Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

portion of the deck big enough to spread out her maps.
    In her journal, Mariah had described a Clovis point brought to her by a grateful slave—maybe the very point Faye had found hidden in the cupola at Joyeuse—and she had described a cistern that marked the spot where it was found. Mariah had said the cistern was on the far end of Last Isle, presumably meaning the end farthest from Joyeuse. She had also said that the artifacts were found along a trench cut through the island by a hurricane.
    Faye compared her copy of the topographical map printed by the United States Geological Survey in 1940 to a current one, pinpointing on the new map the location of the westernmost island pass in 1940. What were the odds that Mariah’s landmark still survived? The map in Faye’s hands depicted changes in elevation as small as five feet. She prayed that the old pit hadn’t silted up completely, that there was at least five feet of topographic relief remaining in 1940.
    And there was. The westernmost Last Isle was named “Water Island,” probably a reference to the cistern dug so long ago. A small depression so nearly circular that Faye wondered why she’d never noticed it before decorated the east end of Water Island. It was visible on both maps.
    She cranked the boat and pointed it southwest. The waves slapped the hull of her boat with even more jarring force, because now Faye had a destination and she needed to get there fast.

Chapter 16
    Faye beached her skiff and struggled through the dunes of soft sand that kept Water Island from washing away with every wave. They were dazzling white in the noonday sun. Beyond the dunes, she saw the treetops of a small grove of sizeable live oaks and was encouraged. Their presence suggested that this spot of ground had poked out of the water for decades, possibly long enough to have been Mariah’s high ground. Perhaps Mariah had made good on her ambition to come here and dig for curiosities. She would have worn her oldest clothes although, ever a lady, Mariah never would have allowed herself to be seen with her hair hanging loose. In the excitement and exertion of her amateur archaeological dig, however, she might not have noticed when a tiny comb dropped out of the hair at the nape of her neck.
    Faye crested the dunes that Mariah might once have crossed and looked over a shallow lagoon separating them from the main part of the island. The destruction there sucked the breath out of her lungs. Litter-strewn pits dotted a clearing that was at least an acre in extent. In the center of the clearing, crude dikes and drainage ditches kept the old cistern dry and easy to loot.
    Faye slogged across the narrow lagoon and picked up a good-sized chunk of pottery incised with lines and dots. It was of the type made by the Fort Walton culture in late pre-Columbian times. If she remembered right, artifacts found on some barrier islands in the Panhandle were as old as eighteen hundred years, long before the appearance of the Fort Walton culture, so the dates were plausible. But Fort Walton sites were typically pretty far inland. Did they live here on the islands too, or did this shattered pot belong to a member of another culture, someone who traded with the Fort Walton people for it?
    She tossed the sherd to the ground. The artifacts, the soil, the strata of this site were completely churned, robbed of any useful information. She would never know how the Fort Walton pot got there.
    The cistern’s slopes had been chewed up by idiots armed with shovels, and the land around it was littered with sherds that were evidently too plain or too broken-up to bring a good price.
    Faye guessed that this cistern had served as somebody’s trash pit for many a day.
    Here and there were pieces of bone. Outside of a laboratory, it was impossible to tell whether they had supported human or animal bodies, but a sloppy pile of SCUBA gear resting beside a crate of butchered mastodon bones, uniface stone tools, fluted stone points—virtually the entire Clovis tool kit—told her that the biggest tragedy lay beneath the water. It was the only place artifacts of that age could be. In the twelve thousand years since they were made, Florida had become a wetter place and the sea had crept in to inundate evidence of its coastal cultures.
    But even the sea couldn’t hide everything, not forever. Fishermen still found stone tools with distinctive Clovis fluting atop sandbars, their unchanged stone faces contrasting