Findings Read Online Free PDF Page B

out. “I want to help you make the arrangements for…”
    Emma turned her eyes away from the endless water and focused them on Faye. “I’d like it very much if you’d go with me to the funeral home tomorrow morning. We’re having the funeral on Wednesday, and two days isn’t much time to plan.”
    “Planning a funeral is tough on anybody. I definitely think we should do it together,” Faye said.
    “Oh, it’ll be hard, but not the way you’re thinking. The funeral director’s going to try to sell me a package worthy of the richest man in Micco County. And I’ll be trying to follow the wishes of a man who told me to bury him in a pine box.”
    Faye saw an immediate problem. “I’m not sure they sell those any more. And I’m not sure how the health department feels about them.”
    “There’s plenty of room on Joyeuse Island—” Joe began.
    Faye interrupted him before he finished offering to bury Douglass himself, under a big live oak, without bothering with embalming or fancy hymns or a florist’s services. She knew that he was well-qualified to give the deceased a Creek-style sendoff, but the fact was that Douglass the Deacon would have wanted a Christian burial. And the health department was likely to be somewhat finicky about pesky details like embalming.
    “Joe,” Faye said, “I think you’re going to have to let us plan a traditional funeral.” Then she realized that her statement needed clarifying. “I’m talking about Douglass’ traditions, not Creek ones.”
    Joe nodded that he understood.
    “I think we two women can stand against a hard-sell funeral director,” Emma said. “We know what Douglass liked. He appreciated beautiful things and he was willing to spend his money on them, but he wouldn’t have parted with a nickel just to impress somebody. If we keep our wits about us, nobody will be able to sell us anything we don’t want.”
    Thinking of hermetically sealed metal caskets lined in quilted satin, Faye found herself hoping that Joe would take care of her burial when the time came.
    ***
    Joe had a characteristic that was most useful in a colleague. He worked in silence.
    He’d been remarkably useful to Faye as she attacked a huge and unpleasant task, sorting through the debris that the burglars left behind. It was like excavating a grievously desecrated historical site, treasures mixed with garbage, then thrown willy-nilly everywhere.
    On Monday, once the technicians had finished their photography and their inch-by-inch survey of the crime scene, the sheriff had asked Faye to take the lead. Today, on her second day of sorting through the mess, Faye had found that she could close her eyes and still see scattered junk imprinted on her retinas.
    She’d grown to hate the sight of her lab, with its cheerful yellow walls and its dark history as a murder scene. Yet she couldn’t leave it. She couldn’t stand to see the artifacts that she’d so carefully excavated lying broken on the floor. She needed to make the place neat and orderly again, because there was no other way to set her broken world right.
    Joe’s skills at cataloging broken bits of flint were nothing short of amazing. As an experienced flintknapper, he could sift through a pile of rock chips and pluck out two pieces that had been broken from the same rock. In a sense, he was gathering up remnants of artifacts that the thieves had damaged and making them whole again. He’d done his darndest to find more emeralds, and so had Faye, but they’d had no luck, so far.
    She tried to reconstruct the thieves’ activities. They’d broken the front door and run straight downstairs. The muddy footprints on Emma’s elegant celery-green carpet made that perfectly clear. Why had they come down here, rather than ransack the house’s expensively furnished living quarters?
    A few possible answers came to mind. Perhaps Douglass was their only target, and they knew he was in the basement alone. But this begged the question of why