Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

outdoor stairs tucked under the rear gallery.
    Joyeuse’s interior staircase was a freestanding spiral of singular grace, but it wasn’t aging well. It shifted perceptibly underfoot and the plaster that coated its underside was flaking away, clear evidence of motion beyond the architect’s specifications.
    That very morning, Faye had removed several balusters to enhance its rickety appearance, yet the inspector was risking her life to climb it so she could harass Joyeuse’s tax-dodging owner. Faye hoped it fell, because she had only one more trick up her sleeve.
    The footsteps kept coming closer and closer, climbing further up the spiral. The treads creaked under the woman’s feet and Faye could almost feel Joyeuse herself tremble and shift in sympathy. The footfalls stopped when the stairs ended at a square landing that served no purpose other than to provide access to the huge bedrooms hiding behind closed doors.
    On this landing, Faye had pulled out the stops, evoking every stereotype she knew to convince the inspector that the tumbledown house was just a shell that luckless people used to keep the rain off their heads. Ratty clothes were tossed among discarded cans of beans and beer and Sterno. She hoped the inspector was writing “abandoned, uninhabited, and uninhabitable” on her clipboard. She hoped the inspector was doing anything other than reaching for the doorknob to one of the bedrooms.
    For a long moment, there was no sound, no footstep broadcasting the intruder’s inspection of the squatters’ refuse, no turning doorknob, nothing. Then, there were quick footsteps as the woman stumbled down the deathtrap masquerading as a staircase, across the entry hall, and down the grand outdoor stairs.
    Faye’s final, inspired trick had worked. Joe had been instrumental to her plan. She had left him in privacy to do the task and she imagined he had performed it with the glee of a small boy. She hoped he was as gleeful when she asked him to clean up after himself.
    The coast was clear and it was safe for Faye to laugh out loud. The intrepid inspector had been scared away by the simple odor of urine.

    Stuart was tired of walking into bars and walking out again, still sober. It was not possible that his targets had lingered long in this area without being seen by somebody, especially when one of the targets wore a feather in his long black hair. Maybe the people who had the information he needed didn’t drink, so bars weren’t the best places to look. Maybe they were upstanding, churchgoing folk.
    Tomorrow was Sunday. Maybe he’d find himself a shabby suit at the thrift shop and visit some churches. Nah. He shouldn’t have to do anything that drastic. Bars are chockfull of churchgoing family people just looking for an hour’s peace. Bars are full of people who filled their cars at service stations and shopped for groceries and picked up the weekly dry cleaning. How was it possible that no one in this lightly populated corner of the world had seen the Indian guy and his young sidekick?
    Stuart could see only two possibilities: either they were drifters who didn’t stay in the area long enough to make an impression on anyone but his client, or they lived someplace unusually secluded. If they’d drifted on, then they’d taken his chance at a fortune with them and he might as well go home and have a cold beer. It seemed more practical to assume that they were hiding in an extremely out-of-the-way spot and, if he could only find it, the money would be his.

    Faye took a moment to enjoy being alone at the top of her home with a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the Gulf of Mexico and its coastline. She didn’t know when she’d last taken the time to crawl up into the cupola just to look around. The view was worth the climb. Her eyes were drawn to a scattering of dark patches in the aquamarine waters far to the southwest, like inclusions in an otherwise flawless gemstone. She’d had no idea that the Last Isles were visible from Joyeuse.
    It was good to know that Joyeuse was safe and that she’d been the one to save it. Grounded by the feel of her home, old and solid beneath her, and soothed by the all-encompassing water, she sank down on a bench beside a floor-to-ceiling window.
    When she felt rested, she stood up and looked down at the old storage bench where she’d been sitting. The words “old” and “storage” coalesced in her archaeologist’s brain and she lifted the lid. It was stuffed