Free Isolation by Mary Anna Evans

of lab results, he’d gone back to studying his site map. This meant that he didn’t notice that Faye was studying him. And those damnable red flags.
    There seemed to be no end to them. Nadia had sampled an area the size of…hmm….how big was it? Faye judged that it was the size of a two-car garage. And the arsenic levels had refused to drop to zero as the sampling locations kept creeping outward. This couldn’t be good.
    The current set of samples was being collected far, far away from those red flags, so far away that they were almost guaranteed to be clean. Gerry called them “background samples” and they were going to tell him the natural state of Faye’s dirt. It was possible for arsenic to be naturally present in soil. In other words, it was possible that Gerry’s red flags marked nothing that God hadn’t put on Joyeuse Island on the day of creation. To test that theory, Gerry had asked Faye to help Nadia find the best spots to collect background samples.
    Some of them had come from the front and back lawns of Joyeuse’s great house, where no crops were ever grown and, thus, no nasty old-style agricultural products had ever left any arsenic behind. Now Nadia was collecting a sample under the big oak tree that dominated the landscape on this end of the island. It looked to be more than two hundred years old, so if anybody had ever farmed the spot where it stood, they’d done it long ago. She also planned to collect a bit of the very sandy soil near the high water line. Other than those spots, there was no place on the island where Faye could swear that no one had ever tried to grow a crop or pasture a cow.
    Faye didn’t like the idea that her entire island might have been covered with a fine dusting of arsenic by Mother Nature herself, but her pocketbook hoped that this was true. The state of Florida would be hard-pressed to make her clean up a bunch of arsenic, if she could prove it was a natural part of her island. This put Faye in the strange position of hoping that Nadia’s background samples simply reeked of poison.
    Too antsy to wait for the lab results, she decided to walk a circle around the contaminated area, for no better reason than to take yet another look at her problem. An open, shrubby area, dotted by small trees, lay inland from the excavation. Blackberry vines, briars, and shrubby weeds filled the spaces between the trees, so Faye was grateful for her boots and long pants. As she shuffled through the spiny undergrowth, one of those boots struck a piece of wood about the size of her thigh. It looked familiar.
    Faye squatted to get a closer look. It wasn’t a downed tree branch, nor any other kind of wood that could have gotten there naturally. Though it was weathered and splintery, she could tell that it had been hewn into shape by humans. It took her a second to remember why it looked familiar. When she was a kid, she’d walked this whole island with her grandmother many times, and she remembered a clearing that had once been scattered with several chunks of wood like this one.
    She looked around and saw that the trees around her were easily less than thirty years old. She was pretty sure she was standing in the clearing she remembered from childhood.
    Faye studied the piece of wood. It had the curved outline of a hollowed-out tree. What had her grandmother said about the broken pieces of wood strewn about the clearing? She’d said that they had once been part of a feed trough. Faye pictured a long, crudely hollowed log holding feed for livestock. The chunk on the ground in front of her looked like a broken piece of a feed trough like that.
    Leaving the wood on the ground and circling it in an organized search pattern yielded nothing. The other pieces of the trough had not survived the tropical storms of the years since Faye’s grandmother had died. She squatted again to study the weathered wood, pulling out her cell phone to take a