing a goodly percentage of the farmers and day laborers in the area.
    Each article was adorned with the same close-up photograph of Abigail. Clearly a senior portrait intended for the school yearbook, it showed a smiling dark-haired girl glancing at the camera over a shoulder draped in chiffon. Every newspaper printed the same photo, week after week, all summer.
    Faye imagined the grieving father sitting alone in his home with the life-sized original portrait on the wall until the day he ripped it down, shattered the glass that covered it, and splintered the wood frame rather than