Findings (10 page)

She started the motor. “Besides, you and I don’t get much of a chance to be alone lately. Let’s quit wasting time.”

***

If Ross had ever wondered why Faye was always short on cash, his question began to be answered as soon as she tied the boat to her nearly new dock. He supposed it had been built since the big hurricane, because Category 5 storms don’t tend to spare puny things like boat docks. Hefting a bag packed with his bathing suit and towel, he followed Faye up a dirt path leading through a dense thicket of bushes and undergrowth. Huge trees lay toppled in all directions, their thirsty roots reaching for the clouds.

“The hurricane wrecked the tree canopy on this side of the island,” she said, pointing at the trees’ carcasses. “These vines and brushy plants had never had much sunlight before, but they’re really growing now. It’s interesting to watch the plant life change from month to month, just because we had a big storm. Joe cut up some of the downed trees for firewood, but I think we’ll leave most of them for wildlife habitat.”

Ross had hoped that they’d exhausted the topic of Joe. Apparently not.

The path curved to the left and Faye plunged on, pushing the over-eager vines out of their way. The verdant leaves blocked his view, so that Faye’s home revealed itself suddenly. One minute, he was pushing his way through a wild and unkempt piece of nature. The next minute, he was standing at the edge of a neatly mown clearing with a monumental edifice gleaming against the grass like a white jewel.

The house was encircled with slender white columns and delicate balustrades. A broad staircase swept upward to a finely detailed double door. Palladian windows ornamented the dormers that brought light to the top floor, and a proud cupola rose over the whole confection. If ever a woman was house-poor, it was Faye.

The roof was obviously new. The paint job was fresh. Faye had told him about her fruitless struggle to find someone able to reconstruct the exterior staircases using the original methods. In the end, she and Joe had taught themselves how to do it.

He hoped she’d taken advantage of every source of historical preservation funding available—hurricane recovery funds, too. He didn’t know anything about 19th-century carpentry techniques, though he was willing to learn, but he knew quite a lot about how to navigate governmental mazes. He could help Faye get money for her quixotic project. And he had a good bit of money of his own that he was willing to spend. He was willing to do pretty much anything to make Faye happy.

She’d struggled so hard. Losing her mother and grandmother when she was hardly out of high school. Flipping burgers to pay for college, until the money just wouldn’t stretch far enough to make school possible. Digging for bits of her ancestors’ past, then selling them to artifact collectors, just to raise the money to pay the taxes on Joyeuse and keep it standing. And now she was back in school, working for Douglass’ museum, doing her doctoral research, and continuing the work on Joyeuse.

He knew she would always continue restoring this old house. It was the legacy passed down from her mother and her mother’s mother, all the way back to a freed slave named Cally. Faye had told him Cally’s story, and she’d made it her story. Any man who hoped to make a life with Faye would be making a life with Joyeuse, as well.

She was slapping a hand on the smooth masonry wall of the bottom floor. “This above-ground basement was built sometime shortly after 1798, according to a family journal. It was probably just a modest building built out of tabby, a kind of cement people made with the ingredients at hand—sand, shells, stuff like that. Sometime before 1829, my great-great-great-grandfather turned that little cement building into a rich man’s dream.”

She led him into the ground floor basement, where the thick, dense walls had kept the air cool all day long. “There’s a bathroom to your left. Do you still want to go for a swim?”

He nodded silently, still occupied by the sight of the wrought iron hinges and the irregular shapes of the tiles under his feet and all the other obvious signs that he was standing in a structure built completely by hand.

“I’ll go put on my suit. See you in a few minutes.” Faye stepped into a closet-sized room where a cramped staircase was hidden. Her erect carriage emphasized the shapely figure beneath the baggy clothes. He wondered whether bathing suits were strictly necessary, this far from civilization.

***

As a true island dweller, Faye owned more bathing suits than dresses. She had a dresser drawer packed full of them. Unfortunately, as the owner of two aging boats, most of her bathing suits sported grease stains in strategic places. They were all bikinis, so she pawed through the pieces, hoping to find a clean-ish top and a clean-ish bottom in coordinating colors. Maybe she should just take a heavily stained suit and dip it in motor oil, rendering it all one color—a nasty color, to be true, but still one color.

A glint of fuchsia in the bottom of her drawer spoke to her, and she answered it.

“Come to Mama.”

She’d bought the fuchsia suit for a long-ago date with a long-ago fiancé, and it had been way too cute to do engine work in. It had flirty white polka-dots, a flirtily low-cut top, and flirty knots on the hips. It was perfect. An old memory stirred, and she dug around in the back of the drawer. With a triumphant yank, she pulled out the matching sarong. A few minutes later, Faye sauntered down the sneak staircase, looking like a woman who had no idea how to keep a boat engine humming.

The sand on Faye’s little tiny beach was fine-grained and perfectly white. The water was still a bit cool for her Florida-girl tastes, but she couldn’t resist its transparent turquoise. Ross surprised her by shedding his oh-so-cultured lawyer persona. He tossed his towel on the sand and ran headlong into the water with a whoop.

“You look so…dry,” he said, shaking water out of his tight curls.

She responded by running almost as fast as he had and whooping just as loud. The water closed over her head and she knew that, in a minute or two, it wouldn’t feel quite so cold.

Ross’ hands closed on her waist. He pulled her to him and, as her face broke the water, he kissed her. Then he dunked her back beneath the waves. Clearly, he was unaware how dangerous it was for a city boy to declare water war on an island woman.

Yes, he was taller and sometimes he reached out a long arm and grabbed whatever he could reach, tossing her into the air. And, yes, he was stronger, so he could sometimes fend off her submarine attacks. Often enough, though, he was toppled when she dove down and grabbed one of his big feet.

Faye had known for a long time that a small person could splash as well as a large one, so she used her watery ammunition well. Ross might have declared water war on her, but she was proud of fighting him to a draw. They were still laughing when they waded onto the beach.

She was shaking the sand out of her towel when she felt something come between her skin and the chilly spring breeze. Ross had wrapped one end of his towel around her and, because a big man requires an oversized towel, it was long enough for him to wrap the other end around himself. Faye had to admit that this was a most attractive way to warm up after a swim.

He leaned close and said, “I like your beach, and your basement is very nice. Why don’t you show me the rest of your house?”

***

A historian’s fantasy. Or, to be more accurate, an archaeologist’s fantasy. Ross could think of no better way to describe Faye’s cherished home. She’d escorted him through the above-ground basement’s open-centered passageway, pointing out the rooms that had once been the plantation office, the dispensary, the wine cellar, and all the other service rooms used to run a large household and a tremendous agricultural business.

Upon opening the doors to those service rooms, he found that Faye had converted them into comfortable living quarters. A modern sofa and easy chair adorned the old office, and groaning bookshelves lined its walls. A quick glance at the books’ titles gave him a glimpse of the woman. Her library included tomes like
Make Your Restored House a Home
, the collected works of Shakespeare and Austen,
The Martian Chronicles
, and
The Complete Tightwad Gazette
.

She had already moved on into the old infirmary, where she had installed a sleek and functional kitchen. “I love my gas-powered refrigerator. I can’t tell you how long I lived out of ice chests. It seemed like forever.”

“Is that an electric light?”

“I have solar panels.”

“Were they expensive?”

“The tax credit helped a lot.”

Ross thought,
Good girl. Let the government help you with this place.
Then he realized that maybe Faye didn’t even need him to help her find funding for this mammoth home improvement project.

She gave a careless gesture toward one door and said, “That’s Joe’s room,” then moved on quickly as if to avoid a difficult subject.

Pointing at the bathroom where Ross had dressed, she said, “Joyeuse is amazingly livable these days. I’ve always had bathrooms—my grandmother installed them, using the original cisterns and pipes—but I was able to spruce them up a lot last year. I’m especially partial to the humongous claw-foot bathtub.”

“It’s authentic, I’m sure. You don’t seem to be very fond of reproductions.”

Faye grinned and nodded. “If it looks old, I want it to be old. If it’s not old, then it can look modern, because I’m not into fakes. It took me a long time to find just the right tub for this room. My job gets me dirty and I do love a nice hot bath.”

Ross found himself distracted by some enticing mental pictures.

Faye opened the sneak staircase door, thought for a second, then closed it. “Let’s go outside and walk up the grand staircase. That’s the way you were intended to enter the main floor.”

The steps were broad and deep enough to be negotiated by a lady in a hoopskirt, or a man in riding boots and spurs. The wood was new, but the design of the staircase meshed seamlessly with the style of the house. The craftsmanship of the stairs was superb, which wasn’t surprising, considering who had built them. Ross suspected that, together, Faye and Joe could build anything they damn well pleased.

The color of the wood under his feet changed as he reached the top of the stairs, turning to a dull, weathered gray. The boards of the broad porch felt strong and sandy under his feet—old, strong, and sandy. A porch swing hung to his right, and the vibrations of their footsteps had set it into motion. It swayed back and forth, inviting him with its slight motion to sit and rest.

“The main floor didn’t suffer as much as the rest of the house over the years, not until the hurricane. I’ve cleaned it up, but restoration is a long way off. And Lord knows how much it’ll cost me to furnish it.”

The heavy doors swung open and Ross found himself looking into a cavernous space that could have been described as a domestic cathedral. The spacious rooms flowed into one another—Faye explained that she couldn’t yet afford to replace the pocket doors that had once divided them—but their absence only made the space seem more vast.

There wasn’t a stick of furniture in sight. Ross’ last girlfriend had been an interior designer. She’d have had a spasm if she’d gotten a look at this place.

“None of the wallpaper was salvageable after it had a nice little soak in saltwater. I’ve been researching the paper patterns, hoping to find designs that come as close as possible to the originals, because I’m pretty sure I’m gonna be stuck with reproduction paper. I guess it’s too much to hope that some wallpaper company might have rolls of paper from the 1800s just lying around its warehouse.”

Reading between the lines, Ross figured Faye was planning a full-out assault on those warehouses, just in case.

“I know how to patch the plaster work,” she said, pointing up to a finely detailed medallion on the ceiling. The moldings at the top of the walls were almost as elaborate. “I just need to find some time. I’ll need a whole lot of time to touch up the faux marbling on the mantels and the painted graining on the woodwork, too. You can’t rush that stuff.”

She opened a little door in the dining room to reveal the sneak staircase. “One more floor. Well, two, counting the cupola. I used to have a spiral staircase that took you as far as the bedrooms, but the hurricane got it. I can’t get it rebuilt until somebody figures out how it was built in the first place. It looks like Joe and I may have to do that ourselves, too, if we don’t die of old age first.”

So she was planning to keep Joe around until she died of old age. Perfect. Ross almost groaned out loud.

The sneak staircase ended in the master bedroom. The décor here looked…frothy…to Ross’ masculine eyes. Each square inch of wall and ceiling space was covered with murals in every shade of off-white he could imagine. Lilies, roses, magnolias, lace, ribbons—the room was white-on-white, shaded with gold, and it was too fresh for the house.

“You did this?”

“I restored the original murals, yes.” She smiled as his astonishment.

“Now I understand why you don’t have a TV. When would you watch it?”

She toured him through a music room adorned with tiny harps and a gentleman’s bedchamber painted with foxhunting scenes. Her own room was a lavender confection of swans and wisteria so beautiful and so feminine that it was clear why she had chosen it for her own, over a master bedroom that was a lovely but sterile vision in white.

There was little furniture on this floor, either, just beds in her room and in the master bedroom. There was a chest of drawers where Faye kept her clothes, and several display cases where she kept her most treasured archaeological finds, but that was about all. Everything he laid eyes on seemed to be an artifact or an antique or simply something old that still worked. Ross hoped she was able to find some antique wallpaper stashed in a warehouse somewhere. It would be a shame to paste something fake onto something as completely authentic as Joyeuse. It was as authentic as Faye herself.

The sparse furnishings told him that Faye didn’t throw away anything that might still be useful. She slept on an antique convent bed. The display cases housing her finds looked like they’d been discarded from a musty old university laboratory. Ross could almost smell the formaldehyde.