Findings (2 page)

Chapter Two

Faye piloted her skiff over the dark waters of the Gulf of Mexico, enjoying this late-night ride home. The silhouette of her beloved island blotted out a sweep of stars near the horizon, and its dark looming shape left her perfectly happy.

Her entire self was bound up in that island. Her African-American ancestors had been slaves there. They had built the glorious mansion for their masters…who were also her ancestors. And before that the island had been held by a succession of Native American tribes. Her romantic imagination insisted that the Creek were among the indigenous peoples who had lived on Joyeuse Island. Since her great-great-great-great-grandmother was half-Creek, imagining them on her island just enhanced her sense of ownership. And since her best friend Joe was mostly Creek, it gave them both a blood connection to their island home, and to each other.

When her cell phone rang, she was almost nostalgic for the days when she couldn’t afford one.

“Faye.”

Emma’s voice was quiet and terrible. Faye cut the motor so she could hear her better.

“Douglass is in the hospital. He’s in critical condition. He—”

Knowing full well that she shouldn’t interrupt a woman with a voice so full of devastation, Faye couldn’t help herself. “What happened? I just left him. He had a heart attack, didn’t he? Or a stroke.”

Faye remembered his heavy tread on the staircase. She should have stayed with him until Emma got home.

“Faye?” Emma’s voice interrupted her dark thoughts. “Did you hear me, Faye? This was no heart attack. Somebody beat him, somebody that wanted him dead. From the look of him, I think they thought he
was
dead when they left him lying there. I surely didn’t expect to find him still breathing when I saw what they’d done.”

“But who? Who would want to hurt Douglass?”

“I don’t know if they came intending to hurt him. Maybe they just wanted his…our…things.”

Emma said the word “things” as if she wanted to run through her luxurious new beach house and throw all its beautiful furnishings—antiques, artwork, and all—into the waves.

“I knew right away that something was wrong,” Emma raved on, “just as soon as I got home. Somebody had kicked the glass right out of the front door and left it wide open. When I saw that, I started looking for Douglass. The light over the basement stairs was the only one burning in the whole house, so I went down there first. Everything was dumped on the floor, all your artifacts and your file folders and everything, and Douglass was lying bloody in the middle of the mess. Oh, Faye…”

“I’m coming,” Faye said, though she didn’t move to start the skiff’s motor, not yet. She needed to be able to hear everything her tortured friend had to say. “I’m just so glad that whoever did this was gone when you got there.”

“I didn’t miss them by much. When I walked in the house, I could see out the back windows, all the way down to the water. Two big men were carrying boxes out there. I’m guessing they had a boat tied up to our dock.” Emma’s voice shook with indignation. “They came here to steal something, but what? It looks like they went straight to the lab in the basement, without touching our stuff upstairs, which is actually worth money. Douglass always told me not to worry when he brought artifacts home. He always said, ‘I run a Museum of American
Slavery
, sugar. Slaves were poor folks, by definition. There’s nothing in the whole museum worth stealing.’”

But Faye knew that there was. The last time she saw Douglass, he was cradling an emerald in the palm of his hand. No one had seen that emerald since it went in the ground years, maybe centuries, before. How was it possible that anyone other than she and Douglass could have known where it was tonight?

“They don’t think he’s going to make it,” Emma sobbed. “The paramedics wouldn’t come out and say so, but I could tell. I rode in the front of the ambulance, and there was a little window where I could look back and watch them work on him. The sight was horrible, but I couldn’t look away. It would have been like abandoning him at the very end.”

“We don’t know that this is the end. Not yet.”

“The trauma people put him on a stretcher and wheeled him away from me, then they closed the door behind them. He needs me there. He needs to know that I would never leave him alone.”

Tears burned Faye’s eyes. “He knows that. He’s always known that.”

Emma was whispering now. “They called a Code Blue on somebody back there. I heard them. What will I do if they come to tell me…what will I do? I’ll be alone, Faye.”

“I’m coming.” Faye cranked the motor. “This boat makes a mighty lot of racket, but I can still hear you. You just keep talking to me, and you won’t be alone.”

Hardly ten minutes had passed when Emma’s reflexive babbling slowed and she said, “Somebody’s coming. His doctor is walking across the waiting room and he’s got me in his sights.”

“I’m coming. Just hang on to the phone.” Faye goosed the motor and wrung a little more speed out of it. “Don’t put it down, because I’ll be on the other end for as long as you need me.”

***

Joe Wolf Mantooth settled himself behind the wheel. He still gloried in his ability to drive, and it was all thanks to Faye.

She had opened so many doors to the wide world for Joe. First, she’d helped him get his driver’s license at the advanced age of twenty-eight. Then, she’d hauled him bodily through the paperwork involved in getting his education back on track, making sure he got every accommodation for his learning disabilities that the law allowed. He wasn’t real clear on the details, but he thought it was possible that she’d gotten him some accommodations that the law
didn’t
allow. Faye could be scary when she was in hot pursuit of a goal.

Thanks to Faye, Joe had earned his GED, and he was now enrolled in some remedial classes that promised to make him college-ready in time for the fall semester. He was proud of his accomplishments and he wouldn’t trade them for anything—except now he was going to school in Tallahassee, and Faye was doing archaeology in the Last Isles. Joe didn’t much care for cities, and he didn’t much care for being so far away from Faye.

Joe grieved for Douglass as he drove south, but the teachings of his Creek ancestors comforted him, because he knew that Douglass had earned his peace. There was more value, right this minute, in focusing on the needs of those left behind. He would be with Emma and Faye, sharing their burden, just as soon as this car could get him there.

This was no time to think of himself, but even Joe wasn’t completely pure of heart. He’d been in Tallahassee for nearly three months, plenty of time for Faye to invite her new friend, Ross Donnelly, to drive his sleek sports car down to Florida from his Atlanta townhouse. And maybe she had. Faye’s business was her own.

Still, Joe noticed that, when faced with matters of life and death and love, Faye had chosen to call him. She had asked him to come.

He stomped on the accelerator, but his rusted-out, underpowered excuse for a car was already giving him all it had. Maybe it was time to get a new one.

***

Faye sat vigil with Emma, in the living room of the elegant home the older woman had shared with her husband. She couldn’t believe that Douglass was dead.

Someone tapped on the front door. Faye recognized Joe by the sound of his quiet knock, respectful but not tentative. She went to meet him, but she was stopped short by the sight of him standing calmly outside the shattered door. Splintered glass framed Joe’s tall, sturdy body, and she worried that scattered shards of broken glass would slice right through the soles of his moccasins. He stood there patiently, as if it would never occur to him to step through the violated doorway, unless invited.

Joe had brought some necessities with him: bourbon, handkerchiefs, and his two strong arms. He distributed hugs liberally, then settled himself beside the two women. Faye couldn’t think of anyone better suited to visit a house of grief. Joe knew how to talk when people wanted to talk, and he knew how to sit still when people didn’t want to talk. She thought perhaps the bourbon was a bad idea, since he was visiting the widow of a deacon in the Blessed Assurance African Methodist Episcopal Church. As usual, she thought wrong.

“Let me find some glasses for that stuff,” Emma said, rummaging through the kitchen cabinets and coming up with three large tumblers. “The rest of the world drinks it. It can’t be all that bad. Besides, the good Lord knows I need something to get me through this night.”

Joe sloshed a couple of ounces of bourbon into Emma’s glass, ignoring Faye’s signals to give her a tiny portion. Emma stifled a little gag and coughed, but she forced down a couple of sips. “Tastes like gasoline,” she said. “Or shoe polish. But it
is
distracting.”

Faye swirled the brown liquid around in the bottom of her own glass. She wasn’t much of a bourbon drinker, being as how she couldn’t afford it. She lived in a money pit, so she never had any spare cash. And neither did Joe, on his work-study salary, but he didn’t seem to need a lot of money…although she’d bet his grocery bill had gone up, now that he was living in Tallahassee. The hunting and fishing couldn’t be good in a town that size.

Faye agreed with Emma about the flavor of bourbon, but she would have compared the flavor to paint stripper. Still, this was a good night for buffering pain, and bourbon was a good enough way to do it.

Crunching glass outside the front door signaled the arrival of another visitor before the doorbell even sounded.

Sheriff Mike McKenzie stood outside, hat off and head slightly bowed. “You know I have to be here on business. First, though, please accept my most sincere personal condolences. God makes very few men as fine as your husband, ma’am.”

The four of them sat together for a time. The sound of evidence technicians hustling equipment downstairs and the sheriff’s refusal of a glass of bourbon were the only reminders that he was on duty. Soon enough, though, he brought the conversation around to the difficult truth. “Do any of you have any idea who did this thing?”

“If it was somebody looking for something to steal, then they got interrupted.” Faye gestured at the walls around them, covered with original artwork.

“Or they were too stupid to know what they were looking at,” the sheriff said. Everyone present nodded to acknowledge his point.

“Did your husband have any enemies?”

“Not really. Not any more. When he was just building his construction business, there were people who didn’t like him. Competitors who couldn’t stand losing a job to a black man. Problem employees who couldn’t understand that they were fired for their own bad behavior. Clients who couldn’t pay their bills. Business people don’t always win a lot of popularity contests. But Douglass was retired. We don’t have to deal with those people any more.”

“It wouldn’t hurt for you to make a list of old enemies, just in case,” the sheriff said. “And we can’t lose sight of the simple fact that he was widely known to be the richest man in the county. Maybe he just had the awful luck to cross paths with the baddest criminals in the county.”

“I wish I’d gotten a better look at them when—” Emma caught a sharp breath. “I just remembered. The two people I saw running away…they were carrying boxes. There’s nothing missing upstairs, not that I can tell. Nobody but Faye’s going to be able to tell us whether there’s anything missing downstairs.”

The sheriff turned his attention to Faye. “You were the last person to see him before the attack. Did he seem upset? Worried?”

“Not a bit. I do want you to look at an article about Douglass and his museum that ran in the Tallahassee paper yesterday. I can’t think of anything in that article that would have put him in danger, but it’s a mighty big coincidence that he was killed so soon after it appeared.”

Faye was considering whether this was the time to tell the sheriff about the emerald, when yet another knock sounded. Though broken and useless, that front door was turning out to be the center of the evening.

“Why, Dr. Clark, how nice to see you,” Emma said, curiosity faintly coloring her cultured voice. Her unspoken question couldn’t have been more obvious.
Do doctors really call on the homes of their deceased patients these days? After midnight?

“We have procedures to deal with things like this, ordinarily, but—”

Faye could see the man’s hands clenching and unclenching in the pockets of his lab coat.

“I’m glad you’re here, Sheriff,” the doctor began again. “And I’m glad we’ve got a couple more witnesses, as well. This isn’t something I’d trust with just anybody. That’s why I came straight to Mrs. Everett. I’m not sure the hospital’s security is all that secure, if you know what I mean. I’m not even sure I’d trust everybody at the sheriff’s department. No offense.”

“None taken. But do you mind spitting out whatever it is you’re trying to say?”

The pockets rippled again as the man’s fists clenched. “Did any of you know about the secret pocket in the waistband of Mr. Everett’s pants?”

Before speaking, the sheriff cast a quizzical glance at Emma, whose expression said exactly nothing. He spoke anyway. “Lots of rich men have places to hide extra cash.”

“It wasn’t cash that we found.” The doctor pulled his right hand out of a lab coat pocket, holding it up, palm outstretched. Resting on it was an emerald the size of a wild plum.

Chapter Three

Splintered potsherds. Scattered flint chips. And dirt everywhere. Faye longed to sweep it all up, so she could mop the floor. She needed to erase the blood that Douglass had left behind. She needed it badly.

But this was a crime scene, and she wasn’t here to clean, but to help the sheriff find enough clues to nail her friend’s killers. She stood where the sheriff told her, at the foot of the stairs, and answered the sheriff’s questions as best she could.

“Do you know what he stored in the safe?”

“No. He was planning to put the emerald in there, but he must not have had a chance.”

The sheriff made a note on his clipboard. “Can you tell if anything else is missing?”

She looked at the wreckage and started to laugh.

He rethought his question. “Okay. Let’s take this a piece at a time. What about the walls? They weren’t disturbed, not that we can tell. Was there anything hanging on the walls that’s not there now?”

Faye shook her head.

“Okay, now look at the big stuff. Has any of the furniture been moved? Besides that overturned desk chair?”

She shook her head again, and he recorded her response.

He asked her another question and she had to ask him to repeat it, because the meticulous preparations of the evidence technicians had distracted her. Lifting fingerprints and collecting loose hairs was painstaking work. Any clues they found would probably be fragile and fragmentary, and it would take expertise and intuition to make any sense of them. Not for the first time, Faye reflected that crime scene investigation wasn’t so very different from archaeology.

“Faye,” the sheriff said again. “Are you listening? Maybe we should do this tomorrow. I hope I never have a night like the one you just spent.”

She shook her head, trying to bring her focus back to the here-and-now. “Are you kidding? There’s nothing else left that I can do for Douglass. Or for Emma. If there are any clues here, we need to find them now, before the bastards get any further away. You do have people out there looking for them, don’t you?”

Sheriff Mike gave her a look that asked,
Do you truly think I’m an idiot?
, and didn’t dignify her question with the answer. No one on his payroll would sleep tonight. The woods, swamp, and gulf were full of his people.

He directed Faye’s attention back to the cluttered laboratory. “Okay. Look at the pattern of the stuff on the floor. Can you tell anything about what they were looking for?”

She searched the floor, looking for patterns. That’s what science was…a search for patterns that explained something important. And what could be more important than the murder of a friend? She willed herself to see the pattern, but there was none. Only paper and debris and dirt and blood.

If this were an archaeological dig, how would she approach it?

Photographs. Lots of photographs. And sketches. When she dug into history, she was always acutely aware that she wasn’t just uncovering evidence of the past. She was destroying evidence, too. No power on earth could put dirt back in the ground and restore a site to its original condition. Everything had to be done right, the first time.

When she dug, she needed to know the exact depth where each artifact had been found. A photograph of a precisely vertical slice through the ground gave her a permanent record of every soil horizon. In a sense, it also gave her a slice through time.

This ransacked room presented a different problem. The debris wasn’t distributed vertically through soil; it was spread horizontally across the floor. The most useful photograph would come from directly above. A simple sheet of graph paper laid over that photo would give investigators a plot with the location of every last piece of trash.

But how to get that photo?

The sheriff’s voice intruded on her thoughts. “Faye?”

She held up a hand, signaling that she needed just another minute to think. He knew her well, so he held his tongue.

To get the whole floor into one photo would require chopping out the ceiling and the upstairs rooms, then mounting the camera in a helicopter. So that idea could be eliminated. The investigators would have to make do with a composite of several shots.

Should they take the pictures from atop a high ladder? Possibly, but the drawbacks were serious. The legs of the ladder would obscure part of the floor. Also, dragging a ladder around the room would disturb the very crime scene being photographed.

Scaffolding was the only answer. And the key to getting the job done was right in front of her, just above eye level.

“Those windowsills will each support one end of a scaffold,” she said, her eyes on the windows, rather than on the sheriff. “For your photographer.”

“Do what?” he began, then he caught her meaning. Four high windows were evenly spaced down the opposite wall. If his techs built supports where they sat, snug against the wall pierced by the staircase, then passed scaffolding through those windows, the crime scene would hardly be disturbed. At worst, they’d have to install a single support in the middle of each scaffold. And the benefit of having a perfect record of the location of all this…stuff…would be well worth that drawback.

“You ever thought of going to the police academy? If I had you working for me, every two-bit criminal in the county might as well move on down the road. ‘Cause you and me would fill the jail with the sorry asses of every last one that stayed.”

***

The scaffolding was in place, and the photographer was working diligently. Hours had passed, and Faye thought she saw dawn’s pink light seeping through the basement’s windows. Sheriff Mike was sitting on the bottom stair with a notebook computer balanced on his lap, and she was perched two steps up, so she could look over his shoulder at the first batch of photos.

He used his pen as a pointer to gesture at the computer screen. “Maybe all this stuff came out of one box.” The pen drew a circle in the air over the lower right-hand cover of the screen. “Or maybe the stuff in…say…this area here came out of one box, because they were looking for something in particular…something they thought was stored in that box. Something that’s missing now. That’s the kind of pattern we’re looking for. Nobody would know those things but you.”

The sheriff’s pen dropped to the clipboard balanced on the stair beside him. He scribbled on it like a man who knew that a computer was more efficient, yet preferred paper because it helped him think. His words echoed in Faye’s sleep-addled mind. “Maybe all this stuff came out of one box…”

The sheriff’s incessant note-taking bothered her for some reason she couldn’t fathom. Didn’t her work require her to take whole books full of notes?

This, finally, was the question that shifted her brain out of neutral. Yes, her job did require her to fill up one field notebook after another. Her eyes darted around the room. Where were the boxes that had held her field notebooks?

“They took my field notes.” The sheriff kept taking copious notes of his own. “Why would they take my field notes?”

The sheriff’s face was troubled. His wife, Dr. Magda Stockard-McKenzie, was an archaeologist and Faye’s mentor. He knew exactly what the loss of a boxful of field notes could mean—months of wasted work and the loss of irreplaceable information. “How much work did you lose, Faye?”

Faye cracked a smile, the first one since her last conversation with Douglass. “I didn’t lose a second of work, because I always do everything Magda tells me to do. In a file box in my bedroom, I have photocopies of every last page of those notebooks. I used to be sloppy about that kind of thing, until one day when she hid my field notes. I thought I’d lost a whole semester’s work. A shock like that leaves a mark on a girl.”

***

It hadn’t taken Joe long to pilot Faye’s boat out to Joyeuse Island and retrieve her notes. Faye had wanted to go herself, just because she thought the salt spray would clear her head, but the sheriff had made an excellent argument for her to stay right where she was.

First, he’d said, “Stand here and look at the dirt and junk thrown all over that floor.” After she’d done that, he’d said, “Now come upstairs for a minute. I want a word with you in private.” Once out of earshot of the technicians, he asked, “Could that emerald have been part of a bigger piece of jewelry? A necklace or a bracelet or something?”

“Absolutely. There’s really no way to know.”

“And you say that it looked like just a clod of dirt before you cleaned it?”

Light had dawned. “You need me to sit on those stairs and help you watch your staff, just in case one of them uncovers a priceless emerald.”

“Yep. I’ve gotta be in and out of the room, talking on the radio to the folks I’ve got out on the water, looking for the killers and their boat. And I need to be in and out of the house, overseeing the technicians who are looking for evidence inside and outside. I’ve got Joe busy upstairs, pretending to keep Emma company while he watches out the windows for bad guys. There’s nobody else to sit here and watch for emeralds. Besides, you know your lab. It needs to be you keeping an eye on things.”

“Do you have doubts about any personnel in particular?”

“Heck, no. But I’d hate to see a bunch of jewels get swept into a dustpan and thrown out the back door. Besides—my techs are real young. They’ve got bills, and they’ve got student loans to pay off. A pocket-sized fortune would be a powerful temptation.”

“I’d better get back down there.”

“Good idea.”

So she’d spent hours watching the technicians work, and she was still sitting there when the sheriff told his staff to knock off work before they went to sleep on their feet.

After they were gone, he settled himself heavily on the steps beside her, and Faye remembered that he was almost as old as Douglass had been. Time was wreaking havoc on her friends.

“No emeralds, huh?”

She shook her head. “Anybody find anything upstairs?”

“Emma took me on a tour of their art collection. Nice stuff, too. It’s all where it should be. And her jewelry’s in the bedroom, right where she left it.”

“What can I do to help you find the people who did this to Douglass? And to Emma. Every time they hit Douglass, they were battering Emma, too.”

“Well, for starters, you can try not to get your own self killed. Stick close to Joe and don’t give any bad guys a chance to get close to you. That means you can’t go out looking for bad guys.”

Faye rolled her eyes. “I’m not in the habit of doing that.”

“But you could keep looking into the information that was published in that newspaper article. Especially that silver hip flask. You know—see if there’s anything else that would have attracted thieves or a killer. The emerald’s a long shot, since nobody knew about it but you and Douglass, but it wouldn’t hurt to keep checking that out. You’re gonna do it anyway.”

She snorted, but couldn’t keep the smile back.

Emma’s voice wafted down the stairs. “Faye. The morning’s gone and you still haven’t slept. I’ve made up a bed in the room next to mine. It’s time for you to take a nap.”

Faye wanted to be in her own bed, so she began assembling an excuse, “Oh, Joe and I need to get home to—”

Emma came far enough down the staircase to make eye contact…serious, motherly, no-nonsense eye contact. “I chased Joe into the guest room five minutes ago. He’s asleep. Don’t make me chase you into your room, too.”

Not wanting to upset Emma, Faye did as she was told. As her eyes slid shut, she heard steps in the room next door as Emma walked from one end of the room to the other, paused at the window, then paced back. Sometimes, she paused in the middle of the room for no apparent reason. Or, rather, for a reason known only to her. Perhaps she was studying a carpet stain made when Douglass dropped a coffee cup. Or maybe she was surveying the king-sized bed where she would now be sleeping alone.

After each pause, the deliberate steps began again, at the exact same tempo.
This
, Faye thought,
is what it sounds like to be widowed.