Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

acquaintances. He had no friends. Maybe he should put his ideals for female beauty in a compartment with the rest of his old life and lock the door.
    He considered Faye’s property dispute. It was probably valid, but she would lose in court without solid evidence. Ordinarily it was political suicide to back a lost cause, but African-American voters were going to eat this story up with a spoon.
    His memories of the Last Isles stretched back to a childhood spent puttering around in boats, exploring uninhabited islands and claiming them as his own, if only for an afternoon. He would fight development of the Last Isles as long as he had breath and if doing so helped the lovely Ms. Longchamp, so much the better. If there was any benefit to leaving his youth behind, it was the acquisition of enough maturity, wealth, and power to fill the role of a shining knight. At least once in his life, every man should get the chance to rescue a fair maiden in distress.

Chapter 9
    Faye was worn out. In a single day, she’d lobbied her senator, played hardball with her best client, and sparred with the law. All those activities, plus piloting the Gopher to shore and back and driving a car to Tallahassee and back, tended to make a girl tired. Then, after that, she’d spent hours making her cherished home look like an uninhabitable dump. She’d been successful, and that was depressing in itself.
    This was the kind of day when she most appreciated Joe’s culinary skills. He had no way to pay her rent. Besides, she would never have charged him for the square of ground beneath the one-man shelter he had built out of branches and palmetto fronds. Nevertheless, Joe paid his way, in his own way.
    Faye hadn’t cooked a meal since she met Joe, and her grocery bill had dropped precipitously, thanks to his subsistence skills. She hardly bought more than an occasional bag of cornmeal or can of shortening—Joe subscribed to the “fried is good” school of culinary arts—yet she ate like a queen. No one could catch fish more reliably than Joe, and he promised her oysters when they came back in season. Joe picked blackberries. He gathered hickory nuts and—she still found this remarkable—he brought down ducks, squirrels, and rabbits with his handmade bow and his chipped stone arrows.
    He had pestered her to let him put in a garden, but she’d been reluctant, because modern property assessments are augmented by aerial photographs. The regular grid of a vegetable garden would be patently obvious from the air. She’d relented when he showed her how he could grow vegetables in tiny clearings that just admitted enough sun to support one plant. He had adhered to her rule that his unorthodox garden had to be in a part of the island far, far from the Big House. Even Faye had to admit that a single cucumber plant, when seen from the air, looked pretty much like the start of a kudzu infestation.
    Faye tucked into her meal—fried fish, pink-eyed purple-hull peas, and sliced tomatoes—and her toes curled in pleasure. It was so satisfying to see the soil of Joyeuse feeding people after all the fallow years. Good food makes the eater feel cordial to everybody, especially the cook, and it occurred to Faye that the sheriff was right about one thing. She knew very little about Joe. When they’d first met, she had hesitated, out of good manners, to question him. Months had gone by and what had passed for good manners now bordered on unfriendliness.
    “Joe,” she asked, “where’d you learn to do all the things you know how to do?”
    “My mama,” he said, with the country boy’s quiet assurance that his mama was the best mama of them all.
    The silence hung there and festered while Faye wondered whether Joe had reasons for not talking about his past. The sheriff’s suspicions nagged at her—how well did she know this man, really? She probed again.
    “You hunt and fish better than any man I know. If you tell me your mama taught you to do those things, then I’m proud to be a woman.”
    “It was mostly Mama’s doing. When I was little, Daddy thought I was slow and I am. I know it. I didn’t like school and, after a while, Mama didn’t make me go, but she said I oughta be useful, so maybe I could hunt and fish. Daddy was afraid I’d shoot somebody, or run a fishhook through my thumb, but he was a long-haul trucker and he was gone a bunch. Mama took it on herself to teach me to fish. One day after we’d practiced for months and months, I