Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

Her prepared lie—that an old basketball injury had come back to haunt her—sounded weak even to Faye. She accompanied Magda, not just because she too needed to check on her workers, but because of Magda’s newest safety rule. No one was ever to be out of sight of at least one person while they were on Seagreen Island and no one was to be there after dark.
    The deputy that Sheriff Mike had sent to watch over them was constantly audible, stomping through the underbrush. He made everybody feel more secure, but his presence reminded Faye of Magda’s premise: they were never really safe.
    Faye and Magda stood in the shade of a tremendous live oak and looked down the line of the team’s sampling sites. The surveying flags marking each site were the peachy color of orange plastic that has been faded by weather. These were the flags that Sam and Krista had set out the night before they died. There had been no reason to remove them. It would have been senseless and disrespectful to undo their work and then do it over again. So they stood as a last monument until, one by one, they would be removed and discarded when the spot they marked had been properly excavated.
    The silent team members were working terribly hard, as if they wanted to finish the job and quit this place forever. Faye could see no sign that they had uncovered anything of significance. They were Seagreen Island’s last hope. Unless they dug up something comparable to King Tut’s tomb or Machu Picchu, this tangled spot of wildness would soon be a tamely exotic vacation destination. It would be gone, just like Sam and Krista.
    They were digging in the wrong place. Faye couldn’t have said how she knew it, but she was sure. Her intuitive sense—the one that told her where to dig when she was pothunting—said that the land beneath her feet was more interesting than the land her colleagues were excavating. The oak tree shading it had been there for centuries. It would have drawn human activity, simply by being there. There was no rule that said she couldn’t dig there and, since she pretty much always had a trowel in her hand when she was working, there was no reason not to start digging right away.
    She stooped down and cleared away the fallen leaves and branches that always litter the ground under deciduous trees of that age. Her trowel had hardly turned over a bucket load of earth before Magda dropped to her knees next to her and joined her in digging.
    “Can you tell anything about the strata?” Magda asked.
    “There aren’t any. The layers of soil are all mixed up. Somebody’s been digging here. And it looks recent to me.”
    Faye stopped digging and used her bare fingers to brush dirt away from a human femur. It was hardly longer than her forearm and a break near the knee had healed badly.
    Magda made a choking sound. Faye looked up to see her uncovering an adult skull with an extensive, unhealed fracture.
    “Somebody get the deputy,” Faye bellowed. Her voice, usually so soft-spoken, cracked under the strain, but she recovered herself well enough to bellow again. “Get him up here now.”

    Faye stood with Magda on the floating dock that the university had installed to facilitate the project and watched Sheriff Mike and his forensic team disembark from their boat. Magda’s students were gathered on the beach behind them, shoulder to shoulder. Together, they drew a line in the sand. They were a line in the sand.
    “We will have an agreement with you before you set foot on this beach,” Magda began.
    “Let me list the laws you are breaking, right now,” Sheriff Mike rumbled.
    Faye would have enjoyed his discomfort more if she weren’t having flashbacks. Sam and Krista’s faces. Abby’s bare skull. Now, another skull, shattered, and the remains of a wounded child.
    Magda continued, undeterred. “We have uncovered bones that are clearly not recent. Do they constitute evidence of a crime that’s recent enough to prosecute? Or is the killer, if there even is one, long-dead, in which case this is an archaeological site that my team is trained and qualified to excavate?”
    “I don’t want to arrest you and your co-conspirators—I mean students.”
    “And we don’t want to tie this site up in court while a bunch of lawyers get rich. We have one demand and it’s simple. You will not exclude my team from the excavation of those bones.”
    Flashbacks or not, Faye was getting a charge out of watching Sheriff Mike squirm.

    The Supreme