Free Findings by Mary Anna Evans

F301.
    Faye recognized the cryptic letters and numbers instantly. Any student in a graduate program that still required extensive research on hard copy documents would recognize it. This was a Library of Congress call number.
    Actually, it was only part of a call number. RARE signified a book shelved with rare documents. The F said that the book’s topic was American history. She’d need to look it up, but she was pretty sure that 301 was one of the numbers assigned to the states ringing the Gulf of Mexico. There should have been a period after the 301, and some additional characters identifying the exact document, but they were missing.
    Without those characters, this call number would leave her standing helplessly in front of a whole row of shelves full of books on southeastern history. Without some clue about what Wally had wanted her to know, she could paw through all those books for months without finding anything.
    Baffled, Faye left Wally’s note in the sink to dry and got in the shower. Sometime in her shampoo cycle, between lather, rinse, and repeat, Wally’s contorted face crept into her mind and wouldn’t leave. He may have been a scoundrel, but he’d been her friend, too. Faye was just so sad to get him back, only to lose him forever.
    His last words came back to her. Remember before, Faye. She and Wally went back a long way. There was plenty of “before” for her to remember.
    ***
    Faye considered a night of dreamless sleep in her own bed to be the very definition of heaven. When she woke, Joe had already gone fishing and cleaned the morning’s catch, which was a fair measure of how badly she’d needed the sleep. A breakfast of grilled fish that couldn’t have been fresher quelled her nervous stomach.
    If she purposefully kept her thoughts on the here-and-now, ignoring her insistent memories of Douglass in his coffin and Wally lying dead in her lap, then she felt almost ordinary…until she flashed back on the sound of Emma’s voice as she told her that Douglass was gone. Or until Wally’s weak, thready voice intruded on her ears, insisting that she “remember before.”
    “The sheriff told me to bring you back to see him this morning. He said he’d want to talk to you some more. About Wally and all that stuff.”
    Faye nodded. The fish in her mouth tasted like smoke and sea. It seemed a lot more real than the bizarre happenings that had taken the lives of two of her friends. The sand, the fish, the warm air, the sea smells, the fresh breeze—these things were real. The dead bodies of her friends were not.
    What had left their bodies at the moment of their death? She had watched Wally pass from this world to the next, yet she couldn’t say what had happened. One minute, he was himself, alive, carrying around with him the memories of their past together. The next minute, her friend was inarguably dead, but she couldn’t say how she knew it. She certainly couldn’t say how it happened. Well, there was the bleeding hole in his back, but that wasn’t what she meant. What had changed when Wally went away and left her sitting alone, with a man’s empty shell in his lap?
    Thinking of these things gave Faye vertigo. She regained her balance by reminding herself that she had no control over the things life hit her with, but she could control how she reacted to these blows. Her natural response to pain was to fight it. She could fight her friends’ murderers by helping Sheriff Mike bring them to justice.
    Faye was a little fuzzy on how she might do that. The sheriff had said he wanted her to pursue the stories behind Bachelder’s flask and the emerald. It wasn’t clear to her how learning that history would help but, like the sheriff, she had a tenuous feeling that the events of the past week were connected. She would follow the story as best she could, for Douglass and Wally, and to satisfy her own ferocious curiosity. One topic that she was uniquely qualified to pursue was the emerald. At the