Strangers

by Mary Anna Evans

  The book lay on the table between them. Faye reached out her gloved hand and took it back. “I know my responsibility. I am looking into the most suitable home for the book, and I will advise my clients accordingly.”

  This was going swimmingly. Rosa had been cordial, if a little stiff, as she piled Faye’s study table high with books on Timucuan stone tools and Spanish coins and Art Deco tiles and early twentieth-century children’s toys. Faye had only stopped poring over them because it was lunchtime and because Joe would have a spasm if she didn’t eat.

  She’d been saving the journal to show Rosa after they’d discussed all the other artifacts. She was very glad she did, because now she just wanted to get the heck out of Dodge, away from the librarian’s disapproving gaze.

  She laid a business card on the table and said firmly, “I want to do a good job for my client and for St. Augustine. My report will be filed with the city archaeologist and I’ll be happy to donate a copy of it to the library, if you’d like. If you think of anything that will make that report better, please don’t hesitate to call me.”

  Then she collected the journal and her notes and tried to exit gracefully. The part of her that despised conflict just wanted to bolt for the door and put herself far away from Rosa’s disapproval.

  Advanced pregnancy did not make for a quick or easy retreat, however. The library was housed on the second floor of a Spanish Colonial home, and it was accessed by an exterior staircase that was tough for Faye to navigate in her oversized condition. If there was an elevator for handicapped access, Faye didn’t want to take the time to look for it.

  The open courtyard at the foot of the stairs was a calm and lovely place to catch her breath. She leaned against an arch made of local coquina rock and decided to just enjoy the flowers for a minute…until the clattering of hard soles on that old wooden staircase made her want to flee. Was Rosa really going to chase her, demanding custody of a book that (probably) belonged to Daniel and Suzanne Wrather?

  Faye could flee, but she wouldn’t get very far and she wouldn’t get there fast. Because Joe had refused to let her wander the town alone with a kidnapper on the loose, she had no car and was thus trapped in the library’s courtyard. A rebellious part of her was pretty sure that Joe was using the notion of a free-range kidnapper wandering the streets to accomplish what his over-protective self had wanted to do all along: put his pregnant wife in a padded box and keep her there till the baby arrived safely.

  St. Augustine was a small town, so it had taken Joe ten minutes, tops, to pick her up at the Fountain of Youth and drive her into the historic sector so that she could make this library visit. That was pretty darn quick, but it still meant that, even if she called him right now and he left instantly, she was still trapped here for longer than she wanted to be.

  Oh, she could leave on foot and call Joe as she walked, telling him just to pick her up somewhere on Aviles Street north of the library, but she could only waddle so fast and so far. If Rosa came after her, the stern librarian would surely catch up with Faye, the evildoer who wasn’t treating Father Domingo’s manuscript properly—which was to say that she wasn’t treating it the way Rosa wanted it treated.

  As the footsteps neared the bottom of the staircase, Faye detected the distinctive tapping of a pair of stiletto pumps. What a relief. Rosa had definitely been wearing a staid pair of lace-up flat shoes.

  “Dr. Longchamp-Man…uh…”

  “Longchamp-Mantooth, but call me Faye. My married name is a real mouthful.”

  “Okay, Faye.” Seeing Faye heft her tote bag onto her shoulder and hold it close to her body, Rosa’s assistant Harriet laughed. “Relax. I didn’t come to swipe your book. Rosa can be a bit…intense…when it comes to local history. So can I, actually, but I like to think I have more perspective on the matter.”

  Harriet’s sundress and shoes were brand-new and expensive, but the dress’ dropped waist and the pointy-toed pumps gave her style just a whisper of an earlier era. Her long frosted hair, however, bore no resemblance to a flapper’s bob. Faye hoped she had as much fashion sense as Harriet when she hit her sixties. Heck. She wished she had it now.

  Harriet was overloaded with an armful of books.

  “Listen, I heard you say you’d been in the attic at Dunkirk Manor. Did you see anything interesting? Anything related to the murder?”

  “Murder?” Faye’s throat constricted. “Did they find Glynis?”

  Why did Faye’s hand clutch reflexively at her swollen belly so often these days? She forced herself to let it hang by her side.

  “No. Oh God, no. I’m sorry to startle you. You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Here, sit down.”

  Harriet helped Faye take an uncomfortable seat on a lower stair.

  “I was talking about the murder of Lilibeth Campbell, back in the Twenties. You haven’t heard about it?”

  Faye shook her head. She knew she didn’t have to speak, because she could see that Harriet had plenty to say.

  “Oh, this story has it all. Glamour, money, sex, blood, death. Did you know that St. Augustine was a major player in the early days of the movies, before Hollywood?”

  “I’ve seen some cool still shots of the Creature from the Black Lagoon being filmed at Marineland.”

  “That was later. I’m talking way before that, back in the silent era—Theda Bara, Ethel Barrymore, Rudolph Valentino. They all made movies here. And so did Lilibeth Campbell. She would have been that kind of a star if somebody hadn’t knifed her to death and left her body on the bridge that crosses the moat of the Castillo de San Marcos.”

  “Nobody knows who killed her?”

  Harriet sat beside her, books on her lap, and opened the top one. “Nope. Maybe it was the director, a well-known lecher. Maybe it was her co-star, a cut-rate Rudolph Valentino clone. Maybe it was one of the men bankrolling the movie. From these pictures,” Harriet held the book so that Faye could see, “it looks like the financial dudes thought their money gave them the right to rub their paws all over Lilibeth every chance they got.”

  “Ick,” Faye said, looking at a photo of three portly old men clustered so closely around a pretty young woman that they’d all managed to get a proprietary hand on her. Her sleeveless, knee-length dress was modest by modern standards, but to men who grew up in a world where corseted women were covered from their necks to the wrists and ankles, she must have looked half-naked. Touching her bare arm, to them, would have been like public sex.

  “Why did you ask if I’d found anything related to her murder at Dunkirk Manor?”

  “Because Raymond Dunkirk was one of the prominent men who worked so hard to bring the movies to town. He turned that fabulous atrium into a ballroom and threw over-the-top parties to lure all those disgusting old men here.”

  She waved her hand at the photo of the three Hollywood moguls lusting after a young girl. “I’ve seen photos of some of those parties…oh, you wouldn’t believe the ballgowns and the jewelry and the jazz bands perched up on the stairway landing. Dunkirk Manor was well-known for having the best bands south of Charleston. Look, here’s a picture. And there Lilibeth is, standing next to Raymond Dunkirk.”

  Faye felt the weird sense of recognition that comes with seeing a very old photo of a familiar place. The people in this photo were adults in the 1920s, so they were likely all dead. But Dunkirk Manor’s burnished magnificence was unchanged, even when depicted in faded black-and-white.

  Lilibeth Campbell was standing in the shadow of the grand staircase, partially obscured by a crowd of admirers, yet her pale oval face was the first thing Faye’s eyes lighted on. This quality of being impossible to ignore was called star power.

  The man standing a respectful distance from her right elbow had it, too. His chiseled face was as pale as Lilibeth’s, and his black eyes were set in that face like twin chips of onyx. Faye suspected that Lilibeth didn’t need to fend off the attentions of elderly drunks when Raymond Dunkirk was around.

  Harriet kept talking. “Ther
e’s the director, here in the foreground. His name was Timothy Selby. And there’s the star—Randolph Terracina. Don’t you know they gave him that screen name so people would associate him with Rudolph Valentino? Hollywood thinks people are so stupid.”

  “The movie industry has made many fortunes by underestimating their viewers’ intelligence.”

  “True,” Harriet said, lightly brushing the photographed faces of Lilibeth and Raymond. “But Randolph Terracina was not the man with the most sex appeal in this room on that night.”

  And she was right. Randolph Terracina had the big eyes and the over-pretty features and slick hairstyle that were the epitome of male beauty in that day, but Raymond Dunkirk would have been head-turningly handsome in any age.

  Harriet’s finger traced the two faces lovingly again. “I think it was a crime of passion. Everyone did at the time, actually. Newspapers were willing to publish lurid speculation in those days—and lately they’ve started to do it again—but their prose was really purple when they described the violent death of this sexy starlet.”

  Lilibeth Campbell was still looking at them out of the old photo, and she always would be.

  “They said that someone had washed her wounds clean,” Harriet said with an unseemly degree of relish, “and wrapped her in a silk sheet before dumping the body. So, yeah, there could be information on her murder in Dunkirk Manor, since this isn’t the only photo taken of her there. I heard you say that the owners inherited a pile of junk. I’m sure they did—there’s a lot of room for junk in that big old house. I imagine Lilibeth spent a lot of time there, and not just at parties.” She cocked one eyebrow.

  Faye cooperated and asked “Why?” even though she knew where the conversation was going.

  “Because the whole town knew she was having an affair with him. With Raymond Dunkirk.”

  “He was married.”

  It wasn’t a question. Victor had mentioned “Miss Allyce,” but who knew when Victor knew her? There was no reason to believe that Raymond Dunkirk was already married when this photo was taken, but Faye thought he was. She knew that men who owned mansions like Dunkirk Manor almost always owned a high-society wife as an ornament to the home. If he was lucky, that wife was more than a social asset. She had the judgment and smarts to run a small business, which is what a household of a dozen servants was.

  Faye had already spotted the slender figure on the staircase above Raymond and Lilibeth. She was graceful and smiling, but her eyes were locked with the band leader’s in a way that said she needed a word with him. This was not a woman who could be pushed around by the hired help.

  “Yes, he was married,” Harriet said, pointing to the figure on the staircase. “That’s Allyce Dunkirk, there. The whole town was apparently talking about it. When Lilibeth was killed, several people came forward with their suspicions of Raymond.”

  Faye could tell there was more scuttlebutt, but Harriet wanted to continue playing the gossip game, and gossips dearly love to be asked for their fascinating information. So she said, “There has to be more to the story.”

  “Exactly!” Harriet said, exultant. “I looked up Lilibeth’s death certificate. It’s signed by Dr. Raymond Dunkirk.”

  Faye cocked an eyebrow. “Would a doctor stab somebody to death?” she mused. “He wouldn’t be squeamish about the blood, but would he randomly hack somebody up like that? Or would he do something cleaner, like maybe using poison?”

  “When it comes to crimes of passion, I don’t think a person’s brain is really operating, do you?”

  Faye was too startled to respond. She was staring at Harriet’s book.

  Harriet had turned the page to a full-page photo taken at a party in the back garden of Dunkirk Manor. Again, though Lilibeth Campbell was doing nothing more attention-getting than lolling on a chaise lounge, her beautiful face drew the eye. And, again, Raymond Dunkirk hovered at her side.

  The chaise lounge sat on a pavement of hewn stone tiles surrounding an elegantly oval swimming pool that was rimmed with familiar Art Deco tiling.

  “I’m going to need a copy of this photo for my project report.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Faye was hardly back from her trip to town when Daniel and Suzanne brought the leftovers from breakfast out to Faye’s work site and treated the archaeological team to lunch.

  “We can’t serve this stuff again tomorrow. People will notice, and they expect fresh food at these prices. It’s still good, and it tastes wonderful, if I do say so myself. You people might as well eat it.”

  Suzanne handed Faye a loaded plate and added, “Especially you, Faye. Here’s some protein and iron and vitamin C and calcium and a whole lot of other good stuff.”

  She placed a sprig of parsley on the plate then, thoughtfully, she picked it up and moved it a half-inch closer to the plate’s rim. Faye didn’t think the placement of a bit of green stuff rated the intense concentration on Suzanne’s face, but she had to admit that the plate looked noticeably better after Suzanne moved the garnish.

  Next to the parsley was a big chunk of egg casserole and a dollop of fruit salad with sour cream dressing. The baby would thank her, but her arteries might not.

  The aroma of bacon and cheese rising from the eggs made Faye hungry for the first time in days. Hang the cholesterol. Today, she’d act like a pregnant woman, instead of a 40-year-old hoping to avoid a stroke. This food smelled good.

  She took the fork Suzanne offered. “Thank you so much. I could sure use some protein and iron and all that jazz.”

  “And some calories. You could sure use some calories, too.” Suzanne cast an evaluating eye on Faye’s body, head to toe. “That baby’s not much smaller than you are. Eat up. I promise it’ll taste better than those pregnancy vitamins. I remember that awful iron after-taste…”

  Suzanne drifted away, dispensing already-loaded plates from a rolling cart. Faye stood, plate in hand, watching her. Daniel and Suzanne had no children. If Suzanne was intimately familiar with the flavor of prenatal vitamins, then that meant…

  “We lost a child,” Daniel said, answering her unspoken question. Faye blushed, realizing that she’d been staring at Suzanne. “Annie had leukemia. She was ten. That’s when we sold everything up north and moved down here. I just couldn’t stand practicing law for another second. I was never the tough, driven trial attorney in the family, anyway. Suzanne was the brilliant litigator, not me. I’d rather play tennis. Suzanne left our practice to take care of Annie, and she was too fragile after we lost our little girl to even consider going back in the courtroom. There was an awful time when I thought I’d lose her, too. She’d inherited this place when her father died a few years back, and we both wanted to leave everything behind. Sometimes, you need to start over.”

  A tall man flung open the back door of Dunkirk Manor, making just enough noise for everyone in the garden to notice and lingering just long enough in the open doorway for everyone to see him. Then he strode across the big yard, heading straight for Daniel and Suzanne. They rushed to meet him.

  “Alan,” Suzanne said, “we’ve been so worried about you. Did you get my call? Has there been any word on Glynis?”

  Alan Smithson shook his dark-haired head wordlessly in her direction, the action of a man who knew the rules of polite behavior but who had been pushed to the brink.

  He spoke instead to her husband. “I waited for a ransom note for twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours. It didn’t come. So now I know they weren’t after my money.” He shook his head again, as if he could hardly believe it. “They weren’t after my money. They were after my daughter.”

  His mouth worked, but it refused to form any more words. Suzanne ran for the cart, poured a glass of ice water, and thrust it into his hand. Alan gulped the whole thing down.

  “I think it’s your fault, both of you.”

  Daniel took a step back in the face of Alan’s anger and put a hand on the small of Suzanne’s back.

  Alan moved like a man trained in hand-to-han
d combat. He stepped into the space vacated by his adversary, Daniel, and kept talking. “You put her in that ad. You let her be the face of something controversial.”

  “Why should preserving the past be controversial?” There was a slight quaver to Suzanne’s voice, but it somehow made Faye want to congratulate her for speaking up in the face of Alan Smithson and his practiced intimidation techniques.

  Alan looked at Suzanne as if she were a five-year-old. “Because preserving the past costs money. The preservationists who hid behind my daughter’s pretty face know how much money is at stake in the development business. They knew it then, and they know it now. The new preservation-friendly board that rode to election on my daughter’s elegant coattails will cost me something on the order of six figures, maybe seven, but I’ll survive. With the economy like it is, some of my competitors won’t be able to do that. They’ll be bankrupt in a year. You don’t think one of them might want to scare the new board into voting the right way…their way?”

  Faye was struck by Alan’s certainty that Glynis’ disappearance was linked to money. In his world, either someone kidnapped her because they wanted some of his money, or else they did it because they blamed her for the loss of their own money. He could think of no other possible motive.

  What about Glynis herself? A woman that beautiful would always be sexually vulnerable. Had her father not thought of that? Or maybe he just couldn’t bring himself to think of that.

  The first suspect in any crime against a woman is generally the man in her life. In this case, the man in Glynis’ life was missing, too. Detective Overstreet hadn’t said he was focusing his investigation on Lex, but he’d be a fool if he didn’t.

  Faye couldn’t help herself. “Why are you blaming Daniel and Suzanne when your daughter’s boyfriend is missing, too? Don’t you think Lex might have taken her?”

  “Impossible,” Alan stated with the blustering certainty of a rich man. “I know the man. He…” The bluster faded. “Well, frankly, I’m concerned that he’s been harmed by the people going after my daughter. I can’t believe…”