Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

was the necklace Abby was thought to be wearing on the night she died. It was in the grave, under the body.
    Had the killer dug a pit to receive Abby’s body, then brought her there to kill her so that her fresh corpse could fall neatly into its resting place? No muss, no fuss. Seeing the gaping pit, Abby would have had no doubt of his intentions. She would not have been granted the gift of denial, telling herself, “He only wants to rob me or rape me or beat me. I can survive this. I’m strong enough.”
    No, she would have known the stakes as she stood on the sliding, sandy lip of her own grave and clawed at her attacker. Her necklace could have been torn free in the melée, dropping into its owner’s grave before she was even dead. That would explain its position beneath Abby’s remains.
    Pure, clean scientific reasoning prevented her from settling into a maudlin weeping session over Abby’s long-lost necklace and her gut-freezing fate. No scientist worthy of the name seized on the first plausible theory that suggested itself without considering other options.
    So how else might the necklace have come to be beneath Abby? Perhaps it was already there when her attacker shoveled a woman-sized hole in the sand and he didn’t see it. Perhaps he did see it, but left it there. Or perhaps he put it there on purpose. She couldn’t disprove those possibilities, but there was no evidence or human motivation to support them, either.
    A more likely scenario insisted on replaying itself for her. She closed her eyes and saw Abby under attack, reaching up in panic and grabbing something, anything. Faye saw the chain snapping and the assailant’s broken necklace falling unnoticed into the pit he had dug to hold his victim.
    The scene reminded Faye that premeditated violent murder wasn’t just a hypothesis to coolly examine and discard. It was a planned act that required the killer to disable key parts of a human body, stopping only when the body no longer functioned. Cries of pain, spurting blood, loosened bowels—these things had to be ignored until the deed was done.
    Faye studied the religious medal in her hands. Perhaps Abby had indeed ripped it from her assailant’s neck as she struggled for life. She liked to think that the girl had fought back, and this scenario fit the facts as well as any other.
    Only one detail of the crime scene, as she herself had observed it, didn’t fit. Douglass Everett’s watch was also in the grave, under the body, and she knew for a fact that he wasn’t Catholic. He was, in fact, a deacon of long standing in the Blessed Assurance AME Church in Panacea.
    So what should she do? Turn over the watch and the medal to the sheriff? That would be tantamount to throwing Douglass to the wolves. The sheriff suspected him and he was handy, while the owner of the religious medal was nowhere to be found. She didn’t feel good inside herself about doing that, because finding the medal reinforced her gut feeling that Douglass was innocent of Abby’s death.
    The sheriff didn’t need to know about these things, Faye decided, as she tucked them in the display cabinet with her other artifacts and hurried to her bedroom to see whether the August heat had rendered her makeup unusable.

    Hurukan is the Mayan storm god and it is fitting that his fearsome name is attached to hurricanes, the greatest storms on Earth. For all the death and havoc they wreak, it is important to remember that they are only heat engines, necessary to transfer energy from the tropics to regions that receive far less of the sun’s heat. If humans didn’t exist, hurricanes would simply be Nature’s elegant means of taking from the energy-rich and giving to the energy-poor, wiping parts of the world down to a clean slate in the process.
    But humans do exist and Hurukan recognizes that some of them desperately need to be wiped to a clean slate. And some places are just bad, provoking humans to be their worst selves. Last Isle was such a place. It was a haven for natives killing natives, then for Europeans killing natives and Africans and each other. Hurukan smiled when hurricane after hurricane took its toll on Last Isle, blasting it to pieces. Sometimes a place needs the cleansing only a mammoth storm can provide.
    Sometimes, a lot of times, humanity needs cleansing, too. Evil can grip whole nations or it can nest comfortably in a single heart. In either case, human evil can only be cleansed by human beings. Even mighty