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Overview
Faye Longchamp, back in school to pursue her dream of becoming an archaeologist, has been asked to run a project for which she is barely qualified, under the direction of a man who doesn't seem to like her much. Her assignment: to uncover the origins of a mysterious ethnic group. The Sujosa have lived in Alabama's most remote hills for centuries and have shown impressive immunity to many diseases…including AIDS.
Late one night, Faye awakes to find the house in flames. She saves herself and one of her housemates. But her friend Carmen, the project historian, never had a chance. Within days, an 18-year-old boy jumps from a cell phone tower that, when completed, would connect the outside world to the Sujosa community. Are these events somehow related?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781470846268 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Blackstone Audio, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2012 |
| Series: | Faye Longchamp Series , #2 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Pages: | 1 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.30(w) x 7.50(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Check out her website, enewsletter, facebook author page, and twitter.Winner of the 2018 Sisters in Crime (SinC) Academic Research Grant
Read an Excerpt
Relics
A Faye Longchamp Mystery
By Mary Anna Evans
Poisoned Pen Press
Copyright © 2012 Mary Anna EvansAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59058-991-5
CHAPTER 1
Friday, November 4
Faye Longchamp was born on the first floor of a Tallahassee hospital built at an elevation of fifty-five feet above sea level. In the thirty-six years since then, she had never set foot on a taller hill. Her cherished home, a tumbledown antebellum plantation house called Joyeuse, was built for her great-great-grandfather by his slaves — some of whom were also her ancestors. It sat firmly on an island with a maximum elevation of seventeen feet, and few of its inhabitants ever strayed far from their coastal paradise. Faye herself had never, before today, left the low-lying Florida Panhandle. If the term "flatlander" was ever true of anybody, it was surely true of Faye.
This was the reason the gaping ravines that yawned along the Alabama roadside made her clutch the steering wheel of her twenty-five-year-old Pontiac in white-knuckled terror. When her tires rolled too close to the edge of the worn pavement, crumbles of asphalt slid down slopes that looked vertical to Faye's flatlander eyes. And her tires rolled too close to the edge of the pavement with frightening regularity, because her barge-sized car was not built to maneuver hairpin turns. Faye had not expected Alabama to look like this. She made a mental note to never, ever venture into Colorado.
"Where are the guard rails?" she muttered. "How can they possibly build a road like this without guard rails? This is America. Somebody might get sued."
Joe Wolf Mantooth sat in the passenger seat. Sometimes, the view out his window encompassed nothing but autumn-hued trees and a clear, meandering stream. Other times, the same window revealed a dizzying drop into the depths of a roadside precipice, but Joe always looked as relaxed as an old man after a good dinner. This was an accomplishment of sorts for a twenty-six-year-old.
"Want me to drive, Faye?"
Faye wanted to blurt out, "Are you kidding? You don't even have a driver's license," but Joe didn't deserve her rudeness. Instead, she said, "I can handle it."
She wished she could tear her eyes off the road, because her peripheral vision was picking up glimpses of loveliness. Russet-hued sumacs stood flaming among persimmons and sweet gums that simply couldn't decide what color they wanted to be. Their yellow and orange and purple leaves trembled like bits of glass in a kaleidoscope, framed by the laurel oak's constant green. All her life, Faye had heard people raving about autumn leaves. Until now, she'd never understood what the fuss was about.
The trees on Joyeuse Island were predominantly palms and live oaks, with an occasional dogwood planted by some ancestor who enjoyed white flowers at Easter time. Live oaks got their name because they carried their green leaves through every season. Palm trees held onto their fronds until they turned brown and fell off. The dogwoods tried to put on a show, but Joyeuse's short autumns made sure that each red leaf lasted about a day before it browned and dropped to the dirt.
Here in the southernmost reaches of the Appalachians, Faye was seeing autumn in all its glory for the first time, but enjoying it would have required her to take her attention away from the narrow, winding roadway. Convinced that doing so would bring certain death, she firmly insisted that the fluttering leaves stay in her peripheral vision.
Joe leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes. His rhythmic breathing was the only sound in the car except for Faye's occasional cursing of the civil engineer who designed the deathtrap roadway beneath her tires.
The ever-darkening sky wasn't helping matters. Faye glanced at her watch. Sunset was still an hour away, but the sun was far on the other side of a mountain clad in autumnal clothing, and the trees' garish colors weren't bright enough to light the pavement ahead of her. She flipped on her headlights and goosed the accelerator.
Faye was eager to reach her destination for reasons that had nothing to do with the oncoming darkness or the treacherous road. Her new job as archaeologist for the NIH-funded Sujosa Genetic History and Rural Assistance Project — commonly called simply the Rural Assistance Project — excited her personally, as well as professionally. Here was her chance to do some important science, and to make a difference in the world, too.
As Faye had discovered while preparing for the job, the Sujosa had lived in an isolated valley in these hills since God was in kindergarten, and they held their secrets well. Their dark brown skin and Caucasian features suggested that they had arrived in Alabama sometime after 1492, but fringe theorists liked to argue that they might have beaten Columbus to the New World. Extreme fringe theorists thought they were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel.
Everyone agreed that they were settled in Alabama by Revolutionary times, because the word "Sujosa" appeared in several written documents of the era. Other documentary evidence proved that they had, at times, been deprived of the right to vote and own land, simply because their skin wasn't white enough. First by law and then by custom, they'd been forced to worship separately from their white neighbors. Their children had been segregated into their own school until as recently as 1978, even after black children were finally admitted to white schools.
In fact, no one had ever given a tinker's dam about the Sujosa — until a local doctor noticed that they didn't get AIDS, even when they'd been exposed many times. When the issue of Health that carried Dr. Brent Harbison's article hit the mailbox of the National Institutes of Health, the powerful and wealthy eye of the United States of America turned, for the first time, toward some of its weakest and poorest citizens.
The result was the Rural Assistance Project, whereby the NIH hoped to isolate the genetic basis for the Sujosa's formidable immune systems, and give a hand to the Sujosa settlement at the same time. The NIH wanted to know where in Europe or Africa or Asia (or, for that matter, Antarctica) these people originally lived, and where they got their inherited ability to fend off disease. A geneticist, a linguist, an oral historian, and assorted technicians would work with Faye to dig up the Sujosa's past, while an education specialist and a physician would work to help the land-poor Sujosa's future.
The project was an archaeologist's dream. And there could be no job more personally intriguing for a dark-skinned, Caucasian-featured archaeologist like Faye.
Faye glanced at Joe, who appeared to be sleeping, and smiled. It had taken quite a bit of wangling to get him on board the project as her assistant. Governmental agencies tended to be finicky about things like high school diplomas, and Joe didn't have one. His paycheck would be absurdly small, compared to his value to the team, but sometimes money wasn't the most important thing. She turned her eyes back to the road.
It couldn't be far to the settlement now. She passed through Alcaskaki, the last town before the bridge, and saw that there wasn't much to see — just a few city blocks of downtown surrounded by woodframe houses and farmland. On the far outskirts of Alcaskaki, the farmland petered out and a ravine opened up on the left-hand side of the road. To her right sprawled the county high school, a dusty collection of institutional buildings clustered protectively around a monumental football stadium. A bare handful of cars remained in the parking lot, its students having fled for the day.
Leaves, grown tired of living, dropped from the dimly lit branches above, through the bright cones of her headlights, and onto the roadbed — red, yellow, orange, purple, and gold. As she drove over them, her tires stirred them into the air again.
The object dropped out of the trees ahead, like a panther after prey. She threw the wheel violently to the left, and the car obeyed by veering hard, then skidding on the gravel scattered over the roadway's crumbling pavement.
There was no time to study the thing as she passed under it. She retained only the image of someone dangling limp and blue-faced. Perched above was someone else, swathed in a hooded jacket. Beneath the hood, a dark face was lit by blue-green eyes the color of the luminous gulf waters around her island home. Then both faces faded out of sight, and she was fighting to regain control, thinking only of the deep chasm to her left. She heard the sound of shoes dragging over the roof of her car.
The Bonneville's brakes squealed as they fought against the momentum the old car had earned through its sheer bulk. It might stop sliding toward the ravine's sheer flank, and it might not, but the answer was a matter of physics. She and Joe were simply along for the ride.
* * *
The car skidded to a stop — dangerously near the edge of the ravine, but not in it. Dust rose around its tires as Faye jerked her door open and ran back along the road.
"What happened?" Joe said, running after her. His longer legs negated her head start and he was abreast of her within seconds. "Faye! Are you okay?"
"I think somebody's hurt." She pointed down the road.
Joe put on a burst of speed and reached the dangling form first, grasping it under its arms and lifting it to release the rope's tension.
"It's okay, Faye. Nobody's hurt."
"How can that be?" Then she saw what he held in his hands. Bottled-up fear turned to rage and she slapped the lifeless head as hard as she could. It was a papier-mâché dummy of a horned man wearing nothing but a banner that said, "Devils Go Home!"
"Somebody worked hard on this," Joe said, bending its articulated joints with the appreciation of a fellow craftsman.
Faye wasn't interested in the artistic quality of a prank that had nearly sent her and Joe to their deaths. She looked up into the tree, and into the darkening woods. There was no one there.
She pulled her father's pocketknife out of her pocket and cut the devil's rope. "I'm taking this with me so it doesn't kill somebody. We have to track down the idiot who made it."
"Nobody's hurt, Faye," Joe said again, as she hurled the loose-limbed devil into the Pontiac's back seat. "That's what counts. Let's go."
Faye took a deep breath and blew it out slow. Joe was right. When it came to the important things, like life and death and nature and spiritual stuff, he usually was. He seemed to have an esoteric Creek spiritual practice to suit every possible crisis of the soul. Faye's expertise lay in practicalities, like paying the bills. When she got out of graduate school and finished renovating her two-hundred-year-old house and started putting some money aside for retirement, that's when she'd have time to meditate on the meaning of human existence. In the meantime, she had Joe to take care of things like that for her.
"Yeah," she echoed. "Nobody's hurt, and that's what counts." She cranked her old car and pointed it toward the Sujosa settlement. She would have enough on her plate as it was without tracking down mysterious kids in hooded jackets. She was about to take on a job for which she was barely qualified, joining a team of seasoned professionals a month into the game. While somehow managing not to fall off these god-awful hills.
No pressure there. No pressure at all.
CHAPTER 2As they crossed the Broad River bridge and entered the Sujosa settlement, autumn passed and winter settled in. The higher elevation surely contributed to the colder weather, and so did the brisk wind whipping along the river valley, but Faye couldn't shake her impression that there had been a change in season during the short drive. She reached into her tote bag and pulled out a black cardigan to wrap herself in.
The Sujosa settlement clustered on the riverbank, around a flat spot of ground that housed a church and a building bearing a sign that said, "Hanahan's Grocery and Sundries." A few houses were visible along roads that wound up the hills on either side of the church and store. They were scattered at intervals that suggested each was associated with several acres of land. Garden plots, left fallow by the fall harvest and marked only by bare soil and a few collard plants with enough guts to face winter, lay behind each one.
Following the directions she'd learned by heart, Faye drove past a tall, narrow house that gave a dignified air to the flanks of the hill to her right. It proudly sported mint-green asbestos siding, evidence that its owners had enjoyed a period of prosperity sometime during the mid-twentieth century. Dr. Andrews Raleigh, the project leader, had written to her explaining that it served as the bunkhouse for the men working on the project.
She parked the car in front of the smaller women's bunkhouse nestled at the base of the same hill. A small, square building with a tall, peaked roof, it was the purest example of a four-square Georgian vernacular house that Faye had ever seen. Whoever had built it had enjoyed as much status as a poor community like this one could confer.
Faye turned to Joe as they got out of the car. "I guess I'm staying here. You're back at the green house, if you want to go check it out."
Joe nodded, and Faye headed up the steps. After a short hesitation, she went inside, surprising a statuesque brunette apparently on the way out. Setting down a large metal briefcase, the woman extended a hand.
"You must be Faye Longchamp. I'm Carmen Martinez." She carried herself with a confidence that lent glamour to her tee-shirt and stylishly cut jeans. "I'm doing the oral histories."
"Pleased to meet you," said Faye.
Oral historian. That was a job for someone who enjoyed going door-to-door, sitting in rocking chairs and trying to coerce old folks into telling her their tales. At first glance, Faye wasn't sure Carmen was the right person for the job. People tend to trust people like themselves, and Faye doubted that flamboyant Carmen had much in common with folks who'd hardly left their remote settlement in — how long? Nobody knew.
"I'll show you your room," said Carmen. "You're across the hall from me, and Laurel is next to you." As Faye followed Carmen on the brief tour of the house, she thought about the task before her. The Sujosa were thought to be a tri-racial isolate group like the Melungeons of Appalachia or the Redbones of Louisiana. Common wisdom held that these relic populations were remnants of colonial America: the products of intermarriage among Native Americans, Africans imported as slaves, and Europeans who had imported themselves.
But other origin legends flourished. Some Melungeons believed that their ancestors included Turks who reached the Americas as servants or slaves on European sailing vessels. Some people thought the Sujosa descended from Portuguese sailors shipwrecked in the Gulf of Mexico. Cynical observers saw such tales as efforts to explain away the fact of dark skin without claiming the stigma of African descent. Nobody had ever known the origins of these groups for certain, and nobody had much cared, until now.
After a tour of the bedrooms, bathroom, and kitchen, Carmen led her back to the parlor. "You'll want to come to our regular Friday team meeting tonight. We meet in the church at seven-thirty. It'll be a good chance to get you up to speed."
Faye wrapped one side of her unbuttoned cardigan over the other. Carmen seemed plenty comfortable in her short-sleeved tee-shirt, which made Faye feel like a wimp.
"I understand that Dr. Raleigh went ahead and began excavating while he was waiting for me to be approved for the position."
Carmen sighed. "I don't know why the bureaucrats sat on your application while the rest of us were out here getting started. Raleigh should have done something."
"It wasn't his fault," Faye cut in, not anxious to start ragging on her principal investigator before she even met him. "I was a last-minute hire. He had a lead archaeologist in place — my research advisor, Dr. Magda Stockard-McKenzie — but her health took a turn for the worse. It's not easy being pregnant at 45."
"Better her than me," Carmen said, "although my abuela keeps telling me that I need to start making babies before she's too old to warp them with her Cuban ghost stories."
Faye couldn't make out a single wrinkle in Carmen's olive skin. "Tell your grandmother that I said you've got time."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Relics by Mary Anna Evans. Copyright © 2012 Mary Anna Evans. Excerpted by permission of Poisoned Pen Press.
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