Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

pulled the watch from her pocket.
    “Tell me about Abby Williford.”
    Faye had never seen a black man’s skin turn the color of ash.
    “You’ve found her, after all this time,” he whispered.
    Faye noticed that he didn’t ask where Abby had been all these years. She waited.
    “I was a sharecropper’s only son, his only child,” Douglass said. He paused to drain the last of his drink. “My father farmed all his life for Irvin Williford. We lived in a house not a quarter-mile from the house where he raised Abby after her mother died.” He retrieved a fistful of change from his pocket and worked the coins around in his hands like worry beads.
    “It was a strange world,” he went on, still clicking the coins. “In town, Abby and I couldn’t swim in the same pool or drink from the same fountain. But at home, we played like brother and sister and nobody batted an eye. She taught me to ride a horse and how to swim. I hauled her home from the swimming hole the day she slipped off the swinging rope and broke her arm. When her father got me admitted to the white high school, Abby shadowed me for weeks, protecting me from her buffoonish classmates. I would have dropped out without her support. I will never stop missing Abby.”
    “What do you know about her disappearance? Oh, let’s not mince words. What do you know about her death?”
    Douglass answered without a moment’s reflection. “I didn’t do it, but a lot of people thought I did. Her father protected me.”
    Faye raised an eyebrow.
    “He’d known me all my life and he knew I would never hurt Abby. He gave me an alibi. Nobody believed him, but when the victim’s father is a rich, upstanding member of the community, nobody is inclined to argue with him, either. He was a good, fine man.”
    “Who did kill her?”
    “Let her rest. She has no family to be glad you found her. Her friends have forgotten her. You stand to lose a lot if people know you’ve been digging around the Last Isles. Leave her where she is and protect yourself, Faye.”
    Faye almost believed him. After all, he had believed her about the Clovis artifacts.
    The more she thought about those artifacts, the madder she got. There was nothing she could do for Abby. If Douglass was guilty, then he’d have to save his own soul. A Clovis habitation site—if that was where the artifacts had come from—was different. Such a site would be irreplaceable, but it was still possible that what was left of it could be saved if it could be found.
    “I’ve got to get out of here,” she mumbled.
    “Can I have my father’s watch?”
    “I think I’ll keep it for now,” Faye said, and slammed the door shut behind her.
    Running down Douglass’ dock, Faye felt she couldn’t get to her boat fast enough. Anyone watching her skim across the water in her mullet skiff would be astonished by how fast the ugly little boat could go. Faye enjoyed the hypnotic slam , slam , slam of its hull crashing into one wave after another. They were only low swells, hardly ripples, but riding roughshod over her obstacles suited Faye’s mood. She was maddeningly, blindingly, angry.
    This was personal.
    Somebody was trespassing on land that belonged to her by whatever definition she chose. It was hers by inheritance, if one ignored the thievery that took it from her great-grandmother. Even if she acknowledged that she had lost sole legal title to the land forever, it was still hers as a citizen of the United States, a country willing to purchase and maintain national seashores and wildlife refuges for the sheer beauty of them.
    Sure, she’d skirted the laws protecting public lands to retrieve things she considered her family’s buried heirlooms, but she’d done no great harm, not to the islands themselves and not to the archaeological record. She had dug up nothing of great intrinsic cultural value. She had seen to it that her most interesting finds were housed in a museum. And she had documented her every step in field notebooks, just in case she was wrong about a site’s importance.
    No, she had broken the letter of the law and the archaeologist’s code, but she had preserved their intent, and she was hopping mad that someone else was raping the past.
    On her skiff, Faye kept navigational charts, current topographic maps, and copies of the oldest topographic maps she could find, all stored in a watertight cooler, since nothing stayed reliably dry in a boat so small. She killed the motor and dried off a