Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

It was Cyril. Actually, it wasn’t. Cyril was several years younger than these kids. The face that drew Faye’s eye was Cyril’s older brother, Cedrick. The family resemblance was strong. Even in black-and-white, Faye recognized the thick, fine hair that was light but not blonde, the sharp eyes, the square jaw. Brains also ran in the family, because the yearbook credited Cedrick as a Cum Laude graduate. He had Cyril’s lean athletic masculinity, so she wasn’t surprised to read that he was captain of the baseball, football, and track teams.
    She flipped forward in the yearbook and found something that made her smile: a candid shot of the entire senior class clowning around for the camera. Abby, eyes crossed and laughing, was holding two fingers behind Douglass’ dignified head in the age-old symbol for devil horns. Sheriff Mike stood behind a blonde girl who wore a bouffant hairdo and an effervescent smile. Grinning over her shoulder at the camera, he had both arms wrapped around her slender waist. Cedrick’s yo-yo was in orbit around his own head.
    Each student was identified by a nickname: Sweet Thang for Abby, Professor for Douglass, Criss Kross for Cedrick, Broomstraw for skinny Sheriff Mike. It was time to leave for her lunch date, but Faye wanted copies of this photo and of the individual portraits of each kid. She’d already gleaned all the information she needed, but the part of her that had grown up and grown cold wanted to document these children’s last spasm of innocence. Abby would be dead before the summer was over.
    On her way to the copier, she found a picture of Wally, who had been a strangely solemn-looking eleventh-grader that year. Flipping through the rest of the yearbook, she found Senator Cyril in the fourth grade. He’d been a hollow-eyed boy, small for his ten years, wearing a dress shirt so small that its collar button wouldn’t button.
    His nose had been broken and a long ragged scar angled between his right brow and his hairline. A permanent front tooth was missing. It was not a face of privilege. He must have blessed the day he scared up enough money to get a nose job. Her opinion of the senator rose. It would be worth the effort to get to know anybody who could rise above a beginning like this.

Chapter 14
    Bahia grass waved V-shaped seedheads in the muggy breeze. Faye inhaled its scent, like bread baking in the oven of a Florida noon. She was glad that the city of Panacea couldn’t afford to mow this park on a regular basis. She liked its weedy, seedy ambiance.
    There was a new sign standing among the weeds, impressive and expensive, marking the entrance to Panacea Mineral Springs Park. It was a monument to the governmental tendency to earmark plenty of money for capital expenditures and none for maintenance. Faye considered it a poetic place to bring a politician. She wondered how Cyril would like it.
    Intrepid visitors who passed the fancy sign quickly found their cars jouncing over a rutted dirt road past aged brick and wooden pavilions on the brink of collapse. On her first visit to this park, Faye, being who she was, had hopped out of her car to see how old they were. She found that the pavilions were a century old and that they were never meant for picnickers; they were built to shelter invalids. Under each of the half-dozen roofs festered a stagnant pool of water, the remnants of a natural spring. These springs had lured the infirm here to dangle their weak legs into cold, healing waters.
    At some point the water level had dropped or the springs had silted up, leaving nothing but murky holes—except for one. Walking over the grounds on that first visit, Faye had found a foot-wide hole where water bubbled out of the earth, still clear and still cold. The spring spilled into a creek skirting the park and, after passing through a culvert under Highway 98, flowed directly into the salt marshes buffering the little town of Panacea from the great Gulf of Mexico. Dipping her hand in the pure water, she finally understood why some fool had called the place Panacea, Greek for “cure all,” a place-name that Faye considered as fate-tempting as calling a place Paradise or Shangri-La.
    While Faye waited for Cyril, she sat happily at a picnic table and did nothing but just love the place. Even when he came into sight, she had to wait awhile for his white Lexus to bump slowly down the dirt driveway toward her. She hoped the potholes wouldn’t harm Cyril’s fancy car. When they