Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

bed.”
    They crossed the crest of the small hill that ran down the spine of Seagreen Island. In their wake stood a tidy row of surveyor’s flags, each consisting of a simple length of wire topped with a rectangle of orange vinyl. The flags marched straight toward a mammoth live oak tree and the last one stood in the shade of the oak’s moss-draped branches.
    Early the next morning, the rest of the field crew would arrive to dig a test pit at each spot marked by a flag. If they were to dig under the live oak, their shovels would turn over more than just dirt.

    Faye picked up a twig and rested it on the bone that had once underlain somebody’s upper lip. She tried to slide it into the skull’s former nostril, but the twig butted up against a bony ridge.
    “You’re off the hook, Joe. There’s no need for any mystic tobacco-and-corn ceremony. This is a Caucasian skull. I’ll just cover him up and say a Christian prayer over him. If he was a European invader of the rape-and-pillage variety, even my puny prayer would be too good for him.”
    Faye traced her fingertips over the soil surface, looking for artifacts she might have disturbed while digging, and was rewarded with a clod of soil that was too heavy for its size. She worked the dirt away from the solid center of the clod while she listened to Joe argue his point.
    “Everybody deserves a comfortable grave, Faye. Just let me go get my—”
    Somewhere in the direction of Seagreen Island, Faye heard a boat motor turn over. Pointing at the sound, she barked, “Help me cover her up. Somebody’s coming.”
    Joe tended to obey authoritative voices, so he dropped his argument and began shoveling dirt back into the excavation, but he didn’t stop talking. “Why did you say ‘her’? I thought you said ‘him’ before. How do you know that this was a girl?”
    Faye kept shoving dirt over the skull without answering Joe. Getting caught would be an outright disaster. First, she was digging in a national wildlife preserve and removing archaeological materials from federal lands was a felony. Second, a brush with the law—and the fines and legal expenses that would accompany such trouble—would hasten the inevitable loss of her home. And third, the artifact in her hand suggested that she might be treading on legal quicksand far more serious than simple pothunting.
    As they sprinted toward their boats, she held out her hand to show Joe the single item she had removed from the grave. “This is how I knew she was a girl.”
    A corroded pearl dangled from an ornate diamond-studded platinum earring. Her practiced eye saw that it was machine-made and recent, but no archaeological knowledge was required to date this artifact. Any woman alive who ever played in her mother’s jewelry box could guess its age. The delicate screw-back apparatus dated it to the mid-twentieth century and the style pinpointed the period still further. The woman who wore this earring had wished very much to look like Jackie Kennedy.
    Somebody had buried her in a spot where she was unlikely to ever be found. Most likely, that somebody had killed her.

    Walking up the wooden stairs and onto the broad porch of her home never failed to settle Faye’s soul. Even tonight, after violating her professional ethics, breaking several laws, and disturbing the dead, she was soothed by the gentle sea breeze that blew through the open front door.
    The old house and its island had both been named Joyeuse by one of Faye’s ancestors whose name she didn’t know. The old plantation house on Joyeuse Island was more than home to her. It was a treasure entrusted to her by her mother and her grandmother and her grandmother’s mother and, most of all, by her great-great-grandmother Cally, the former slave who had somehow come to own the remnants of a great plantation.
    Cally’s story was lost to time. No one remembered how a woman of color had acquired Joyeuse Island and held onto it for seventy years, but Cally had done it, and her descendants had preserved her legacy and her bloodline. Something of Cally lived on in Faye, maybe in her dark eyes or her darker hair, but another, essential, part of Cally survived in the home she fought to keep. Joyeuse was a decrepit relic of antebellum plantation culture, built by human beings laboring for people who believed they owned them. Even so, it was a calm, beautiful place and Faye had learned to live with the ambiguity of that. Sometimes Faye thought Ambiguity should