Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

difference between a twenty-nine-year-old and a twenty-one-year-old? Could she right now, today, distinguish between a fifty-seven-year-old and a forty-nine-year-old, especially if the older man had had a facelift? Apparently not.

    A lean, powerful man strode along Douglass Everett’s dock, dripping wet. Douglass watched him cross the very deck where Abby was beaten to death. He had the powerful sense that time was a circle, a carousel that no one ever got off. The man banged on the back door and Douglass felt he had to answer it. Otherwise the carousel would swing round again and again until the unfinished business of Abby’s death was settled.
    “Douglass Everett?” the young man asked.
    “Who are you and why are you here?
    “My name is Joe Wolf Mantooth. I’m here because Faye Longchamp showed me this house once and told me her friend Douglass lived in it. Well, Faye’s my friend, too, and she’s in danger. I need you to help me save her.” He turned and pointed to a shiny white luxury cruiser resting on a mammoth boat lift. “What I really need is your boat.”
    “Faye thinks I’m a murderer. She doesn’t want me to save her.”
    Joe cocked his head. “I don’t think that’s right. Faye goes by her own laws, but she wouldn’t watch a murderer live this high on the hog.” He gestured at the sprawling beach house. “If Faye really thought you killed somebody, she woulda taken her story to the sheriff, but she didn’t. Besides, the sheriff don’t need Faye’s help to suspect you. First thing he said after finding Abby Williford’s grave was that he wanted to talk to you.”
    Douglass leaned against the doorjamb and said nothing.
    “Did you hear? The sheriff’s coming for you. And we need to get Faye ashore while we still can. We can worry about the law when she’s safe.”
    Douglass said, “It’ll be rough, what with the hurricane heading for Louisiana and all.”
    “Might be bad,” Joe observed. He didn’t know that Douglass had spent the last thirty years indoors and had lost the connection to the natural world that he had once enjoyed.
    Douglass didn’t know that Joe didn’t believe in wasting time on idle talk about the weather.

Chapter 24
    The undergrowth reached out for Faye and Cyril as they approached the big house. No, not Cyril. Cedrick? He hadn’t been Cedrick for decades. She couldn’t think about him rationally without an accurate name and she was going to need every scrap of her rationality to get through this. She would think of him as the Senator. His title, at least, was the truth, no matter what other lies he might have told about himself.
    So what had happened to the real Cyril, after his brother stole his name? Was he farming quietly in a rural county somewhere in the south? Was he in prison? The truth struck her so suddenly that she forgot to watch her feet and tripped over a briar. Cyril was dead. He had lain beneath the sand on Seagreen Island between his mother and father ever since his brother buried them there. This possibility had never occurred to her before. Until a few minutes ago, she had thought the Senator’s missing family consisted of a man, a woman, and a grown son.
    She remembered holding the broken femur. Coupled with the picture of young Cyril with a shattered nose and a missing tooth, it completed the picture of a short painful life quite different from the powerful destiny of his older brother.
    In all these years, she had never brought a man out to Joyeuse, never revealed this part of herself to any lover. Now a man who had murdered many times over was walking up the grand staircase and into her home. Faye had always told herself that she chose to let people into her life based on cool, passionless skepticism. She had imagined herself as a woman who didn’t trust easily, yet whom had she chosen to trust? Shallow, vain Isaiah. Backstabbing Wally. This man beside her, a murderer whose very name was a lie.
    And Joe, the only man who had ever deserved the trust she gave him, sat in jail, accused of this man’s crimes.
    Faye knew she had to get back to shore in one piece. If she didn’t return from today’s outing with the murderous Senator, Joe would have no one to defend him. She had to survive this.
    How was she going to do that? Her only plausible option was to pretend like nothing had changed. She’d have to carry on with her efforts to borrow money from this man, this killer, then hustle her butt back to land where she would be