Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

nails, Joe couldn’t restore the shutters to their original positions, so he leaned out each window, yanked each shutter free, and hauled it inside. They were just barely taller than the cramped room, so he rested the bottom of each shutter on the floor, slightly away from the wall surrounding its corresponding window. Slanting each shutter back toward the wall, he jammed their tops, one by one, into the angle where wall and ceiling meet. The makeshift screens wouldn’t keep the water out, but they would provide some protection against broken glass and wind-blown debris.
    Finished with the shutters, Joe spread the contents of his leather tool bag over a piece of plastic tarpaulin roughly the size of a desktop. Faye saw nothing among the twine, raw stone, and arrowheads that might save them from their pursuer or from the storm.
    “When you get finished, Joe, can I have that piece of plastic? To protect the journal?”
    Without a word, he nodded.
    Douglass mumbled, “I’m cold, Faye.”
    She went to the storage bench and fetched the dresses she’d found on the day she discovered the Clovis point. She guessed by their style that they’d been made in the 1930s. Perhaps they had been Cally’s or Courtney’s or her grandmother’s. She spread one over Douglass and let its wide skirt flare out over the floor. Then she wrapped another one around her shoulders, hoping that Joyeuse’s ghosts would protect them.
    ***
    Excerpt from the oral history of Cally Stanton, recorded 1935
    The big wave washed right up to the sill of that broken window. Folks on the bottom floors never had a chance. The wind was coming in hard, but I thought the building would hold. Maybe it would have, if that first wave had been the only one.
    The Good Book says a house built on sand will fall and a house built on rock will stand. That worries me, because I don’t think there’s a rock big enough to stand on in all of Florida. There wasn’t nothing on Last Isle to build on but sand, and I was there when it all tumbled down. The hotel came apart, flinging splinters and boards far and wide. The wind was like a wolf breaking open a log to get at the little rabbit inside, and the little rabbit was me. The shrieking storm drowned out the Missus and her screaming. That was good, because it meant I could forget her and save my own rabbit skin.
    The walls fell around me. As the water carried me off, two dresser drawers floated by and I grabbed one. I don’t know why, but I shoved the other drawer over to the Missus and helped her grab hold. Then we floated out the window and watched the hotel pieces wash away.
    The Missus hung on to that dresser drawer with more spunk than I figured. I knew I could get through just about anything, but the Missus couldn’t get to the outhouse without a buggy and a span of horses. While we were trying not to drown, she rambled on about wanting to see her son one last time. She cussed the Master’s dead body. She took on something terrible about what he did to me and to my mama. And he thought he was so smart and his wife wouldn’t never know.
    She cussed his dead body some more, but I hoped he wasn’t dead. Not yet. I wanted him to float around in that black water, getting beat up side the head with floating tree limbs and trying to catch a breath that wasn’t half sea water. The whole time we fought that storm, I hoped he was suffering, too. Then, when the storm slacked up, I went back to wanting him dead.

Chapter 27
    There was no light but the incessant lightning. No sound could rise above the wind. There was a locomotive riding in that wind, and a banshee and a siren and the bone-shaking grind of a wrecked car sliding on its roof down a gravel road. Tree trunks popped like firecrackers and the massive piers that had supported Joyeuse all those years groaned under the shearing force of the wind. What were the swirling waters doing to the sand around the old foundations?
    Faye’s view of the ground below her was a shutterspeed illusion. Each lightning strike gave only a snapshot; the rapid flashes revealed a series of still scenes that blurred together like cinematic images, giving an illusion of motion.
    It was less frightening to watch the world end this way, to see the storm surge approach in the jerky style of a music video, showing no discernible color other than shades of gray. The great wave was lit by strobe light as it crashed onto the land and through the trees and struck the long straight