Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

sit in the room with us and listen to what he has to say.”
    Sheriff Mike hustled Claypool into a questioning room and had Mr. Mantooth brought in. The prisoner did not look good. Despair had drained the youth out of his eyes and anyone asked to guess his age might easily have made Claypool’s error. He sat in the chair Sheriff Mike offered him and spread his hands out on his thighs. They were the hands of a man who made and fixed things. One of his fingernails was bruised black and all of them were broken. His hands were callused in odd places that had to be specific to a certain task.
    “What do you do for a living, Mr. Mantooth?” the sheriff asked, hoping to figure out where he got those calluses.
    “My last job was working for a flintknapper in Georgia. I ain’t worked steady since then, but I still chip stone, when I got the time and the stone.”
    A bit of life glinted in the prisoner’s eyes and the sheriff understood. Humanity had lived in the Stone Age far longer than it had enjoyed the Information Age, and the slick-sharp feel of a stone tool resided in the collective unconscious. He’d found few thrills in life purer than the act of pulling an old arrowhead out of freshly plowed soil. Like anybody who’d walked many miles behind a plow, he’d amassed a sizeable collection. It pleasured him just to look at the ancient things.
    “You have the hands of a flintknapper. I wish I had your skill,” the sheriff said before getting down to business. “Now here’s what I want to know. Explain to me what you were doing on Seagreen Island this morning.”
    “It hurt my heart to think of those poor people lying for years and years in unholy graves. And your people left some of their bones in the cold ground and took some of them away. That can’t be comfortable for them.”
    “And you know how to help them rest comfortably?” the sheriff asked.
    “I do the best I know how, but I didn’t get the feeling that I helped much this morning. Their spirits were just too stirred up.”
    The sheriff heard Claypool shift in his chair and, without turning to look at him, said, “Wipe that cynical look off your face, son.”
    “I didn’t get a good feeling last week, either,” Joe added.
    Sheriff Mike considered this cryptic comment. “What happened last week?”
    “Same thing. I tried to help a poor girl buried all by herself. I tried to consecrate her grave, too, but her spirit wasn’t all stirred up. It just wasn’t there.”
    The sheriff heard Claypool slide to the edge of his seat and hold his breath. Trying to keep the casual tone in his voice, Sheriff Mike asked, “What girl?”
    “Don’t know. Just saw her bones and a tiny little earring. That’s how you could tell she was a girl.”
    Old tears rose in the sheriff’s eyes, tears older than Claypool and Joe. “Tell me about the earring.”
    “It was silvery, with a screw on the back to hold it on and a little ball dangling off the bottom.”
    Sheriff Mike closed his eyes, to get a better look at his memory of Abby Williford’s young face with her favorite pearl earrings dancing on either side of it. “Can you take me to her body? Please?”

Chapter 23
    The sky was still clear, but the waves were rolling ever higher, complicating Faye’s efforts to get Cyril to Joyeuse as quickly as possible. She needed to ask him for the loan before her dignity reasserted itself. She could not afford to be proud today.
    The Gopher refused to slice through waves this size and the repetitive thwap as its hull hit the water after each swell passed jarred her wounded leg painfully. The windscreen wasn’t doing its job, either. She could barely keep her eyes open in the face of the hot wind.
    Faye was perversely happy to be uncomfortable. She was poised to use Cyril, then lay a pointy finger of suspicion on his long-lost brother. She hoped, for his sake, that the voters could be trusted to remember that being the brother of a murderer didn’t make a man any less electable.
    As if to make her feel even more like dirt, Cyril hadn’t even asked her what her troubles were. He’d just cancelled his appointments for the day—appointments that probably included CEO s, other legislators, maybe even the governor. He was letting her take him into her confidence in her own time and she was grateful.
    His concern was evident in the way he stood behind her as she piloted the Gopher , hands resting on the wheel beside hers, arms encircling her. It was a tender