Faye took her hand from his and spread it atop the paperwork that was keeping her awake nights. “We can’t default on this project, Joe. We’ve spent too much money getting it done. It’ll bankrupt us, and we’ll never get work again.”
“There’s nothing you can do on that computer in this cabin that you can’t do at home. Yeah, I’m out there most days doing field work, but we can hire that out. You know we can. We’ve hired the rest of it out, and that’s working fine.”
Faye could feel it all slipping away. The project she’d worked so hard to land. The company she and Joe had struggled to build. The PhD that had taken half her life to get. And her home, lying defenseless in the path of an endless rush of crude oil.
She took her hand off the stack of paper, and gripped Joe’s hand with it. “You win.”
***
How many times had Joe heard the words, “You win,” pass Faye’s lips?
Not once. Not until now.
She wasn’t known for changing her mind, but he acted quickly, just in case.
“How long will it take you to pack? I’ll gas up the car.”
“I think you should pack enough of your own things for today and tomorrow, then go. It’ll give you a fighting chance of getting home by midnight. There’s a lot to do to get this place ready for checkout. Somebody needs to let Manny know we’re leaving. The rental boat has to be returned. The refrigerator needs to be emptied. I’ll stay here and shut things down.”
Joe was beginning to suspect that Faye hadn’t really meant it when she said, “You win.”
“When you say, ‘I’ll stay,’ do you mean a day or a month?” he asked.
“I mean two or three days. Some of our contract workers are a little lacking in their work ethic. I need to meet with them face-to-face before I go. I need to talk to our client liaison and make sure we’re not freaking him out when we shut down our on-site headquarters and move to a whole nother state. I can do it, Joe. Just not today, and probably not tomorrow.”
“If you don’t come with me today, you’ll be making a nine-hour car trip with a one-year-old. Alone.”
“I find that jelly beans make good bribes.” She looked out the window in the direction of the houseboat.
He squeezed the hand resting in his. It looked no different than it had the day he met her, small, brown, narrow-fingered, with close-clipped nails. The seven years that had passed were invisible, without leaving even an age spot to mark their passage, but the time had gone by. Years pass, and things change. Where would he be, if he hadn’t found Faye?
He nodded his head toward the window. “You’re gonna have to say good-bye to her, sooner or later.”
“I just wish I knew she was going to be okay. I was hoping to leave her in a good place.”
“I know, but there’s no help for it. We have to go home.”
Chapter Twenty-six
Faye had hardly kissed Joe good-bye when her cell phone rang and she saw that it was Reuss calling. After a perfunctory hello, he said, “Look. I didn’t want to say this in front of the little girl this morning, but I think somebody needs to know. Calling you about it is irregular, ethically. I should be talking to my client or her guardian, but I think it’ll be obvious why I can’t take this to Didi. Amande doesn’t have anybody else but you to look after her. And yes, I know she’s only got you for another week or two, but I’m afraid she’s going to have to take the next two years one week at a time.”
Actually, Amande would be on her own far sooner than “another week or two,” since Faye was packing even now, but Faye kept that to herself. “What’s the problem?”
“I was being completely straight with her when I said that Steve, Didi, Stan, and Tebo had all been to see me. I left out the part where Steve asked me if it might be possible for him to get custody of Amande. Just this morning, in fact.”
“What?”
“Yeah, I know. I couldn’t come up with a less suitable guardian for a teenaged girl if I trolled maximum security prisons. He fed me some line about how he wanted to make sure his dead wife’s little girl had a good future, but think about it for a minute. He’s got even more to gain from getting control of Amande’s inheritance than Didi does. Amande and Steve together will hold half of the houseboat and stock, but Steve didn’t talk much about that. He was more interested in understanding how ownership of the island would be handled. This took me some time to explain, because the man is not overblessed with brains. Finally, he got the picture: Didi has no share in the island, because Justine owned it alone. If Steve gains custody of Amande, he’ll control the island outright, presuming he can get a cooperative trustee for the girl’s inheritance. If he is the trustee, she’s in deep trouble.”
“And you think he wants that island.”
“Oh, there’s no doubt. He wants it.”
“No sane judge would give that girl to Steve Daigle. Am I right?”
“Probably, although not all our judges are sane in these parts. But think about this. Amande says she’s looking to get married. What will happen if she marries Steve?”
“He gets control of the whole island.” She struggled to untangle the legal details she’d discussed with Reuss just an hour before. “She can’t get married unless Didi signs. Steve is Didi’s new boyfriend, so she’s not gonna be real excited about marrying him off to her niece…”
There was silence on the other end while Reuss waited for her to finish thinking.
“…but Didi’s not real dedicated to the sanctity of marriage, is she? There would be no reason for her to stop seeing Steve, just because he married her niece. And she can be bought.” When Faye sifted through Amande’s possible custody arrangements, she saw that Didi might be a lowlife, but she wasn’t stupid. “By taking up with Steve, Didi’s put herself in a no-lose situation. It doesn’t matter to her whether she is Amande’s eventual guardian, or if Steve is, or even if the girl gets emancipated by marrying Steve. Under all those scenarios, she and Steve will control the boat, the stock, the worthless island that everybody seems to want—everything.”
Faye wondered whether pillow talk, for Steve and Didi, involved brainstorming ways to cheat a young girl of what was rightfully hers.
“That settles it,” she said. “I listened to Amande’s social worker when she said that Louisiana wouldn’t want to place her with someone who lived out-of-state, but there has to be a way to do it. I cannot believe that any sane judge—”
“I told you not to presume any judge is sane.”
“Anyone with a beating heart, then. No one with a heart would put that child with those people. You’re her lawyer. I’ll pay you to find a better place for her to live than with Didi or Steve. Maybe it’ll have to be foster care, but I hope it will be with me. In the meantime, she will not spend another minute aboard that boat with those people. I won’t leave here until I’ve found someone to keep her until things are settled. If Didi tries to make trouble with the child services people, well then, it’ll be time for Amande’s lawyer to explain to them just how unfit she really is.”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m sure there’s an ethical loophole that’ll let me do an end run around my client and her guardian. I’ll get right on it.”
***
The phone was still in Reuss’ hand when the knock on his door sounded. Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth’s husband stood outside, looking confident and trustworthy and altogether suitable as a father for his favorite client. He also looked like someone who had just made a decision.
The man didn’t seem to be a big talker, but he knew how to make his point. After shaking hands and saying hello, he said, “Faye and I have to go home to Florida. My wife will not rest if she thinks Amande isn’t being taken care of. I want you to do whatever it takes to get the state of Louisiana to name us as her guardians. Or foster parents. Or adoptive parents, I don’t care.
It don’t make a hill of beans to me what people call us. She’ll be treated the same as our own. Bet on that.”
“Have you talked to your wife about this?”
“I wanted to ask you whether it was even possible before I did. It ain’t like I don’t know what she’s gonna say.”
Reuss nodded to concede that obvious point. “It’ll take time.”
“I figured that. Will the girl have to stay with her no-good aunt until we get this thing worked out?”
“She may have to go into foster care, unless we can find friends or family willing to take her.”
“I have some ideas about that. Let me do some talking around.”
Reuss watched the man open the leather bag hanging at his waist. He saw a couple of hand-chipped stone tools, a roll of fishing line, a small plastic box of fishing hooks, and a plastic bag of nuts and dried fruit. This guy was a fisher and a hunter, and Reuss wagered that neither he nor his family would ever starve. Again, not a bad father for his favorite client.
The big man held out a business card as he left, saying nothing more than, “Keep me posted on what I need to do to help this thing along.”
Reuss studied the name on the card. Joe Wolf Mantooth. It suited him.
It had taken the two archaeologists a while to jump into instant parenthood. It interested him that they’d done it without consulting one another, but with the calm confidence that the other spouse would back the decision. Reuss knew his wife would shoot him dead if he came to her and said, “Honey! I decided we needed eight kids, so I brought another one home to go with the seven we’ve already got! Here she is!” but he’d come close to doing that today, because Amande Landreneau deserved better than the things life had dealt her so far.
By taking Amande before he did, Faye Longchamp-Mantooth and her husband may just have saved his life.
***
Faye wasn’t a list-maker, because she tended to lose the lists once she made them. Closing down their temporary business office in south Louisiana was a task complex enough to require a list, so she’d forced herself to make one.
The list depressed her. The oil encroaching on Joyeuse Island depressed her. The necessity of leaving Amande depressed her heavily. The thought of leaving the site work in the hands of contract employees who had not shown themselves to be self-starters—this thought was infuriating, but it was also the only one of her problems that she could attack directly. She needed to go find a couple of her sometimes-competent workers and put the fear of God into them.
“Guess what we’re doing this afternoon!” she burbled to Michael. “We’re going on a boat ride.”
“Boat!” he said, showing off the third word he’d learned, after “Dah” and “Mah.”
She had two sites to the southwest, and they were being surveyed by two of her weakest contract workers. She thought a surprise visit from corporate management was just the thing those two employees needed to gain a healthy respect for deadlines and quality work.
Faye also thought she needed a boat ride more than she needed air.
It was way quicker to get to those sites by boat than by car, so she had an excuse for that boat ride. Even better, the time would be billable to the client. If she spent the afternoon jerking a knot in her lazy staff, she could spend the next morning closing down the cabin and returning the boat and still be at home on Joyeuse by bedtime.
Sometime in the next twenty-four hours, she would need to say good-bye to Amande, but that thought made her want to eat a bag of jelly beans. This meant there’d be none left for bribing Michael, if she got desperate on the car trip. Maybe that was a good thing, because she might indeed go to Mother’s Hell if she stooped that low.
***
“A-mah!” Michael said, as they walked across the parking lot and veered left toward the rental boat without stopping at the houseboat.
Faye didn’t think she could talk to Amande without crying. Maybe she’d be able to manage it after she’d spent an afternoon on a boat, skimming between the sky and the Gulf. Besides, she needed to talk to Joe before she committed to making Amande a part of their family. She knew he would agree, but the capriciousness of the law scared her. Some judge she’d never met was going to decide whether Amande came to live with them, and when. She had to trust that it would happen, all in good time.
“We’ll see Amande when we get back,” she said.
Michael expressed his feelings about leaving Amande behind by starting a quiet but continuous whining in the back of his throat. The noise had the potential to cost Faye what was left of her sanity. She walked even faster, hustling him along, because she knew that the boat motor would drown out the noise.
In minutes, he was in his life jacket and Faye was in one of the happiest places she knew, in command of a boat.
***
Amande had been putting off her statistics exam for a week. She wasn’t dreading it because it was hard. She was dreading it because statistics was mindless and boring.
She’d also been putting it off because playing with Michael was fun, and the tests took so frickin’ long. The school system was dead-set that all students experienced a full quotient of misery before earning their credits, so the test was timed. Even if you could finish it in twenty minutes, you had to sit at the computer until the two-hour clock ran out, occasionally poking a button that signaled to the computer that you were still sitting there, suffering.
Amande had long since finished the test and checked her work, so she was now in the button-poking-and-suffering stage. She’d passed the time so far by eating a sandwich and part of a big bag of barbecue-flavored potato chips, but a girl could only eat for so long.
Didi poked her head in the bedroom door. “I’m going to the Social Security office again to see what it’ll take to get us some help. We need those checks to start coming in now, not next year.”
Amande poked the button and told her statistics test that she was still alive. “Good luck with that,” she said, without looking up.
Didi gave being maternal a shot. “You’ll have the house to yourself while I’m gone. Try not to mess it up any worse than it already is. Even better, why don’t you run the vacuum?”
“With Tebo on the couch and Steve in your bedroom, this place isn’t ever going to be all neat and tidy. Somebody needs to take out the trash.”
“Very funny. For your information, Tebo is nowhere in sight and Steve went fishing. It’d be nice if he caught something. There’s no downside to eating supper for free.”
Amande stifled the urge to point out that catching the fish would cost Steve something, in terms of boat fuel, and that cooking it would cost Didi something, in terms of propane for the stove. She just stared at her computer screen and waited Didi out. Soon enough, her aunt walked away and left her alone.
***
Faye’s first stop had been so short that Michael had slept through it. She’d just needed to pilot the boat down a narrow bayou to a barely discernible shell midden, where she had politely asked her field tech why in the hell it was taking him two days to walk the site and take some pictures. Once she’d finished terrorizing the young man, she had eased the boat back down the bayou. Mission accomplished.
The next stop would actually be fun. There were two contract employees working at that site, and they weren’t lazy. They were just young, inexperienced, and burdened with a site so interesting that it was freaking them out. Faye had sent one of them to check out the site of an old lighthouse that was probably long-gone, but a quick walkover of the surrounding land had uncovered potsherds from the time of European contact, a chunk of English pottery from the eighteenth century, and a piece of glass that just might be a rum bottle from the early nineteenth century. Faye figured a personal visit and a pep talk would keep them focused.
She also figured that there was no harm in taking Michael
swimming at the conveniently located spit of light brown sand just a few feet away. She was sure that thirty minutes in the water was all that she needed to restore her sanity. Pretty sure.
***
As Faye puttered down the bayou that led away from the first site, she checked her phone’s connection periodically, waiting for Joe to notice that she’d left him a message. The man was hopeless with technology less than five hundred years old. His phone was probably resting in his pocket, dead, and it would remain that way until he wanted to use it. After they’d had a chance to discuss things, she’d go talk to Amande.
Faye tried to remember whether she’d brought a dress on this trip. And makeup. It felt wrong to say, “Would you join our family?” while wearing shorts and flip-flops. But what if Amande didn’t recognize the heavily made-up woman asking to be her mother?
What had Amande’s real mother looked like, anyway? Faye had never even seen a picture of her or of the grandfather who had left behind the property causing all this trouble. Justine had been no relation to Miranda. The faceless woman hadn’t been related to thin and homely Tebo or to fat and homely Hebert, either. Didi and Amande were her only blood relatives that Faye had ever met. They were both inordinately pretty, so Faye pictured Justine as being fine-boned and elegantly built, like her daughter and half-sister. But was she brunette like they were? Was she tall like Amande or petite like Didi?
Following the branches of Amande’s family required more mental effort than Faye wanted to exert right this minute, not while she was preparing to complicate her own family tree. She wondered whether they themselves remembered how they were related. Or how they weren’t related. Miranda’s death had drawn lines in the family that might have been forgotten.
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