Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery #7 (Faye Longchamp Series) (5 page)

“My family has always made these. They are not toys, no, they are guardians. Parents, godparents, aunts, uncles—people buy them for little children in their care. This one will get a face when I sell it. I make them to look like the children they will guard. See?”

She slapped her other hand on the table, and Amande laid a second doll in that spot so quickly that Faye hardly realized she’d left the room. The second doll had strong cheekbones crafted of straw and its embroidered eyes were a warm brown. Its head was covered with corkscrew curls twisted from raffia dyed cocoa-dark. This was obviously Amande’s guardian.

The guardian dolls creeped Faye out, yet she found herself able to admire their craftsmanship. Dauphine, on the other hand, had noisily pushed her chair back from the table as soon as the first doll entered the room. The room was too small for Dauphine to put much distance between herself and Miranda’s craftsmanship, but she had instinctively moved as far away from the dolls as she could manage. Even Joe, whose calm manner was so everpresent that Faye sometimes suspected him of being anesthetized, had wrapped a bronze, sinewy arm around Michael’s middle so tightly that it was making him squirm. Joe’s green eyes never left Miranda’s hands.

“They’re beautiful, Miranda,” Faye said, since she seemed to be the only guest capable of speech. And they were. Creepy, but beautiful.

“My granddaughter thinks they don’t make me enough money. Maybe I might make more by doing things her way. Maybe I might not. But I don’t understand why I need a ‘site’… everwhat that may be.”

“It’s a website, Grandmère. They tell people about your work. Artists need them. You’ll see, once I get it up and running.”

Miranda fondled the dark curls on Amande’s guardian doll. “People come to me. I make their dolls. My
maman
did it that way. Her
maman
did it that way. You will do it that way. Everybody around here knows I make dolls, and they come. What do I need with any website?”

Faye saw Amande flinch at the suggestion that she would take over the family doll-making business.

“You’ll see, Grandmère. When you get your first order from someplace like…um…New Zealand, you’ll be glad I built you a website.”

“If I get too many of them New Zealand orders? You gonna spend more time helping me then, yes? And less time doing calculus? Everwhat calculus is. Sure as hell ain’t useful.”

Amande rolled her eyes and Miranda was silent for a moment, sizing Michael up as if designing a guardian doll for him. Faye wondered how she could possibly refuse such a gift if it were offered, but even her oversized plantation house wasn’t big enough for her and one of those spooky dolls. She wouldn’t sleep a wink until she threw it into the Gulf or, even better, burned it.

Taking advantage of the silence, Amande beckoned to Faye and Joe. “Come see what I’ve found.”

They followed her out of the room, with Michael in Joe’s arms, and Faye felt more than a little guilty about leaving Dauphine alone with Miranda, eyeball to eyeball, mambo to mambo.

The houseboat wasn’t new and it wasn’t fancy, but it wasn’t all that small, either. Amande led them through a compartment that must have been Miranda’s bedroom. A small berth in the corner was made up with a clean, worn patchwork quilt. Faye recognized the altar in the corner, because it was so like Dauphine’s. It was a small table, spread with fine silk fabric and adorned with pictures of spirits with frightening faces, including one she recognized from Dauphine’s altar—
La Sirene
, the lady of the sea. What better voodoo
loa
to guard a houseboat? Candles and a jigger of amber liquor were carefully arranged across the altar.

Doll heads hung from the ceiling all around Miranda’s bedroom, waiting for faces and bodies and legs. Faye had to push two of them aside to enter the room. They swayed with the boat’s gentle motion.

Built into the wall was a compact workbench. A well-worn set of tools was arrayed neatly atop the bench. A basket of straw, ready for weaving, sat nearby.

Faye was glad when she’d passed between two more dangling straw heads and entered Amande’s room, where another handmade quilt adorned another narrow berth. An ancient computer sat atop a built-in desk that was just barely big enough to hold it, and it occurred to Faye that, for a girl Amande’s age, this was its own kind of altar.

A wicker basket beside the table overflowed with dirty clothes. Other than that sloppy spot, the room was painfully neat for a teenager, although maybe not so neat for a person who had lived all her life in very close quarters.

A rack full of baseball caps in every shade of the rainbow hung on one wall, over a bank of wood-fronted drawers. Any ordinary teenager would have stuffed those drawers with clothes. Amande opened one, revealing that she had stuffed most of hers with trinkets and chipped stone and a few treasured pieces of silver.

“It’s a good thing my aunt grew up and moved out. I was running out of room for my stuff,” she said.

Faye noticed the second berth folded into the wall above Amande’s bed. From Faye’s perspective as the owner of a plantation house that was old and bedraggled but huge, this room would have been utterly claustrophobic with two young girls in it.

Joe set Michael on the bed and reached for the shallow box Amande was holding out. It was lined with cotton and filled with a neat array of stone tools. “It’s been a long time since I saw anything like these. I need to look them up to be sure, but I’d say most of them were made before the Europeans got here.” He reached into the leather bag that he always wore at his waist, and pulled out a few chunks of stone. “I’m still working on these. See the way I shaped the cutting edge on this one? This one of yours looks a lot like it. Yours still has a nice edge on it, after all these years.”

He gently picked up one of Amande’s treasures, a palm-sized stone blade, and held it up to the light, then he handed her his own half-finished work.

“You made this?”

Faye hoped Joe heard the awe in the girl’s voice.

While Amande took Joe on a guided tour of her arrowhead collection, Faye looked through the drawer that held the girl’s European artifacts. There were the expected bits of broken china and several metal buttons, but Faye was particularly taken with a bent piece of brass that she was pretty sure had been part of a sextant, once used for navigating. A sextant found so near the mouth of the Mississippi could have been used to guide a ship to the far corners of the earth, before it ended its life here at one of the shipping crossroads of the world.

“I’ve thought about trying to reconstruct that sextant. This is the important piece, it seems to me, but it’s really warped. Maybe I could make the missing pieces out of wood or something,” Amande said, rubbing a finger over the numerical scale etched into its weathered brass. “I like navigating. It’s like solving a puzzle, only you use maps and stars. I’m pretty good at finding my way around in a boat, because I know the islands and landmarks around here. In open water…not so much. I’d love to learn to navigate out there, and it would be fun to do it with something this old. Grandmère would feed me to the sharks before she’d let me go out that far, though.”

She turned her attention back to the drawerful of European artifacts in Faye’s lap. “I don’t find so much stuff any more. I mostly stick with surface collecting now, since I started reading online about how digging can mess up an important site if you don’t know what you’re doing. But sometimes my metal detector starts beeping and I can’t stand it, so I cheat a little.”

Amande pulled a glass jar full of change out of the drawer. “These coins are new and they’re pretty beat up. With my metal detector, I find coins all the time. These are only worth their face value, but I don’t spend them. I want to spend my found coins on something special, but I don’t know what that’ll be, so I just throw them in here for later.”

“Because the things you find are like treasure, and you don’t want to waste them on candy bars or movie tickets.” Faye stated this as if it were fact and not a question. It was the way she would have felt in Amande’s shoes.

Amande didn’t contradict her. She just nodded once and groped further back in the drawer.

“This
is where I keep the good stuff…” She opened a protective folder and showed them dozens of coins minted during the first half of the twentieth century. “They’re beat up and not worth much now. But they’re all silver. I figure they’re only going to be worth more and more. I’m thinking I can sell them to buy my books when I go to college.

Reaching so far back into the drawer that Faye heard her hand bump its back, Amande drew out a small wooden box and opened it. Inside, cradled in yet more snowy cotton, rested two very old chunks of silver. And “chunk” was the right word. The objects were vaguely disk-shaped, at best. Faye only recognized what they were because she’d seen very old coins before.

The irregular shapes of the blackened and corroded silver chunks were typical of coinage from the early days of Spain’s invasion of the Americas. Silver had been formed into cylindrical rods, then sliced into rounds. The image always made Faye think of slice-and-bake cookies.

The images stamped into the front and back of these disks had often been equally crude. With a magnifier and some cleaning solution, Faye would have had a fighting chance to pinpoint the age of Amande’s coins, but she didn’t offer. She had the feeling that Amande would prefer to do it herself, even if it took her a lot of time and effort to learn how.

“I found these when I was a little girl,” Amande said. She held up one of the coins. “I found this one underwater near an island beach, just after the tide went out. This one—” She held up the other one. “I found it buried nearby.”

Faye was impressed that the girl could tell the two coins apart. They’d look like identical twins to most amateurs. Amande had picked up on the subtle differences in size and weight, possibly without even thinking about it.

“I remember the day I found them. Grandmère had taken me on a picnic to a little island somewhere out in Barataria Bay. She says she doesn’t remember which one. I wish she did, but it only makes sense that she wouldn’t remember one picnic from a hundred others. I guess. It was years ago, and for a long time I didn’t realize what I had.”

“The sextant came from right where we were walking today. It was just a couple of years ago, so I knew enough by then to understand what a cool thing I was looking at,” she said, holding it up to the light. “When I saw what I had, it set me on fire to find more. Ever since then, I’ve walked the shoreline around here every day, and I’ve found all this silver money,” she gestured toward the folder, “but I’ve never seen anything like the sextant or like either of these.” She held the oldest coins out. “Do you think they’re worth anything? I need college money.”

Faye took them, handing one to Joe. He had the sharpest vision of anyone she knew. If there was an identifying mark on either coin that was visible without magnification, he would be able to see it. Several minutes spent holding them up to the light and squinting convinced both Faye and Joe that there was nothing to see. Amande spent all those minutes detailing her plan for finishing her education.

“I left school last year, when I found out that the online school would let me take more advanced placement classes than my brick-and-mortar school would allow.” She waved her hands at Faye and Joe like she was trying to catch their attention. They were listening while they worked, but they must not have looked like it to Amande.

“Those AP classes are important! Every one I take earns me college credit. No tuition. No dormitory bill, because I’m living right here. Free books, even. Look.”

She grasped Faye by the elbow and dragged her over to her desk, where a basket of old potsherds held down a stack of papers and photos. Pulling a piece of notebook paper covered in handwriting from the pile, she laid it on her desk beside the computer and smoothed a hand across all those words.

“This is my schedule for the rest of high school, including summer classes. I’ve signed up for every AP course that the online school will let me take, even the ones that sound really boring. I actually signed up for AP Accounting.” She said “accounting” as if the word tasted bad. “It won’t be much use to me as a historian or archaeologist, but it’ll give me credit toward my bachelor’s degree. I figure I can get almost halfway there by taking AP courses. To get the rest of my degree, I’ll just have to figure something out. I can get a job. I ought to qualify for some grants, and maybe I can borrow some money. Or sell a kidney.”

“Keep your kidneys. You’re smart enough to find a better way to pay for your education than
that
.” Faye took the paper. “You’ll be glad you took accounting if you wind up being a consultant like me. Our business has to file taxes and make payroll and bid jobs all the time, and I never learned any of that stuff.”