Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

useful or detrimental to the campaign she was currently masterminding. And she was probably right. Faye would not be an asset in an election. A relationship with her would cost him votes but, in his judgment, not enough votes to lose. And, if that relationship should evolve into something more, Faye had the beauty, the brains and, yes, the cunning, to be the toast of Washington.
    Alice could natter on about this issue until the cows came home, and she was working on it, but Cyril wasn’t listening. He knew she was too cheap to have him tailed indefinitely. Even if she did, he’d dodged her private eyes before. He refused to give up his dreams of electoral glory and he refused to give up a chance with the first woman he’d ever met who didn’t make him impatient merely by the way she shifted her hips in her chair. When the voters of Florida saw Faye in a sweeping ballgown at the next presidential inauguration, they would be glad they sent Cyril and his inappropriate woman to Congress.

    Faye’s mind was chasing its tail as she sat down to supper with Joe. She’d had a day that left her with plenty to think about. Liz and Wally had been deliberately vague about Joe’s trouble with the Fish and Game agent that morning. Joe himself wouldn’t talk to her about it at all. And her library trip confirmed that she had indeed found Abby Williford’s remains, but the question of who killed her was still wide open.
    Her lunch with Cyril would also require some thought. Dating anyone seriously would, sooner or later, mean divulging the secret of where she lived, and she balked at going down that road. But the alternative was to spend her life alone. Was that what she wanted?
    To clear her thoughts of that knotty question, she had spent the rest of the afternoon in her map room, a converted butler’s pantry in Joyeuse’s aboveground basement. It was one of her favorite spots. The thick tabby walls held out the heat and the casement windows funneled every breeze inside. Its walls were covered with built-in cabinets, drawers, and countertops designed as a staging area for serving tremendous numbers of partygoers in the ballroom overhead.
    In this creaky old cabinetry, Faye stored maps of the area surrounding Joyeuse and the Last Isles. She had aerial photographs and topographic maps dating back to the 1940s. She even had copies of hand-drawn sketches from the latter half of the 19th century, but she had nothing that showed how Last Isle had looked before the 1856 hurricane blew it apart and washed away the Turkey Foot Hotel.
    Faye adored poring over the raggedy old documents. They always gave her fresh ideas of where to go pothunting, but they never unveiled their big secret. Where did her great-great-grandfather build his hotel? If she knew that, maybe she could get his land back. Faye played with her maps until the scent of fish frying atop Joe’s camp stove called her to supper.
    Joe’s plate was resting untouched in his lap. It was heaped with a working man’s portion of food but, being well brought up, he was waiting for her to sit down before he lifted his fork. Sitting on a stump while he waited, he studied Joyeuse’s back façade. She stood beside him for a minute, enjoying the sight of it. The house was impressive from any angle but the rear view, shaded by trees and protected by porches on two stories, had a homey feel. The dozens of wooden jalousies sheltering those porches added an air of privacy, even secrecy.
    “How’d you come to own Joyeuse?” Joe asked, digging into his butterbeans as soon as her behind hit the porch step.
    It was a reasonable question. She was surprised Joe hadn’t asked it before. “My grandmother said that her grandmother was a quadroon slave girl named Cally and that Cally was the master’s common-law wife. Remember, this is just family talk. I can’t prove much of anything that happened in the 1800s. The master died young and, after the war, Cally raised their daughter and managed Joyeuse all by herself. Grandma said that Cally’s daughter, Miss Courtney Stanton, was a great beauty with dark hair and blue eyes and dead-white skin, and that Cally sent her off to pass for white at a finishing school up north.”
    Joe chewed for a while, then said, “Did the master have any other kids?”
    “Just Courtney.”
    “So if she went up north to live with white people, then how’d Joyeuse pass from Cally all the way down to you?”
    Faye reminded herself never to underestimate