Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

them and sketching their floor plans. Many of the structures they recorded in the 1930s were caught in the act of falling down. Some of them were documented in no other place. Magda adored the photographs those nameless government employees took.
    Magda used the HABS catalog frequently. It was useful, as far as it went, but it only told her which structures had been documented. Finding the documents—the photographs, the maps, the drawings—was a different story. It frustrated her that, to this day, no publication existed that gathered in one place photographs of all the structures documented by the HABS . Magda had never been one to accept the status quo. Over the course of her career, she had cobbled together her own compilation of HABS work in Florida. The resulting document was more of a scrapbook than a reference tome, chock-full of reprints and photocopies and scrawled marginal notes. She had pored over her collection of journals and exhausted the stores of more than one university library before ordering expensive photographic reprints. Compiling it had been costly work.
    Those old buildings—houses, courthouses, general stores, barns—were hard-wired into her brain by now. She knew their front and rear elevations, their floor plans, every detail the HABS people saw fit to record. She loved them all, but she loved the houses the best.
    It seemed like only minutes passed while she flipped through the scrapbook, searching for Faye’s mystery house, but time is relative. The clock on Magda’s wall stopped ticking when she opened the well-used book and its hands only rushed to their actual positions hours later when she smoothed her hand over a page and gave it a protective little pat.
    The house itself told her she was right. There were no other candidates that met the criteria: early 19th-century design, never professionally restored, and within a reasonable driving or boating distance of the places Faye was known to frequent. Even in the faded photograph, she could tell that everything from the main floor up was of wood-frame construction, but the stuccoed ground floor could easily have been crafted of tabby. The ground floor looked old, relative to the style of the upper stories.
    Magda guessed that a long-ago someone had built a one-room tabby structure on the site. Later, as his economic situation improved, he had built a second square structure next to it, roofing over the two tabby buildings and the space between them. This dogtrot configuration allowed for a covered breezeway that gave valuable outdoor living space in a hot climate, which was the prime reason why dogtrot houses dotted the American South almost until God created the air conditioner. The fact that this dogtrot was built of tabby made Faye’s house a curiosity, a beautiful example of the adaptation of traditional design and native materials to a harsh climate. And the ostentatious palace that rose above its tabby basement was a textbook illustration of how a newly rich man might adapt an existing home to reflect his improved circumstance.
    There were other houses with plastered exteriors that might hide tabby, but even if there’d been five hundred houses that could plausibly belong to Faye, she would still know that this one, Joyeuse, was the one. Now that she held its photograph in her hands, she could draw no other conclusion.
    The old HABS photos occasionally featured the inhabitants of the historic structures. Sometimes they were the owners, but frequently the photographers had immortalized renters or squatters who simply wanted to be part of the picture.
    Magda couldn’t take her eyes off the figures posing on the front porch of Joyeuse. In two rocking chairs sat an old lady and another, truly ancient woman. Either of them might have been taken for white, but there was an obvious family resemblance between them and the darker-skinned woman standing between them. In this younger woman’s arms was a beautiful toddler with dark eyes and long ringlets. Every one of the women had Faye’s face, or the face she once wore, or the face she would someday wear.
    Finally, Magda’s suspicions jibed with what she knew of Faye’s character. If Faye were indeed conducting digs on her own, even if she were selling the things she dug up, she, like Magda, would recognize a moral difference between doing it on your own land and doing it on someone else’s.
    Everything made sense to Magda, except for one critical thing. The Faye that Magda