Strangers

by Mary Anna Evans

  “Why didn’t you show me these this morning?”

  “Oh, don’t worry. I wasn’t keeping anything from you. It’s just that the lab hadn’t released the materials. Besides, we didn’t know what we had.”

  “Come again?” Faye said, one more time. How could the police not know about the artifacts Glynis had apparently wanted her to see?

  “Ms. Smithson had written her note, then folded it up and put it in an envelope with the smaller stuff—the crucifix, the musket balls, the beads, the bone. The broken blade and the pieces of the—um, did you call it a celt?—were a little too big for the envelope, so maybe she was carrying them in her hand when she was…kidnapped…or attacked…or whatever it was that happened to her. We found the broken blade and this piece of the celt on the passenger seat of the car, resting on a pile of wadded-up wrapping paper. The chunk of celt in the photo was on the ground outside. I was wondering if you could tell whether the celt was broken recently, maybe during a struggle this morning, or whether it was already broken.”

  “Let me see.” Faye reached for the photo and the hunk of stone.

  Overstreet pulled a few more photos out of his file, showing the two weapons from all possible angles.

  Faye pulled a magnifier out of her purse and studied the celt’s fracture plane, both on the physical piece of rock and in the photo. “I’d say it’s been a real long time since this club was in one piece. A lab could tell you for sure.”

  “I had a feeling that interviewing you would be useful.”

  “I can’t imagine that knowing the age of the celt, or whether it had been broken for long, would give you much that would help you find Glynis.”

  “The celt is rather…important.”

  Faye turned her attention to a photo that focused tightly on the celt’s blunt edge. A smear of blood resolved itself in front of her eyes, and she set the magnifier down with a clatter.

  Steeling herself, she picked it back up. “I think this celt looks like it has been…used for its design purpose.”

  “That is, peculiarly scientific way of saying that you think someone was bashed with this stone club.”

  “I’m a scientist. So sue me. And I don’t deal on a day-to-day basis with weapons that have been recently used.”

  “Believe me when I say that I wish I didn’t.”

  She turned her attention back to the blade. “If I really wanted to hurt somebody, though, I don’t think I’d club them with the celt. I’d use this. Even though the pointy business end of it is gone, the part that’s left is still a fearsome thing.”

  “There’s not a trace of blood on it. Believe me, we looked. Because we think somebody got hurt this morning with something a lot sharper than a broken Indian war club.”

  “Oh, Glynis.” The words escaped Faye’s lips like a sigh.

  “No, not Glynis.” Detective Overstreet paused, then he backpedaled. “Well, maybe not. Two people got hurt this morning. We know that because the blood we found wasn’t all the same type, and most of it wasn’t hers. I’m hoping the lab can tell me whether the blood got on this celt because it was just…everywhere…or because somebody used it as a weapon. It’s certainly solid enough to do some serious damage if someone decided to bash someone else in the head. I guess I never really answered your question about why I didn’t tell you about the note when I was here this morning. That’s why.”

  He rubbed a finger on the photo, as if trying to wipe the blood off the celt’s blunt edge.

  Faye wasn’t following him. “What’s why?”

  “We didn’t know that Miss Smithson had written you a note this morning, because we hadn’t opened the envelope yet. We couldn’t open it right then because…well…”

  Faye waited.

  “Aw, ma’am, I don’t like to say such things to a pregnant lady. But there’s no help for it. You may be able to help us get that young woman back home to her family. The more I think about it, the more I think I need to get the department to issue you a consultant’s contract. You know stuff about the potential murder weapons that I just can’t know. And you understand the ramifications of Glynis’ artifacts, in terms of money and politics, in ways that I don’t.”

  He shuffled the rosary beads around the table, and Faye wished he weren’t spreading his skin oils all over things that were potentially so old.

  “It’s like this,” he said. “We didn’t know about the note this morning, because we didn’t want to open the envelope until the forensics lab could process it and open it under a controlled environment.” The detective lowered his calm voice a single decibel. “Because it was saturated in blood.”

  ***

  Dr. Faye Longchamp-Mantooth put a hand on the table in front of her, using the leverage to hoist herself out of her chair. Detective Overstreet thought she looked like the events of the day had sapped her last erg of energy.

  He rose, too, walking with her toward the door. She tottered a bit and he reached for her arm.

  She smiled and her teeth gleamed white in her golden-brown skin. “It’s okay, Detective. My husband’s out back with our crew. I can walk that far. Really.”

  He was sure she could. Nevertheless, he was going to dog her steps until he placed her in the care of that big, strong husband. Then he was going to remind Daniel Wrather to get a contractor out here to install a lock and a key-coded opener on the iron gate leading to the parking lot and back garden, so that he could control access to his property. Never mind that the gate hadn’t been locked, or even closed, in fifty years. Something terrible was afoot.

  Detective Overstreet walked at Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth’s side until he had shaken hands with her husband and handed the pretty doctor over to him. He had seen the things that one human being could do to another, and just because this woman thought she could take care of herself didn’t mean that it was true.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Faye had learned early in her career that moving dirt around was a peaceful thing. Glynis’ disappearance had fouled her mind considerably, so she’d set aside her plan to spend the rest of the afternoon translating Father Domingo’s memoirs. Instead, she was on her knees, clearing away the dirt atop more of the stone tiles so that Levon could pry them up to see what was underneath.

  Joe had spent the first half-hour after her return telling her to go sit down. He’d shot her disgusted looks for another hour and a half, then he’d given up. She hoped he forgave her by quitting time, because she was going to need help standing up, and he was the only person close-by who was big enough to give it to her.

  Her work crew had a spectator this afternoon, an elderly busybody named Victor. After Victor took up residence in Dunkirk Manor’s back garden, Faye had sent Kirk to ask Daniel to please shut the garden gate, but she hadn’t had the heart to send the feeble man packing.

  Daniel had come out to tell Faye himself that he was having a keypad entry system put on the gate. He’d brought one of the police officers who were still searching the grounds for signs of Glynis to check out the interloper, but it hadn’t taken any of them long to figure out that a ninety-year-old man had not attacked and wounded young, strong Glynis. And if Victor had seen anything that morning that would help find the young woman, it was lost in the clouds of senility where he floated so happily.

  Faye had asked Victor where he lived, and she’d gotten a vague reference to a boarding house downtown where he’d eaten for a while after World War II. She sure hoped he wasn’t sleeping under a bridge somewhere, and that he owned more possessions than the scraggly junk in his Piggly-Wiggly shopping cart.

  Victor, however, wasn’t worried about where he slept nor whether he owned anything he couldn’t push around in his shopping cart. After the police officer left to resume the gargantuan effort of searching Dunkirk Manor, Victor had shoved his cart into the shadow of a tree, then trotted across the garden lawn at an astonishing clip to take a gander at the archaeologists’ work.

  Faye would never forget his happy, burbling tone as he crie
d out, “What are you folks doin’ back here? This looks interesting.”

  Not wanting to encourage him, Faye had given a polite but brief answer to the question of “What are you folks doin’ back here?” She’d learned that it didn’t take much to encourage Victor.

  For a no-nonsense scientist, Faye was a little soft-hearted so, though it had taken her an hour to train him to stay out of her crew’s hair, she couldn’t bring herself to chase Victor away.

  “Never was sure whether the Mr. Raymond Dunkirk I knew in the Twenties was the man who built this place, or whether it was his father—”

  Faye knew that it was his father, because she’d seen the deed and she knew both Dunkirks’ birthdates and death dates. She wondered just how old Victor was, if he remembered the 1920s so well. If he was over ninety, it was indeed possible that he remembered the Jazz Age.

  “—but I do know that the railroads must have paid the people that ran them a powerful lot of money back in those days. You could tell, just by the way they flung cash around. That’s where Mister Raymond’s father got all his money. Mister Raymond…he doctored people. That’s where he got his money.’”

  Faye had inventoried the Piggly-Wiggly shopping buggy. There was nothing in it but a pink wool sweater, a stack of Captain America comic books, and an electric skillet. She wondered what “a powerful lot of money” was to Victor.

  “Miz Dunkirk—she used to let me call her Miss Allyce—went around in fancy dresses, a-drippin’ with jewels. Then, at night, she changed into even fancier dresses and put on different jew’lry that she saved just to wear at night. And she did that every night, even when nobody wasn’t coming to eat at that big long table but her and Mr. Dunkirk. Used a different dining room at night, too. There was times after my folks died when I ate there with ’em. Me and my raggedy knee pants.”

  Victor shook his head at the thought, then he just kept shaking it for awhile, as if it felt good to work the kinks out of his aged neck.

  Faye eyeballed the back of the hulking Dunkirk mansion. She imagined that the people who had lived there could have afforded to behave exactly as Victor described.

  Still shaking his head a little, he asked, “Tell me one more time why you folks are digging back here?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Wrather hired us. They want to build a swimming pool back here for their guests, and—”

  Victor couldn’t be bothered to wait for the answer to his question. “What in the heck they need another swimming pool for? Mr. Dunkirk—the one I knew—he tore up the one he had. Tore it up and filled it in with dirt.”

  There, from the mouth of a man who was possibly both homeless and senile, was the answer to the question of the hour…the month, actually. Well, except for the bigger question of Glynis’ whereabouts.

  Faye didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to her to ask Victor what he remembered about her worksite. Probably because she’d had no way to know that he was so familiar with Dunkirk Manor and its inhabitants.

  For the next hour, Victor was the center of attention, as he led Faye, Joe, Magda, Levon, and Kirk on a tour of the great house’s rear garden, saying things like, “Wouldja look at how big Miss Allyce’s camellias have got? I helped her plant that one there. It blooms red, all winter long. And just look at her crepe myrtles getting ready to bloom.”

  After a few minutes of listening to Victor, Faye called Suzanne and Daniel. She knew they’d enjoy Victor’s stories.

  “The swimming pool…it was a big one. And deep. Mr. Dunkirk could dive like a seagull going after its dinner. I saw him do it lots of times when I was a little kid living down the street, ’cause Miss Allyce used to let me come swimming. She’d swim, too, like a fish, wearing one o’ them old-timey bathing suits that looked like long dresses with pants under ’em. Salty, that water was.”

  Magda grinned at this confirmation of her theory that the pool had been filled with water piped from the brackish river.

  “Allyce Dunkirk was my great-great-aunt,” Suzanne said. “I don’t remember her, but my father inherited this house from her and her husband. It’s so nice to talk to someone who knew my family. Did you know my father?”

  “That may be. I knew a young scamp who used to climb that tree there and drop right into the pool.” He pointed to a massive live oak.

  “Does this look familiar to you?” Faye asked, holding out a fragment of one of the black-and-white Art Deco tiles.

  The wrinkled face softened. “Yes. Oh yes, it was such a pretty thing, that pool. Them black-and-white tiles ran around the rim, and all the others was snow-white. The walls and the bottom and the wide steps where the pretty ladies walked so careful into the water—they was all slick and white. And the railings for them to hold onto were all shiny and silvery. The men…they jumped and dived and jack-knifed right into the deep end, else they would have looked all sissy-like, creeping down the steps a-clutching the hand-holds like a girl.”

  He took the broken tile in his hand. “Betsy would like this. She’s a pretty girl and she does like pretty things. She should really be more careful what she does to get ’em, though.” His gaze turned to Faye’s face. “Listen. Folks should listen more better when I talk to ’em. You should all be more careful what you do for pretty things.”

  Faye wasn’t sure how to answer him, but it didn’t matter. Victor just kept talking.

  “You people, for example,” he said, gesticulating first at Faye, then Joe, then the rest of the archaeologists. “What call do you folks have to come here and disturb the dead?”

  Magda leapt into the conversational breach. “Now, Victor, it’s not like we’re digging in a graveyard here. We’re not disturbing the dead. We’re just digging up their stuff.”

  Daniel and Suzanne nodded vigorously, as if to say, “Besides…it’s our stuff now!”

  Victor’s mood had darkened. He had no more stories to tell about little boys leaping into a gleaming saltwater pool. Now he was shaking his grizzled head and muttering about dead people and foolish girls and greed and death.

  He shuffled over to his Piggly Wiggly cart, saying, “Time to go. Time to go.”

  Go where? Faye wondered. Where did this very old and sometimes very confused man sleep?

  She didn’t like to pry, but no one should be homeless, especially not someone so feeble and fragile. “Victor,” she began in a light tone of voice, “do you live near here?”

  He glared at her as if she’d asked the most personal question imaginable. “Sure do. Always have.” This didn’t answer Faye’s real question, which was whether the place near here where he lived had an actual roof.

  Victor was still muttering under his breath but, after a moment, the words grew loud enough to understand. “Gotta go. Gotta go. But I gotta do something for the children first.”

  He reached deep into the pocket of his baggy black pants and came up with a handful of coins.

  “…something for the children…” he crooned the words softly.

  Walking from person to person, he carefully set a coin on the palms of Levon and Kirk and Faye and Joe. She found it interesting that a ninety-year-old man drew the line between children and adults at the onset of middle age. Forty-year-old and pregnant Faye was one of the “children,” but forty-eight-year-old Magda and fiftyish Daniel and Suzanne missed the cut.

  Faye watched Victor wander out the gate, and she resolved to ask Detective Overstreet if he knew where the old man lived. She glanced down at the coin on her palm. It was a dime, but the gleam of the sun on its worn surface was all wrong.

  Looking more closely, she saw why the light reflected strangely from the dime. It was silver.

  Minted in 1941, Faye’s gift coin was a Mercury dime, adorned with the head of Liberty, wearing a winged cap. Looking over Joe’s shoulder, she saw that he’d gotten a modern Roosevelt dime, while Levon held an older Roosevelt dime, also with the unmistakable sheen of silver.

  “He does that…gives away dimes, I mean,” Suzanne said. “The cook grew up here, a
nd she says he’s done that for as long as she remembers.”

  Faye didn’t know much about American coins, but even this worn silver dime in her hand might be worth ten or twenty bucks. Who knew what else Victor was carrying around? If he was destitute, the answer to his problems might be found in the pocket of his worn black pants.

  ***

  Faye’s day was ending in the best way possible, considering the way it had started. She’d given their room a good dusting, which had gone a long way toward making it comfortable. Now, it was quiet and peaceful, except for the sound of the television.

  She was curled up in bed in front of the TV, her head on Joe’s shoulder and a chunk of blueberry coffeecake on a plate in her lap. More accurately, the plate was sort of balanced on her belly, because she couldn’t actually see her lap any more. Even more accurately, the blueberry coffeecake on that plate was crowned with a dollop of ice cream, thanks to Suzanne’s amply stocked kitchen.

  The coffeecake was so good that she wanted to grab it with both hands and shove the whole thing into her mouth at once. She might be sleeping in a dump, but the leftovers at an upscale bed and breakfast were divine.

  Her mind was calming itself after a tough day…a tough week…a tough year. Okay, a tough life. She’d traded the worries of a grad student for the worries of a business owner, and now she was trading her life-long grief over parents who had died too young for the typical towering pile of parental fears.

  Would the baby be okay? Would she know how to take care of it? Oh, God, would she drop it or do something else stupid that would maim it for the rest of its life?

  Should she have let the doctor tell her its sex, so she could stop calling her baby “it”?

  Joe seemed to be exercising his own particular brand of Creek zen, because he looked completely calm. She had always liked to look at him, but now she could play the completely distracting game of “What-will-our-baby-look-like?”