Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

interesting point, Ms. Longchamp.” The hazel eyes were still sharp, but there was a glimmer of something else. “I will take your request under consideration.”

    Faye was glad to be alone in the elevator. Her guts roiled over the risk she’d just taken. She’d managed to keep Joyeuse out of her conversation with the senator, but anybody probing in court documents and tax records was going to find that her great-grandmother Courtney hadn’t lost everything. The judge had ruled in her favor regarding ownership of Joyeuse because she could show more than a century of continuous occupation. Faye wasn’t eager for Cyril or anybody else to ask any questions about Joyeuse, not until she could afford to answer them.
    The elevator doors were opening, so Faye stopped leaning against the cool metal walls and pulled herself into a respectable upright position. Heaven only knew how she planned to pay the taxes on Seagreen Island, even if she did get it back. She couldn’t even take care of Joyeuse. Nevertheless, she was going to regain what was rightfully hers before the resort developers ruined it. She owed that much to her mother and her grandmother and all her ancestors right back to Cally Stanton, the slave girl who had managed to hand such a legacy down.

    Joe Wolf Mantooth was knapping flint, making a tiny bird point. He didn’t plan to shoot any birds with it, but he enjoyed the repetitive work and the feel of the rock in his hand, smooth and sharp. The growing pile of stone flakes between his feet gave him a feeling of accomplishment. Truth be told, he would have enjoyed flintknapping even if he never got a useful tool out of the activity, simply because the cracking sound of rock striking rock was so completely satisfying.
    Once, long before, Joe had listened as a friend tried to explain the concept of meditation, how it settled the soul and soothed the mind, how it even lowered the blood pressure. Joe had listened until he got tired of feeling stupid, then he’d gone home and flaked a chunk of flint while he studied on his friend’s words.
    Joe spent time chipping stone most days and sometimes he mused on things he didn’t understand, like what “blood pressure” meant and how computers worked and why women wore silly shoes. He turned his questions over and over until they clicked together like hard cool rocks and made sense. Sometimes he knapped stone without thinking at all, but when he set down his tools he felt like something somewhere in the world made more sense than it had when he had sat down to work.
    The sound of a boat motor startled him from his rhythmic chipping. Joe rose to greet Faye, as he always did. It would no more occur to him to stay with his work and ignore Faye’s homecoming than it would occur to a child to stay with his crayons rather than greet his mother at the door with a sloppy kiss.
    By the time he realized that this was not the sound of Faye’s boat, the boat’s sole occupant had seen him.
    Joe raised a hand in greeting.
    Wally cut his engine, looked Joe up and down, and blurted, “Who are you and what are you doing here?”
    Joe, who always took the route to the truth that yielded the greatest economy in words, said, “I’m Joe. I live here.” He didn’t have to add, “What are you doing here?” The words were implied.
    Wally sputtered something about checking on his stored furniture, but never disembarked. Instead, he cranked his boat and navigated it back toward open water at a rate of speed far too great for the shallow inlet Faye used to harbor her boats. Joe watched him tear away. Another man might have concluded that Wally was upset, even jealous, to find a man living with Faye, but such things were beyond Joe. He simply filed the encounter under “unexplainable.” Joe found almost everything in the modern world to be unexplainable.

Chapter 8
    Faye walked through the front entrance of the Museum of American Slavery like any sightseer looking to idle away her lunch hour. With a delicious sense of skullduggery, she browsed through the exhibits as if she’d never seen them. When she was certain that no one was looking, she slid through the door marked “Director” and took a seat at one end of a long conference table.
    Douglass Everett took the seat across from her with a cordial, “It’s good to see you again, Faye. I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to speak at Senator Kirby’s Seagreen Island press conference. That was a terrible day. Are you all