Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

with old dresses—Depression-era, from the looks of the fabric. Interesting, but not earth-shattering. She wanted something old . She pulled the dresses out and found nothing beneath them but broken glass. It was thicker and clearer than window glass, but no more earth shattering than the dresses. Finally, in a back corner beneath a broken teacup, Faye at last found something old .
    Ten thousand years old.
    It was a long, distinctively fluted piece of stone. Faye gawked at the Clovis-style spearhead in her hand. Implements from the famous Clovis, New Mexico, site had been found in association with Pleistocene species; the Clovis people lived so far in the past that they hunted mammoths and other Ice Age animals. Could this point have been brought here by someone who bought it or collected it elsewhere? Or was there a Clovis site nearby? Artifacts of that age weren’t unknown in Florida, but habitation sites of such great age had proven elusive so far.
    Holding something so ancient made the great house on Joyeuse seem new, a frivolous whim built by someone who thought he needed a dwelling much more grand than the ephemeral hut of the hunter-gatherer. When this grand house blew away on a puff of wind and water, the artisan who made the thing in her hand would live on in the poetry of its form and function.
    She couldn’t wait to show this to Joe.
    Stooping over, she pushed on the lever that activated the trapdoor’s latch. Nothing. She tried again. The mechanism tripped properly, but the door didn’t budge. Hanging on to a window sill so that she wouldn’t drop through the hole when the door finally opened, she stomped on the lever with all her weight. Nothing.
    This was a sorry state of affairs. Perhaps, in a single hour, humidity had caused the wood of the door to swell an extra millimeter. Perhaps the house had shifted and the trapdoor frame was barely out of square. Perhaps one too many coats of varnish had been applied to the door and its frame, and they had bonded chemically under pressure.
    Joe wouldn’t be back to the house until suppertime. Unless she planned to perch in the cupola until then, waiting for rescue like Rapunzel, she would be crawling over the roof.
    Praying no one had painted the windows shut, she knelt by one and pushed up the sash. It rose easily and she leaned out to plan her escape. The roof descended at a sharp slant, but the tin roof’s ridges and her rubber-soled boots would give her traction. Wrapping the still-sharp edges of the Clovis point in the silk remains of a seventy-year-old dress and tucking it inside her shirt, she stepped out of the window. It was a simple traverse, across the roof and down a little to the gable of her own bedroom window, which should be easy to open, considering that she’d smashed half of its panes.
    Faye was in good shape and she was wearing boots with good traction. She should have had no difficulty sidling down the slanted roof. It would have been a lot easier if she’d made the trip in a single motion without pausing to think about the distance to the ground, and what a human body would look like once it had made that long trip. Three days ago, she’d seen two people with the life snuffed out of them. They’d been shot, whereas, if she fell, she’d merely break every bone in her body. Still, dead is dead.
    Faye’s crawl down the roof resumed, but her progress was painful. She successfully negotiated the roof and raised the window, then fell through the open bedroom window directly onto her bed. Very old swans and wisteria watched over her as she slept through the rest of the afternoon and into the night.

    Nguyen had been watching the news and keeping an eye on boat traffic out of Wally’s Marina. He and Wally had made a few scouting trips through the Last Isles. The coast was unquestionably clear.
    The Marine Patrol boats and the Sheriff’s Office boats and the Park Service boats had gone back where they came from, except for a few that carried investigators back and forth to the crime site on Seagreen Island. Nguyen’s dig site was on Water Island, another of the Last Isles, miles away, and the cops hadn’t been near it in days. Nguyen judged that it was safe to begin digging again.
    It would take time to ferry their equipment back out to the island, but Nguyen figured that the rewards outweighed the effort. The riches buried under the sand and sea were more than sufficient to drive a man to extreme measures.

    When Faye crawled out