Last month, I traveled to our Florida plantation, with plans to conceal the necklace there, only to find that you had been forced to sell that property. I commend you for finding a way around the laws that would prohibit a woman from such commerce. Do not worry that I grieve over my childhood home. I know that it cost your heart dearly to sell it. I pray that the proceeds have kept you safe and fed. But its loss meant that I was forced to find another safe haven for the jewels.
I know you recall the holiday we spent, just before the war, at the island plantation once owned by a friend of my father’s. There was a time when the two families visited often, for they were our close neighbors when one traveled by water. Though the property had passed from the man I knew, Andrew, to his young step-son, Courtney, by the time of our visit, you remember the compatibility of our interests and the even-tempered graciousness of Courtney’s character.
I wished before our visit that Courtney had been married, for I feared that you would lack feminine companionship during our long time on his island. My worries were for naught. The lady of the house, Courtney’s young cousin, managed to entertain you delightfully, without sparing herself the duties of a household. You may remember remarking on the beauty of the house and the delicacy of the foods her cooks served us.
Ah, I must not think of delicate foods in this difficult time.
With Courtney’s assistance, I have secreted our future, in the form of that exquisite and rare necklace, on his island. I will say no more in future letters of the necklace or of its hiding place, for fear of my letters falling into hands other than yours. Either destroy this epistle or give it to Isaiah, for I know that you have taught him to read by now, as surely as I know that I love you. Should the war find our home, it might be ransacked for valuables, but I deeply doubt that the invaders would look to a freed slave for treasure.
If I should not return, Isaiah can help you find the island. The necklace is buried in a copse of trees southwest of the great house. Courtney observed that it would be a lovely location for a summerhouse. He expected to have his men begin construction the following day. You and Isaiah will find a crawlspace under the elegant new structure. And buried there you will find a treasure.
Though I rather hope you don’t. I’d prefer to fetch the treasure myself and fasten it around your willowy neck.
Your adoring husband,
Jedediah
Chapter Fourteen
Faye had stopped being sleepy by the time she’d heard the first paragraph of Bachelder’s letter. Her first thought had been Why didn’t Joe tell me about this? Then she read back over the letter. Bachelder had mentioned visiting an island plantation, yes. But he’d mentioned no last names, and only two first names: Andrew and Courtney. There was no reason to expect Joe to remember every name on her family tree. Also, by the time he’d read half-a-dozen letters into the recorder, his brain would have been on automatic pilot. He might not have noticed his own name as he mumbled it into the machine.
When she’d turned on the voice recorder and started listening to Joe’s soothing voice, Faye had been at a dead end in so many ways. She’d had no clue about who killed Douglass and Wally, and neither had the sheriff. And she’d been stymied by the problem of fitting together the emerald and the silver flask and her friends’ murders. There was no reason they should fit together, other than the circumstantial fact that something significant happened to each piece of the puzzle—the emerald was found, the flask’s photo was in the newspaper, Douglass and Wally died, and Nita and Wayland showed up with shovels and a gun—all within the space of a few days.
The letter changed everything. It told anyone perusing the worn volume of Bachelder’s collected letters that a fabulous necklace was hidden somewhere in the islands near his childhood home. Anyone who read the local paper would also have known that Douglass possessed one of Bachelder’s personal items and that he employed a personal archaeologist. If they were sufficiently interested to visit Douglass’ museum—and who wouldn’t be sufficiently interested in a handful of emeralds and gold?—then they might even have seen the gold finding
The first names of Joyeuse’s Civil-War-era owners, Andrew and Courtney, might have already led them straight to Joyeuse Island, but for the fact that the Micco County Courthouse had burned in the 1890s. So far as the killers knew, the only key to finding their home—and the treasure that had been buried there under a summer house—lay in the field notes that documented where Faye had found the hip flask and the finding.
Nobody but Faye and her closest friends knew that a piece of Bachelder’s necklace had already been found. Its location had been documented in her notes, but it hadn’t been labeled, “Priceless emerald.” Probably her notes said something like “Unidentified object, possibly manmade.” And the thieves didn’t get that notebook, anyway. They were still working blind.
They did get the notebook that documented the finding. Faye would have bet good money that this information was what had brought Nita and Wayland to her island. Too bad they didn’t know how to figure out where the finding had been, based on her notes.
Given the thieves’ limited knowledge, it was no surprise that someone had come to Douglass’ house, looking for Faye’s notes and the catalog. Those innocuous papers could be the modern equivalent of a treasure map, minus an X marking the spot.
She told herself not to jump to conclusions, but there was no way to stifle her first excited thought. She was pretty sure the spot where she and Joe had been attacked by Nita and Wayland—the spot where she’d found the emerald—was southwest of the house, right where Bachelder said he’d buried the necklace. A quick look at her site sketch would give her that answer, but she had more pressing issues.
First and obviously, she needed to call the sheriff. If the killers were after the emerald necklace, which seemed even more possible than it had an hour before, then Sheriff Mike needed to know everything she did.
It was the middle of the night, but the parents of babies didn’t tend to keep regular hours. It was time to call the sheriff. Besides, if he found out that she’d kept something so important from him for even a few hours, he’d…what? Sheriff Mike was a very gentle man, but he had ways to keep people in line. If Sheriff Mike were ever really mad at Faye, he’d sic Magda on her.
Faye shivered at the thought.
Her plan for the night followed a logical sequence of events: First, she’d call Sheriff Mike. Then, she’d scour her field notes to remind herself exactly where she’d dug up the emerald and the finding. Next, she’d see if voice recognition software could recognize Joe’s rural way with a vowel, because she wanted hard copies of those letters. No. She needed hard copies of those letters.
Finally, she’d reward herself with the chore she was looking forward to most. She’d pull out her old family journal and see if Great-great-grandmother Cally had mentioned any of the Bachelders’ visits.
***
The sheriff had been properly appreciative of Faye’s exciting new information, and he hadn’t once squawked because she called him in the middle of the night. He was not, however, the one who had gone to his office at midnight to fetch the extra copies of Faye’s field notes filed there. Magda went, because she was on fire to read them and she couldn’t wait till he got home. Also, somebody had to stay with little Rachel.
Faye knew that Magda was even now pawing through the notes, looking for something that would tell them where Courtney had built his summer house. If God was good, she’d also find something that linked it to the jewel and the tiny gold finding that might once have cradled it.
In the meantime, Sheriff Mike wasted Faye’s time asking questions like, “Is Joe out there with you? I know Liz slipped him a gun, and I don’t want to know whether it’s registered. I just want to know that he has it with him. We can deal with the paperwork crap some other time.”
Faye was patient with him.
Yes, the house was locked up tight.
Yes, Joe w
as with her.
Yes, Joe had the gun.
Joe also had an arsenal of homemade stone weapons. There were always a few of them scattered around any place he frequented—his bedroom, his boat, the spot in the woods where he went to meditate and chip stone. He had accepted Liz’s handgun, but he’d held it slightly away from him, as if it smelled. Maybe, to Joe, it did.
Finally, Sheriff Mike hung up, so she’d accomplished the first task on her list. Magda was looking for clues in the field notes, so she was taking care of Task Two. A few keyclicks on the laptop had put the voice recognition software to work transcribing Joe’s recordings, which gave her a good start on Task Three. The slowest link in this chain of events was Faye’s ancient printer. She left it printing the transcripts and used the time to spend a few moments with her great-great-grandmother.
Cally hadn’t actually written in the old family journal, started by her great-grandfather, William Whitehall, in 1798. She’d spent her whole life keeping Joyeuse from rotting down and keeping the farm surrounding the house solvent. There had been little time for niceties like journal writing.
Instead, during her last years, Cally had described her long and eventful life to an interviewer for the Federal Writers’ Project, a program that had documented the stories of former slaves while creating work for writers left unemployed by the Great Depression. Long ago, someone had tucked a copy of the interview into William Whitehall’s journal. It seemed fitting to Faye that she keep it there.
Excerpt from the oral history of former slave Cally Stanton, recorded 1935
When the first master was over Joyeuse, you wouldn’t ever have known we lived on an island out in the water. People came and went all the time and they didn’t just come for dinner and leave, not back then. They’d come to stay, and the master would throw a ball, because his guests had to have something to do. Wasn’t any radio then, and the master’s friends weren’t big on doing anything useful with their time. So there wasn’t an awful lot to do but throw a formal ball. Besides, how else would the ladies get to wear those ballgowns we sewed up?
I didn’t ever think about it before, but I bet that’s why he built the hotel. He could go out there to Last Island and visit with his fine friends, dance with their wives and drink a lot of French wine. Except when he did all that at the hotel, his friends were paying for their own keep. The master was rich enough, but he still had to watch his pennies, at least until he married the second missus and her money.
Before the hotel, every rich family south of Charleston paraded through our doors. You saw the picture of this house, the one that was painted before the paint peeled and the gardens grew over? (Faye desperately wished this painting had survived.) This place was like a palace. Why do you think he built a castle out here in the middle of the water? He never had any children—at least not by either of his wives—so he sure didn’t need the rooms. He built himself a mansion so he could impress the Yanceys and the Baileys and the Bachelders and the Lamars and all the others.
There it was. Independent confirmation that Jedediah Bachelder’s family had visited Joyeuse during the years that Andrew LaFourche was its master. What about later, when Courtney Stanton had inherited all his stepfather’s worldly goods? Had Bachelder visited again, long enough to hide a fortune in emeralds under Courtney Stanton’s new summer house?
A quick scan of the rest of Cally’s story gave her nothing concrete except for the occasional mention of a summer house—proof that it existed, though not proof that anything was buried under it besides sand. A careful reading for more subtle clues was in order, but later, when there was time to consider every word.
Because Cally was answering the interviewer’s questions and just generally reminiscing, the narrative rambled to and fro through time, but Faye could find no entry that mentioned the summer house in such a way that showed it had existed before Bachelder’s 1863 visit. So there was nothing to contradict his narrative.
She had looked for the summer house before, based on Cally’s mentions of it, but she’d come to believe that it hadn’t been intended as a permanent structure. She’d found no sign of any masonry foundations that couldn’t be linked to known slave cabins and service buildings. That might mean that it had been built on an ephemeral foundation, perhaps wooden posts sunk into the ground. It might mean that the summer house was never there at all. Or it could just mean that she’d been looking in the wrong places. It was a big island, after all.
Still, logic had told her that there were only a few plausible locations for a summer house. It should have been close to the beach or the dock or the gardens or something else attractive. There seemed to be no reason to build a big gazebo-like structure for people to go outside and sit in, unless there was something to make it a better place to sit than the porches. Joyeuse was awash in porches. There was no shortage of places to lounge out-of-doors.
But perhaps her logic had been faulty, because she was missing a key piece of information. Maybe Courtney Stanton had built his summer house in a completely illogical spot, simply to obscure Bachelder’s hiding place.
Her cell phone rang. Magda was on the other end, saying, “I found it. Oh, not everything you need. But some of it. Do you have copies of the notes handy?”
Faye absolutely did.
“Okay, look back to the September before the hurricane, when you were working by yourself. The label on the spine says, ‘September 8-September 29.’ You made a site sketch on the back page. See it?”
“Yep.”
“See the point labeled ‘42?’ Southwest of the house? That’s where you excavated the gold finding.”
“Hot dog! It’s also near the spot where I found the hip flask.”
“Faye. Did you just say ‘hot dog!’”
“Yeah. What do you say when you’re excited?”
“‘Eureka!’ worked quite well for Archimedes.”
“Yeah? Well, he was Greek and ‘Eureka’ probably means ‘hot dog’ in Greek. He was also wet and naked. I’m not.” Faye shuffled through the papers, looking for some more recent notes. “I think that’s also pretty close to—”
“—to the spot where you found the emerald. See? On the site sketch you drew last month? The point labeled 24? It wasn’t close enough to the finding to give us the whole story—if the necklace simply disintegrated during a few generations underground, the two pieces should have been inches apart, not yards—but the close proximity is suggestive.”
“When you say ‘close proximity is suggestive,’ you sound exactly like a university professor. Would it kill you to do a little speculation, Magda? Like maybe the ground got disturbed when the summer house was demolished.”
Magda’s voice took on a raspier edge, making her sound less like a new mother and more like a contentious academic. “Okay, I’ll play. Maybe Bachelder came back and dug up the necklace. Maybe it broke in the process and he lost a couple of pieces.”
“Or maybe somebody else dug it up and became fabulously rich. Except it sure wasn’t my family. Since the Civil War, we’ve never had two extra pennies to rub together.”
“According to your site sketch, that copse of trees isn’t there any more. Maybe the necklace got caught in the roots when one of your ancestors knocked down the trees. Or when a hurricane did it for them.”
Faye had forgotten about the trees. She looked back at the notes describing the appearance of the soil at the time of excavation. The notes read, “Site stratigraphy is difficult to read, due to copious partially rotted roots.”
Magda must have been reading her own copy of the notes, because she blurted out, “The roots! They were there!” at the same time Faye said much the same thing.
“This is the place,” Faye said, stabbing at the site map with her finger, as if Magda could see. “You know this is the spot Bachelder buried that necklace. Don’t get all skeptical and cautious on me.”
“It looks good. But you need to get out there and look for the rest of thos
e emeralds.”
“I’ll be looking all day tomorrow. If I find anything, I’ll let you know.”
Chapter Fifteen
As soon as the next morning dawned, Faye wanted desperately to grab her trowel, walk out her front door, and run headlong to the southwest. She wanted to dig up some more emeralds.
She wanted it so badly that she conjured up a rainstorm. There could be no other explanation for the unseasonably dark cloud and torrential rains. If an equally miserable wind had been whipping off the water, she and Joe would have been stuck inside the house all day, but the seas were calm enough for safe boating. The two of them were simply getting wetter by the minute as they readied the Gopher for its first trip to shore in weeks.
Getting to shore on her skiff would have been no fun in the rain, and Joe’s john boat would have been as bad, even if it hadn’t been moored at Liz’s. The Gopher was a different matter. She’d lived on the Gopher for years while she made Joyeuse livable. It would get her and Joe to the mainland, and it would keep them dry enough. Then, her car would get them to the library—but not the university library, with its forbidding librarian and jealously guarded manuscripts. Not at first, anyway.
First, she wanted to see someone who, unlike the rare books librarian Ms. Slater, was always thrilled to have his archives examined. Captain Eubank lived and died for Micco County history, and he couldn’t quite understand anybody who didn’t.
Faye didn’t intend to waste today, not after the things she’d learned from Bachelder’s letters and Cally’s oral history. If she couldn’t go digging for jewels, then she could certainly spend the morning sifting through Captain Eubank’s informal library for more clues.
Too bad she stopped at Magda’s house on the way there.
While Joe was stacking wooden blocks for Rachel to knock over, Magda delivered the bad news.
“Mike says you can’t stay on the island any more. Not until we figure out this Bachelder mess.”
Findings Page 14
