Strangers

by Mary Anna Evans

  Overstreet seemed like an innately reasonable man, and that trait won out over his innate need to protect her. His gentle eyes just looked at her, while he nodded his head. Faye snatched her phone out of her pocket and speed-dialed her husband.

  She looked the body over one more time, then she went back to the car to wait for Joe—not because she couldn’t handle the corpse’s horrific condition, but because there was no sense getting in the way when she couldn’t think of anything else helpful to do. And because she was dead-certain that Overstreet would get progressively happier with every step she took away from the rotting human being who had, until an hour before, been floating free in the Matanzas River.

  ***

  Joe and Benedict and Overstreet were crouched in the boat, talking and scrutinizing and squinting at the corpse like some kind of biology project. Faye had never liked biology class, because she always felt bad about the frog or earthworm or cat or whatever it was that she was dissecting.

  Her feelings about the body they were examining were more complicated. She was deep-down glad that it didn’t belong to Glynis.

  Should she feel guilty about that?

  She should definitely feel guilty if she believed that it was extra-sad for Glynis to be chewed on by fishes, just because she was young and pretty

  She’d known Glynis for a day, but that was enough for her to know that the woman was more than pretty. She was smart and competent and interesting, and Faye had liked the way she supported her employers, particularly gentle and vulnerable Suzanne. Faye had seen that Glynis was also well able to stand up for herself in the face of her obnoxious boyfriend.

  This last fact made Faye’s feelings at the moment particularly confusing. Because the corpse rotting on the bottom of the boat was Glynis’ obnoxious boyfriend.

  ***

  Faye watched Joe and Overstreet rise to their feet and strip off their rubber gloves. Benedict tossed the other two a bottle of hand sterilizer and a towel. He probably figured that, though the gloves had protected their hands, they were both feeling fairly icky right now. And a medical examiner ought to know.

  Joe was gesturing with his hands as he wiped them, making long, powerful stabbing motions. Benedict and Overstreet leaned in close to watch the demonstration.

  Faye hauled herself to her feet. If Joe was pantomiming a murder, then she wanted to see how he thought it was done.

  Now he was pointing to Overstreet’s throat, tapping at its soft hollow. “Yeah, I think the killer used the pointed end of that broken blade, or something shaped a whole lot like it, and I think it hit Lex hard right there.”

  Joe was still pointing his index finger at the detective’s throat. “That scar on his neckbone was deep, but a blade that size could certainly have gouged it out. If I had to guess, I’d say Lex was already down when that blow was struck. You’d have to be damn lucky to strike someone dead center in the throat and drive the blade straight in, if the person was standing and fighting back. That wound looks like it was made by someone straddling somebody who was already pretty helpless.”

  Overstreet wiped his hands down and handed the towel back to Benedict. Then he stared at the river for a moment. The slow-moving blue Matanzas seemed to help him think. “So you think the person who stabbed Lex wasn’t necessarily someone who had a lot of experience with a knife?”

  This scenario would have made the murder easier for someone less physical than, say, Joe. Someone like Glynis.

  Joe nodded slowly, still picturing how the killing might have been choreographed. “Yeah. See that big bruise on his forehead,” he said. “If he got hit hard there, it might’ve immobilized him long enough for someone to finish him off. Would’ve taken something bigger and blunter to make that lump, though. Something like that celt Glynis found. You did find blood on one piece of it.”

  All three men and Faye peered over the side of the boat.

  Faye’s imagination was a little too good. She concentrated her energies on not picturing what this experience would be like for Lex or for his killer.

  “You sure know a lot about deadly weapons,” Overstreet observed.

  “Many’s the time I fed myself with ’em. Deer. Squirrels. Rabbits. Duck,” Joe said. “But in case you’re wondering,” Joe said. “I didn’t use any weapons on Lex Tifton. I would’ve just used the sharp edge of that blade to cut the carotid, myself. It’s a lot more certain than striking hard and maybe missing.”

  Faye decided to focus her mind on not picturing a man bleeding to death from an arterial neck wound.

  ***

  Faye leaned in through the open driver’s window to say good-bye to Detective Overstreet. She’d hardly known him a day, but when that day was punctuated with the discovery of a murdered man’s corpse, the bonds of friendship formed pretty quickly.

  His thin gray hair was stuck tight to his sweaty forehead and his fingernails looked freshly gnawed. She opened her mouth to tell him to go home and get some rest, but he beat her to it.

  “Tell that husband of yours to take you home and let you put your feet up. Make him get your supper for you. He should also talk to you about something more pleasant than prehistoric murder weapons and how to murder people with them.”

  “You mean that we shouldn’t discuss the best way to slice someone’s carotid artery while we’re sipping our after-dinner coffee?”

  “Now, you know that man’s not going to let you have any coffee.” He nodded in the general direction of Joe, who was using hand gestures to help an ambulance driver thread his way through the parking lot serving the ramp where the boat and its cargo waited.

  “Okay. I promise that we won’t talk about blood and guts while we sip our tea.”

  “Caffeine. Joe’s not going to let you have any caffeine till you have that baby. Longer, if you’re nursing. My wife’s in the La Leche League. I think she nursed ours until they got on the school bus.”

  “That’s a heckuva long time to go without caffeine.”

  Overstreet laughed. “I didn’t think she was going to survive the withdrawal…which lasted maybe three years.” He reached for his cigarettes and stopped short for about the thirtieth time that day. “I hope you survive till you can have your coffee—”

  “Coke. I’m dying for a real Coke.”

  “—your Coke. I hope you survive till you can have some real Coke again. Tell Joe I said good-bye and that it was a pleasure working with him.”

  “I’ll do that—”

  Benedict interrupted Faye by politely tapping her on the shoulder, and she stepped away from the car window. “Detective, could you come with me for a second? We were getting ready to move the body, but something just fell out of his pocket.”

  “What was it?”

  Overstreet was out of the car and had taken three steps in the direction of the boat before Benedict could answer his question.

  “I think it could be important. I mean, I can think of two or three ways this thing could get somebody mad enough to do murder.”

  Overstreet had pushed his weary body to a jog, but he still had enough wind to say, “Come on, Butch, don’t make me guess. Money’s plenty good enough to trigger a murder, but you’re not going to come grab me out of my car because the man had some Benjamins in his pocket.”

  “Well, I might if he had a thousand of ’em.”

  The two of them reached the boat, with Faye close behind, pushing her own legs as fast as they’d go. A crime scene photographer was pointing her camera at something protruding from a pocket on the chest of Lex Tifton’s sodden golf shirt. A slender blue-tipped piece of white plastic showed stark against the black fabric. The familiar thing struck at a place in Faye’s heart that, until now, had only been associated with happiness.

  Even from this distance, she could see three letters clearly through the window in that little piece of plastic. They said, “YES.”

  Why had Lex Tifton been carrying a positive pregnancy test in his shirt pocket when he was killed?

  CH
APTER FOURTEEN

  The vampire was unexpected.

  In her lifetime, Faye, like all Americans, had seen many people parading around outdoors in sweeping capes and an unhealthy pallor. But always in October, never May. Well, maybe occasionally outside movie theaters when certain movies were playing.

  The woman on the front doorstep of Dunkirk Manor looked out-of-place, standing in front of a froth of Suzanne’s white daisies and pink sweetheart roses while dressed in jet black satin. There were a dozen people standing around her, dressed normally (for tourists) in shorts, sandals, and t-shirts with risqué sayings across the chest. They seemed to see nothing odd in the woman’s clothing, not even when she called their attention to it by spreading the cape wide with both arms, then crossing them across her chest to furl it around her body.

  Faye usually parked in the employee lot but, since she’d left that morning, Daniel had finally gotten the garden gate closed and a keypad installed. With no access code, she and Joe had no choice but to park on the street.

  After conferring for a moment in the parked car, they’d decided they’d rather pay for takeout than eat yet another meal from the bounteous leftovers of Dunkirk Manor’s breakfast. So Joe had driven away to scout out nearby restaurants, and she was on her own, with no way to enter Dunkirk Manor other than to wade through the crowd on the porch. So she did so.

  The cape-wearing woman was delivering a speech that she’d obviously given a hundred times, but her delivery was fresh and convincing.

  “Thank you for joining me for this evening’s ghost tour. The costume’s just for fun…and it is fun, isn’t it?” she said, twirling in place to spin out the hem of her trumpet-shaped skirt. “But I’m serious about ghosts, and this city is full of them. We begin our tour tonight with Dunkirk Manor, one of the most haunted homes in town. Our tours begin at dusk and I’m here to tell you that I start here because I want to move on before the sun goes all the way down. I’m afraid of this place after dark.”

  She paused to let her customers titter and whisper among themselves. Faye took this opportunity to politely wend her way through the crowd toward the front door.

  The vampire assailed her as she approached the door. “Faye!”

  Faye was pretty sure that she didn’t know anybody with fangs.

  “It’s me, Harriet!”

  And indeed it was. Faye recognized the librarian’s long frosted hair and trim figure, but her daytime look had lacked the gothic glamour and exposed cleavage of these vampire threads.

  Harriet gave her a quick hug and whispered in her ear. “I’d love to talk to you sometime about the inside of this house. I’m only allowed to take my guests into the entry hall for the tour.” Then she turned her attention back to the paying customers.

  “Dunkirk Manor is one of the poured-concrete buildings characteristic of St. Augustine. When Henry Flagler brought his railroad down the east coast of Florida in the late 1800s, opening up the Sunshine State to tourists…like you wonderful people—” Harriet gave her audience a welcoming smile. “—he chose our city as the grand destination. And in those days, the word ‘tourist’ wasn’t in common use. Here in St. Augustine, we were still using the older word, ‘stranger,’ which I find interesting as a real-life librarian. If you start researching the history and etymology of the word ‘stranger,’ you find yourself taking a side trip through synonyms to ‘guest’ then through ‘host’ and even to ‘ghost.’ So bear in mind as we enter the house that we may not be the only ‘strangers’ in the room.”

  The tourists laughed.

  “Our next stop,” Harriet continued, “is St. Augustine’s city gate, one of the most haunted places in town. I see it as a symbol, because this place is one of the first gateways from the Old World to the New. This is where the European invaders stepped ashore and stayed. And when you think about ghosts and guests and strangers…well, from the First Americans’ point-of-view, weren’t the Europeans the ultimate strangers?”

  She flung open the front door, motioning to Faye to enter ahead of them. Faye hadn’t used the front door since she first arrived, and the sumptuous entry hall seemed cold and empty and filled with echoes, compared to the warm conviviality on the flower-draped front porch.

  “As I was saying, the poured-concrete construction of Dunkirk Manor is characteristic of Gilded Age St. Augustine. Henry Flagler’s Hotel Ponce de León was the nation’s first major poured-in-place concrete building and it was among the first major buildings to have electricity. I’m told that Flagler employed electricians whose only job was to go from room to room, turning the lights on and off for the hotel’s guests…tourists…strangers…ghosts. Whatever.”

  Motioning her tour group into the house, Harriet flicked the wall switch and the electric wall sconces flickered spookily. “Don’t tell the owners I did that, Faye.”

  “I’ll take your secret to the grave.” Faye was tickled to see that her weak ghost joke got some giggles from the tourists.

  “Dunkirk Manor is the home of several ghosts. The first Dunkirk couple who lived here are said to have shared their wedding night with a bunch of angry spirits who whispered in their ears for hours in foreign languages that neither of them recognized. They moved to another room, then another, but the constant chatter continued until dawn. Mrs. Dunkirk announced the next morning that she was returning to Pennsylvania on the first train and invited her husband to join her. This put Mr. Dunkirk in a major bind. As one of Henry Flagler’s top officers in the East Coast Florida Railway, he made plenty of money, but you can see how even a rich man could sink his entire fortune in this house.”

  Harriet extended her long arms toward the walls, covered from polished floor to high ceiling with hand-crafted woodwork. “And he had no hope of selling it, because nobody in town had enough money but Henry Flagler, and Flagler had his own mansion. Mr. Dunkirk persuaded his bride to go to her parents’ home in Pennsylvania for a few months while he consulted a priest for an exorcism. The priest said the place was full of really pissed-off Timucuans who had been killed off by the Spanish. He did the best he could, but he advised Mr. Dunkirk to just give the house over to the ghosts at night. The priest told him that if he built a bedroom wing to the rear, he was pretty sure that the ghosts and demons would leave the young couple alone there. You can see in this photo that the rear wing isn’t made of poured concrete. It would have cost too much to bring the masons back out to the property, and Mr. Dunkirk had already blown all the cash he could afford.”

  She held up a large book with a color photo of Dunkirk Manor’s rear garden. Faye had spent two days in that garden without paying any attention to the rear wing, but Harriet was right. It was a wood frame structure protruding from the opposite side of the main building from the garden gate and parking lot. Its design was rather plain for the late Victorian era, and it looked out of place stuck onto the back of a building that was otherwise perfectly symmetrical—twin square turrets on either side of a vast rectangular block of a house, with a central rear wing housing the kitchen and servants’ quarters.

  Faye knew that the interior was just as symmetrical, with the rectangular atrium surrounded by double parlors and even twin dining rooms. The kitchen wing, though larger, balanced the entry hall nicely, and the two identical turrets towered above it all. How interesting that all the bed-and-breakfast guest rooms were in the new wing. Daniel and Suzanne slept in the main house, and so did the archaeology team, but not the paying guests.

  “I think Mrs. Dunkirk never intended to come back to Florida, but apparently the ghosts didn’t disturb her entire wedding night. She returned to St. Augustine in time for her only child, Raymond, to be born, right here in this house.”

  “But probably in the rear wing,” said a gray-bearded man.

  “Probably,” Harriet said with a laugh. “They say that she lived here until young Raymond was seven, then went home to Pennsylvania for good. The boy stayed here, to be reared by his father and their servants.”

  Faye remember
ed Raymond’s black eyes. They had stared coolly out of both photos she’d seen of him, unreadable. Maybe the nameless emotion in those eyes had been the loneliness of a boy whose mother had abandoned him. She shivered, wishing she could just go to bed and lie under the covers until she got warm.

  Dummy, she thought. You can. You’re not part of this tour. Stop listening to Harriet’s silly ghost stories and go to bed.

  She stepped politely through the crowd and put her hand on the door that opened into the atrium, nodding good-bye to Harriet. Turning its polished brass knob, she took a step into the atrium and stopped abruptly, startled by the whoosh of cold air rushing through the doorway.

  Harriet was close behind her, saying, “This is a rare opportunity. I’ve been in the atrium a couple of times, during fundraisers given by the non-profit that maintains the house. The place is simply magnificent. Everybody try to take a peek while Faye has the door open.”

  Faye cooperated by lingering longer than strictly necessary on the threshold, willing to give the crowd a chance to see the house’s crowning glory.

  “This room is considered an architect’s marvel. Its proportions are perfectly calculated to make it seem even more vast than it is. The stained glass of the atrium ceiling, made in a peacock feathers pattern, was based on a design by Louis Comfort Tiffany,” Harriet said, pointing upward, over Faye’s shoulder. “Like the rest of the house, the atrium is perfectly symmetrical from left to right, as if a mirror were placed in the center of the room, just between the matching staircases leading to the balconies that surround the second and third floors. And try to get a glimpse of the artwork, if you can. You can get a taste of it in here,” she gestured to the bold paintings that ringed the entry hall walls, “but everything in the atrium is on a monumental scale, and that includes the art.”

  Faye hadn’t noticed the size of the paintings on her first visit to the atrium. They were the right size for the room, so their scale didn’t call attention to itself, but that room was immense. The painting to her immediate right, a surreal landscape under a bronze sky studded with sun, moon, stars, and comets, was taller than she was. The subject, a young man with a flowing beard and long red hair, was shackled to a spreading oak tree.