Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

knew would not desecrate an archaeologically significant site, nor would she make the amateur’s mistake of mixing artifacts of radically different dates. Maybe Faye wasn’t the only pothunter prowling around those islands.

    Faye brooded over the small cluster of graves in the grove beside the inlet on Joyeuse Island. Mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother, but no fathers or grandfathers. Somewhere on the island were Courtney Stanton, Mariah Whitehall LaFourche, Andrew LaFourche, even William and Susan Whitehall, but their graves had been lost when the two great Apalachicola hurricanes of 1886 reconfigured the island.
    Joyeuse and the Last Isles were peppered with lost graves. Native Americans had occupied these islands since they had risen out of the sea. In the intervening years, all of them had died and some of them had been buried. Beside them were buried dead conquistadors who didn’t survive the European invasion. Next to them were the unmarked graves of her ancestors, slave and free. And somewhere lay the unconsecrated bones of Abigail Williford.
    When she got home from her dinner with Cyril, she had checked Cedrick’s yearbook picture. There was something hanging around his neck that could only be the religious medal she had found buried with Abby. The presence of his necklace and Douglass’ watch and the absence of other evidence made them equally likely to have murdered Abby, but human nature made her far more inclined to believe that Cedrick did it than to pronounce her friend Douglass a killer. But must she broadcast Cedrick’s guilt to the world and ruin her new friend Cyril’s life?
    What would Cally and Mariah and William and Susan and all the others think of her for protecting Douglass and Cyril by keeping the evidence to herself? The law had been no friend to any of them—not to Mariah, a rich woman with nothing to call her own, and not to Susan, whose fellow Creek had been forcibly relocated to an inhospitable country. Cally could certainly have no respect for the law, not when she had quite legally been held captive for a quarter-century.
    She wondered what her ancestors would have thought of her budding relationship with Cyril? They could not object to his race or hers. Each of them had carried some impossible-to-pinpoint mixture of blood, but they had lived and died in this world on their own merits. In the end, it just didn’t amount to a hill of beans. Maybe it was time to bring Cyril home to meet the folks.

    Because Faye had moved away from civilization and the need to wear makeup every day, she actually enjoyed the ritual of removing it at bedtime. Tonight, mindlessly rinsing off goopy mascara remover had the flavor of spiritual cleansing. No more guilt over Abby Williford. No more worries over whether Cyril was right for her.
    “Things generally work out for the best,” her mama had always said. “You just gotta trust in the Lord.”
    “Okay, Mama,” Faye muttered through lips that still bore traces of the evening’s cherry-red lipstick. “I’m doing the trusting. You and God better start working things out.”
    Faye generally washed her face in her beloved cistern-fed shower, but when she succumbed to the siren song of cosmetics that weren’t water-based, the need for other equipment proliferated. She had an antique pitcher to carry the water in and a matching basin to hold it while she washed. Her battery-powered camping lantern provided the necessary light and a mirror provided the necessary assistance. If the sun hadn’t heated her washing water so delightfully, she would have needed to warm a pot of water on the camp stove, too. Such labor-intensive toiletries were too much work for every day, but paying attention to her looks now and then made her feel like a girl.
    She slipped out of girl mode only long enough to clean the wounds on her thigh. The purple-green bruises were hideous. The control-top support hose she’d started wearing upon turning thirty had acted like a compression bandage—her leg had hardly hurt at all during dinner—but she was paying for it now.
    Faye wrapped her battered but very feminine carcass in a cotton nightgown and soft slippers and shuffled to bed, casting an affectionate glance at the red dress hanging in her armoire. Fresh-scrubbed and damp-haired, she pulled out William Whitehall’s old journal, one more time.
    The fact that Mariah had closed the journal for the last time when her granddaughter Cally was