Findings

by Mary Anna Evans

  “Maybe they’re already here,” Douglass says, gesturing at all the artifacts yet to be cleaned.

  “That may be,” Faye says, “but you keep your hands off. If you want your museum to be taken seriously, we have to do things right.”

  ***

  Douglass rolled the emerald around on his palm. He was still laughing, an hour after she left, at the bossy angle of Faye’s head as she told him to keep his hands off her precious artifacts. He knew better than to try his luck at amateur archaeology. He had learned long ago that it was worth the money to hire smart, competent people. That was why he kept Faye around.

  Well, he also kept her around because she fussed over him like the daughter he and Emma had never had. And every now and then, she let him fuss over her, although she remained remarkably resistant to letting him give her things. She continued to let him pay her a nice little salary, but only because she knew she earned it.

  Sometimes, he fancied that she looked like the daughter he and his wife should have had. She wore her hair cropped short like Emma, but her glossy and straight black locks looked nothing like his wife’s soft, tight curls. Faye’s determined jawline reminded him of his own, but he suspected that it was due less to genetics than to sheer, stubborn cussedness. And he and Faye both had cussedness to spare.

  He felt in his pocket for the cigar that he was saving for this moment, when neither Faye nor Emma was around to fuss at him for tainting his lungs. Retirement gave a man so few opportunities to do things that met with his womenfolk’s disapproval.

  A noise at the top of the stairs told him that Emma had finally come home from her regular Saturday-night bridge party. There would be no cigar tonight.

  “I’m down here!” he called out, holding the emerald up to the light and knowing how much his wife would appreciate this rarity that Faye had dug up. Maybe Emma would like some emeralds. He’d never bought her any, not that he could remember.

  The footsteps on the stairs were loud and hurried, which wasn’t like Emma. Maybe if she’d been the kind of woman who drank while she was playing bridge, her step might not be as light and ladylike as it always was. He rose from his chair. “Emma? Are you okay?”

  Another set of footsteps and a deep voice told him that he and Emma had an uninvited guest. “Shit. There’s somebody down there. I thought you saw two cars leave. Shit.” Clattering footfalls echoed down the staircase.

  This was a most inopportune time to be balancing a fortune on his palm.

  At least two sets of footsteps rushed down the basement steps toward him. The building inspector had approved the room’s small, high windows as “emergency escapes,” but Douglass knew he could never haul himself out before the intruders arrived. Nor could he leave Emma to a stranger’s mercy. For the first time, he wondered if she were even home. He prayed she was still trumping her partner’s aces. He’d presumed the first footsteps were hers, but he’d never heard her speak. All he knew was that here were at least two intruders closing in on him. There could be more.

  His fist closed over the emerald. He needed to hide it, but the safe mocked him from across the room. It might as well be a million miles away.

  With an odd pang of relief, he watched two men, and only two men, clad in dark clothing barrel into the room. Emma wasn’t here. Knowing she was safe gave him the strength to face this danger alone.

  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. Th
at’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.