“Um…come to think of it…Liz’s crowd seems to be flocking to Tallahassee.”
Magda’s eyebrows rose. “Who?”
“Liz tells me that Chip has been seen strolling around campus. She’s all excited about it, since she figures it means he’s going back to school. Also, he was in the company of a woman, so she’s already buying yarn for the baby booties she’s planning to knit.”
“Liz? Knitting?”
“Okay. So the baby booties were metaphorical. But Chip has been seen at the university lately. And he knows his way around campus. He’s the least of our worries, though. He actually has a decent reason to be there. Another of our suspects—one who doesn’t seem the bookish type—has actually been to the library. He’s been to the rare book room, in fact.”
“Who? So help me, Faye, if you don’t just spit it out instead of making me wait for you to spin a good story, I’m gonna scream.”
“Settle down. You’ll curdle your breast milk. I saw Wayland’s name on the sign-in sheet at the rare book room. And the book of Bachelder’s letters was on the returns cart so, unless Ms. Slater hadn’t shelved returns since Friday—which I doubt, given her obsessive personality—somebody besides us looked at it in the past few days. Maybe it was Wayland.”
“When was he there?”
“I didn’t get a look at the date, but I was there the day after Wally died. No, wait. It was the day after that. Friday. Joe and I closed the place down. Wayland has been in the rare book room sometime since then.” Another thought struck her. “We know where Wayland has been a lot of that time. Sheriff Mike said they were arrested sometime yesterday, down in the National Wildlife Refuge.”
“It was pretty early,” Magda said, eyeing Faye’s nearly empty coffee cup. “Before lunch, for sure.”
“There’s not much chance that Wayland could have been at the library when it opened at eight, then finished whatever research he was doing so he could drive an hour south—”
“—and who knows how far out in the woods—”
Faye nodded. “Exactly. It would have taken an Olympic sprinter who owned a racecar to do all that in time to be arrested by noon.”
“Mike had Wayland and Nita in custody practically all day Sunday, too.”
“Saturday?” Magda had pulled a calendar out of her purse and started taking notes.
“We saw them at Herbie’s pothunting party mid-morning on Saturday. You know—at Bachelder’s homestead.”
“And who knows how far out in the woods that place is. But I guess they could have driven to Tallahassee after you left. And they might have, if they thought you were getting too interested in Jedediah Bachelder. The rare book room’s hours are short, but it seems like Saturday was Wayland’s only chance to spend much time with Bachelder’s letters.” She circled Saturday afternoon on her calendar. “And for all we know, this wasn’t his first trip to the rare book room.”
“Saturday to Monday…” Faye tried to think how much traffic the rare book room could have seen in that amount of time. There wouldn’t have been many people in and out, so Miss Slater—or whoever worked on weekends—should have had time to reshelf the book. Especially since it was so irreplaceable that she practically had kittens every time Faye wanted to see it. Faye imagined that the librarian had probably had some choice words for her employees if it had stayed out and unprotected for that long. “It’s possible that someone else came in early on Monday to look at the book, but we can’t know that for sure.”
Faye wished for a little more certainty in their speculations. Maybe Wayland looked at the book when he visited the library. Maybe somebody else did. Maybe that someone had left when she and Joe arrived and headed downstairs to do a little brake-tampering. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
Her car, scraped and crushed into a lethal shape, rose in her mind’s eye. She realized that she had been harboring a suspicion that Wayland was the saboteur who might have killed her. And Joe had thought so, too. Realizing that Wayland had been behind bars when it happened robbed her of a face to put on her enemy.
“The person who sabotaged your brakes must have known what you drive, or watched you drive into the parking garage.”
“True. Neither of those are comforting thoughts.” Faye thought of the Wayland’s tanned, muscled arms, covered in tattoos from shoulder to wrist. His close-cropped hair and expressionless face made her think of a school shooter. His looks alone made him easy to suspect of attempted murder, but she’d have to let go of him as a suspect…which still didn’t mean that he wasn’t up to no good.
Faye brought her attention back to the subject at hand. “That’s not all. Captain Eubank says Wayland came to his collection, too, looking for information on Bachelder. And there was something else…oh, yeah. When Joe and I saw Wayland and Nita at Bachelder’s home site, Wayland said some things then that made me think he knew more than he was letting on.”
“It all comes back to Bachelder. Which makes me think that it all comes back to Bachelder’s emeralds, too.” Magda settled Rachel in her automatic swing and pushed the on button. “She just loves to ride in this thing. That means I love it to pieces. Now, where were we?”
“I was telling you that Wayland had been to see Captain Eubank. What you don’t know yet is that Herbie’s been to see the captain, too.”
“Well, as the owner of Bachelder’s home site, Herbie’s in a position to know a lot about him—including the existence of the emerald necklace. I think we’re seeing a couple of people—Herbie and Wayland, maybe Nita, too—who are acting like they know about it, and it looks like they’re darn close to figuring out where Bachelder hid it all those years ago. Which brings them perilously close to Joyeuse Island. And to you.”
“Nita and Wayland weren’t just close to Joyeuse Island. They were there. They were digging in the wrong place, but they had the right island.” It was an island that was Faye’s home, an island where she couldn’t even live in peace, for fear that one of these bozos would kill her for the treasure buried there. The thought made her mad enough to spit.
“Anybody else got a link to the university? That’s where your brakes got cut, you know.”
“Believe me. I know.”
As she thought of the university, an image popped into her mind…an image of the university seal on a torn and bloody scrap of paper. “Wally. I think Wally had been there shortly before he died. We know that he wrote me a note on university letterhead.”
“Dang, that’s a lot of potential criminals for one little campus.” Magda reached for Faye’s cup of bad coffee and drank the last swig. “It’s enough to make a girl scared to go to work.”
***
Faye’s suitcase was bearing the brunt of her pent-up anger. She had wadded up several changes of clothes and thrown them at the defenseless piece of luggage, but they made no sound on impact, so there was no satisfaction to be had there. It had been slightly more rewarding to hurl face soap, shampoo, a toothbrush, and a tube of toothpaste, but they only made mild tapping noises when they hit the suitcase lid. More noise was necessary to express her frame of mind. Much more noise. Faye decided she needed something louder to throw. Maybe she should pack a big rock.
“That’s not gonna help,” Joe said, walking into the room as she missed the suitcase completely and a hardcover book thwacked on the floor.
“I don’t want to leave my home. I don’t want to live in a house with a bunch of people watching my every move, just in case somebody tries to kill me. Again.” She threw her alarm clock in the general direction of the suitcase and missed again. “And I don’t want Douglass to be dead.”
She dropped to the bed, sitting on the side with her head in her hands. “Everything’s wrong, Joe.”
She felt in her bones that he was about to start spouting Native American philosophy about how everything was as it should be. The sun rose in the east and it set in the west. A billion stars wheeled endlessly in the firmament, but people weren’t eternal.
People were born to die.
She was not in the mood for philosophy.
But Joe didn’t say anything. He just stooped down and took a seat on the floor, as if he planned to sit there and wait until she felt better. Faye found the silence oddly comforting. Sitting alone in a quiet room would have done nothing for her disposition, but sitting alone in a quiet room with her best friend was a healing thing. Soon enough, she was ready to start packing again.
She was zipping the suitcase when her cell phone rang. It was Sheriff Mike.
“The Feds let me take a look at the box of junk Nita and Wayland had in their car when they were picked up. I told them I had a consultant who knew all there was to know about archaeology in these parts, so they want you to go through it. They’ll probably cut you a nice fat federal check, because I used the word ‘consultant.’ You can thank me later.”
“What kind of junk are they consulting me about?”
“Old stuff. Old dirty stuff. The kind of stuff you live for. There’s just one problem. I’ll be hornswoggled if there’s anything in that box worth selling. I’ve been hanging around you long enough to have some notion about that. That’s for you to say, though. You come on over here and charge these Feds a nice fat fee to take a gander at something you’d have happily looked at for free. There’s a broken plate I definitely think you should see, though.”
“A broken plate? Sounds real exciting.”
“It’s stamped smack in the middle with a seal that says, ‘Turkey Foot Hotel.’”
Faye felt the possessive part of her yell, Hey! That’s mine!, but she tried to be reasonable. “I suppose it could have washed ashore long ago onto the land that’s now the wildlife refuge, where they were digging. After all, the hotel was destroyed a hundred-and-fifty years ago by one hell of a hurricane. But I think Joe and I will take a little boat ride over to the Last Isles and check on the hotel site. Right now. I have a sick feeling that somebody’s been mucking around on my property.”
***
The hurricane that had howled through Faye’s world nearly four years before had reconfigured the Last Isles. It wasn’t the first time that a Category Five storm had redrawn the map of that part of the world. When Faye’s house had been built around 1798, there had been just one Last Isle. That island had lived another half-century before being washed away in the 1857 hurricane that must have been as monstrous as the one that had nearly killed Faye and Joe. Last Island had been obliterated by the 1857 storm, broken into sandy pieces that were more sand bars than full-fledged islands.
Hundreds of lives had also been obliterated by that long-ago disaster. No one knew how many people died when the Turkey Foot Hotel was washed off Last Island, but Faye’s great-great-great-grandfather, Andrew Whitehall, had been one of them. Her great-great-grandmother, a slave named Cally, had floated out of an upstairs window, clinging to a buoyant dresser drawer, adrift and alone in the angry Gulf of Mexico, but she had survived. The women in her family had always been survivors.
Giving further evidence of the family tenacity, Cally had achieved ownership of the Last Isles and Joyeuse—island and house, both—within ten years of the hurricane, and her daughter and granddaughter had spent their lives helping her hang onto that land. In the end, though, the destruction of Last Island had wrested a good deal of property out of the possession of those tenacious women, at least for a few decades. With no surviving landmarks to establish property boundaries, it had been easy for a corrupt judge to rule against the family’s claim to the remaining islands, leaving them only their homestead on Joyeuse Island. Court decisions had frequently gone that way for people of color in the years after the Civil War.
Faye was intensely proud of reclaiming that land. When the most recent hurricane washed away the sand covering the ruined foundations of the Turkey Foot Hotel, she had been able to produce a document showing that her family had owned it. Those ruins had given her physical proof that she was the heir to what was left of the hotel…and thus the island—now islands—that it had stood on. Procuring funding for excavating those foundations was a particularly sweet victory, since she would have done the work, regardless.
There wasn’t much left of the old hotel but, from a witness’ description of its layout, she thought she’d located the kitchen. Thinking like a busy cook who needed to dump her trash quickly and get back to work, she’d used that information to intuit the location of a garbage pit.
A garbage pit. A hole full of hundred-and-fifty-year-old kitchen refuse…Faye might as well have been in heaven. The only thing better than a garbage pit would have been an outhouse. Overdressed Victorians had dropped the most interesting things into latrines back when getting dressed had meant fastening a plethora of buttons and pins. She hadn’t had time to completely plumb the depths of the garbage pit, and the time she’d spent on Bachelder’s history was time she could have spent shoveling old trash. The pit was calling her. She prayed Nita and Wayland hadn’t ruined it.
Faye’s skiff had eaten up the short distance between Joyeuse Island and the piece of Last Island where the hotel had stood. Joe was in his john boat, not because they had packed so heavily that it took two boats to carry their stuff, but because they might be ashore for quite a while, and they might both need water transportation while they were staying with Emma. Faye’s skiff was fast, but Joe’s john boat had kept pace with her. They’d no sooner dragged their boats up on the beach, than Faye felt a sick feeling wash over her. Drag marks on the sand told her that someone else had beached a boat lately, probably since the last high tide. Footprints pointing in the direction of her excavation told an even worse story.
Self-preservation reminded her that there could still be bad guys around. A bruised abdomen and a throbbing butt cheek reminded her of the damage those bad guys could do. A glance up and down the shoreline told her that no criminals were lurking on this side of the tiny fragment of an island. No one with a gram of sense would try to land a boat on the other side of this island, where mosquito-infested swamps predominated, so if anyone nasty was here, then they were very good swimmers. She judged that it was safe to proceed, and Joe must have agreed, because he didn’t try to stop her.
Bad news greeted them at the hotel site. Randomly placed piles of earth and a few shattered sherds of white-glazed pottery gave evidence that somebody—probably Nita and Wayland—had been treasure-hunting smack in the middle of her neat and scientifically designed project.
Joe held out a hand, as if to quiet her inevitable outburst. “Don’t fly off the handle. Let’s just see what they did.”
She found three or four pits randomly placed alongside the more well-preserved stretches of the hotel’s foundations. Rectangular depressions in those areas showed that the pothunters had pried up some of the bricks and hauled them away. She didn’t imagine they’d found much else besides bricks in that area. She didn’t even want to think about the other parts of the site they could have messed up
Joe’s voice, which said only, “Faye,” came from the direction of the old garbage pit. She hurried over.
When she’d last been on this island, she had left a neat rectangular excavation with straight, sharp, vertical sides. There was nothing left now but a formless pit, surrounded by soil that looked like it had been plowed. Badly plowed. She’d had trouble with pothunters out here a time or two before, but it had never been anything like this.
The sheriff might have recovered the artifacts scavenged from this place. But how much information had been destroyed? Could she still sift through this churned-up soil and uncover the things she’d hoped to learn about the diet of the hotel’s guests and employees? Or the kitchen help’s cooking techniques? Maybe. Maybe not.
“Shit.”
“I’ll call the sheriff.” Joe whipped out his cell phone and started punching buttons.
Faye couldn’t think of any way to express her anger that wouldn’t hurt more than it helped. She couldn’t pick up a brick and hurl it at a tree. The
handmade bricks, molded and burnt on-site, were artifacts in their own right. There wasn’t a rock in sight, so she couldn’t even chunk a rock at a tree. Besides, the trees never did anything to her, so there was no point in hurting them. She certainly couldn’t yell at Joe, who never did anything to her, either, so she just stomped across the dunes and climbed in the skiff.
Soon enough, Joe appeared, folding his cell phone shut. They cranked their boats and pointed them toward shore, where the stuff Nita and Wayland had stolen from this site—from her, personally—was waiting for her to inspect it. She and Joe didn’t talk, because there was nothing to say.
***
“I don’t get it,” Faye said, sorting through the pile of dirty junk.
Besides the broken plate the sheriff had mentioned, there wasn’t much to see. A piece of a bottle that had probably held vinegar. A plain metal button. The corroded blade of a butcher knife. The green neck of a wine bottle. She balanced the green chunk of glass on her palm, holding it up to the light. Nothing could have been less like the enigmatic emerald. The only things the two things had in common were that they were clear, smooth, cool to the touch, and green.
“Nobody’s going to buy this stuff,” she said to the sheriff and his friend, the man who was paying her a considerable consulting fee. The contract, hastily drawn up, rested comfortably in her purse. Given the chance, she could really get into this consultant gig.
She sighed. “I could’ve done something academic with all this trash. Maybe. I could’ve researched the wine to determine the country of origin and learn something about import patterns of the day. It makes sense that a large kitchen would have bought vinegar, even though housewives at that time generally made their own, so that broken bottle is mildly interesting. The button and the knife…I can’t think of anything exciting to learn from them, but I might eventually come up with something. But collectors? They wouldn’t give this junk a second look, much less pay good money for it.”
Findings Page 18
