Findings (3 page)
When Faye woke, the glow of late afternoon sun was seeping in her window, and the footsteps in the master bedroom had gone quiet. She would rather eat dirt than wake Emma. Leaving a note on the kitchen table, she slipped out the back door. Joe was on the beach, watching the waves crash. He must have taken his ponytail down when he went to bed, because loose near-black hair played around his face, stirred by the sea wind.
“I want to go home,” she said. “I want it bad.”
“Got anything to eat out there?”
“Peanut butter and bread. I’m out of honey.”
“How long since you ate that ham sandwich the sheriff’s folks brought out?”
“Um…”
“You gotta eat, Faye. You should take better care of yourself than that.”
Joe reached into the leather bag he wore at his waist and pulled out a handful of jerky. Faye took it, even though she had no notion of what kind of meat Joe had seasoned and desiccated and stored for just such an occasion. It probably wasn’t beef jerky, since Joe didn’t go around shooting cows with his handmade arrows. More likely, it was preserved venison or squirrel or rabbit. Regardless of which animal gave its all for this snack, it was unquestionably tasty. Joe was a man of many gifts, and one of those gifts was a pronounced knack for cooking.
He rummaged around some more and fetched out some dried blackberries. Like the jerky, they were chewy but good. Faye wondered if Joe’s magic bag held something from every level of the USDA’s food pyramid.
“This’ll keep you on your feet until we go back inside,” Joe said, adding some pecans to the pile of sustenance on Faye’s palm. “I did want to let Miss Emma sleep, though.”
“Me, too. She needs a few minutes when she can forget everything.”
Joe stared at her as if she’d said something idiotic. Faye couldn’t remember ever being on the receiving end of such a look from Joe.
“Sleep isn’t for forgetting. That’s when the dreams come. The healing dreams. Miss Emma needs to sleep so she can know that everything’s gonna be okay.”
Suddenly, Faye knew how Joe felt, constantly being treated like a remedial student by everyone around him. Lord, she hoped she didn’t do that to him often. When it came to spiritual matters, Joe possessed the equivalent of a Ph.D. Why did she keep forgetting that?
Maybe she needed to spend more time dreaming.
***
Faye didn’t know how long she’d sat with her head on Joe’s shoulder, watching the sea birds dive for fish. Something made her look over her shoulder—maybe some of Joe’s intuitive ways were rubbing off on her—and she saw Emma above them, leaning against the deck railing and staring at the self-same birds. The older woman’s face was sleepy and unlined, as if a few hours’ healing sleep had washed away whole years.
She and Joe hurried up the wooden steps leading to Emma’s vantage point.
Faye reached out a hand and touched Emma’s shoulder. “How do you feel?”
“Like I’m living in a brand new world that I don’t like much.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Faye blurted out. “I want to help you make the arrangements for…”
Emma turned her eyes away from the endless water and focused them on Faye. “I’d like it very much if you’d go with me to the funeral home tomorrow morning. We’re having the funeral on Wednesday, and two days isn’t much time to plan.”
“Planning a funeral is tough on anybody. I definitely think we should do it together,” Faye said.
“Oh, it’ll be hard, but not the way you’re thinking. The funeral director’s going to try to sell me a package worthy of the richest man in Micco County. And I’ll be trying to follow the wishes of a man who told me to bury him in a pine box.”
Faye saw an immediate problem. “I’m not sure they sell those any more. And I’m not sure how the health department feels about them.”
“There’s plenty of room on Joyeuse Island—” Joe began.
Faye interrupted him before he finished offering to bury Douglass himself, under a big live oak, without bothering with embalming or fancy hymns or a florist’s services. She knew that he was well-qualified to give the deceased a Creek-style sendoff, but the fact was that Douglass the Deacon would have wanted a Christian burial. And the health department was likely to be somewhat finicky about pesky details like embalming.
“Joe,” Faye said, “I think you’re going to have to let us plan a traditional funeral.” Then she realized that her statement needed clarifying. “I’m talking about Douglass’ traditions, not Creek ones.”
Joe nodded that he understood.
“I think we two women can stand against a hard-sell funeral director,” Emma said. “We know what Douglass liked. He appreciated beautiful things and he was willing to spend his money on them, but he wouldn’t have parted with a nickel just to impress somebody. If we keep our wits about us, nobody will be able to sell us anything we don’t want.”
Thinking of hermetically sealed metal caskets lined in quilted satin, Faye found herself hoping that Joe would take care of her burial when the time came.
***
Joe had a characteristic that was most useful in a colleague. He worked in silence.
He’d been remarkably useful to Faye as she attacked a huge and unpleasant task, sorting through the debris that the burglars left behind. It was like excavating a grievously desecrated historical site, treasures mixed with garbage, then thrown willy-nilly everywhere.
On Monday, once the technicians had finished their photography and their inch-by-inch survey of the crime scene, the sheriff had asked Faye to take the lead. Today, on her second day of sorting through the mess, Faye had found that she could close her eyes and still see scattered junk imprinted on her retinas.
She’d grown to hate the sight of her lab, with its cheerful yellow walls and its dark history as a murder scene. Yet she couldn’t leave it. She couldn’t stand to see the artifacts that she’d so carefully excavated lying broken on the floor. She needed to make the place neat and orderly again, because there was no other way to set her broken world right.
Joe’s skills at cataloging broken bits of flint were nothing short of amazing. As an experienced flintknapper, he could sift through a pile of rock chips and pluck out two pieces that had been broken from the same rock. In a sense, he was gathering up remnants of artifacts that the thieves had damaged and making them whole again. He’d done his darndest to find more emeralds, and so had Faye, but they’d had no luck, so far.
She tried to reconstruct the thieves’ activities. They’d broken the front door and run straight downstairs. The muddy footprints on Emma’s elegant celery-green carpet made that perfectly clear. Why had they come down here, rather than ransack the house’s expensively furnished living quarters?
A few possible answers came to mind. Perhaps Douglass was their only target, and they knew he was in the basement alone. But this begged the question of why they wanted him dead, and how they knew where he was, and why they took anything with them. For there was no question that the two boxes that had held her field notes were missing, and Emma had no doubt that she’d seen two men carrying boxes.
Or perhaps they’d known exactly what they wanted and where to find it. Perhaps they had rushed downstairs, intending to steal one specific thing, but Douglass was unlucky enough to be in the way. Then, after putting him out of commission, they had packed the thing or things they came to steal into the two missing boxes and left. This would make her notebooks innocent bystanders, accidentally kidnapped during a crime. Supporting that theory was the fact that the newspaper article published on the day of the robbery had mentioned that Douglass had a basement lab manned by a professional archaeologist. If they had wanted a particular artifact, then they knew that there was a good chance it was stored in the lab.
Nibbling at Faye’s mind was the final and, to her mind, least likely possibility. Perhaps her notebooks hadn’t been an unfortunate casualty. Perhaps the thieves hadn’t just thrown the objects of their invasion into the boxes storing her notebooks, stealing them accidentally. Perhaps her notes had been their goal all along. But why?
The article had mentioned no artifacts more valuable than the silver flask, which was nearly worthless, so there was no value in stealing the notes documenting all her valueless finds. It hadn’t, thank goodness, mentioned her by name, but every page of those notebooks bore her initials. Micco County was no burgeoning metropolis. It wouldn’t be too hard to find an archaeologist with the initials F.L.
Faye hadn’t discussed these suspicions with anyone. Neither Joe nor Ross could be trusted to react rationally to the idea that Douglass’ killers might be looking for Faye. She hadn’t even mentioned them to the sheriff, but she sensed that he shared her concern. Otherwise, his not-too-subtle efforts to ensure she was constantly monitored by Joe or someone equally large were nonsensical. And a little insulting.
Faye was no dummy, and she didn’t mind taking reasonable precautions. Part of those reasonable precautions had been to use her photocopies of those field notebooks as bedtime stories for the past two nights. Reading those notes had only fed her desire to get back out to Joyeuse Island and look for some more emeralds, but the work she was doing in the lab where Douglass was killed was far more important for the time being.
She had scrutinized every notebook page for some detail that might make her a target. She’d found nothing so far, but she was keeping her eyes open.
Every pew in the Blessed Assurance African Methodist Episcopal Church was full, and the ushers had filled the vestibule with folding chairs. Being the survivor of a housefire, Faye found herself scanning the room, looking for a clear path to a window or a door. The open casket made her uncomfortable, but it was what Emma had wanted. She had to admit that, as she watched the mourners file by Douglass’ body, many of them seemed to get comfort from one last look at the dead man’s face.
She surveyed the casket’s polished wood with satisfaction. As she had suspected, there was no modern equivalent of the plain pine box, but neither she nor Emma could bear the thought of putting Douglass into the enameled tin cans that passed for caskets these days. The funeral director’s eyes had lit up when Emma asked about wooden coffins.
“Oh, yes, ma’am, we have those, and they are well-worth the extra cost. They feature lovely lines and a hand-rubbed sheen. We can provide any finish you desire—cherry, mahogany, maple, oak…pine…”
With the single word “pine,” the solicitous man made his sale. Emma never even asked the price. Douglass had certainly left her enough money to give him exactly what he’d wanted. It was her last chance to do so.
The pine glowed golden, even though its finish was now smudged with the fingerprints of an onslaught of mourners intent on laying hands on the deceased and everything associated with him, even his coffin.
Faye had been honored to sit in the daughter’s spot in the family room during the viewing of the body. She had leaned in close to Emma and stayed there while hundreds of people filed past to pay their respects. She had rarely spoken, but Emma seemed to derive strength from her presence, and a newborn widow certainly needed her strength. Faye didn’t think that the current Queen Elizabeth herself was ever forced to graciously greet this many people in the space of a single evening.
Joe had long ago stood in the interminable line for a chance to pay his respects to Douglass’ widow. Since then, he had stood in the front corner of the family room, near the door, where he could see the face of everyone who entered or left. His intense scrutiny was Faye’s most insistent reminder of the fact she would like to forget but couldn’t. Douglass had not left this life on his body’s schedule or on God’s. He had been brutally removed from the side of his loving wife. Joe’s clear green eyes were searching the funeral guests, looking for signs of a murderer. Sheriff Mike lingered nearby, doing the same thing.
As Faye sat watching Joe, a familiar figure came into sight and paused, standing framed in the doorway. She had told him not to come. She had called him, weeping and looking for comfort in the face of violent death. In the same breath, she had told him not to come, but here he was.
Why hadn’t she wanted him to come? Because she had the feeling that it would be unwise to let herself be alone with him now, when her shattered defenses might prompt her to make a commitment she wasn’t ready to make. When dealing with a man like Ross Donnelly, a woman had to know what she wanted. Otherwise, she was going to get what Ross wanted.
***
Emma did her best to walk proud during her long trip down the aisle to the front pew, which was reserved for bereaved family members. Douglass had never seen her hang her head and weep, and she knew he was looking down on her from heaven now. Nothing would make Emma lose her grip on her dignity.
And apparently, nothing would make Faye lose her grip on her elbow. The child seemed to believe that Emma would collapse if she let go. That was doubtful. Emma reflected that she had lived sixty years without collapsing even once. She’d never fainted yet, nor succumbed to a fit of the vapors. It seemed unlikely that she would start doing such things now. Still, she wouldn’t have wanted to live through this thing without Faye’s help.
There had been talk among Douglass’ kinfolk about her inviting Faye to sit with the family at the funeral. Emma was not surprised. The Everetts were the kind of family that was very good at that kind of backbiting.
The way Emma saw it, her husband’s cousins had been blessed with all the children they wanted. She and Douglass had not. She figured that since God had not given her a daughter, then He had implicitly given her the option to choose her own. Although if Faye didn’t stop pushing Kleenexes in her direction, she planned to stuff the whole wad of them into the casket with her late husband.
Lord, how she hated that open casket, but she knew her friends and relatives. If the lid had been closed, they would have talked about it all week.
Reckon how bad those murderers beat him? Must’ve been plenty bad, if Emma didn’t even let the reverend open the coffin lid.
Emma wished she had eyes in the back of her head, because two of the seats directly behind her were occupied by intriguing people. Joe Wolf Mantooth remained intriguing, though she’d known him for more than three years now. And Ross Donnelly was newly intriguing.
She and Douglass had met him just a month before. Faye was making her third trip to see Ross in Atlanta, and Douglass had said, “She’s apparently not going to bring him home to meet us any time soon. Let’s fake an urgent business trip to Atlanta.” So they’d done just that, calling Faye on her cell phone when they got close to town and offering to take her and Ross out to dinner.
Faye had known precisely what they were up to. So, probably, had Ross, but they had been very gracious to a meddling old couple, and the four of them had enjoyed a fine evening out on the town.
Ross had made a most favorable impression. Douglass had decided that Faye should marry him immediately, because he had all the qualities men want in their daughters’ husbands. He was intelligent, respectful to his elders, financially successful, and he treated Faye like a queen. Emma agreed with her husband’s assessment in all of these areas and, as a woman, she would have added that Ross looked like an African god. She thought Faye could be happy with Ross.
But then there was the question of Joe. Douglass had hooted at the idea that his pseudo-daughter should marry this man who needed her help just to get his driver’s license. Faye didn’t even seem to notice that her steadfast friend was a man—and a man who had put her on a pedestal that was too high even for a physical specimen like Joe to climb. This proved that even brilliant women could be oblivious to bare facts.
When it came to husband material, Emma wasn’t so sure that Joe should be dismissed out of hand. He couldn’t offer financial stability, it was true, but Faye had been taking care of herself for many years and she didn’t seem much the worse for wear. Like Ross, he treated her like a queen, so that race was a dead heat. He couldn’t give Faye the deep, scholarly conversation that Ross’ wife would enjoy, but Emma believed that only a few people were blessed enough to meet their soulmates. And Joe owned the most beautiful soul she’d ever seen in a man, setting aside her late husband.
Emma had planned to ask Joe to sit with her and Faye in the family pew, until Ross had shown up. Not wanting to put a pseudo-mother’s stamp of approval on one man or the other, she had taken the no-action alternative. Neither man was honored with an invitation to sit beside Faye. They weren’t told where to sit at all.
Emma didn’t have eyes in the back of her head, but she’d sneaked a look in that second pew as she took her long widow’s walk to the front of the sanctuary. Both men were there, sitting broad shoulder to broad shoulder. Now they sat together behind Faye, giving her their simple physical presence, which was the same support Faye was giving Emma.
If Joe and Ross felt a sense of competition, it was not evident. They didn’t glare at each other or pull away when the fact of a crowded pew forced them to touch each other. Emma thought that, in other circumstances, they might have been friends. Unlikely friends, but friends all the same.
Sooner or later, Faye would have to choose between them. Or maybe she wouldn’t choose either of them. Emma wished she could tell Faye what choice to make, but she couldn’t. This race was too close to call.
***
Emma had never seen so much food in her life. Which was saying something, since she’d lived all her life in the South and she had attended southern funerals before. She didn’t know about the rest of the country, but she sensed that her friends and neighbors monitored the obituary pages, looking for the name of someone they knew, however vaguely. When a familiar name surfaced, these people flipped their oven switches to “Preheat” and started whipping up delicacies.
She recognized Magda’s summer squash soufflé, and she knew that the sheriff grew a dense forest of zucchini every summer, so that their deep freeze could be well-stocked with critical supplies in case somebody died. A generous bowl of his smoked mullet spread sat in the place of honor on Emma’s coffee table, surrounded by saltine crackers.
Joe had contributed the pot of oyster stew that was simmering on the stove. Even Faye, who usually relied on Joe to keep her fed, had dragged out her grandmother’s recipe for pralines, proving that she did indeed know how to cook.
Ross had shown no signs of any kitchen survival skills whatsoever, but he’d wanted to help, so Emma had suggested that Faye allow him to monitor the candy thermometer. He’d succeeded perfectly, which was what Emma had expected when she nominated him for the task. “Precision” should have been Ross’ middle name. The creamy pralines were mouthwateringly good.
The entire congregation of the Blessed Assurance African Methodist Episcopal Church had prepared the rest of the bounty that threatened to collapse Emma’s kitchen counter. Each and every congregation member had stopped by after the funeral to pay their respects to the widow, and they’d all done their best to eat their share of the baked offerings, but it was to no avail.
Emma stood in her kitchen, arms outstretched as if to gather up all the excess food, and moaned, “Would you look at this stuff? Have these people missed the point completely? I’m a widow now. One person can’t eat all this.”
“Food equals love,” Magda said, sitting at the kitchen table and spooning applesauce into little Rachel’s mouth. Achieving motherhood at an advanced age agreed with her. Her arms and legs were still short, sturdy, and muscular, and no amount of time sitting in a darkened nursery would wash away the tanned and weathered skin of a career archaeologist, but the lines around her mouth and eyes were softer.
Her husband Sheriff Mike, already a grandfather three times over, was well-practiced at doting. He exercised this skill at every opportunity. With parents like hers, Rachel would either grow up to be a princess or the president.
Joe and Ross stood on either side of Emma, each wielding a spoon with aplomb. A stack of filled freezer boxes rose in front of each man. Faye was washing casserole dishes as fast as they got them emptied.
“You’ll eat well for a year, Miss Emma,” said Ross.
“It’s not like I can’t buy food. And some of the generous folks who cooked this stuff aren’t as comfortable as I am. Fortunately, I’ve figured out how I’m going to get rid of all this food, without wasting it or hurting the feelings of the people who brought it.”
“How you planning to manage that?” asked the sheriff as he tested the temperature of Rachel’s rice cereal with a clean fingertip.
“Every time I go to church—Sunday mornings, Sunday evenings, Wednesday nights, every single time—I’m bringing somebody home with me for a meal. Somebody whose months last longer than their money does.”
“Well, okay then. I like that plan,” Ross said, scooping creamed corn with renewed vigor.
“Just as long as it’s somebody you know well,” the sheriff said, glancing up from Rachel’s bottle with a lawman’s gleam in his eye. “None of us needs to forget that there are two murderers out there.”
“That worries me, too,” Ross replied. “I’ve been talking to Faye about beefing up security out there on her island. Those killers came a little bit too close to her for my liking.” He quickly added, “And to you, too, Miss Emma.”
The room’s festive atmosphere dampened measurably.
Faye plunged her hands deeper into the hot, soapy water with an annoyed snort. Emma knew Ross had been pressuring her to accept his personal protection since the minister had closed Douglass’ funeral service with a heartfelt “Amen.”
Emma didn’t see that Faye was necessarily in a great deal of jeopardy. The fact that she’d just left Douglass when he was attacked was simply a case of coincidence. What could the burglars have possibly wanted with her?
They would have been quite satisfied to get their hands on her emerald, but they’d had no way to even know that it existed. If they’d given her field notes a quick glance, they’d know that
she
existed, but Faye had explained that those notes described potsherds and flint chips, not emeralds or diamonds. They didn’t even have her notes from the day she found the dirt clod that had harbored the emerald. That notebook had been with Faye in the skiff.
“Emma and I can take care of ourselves,” Faye piped up.
No, Emma saw no reason to force Faye to accept a bodyguard she didn’t need, not even one that looked like Ross. Emma also saw Faye’s unspoken objection: being on an island with both Ross and Joe could get a little…crowded.
Fortunately, Emma was significantly older and wiser than Faye, and she saw an elegant, Solomon-like solution to this problem. “Even if Faye needs male protection, which I doubt, she has Joe. I don’t mind saying that I’m a trifle nervous to be staying here all alone. Just because those burglars didn’t load my art treasures in their boat on their first trip doesn’t mean they won’t be back. And this time, they’ve gotten a look inside my house. They’ll know what they want, and they’ll know there’s nobody but a little old lady to stop them from getting it.”
There. She’d played the widow card. It had been a little hard to make her lips form the words “little old lady” when she’d put so much effort into remaining attractive for Douglass. Yoga. Facials. Fashionable clothes. She hoped she had the fortitude to continue to put her best face to the world, just for herself.
Poor Ross.