“I cut my toe on one of the dock’s timbers when I was a kid, and Grandmère told me she remembered when it used to poke out of the water at low tide. I’ll wade out there with you. I bet we can find it.”
She buffed the old quarter on her shirt and held it out for Faye to see again, with the friendly enthusiasm of someone who has never before met anyone else interested in old dirty things and broken rocks.
A tiny feminine form approached, wrapped in shawls despite the heat. Amande’s voice dropped, as if there were things she must say before her grandmother got close enough to hear.
“I know some islands where we can find arrowheads and stuff, too. Want me to show you? I haven’t been out there since my grandmother sold my boat. God, I miss that boat.”
Faye lowered her own voice. “You should’ve known my grandmother. She would’ve yelled at me or grounded me or maybe even spanked me if I broke one of her rules, but she’d never have taken away my skiff.” Faye grinned, as she always did when she remembered Grammy. “When she got old and sick, I used to push her wheelchair to the end of the pier and help her into the boat. Once I got her settled at the tiller, she wasn’t frail and sickly anymore. She was back in charge. But she wouldn’t have wanted to go looking for arrowheads. Grammy only ever wanted to fish. If she couldn’t eat it, she didn’t want to waste her time on it.”
Amande’s grandmother was moving slowly in their direction, looking intently at Amande as if to say, “Don’t you dare move before I get there.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Faye saw a tiny boy clad in shorts but no shirt, toddling fast on his muscular legs and sturdy feet. Michael caught up with Amande’s grandmother from behind, flinging his wet arms around one of her legs and bleating “Pick me up!” noises.
The old woman staggered but didn’t fall. She glared down at Michael, who fell back onto his diapered bottom and burst into tears.
Faye was at her son’s side in seconds, scooping him onto her hip.
Dauphine was two steps behind her. “Oh, excuse me, ma’am, I tried to stop him,” she said as she reached out a hand to steady the older woman. Dauphine was panting, and Faye could see that her scarf was damp where it crossed her forehead.
Amande’s grandmother’s angry face did not soften.
“Grandmère,” Amande said as she leaned down to kiss the weatherbeaten cheek, “I think he thought you were his grandmother. You’re wearing the same color scarf.” She tucked the fuchsia chiffon behind the old lady’s ear. “Faye, this is my grandmother, Miranda Landreneau.”
Faye didn’t even bother to butt in and say, “No, Dauphine isn’t his grandmother. She’s his babysitter.” She was too busy watching Amande charm a crabby old woman.
She was pretty sure that the girl was right. Both Miranda and Dauphine dressed like they’d fallen into a gypsy’s washbasket. Michael only knew one woman whose clothes flowed behind her like a wet watercolor painting, and he associated that woman with cookies and kisses and unconditional love. Looking up to find Miranda’s timeworn scowl, instead of Dauphine’s soft smile, must have turned his tiny world upside down.
Faye nuzzled the back of Michael’s neck, trying to get him to stop squalling. No dice. Then Miranda reached out an arthritic hand and touched the child on his shoulder. Her touch was neither loving nor violent, but it silenced the child. Instantly.
Faye stifled the urge to draw her son to her breast and take two steps back. She could tell by Dauphine’s reaction that the babysitter was not amused, but she was intimidated. Faye herself was hard to intimidate, but she found herself wanting to leave Miranda’s presence. Immediately.
“It’s very nice to meet you. You have a lovely granddaughter. If it’s okay with you, I’d like to—”
Amande, standing behind her grandmother, had embarked on violent headshaking. She was also mouthing the word “No,” repeatedly. It did not take a genius to see that she didn’t want her grandmother to know about their plans to go arrowhead hunting. Faye had no intention of taking the girl anywhere without her grandmother’s permission, but she followed Amande’s lead.
“—um…I’d like to talk to her about archaeological sites in the area. Actually, I think both of you may be able to help us.”
Joe had joined them, and she could tell he was wondering just how these two people could be any help to them at all. She raised an eyebrow in his direction that signaled, I’ll tell you later. Then she nodded at Miranda and Amande and said, “Right now, though, we should really get back to our cabin. You two have a good—”
Amande interrupted Faye, and the girl’s bad manners caused Miranda’s disapproving black eyes to swivel in her direction.
“But I wanted to show you my silver coins. And all those arrowheads. Can you come now…please?”
Chapter Four
Faye counted heads. Miranda, Amande, Michael, Joe, Dauphine…counting Faye, there were six people crowded into the houseboat’s tiny dining room. The dinette table was built to seat two.
Michael sat on Joe’s lap. Amande was perched on a stool in the corner, blowing into a cup to cool her tea. The others crowded around as Miranda handed teacups out. Faye felt the need to watch the old woman’s every move, though she couldn’t have said why.
Perhaps it was because she’d had experience of her own with Dauphine’s voodoo chants and potions and powders, but some primitive part of her believed Miranda could slip something into her tea that would silence Faye as effectively as Miranda’s withered hand on Michael’s shoulder had silenced him. She noticed that Dauphine was watching their hostess just as intently.
Then Miranda pulled a (thankfully) clean dishrag out of a kitchen drawer and laid it on the counter beside a bowl of sugar and the bottle of rum. “I shall make the boy a sugar tit. He’ll be happy, and we can talk.”
Her shriveled but competent hands twisted the dishrag into a point. Dipping it first into her tea cup and then into the sugar bowl, Miranda was already poised to drizzle rum over the twisted rag and pop it into Michael’s mouth before Faye could act.
Hastily grabbing a teething ring out of Michael’s diaper bag, Faye said, “Oh, don’t go to any trouble. He just loves this thing.” Then she stuck it into his mouth so that there would be no room for a rum-spiked sugar tit.
He accepted the toy happily and she was absurdly grateful. They would need to leave when he got fussy, because sometime in the twentieth century it had stopped being okay to quiet a crying child with a dose of liquor. But not in Miranda’s world.
“You are a mambo, yes?” Miranda’s black eyes raked Dauphine from head to toe
Faye hadn’t heard Dauphine say so, but maybe voodoo practitioners had their ways of recognizing each other. Dauphine’s quirky clothing could be a clue, but anybody could wrap a robin’s-egg-blue shawl around her hips. Maybe there was a secret handshake or a sign…sort of like the Masons or the Shriners. Or maybe voodoo ladies could feel each other, the way that Darth Vader could sense a disturbance in The Force whenever Luke Skywalker was around.
Dauphine said only, “Yes,” but Faye noticed that she cradled her cup close to her chest, with her free hand draped over it. Did she think that Miranda could magically fling a hexing powder into her tea?
“Faye, did you find anything really old yet? When are you going to start digging? Can I help? What’s the oldest and coolest thing you ever found?”
Amande showed no sign that she noticed the voodoo duel happening at the table, probably because teenagers routinely ignored their parents and grandparents. Amande surely found Miranda’s in-your-face eccentricity profoundly boring.
Faye shook her head. “We just got started so, no, we haven’t found anything exciting yet. And there won’t be any digging. The client only wants preliminary work.”
Amande’s disappointed face said that she was expecting Hollywood-style archaeology with armies of workers carrying shovels. And a pith helmet for Faye.
Faye felt compelled to deliver some really exciting archaeology, but she was
having trouble competing with Indiana Jones. “Hmmm…I’ve found some Paleolithic points near my house, underwater. They’re thousands and thousands of years old.”
Amande was still looking expectant. Faye had been enjoying the girl’s hero worship more than she realized. She looked to Joe for help. He held up the hand that wasn’t tickling Michael’s belly. Opening it wide, he slowly squeezed his long and slender fingers shut, as if he were gripping a baseball.
“Oh, yeah! The PPOs. Poverty Point Objects. We’ve found a lot of those.” She leaned closer to Amande and said, “The PPOs we found are maybe three thousand five hundred years old, so they’re not nearly as old as the Paleolithic stuff, but they’re just so cool. The Poverty Point people cooked by heating clay balls, then throwing the hot balls into the food they wanted to cook. They did that every time they cooked a meal, so when you’re at a Poverty Point site they’re just…everywhere.”
Faye flung her hands as wide as the close quarters allowed, trying to convey acres and acres of land, peppered with ancient wads of clay. “To make them, people reached down, scooped up some clay, squeezed, and threw the balls in the fire.” Her own fist clenched and opened. “The really cool part comes when you can still see the shape of somebody’s fingers in the fired clay, and you know that the person has been dead for thirty-five hundred years. I wish you could see one.”
Amande gave a geeky little sigh that made both Joe and Faye grin. “Me, too.”
Miranda snorted, wordlessly communicating that Faye’s pointless stories about ancient trash would now stop, in favor of something interesting.
“Fetch a doll,” Miranda said, flinging out an open hand as if she expected the doll to drop right into it.
Amande seemed accustomed to receiving abrupt orders, because she disappeared into the next room and came back with a naked doll, woven out of basket straw. It was too large to rest on Miranda’s palm, but Amande laid it across the old lady’s lap, with its head rested in the outstretched hand. The doll’s face was blank, with no features adorning the smooth straw. Its bald head wasn’t simply round. It was carefully modeled to the oval shape of a human head. The body, pear-shaped, sprouted unnaturally tubular arms and legs that were much less lifelike but, when dressed, this life-sized doll would look a great deal like a young toddler.
“My family has always made these. They are not toys, no, they are guardians. Parents, godparents, aunts, uncles—people buy them for little children in their care. This one will get a face when I sell it. I make them to look like the children they will guard. See?”
She slapped her other hand on the table, and Amande laid a second doll in that spot so quickly that Faye hardly realized she’d left the room. The second doll had strong cheekbones crafted of straw and its embroidered eyes were a warm brown. Its head was covered with corkscrew curls twisted from raffia dyed cocoa-dark. This was obviously Amande’s guardian.
The guardian dolls creeped Faye out, yet she found herself able to admire their craftsmanship. Dauphine, on the other hand, had noisily pushed her chair back from the table as soon as the first doll entered the room. The room was too small for Dauphine to put much distance between herself and Miranda’s craftsmanship, but she had instinctively moved as far away from the dolls as she could manage. Even Joe, whose calm manner was so everpresent that Faye sometimes suspected him of being anesthetized, had wrapped a bronze, sinewy arm around Michael’s middle so tightly that it was making him squirm. Joe’s green eyes never left Miranda’s hands.
“They’re beautiful, Miranda,” Faye said, since she seemed to be the only guest capable of speech. And they were. Creepy, but beautiful.
“My granddaughter thinks they don’t make me enough money. Maybe I might make more by doing things her way. Maybe I might not. But I don’t understand why I need a ‘site’… everwhat that may be.”
“It’s a website, Grandmère. They tell people about your work. Artists need them. You’ll see, once I get it up and running.”
Miranda fondled the dark curls on Amande’s guardian doll. “People come to me. I make their dolls. My maman did it that way. Her maman did it that way. You will do it that way. Everybody around here knows I make dolls, and they come. What do I need with any website?”
Faye saw Amande flinch at the suggestion that she would take over the family doll-making business.
“You’ll see, Grandmère. When you get your first order from someplace like…um…New Zealand, you’ll be glad I built you a website.”
“If I get too many of them New Zealand orders? You gonna spend more time helping me then, yes? And less time doing calculus? Everwhat calculus is. Sure as hell ain’t useful.”
Amande rolled her eyes and Miranda was silent for a moment, sizing Michael up as if designing a guardian doll for him. Faye wondered how she could possibly refuse such a gift if it were offered, but even her oversized plantation house wasn’t big enough for her and one of those spooky dolls. She wouldn’t sleep a wink until she threw it into the Gulf or, even better, burned it.
Taking advantage of the silence, Amande beckoned to Faye and Joe. “Come see what I’ve found.”
They followed her out of the room, with Michael in Joe’s arms, and Faye felt more than a little guilty about leaving Dauphine alone with Miranda, eyeball to eyeball, mambo to mambo.
The houseboat wasn’t new and it wasn’t fancy, but it wasn’t all that small, either. Amande led them through a compartment that must have been Miranda’s bedroom. A small berth in the corner was made up with a clean, worn patchwork quilt. Faye recognized the altar in the corner, because it was so like Dauphine’s. It was a small table, spread with fine silk fabric and adorned with pictures of spirits with frightening faces, including one she recognized from Dauphine’s altar—La Sirene, the lady of the sea. What better voodoo loa to guard a houseboat? Candles and a jigger of amber liquor were carefully arranged across the altar.
Doll heads hung from the ceiling all around Miranda’s bedroom, waiting for faces and bodies and legs. Faye had to push two of them aside to enter the room. They swayed with the boat’s gentle motion.
Built into the wall was a compact workbench. A well-worn set of tools was arrayed neatly atop the bench. A basket of straw, ready for weaving, sat nearby.
Faye was glad when she’d passed between two more dangling straw heads and entered Amande’s room, where another handmade quilt adorned another narrow berth. An ancient computer sat atop a built-in desk that was just barely big enough to hold it, and it occurred to Faye that, for a girl Amande’s age, this was its own kind of altar.
A wicker basket beside the table overflowed with dirty clothes. Other than that sloppy spot, the room was painfully neat for a teenager, although maybe not so neat for a person who had lived all her life in very close quarters.
A rack full of baseball caps in every shade of the rainbow hung on one wall, over a bank of wood-fronted drawers. Any ordinary teenager would have stuffed those drawers with clothes. Amande opened one, revealing that she had stuffed most of hers with trinkets and chipped stone and a few treasured pieces of silver.
“It’s a good thing my aunt grew up and moved out. I was running out of room for my stuff,” she said.
Faye noticed the second berth folded into the wall above Amande’s bed. From Faye’s perspective as the owner of a plantation house that was old and bedraggled but huge, this room would have been utterly claustrophobic with two young girls in it.
Joe set Michael on the bed and reached for the shallow box Amande was holding out. It was lined with cotton and filled with a neat array of stone tools. “It’s been a long time since I saw anything like these. I need to look them up to be sure, but I’d say most of them were made before the Europeans got here.” He reached into the leather bag that he always wore at his waist, and pulled out a few chunks of stone. “I’m still working on these. See the way I shaped the cutting edge on this one? This one of yours looks a lot like it. Yours still has a nice edge on it, after all these years.”
He gently picked up one of Amande’s treasures, a palm-sized stone blade, and held it up to the light, then he handed her his own half-finished work.
“You made this?”
Faye hoped Joe heard the awe in the girl’s voice.
While Amande took Joe on a guided tour of her arrowhead collection, Faye looked through the drawer that held the girl’s European artifacts. There were the expected bits of broken china and several metal buttons, but Faye was particularly taken with a bent piece of brass that she was pretty sure had been part of a sextant, once used for navigating. A sextant found so near the mouth of the Mississippi could have been used to guide a ship to the far corners of the earth, before it ended its life here at one of the shipping crossroads of the world.
“I’ve thought about trying to reconstruct that sextant. This is the important piece, it seems to me, but it’s really warped. Maybe I could make the missing pieces out of wood or something,” Amande said, rubbing a finger over the numerical scale etched into its weathered brass. “I like navigating. It’s like solving a puzzle, only you use maps and stars. I’m pretty good at finding my way around in a boat, because I know the islands and landmarks around here. In open water…not so much. I’d love to learn to navigate out there, and it would be fun to do it with something this old. Grandmère would feed me to the sharks before she’d let me go out that far, though.”
She turned her attention back to the drawerful of European artifacts in Faye’s lap. “I don’t find so much stuff any more. I mostly stick with surface collecting now, since I started reading online about how digging can mess up an important site if you don’t know what you’re doing. But sometimes my metal detector starts beeping and I can’t stand it, so I cheat a little.”
Amande pulled a glass jar full of change out of the drawer. “These coins are new and they’re pretty beat up. With my metal detector, I find coins all the time. These are only worth their face value, but I don’t spend them. I want to spend my found coins on something special, but I don’t know what that’ll be, so I just throw them in here for later.”
Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery #7 (Faye Longchamp Series) Page 3