Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

fighting for her land fascinated him. His life was bound up in the coastal area around the Last Isles, yet he never knew about this travesty. And the tiny little woman who took her losing battle to the newspapers was his key to understanding Faye—her reticence, her self-reliance, and her pain.
    A random line jumped off the newsprint. “Mrs. Courtney Stanton Wells still owns and maintains her lifelong residence on Joyeuse Island. Ownership of Joyeuse is not in question.”
    There was no way on God’s green earth that the descendants of a woman like Courtney Stanton Wells would let that land go. He would have his people check the property assessor’s records, but he knew what they would read. Faye still owned Joyeuse. She had to. It was so useful to know the secret things that drove a person, especially a person you hoped to know very, very well.

    Liz didn’t like Wally’s friend Nguyen, not even a little bit. Wally had a long list of crooked friends and, generally, they were charming people. Up to a point. They rolled into the marina and fastened their “please, like me” smiles on Liz. They admired her biscuits. They flattered her pretty red hair—which was dyed, for God’s sake, and they knew it—and flirted until Wally appeared, then they forgot that she existed while they convened with Wally to discuss mysterious things in urgent whispers.
    Nguyen was different. He had drawn Wally into many a corner booth for many an urgent conversation, but he had never once acknowledged that Liz was a human being who would appreciate at least a “Good morning.” She knew he was a diver, because he always brought air tanks for Wally to fill, and she knew that he and Wally were up to something, because Wally never charged him for the refill. In fact, even if she’d never seen him near a tank, she’d still have known he was a diver by the way he walked, like he was wearing flippers. Something in the look of his motionless black eyes made her wonder whether Wally was stingy with the oxygen when he filled Nguyen’s tanks.
    Today was an extraordinarily unpleasant day in the marina, not just because Nguyen was visiting, but because about twenty hungover teenagers were sitting in her grill having their breakfast at noontime. The residual alcohol in their bloodstreams left them both loud and obnoxious.
    “Sure there’s a Wild Man. My cousin Bill saw him when we were kids,” said a young blonde man perched at the bar.
    “Well, my granddaddy says his daddy saw him when he was a kid. How old could this Wild Man be?” came the rejoinder from a young woman with the face of someone not to be messed with.
    “I hear he’s probably about seventy by now,” the blonde at the bar replied. “They say a young mother took her twin boys for a walk in the woods near here and didn’t get home before sundown. They were little, maybe two or three, and got too tired to walk, but she was too afraid of gators to stop and rest. So she’d carry one a ways, set him down, then go back up the path and get the other one, figuring she’d just leapfrog her way home.”
    “I’ve heard this,” interrupted a young woman in a Sopchoppy High School T-shirt. “One time, she went back for the boy left behind and he wasn’t there. Before the week was out, everybody in these parts had stomped through the swamp looking for the poor lost boy.”
    Liz sighed. This tale had been the catalyst for way too many drunken forays into snake- and gator-infested territory.
    The blonde guy regained control of his story. “But they didn’t find him. Not that day. Not till twenty years later, when the lost boy’s twin brother went bear hunting and found himself face-to-face with him. He was naked and his hair hung down past his butt and his fingernails and toenails looked like bear claws, but the two men had the same face. Every hunter there saw it. Then the Wild Man followed two black bears into the woods.”
    “They say the bears raised him,” came a voice from the corner. It was Nguyen’s. “I’ve never seen him, but I’ve seen his tracks.”
    Wally looked at the man standing at his elbow as if he’d said the sun was blue. Nguyen’s black eyes were cool and they said quite clearly that he didn’t care what Wally or anybody else thought. He repeated, “I saw his tracks, just last year.”
    Nguyen scanned the kids’ faces. “Aren’t you folks about the same age as those kids that were shot last week? I’ve been wondering. Reckon the Wild