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

by Evans, Mary Anna

  With every step away from her paperwork and into the sunshine, Faye felt lighter and freer…until her eyes rested on the houseboat where Amande was trapped with Didi and Tebo. That poor girl.

  Faye was never clear on how it was that Joe could read her mind. Maybe he heard a slight catch in her breath. Maybe he saw a miniscule hesitation in her step. Maybe he was conscious of her tiniest eye movements.

  Whatever arcane psychic methods Joe used, they worked. He put a hand between her shoulder blades and guided her toward the dock. “She’s waiting for us in the boat.”

  Seconds later, Faye got to see Amande grin as she heard Michael crow, “A-mah!” for herself.

  ***

  Joe had done an amazing thing when he spotted that barely visible bead. Faye was a better photographer than he was, so she’d spent a pleasant quarter hour searching for the perfect angle to show off its ancient patina. This required her to wallow in the mud atop the mound, adding an extra dimension to Joe’s observation that she looked happier than a pig in slop.

  While she was doing this, Joe crawled over the mound until he spotted a potsherd half the size of his pinkie nail, which gave her the happy chance to do some more muddy camera work. Amande and Michael whiled away the time by chatting with three preteen kids who’d gathered to see what was going on. Faye thoroughly enjoyed overhearing scraps of their conversation. Amande was in fine form as a community educator.

  “You guys need to find another place to ride your bikes. You’re messing up important stuff.”

  “Yeah!” Michael added helpfully.

  “It’s just a pile o’ dirt, but it’s a good place to ride,” said the obvious leader, shoving her overlong bangs out of her eyes. “Franky catches air nearly every time. Sometimes Ginny does, too.”

  Franky jutted out his prepubescent jaw in pride. Ginny chewed on her pigtail.

  “It’s not just a pile of dirt! Indians built it…oh…hundreds of years ago. Maybe thousands. See these oyster shells? That’s what they ate.” Amande brushed a little sand off a shell protruding from the mound’s chewed-up side. “And come see what Michael’s daddy found.”

  “Dah!” shouted her tiny assistant.

  Franky and Ginny and their talkative friend gathered around Faye and her camera.

  “It ain’t much of a bead. It looks like something that fell out of a bean bag. You know—those little white spongy balls. I’ve got a thousand of ‘em on the floor of my closet.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Lena.”

  “It’s not spongy, Lena,” Amande said confidently. “Spongy things don’t last this long. What’s it made out of, Faye?”

  “Clay, I think. And you’re right. It’s really old. Get Joe to tell them about this other cool thing he just found.”

  Faye resumed focusing her camera, this time on the potsherd, but she heard Joe do a creditable job of explaining its importance in words of two syllables or less.

  Amande was warming up for her lecture’s big finish. “So you see, you have to leave this stuff alone. No riding bikes or four-wheelers on the mound. And no digging, because when Faye and Joe come back to study this spot, they won’t be able to tell anything about it, not if you’ve messed it up. Maybe y’all are part Indian and your ancestors built this. Do you want to ruin it?”

  Lena and Franky and Ginny decided that being part Indian was an excellent idea. Franky was pretty sure he had a bow and some arrows at home, so the little tribe departed. Faye figured the odds were damn slim that they’d leave this mound alone from now on, forever, because children were curious beasts. Nevertheless, she was proud of Amande for trying.

  After another quarter hour, she stood and surveyed the muck coating her chest, elbows, and knees. Joe reached out a hand and took the camera. She ran across the strip of land separating her from the water as happily as a ten-year-old, and she kept going till she fell face-first in the water. Three splashes and a gurgly cry of “Maaaah!” told her that the rest of her field team had joined her.

  It was almost like being on the beach at Joyeuse, except there was a lot more mud.

  ***

  It hadn’t taken much begging for Amande to convince Faye that they should take a field trip to her island. No. That wasn’t true. It hadn’t taken any begging whatsoever. The conversation had gone like this:

  “If we go to my island now, you’ll have your tools. You can do a better job of checking things out, and I bet you’ll find something important enough to put in your report.”

  Faye, enjoying the sun as it dried her wet clothes, had grunted and nodded.

  “While you’re doing that, Michael and I can check things out with my metal detector. I brought it.”

  An object the size of a metal detector was impossible to miss in a boat the size of the one she was sitting in, so Faye had already known that. Still too mellow to talk, she’d nodded sagely.

  Joe signaled his willingness by saying, “You got your camera this time. You could take pictures of the place where you found that wood.”

  Faye leaned back and got comfortable. She could get used to having a fancy boat like this one, with cushy chairs that swiveled and reclined. Her oyster skiff and Joe’s johnboat had their advantages, but this was a much better place to nap.

  “I’m just along for the ride. Take me…wherever,” she said as her eyes drooped shut. But what she really meant was, “Take me someplace as far from spreadsheets and project management software as I can possibly get.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Amande’s island was bigger this trip because the tide was lower. It was a lot bigger. There must be almost no slope to the land as it entered the water. Faye wondered how far it took for the land surface to drop even an inch.

  Amande was ecstatic, because the extra land gave her great scope for her metal detecting adventures. She’d buckled Michael into the baby leash that he refused to wear for Faye and he was trotting beside her, looking over one shoulder to watch his footprints fill with water. With the leash looped around her left wrist and her headset on her head, Amande was leading her prisoner across the mudflats while she waved her metal detector around, and she was doing it with style. Today’s baseball cap, lime green, contrasted sharply with her chocolate-brown hair and the flamingos on the shirt billowing around her in the breeze.

  Faye could see no obvious way that this arrangement could result in a child lost at sea, so she followed Joe to the spot where they’d found weathered bits of wood on their last trip.

  “Point that camera down here,” Joe said, as he began removing silty sand, one layer at a time.

  His work was swiftly rewarded. Amande was the proud owner…part-owner…of yet another old splinter. She would be so proud.

  As Joe bagged the wood sample, Faye snapped a series of photos of a clearly demarcated area of discolored soil that had surrounded it. They might have uncovered something as mundane as a scrap of wood discarded when the cabin was built, but this was something manmade, and it wasn’t left here yesterday, either.

  “Maybe we should give Amande’s metal detector a try,” Joe said.

  “Yeah. Maybe we’ll get lucky and she’ll find a penny. Reading the date off its face would be a lot cheaper way to date this stuff than sending it off for carbon dating.”

  Joe stood up and hollered, “Can you bring that thing over here?”

  The wind was kicking up, and the sound nearly drowned Amande’s smart-ass answer. “That’s not a nice way to talk about your son.”

  Within a minute, she was beside them, headset in hand, still being a smart-ass. “So you two highly trained professionals can’t find anything without my help?”

  Faye silently held up the splinter in its sample bag. Amande squealed, then she obediently started scanning the area for signs of metal objects. Nothing turned up immediately, and Michael was fussing to get in the water.

  Joe held out his hands. “Here. Give me that thing. Faye and I can figure out how to run it. You take Michael swimming.�
�

  Amande thrust the metal detector and headphones in his direction, saying, “It’s old and quirky. You gotta keep it moving and listen good. But you can’t move it too fast, either. Every time you sweep, count to three.”

  Amande was busy talking, so Faye didn’t have to come out and say to Joe, “You’re going to let a sixteen-year-old girl be the only thing between your son and death-by-drowning?” All she had to do was deliver her husband a look that said, “You just screwed up. Bad. Do something about it.”

  Joe rectified his error by saying, “Let me use the metal detector while the three of you go swimming.”

  Faye put her camera back in its bag and said, “I just now got my clothes dry. Let’s go in the shack and put on our bathing suits.”

  Amande scooped up Michael and said, “We’ll get there first!”

  Since Faye was not sixteen and she did not have the long legs of a six-footer, Amande and Michael did get there first. This meant that there was a long and miserable space of time after she heard Amande’s wail and before she could haul her forty-one-year-old self to the cabin door.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Joe had adjusted the metal detector’s headphones to fit his ears. He still needed to twiddle with the operating frequency, but the thing was working. He liked to learn by doing, so instead of fooling with the controls, he went straight to waving it back and forth, three seconds to a sweep. Amande had already swept the cleared area where he’d been working with Faye, so he thought he’d branch out a little by checking out the underbrush surrounding the clearing.

  The chirping was so immediate and so loud that Joe’s sensitive ears rebelled. The cache of metal that had set the machine off was nothing more than a couple of old soda cans, but the metal detector was as excited as it would have been if it had uncovered the lost treasure of the Aztecs. Joe ripped the headphones off and tried to shake the noise out of his ears.

  That’s when he heard Faye calling for him.

  Joe wasn’t even close to forty yet and he was way bigger than even a sixteen-year-old six-footer. He reached the shack in seconds.

  He found a sixteen-year-old in the throes of righteous indignation.

  “This is my island and my cabin,” she was saying, blissfully ignoring Steve Daigle’s claim on three-quarters of it. “It is not okay to slosh beer on the floor and throw the cans in the corner. It’s not okay to leave a bowl of sugar and a bottle of whiskey on the counter to attract ants, or a jar of instant coffee to attract…whatever eats that stuff. It is also not okay to leave chicken bones in my sink to rot.”

  So that was the source of the smell. It had been hours since Joe’s family and Amande had emptied their bucket of chicken, which was probably a good thing. After getting a noseful of the decaying flesh in the kitchen sink, Joe thought it would be a while before he wanted to eat chicken again.

  “None of this stuff was here before,” Faye said, which was code for, “Somebody’s been here very recently.” With murders happening every couple of days, it paid to be cautious when people were places they weren’t supposed to be.

  “Why don’t y’all take Michael for a quick swim?” Joe asked.

  Faye was looking at Joe as if to say, “I don’t want to stay here on this island anymore, not even another minute,” so he added, “But make it a quick swim. We need to leave in…oh…fifteen minutes, if we want to get back before dark. I’ll step outside while you change.”

  He didn’t add, “And I’m going to give this island a good looking-over while you’re doing that.”

  ***

  It hadn’t taken Joe long to walk around the perimeter of the fishing shack, and he’d been almost as quick about checking out the pathetic little thicket of trees at the center of the island. There was no place else to hide anything without burying it, and the only things he’d seen above-ground were the soda cans in the trees’ weedy shadows.

  Though the tide had come in a bit, there was still a broad expanse of muddy sand between the shack and the water in front of the shack, and an equally broad expanse of shrubby undergrowth and marsh grass on the other three sides. When Joe reached the far side of the mudflats, barely in sight of the water where Faye and Amande and Michael were swimming, he finally found more evidence of the person who had trashed Amande’s dream house—footprints across the mudflats in the treasure hunter’s telltale pattern. Somebody besides Amande had been using a metal detector on this island, and they’d done it sometime since the last high tide.

  Since their last visit to the island.

  Since Miranda died.

  If Faye hadn’t decided that they all needed to go swimming in their clothes after they finished working at that shell mound, they might have seen the treasure hunter face-to-face.

  Judging by the quantity of beer cans that had been discarded in the shack in the two days since Joe and Faye had last visited the island, there could be more than one treasure hunter. Or, if only one person had put away all that beer, the treasure hunter was a seriously hard drinker. This was a hard-drinking part of the world, so it was possible.

  Joe didn’t relish the company of a crowd of people who left beer and refuse all over a floor that didn’t belong to them. Or even one that did. If all those empties were generated by one person, Joe was pretty sure he’d cross the street to avoid that person. He needed to get his family off this island, just as soon as he’d checked out the scuba gear piled in the only one of the shack’s corners that wasn’t full of garbage.

  ***

  Joe idled the motor so that he could maneuver the boat into its slip. Amande took advantage of the lower noise level to broach a subject that had clearly been bothering her for a while.

  “I heard you talking on the phone with Detective Benoit. About Dane.”

  “Detective Benoit talked to Dane after we left, because he thought Dane might know something about your grandmother’s murder. And yes, Benoit called me the next morning at an unholy hour because he knew I’d want to know what he said.”

  “Did he think Dane killed my grandmother and my uncle? Because I don’t think so. I know he didn’t.”

  Choking back the questions she wanted to ask, like, “Did that man touch you?”, Faye opted for saying something safe and obvious. “You like him.”

  “He’s just so smart! The first time we met, we talked and talked about archaeology and pirate ships and sunken treasure. I showed him all the things I’d found, and he was interested in all of it, from the old coins to the little tiny pottery chips! Most people’s eyes just glaze over. He—”

  “You took him on the houseboat, alone—and into your room? Miranda couldn’t possibly have been home, because she’d never have allowed it. And what do you mean when you say, ‘The first time we met…’”

  Amande ignored the final query and went with the first question. “She was taking a nap. So I wasn’t really alone with him.”

  Faye would have grounded the girl on the spot, if she’d had any plausible status as a disciplinarian. Without that status, she could take no action other than to sputter. Most demoralizing of all…Amande’s teenaged agony meant that she didn’t even notice that Faye was on the verge of having a stroke over her behavior. She just kept babbling revelations that measurably increased Faye’s risk of cerebral hemorrhage.

  Joe, in the meantime, was displaying the timeless wisdom of a man who knew when to keep his mouth shut.

  “When we were talking at Manny’s place, just before you came, Dane asked to take another look at my Spanish coins, and I had to tell him they got stolen.”

  So the man had been wangling a second invitation into a sixteen-year-old’s bedroom. Faye’s resolution to stick with safe, obvious topics left her, but there were so many unsafe and obvious topics that she hardly knew where to begin. She decided to ask them in chronological order, from the moment of the quite adult Dane’s hitherto unknown meeting with this underaged girl.

  “You knew Dane Sechrist before the coins were stolen?” Faye’s sharp tone sc
ared even her, and her resolution to take the questions one at a time crashed and burned. “When did you meet him? He knew you had those coins before they were taken? How many times have you seen him, anyway?”

  Amande’s eyes went to the ground. “Just the two times. I met him at the marina a few days before you and Joe got here. He saw me outside with my metal detector and we started talking about archaeology. He asked for my phone number, but he never used it. All we did was talk…”

  “Then why do you look like you just got caught robbing a bank?” A worse thought occurred to her. “Benoit said that he didn’t talk to anybody who recognized the name ‘Sechrist,’ but he talked to you. Amande…did you lie as part of a murder investigation?”

  “I could never have told Grandmère I’d been talking to a man Dane’s age, and I think I panicked when Benoit asked me about him. Somehow, it felt like she wasn’t really dead and that she’d know I’d been sneaking around. I felt…ashamed, I guess, and I didn’t want anybody to know about…about Dane and me. He’s got to be at least twenty.”

  There was no “Dane and me,” as far as Faye was concerned. Also, Dane was looking at twenty-five in his rearview mirror, if Faye was any judge, but she kept her mouth shut on that subject.

  “Well, this man that you’ve been sneaking around with, but know nothing about, did use your phone number. He used it to call your grandmother,” Faye said.

  “He did what?”

  “He called your grandmother and made an appointment for the afternoon she was killed, which she kept. She had a piece of pie with Dane in Manny’s restaurant, in fact. He and Manny may have been the last people she saw. Obviously, Dane said she was alive when he last saw her, but nobody knows if he’s telling the truth. You need to be careful, Amande.”

  “I am careful. And I don’t believe Dane killed my grandmother. He just couldn’t.”

  Faye knew that Amande was basing that judgment on Dane’s friendly brown eyes and general good looks, and she knew she would have made the same judgment when she was sixteen.

  It was a wonder anyone survived adolescence.