Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

the significance of her last statement.
    He answered quickly, without bothering to ask what the trouble was. “I’ll meet you at Wally’s Marina in two hours.”
    Faye hung up the phone, feeling measurably safer. She dodged the mid-morning influx of recreational fishermen and walked over to the grill. As she plopped onto a counter stool, Liz leaned over the counter and whispered, “I’ve been waiting for you. Your handsome friend Joe called an hour ago, but I couldn’t reach you. Don’t you ever turn your radio on?”
    Faye shrugged. “There aren’t many people I want to talk to. What did Joe want?”
    “He wants you to get him out of jail. You were his one phone call.”
    “Jail? What’s Joe in jail for? Vagrancy? Building a campfire without a permit?”
    “Murder. They got him for killing your two friends. And some other people. Three of them.”
    “Joe didn’t…” Or did he? Where was he the morning that Sam and Krista were killed? Where had he been the night they had found Abby?
    If Joe had done all five Seagreen Island murders, she could keep quiet about Abby. Cedrick was gone, dead or in hiding. If he had killed no one else since Abby, he couldn’t be much of a danger any more. Let him rot, wherever he was.
    It was so tempting to leave Abby to her fitful rest and let Joe answer for all the other killings. She would be back where she started, treading financial water and trying to save Joyeuse with nothing more serious on her conscience than poaching an occasional rusty artifact off the land of an American public that didn’t give a damn. But she knew that the connection between Abby and Krista and Sam and the nameless three on Seagreen Island, though tenuous, was real.
    Joe wasn’t old enough to have killed Abby. And he wasn’t old enough to have murdered people who’d been dead so long that tree roots had grown through their chest cavities. Her gut said that Cedrick had killed them too, then killed Sam and Krista to cover his crime.
    Joe’s plight didn’t change her plans for self-sacrifice. It reinforced the need for it. She would go to Sheriff Mike, as planned. She would tell him about Abby, show him the earring, the religious medal, the yearbook photos. He would understand that the connection between all the killings was plenty real and he would free Joe. He would probably turn around and arrest her, which was why she still needed to take Cyril to Joyeuse for a fundraising drive. Lawyers could be fearfully expensive.
    She had just one thing more to do and she could squeeze it into the two hours left before Cyril arrived. She said to Liz, “I’m meeting a friend. If he comes before I get back, tell him to wait here in the grill for me.”

    Faye thought she was prepared for the sight of Joe in jail. She was not.
    An hour away from the sun had bleached the ruddy color from his face and bowed his broad shoulders. His jailers had taken the leather thong that graced his omnipresent ponytail, leaving his lank hair hanging around his face. Why? Was that tiny strip of leather a threat to Joe or the people around him?
    He sat behind a sheet of safety glass and spoke meekly into the microphone. “I don’t understand, Faye. I never said I killed anybody. I never did kill anybody. But they say I did. They say I said I did.” There was a noise behind him and he looked surreptitiously over one shoulder at the sound of angry voices. Joe, who could face down a bereaved mother bear, was afraid of the men jailed with him.
    Faye got through her allotted ten-minute visit with as few tears as she could manage. Above anything else, she couldn’t afford to make Joe cry. The sight of his tears would finish her. Her impotent anger would drag her off the uncomfortable stool and make her put her skinny foot right through that pane of safety glass. Then they’d both be in jail and she’d have several dozen stitches down her leg.
    “I’ll get you out,” she vowed before she left him, “but it may take me a little while. Be patient. And Joe—” His gaze, which had been wandering, focused on her again. “Please stay safe, Joe.”
    She left him and went looking for Sheriff Mike, but he’d gone to the forensics lab in Tallahassee. One of his deputies was tending the store.
    “What will it take to get him out of here?” she asked.
    The deputy was polite and well-trained. “Nothing short of intercession by the President, the Pope, and the Queen of England would get that man out of jail before he