Findings (24 page)

Joe must have felt really terrible, since he hadn’t fussed when Faye spread a blanket over his legs. He’d just sat propped up in Emma’s chaise lounge and stared at the sunlit trees. Faye had been steeling her nerves all day to talk to him, to pour out her heart, to ask him never to go away. Even if he couldn’t love her, she’d be okay if he never went away.

“I’m glad you’re home, Joe,” she began, but Joe interrupted her, possibly for the first time in his soft-spoken life.

“I never ever had so much time to think as I did when I was lying in that hospital bed. I figured out that there are a few things I want to do in this world before I leave it.”

Faye held her tongue, possibly for the first time in her outspoken life, but she was thinking,
I want you to do those things as much as you do. But please do them with me.

“I want to finish school. It’ll be hard. I believe I’d rather take on a panther, bare-handed. But you showed me I could do it, and I thank you for that.”

Faye’s mouth tasted bitter. He was telling her good-bye.

“I don’t rightly know what I’ll do when I get out of school. Heck. It may take me till I’m forty to get that degree.”

Faye couldn’t imagine Joe at forty. He already had the centered, settled, solid air of someone who’d grown into himself. Middle age might not change him at all, but she would have liked to have had the chance to find out firsthand.

“I want to do something that’s useful to people, but I don’t want to sit at a desk. I looked out that hospital window so long that I know I never want a pane of glass between me and the world, not ever again.”

Faye could no more imagine Joe working at a desk than she could fly.

“And I want children. I can talk to children. Sometimes better than I can talk to adults.”

Something inside Faye broke. “I want you to go where your dreams take you, Joe, but I’d dearly love to see your children.”

He turned his eyes her way. They had always been green, like the leaves of the live oak trees that sheltered Joyeuse, and they always would be, even if he traveled farther than Faye wanted him to go. “Why wouldn’t you see them, Faye? Won’t you be there?”

Would she? Would she want to watch Joe make a life with somebody who wasn’t her? She didn’t know. Finally, the tears came.

“Faye. I’m telling you all this so you’ll know who I want to be. I want to be the right man for you. All this time, I’ve been telling myself that you’re too smart for me and too pretty and too…well, I’ve been telling myself that I wasn’t good enough. I laid flat on my back for a long time while I was getting well, and I didn’t do anything but think. Do you want to hear what I think? I mean, do you want to hear what I know?”

Faye nodded, wiping her eyes on the back of her hand.

“I know that I love you. I’ve loved you ever since you caught me camping on your island, but you were too tender-hearted to make me go away. And I know that I would be good to you. I think maybe that’s enough. If I can give you those two things, then maybe I’m good enough for you, after all. I want to be.”

She threw both arms around him, but she did it carefully. He’d been through hell and back, and he’d gone there because he put his own body between her and death. “I love you, Joe. I always have. If I’m so smart, why didn’t I know it?”

Joe rested his chin on her head and smoothed her hair with his big, calloused hand.

“Marry me, Faye.”

Guide for the Incurably Curious:

Teachers, Students and People Who Just Plain Like to Read

For those who have read
Artifacts
, what did you think of Faye’s return to her home on Joyeuse Island in
Findings
?
When I took Faye to Alabama in my second book,
Relics
, some of my readers were concerned. They had enjoyed the island setting of
Artifacts
so well that they thought it would be risky to move the action. I think they thought that Faye wouldn’t be Faye if I plucked her off Joyeuse.
I was convinced that I needed to take Faye on the road for a couple of reasons. First, how many mysteries could she possibly solve from the vantage point of a single island? And second, how could I explore her character if I never took her out of her comfort zone?
In
Artifacts
, I put Faye through hell, but I left her on her home turf. In
Relics
and
Effigies
, I tested her in unfamiliar territory. When I began plotting
Findings
, I felt sure that it was time to take her back home.
It was fun for me to revisit the setting of my very first published novel, and it was a bit relaxing. I didn’t have to spend effort on designing Faye’s world, because I’d already done that. I’d already read about the way barrier islands are built, and I knew an awful lot—both from reading and from personal experience—about the ways the environment recovers from such a hurricane’s brutal assault by wind and water. And I knew almost all the characters intimately. With
Findings
, I was able to concentrate on crafting a story that functions as a pivot point in the lives of each of those characters.
As I finished writing
Findings
, I realized that it was different from my other books in some important ways. I consider mystery fiction to be the “literature of justice,” in the way that science fiction has long been called the “literature of ideas.” So it is no surprise that I considered my first three books to be explorations of the notion of justice. The real surprise for me was realizing that
Findings
was about something altogether different. What would you say was the central theme for this book?
Reading my own book after it was already written, from the point-of-view of a reader, gave me an interesting perspective on
Findings
. Suddenly, it became apparent to me that I had written a book about love. This story is permeated with romantic love—Faye and Joe, Faye and Ross, Douglass and Emma, Jedediah and Viola, Magda and Mike, Curry and Sharon—there is hardly a character in this book who is not affected, for good or ill, by romantic love. Romance has never been a major theme in my previous books. How did these love stories work for you?
I originally created Jedediah and Viola Bachelder and their Civil-War-era world strictly for plot purposes. As I wrote, they all came alive to me. Jedediah and Viola developed a habit of saying and doing things that I never planned or expected. Joe’s character developed in that same way while I was writing
Artifacts
, and he continues to “tell” me what I should do with him. Do these characters feel real to you? And are there any other characters you particularly enjoyed?
I always choose an unusual corner of history to explore in each book. I want to take readers to a place or time that they know little about. For this book, I wanted to take a peek at the short-lived government of the Confederate States of America. Many books, notably
Gone with the Wind
, have given us an image, factual or not, of everyday life in the American South before and during the Civil War. Battlefield scenes have been described in both fiction and nonfiction works. However, I don’t think the Confederate government is given much thought when most Americans think about the Civil War. Yet I wondered how one would go about setting up a government for a brand-new nation that was born at war.
Jedediah’s description of the CSA’s constitutional convention was based on descriptions of discussions said to have been held during the writing of the Confederacy’s constitution. His diplomatic trip to Europe was based on the real Duncan Kenner’s actual diplomatic efforts. Kenner is said to have recommended freeing the slaves as a way to solidify diplomatic ties with Europe to CSA President Jefferson Davis, but this plan never came to pass. It makes sense that a man like Jedediah would be chosen for just this sort of diplomatic mission.
Jedediah and Viola, when I first created them, existed only to provide an illustration of real situations that are often forgotten when we view the people affected by the American Civil War from this distance. Many citizens of the Confederacy owned no slaves simply because they could not afford them. A few, like Jedediah and Viola, owned no slaves because their conscience forbade it.
Though we often hear the cliché that our Civil War pitted brother against brother, we forget that this conflict extended to the non-military citizenry. Though I don’t say so, Viola was likely born in the North, since she mentions her mother in Pennsylvania. The story establishes that Jedediah spent his childhood on a Florida plantation, yet Viola mentions his aunt in Ohio. When war closed the channels of communication between family members, people were harmed in a way that’s not apparent by reading history books. To read Viola’s concern about their northern relatives puts the modern reader directly into this terrible enforced separation.
Viola Bachelder was simply created as a foil to receive the letters Jedediah sent. I never intended to include any of her letters in the book, but she wouldn’t agree to stay quiet. In the end, I realized that any woman who would so captivate a man like Jedediah after years of marriage would have to be loving, yes, but also strong and independent. I had already “killed” her during the plot development phase of the book, and it grieved me that I could think of no way to “save” her without weakening the story. The final two letters that passed between Viola and Jedediah were among the last passages of this book that I wrote, and it pleased me to give them a happy ending, even if it couldn’t come in this world.
How did you feel about the fact that Faye was looking for gold and emeralds in this book, rather than the arcane archaeological finds she’s usually hunting?
I’ve always felt that archaeology made such a good setting for mystery novels because, though it is a science, there is also the air of a “treasure hunt” about an archaeological dig. No, modern archaeologists are not looking for King Tut’s gold. They’re looking for rotted kitchen scraps in order to reconstruct a civilization’s diet. Yet the fact remains that they could, at any time, unearth a bag of gold or even a huge emerald that was buried for safekeeping years ago. You can never know where you might find hidden treasure. If you knew where it was and where it wasn’t, then you couldn’t call it “hidden.”
I was already toying with a story about Jedediah Bachelder and the Confederate government, when I realized that this story could send Faye on a real treasure hunt. The fate of the Confederate treasury still generates books and magazine articles and web pages galore. Some stories say the Confederate Gold passed through Florida. Other stories put it in just about any other place you could imagine…which made it easy for me to put it exactly where I wanted it to be. How did you feel about the fictional Faye discovering the fate of a real treasure? Does that blur fact and fiction too much? Or does it just make the fiction feel more real?
Now we know how Faye and Joe feel about each other. Is this the end of the series?
Of course not. When a romance resolves itself in real life, do the lovers’ lives come to an abrupt halt? Faye and Joe need to finish school, find jobs, enjoy the company of their friends and each other…and we know they both want children. Life goes on, but if all goes well, they’ll be living that life with each other. I will continue throwing life-and-death ordeals at them but, in the end, I want them to be happy.

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