Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

have been her middle name.
    If race is the abiding conflict of the Americas, then Faye considered herself the physical embodiment of that conflict. Her great-great-grandmother Cally had been born a slave on Joyeuse plantation, the product of the master’s assault on her mother. Unprovable family lore said that the master himself was not as white as he might have believed; his grandmother was half-Creek. There were surely people who died on the Trail of Tears with no more Native American blood than he.
    Faye’s ancestors had sprung from Europe and the Americas and Africa and God-knew-where-else. The casual observer, noting her darker-than-olive skin, tiny build, delicate features, and stick-straight black hair, would be hard-pressed to name her racial affiliation. Faye was never too sure herself.
    Settling herself on a ramshackle porch swing, she studied the earring in her hand. She couldn’t call the law. How would she explain why she was digging on federal land?
    Faye tucked one foot under her and pushed against the floor’s cypress boards with the other, ever careful to maintain her balance. How many times in her childhood had she leaned back too far and felt the old swing dump her onto her head? Then, once she’d learned the trick, how many times had she done it on purpose because it was fun to fall, heels over ears, into a giggling heap of little girl? All those memories would be sand under the feet of anyone but Faye. There was no way in hell she was going to let Joyeuse go.
    She swung herself gently back and forth. What harm would it do to forget she’d ever seen those bones? One more good hurricane and they would be swept away, anyway. She hated to think about someone getting away with murder but, in reality, someone already had. What was the likelihood that a critical clue had survived for decades under damp, wet sand? Still, her sense of right and wrong said that she ought to tell somebody. The dead woman’s family would derive some comfort in knowing, with certainty, that she was never coming home.
    Her sense of self-preservation wouldn’t let her go to the police, but her conscience wasn’t quite ready to let her destroy evidence of a murder. Keeping the earring at least gave her the option of doing the right thing someday. But where could she hide the evidence? There was no available nook in Joyeuse’s above-ground basement. It was built of tabby, a durable concrete concocted of oyster shells, lime, and sand, and it would survive a direct atomic strike. After more than a hundred and fifty years, there were still no crevices large enough to serve as a hiding place in its rock-like surface.
    She climbed the staircase tucked under the back porch roof, leaving the service rooms in the basement behind. The main floor sat a full story above ground level, a form of house design that was prudent in a hurricane zone. Faye wandered around the main floor, poking around in the ladies’ parlor and the gentlemen’s parlor and the vast room that had served as both dining room and ballroom. The fine furnishings and draperies were long gone and the cavernous empty chambers offered no nook to house the old pearl earring. There was really only one place in the whole house that offered hiding places which she didn’t already use to store her everyday necessities, and it was two stories above her.
    She climbed the porch staircase to the next level, which had housed the bedchambers and music room back when the house served as a home for a family and its servants. She’d converted the two largest bedrooms into her temple to legitimate archaeology, two treasure rooms where she stored artifacts that made her black-market customers sneer.
    The walls of her own bedroom and the adjacent master bedroom were lined with glass-fronted shelves loaded with unsalable finds. Cracked pottery, broken bone tools, the bones and shell of a turtle—the discovery of each of these things was described in waterproof ink on the pages of the field notebooks stacked on the topmost shelf. Any of these shelves could have served as a hiding place for the earring, but Faye had another spot in mind. She reached in a broom closet for a long-handled implement tipped with a metal hook, but before she could use it, she heard Joe coming.
    Faye listened to Joe climbing the spiral staircase that rose through the precise center of the old house, piercing the square landing that provided access to the rooms on this level. Joe’s footfalls were quiet