Plunder: A Faye Longchamp Mystery #7 (Faye Longchamp Series)

by Evans, Mary Anna

  There was nothing to say but, “I’m so very sorry. If you need anything, you know where Joe and I are. We’re just a few steps away.”

  Tears ran into Amande’s mouth when she opened it to speak. “Why are you being so good to me? Are you doing this just to get free babysitting?”

  Faye was shaking her head when Amande’s composure finished crumbling. The girl leaned her head on Faye’s shoulder and just cried.

  Episode 3 of “The Podcast I Never Intend to Broadcast,” Part 1

  by Amande Marie Landreneau

  I’ve been recording these dumb little podcasts every day since my grandmother died. Sally recommended it on that first day, and I figure anything that gets Sally off my back takes me one step closer to getting my case closed. Also, there are only 672 days left before I turn eighteen, so anything that stalls the process of dumping me into foster care for even a single day can only be a good thing.

  Faye and Joe are great, but they’ll finish this project soon enough, then they’ll be moving on. I feel bad about the time they spend on the phone with Sally and my wormy-looking lawyer. I feel bad about the time anybody spends with my half-aunt and stepuncle, but even Faye’s not smart enough to avoid them all the time. Didi and Tebo are pretty good at avoiding Joe, since he looks at my half-dressed aunt like she’s a bug and he looks at Tebo like the undergrown drunk that he is.

  I pay Faye and Joe back for all their help in the best way I know how. I take care of little Michael while they work. The kid’s so cute that I don’t even mind changing his poopy diapers. I find this amazing.

  Uncle Hebert’s death has made me think about the simple…reality…of what happens when a body stops functioning…about the mechanics of it, if you will. I never knew him when he was a person, instead of just a dead…thing.

  My mother’s death just crops up in my mind as a puzzle to be solved, the way she herself did when she was alive. I used to think, She’s not here. Why isn’t she here? How am I supposed to feel about that?

  Now, I find myself thinking, She’s dead. I’m not sure how much different this is from when she was alive and she wasn’t here. How am I supposed to feel about that?

  Grandmère’s death, though…it’s like a hole. A hole in my life. A hole in the world. I look at our boat and I expect to see her on the deck. When I stay up past eleven o’clock, I expect to hear her scolding me in French. When I’m tempted to do something I know she wouldn’t like, it doesn’t do me any good to sneak around and do it. Somewhere up in heaven, Grandmère knows what I’m doing.

  Okay, now I’m crying. I should have left well enough alone, instead of thinking about my grandmother up in heaven. That was stupid.

  I think I’ll drop this mopey stuff and tell some more of her stories, instead.

  According to Grandmère, the legends of Gola George grew and grew. Was it really possible for one man to kill so many men, even when that man was plundering ship after ship after ship? (Geez, I seem to be on a death jag tonight. Just can’t stop talking about it.)

  He can’t have killed every sailor on those ships he captured, because he made slaves of a bunch of them. I imagine they were mostly white. I don’t know for sure, but I picture the sailors back in George’s day as being white guys. Don’t you imagine Gola George saw this as a little bit of revenge for being kidnapped out of Africa and chained up in the bottom of a slave ship?

  On an island somewhere between here and the gulf, he built…well, I guess it was a little town. They say that Henry the Mutineer did the surveying and drew up the plans for the town and the buildings. He’d been George’s navigator, or so they say, and there has to be a lot of overlap between surveying and operating a sextant and making scale drawings like an architect.

  Henry and George built storehouses, lots of them, to store their treasure. I guess it was their treasure, and not just George’s, even though Gola George was the big scary pirate captain. I think Henry was the brains of the outfit, and I think Gola George probably knew it. Without Henry the Mutineer, Gola George might not have lived to get rich and famous.

  They built a big building for the harem of women that George’s men kidnapped from every port in the Caribbean. And they built little huts for the mothers of the children that naturally result when women are kidnapped and raped and imprisoned. Harems and children just go together, don’t they?

  I asked Faye whether that little bit of wood she found on my island could have been Gola George’s town.

  She said, “Sweetie, an alien could’ve dropped it out of a flying saucer, for all I know. I need to get it dated, which is going to be hard to do, unless I can pry the money out of that pirate I call a client. I also need to do some digging to check out the context, but it’s going to have to wait, because my pirate client ain’t gonna want to pay for that, either. I can’t see that your island was ever as big as, say, Grand Terre, which makes it hard for me to believe that a few hundred pirates and wenches and slaves and children ever lived there. But if it makes you happy to think so until we know otherwise, then you go right ahead.”

  I like Faye a lot.

  Grandmère said that Gola George was notorious for leaving on pirating expeditions without getting somebody to take care of feeding the women. So if he didn’t really kill hundreds and hundreds of people with his own sword, he probably starved that many. I’ve been thinking lately that some of the women must have found a way to feed themselves between visits from Gola George, because the stories all say that there were children in George’s little town, and it takes nine months to make a baby and years for that baby to grow into a child.

  That’s a long time for a pirate to sit in port. It’s also a long time to scrounge in the swamps for food. Grandmère said that, even after Gola George died, no one would come near the abandoned pirate town he left behind, because the cries of the children during those years had made them think the place was haunted.

  And now I’ve moved from dead people to abandoned, hungry children. I really need to stop this now.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Faye had spent the last hours of the night staring at the dark ceiling above her face. There had been times when she knew Joe was awake beside her. She could tell by the way he brushed a reassuring hand on her leg as he shifted into a different uncomfortable position.

  Insomnia gave her a chance to wonder why a cabin, intended to accommodate people on fishing vacations, who were frequently male and almost always large, had been equipped with two bedrooms with standard double beds and a small foldout couch. When he was stretched out to his full six-and-a-half foot length, it wasn’t just Joe’s feet hanging off the end. His legs dangled into space from the calves down. She didn’t know how the man could sleep at all.

  Right now, she thought he actually was sleeping. The arm next to hers was utterly relaxed. The breath sounds in his barrel chest came deep and easy. The sighs that wafted periodically out of Michael’s portable crib were just as unfettered. By contrast, Faye’s chest couldn’t have felt more tight and constricted if she’d been corseted.

  Faye had once tried to learn to meditate, and she’d had more than a little trouble controlling her hyperactive mind. Sitting still, to Faye, was an opportunity to plan her next onslaught on the world. The strategy brewing between her ears might be as simple as deciding to go get groceries after Michael napped, then using the rest of his naptime to make a shopping list while she waited. Or it could be as complicated as the development of the multiphase archaeological survey of a piece of land that had been inhabited since before the Europeans crawled out of their tall ships.

  There was always a new and juicy tidbit for Faye’s conscious mind to chew on. It was a wonder she ever slept.

  Her meditation instructor had told her to just relax and watch the distracting thoughts flit in and out of her head. Eventually, the buzz between her ears would slow and stop.

  Maybe it would…when Faye was dead.

  She’d been trying to follow the instructor’s advice for the past six ho
urs. She’d watched passively as imagined images of Miranda Landreneau, bloody and dead, flitted through her mind. These mental pictures were followed by thoughts of Amande living with abusive strangers. Or, possibly worse, with Didi.

  When she’d finally grown numb to tragedy, her brain had turned to her own worries. How on earth were she and Joe going to finish this humongous project?

  Faye was a problem-solver at heart. She couldn’t miraculously give Amande a happy home, and she couldn’t bring Miranda back from the dead, but she’d never failed to deliver a project on time. Heck, she’d never even failed to deliver an elementary school homework assignment on time. There was no way on God’s green earth that she was going to start failing now. Well, she was failing at meditation, but other than that.

  Hours of failed meditation had solved at least one of her problems. She’d finally realized that she needed to hire people to do word processing and graphics. Not permanent staff. Temps would do. It simply made no sense for Faye and Joe to be dragging and dropping pictures and text all over their final report, not when they had so much other work to do.

  Somewhere in heaven, her grandmother, who had worked for decades as a secretary, was glorying in the knowledge that her granddaughter was the boss. Or she was going to be, once she located a few temporary clerical workers.

  A slender shaft of sunlight found a hole in the brown plaid bedroom curtains, shining brightly on the faux-wood paneling of the opposite wall. Faye took that as an excuse to get out of bed, despite the fact that it was hardly past six am Michael and Joe sounded like they were sleeping too deeply to hear her creep out of the cabin. It was worth the risk.

  She slipped outside, notebook in one hand, cell phone in the other, and pen clenched between her teeth. The Internet connection on her phone would allow her to search for temporary employment agencies near her Florida headquarters on Joyeuse Island. The fact that those headquarters were in the Eastern Time Zone meant that she could have her clerical staffing problem solved in less than an hour. Score!

  Maybe then she could stop doing management chores and start doing some archaeology, but she sort of doubted it.

  ***

  Faye had finished researching clerical temp firms and had moved on to the day’s next chore: downloading her client’s template for preparing the final report. It still wasn’t quite eight am in the Eastern Time Zone, so she didn’t yet know who was going to be typing that report, but it wasn’t going to be her.

  Startled by a quick motion seen out of the corner of her eye, she set the phone down. The marina grounds were so quiet that she didn’t even consider that a human might have been the thing in motion. Faye felt alone, so her first-blush assumption was that she’d seen some large variety of wildlife, probably a deer. The thing had been light-footed, so the possibility of a bear never crossed her mind, which was probably a good thing for her blood pressure.

  She turned her head in the direction of the motion, only to be greeted by, “You need to hold this stuff for me, Faye. I can’t keep it safe.”

  Did Amande remind her of a deer? Her coloring was a quiet brown and she moved as easily as a woodland creature. She was wearing none of her trademark Hawaiian shirts this morning, dressing instead in a t-shirt that was wild-animal brown. Towering over Faye, she was certainly closer to the size of a deer than…say…a cottontail rabbit, and her eyes were as soft and vulnerable as a doe’s.

  “What stuff?” Faye mumbled intelligently. It was rather early in the day to be reading the erratic mind of a teenaged girl.

  Amande held out something heavy and flat, and Faye recognized it as the folder full of coins minted back when the United States still used silver. Then the girl held out the jar of newer coins that she’d found with her metal detector. Amande was handing over her treasures.

  “I heard Didi plundering through Grandmère’s drawers all night long, looking for stuff, and she was so drunk that she was talking to herself about what she found. Mostly, she just said things like, ‘Nice!’, or ‘That’s a piece of shit!’, but when I heard her say, “Gold-filled? What the hell can I get for something that’ll turn somebody’s neck green?’, I just couldn’t stand it any more. Faye. She’s going to sell her own mother’s jewelry before the body’s even cold.”

  Amande thrust the box in Faye’s direction. “Didi will be after my stuff tonight. She’d have already come for it, but she passed out in the middle of trashing Grandmère’s room. She slept in her dead mother’s bed without changing the sheets.”

  Faye wasn’t sure why that image was so awful, but it was.

  “She’ll sell the silver money in a heartbeat, unless she’s stupid enough to just spend it, and she will spend this jar full of new money.” Amande held out the folder, waiting for Faye to take it. “That thief took my future. The rest of my stuff is worthless, compared to those Spanish coins, but the day may come when it’s all I’ve got. Maybe that day’s already here. Please keep these things for me? I know you’ve gotta go home soon, but will you keep them for now, until I think of someplace else that’s safe?”

  Hearing the girl’s words, Faye knew that Amande had spent the night awake in bed, chasing thoughts that wouldn’t go away. Just like Faye.

  Amande had followed her fears to their logical end. If Didi was selling her mother’s jewelry already, then nothing was safe. If the child protection people named her Amande’s permanent guardian, she’d be spending the next two years looking for ways to get her hands on the girl’s small inheritance. Faye figured that, given two years to do it, Didi would find a way to spend everything the girl had, even if she had to reckon with a trustee to get it. Amande was smart enough to figure that out, too.

  At first light, the girl had taken the only action she could to protect herself. She had come to Faye. How could Faye refuse to help her?

  Faye nodded and took the folder and jar. Amande vanished as quickly as a doe when she hears a rifle’s first shot.

  ***

  Didi slipped on her favorite pair of shorts and a purple tank top that brought out the gold flecks in her brown eyes. The mirror said that she would need some extra effort to be pretty today. She didn’t like the notion that vodka had put those baggy circles under her eyes, but something had done it. She was only twenty-three, so it couldn’t have been time.

  Didi considered switching to gin. There were herbs and stuff in gin, so maybe it was easier on the complexion. Nothing could have convinced her inner nicotine addict to look closely at the tiny lines forming around her lips.

  There wasn’t enough coffee in the house to meet Didi’s current needs. She had to have a full pot of something black and strong and chicory-laden, and nothing less. There was no other way to face this day. Once she’d pumped herself full of caffeine, she’d be ready to question her mother’s lawyer on the details of her inheritance. Didi slung her purse over her shoulder and left the houseboat, without announcing her intentions to the niece for whom she was responsible.

  She drove past the two nearest bars and tried not to think about the men who’d been pawing her in both establishments, just the day before. None of them had been prizes, and the frontrunner in the competition to take her home had been wearing the residue of thirty years of smoking on his teeth. By dying and forcing her to walk away from this man, her mother had been able to save her from at least one bad decision.

  Now that the vodka had worn off, she needed to assume the role of bereaved daughter. And wife. She kept forgetting that Stan was supposed to be dead. Maybe he was dead.

  There. She’d managed a few tears for her mother and husband. If she didn’t wipe them away, maybe her coffee run could be parlayed into a little bit of sympathy for Didi and her plight.

  And so Didi, a more accomplished method actress than most graduates of drama schools, sauntered into the local grocery store without taking note of a familiar gray pickup pulling into the parking lot behind her.

  ***

  Didi was not impressed with the store’s selection, and she let t
he clerk and the manager know it.

  “I’ve seen fresher lettuce,” she sniffed.

  “I can’t sell it quick enough,” the manager said, adjusting the lettuce display and wiping his hand on his apron. “I can’t sell much of anything. There’s talk of closing the gulf to fishing. There’s talk of a moratorium on drilling. Nobody’s sure they’re gonna have a job next week. Everybody’s cutting way back on their grocery shopping.”

  “I hear you,” Didi said with a calculated quaver in her voice. “Stan works in the oil field, so who knows if he’ll keep his job. Except—” The quaver modulated and deepened to a half-sob. “Except I’m pretty sure he was on the rig that blew up. He’d told me he had a new job with BP, and I don’t always pay attention when he tells me where he’s going to be. All I know it’s somewhere…out there.” She gave an airy wave to the south. “I haven’t heard from him since the day before the explosion.”

  “Really?” said the clerk, a graying woman wearing stretch pants.

  Didi warmed to her audience. “Not a word. And I do so need to talk to him, since my mother died last night. I feel so…alone.” The voice stopped shaking and dropped to a whisper.

  “Now, Didi, you can’t be alone here in Plaquemines Parish. Everybody here has known you all your life.” These reassuring words came from the lips of an elderly lady that Didi thought she recognized as a lunchroom worker from her elementary school, though the woman’s name escaped her.

  Another woman and two men steered their shopping carts down the produce aisle, nodding their heads at the old woman’s reassuring words. Again, Didi knew their faces but not their names. Now she remembered why she’d left home, even though she’d hardly gone a hundred miles. It could be hard to get away with anything when everybody in town knew your mother. Still, maybe she could work the situation to her advantage this time. Everybody knew that her mother was dead and maybe they wouldn’t be so quick to judge her every little move.