Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

It was a scandal the way he acted, the white folks said. And their house servants heard every word.
    Some said Mr. Courtney had bought a cobbler who did nothing all day but make shoes for the field hands. Some said he’d torn down the old slave cabins and built new brick ones. If all the stories were true, then Mr. Courtney had invited the black folk to come in the Big House and make themselves at home. And to help themselves to all his money while they were at it.
    No, those were tall tales, but I knew a true tale and I wasn’t telling. Mister Courtney was thinking about freeing his slaves. I heard him tell his Mama with my own ears. I didn’t believe he’d do it, but the idea of belonging to somebody who’d even give it a thought made me dizzy. Thinking about my own Master made me dizzy, and sick to my stomach, too. He wasn’t a man to set his slaves free. No, sir. I would belong to that man until I died, or he did.

Chapter 20
    Faye was glad to have paying work on a Saturday, which was not surprising for a woman with no money and no social life. Some people might have been surprised to learn that the entire work team had been reassembled on one day’s notice to resume the field survey on Seagreen Island—undergraduates usually plan their Saturdays around sleeping and beer—but not Faye. These kids loved their work, but it was more than that. Finishing this job and doing it well was something tangible that they could do to honor the memories of Krista and Sam.
    Magda sat among them, hunched over her field notebook with her head cocked at an angle that suggested her shoulder was hurting again. Faye could sympathize. Field archaeology involved moving tons of earth and the first fact that young archaeologists learned was a simple one: dirt is heavy. And so is the equipment required to move it. And so are the artifacts of pre-plastic humans.
    A single chip of pottery, a single stone spear point—these things are not heavy. But put them, carefully packaged, in a container for transport and you have a burden that will, over time, wreak havoc on the rotator cuff of the average shoulder. Neither Faye nor Magda was much over five feet tall in her stocking feet, so it was unreasonable to expect either of them to compete with the muscle mass and lever arm advantage of the full-grown men they worked with, but they were unreasonable women. Therefore, their shoulders were wrecked.
    Faye laid a hand on the shoulder in question and said, “It’s paining you again, isn’t it?”
    Magda looked up from her work with a weary nod.
    “Naproxen sodium, over the counter. Double the recommended dose,” Faye said with the authoritative tone of the fellow sufferer. “Get the generic. It’s dirt cheap and Lord knows you’ll go through a pile of it.”
    “What I need is a couple of Valium, but my doctor won’t prescribe it. She says I have a hard-charging personality—and what the hell does that mean?—and might be prone to addiction. She says I should just get more rest, eat better, do some yoga. I’d like to see her stare into Sam and Krista’s dead faces like you and I did. That’s not something you get over with a few hours of extra sleep and some dopey breathing exercises.”
    Faye plopped onto the dirt beside Magda. She had not thought it was possible to be more depressed. “I can’t get it out of my mind that we’re here today because everybody’s given up on finding Krista and Sam’s killer,” Faye said. “How is it possible that they can be dead with no reasonable explanation? We knew them pretty well and we don’t have a clue to why they died. The sheriff knows criminals pretty well and he’s stumped, too.”
    Magda doodled in the sand with a stick. “You want to know why this thing has left us feeling so off-balance? I mean besides the fact that we uncovered the dead bodies of two of our friends.”
    “Yeah. I do.”
    “Well, it’s not pretty. If Sam and Krista weren’t killed over drugs or some other kind of criminal activity, then it could happen to us. We’re not safe and we never will be again.”
    Magda rose quickly, without giving Faye time to reply, without giving her time to think about it at all. “I want to go check on my crew. They’re not used to working without having my crooked nose in their business.”
    Faye limped down the trail that surmounted the tallest part of Seagreen Island and descended toward the work site. She was glad nobody had asked what was wrong with her leg.