Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

a drink. She was dressed in a lacy dress with a tight waist and wide skirt. I didn’t do anything wrong. I just asked her out to dinner. I was rough around the edges in those days, but my manners weren’t so bad. I asked her nicely.”
    He didn’t go on and Faye was compelled to prod him to finish his story. Somebody, finally, needed to know what happened to Abby that night and she was glad it would be her, even if she didn’t live to pass the truth on.
    “Did she laugh at you?” Faye asked. “Was she cruel? Is that why—?”
    “Abby? Cruel? No. She was sweet about it. She said, ‘You see I’m already dressed. Daddy and I are having dinner in Tallahassee. I’m going to college there in September, you know.’ Then she offered me a drink.”
    “I’m not understanding this story,” Faye said, feeling that the Senator had far better reasons to kill her than he had to kill Abby.
    “You wouldn’t. It’s just this: At that moment, I understood that money wasn’t going to fix what was wrong with me. The wad of money in my pocket was worthless. I could never have Abby or any woman like her, because they were going to colleges and cities and places where they could find husbands just like their daddies. The only women who would ever have me were cringing, stupid cows like my mother. I would have no choice other than to beat them, just like my father beat my mother, because what else can you do with a woman like that?”
    He waited until Faye looked him in the face. “So I slugged her. That was how my father dealt with balky women. It seemed like the thing to do. Except, as she fell, she hit her head on the corner of the wet bar. It gashed her scalp to the bone and fractured her skull. There was blood everywhere and that nigra Everett came walking up her dock carrying a fishing pole while I was trying to wipe it up. He said he was going to kill me, but he changed his mind when I told him how things were going to be. Sometime while I was explaining why he needed to keep his mouth shut, she stopped breathing.”
    “How—” Faye groped for a word to describe a debutante with a bashed-in skull, overdressed and dead beside the patio wet bar of her father’s beach house. “How ghastly.”
    “Yes. How do you like that? It took twenty years of beatings for my father to kill my mother, but I managed it on the first try. But then I always knew I was twice the man Daddy ever was.”
    “And little Cyril?”
    “Oh, he killed him, too, same day as Mama. He beat my mother and brother forever, but if he ever beat me, I don’t remember it. I don’t know why not. Probably because I have never in my life looked or smelled like a victim. One day, I came home from football practice and found that he’d gone too far. I think he killed Cyril first. It was probably easy—there wasn’t much to him in body or spirit—but then he had to contend with Mama. God, what a scene I walked in on.”
    “How ghastly,” Faye said again.
    “Yeah. I’d hated Daddy all my life, but that was the first and only time he ever scared me. He scared me enough to make me help him bury them, out in the Last Isles, then he told everybody nasty tales about where my mama was and people believed him.”
    Faye was doing the math. The Senator had confessed to killing four of the six bodies she’d found. If he didn’t kill his mother or his brother, then he was responsible for all the others.
    “When did you kill your father?” she asked.
    “Baseball season. I came home from practice one day, still carrying my bat, and saw him sitting at the kitchen table. My hands just swung at his head without consulting my brain. One good lick upside the head with my baseball bat and Daddy wasn’t ever going to bother anybody again. I buried him with Mama and Cyril, because I knew it would have made him mad.”
    “It was that easy?”
    The Senator nodded. “I told the same story he told about my mama, that he’d run off with some drunken slut. Everybody was happy to believe me. I left town the day after I graduated and only came back to see Abby the one time. When Cyril was old enough, I went to Auburn under his name. By the time I came back to this part of the world, fifteen years had passed and I had been Cyril for more than seven of them.”
    Faye knew it was unwise to bait a confessed killer, but felt she had nothing to lose. “And you’re going to enjoy killing me to cover your tracks?”
    “No, covering my tracks is just a necessary evil,