Read Online Artifacts by Mary Anna Evans - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Mary Anna Evans
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rock era, but Faye’s mother had known how to maintain an engine and she had passed her skills on to her daughter. The ugly rattletrap always cranked.
Faye’s old Bonneville could have found its way to Tallahassee with no driver behind its wheel. Its parsimonious owner wished it could find its way to Tallahassee with nothing in its gas-guzzling tank, but she continued to feed it. Now, if the beast could be cajoled into an approximation of the speed limit, she would arrive in time to make a detour to the university library. Given an hour in the newspaper archives, she laid odds that she could identify the mystery woman buried alone in the Last Isles.
The fact that its archives were not available on diskette or on the Web was a fair indication of the size and circulation of the Micco Times . Searching its archives was a matter of sliding one piece of plastic after another into a microfiche reader. Still, when one is single-minded, an amazing volume of drudgery can be accomplished in an hour.
It only took Faye half that time to find the name she sought. That was one of the benefits of fishing in the small pond of a weekly, as the Times was in those days. She could place the age of the body within six or eight years, given the style of the earring. An unsolved murder in small-town Florida would have been big news, plastered on the front page over a period of weeks. And the value of the earring suggested that this was no unlucky prostitute who would go unmissed and unmourned.
Every front page printed in the Florida Panhandle during the summer of 1964 had devoted space to the search for Abigail Williford. In the half-hour left to her, Faye printed out every article she could. The microfiche printer was so slow that she had time to skim each article as it printed. Column inch after column inch was devoted to informing readers exactly who the missing girl was, though it was apparent to Faye that most of the newspaper’s readership already knew more about her than the reporters themselves.
Abigail Williford was the eighteen-year-old daughter of the richest man in Micco County. He had inherited tracts of middling farmland so large that income from his sharecroppers and tenant farmers would have kept him comfortable for life, but he was not a man to be idly rich. He had built a thriving construction business and, by the time of his daughter’s disappearance, he was a widower employing a goodly percentage of the farmers and day laborers in the area.
Each article was adorned with the same close-up photograph of Abigail. Clearly a senior portrait intended for the school yearbook, it showed a smiling dark-haired girl glancing at the camera over a shoulder draped in chiffon. Every newspaper printed the same photo, week after week, all summer.
Faye imagined the grieving father sitting alone in his home with the life-sized original portrait on the wall until the day he ripped it down, shattered the glass that covered it, and splintered the wood frame rather than look at his missing daughter’s face any longer. Faye wished for a single glance at that original photograph, cursing the enthusiastic journalist who had cropped and enlarged the photo until Abby’s face filled nearly the entire rectangle.
She understood his motives— make the face prominent and find the girl while she’s still wearing that untouched young smile —but the search for the missing girl had been a failure. No one ever saw Abby again, not until Faye had dug her up. Even now, she couldn’t be sure. The overzealous photographer had trimmed away the girl’s earlobes.
The missing person’s report stated that Abby was believed to be wearing her customary jewelry, pearl earrings and a silver necklace, but it gave no further description. Where was the silver necklace? She figured it was wherever the other earring was. And a simple mention of pearl earrings wasn’t enough proof for Faye’s tough brand of logic. Every girl of means had owned a pair of simple
Faye’s old Bonneville could have found its way to Tallahassee with no driver behind its wheel. Its parsimonious owner wished it could find its way to Tallahassee with nothing in its gas-guzzling tank, but she continued to feed it. Now, if the beast could be cajoled into an approximation of the speed limit, she would arrive in time to make a detour to the university library. Given an hour in the newspaper archives, she laid odds that she could identify the mystery woman buried alone in the Last Isles.
The fact that its archives were not available on diskette or on the Web was a fair indication of the size and circulation of the Micco Times . Searching its archives was a matter of sliding one piece of plastic after another into a microfiche reader. Still, when one is single-minded, an amazing volume of drudgery can be accomplished in an hour.
It only took Faye half that time to find the name she sought. That was one of the benefits of fishing in the small pond of a weekly, as the Times was in those days. She could place the age of the body within six or eight years, given the style of the earring. An unsolved murder in small-town Florida would have been big news, plastered on the front page over a period of weeks. And the value of the earring suggested that this was no unlucky prostitute who would go unmissed and unmourned.
Every front page printed in the Florida Panhandle during the summer of 1964 had devoted space to the search for Abigail Williford. In the half-hour left to her, Faye printed out every article she could. The microfiche printer was so slow that she had time to skim each article as it printed. Column inch after column inch was devoted to informing readers exactly who the missing girl was, though it was apparent to Faye that most of the newspaper’s readership already knew more about her than the reporters themselves.
Abigail Williford was the eighteen-year-old daughter of the richest man in Micco County. He had inherited tracts of middling farmland so large that income from his sharecroppers and tenant farmers would have kept him comfortable for life, but he was not a man to be idly rich. He had built a thriving construction business and, by the time of his daughter’s disappearance, he was a widower employing a goodly percentage of the farmers and day laborers in the area.
Each article was adorned with the same close-up photograph of Abigail. Clearly a senior portrait intended for the school yearbook, it showed a smiling dark-haired girl glancing at the camera over a shoulder draped in chiffon. Every newspaper printed the same photo, week after week, all summer.
Faye imagined the grieving father sitting alone in his home with the life-sized original portrait on the wall until the day he ripped it down, shattered the glass that covered it, and splintered the wood frame rather than look at his missing daughter’s face any longer. Faye wished for a single glance at that original photograph, cursing the enthusiastic journalist who had cropped and enlarged the photo until Abby’s face filled nearly the entire rectangle.
She understood his motives— make the face prominent and find the girl while she’s still wearing that untouched young smile —but the search for the missing girl had been a failure. No one ever saw Abby again, not until Faye had dug her up. Even now, she couldn’t be sure. The overzealous photographer had trimmed away the girl’s earlobes.
The missing person’s report stated that Abby was believed to be wearing her customary jewelry, pearl earrings and a silver necklace, but it gave no further description. Where was the silver necklace? She figured it was wherever the other earring was. And a simple mention of pearl earrings wasn’t enough proof for Faye’s tough brand of logic. Every girl of means had owned a pair of simple
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