Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

obsession. Her fate was distant and intriguing in a way that Sam’s and Krista’s could never be, and Faye was looking forward to delving deeper into it. Who would have ever thought that she’d be whistling happily, looking forward to a day that included an hour at the Sopchoppy Public Library, followed by lunch with a man probably destined to be her next congressman?

    Joe found Wally’s Marina deserted and he was glad. He’d successfully avoided the place, just as he’d successfully avoided all public places in the four months since he moved to Joyeuse. Crowds made him jumpy, and Joe Wolf defined a crowd as three or more people.
    He paid the woman behind the counter for a cup of coffee and some chips then, after asking if she minded, he flicked the TV over to the Tallahassee channel. Cyril’s press conference hadn’t started yet, so Joe found yesterday’s paper lying on the counter and focused on the front-page article highlighting the senator.
    Newspapers are written at the eighth-grade reading level these days—slow going for Joe—but he learned that Cyril had entered public life as a county commissioner in his early thirties. A state representative at forty, he had moved up to the Florida Senate after a single term.
    Cyril was a friend of the little man. He supported universal health care for children. He was in favor of an increase in the minimum wage. He co-authored a wildly popular bill that eliminated state sales tax on clothing the week before children started school in the fall.
    Cyril’s politics had not always sat well with the environmentalist factions. Everybody knew that most of his campaign money came from developers who thought Florida would be better off with no wetlands at all. This was not a problem in his job-hungry home district, but the congressional seat he aspired to would require support in more affluent, more environmentally sensitive regions. His political aspirations demanded that he lose the anti-environmental label. There was no other way to explain the sudden switch that placed him in the forefront of the “Save Seagreen Island” movement.
    Joe understood about every third word of the article detailing this switch, but he persevered. When he reached the last sentence, he had come no closer to liking Cyril than he had been before he began reading.
    Cyril’s face materialized on the TV and Joe studied it, trying to figure out what he disliked about the man’s looks. His hair was too “fixed.” The short-sleeved sport shirt was just a little too casual in the way it revealed muscles that were just a little too well-defined to suit Joe. They were muscles purchased in a health club, not earned through meeting the burdens of everyday life.
    Joe was too young, too content in inhabiting his own strong body, to realize that someday his own muscle-bulking testosterone would falter. He was years away from feeling empathy for Cyril or admiration for the man’s refusal to go gently into middle age. And he was years away from cheering Cyril on in his pursuit of a pretty young thing.
    Joe usually limited himself to one thought at a time and, as he studied the man on the television and munched on his Doritos, his current thought was uncomplicated: this old man was not good enough for his friend Faye.

    The young man had said his name was Joe and the name suited him. Liz had been watching him study the newspaper for a while now and she’d been thinking.
    Somebody had been in the marina, just yesterday, asking all the regulars about Joe—or somebody who looked like him—and a dark-skinned adolescent boy that he was known to hang out with. He’d been offering a pretty penny for information on their whereabouts, too. Well, nobody fitting Joe’s description had sidled up to her snack counter in quite a while, so—adolescent companion or not—he must be the man in question.
    It was puzzling. The guy had clearly been a goon, a human weapon working for somebody outside the law, so it was natural to assume he was looking for someone of his ilk. Yet this cute overgrown boy eating chips in front of the TV had none of the hallmarks of a criminal. Liz had encountered a few criminals in her day. Shit. She’d been married to one.
    Stirring up a batch of waffle mix, Liz watched a scruffy fisherman in hip-waders shuffle into the room. He stood gape-mouthed a moment in the middle of the room, before fumbling in his tackle box and pulling out a cell phone. Her pony-tailed customer never