Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

spent the first hour of the day combing her house for things to sell. The harvest was meager so she was taking her desperate inventory to the outbuildings scattered among the trees behind her home. She knew that Joyeuse’s service buildings had once been confined in a courtyard that was always kept fenced and swept clean, because her grandmother had told her so, but nature can take back a lot of land in fifty years. Sizeable trees hung over the old sheds, and damp shade was hard on buildings of any age.
    The condition of Faye’s outbuildings depended heavily on their material of construction. Several small sheds that had served as corncribs and smokehouses were built of pine planks. They sagged at such discouraging angles that Faye had long since emptied them so that nothing would come to harm when they fell.
    The kitchen, however, was stoutly built of cypress. Its long straight sills sat on cypress stumps. Cypress lasts well-nigh onto forever. Faye could have used the kitchen for its original purpose if she’d cared to cook in an immense iron cauldron suspended in a fireplace large enough to house her bed. Someone had years ago decided that the kitchen would make an excellent place to store old farm equipment. Faye looked it over. Some of the equipment might have value as scrap metal. She would ask Cyril if he knew anyone who would be interested in it.
    Sturdier still than the kitchen was the barn she had lent Wally. It was constructed of tabby, the same shell-and-limestone cement that composed her house’s bottom level. She had long suspected that the first settlers on Joyeuse Island, perhaps William and Susan Whitehall, had built a simple dogtrot cabin of tabby that was later converted into a basement for the current house. The ornate and ostentatious upper floors suited Andrew LaFourche’s temperament perfectly. If her suspicions were correct, then the tabby barn would have been the original service building, so it was probably older than any other structure on the island, except for the first floor of the big house. That made it special, and she had been glad to lend it to Wally, whom she had long considered a special friend. Maybe he would miss her when she was in jail.
    She hadn’t been in the old tabby barn since she’d given Wally the use of it. She’d had no need to go in there, and she respected Wally’s privacy. If her memory served, there was nothing of hers in there that had even as much dubious value as the farm equipment in the barn, but today was a day for pursuing long shots. She unlocked the padlock and went in.
    It was dark, with only a single shuttered window. It was also cool, and the thick masonry walls would trap this morning coolness and use it to keep the building comfortable all day long.
    Her eyes adjusted to the small amount of light coming in the door behind her. She was suddenly disoriented. The barn was jammed full of far more boxes than she remembered Wally bringing all those years ago. To her knowledge, he’d never come back. And some of the stuff she did remember—the couch, the dinette set, the well-used mattress—was gone.
    There were only row after row, stack after stack of sturdy crates. Suddenly relieved of any high-minded desire to respect Wally’s privacy, she tried to lower a crate to the floor so she could see what was inside. It was far too heavy.
    Undeterred, she used the stack of crates next to the wall as a ladder and climbed up to open the shutter covering the barn’s lone window, high in the front wall. Balancing atop the stack, she struggled to lift the lid off the top crate. The sun shone in the window, beautifully illuminating a treasure trove of rock and bone, packed none-too-carefully in wadded newspaper.
    Just a glance at the top layer of artifacts in the crate yielded two Clovis unifacial tools and three pre-Columbian chert points. Her friend had stashed crates of stuff—some of it run-of-the-mill arrowheads, some of it irreplaceable museum-quality goods, and some of it junk—in her shed. Faye felt a girlish need to cry. Her backstabbing friend Wally was involved in robbing the Clovis site.
    Oh, great. Now she was going to have to do the right thing and turn Wally over to the Feds. He would, no doubt, spill his guts about everything he knew about her black market dealings, but if she didn’t do what she could to stop him and his grave-robbing, thieving accomplices then, once and for all, she would know that she was just as scummy as they