Artifacts

FayeLongchamp has lost nearly everything, except for her quick mind and a grimdetermination to keep her ancestral home, Joyeuse, a moldering plantationhidden along the Florida coast. No one knows how Faye's great-great-grandmotherCally, a newly freed slave barely out of her teens, came to own Joyeuse in theaftermath of the Civil War. No one knows how her descendants hung on to itthrough Reconstruction, world wars, the Depression, and Jim Crow, but Faye hasinherited the island plantation-and the family tenacity.Whenthe property taxes rise beyond her means, Faye sets out to save Joyeuse bydigging for artifacts on her property and the surrounding national wildlife refuge and selling them on the black market. A tiny bit of that dead glorywould pay a year's taxes, and a big, valuable chunk of the past would save herhome forever. But instead of potsherds and arrowheads, she uncovers a woman'sshattered skull, a Jackie Kennedy-style earring nestled against its cheek bone.Faye is torn. If she reports her find, she'll reveal herillegal livelihood, thus risking jail and the loss of Joyeuse. She doesn'tintend to let that happen, so she probes into the dead woman's history herself,unaware that the past is rushing toward her like a hurricane across deceptivelycalm Gulf waters.