“I’ve been an archaeologist for twenty-five years,” Magda began, in a tone of voice that suggested that quite a bit more time would pass before she was through with this tirade. Faye held the phone out a couple of inches from her head. Her eardrum could only take so much of Magda when she was in full harangue. “A quarter-century. In all that time, nobody’s pointed any guns at me. Well, maybe once. And I don’t believe I’ve ever had to fist-fight anybody. Why do these things happen to you?”
“There were no fists involved. It was a shovel fight.”
“I heard that shovel drew blood. Where did she hurt you?”
“On my cheek.”
“Your face? Faye! You’re too pretty for that. You tell my husband to get you to a plastic surgeon right now and—”
“Magda. It was a butt cheek.”
“Oh. Well—but still—archaeology is not supposed to be a blood sport. I don’t like being worried about you all the time. Can you answer my question? Why do these things happen to you?”
Faye fought the urge to say, I don’t know, ma’am. I’m sorry, ma’am. It’ll never happen again. Instead, she opted for, “I think it’s because I’m spending my career out here in the islands. There are a lot of out-of-the-way spots where people do bad things, because there’s no one to see them. And there’s a lot of valuable stuff to dig up—you know, from the hotel and the plantation and all—and the local people know it. It looked to me like Nita and Wayland were pothunting, planning to sell whatever they found. When people get caught breaking the law, they tend to point guns at people. Especially when there’s money involved.”
“But why were they there, Faye? There are a lot of islands out there. Yours is just one of the biggest. Why’d they pick your island, and why’d they pick that spot? And don’t tell me you presume it was random. Assuming that an important event has no explanation is the last refuge of people who don’t want to use their heads.”
Why were they there in the first place? This was a question a scientist would ask. It had crossed Faye’s mind, but she’d really been too busy to deal with it. “I don’t know. It looked like she’d just picked a random spot and started shoveling.”
As it passed her lips, Faye realized that she’d just used Magda’s least favorite word: “random.” She kept talking fast, hoping Magda hadn’t noticed.
“We’ve had some problems lately with pothunters at the hotel site—nothing too serious yet—but it only makes sense that they’d come there. The newspapers all did stories on the Turkey Foot Hotel and Joyeuse after the hurricane. Treasure-hunters aren’t dumb. The plantation and hotel were full of rich people and they didn’t have a chance to get their valuables to shore before the 1857 hurricane. They’re high-probability places to look for the good stuff. Well, the expensive stuff, anyway. As far as pothunting on Joyeuse Island goes, though, I can’t think of a specific reason for Nita to pick the spot where she was digging.”
“Well, don’t let that question get away from you. It might be important. You sure don’t want to have my husband hauling trespassers off your island on a daily basis. I’m actually glad they were pothunting, instead of just prowling around. That means they weren’t necessarily looking for you.”
“I just happened to be here. That’s all.”
“You’re so sure? There’s no chance of a connection to the two killings?”
“Wayland and Nita wouldn’t be my first suspects, no. They’re way too small to be the people Emma saw after Douglass’ attack.”
“That doesn’t mean they couldn’t have killed you.”
It was true so there wasn’t much for Faye to say but, “Thank you. For worrying about me. For caring. For all that stuff.”
Magda said, “Hmmph,” and hung up.
The sheriff, seeing Faye thumb the phone’s off button, ambled over and said, “Let me count these criminals. One. Two.”
“Too bad they’re not the two people Emma saw the night Douglass died,” Faye said. “In the dark, Nita might pass for a man…a very, very delicate man. However, neither she nor Wayland would ever pass for large.
“My thoughts, exactly. I’ll put them in a lineup and show them to Emma, but these aren’t our killers.”
“Maybe they’re not Douglass’ killers—” Faye began.
“Yeah, I know they were around when Wally was stabbed. I’ll keep them in custody as long as I can, trying to get a lead on his killing. But if I can’t get anything on them besides trespassing and assault, I may not be able to keep them all that long.”
Faye knew a lot of large men. The sheriff. Joe. The only large men she remembered at Liz’s bar when Wally died were among the Civil War re-enactors. Certainly not Wayland. And Nita wasn’t big in the least. Emma would never have mistaken her for a man, even on the dark night her husband was killed. Nita’s sinuous body practically shouted femininity.
The sheriff knew those things as well as Faye did. He could hardly haul in everybody who was a certain size, just because they’d eaten too many plates of Liz’s eggs and grits.
Sheriff Mike leaned closer to Faye and lowered his voice. “We got a lead on Douglass’ murder today. It’s not much of a lead, but it’s something.” He motioned for Joe to come listen. “Emma was wrong about one thing. The thieves did go upstairs—probably after they were finished downstairs, and probably after Douglass was out of commission. That’s why the muddy footprints only went downstairs. They were down there long enough to wipe most of the dirt off their feet.”
“Did they take anything?” Faye figured it couldn’t be anything valuable, or Emma would have noticed by now.
“The original copy of your catalog of the museum’s entire collection.”
“That’s all?”
“It’s all Emma can come up with. I’ve got technicians in Douglass’ office, looking for evidence. So far, we’ve got no fingerprints, so I guess they were wearing gloves. There were a few fibers, mostly cotton, white and blue. Not much we can do with that, unless we get a specific pair of jeans of or a t-shirt or a pair of gloves to check them against. We did get a couple of hairs that look to be Caucasian, so they’re not Douglass’ or Emma’s—”
“That’s great! Can you get DNA from those?”
“Maybe. But we’ve got to have some subjects to match it with.”
Faye cut her eyes toward Nita and Wayland who were being hustled along by a couple of deputies.
“Yes, we’ll look at their DNA first thing. It’ll take time and I don’t think it’ll match. If it doesn’t, then we’ll be back to Square One.”
Faye blew an exasperated breath through pursed lips. “It may be even worse than that. The DNA may turn out to mean nothing. You know the whole countryside came through that house after the funeral.”
“Exactly. Half the people in Micco County could’ve left those hairs. Heck, one of the funeral-goers could’ve taken the catalog as a souvenir, meaning that even following up on that is a waste of precious time. Here’s the bottom line. As far as we can tell, there’s nothing missing but paper—your notes and the catalog you prepared.”
“I don’t like the way all this stuff keeps coming back to Faye,” Joe said.
“Neither do I,” said the sheriff. “And neither does my wife.”
Faye couldn’t argue with any of them.
Chapter Thirteen
The antibiotic ointment did nothing to ease the throb in Faye’s wounded hip. She twisted around to get a look at the cut—thank goodness, it hadn’t needed stitches—but she couldn’t do much more than spin around, chin over her shoulder, like a cat chasing its tail. A mirror helped her get a bandage on it, which was good, because she had no intention of asking Joe to help her with that little chore.
She’d called Ross, intending only a short, happy, reassuring call to tell him how perfectly safe she was. Instead, she got a dozen variations of, “What was in that catalog that the thieves wanted so badly? What was in your notes? Think, Faye!”
; Exhausted by a day spent dealing with an unprovoked attack and hours of subsequent law enforcement activity—not to mention the need to keep all her protectors calm—she pulled some pajama bottoms over the fresh bandage and crawled into bed.
Was she safe here in her home? The sheriff had seemed unsure. Nita and Wayland were in jail, and they’d be staying there overnight, at least. Were they working alone? Or would someone else come to take their place? She was glad Joe was downstairs. And she was glad that Liz had lent him a gun, just in case.
Was it possible that Douglass’ killers really came looking for nothing more than paper? What did they think was hidden in those notes or in the catalog that was worth the risk of breaking into Douglass’ house? When they’d found him standing between themselves and their goal, they’d killed him. What piece of paper, short of a piece of paper money with a heckuva lot of zeros on the front, was worth that? And, just maybe, those same people killed Wally rather than let him tell anybody about the letters from Jedediah Bachelder to his wife. That book didn’t hold anything but letters. More paper.
Everything kept pointing to the emerald. Any crook worth his salt would do whatever it took to steal a treasure like that. But only if they knew where it was, and that was so very unlikely. Douglass hadn’t been stupid enough to tell a soul what he had stored in his safe, much less tell someone he was holding a queen’s ransom in the form of a precious stone. Besides, there had simply been no time for someone to take a call from Douglass, decide to steal the emerald, then boat over to his house to kill him and steal…a lot of nothing.
Presuming for the moment that the thieves had managed to circumvent the time problem, and presuming that they did know about the emerald, Faye asked herself whether that was the only thing they’d come to Douglass’ house to find. Perhaps they would have thought that the location of the rest of the necklace, and its many still-missing emeralds, was hidden in all the paperwork that they’d stolen.
What made them presume Douglass had that information? If they’d read Bachelder’s letters, they would know that he’d once owned an emerald necklace. If they’d read the newspaper, they’d know that Douglass owned one of Bachelder’s many possessions, the silver hip flask. Could this have led them to Douglass’ door?
All this speculation was fruitless, because she knew deep down that nobody but Faye and Douglass were aware that the emerald was in the laboratory that night. Was there any other link, however tenuous, between the necklace and Douglass that someone else could have known about? What was that link?
The word “link” bounced around in her brain. If the emerald had once been part of the necklace, it had hung from a chain, presumably a gold one, based on the fragments of its setting that were still attached. She didn’t have a single link of that chain. The stone’s setting would have been attached to its chain with a piece of gold hardware called jeweler’s finding…and, long ago, she had unearthed a gold finding.
When she found that finding, all those years ago, had she been digging in the area where she’d found the emerald? She thought it was possible. Yes, she was pretty sure that the two objects were found with a few feet of each other.
The finding had been nothing more than a tiny gleam, easy to spot in the sandy soil of Joyeuse Island. She’d found no chain, no pendant, no jewel, just a bit of gold and twisted golden wire. It had been engraved with an M, barely visible after so many years in the abrasive soil. At the time, she’d thought perhaps it had once belonged to her great-great-great-great grandmother Mariah Whitehall LaFourche. With a sense of vertigo, she now realized that it might have adorned the doomed neck of Marie Antoinette.
It was a tiny thing, but an interested person who saw the article about Jedediah Bachelder and his flask would surely visit the museum to see whether anything more interesting had surfaced. Anyone who’d read Bachelder’s letters—which had been in a library accessible to the public for many years—would know that the owner of the little silver flask had once owned something far more valuable. Might someone have visited the museum to see what else Douglass had that could be linked to Bachelder?
It wouldn’t have taken long to scan the little museum for gold or emeralds, for few things in the building fits that description. It was, after all, a museum dedicated to the lives of slaves, who were not known for owning jewels. Douglass’ entire collection of precious metals with some link to slavery—the broken finding, a worn pocket watch, a couple of wedding rings, the silver hip flask—were all displayed together in a small case. They would be quickly found by anyone looking for precious stones or metals.
Would there have been time for someone to read the morning paper, search the museum and find evidence of the necklace in the form of a gold finding, then plan a late-night raid on the laboratory to steal information on where that finding had been found? Yes. But wasn’t it risky doing such things so fast?
Among the sheriff’s suspects was a double truckload of re-enactors and treasure hunters. They would know plenty of arcane history of the time. Perhaps it was common knowledge among Civil War buffs that Jedediah Bachelder had once owned a treasure. Once Bachelder’s flask had been printed in the paper for everybody in Tallahassee to see, the burglars would have been in a hurry to make sure nobody else got there first. If they were sufficiently motivated by greed, they wouldn’t have worried about one old man who got in their way.
If all this were true, then there was enough information publicly available to lead treasure hunters to Joyeuse Island. Perhaps Nita and Wayland were only the first scavengers to come looking for Bachelder’s jewels. And perhaps they wouldn’t be the last.
She reached for her computer. She wished she had enough time to drive to Tallahassee and read every last one of them at a single sitting, even if reading the prolific Bachelder’s correspondence took days. The site work related to Bachelder’s necklace—the visit to his house and the abortive effort to excavate the site where the emerald had lain—had taken so much of her time and mental energy that she hadn’t even finished listening to the ones Joe had recorded for her. Another of Bachelder’s letters would make a good bedtime story.
***
September 10, 1863
My dearest Viola,
I send this letter by private messenger, because I am nearer to you than I was. Not so near that I might come to you, I fear. Hundreds of miles separate us still, and with the disruption of the railroads, there is no easy way to cross those miles. Growing disorder guarantees that unsavory characters litter the territory between us. No matter. My messenger has a fast horse and he is a crack shot. I feel confident that this most important and private missive will reach you.
Our mission to England was not successful. Another group, sent to France with similar orders, met with the same result. There is talk that Duncan Kenner, a respected Louisiana planter, may attempt to succeed where we could not. He has the ear of President Davis, and I understand that he wishes to take with him an incentive that we could not offer: an offer to emancipate our country’s slaves. In my opinion, full emancipation would obtain us important allies in Europe, and such aid might hand us full victory. Unfortunately, from my association with our president, I do not imagine that he would ever agree to such a thing.
And so, we must struggle on alone, cut off from the world by the damnable blockade. I wish I could know that you are well-fed and free from the want of some critical item, such as medicine. I dare not hope that you are comfortable, for we are at war and few among us has everything needed for comfort.
The blockade—I seem unable to leave that subject—has enabled me to see much of the world. A blockade runner smuggled us out of Wilmington, and we landed on lovely Bermuda for too short a time. Because the English cannot receive a ship from our Confederacy without violating their position of neutrality, we were forced to play a shell game, booking passage on a ship—any ship—registered to a country England is willing to recognize.
The briefness of our sojourn in Bermuda will speak to t
he fact that these tricks are played on a daily basis. The ship captains who pause in this harbor are well-versed in deception. Our travels home brought us through Nova Scotia, a landscape as alien to my Florida upbringing as it is possible to find on this earth.
The irony of these maneuvers is highlighted by the fact that the Federals themselves have been forced to recognize our sovereignty, though they do not admit it. A country may close its own ports, but it cannot declare a blockade on them. Lincoln knows that this action signifies recognition under international law, but he had no better choice.
We are in a war between sovereign states, not a rebellion, but such semantics hardly matter in the face of so much death and suffering. It may be treasonous, but I have come to think that not even defeat or victory matter so much, not when one considers the blood spilt on our soil and on that of the Federals.
On the subject of death…it has been much on my mind that I might not survive this war. No, I am not in battle, but my ship might have been sunk at any time on either of my interminable voyages. When I am in Richmond, I am part of a military target. I cannot risk leaving you destitute.
I have written you of a necklace that I purchased in England. It was unwise of me to trust that information to the erratic mails, but I was thoughtless in my despair at our separation. Sending this letter by messenger is far safer. I pray that my first letter reached you, and that no other eyes saw it while it traveled to Alabama. That necklace is our future. What remains of our fortune is far safer, bound up in gold and emeralds that will not perish, than it would be if it were tied to bonds or currency that might be nothing but paper tomorrow.
This necklace has been a much more pleasant traveling companion than paper money. It was easily concealed on my person, whereas the equivalent value of paper money would be far more than I could carry, even if I still possessed the strength of a young man. Our treasure has been as safe as I. I have lately come to understand that I would like it to be safer than I.
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