Findings

by Mary Anna Evans

  “You’re insane!” Faye heard Ms. Slater scramble to her feet. “Why do you keep killing people? I never said to kill anybody. Now…God. I don’t know whether it’s safe to go home. I don’t know whether there are witnesses out there who saw us with these people. I can’t…”

  “But we were going to go away together. It doesn’t matter whether anybody thinks we killed them.”

  “Idiot. We were going to go away with the treasure. With Bachelder’s necklace and the Confederate gold, we could have gone anywhere. Now…I don’t have enough money to get us out of the country. Do you?” She continued to back away from him.

  “None of that matters. Not if we’re together. Elizabeth…”

  Faye had tried to keep both eyes half-open. She imagined that a hooded, blank gaze would make her look good and dead. Also, it gave her just a tiny sliver of vision. She couldn’t see much, but she sensed that her adversaries were distracted. She needed to find a way to exploit that.

  Chip took a step, as if to follow Ms. Slater. Then Faye saw her do what Chip had done…and what Faye had done, and what Joe had done. She acted instinctively to save the person closest to her heart.

  Herself.

  The gun rose from her side. She aimed it squarely at her young lover’s heart. “Don’t take another step. I’m getting out of here, and you’re not. I can make the police believe that you kidnapped me from the library when you snatched these two. I can make them believe you killed the other two men, because you did. I am not going to lose everything because of you.”

  She scuttled backward and disappeared down the path that led to the dock…and to Joe’s john boat, the vessel that held Joe’s only hope for life. Faye had been doing a mental inventory of her fleet of watercraft, and it told her that the Gopher was at Liz’s marina and her skiff was at Emma’s house. If she was going to get Joe to shore, she needed that john boat. Even worse, Chip had taken both their cell phones, and they were on that boat. If it sped toward shore without her, she’d have no way to call for help.

  Faye watched Ms. Slater retreat until she was out of sight then waited until Chip disappeared, too, in hot pursuit. Then Faye tottered to her feet, pausing just long enough to say, “I’m coming back to you, Joe. And I’ll bring help.”

  Chip and his faithless lover had a head start on her, and they weren’t losing blood with every step, but Faye had a single advantage. She was on her home turf.

  ***

  The path back to the dock wasn’t hard to follow. Ms. Slater and Chip would have no trouble getting back to the boat, so Faye couldn’t hope to gain any time because they’d gotten lost. There was an even more serious obstacle to Faye’s hopes of stopping them. She needed to get to the house before she went to the dock, if she had any hope of keeping that lifesaving john boat from leaving the island.

  There was another path that led to the house, and it was an easy walk from there to the dock—fewer roots to trip over than Chip and Elizabeth Slater would encounter, and fewer holes to break an ankle in, too. Faye was grateful for that advantage, but it hardly outweighed her severe disadvantages. She was badly wounded, and she needed to spend a few critical seconds in the house. She forced herself to move, and she found that she could still run.

  It was an odd sensation, moving so quickly, when she sensed that each step might sap the last ergs of energy from her battered body. These next few minutes would be all-or-nothing. She would move at top speed, or she would fall down and never get back up. She plunged down the narrow path, wondering what she would do if she arrived too late.

  When she burst from the wooded path into the peaceful clearing that surrounded her home, Faye searched for the welcome feeling of homecoming that this place always brought her, but it was gone. And it would always be gone if she lost Joe.

  She stumbled into the house, energy ebbing, and bypassed her own room. The thing she needed—the thing she had to have—was hiding in Joe’s room. She prayed that it would be easy to find.

  ***

  It wasn’t in the drawer in Joe’s bedside table. It wasn’t in the cedar chest at the foot of his bed where he stored his clothes and his moccasins and the leather he used to make them. It wasn’t behind the perforated tin door that kept the dried berries and meat stored in his pie safe well-ventilated. Where would Joe have hidden the handgun that Liz gave him?

  Please tell me that you didn’t trash it. Faye had never realized that she talked constantly to Joe, even when he wasn’t there. I know you don’t trust guns and you think they smell funny, but you wouldn’t have dumped something that cost Liz a lot of money. Where did you put it?

  If she were Joe, she could have smelled it. She could have sensed its presence disturbing the peace of the room. But she wasn’t Joe.

  Where would he put something with an odor that disturbed him?

  A breeze wafted into the room and brought an idea to Faye. Joe’s window was fitted with a double set of shutters. Outside, the shutters were crafted of solid wood to shield the window from the onslaught of hurricanes. These shutters were folded back to expose almost all of the window opening. Inside the room, the window was fitted with louvered shutters that let in air, but kept the room cool by filtering the sunlight. These shutters were closed.

  Faye rushed to the window and folded back the louvered shutters. There, on a windowsill made broad by the house’s thick masonry walls, rested Liz’s weapon, tucked out of sight behind the folded-back outer shutters. Faye prayed that she wouldn’t be required to use it on Liz’s son.

  ***

  Faye was too late. And Chip was too late, too.

  As she stumbled from the house to the dock, trusting her body to find reserves of strength that probably didn’t exist, she heard the john boat’s motor start. At that moment, Chip burst out of the woods. When he saw Ms. Slater backing the boat away from the dock, he kept sprinting straight into the water, his gun still in his hand. It was as if he thought he could run right across the Gulf of Mexico, if that’s what he had to do to reach the woman he loved.

  He could have reached her, and they could have escaped together. The boat had hardly traveled ten feet from the dock. He could have plunged through the water and lifted himself over the gunwale before the boat picked up enough speed to leave him in its wake. Unfortunately for Chip, Elizabeth Slater had already decided that her chances of escape were better without him. And she had already shown that her own safety far outweighed any concern for Chip’s wellbeing, and probably anyone else’s.

  The handgun was off her lap in an instant. Her hand was steady as she raised it and aimed. Despite everything he had done, Faye felt a sharp stab of pity for the man as he watched the woman he loved fire a bullet into his forehead.

  Chip disappeared beneath the water and Ms. Slater laid the gun back in her lap so that she could maneuver the boat away from the dock, away from Joyeuse Island, and away from the victims of her venality. At that moment, Faye knew that Joe couldn’t be saved, not even if she ran clear across the Gulf of Mexico. Without that boat, and without the cell phones it carried, there was no way to get help to him in time.

  She stood there with a gun in her hand and wished Elizabeth Slater dead. Of its own volition, her hand rose in front of her, taking aim with Liz’s handgun. She found herself quite willing to shoot another human being because, second by second, that human being was killing the love of her life. If she squeezed the trigger right now, before the john boat was throttled up to full speed and pointed at the mainland, there was a glimmer of a chance that she could swim out to it and go fetch Joe a doctor.

  Elizabeth Slater saw her take aim and raised her own handgun, taking aim. Faye was glad. If she succeeded in killing Ms. Slater before the woman got her weapon steadied enough to fire it, fine. If she didn’t then maybe the woman would kill Faye, and this nightmare would be over.

  Faye pulled the trigger.

  The bullet didn’t tear into Ms. Slater’s head or her chest or her belly. It did something w
orse than that. It hit the john boat’s gas tank.

  The explosion was deafening.

  The water rippled with the concussion, then its surface was dimpled by bits of boat and motor, as they dropped out of the air. If any large chunks of boat still existed, Faye presumed they had gone to the bottom of the channel. She presumed that Ms. Slater had gone there, too.

  Decency demanded that she try to retrieve a woman who was drowning, if she wasn’t already dead, but Faye was still leaving a trail of her own blood everywhere she went. The shock of seeing the boat explode had dropped her sprawling into the sand, and she wasn’t sure she would ever stand again. The boat that had been Joe’s only lifeline was gone, and she needed a doctor pretty bad herself. Faye decided to let Elizabeth Slater stay where she was.

  If she only had a radio…but that would have meant having one of the boats, in which case she would have a cell phone, obviating the need for a radio, so her futile wishes were circular. If she had one floating boat or one working cell phone or one functional radio, then she and Joe might live. Since her boats and radios were together—and since they weren’t here—her only other chance was a cell phone, and they were all at the bottom of the channel with Ms. Slater and Chip.

  Joe’s survival, Faye’s survival—everything depended on getting help fast, but there was no way to do it. Faye would have traded anything on earth for a cell phone. Even Joyeuse.

  There had been a time when she couldn’t afford a cell phone. Before that, there had been a time when cell phones didn’t even exist. Cally had made do with an occasional mail boat, but she had lived in a time when a wound like Joe’s would have been mortal, unquestionably. Faye’s grandmother had used a radio to talk to shore when she visited the island, and so had Faye, back when she couldn’t afford to keep a phone in her pocket.

  She’d been so poor that she’d cleaned layers of grime off the connections on her grandmother’s old radio and kept it functional through sheer willpower and a soldering iron. Did she still have it?

  Of course, she still had it. Faye was not one to get rid of something that still worked. But did it work? She remembered disassembling it, hoping to cannibalize some parts so that she could avoid spending money to fix one of her boat radios…but that salvage effort had failed. Her grandmother’s radio was just too old to have any parts that were useable in a modern set. Sort of modern. Faye didn’t buy many things new.

  But could she get it functional? Oh, yes, indeed, she could. If she had access to a screwdriver and a soldering iron—and she did—Faye knew she could fix damn near anything.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  A cracked collarbone and extensive soft tissue injuries can hurt like hell, but they don’t do much to keep a patient in the hospital. Faye received nothing more than a battery of x-rays and CAT scans and MRIs that proved she wasn’t at death’s door. Then she was handed some tape to stabilize the shoulder, a sling, and some woefully inadequate painkillers, and she was told to go home. This was the only time in her life that she ever expected to want to stay in the hospital, but nobody asked her opinion.

  Ms. Slater and Chip had been fished off the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, and Faye reckoned they’d both been buried by now. She hadn’t asked. She didn’t have a clue what she would say when she next laid eyes on Liz.

  Under questioning, Herbie had told the sheriff that, months before, his re-enactor friends had told him of old rumors that the Confederate treasury had been hidden somewhere nearby, and that a man named Jedediah Bachelder was said to have known what happened to it. When pressed, Herbie said that he was certain that Chip had been part of those conversations. Shortly after that, Chip had quit school and moved in with his mother, probably so he could be closer to the loot’s reputed hiding place. And busboys have a lot more free time to go treasure-hunting than serious students do.

  Having spent his childhood listening to his mother tell people how smart he was, Chip would have been certain that he was plenty smart enough to find a treasure that had eluded the world for nearly 150 years. More scholarly than the jocular but aimless re-enactors, he wouldn’t have been willing to rely on rumors. It only made sense that he would have gone to a reference librarian known to specialize in local Civil War history—someone like Elizabeth Slater. In the rare book room, he’d found the trail of the Confederate Gold, and he’d found love. As it turned out, he’d also found death.

  Either he or Ms. Slater would have seen the newspaper article describing Jedediah Bachelder’s hip flask, and either would have known that it might be a critical piece of the puzzle. Ms. Slater would, by nature, have been the one who did the planning, carefully keeping her hands clean. Gullible Chip would have done the out-of-the-library legwork, which ultimately included two murders.

  Faye wished she were Christian enough to forgive those two and to let the past go. It was what her grandmother would have told her to do. And it was what her mother would have told her to do. Cally, on the other hand…Faye had a feeling that Cally would have known that some grudges have to be nursed a little while before they’re set free, and she had a feeling that Cally would have known exactly how to nurse one.

  Joe deserved for Faye to hate those people. He didn’t deserve what they did to him. Neither did Douglass. And neither did Wally.

  Today, she was carrying a plastic bag as she walked down the familiar hall to Joe’s hospital room. She’d carried it every day that week, and she was going to keep on carrying it until his extensive medical staff gave her a few minutes alone with him.

  She found him alone, praise God, but his eyes were closed, so she just laid her gift on his bedside table. It was the book of Jedediah Bachelder’s letters, and there was a round hole squarely through its middle, surrounded by copious amounts of dried blood. She saw no need to return it to the rare book room, not in its current condition. Libraries lose materials all the time, even rare books like this one. Besides, she figured Joe had earned it.

  His eyes flickered, so she took the opportunity to say, “I brought you a present.” She waved the book at him.

  “I’m real sorry. I meant to take care of it, Faye,” Joe murmured. His eyes opened a little more. They were so green. “I stuck it in my waistband before we left the library, so Ms. Slater wouldn’t see that I had it. I thought you might need it.”

  “Oh, I did need it. Very much.”

  Joe closed his eyes again and drifted off to sleep.

  The hardbound volume had taken the first impact of Chip’s shot, and it was just possible that it had diverted the bullet’s path a very providential millimeter or two. It had burrowed through the ropy muscles of Joe’s lower back and exited from his side, nicking his colon and narrowly missing his spine. There had been an operation to repair the damage to his internal organs, and he had received massive amounts of antibiotics and other miracle drugs to deal with the infection that sprang up in the surgery’s aftermath, but the doctors were finally talking about sending him home.

  She picked up the old book and paged through it, as she’d been doing for weeks now. Time and again, she returned to two letters written in early 1865. The first was written by Jedediah Bachelder, and the second was written by his wife Viola. Faye felt Jedediah’s presence every time that she saw that Viola’s letter had been bound out of sequence. A whole month had passed before he received her response to his letter, a whole month in which he’d continued to write her almost daily.

  There were no more letters from Viola after this one. Faye felt like she knew Jedediah Bachelder after reading so much of his most personal correspondence, and she believed she knew why this last letter was misplaced in time. It was because he’d asked his true love a question, and she’d given him her answer.

  February 21, 1865

  Dearest Viola, my only love,

  I must ask you what you were doing last night. I know that the evening of February 20 will have receded well into the past before this letter reaches you—if this letter reaches you—but please
try to remember.

  You will be wondering by now why I obsess over one particular night, when we have been apart for so many nights. Here is why. Last night, I dreamt a dream.

  I was walking in a night that was cool but not cold. The sky was pricked with more stars than I could ever count and I knew, deep in my soul, that all was well. There was no war, yes, but even the absence of war could not explain my utter peace. I have never before had the certainty in my religious faith that you wear so beautifully, but today I do. I had the unshakeable sense that the world around me was not real, merely crafted by a loving Creator to suit my understanding. Because I am not capable of understanding the world as it truly is.

  I stepped through a copse of trees that had served as a veil for what lay behind it—our home. I had come upon the place of my dreams from an unexpected direction and was treated to an instant of pure joy. I knew that there could never be room for any more joy in my soul than I felt at that moment, or so I thought until you walked out the door and flung yourself into my arms. I no longer fear death, because I believe that I have been blessed with a rare gift. I know what heaven is like, and I know you will be there.

  So, tell me, Viola—what did you see in your dreams last night?

  Eternally yours,

  Jedediah

  ***

  March 18, 1865

  My cherished Jedediah,

  Nearly a month has passed since you wrote me of your dream of heaven. With my whole soul, I hope and pray that you still carry that peace within you.

  You have asked me what I saw in my sleep on the night you had your beautiful dream, believing all the while that I could not possibly remember an evening that has receded further into the past with every step taken by the horse that has carried your letter to me. How wrong you are!