According to Harriet, it was rumored that Robert Ripley had acquired it by bribing a clerk. If so, it had disappeared into the vast collection of bizarre rarities collected by the globe-trotting founder of the Believe-It-or-Not empire. Harriet reported that it was speculated that Ripley’s friendship with Raymond Dunkirk and his obsession with the Lilibeth Campbell case had sparked the interest in St. Augustine that had prompted him to found his first permanent museum of oddities there.
One interesting angle to Harriet’s research was her analysis of the surviving photos of the doomed Lilibeth. They had disproven her most dearly held theory—that Lilibeth had been pregnant at the time of her murder. Faye flipped through the photos at the center of the book. While it was true that the loose, flapper-style clothing of the day could have camouflaged an early pregnancy, and the apple-cheeked ideal of beauty of that day echoed a pregnant woman’s lovely glow, the photos told a different story.
Lilibeth had been photographed several times during the weeks before her death, sometimes wearing scanty harem girl costumes from her movie and sometimes draped in revealing evening gowns made by an exclusive couturier. Her small breasts, flat abdomen, and narrow waist could not have belonged to a pregnant woman…at least, not to a woman who was pregnant enough to be aware of it, back in the days before near-instantaneous testing.
The thought of Glynis caught Faye’s breath in her chest. Her figure had been as slim and girlish as Lilibeth’s, but modern technology had told her she was pregnant, maybe on the very morning she disappeared.
Where are you, Glynis? Faye wondered. Are you and your baby safe?
Harriet had been intellectually honest enough to look at the photos and reject her pet theory. She also rejected a variation of it, that Raymond Dunkirk had used his physician’s training to abort their child sometime prior to a tumultuous argument that ended in her death. It simply wasn’t possible for Lilibeth to have been pregnant enough for either of them to know about it, not in 1928.
Joe rolled over and the old bed squeaked. There was no other sound. The contrast between the creaky spring and the still silence reminded Faye that she was living in a house poured of solid concrete. She might as well have been in a recording studio, completely insulated from the noise of the rest of the world.
The silence gave her the focus she needed to do her best work. She felt at her best as an archaeologist when she could leave the twenty-first century behind and imagine herself in a past she’d never seen.
Joe raised up on one elbow. “Have you memorized that book yet?”
“Nah. I’m just looking at the pictures, mostly. Take a look.”
Faye flipped through the photos, looking for scenes of life at Dunkirk Manor to show him. There was no better way to take the traces of the past Joe was digging out of the back garden and make them real.
Besides the photos she’d already seen—of the movie moguls pawing Lilibeth, of Lilibeth lolling by the pool, and of Lilibeth and Raymond under the staircase—Faye found several others to show Joe, some of which were taken by the pool and in the atrium. In one of those, the door to the entry hall was open, giving them a glimpse into a room that hardly appeared to have changed at all.
“That bookcase is gone now,” Joe said, rubbing a finger over the page. “Remember? That’s where the new elevator is. The elevator shaft runs up the turret on the right side of the entry hall. Other than that, everything looks the same.”
The photos showed that the decades hadn’t even brought that small degree of change to the atrium. Even the paintings on the wall and the curtains around the doorways were familiar. A photo series of a dinner party that spilled through the atrium and into both dining rooms showed that neither of those chambers had changed, either.
“Daniel and Suzanne don’t believe in redecorating, not any more than you do,” Joe said. “You folks take historical authenticity to a whole new level.”
Faye, who didn’t even like mopping her historic home’s wood floors with modern cleaner, rolled her eyes at him and said, “Except for the government-mandated elevator and the demolished swimming pool, this mansion might as well have been sealed in amber. The swimming pool bothers me, though.”
“Why? It was just a hole in the ground that’s not even there any more.”
“It bothers me because I didn’t even know it existed. Before we got here, I looked at everything I could find online and in the library. Books. Aerial photographs. Property surveys. Old fire insurance atlases. But I missed the pool.”
“Nobody’s perfect, Faye. I know you’d like to be, but facts are facts.”
Faye ignored his teasing, except for a well-aimed kick at his leg under the sheets. “I need to check the dates on the documents I saw, but there’s no flippin’ way that pool existed more than a few years.”
“Well…as long as you weren’t wrong…”
Joe headed for the bathroom and she swatted at his tight butt as he passed. She missed.
Perhaps the answer to the question of the disappearing pool was as simple as the boredom of the very rich. Perhaps Allyce had begged for a pool because it was such a conspicuous luxury to own a home pool in those days. Then, as her friends began to copy her ostentation, maybe she’d turned to Raymond and said, “Swimming pools are becoming so…common. I simply can’t bear it any longer. Besides, we need the space for an oriental grotto. They’re all the rage now.”
Raymond Dunkirk wouldn’t have been the first rich man to spend a fortune trying to keep a difficult wife happy. And in this case, it was his wife’s fortune she wanted to spend. Faye’s guess was that the pool had been a few years old when the photos of Lilibeth Campbell were made in 1928, and that it hadn’t existed much longer after that.
Faye was flipping through the photos yet again when the door burst open. The clatter it made by slamming back against the wall filled the room. Magda thrust her torso through the opening, and the distress on her face caught Faye completely off-guard. She had no doubt that Magda had run full-tilt down the hallway to tell her something terrible, possibly calling her name as she ran, but the massive walls of Dunkirk Manor had soaked up the sound of her voice and made this moment a total surprise.
“We need you both outside. Victor’s very upset. So’s Kirk. And Levon. I’m having trouble keeping them off each other, and I don’t want to have to call the police to settle this. Maybe the techs will settle down if their bosses show up.”
Joe appeared outside the bathroom door and she turned to him. “We need you two. Especially you, Joe.”
Faye knew what Magda was trying to say. Sometimes, the presence of someone very large could quiet down contentious males. But what on earth could stir up mild-mannered Levon and Kirk to the point where Magda was thinking of calling 911?
And Victor? How could police possibly be required to settle him down? Faye was pretty sure she could subdue Victor, even in her current bloated state.
Joe rushed out the service entrance, with the women close behind. Faye found that she could keep up with Magda if she wrapped her arms tight around her belly and ran hard. Rounding the corner of the kitchen wing, the fracas at the garden gate was abruptly audible.
“Open it! Open it!” Victor was rattling the newly locked gate on its hinges. “It can’t be locked, ever again. Mister Raymond said so!”
Everything about Victor was startling. The power of his voice, the depth of his anger, the strength of his withered arms as they rattled the heavy iron gate. People Victor’s age lost their physical power as a matter of course, but Faye wasn’t sure why they seemed to lose their emotional power, too. Not Victor. Ninety years of emotions seemed to be erupting out of his trembling body.
A musician friend of Faye’s had once tried to describe his experience as a performer at a nursing home. “The old folks were there in front of me, sitting in the audience. They must have wanted to see the show, or they wouldn’t have come. But they just watched me, with absolutely no expression on their faces. It was like playing racquetball aga
inst a rubber wall. I sent everything I had out there to them, but nothing came back. Did they hate every note I sang? Did they love it, but they weren’t able any more to show me how they felt? Were they listening at all? To this day, I have no idea.”
Victor, on the other hand, had not lost his ability to communicate emotion. Not in the slightest.
Joe’s long legs had already propelled him across the lawn. He grasped Victor and tried to pull the old man away from the gate without hurting him.
As Faye and Magda crossed the gravel driveway, the time-worn rocks bruised Faye’s bare feet and she prayed that she wouldn’t find any sharp objects the hard way. She was suddenly aware that she was wearing her pajamas. They were comfy, but she’d have preferred that her employees didn’t see her wrapped in pink polka-dot flannel.
“Why hasn’t anybody called the police?” Kirk shouted, shaking a shaggy mop of brown hair. “Why are we protecting this bum? Because he’s old? Glynis is missing…maybe dead…and everybody’s tiptoeing around this guy. If a homeless guy my age had been hanging around the scene of a kidnapping for no good reason, somebody would’ve already stuck him under the jail.”
Victor tried to take a swing at Kirk, but Joe blocked his arm in mid-punch. “Stop it, Victor. I ain’t going to let you hurt anybody and I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Mister Raymond told me to look after Miss Allyce. Always. Told me I could be her little boy. And I was. She loved me. I loved her. I love her.”
Victor was crying and his nose was running. Joe had his arms pinned, so Victor tucked his head down and wiped his nose on his shoulder, like a child from another time who had lost his handkerchief. “You can’t lock that gate. You can’t! She hates it.”
“Kirk’s right. We’ve been talking about this since Glynis…disappeared,” Levon said. His close-cropped black hair and neatly trimmed beard framed a tormented face. “This old man’s angry and he’s physical about it. He’s not in his right mind. He hangs around here for no good reason.”
He walked over close to Victor and got in his face, which was very brave of him, considering that the man was ninety and he was being restrained by someone the size of Joe. “Why is no one calling the police?”
“I am calling the police,” Faye said, pointing to the cell phone in her hand as she dialed Detective Overstreet. Whether she agreed with the young men’s suspicions that Victor had taken Glynis was anybody’s guess. She wasn’t sure what she thought about that, herself. Overstreet could quickly get to the bottom of the question of whether it was remotely possible that a frail old man could have stolen young and vital Glynis.
Faye was curious about other things. What had Victor seen in the years that he was Allyce Dunkirk’s “little boy”? Did that rambling and feeble mind hold the answers to her professional questions about the history of Dunkirk Manor?
“Why?” Victor mourned, his tears audible in his voice. “Why did Miss Allyce stay here, all cooped up? Why would anybody take something so lovely away from the rest of the world?”
***
Overstreet had laughed off Faye’s offer to sit in on his interview with Victor. “I hired you to consult on archaeology and you did that. Exactly how do you think questioning this old man has anything to do with your area of expertise? Well, except that he’s a fossil.”
As an experienced husband, he had fended off her attempt to argue further with a simple, “No,” followed by a refusal to listen anything she had to say on the matter.
Frustrated, she’d been forced to listen as he continued to explain why he was rejecting her help. “I am quite able to talk to a crazy old dude. You need to take those pajamas you’re wearing back to bed and get some rest. I’ve spent my share of time watching my wife have babies, and I’m here to tell you this: You do not need to start that process already exhausted.”
Faye’s sore back was speaking to her, which meant that Overstreet’s last sentence made more sense than she liked to admit. So she’d limped back to bed in her bare feet, grateful that Joe didn’t scoop her up and carry her. He’d spent most of the day keeping her feet from touching the ground, so she was glad he was showing some restraint now.
Back in bed, after a hearty meal of takeout and with a hot cup of herbal tea prepared by her wonderful husband, Faye resumed paging through Harriet’s book. Several of the photos interested her because they featured scenes of Dunkirk Manor’s gardens. Allyce Dunkirk was in all of them, spade in hand. When a woman with Allyce’s money chooses to get dirty, instead of letting the hired help do it, then she clearly loves gardening.
In one unposed photo, she was wiping sweat off her face and laughing at a little boy in worn overalls, holding a watering can in his chubby hands. He was looking at Allyce as if she were a goddess walking the earth. Faye instantly knew that he was Victor.
Unlike the photo of Victor as a teenager, the resemblance wasn’t obvious. It wasn’t even there. Little children’s faces are unformed, cherubic. It takes time for genetics and experience and sun and wind to give people their faces. Still, Faye had no doubt. This little boy loved Allyce, and she loved him. He might have been born to another mother. He might have lived down the street with his blood parents. Nevertheless, he was her little boy, and he always would be, even when he was ninety years old.
Harriet’s book included a chapter with short biographies of each of the key characters in Lilibeth’s murder case. Allyce’s story was especially brief, considering that she lived for more than sixty years. She had been born in New Orleans, where she’d entered society at a traditional debutante’s cotillion.
Harriet had dutifully included a photograph of Allyce’s debut. The young woman’s light eyes gazed serenely at the camera, though Faye couldn’t tell whether they were blue or green or grey in the old black-and-white photo. Her slender form was rigidly corseted beneath a beautifully draped white satin gown, and her luxuriant brunette hair was piled high above her finely made features.
Two years after her debut, she’d posed for another picture in white—a wedding gown, this time. She was just as tightly corseted and her posture was just as erect, but there was a softness to her eyes and a gentle smile on her lips. She looked at her husband as if the camera weren’t even there. Faye was surprised to see that Raymond Dunkirk looked just as smitten with her. She supposed that cheaters were capable of love; they just weren’t capable of maintaining it after the initial infatuation wore off.
As Faye had already seen, Harriet’s collection of photos of the Dunkirks was impressive, probably because society people were photographed often, even in those days before paparazzi roamed. Raymond Dunkirk, blessed with the kind of male beauty that grows more rugged with age, but no less handsome, hardly changed over the nearly twenty years between their wedding and Lilibeth’s death.
Allyce’s looks were more affected by time, but not necessarily in a negative sense. In her late thirties at the time of the murder, she had matured into a Jazz Age beauty, with her hair cropped short and her slender body freed from the corset’s whalebones.
Faye would guess that the photo of her in the atrium with Raymond, Ripley, and a teenaged Victor was taken some years after that, but the faint crow’s-feet that were beginning to emerge only served to focus attention on those intelligent eyes. A whiff of sadness showed through the smile she gave the camera, and it occurred to Faye that she didn’t know whether Allyce and Raymond ever had children.
She checked the book, and she found that the mention of Allyce’s most personal tragedy was as brief and circumspect as the rest of her biography. Even Harriet seemed to have felt the age-old proscription against sharing too many details from the personal life of a great society lady. She said only, “Allyce and Raymond Dunkirk had no children, other than a son who was stillborn in 1926. She is also rumored to have suffered a late miscarriage in 1925.”
The silver rattle. Faye looked at the photo of Allyce with her gardening spade in hand and wondered whether there could be any doubt that she had buried her dead
son’s rattle and diaper pins in the rear garden of Dunkirk Manor in 1926. A profound sadness settled on Faye, and she wondered whether she herself was too pregnant to read about such things and still keep a level head.
She flipped through the photos of Allyce, paused, then flipped through them again. At times, Allyce had displayed the early twentieth century ideal of female beauty—apple cheeks, rosy complexion, full breasts—that Faye associated with Gibson girls and period Coca-Cola advertisements. At other times, she had the lean sharp glamour of a flapper. She thought of Harriet’s analysis of Lilibeth’s photos for signs of pregnancy, and she wondered…
Grabbing a pen and paper, Faye began sketching a timeline for Allyce like the one that Harriet had drawn for Lilibeth. She found photos of Allyce taken throughout the first twenty years of her marriage, but there was an obvious gap in 1926, when she would have been pregnant. Looking back at 1925, Faye saw a similar gap. No lady of the day would have allowed herself to be photographed in that condition. The only photo of Allyce taken in 1925 showed a heartstoppingly lovely woman with a glowing complexion and soft eyes. The blast of hormones that signaled the beginning of pregnancy could not have been more obvious on her face.
An early 1926 photo showed the same luminous glow, though Faye could have sworn she detected melancholy in those dark eyes. Becoming pregnant so soon after the loss of a child was hard on a woman, body and soul.
With her new insight, Faye worked her way backwards through Allyce Dunkirk’s thirties and twenties, and the pattern was unmistakable. Again and again, the thin, sad woman bloomed into her full beauty, then she disappeared from the photographic record for months, only to reappear, thin and sad. The scenario even recurred in 1928, the year of Lilibeth Campbell’s murder.
Strangers Page 18
