“Is that an electric light?”
“I have solar panels.”
“Were they expensive?”
“The tax credit helped a lot.”
Ross thought, Good girl. Let the government help you with this place. Then he realized that maybe Faye didn’t even need him to help her find funding for this mammoth home improvement project.
She gave a careless gesture toward one door and said, “That’s Joe’s room,” then moved on quickly as if to avoid a difficult subject.
Pointing at the bathroom where Ross had dressed, she said, “Joyeuse is amazingly livable these days. I’ve always had bathrooms—my grandmother installed them, using the original cisterns and pipes—but I was able to spruce them up a lot last year. I’m especially partial to the humongous claw-foot bathtub.”
“It’s authentic, I’m sure. You don’t seem to be very fond of reproductions.”
Faye grinned and nodded. “If it looks old, I want it to be old. If it’s not old, then it can look modern, because I’m not into fakes. It took me a long time to find just the right tub for this room. My job gets me dirty and I do love a nice hot bath.”
Ross found himself distracted by some enticing mental pictures.
Faye opened the sneak staircase door, thought for a second, then closed it. “Let’s go outside and walk up the grand staircase. That’s the way you were intended to enter the main floor.”
The steps were broad and deep enough to be negotiated by a lady in a hoopskirt, or a man in riding boots and spurs. The wood was new, but the design of the staircase meshed seamlessly with the style of the house. The craftsmanship of the stairs was superb, which wasn’t surprising, considering who had built them. Ross suspected that, together, Faye and Joe could build anything they damn well pleased.
The color of the wood under his feet changed as he reached the top of the stairs, turning to a dull, weathered gray. The boards of the broad porch felt strong and sandy under his feet—old, strong, and sandy. A porch swing hung to his right, and the vibrations of their footsteps had set it into motion. It swayed back and forth, inviting him with its slight motion to sit and rest.
“The main floor didn’t suffer as much as the rest of the house over the years, not until the hurricane. I’ve cleaned it up, but restoration is a long way off. And Lord knows how much it’ll cost me to furnish it.”
The heavy doors swung open and Ross found himself looking into a cavernous space that could have been described as a domestic cathedral. The spacious rooms flowed into one another—Faye explained that she couldn’t yet afford to replace the pocket doors that had once divided them—but their absence only made the space seem more vast.
There wasn’t a stick of furniture in sight. Ross’ last girlfriend had been an interior designer. She’d have had a spasm if she’d gotten a look at this place.
“None of the wallpaper was salvageable after it had a nice little soak in saltwater. I’ve been researching the paper patterns, hoping to find designs that come as close as possible to the originals, because I’m pretty sure I’m gonna be stuck with reproduction paper. I guess it’s too much to hope that some wallpaper company might have rolls of paper from the 1800s just lying around its warehouse.”
Reading between the lines, Ross figured Faye was planning a full-out assault on those warehouses, just in case.
“I know how to patch the plaster work,” she said, pointing up to a finely detailed medallion on the ceiling. The moldings at the top of the walls were almost as elaborate. “I just need to find some time. I’ll need a whole lot of time to touch up the faux marbling on the mantels and the painted graining on the woodwork, too. You can’t rush that stuff.”
She opened a little door in the dining room to reveal the sneak staircase. “One more floor. Well, two, counting the cupola. I used to have a spiral staircase that took you as far as the bedrooms, but the hurricane got it. I can’t get it rebuilt until somebody figures out how it was built in the first place. It looks like Joe and I may have to do that ourselves, too, if we don’t die of old age first.”
So she was planning to keep Joe around until she died of old age. Perfect. Ross almost groaned out loud.
The sneak staircase ended in the master bedroom. The décor here looked…frothy…to Ross’ masculine eyes. Each square inch of wall and ceiling space was covered with murals in every shade of off-white he could imagine. Lilies, roses, magnolias, lace, ribbons—the room was white-on-white, shaded with gold, and it was too fresh for the house.
“You did this?”
“I restored the original murals, yes.” She smiled as his astonishment.
“Now I understand why you don’t have a TV. When would you watch it?”
She toured him through a music room adorned with tiny harps and a gentleman’s bedchamber painted with foxhunting scenes. Her own room was a lavender confection of swans and wisteria so beautiful and so feminine that it was clear why she had chosen it for her own, over a master bedroom that was a lovely but sterile vision in white.
There was little furniture on this floor, either, just beds in her room and in the master bedroom. There was a chest of drawers where Faye kept her clothes, and several display cases where she kept her most treasured archaeological finds, but that was about all. Everything he laid eyes on seemed to be an artifact or an antique or simply something old that still worked. Ross hoped she was able to find some antique wallpaper stashed in a warehouse somewhere. It would be a shame to paste something fake onto something as completely authentic as Joyeuse. It was as authentic as Faye herself.
The sparse furnishings told him that Faye didn’t throw away anything that might still be useful. She slept on an antique convent bed. The display cases housing her finds looked like they’d been discarded from a musty old university laboratory. Ross could almost smell the formaldehyde.
In one jam-packed closet, he saw a camp stove, a large cooler, and a radio so old that it looked like something geeky boys had used to talk to faraway geeky boys back in the 1950s. She must be keeping these things as a defense against the day she lost the modern conveniences that she’d so recently acquired. If her range and her refrigerator and her cell phone evaporated, Faye would still survive, just as she had before she’d owned such things.
She fetched a long tool with a hook on the end, then led him onto the reconstructed landing, where an empty hole waited for the spiral staircase to be rebuilt. Using the tool to hook a metal loop in the ceiling, she yanked open a trap door, from which a ladder unfolded.
The ladder mechanism screeched in protest, and Ross couldn’t help himself. “I need to put some WD-40 on that.”
Faye grinned and scrambled up the ladder. He followed her up into a square room that was practically all windows.
“We’re in the cupola,” she said. “The mainland is that way.” She pointed to a vast expanse of deep green cypress swamp. “The Last Isles, including the site of the Turkey Foot Hotel, are over there.” She waved in the general direction of dark blotches in the crystalline water. “And out there is the open Gulf of Mexico.” Perfectly turquoise waves rolled under a perfectly blue sky.
“My ancestors built this place. With their own hands.” Faye waved a loving hand of her own over the sprawling roof below them.
Ross turned to look at the dark mainland, because he knew that way was north. Atlanta was a long, long way from this spot.
He could live here with Faye and be happy, but there wasn’t a hell of a lot of legal work to be had on a private island. Faye could certainly live with him in Atlanta and continue to go to school, but he wasn’t clear how happy she could be without this aged pile of wood beneath her feet.
All this time, he’d seen Joe as the one thing between him and the woman he wanted. Now he’d seen the face of his true rival, and her name was Joyeuse.
***
Faye took care to tie her boat properly for the night, as she always did. She missed Ross, but she understood his unspo
ken reason for going back to shore so soon. Emma would notice if he didn’t come in until morning. And there was the question of what Joe would do…would he stay the night at Emma’s, or come back to sleep at Joyeuse—which was, after all, his home—even though Faye had a guest and might wish for privacy?
Within the hour, she heard Joe as he dragged his johnboat onto the beach and tied it to a tree. She didn’t expect him to come upstairs to tell her good-night, and he didn’t.
Joe’s recording of Jedediah Bachelder’s letters was still trapped deep in the memory of her laptop computer. The analytical part of her brain, the part of her that belonged to the world of science, begged her to listen to another letter, but the emotional part of her brain said no.
She needed to grieve for Wally and Douglass. She needed to obsess over the problem of Ross. He radiated the confidence of a man who was always in charge. Could she be happy with that? And could she be happy in Atlanta, far from Joyeuse? It was obvious to anyone with a brain that Ross was not born to live on an island.
She banished Bachelder from her mind and cataloged her grief for Douglass and Wally, knowing that she would revisit it compulsively for years and years. Instead, she drifted off to sleep while thinking of Ross’ kindness and strength. Surely those things were enough for real happiness. Could it really matter so much where they lived or what either of them did for a living?
In her dreams that night, she was motherless, alone, and lost. She couldn’t find her way home, because she had no home. Her subconscious mind was screaming at her, trying to tell her what she knew already—that home would always matter to Faye. It mattered far more than her career. Maybe it even mattered more than love. When she was awake, she could argue with that part of herself. But not while she was asleep.
Chapter Twelve
Grief woke Faye early. She’d done this before, waking from a dream she longed to share with her mother, then realizing that her mother wasn’t there. And never would be again.
She knew Douglass would have enjoyed an afternoon like Joe had spent yesterday, talking baby talk to Rachel and sipping coffee with Emma. He would have enjoyed hearing about Bachelder’s letters and, like Faye, he would have burned to know the history behind the emerald he’d had in his hand on the night he died.
The sheriff agreed with her that she should continue to pursue the link between the emerald and Bachelder and Douglass’ death. It wasn’t traditional crimefighting, but he had people to do that. Also, she was a civilian and officially had no reason to stick her nose into the murder investigation.
But the emerald was her business. She’d found it on her own land, and she would have been scouring the countryside for the rest of the necklace, even if Douglass were where he belonged, snoring in bed beside Emma. If she could help find his killer by doing archaeological work that she’d be doing anyway, so much the better.
Today was the day that she went out and looked for that emerald’s brothers and sisters. Her heartbeat quickened. Faye knew that if the day ever came when her heart wasn’t stirred by the possibility of what she might find, that was the day she should hang up her trowel.
***
With field notes in hand, Faye stood in a weedy area between her house and the beach, trying to reconstruct her activities on the day she found the emerald. She remembered squinting through a break in the brushy vegetation, trying to get a glimpse of the Last Isles so that she could orient herself. Most of the trees in that area were gone, victims of the hurricane, so she’d pounded a metal stake into the sandy soil to give herself a reference point.
The stake was there, right where she’d left it. Finding any location listed in her field notes would be a simple matter of measuring its distance from the stake in the north-south direction, then doing the same thing in the east-west direction. Any sixth-grader could do it.
As she squatted to leaf through her notes, Joe walked into the underbrush, following a lizard and studying its movement. Some of the deepest silence on earth settled around them.
The beach was far away and the waves were calm. Their movement added a subtle bit of rhythmic background noise. Sometimes the wind stirred the palm fronds overhead or the hair over Faye’s ear. Those faint sounds only accentuated the lack of non-natural noise. Come sunset, the waterbirds would be diving for their supper, and their caws and splashes would seem earsplitting compared to the present hush.
Had they been anywhere else, the shushing grind of a shovel slicing through sandy dirt would have been drowned out by regular, everyday noise. Faye and Joe would never have heard it.
There had been treasure hunters on Joyeuse Island before, and there would be again. This did not mean that they would ever stop making Faye blindingly angry. Before any consideration of danger had time to reach her forebrain, she was running. The thought of someone else probing beneath the surface of her own island was as horrific to her as the idea of an amateur surgeon slicing open her mother.
Joe was stumbling out of the bushes and hollering at Faye to stop, but he was wasting precious time fumbling at the leather pouch hanging at his waist. Also, Faye had a head start. She just might manage to stay more than an arm’s-length ahead of Joe for as long as it took to track the source of the noise.
At the treeline where Faye’s beach met the tangled bushes, Nita the lady shrimper was perched on the edge of a sizeable hole, with her back to Faye. She was digging with a long-handled shovel, turning over great clumps of soil and scattering the backdirt hither-and-yon, as if it were of no importance. Since it had no monetary value, it was of no importance to Nita.
Faye was so angry that her brain was wiped clean of common sense. People had lived and died on this island, hundreds of them. No, their graves weren’t right there where Nita was digging, not that she knew of. But the things they’d made and used, the artifacts that still told the stories of their lives—those things might be.
Yes, Faye’s archaeological work disturbed the physical record of those lives, but she strove to minimize that disturbance. She thought of her work as a memorial to them. It was a way to reach across time. Learning about long-ago people put a face on them. It brought history to life.
There was a difference between what she did and what Nita was doing.
There was a difference.
Nita was doing nothing but destroying the bridges that bound humans to their past.
“Hey! You can’t do that on my property!”
Faye didn’t know how she’d thought Nita would respond to her challenge. Probably, she’d thought the artifact thief would just run away. Or maybe she’d expected the woman to make excuses for what she was doing. Later, Faye would tell herself she should stop expecting criminals to act like ordinary people.
Nita swung the shovel hard, blade out. Its corner caught Faye in the hip, the only fleshy part of her scrawny body. The blade drew blood and its impact would leave a magnificent bruise, but if such a blow had struck Faye anywhere else, it would have broken a bone.
Common sense returned. Faye’s immediate goal changed. She still wanted Nita gone, but first she intended to avoid getting hit with that shovel again.
The momentum of Nita’s powerful swing carried her torso around like a golfer with perfect follow-through. Faye took the opportunity to launch herself at Nita’s exposed back. The two women were about the same size, but Faye had an advantage: her opponent was off-balance. Her weight carried Nita to the ground on top of the shovel that was doing all that damage. Grasping its handle, one hand on either side of Nita’s neck, Faye pulled it back against her assailant’s throat to immobilize her.
Faye was ridiculously proud that Joe had not had to take down this particular criminal. She was a little tired of him saving her butt.
But where was Joe, anyway? She’d had a devil of a time staying out of his reach. He should have reached her at about the time Nita swung the shovel.
The sound of someone running in heavy boots stopped her breath in her throat. Joe didn’t
wear boots.
The beginnings of a grin on Nita’s face prompted Faye to yell, “Joe! Watch out!”
Nita’s husband Wayland had been standing lookout, though he’d been expecting trouble to come by sea and had been looking in the wrong direction. His inattention had bought Faye and Joe a few seconds, but no more.
Wayland was running toward them with an evil-looking rifle in his hand. Faye knew that she would only be in control of this situation for as long as it took Wayland to stop running and take aim, but she wasn’t about to give Nita the satisfaction of letting her loose even a moment sooner than she had to.
There weren’t many things that would make Faye let go of Nita’s neck, but a bullet would be one of them. She wanted to close her eyes and hunker down, bracing herself for pain far beyond a bruised and bloody hip, but sight was one of the few things left that she had going for her. It would have been stupid to shut it down out of cowardice. She looked directly into Wayland’s face and tried to guess whether he’d really pull the trigger.
Then something alien flew through Faye’s peripheral vision and wrapped itself around Wayland’s legs, taking him down and sending the rifle flying from his hands. Joe had pulled a bolo out of his bag of tricks. While a bolo is a simple weapon made of weights attached to a leather thong, its operation isn’t simple at all. In Joe’s hands, it could drop a rhino.
It took forever for the sheriff and his crew to get out to Joyeuse Island, but Faye didn’t care much. With the judicious use of Joe’s bolo and some rope from her boat, and a few episodes of brandishing Wayland’s gun in their prisoners’ faces, she and Joe had managed to keep things under control until the law arrived.
***
When the sheriff arrived to take the prisoners’ off Faye’s and Joe’s hands, he didn’t say, “Hello.” He didn’t say, “Nice work.” All he said was, “My wife wants to have a word with you.” Then he handed Faye his cell phone and walked over to get a good look at Wayland and Nita. He looked amused at how thoroughly Joe and Faye had trussed the criminals up.
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