Faye Longchamp 01 - Artifacts

insufficient.
    Her work on Seagreen Island was legitimate, but it disturbed her nonetheless. Unless Magda’s archaeological survey turned up a culturally significant site, there would be nothing to stop the developers who wanted to build a resort there. The lush and tangled vegetation topping the island would be scraped off to make room for a hotel and tennis courts and a spa and a couple of swimming pools. As if Florida needed more swimming pools.
    This islet where she stood was too tiny to interest developers, though the government had found it worth including in a national wildlife refuge. It was really no more than a sandbar sprinkled with scrubby vegetation, but Faye’s instincts had always been reliable. The Last Isles were once awash in wealth. The wind and waves couldn’t have carried it all away; they must have left some of it under the sand, ripe for discovery by a needy pothunter. A tiny bit of that dead glory would pay this year’s property taxes. A big, valuable chunk of the past would save her home forever.
    Home. The thought of losing her home made Faye want to hurl her trowel to the ground in frustration, but doing so would require her to stop digging, and she couldn’t do that. Something in her blood would never let her quit. Faye did not intend to be the one who let the family down.

    Two eager archaeology students had volunteered to stay behind the rest of their field crew on mosquito-infested Seagreen Island. Tomorrow would have been soon enough to catalog the day’s finds and mark the next swath of dig spots, but these two were too dedicated to their work for their own good. If the student archaeologists had cleared out on the stroke of five, they could have been enjoying Tuesday-night sitcoms and beer with their colleagues. Instead, they were conscientiously digging their own graves.
    The sun kept sliding toward the Gulf of Mexico, and the red-haired girl kept squinting through the viewfinder of her surveyor’s transit. She barked directions to her partner as he slowly—so slowly—placed one flag after another in yet another nice neat row. They checked and rechecked the grid of sampling spots, careful to ensure that everything was exactly as their supervisor had recorded in the field notebook that the young woman clutched like a bible.
    The young man, standing in the shade of an ancient tree, twisted the surveyor’s flag, yelling, “Hey, Krista, there’s so many roots here, I can hardly get it in the ground.”
    The young man grunted as he pushed the flag into the soil, ignorant of what lay beneath his feet. The base probed deeper. It struck something horrible, but the young man and his companion remained unaware of it, so they were allowed to continue breathing.

    Faye knelt at the edge of the evening’s excavation. She’d put in a full day on Seagreen Island. Then, after her colleagues’ boat was safely out of sight, she’d worked nearly another half-day here. It seemed like she had displaced half the little islet’s soil, and her biceps quivered from the strain. She had been so sure. Her instincts had screamed, “This is the spot,” the moment she dragged her skiff onto the bedraggled beach. This was a place for buried treasure, a place to dig up the find that would change her life. She still felt that electric anticipation, but her shovel had turned over nothing but sand.
    The aluminum-on-sand groan of Joe’s flat-bottomed johnboat being dragged onto the beach caught her ear, but his presence didn’t disturb her dogged work. She hardly looked up when he said, “It’s about dark, Faye. If you ain’t already found anything worth digging up, you won’t be finding it tonight.”
    Joe was right, so she ignored him.
    He tried again. “Faye, the day’s gone. Come home and eat some supper. You can try again tomorrow.”
    Faye continued to ignore him.
    Joe sighed, glanced at the last scrap of sun melting into the Gulf and squatted on his haunches beside her. “Okay, you want to dig in the dark? Let’s dig in the dark. You got another one of those little hand-shovel things?”
    Faye could steel herself against displaying her emotions, even on those occasions when outbursts were expected. At funerals, Faye was the competent one who made sure that the other mourners had comfortable chairs and fresh handkerchiefs. She grieved later, alone in her car, undone by the sight of a woman sitting at the bus stop with her head cocked at her mother’s angle.
    Sometimes, when forced to