Strangers

by Mary Anna Evans

  “What do you think of this stuff? Overstreet asked, pointing at the leather book, the scissors, the ebony carving, the silver candlestick, the knives, the china snuffbox.

  “I think it’s all from the 1800s. I’m pretty sure the candlestick and snuffbox match family pieces I’ve seen in Dunkirk Manor. I figure either Allyce and Raymond gave this stuff to Victor when they got newer, modern stuff. Or he pulled it out of the trash.”

  “Or he’s got sticky fingers.”

  “Oh, I hope not,” said Faye. “Do we have to ask that question? Nobody alive would know whether he stole these things. Can’t we just let him be?”

  “Sure. It’s not like I see anything in this room that looks like it was stolen lately.” He dragged out another box, obviously very heavy, that was hidden under a moldy tablecloth. The contents of the box settled with a metallic clank. “Take a look at this.”

  Faye peeked inside and started to laugh. Overstreet joined her. After peering at them for second, Victor chimed in with a weak giggle that told them he had no idea why they were laughing.

  It wasn’t that the contents of the box were all that funny. It was simply that Faye and Detective Overstreet had confirmation of something they’d both suspected. The box was full, almost to the brim, of dimes, most of them silver.

  “Mister Raymond, he give me those,” Victor said, between giggles. “Every day, he give me some. Nearly ’bout. They piled up, after a while. He said I was a good boy, and I deserved to get paid because I was so nice to his Allyce. I earned my pay. I did. When I got grown, he said I might as well have this house, since I was gatekeeping already. It was a nice house then. I don’t know what happened to it.”

  His bleary eyes searched the room, as if to find cozy curtains at the windows, instead of limp, dirty rags. “I made sure I earned this place, you bet I did. Didn’t nobody ever come down this street that I didn’t tell Mister Raymond about it. Even still, nobody comes down here and I don’t know it. These days, though, I ain’t got no one to tell.”

  Overstreet was looking at Faye, daring her to understand the important point in this conversation. After a second, the answer struck her hard.

  “Nobody, Victor? Nobody ever comes down this street without you knowing about it?”

  “Nope. Not them locksmiths…” The look on Victor’s face said that he wished Raymond Dunkirk had taught him a curse word to use on the people who locked the garden gate. “Not you and Mister Joe, when you came home all muddy yesterday. And not Mister Lex Tifton, on that day when Miss Glynis went missing.”

  Faye now knew the question that Overstreet had already asked Victor, the one he wanted to hear her ask. “Did anybody else come down the street that morning, anybody that didn’t belong here?”

  “Nope, only the usual folks. The gardener and the cook and the housemaids, they drove to work. Miss Glynis, she come to work in her car. A little early, she was, but sometimes she done that. Mister Lex Tifton, he walked in the gate, right behind her car. And that’s all. Nobody else came until the police sirens came blasting up the street.”

  Faye thought through the movements of all the key players that morning. Something was missing. “Did anybody leave? Did you see Glynis leave? Or Lex? Or anybody you didn’t know?”

  Victor shook his head.

  Faye turned to Overstreet. “So if Lex didn’t walk out and wasn’t carried out, then someone threw him over the back wall of the garden. That’s the only way I can think of for him to wind up dead in the river. And Glynis…”

  “She’s either still in the house or an outbuilding, all of which I personally searched from top to bottom, or she went over the back wall, too.”

  A sick possibility presented itself. “Or she’s buried somewhere on the grounds.”

  Overstreet nodded and, suddenly, Victor shook himself and let out a shriek.

  “Dead? Mister Lex is dead? He was my neighbor. Lived right there.” A clawlike hand waved in the general direction of the Fountain of Youth. “I didn’t know it! Nobody tells an old man anything. And poor Miss Glynis…” He dissolved into hysterical tears.

  Faye and Overstreet eyed each other. Victor was apparently telling the truth. Why would he not be? He hadn’t understood the implications of the fact that he’d seen neither Glynis nor Lex leave. He offered no interpretations of what he’d seen. He wasn’t capable of doing that. He’d just told them what he saw.

  As Faye spoke soft, comforting words to Victor, she felt sure that his observations would be a help in solving this case. But how?

  ***

  Overstreet knew he needed to face facts. Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth was a help to him, and not only on those occasions when he wanted to ask her about old things carved out of rock. He’d been born into the Leave It To Beaver era, and it stuck in his craw to think about endangering any woman. But she’d gotten herself into trouble while she was doing nothing more dangerous than checking out those old things carved out of rock that he’d hired her to study. And if he judged her character right, she was well able to get herself into trouble any old time. Doing contract work for the police department just gave her more convenient access to danger.

  So after they’d left Victor in his hovel, he’d invited her to take a ride so they could talk about the case. All of it, not just the archaeology. They were sitting in the Starbucks drive-up doing that right now, while they waited for their coffees. But that didn’t mean that he intended to let her drink anything but decaf.

  “Catch me up on the case,” she said, sucking on the travel cup like she thought she might be able to get some real, actual coffee out of it.

  “We haven’t found the first physical clue since we searched her car. That waist-length platinum hair Glynis has is a double-edged sword. If she left one behind, we’d surely see it. But so would the person who took her. If there was any time at all to clean up someplace she’d been, the hair would be as obvious as a neon sign. Any idiot would find it and get rid of it. So no hair evidence.”

  “What about fibers?”

  “We’re lucky to have the convenience store video, so we know what she was wearing—even down to the brand name, because one of our officers went to the mall and tracked down the outfit. Rich women like Glynis don’t wear their clothes long. A new trend crops up and they send their old dresses off to Goodwill before they’re even sold out at the mall. So we got lucky there. Her blouse was a black-and-white print silk. The pants were black with a small houndstooth check. Again, those threads would be easy to see, but we haven’t seen any, except in her car and her house. Maybe we haven’t been going the right places, or maybe the culprit did a good job of cleaning up. There’s no way to know.”

  “No footprints?”

  “Nothing beyond what I already told you. Footprints could eventually prove helpful, because both Glynis and Lex wore really pricey shoes. Not a lot of people around here spend that kinda money on their feet. So if we find the print of a five-hundred-dollar loafer, we won’t necessarily be able to prove it belonged to Glynis or Lex, but it sure would be a solid hint that one of them had left it.”

  “And that’s it for physical evidence?”

  “Well, there was the questionable trace of blood in the garden shed. Remember? Coulda been blood. Coulda been boxwood or poison ivy. Those chemical tests are useful, but they have some damn huge drawbacks.”

  “What do you think about Victor’s certainty that nobody steps onto Dunkirk Manor’s property without him knowing about it?”

  Faye’s latté had left her with a little milk mustache. Overstreet knew that a real gentleman would tell her, but he apparently wasn’t one of those, because he just answered her question without telling her to wipe her face. “I don’t know. Victor lives in his own little world. But let’s go with it. Say he’s right. What does that really do for us?”

  “Well, it lets Dick Wheeler and Alan Smithson off the hook. If they weren’t on the grounds, then they didn’t do the killing or the kidnapping.”

  “Do you really wa
nt to eliminate them as suspects?”

  “Hell, no,” she said, wiping her face with the back of her hand. Feeling the dampness on her upper lip, she shot him a dirty look. “We can’t eliminate anyone, even if Victor is a hundred percent right that nothing went through that gate but Lex, Glynis’ car, and the household staff’s cars. A killer could have been lying in the back seat, with a gun pointed at Glynis’ head. Victor wouldn’t know.”

  “Or somebody could have been hiding in the trunk of any of the cars.”

  “Exactly. This isn’t like some Agatha Christie locked-room mystery, where there’s no way to get to the scene of the crime other than on foot or by driving one of the few cars known to have entered the property. It’s more like a physics problem…a conservation problem.”

  “Come again?”

  “Well, you know that matter is neither created nor destroyed. It is conserved. If you look in a big black box and you see a…um…dog, and you look in the black box later and it’s empty, then you don’t have to be a physicist to know the dog is somewhere else.”

  “Might be dead.”

  “Well, yeah. But the dog…or its parts…are somewhere. Fluffy the Poodle didn’t go poof and disappear. That’s not the way things work in our world.”

  “Dogs are neither created nor destroyed. Check. Except for puppies. They just…happen.”

  She looked like she wanted to choke him. “Would you focus?”

  He nodded, so she could continue teaching him physics. “So we can treat this case like a black box. We have to presume that the people who came onto the Dunkirk Manor grounds are still there, unless we know they left.”

  “Like Glynis.”

  “Yes. And we have to think very carefully about ways people could have gotten onto or off the grounds without anybody, even Victor, knowing. Which means that Wheeler or Smithson or someone else could have come and gone over the garden wall. And they could have taken Glynis with them.”

  “It would have been hard for Wheeler to do that,” she observed, “then get the river mud off himself in time to be at the Rotary Club in less than an hour.”

  “True.”

  “Like you said, someone could have been in the trunk of any of the cars that came in that morning.”

  “Or the day before, if he found a place to hide and wait.”

  Overstreet’s new consultant Faye liked this line of reasoning. He could tell by the way she was draining her tall decaf latté before she spoke. “Yes. But then they’d have had to hide and wait for a chance to leave.”

  “We searched the place hard. Even in that big old house, I just can’t believe we missed a place big enough to hide a person.”

  “Or two. Glynis has to be somewhere.”

  “You’ve checked Wheeler’s alibi out at the Rotary Club?” Faye was obviously still trying to imagine the man coming and going over the garden wall in a business suit.

  “Yep. He checks out.”

  “Damn. I don’t like him. But Smithson hasn’t got any alibi. Do we really think he would do anything to harm Glynis—his own daughter?”

  Without waiting for him to answer her question, she plunged on. “But we don’t really know Glynis is hurt. If Lex was standing in the parking lot yelling at Glynis, maybe hitting her once or twice—”

  “—which would account for the little bit of her blood that we found—”

  “Yeah.” Faye nodded vigorously. “Yeah. Maybe Smithson stumbled onto an ugly scene between his daughter and her boyfriend. He killed Lex, then dumped his body in the river.”

  “But where’s Glynis?”

  “Maybe her father hid her, so that she couldn’t testify against him in a murder trial.”

  “But how long could he possibly keep her hidden?”

  Overstreet had a sudden image of Rapunzel alone in a tower with only her flowing golden locks for company. Wherever Glynis was, how very lonely she must be.

  ***

  Faye looked longingly at the rickety stairs rising to the attic where Father Domingo’s journal had lain hidden for who-knows-how-long. How much would she give for a day alone in that place, plundering for hidden treasure?

  Instead, she’d ridden the elevator up to Daniel’s office, for no good reason other than he wanted her to. He’d asked her how the excavation was going and whether the project was on budget. He’d asked her to tell him again about the artifacts they’d found. Then, like everyone else she encountered these days, he’d decided that she looked tired.

  Over her protests, he’d taken her solicitously by the arm and escorted her back to the elevator, even going to the ridiculous extreme of riding downstairs with her. They’d paused in the entry hall, with his hand still gripping her elbow, to discuss whether she was capable of walking to her bedroom or to the excavation under her own locomotion.

  Faye really thought she might scream. But who would hear her and rescue her from this nuttiness? Joe and Overstreet were just as bad. So was Magda. Levon and Kirk might have been, except they came from a generation that rarely guided a woman from place to place with a hand cupped around her elbow.

  She pulled her arm closer to her side, hoping to disengage Daniel’s hand, but it clung like a vise. Faye knew she shouldn’t be so resentful of people who were trying to help her, but she was only human.

  Then a shadow fell across the perfectly buffed oak floor of the entry hall. Daniel’s hand relaxed. So did Faye. Maybe she was hormonal, but there were times when she just wanted to stand still and look at her beautiful husband.

  Joe’s skin glowed with the same bronzed brown of the oak floors. He was as solid and strong as Dunkirk Manor, but he was alive from his dark flowing hair and clear green eyes to his powerful legs and moccasin-shod feet.

  “I’m glad you’re back, Faye. Let’s go get you off your feet.”

  He thanked Daniel for looking after her and ushered her through the atrium. Ever empty and ever cold, the light in the atrium always seemed wrong. Not quite the filtered light of late afternoon and not quite the warm, shifting glow of candle fire, this light made shadows where there shouldn’t be any.

  Before the thought was fully formed in her mind, Faye’s eyes darted to the staircase, looking for Allyce. She saw nothing but shadows, and she felt nothing but the chill breeze of Dunkirk Manor’s modern air conditioning system.

  Then, once again, Suzanne stepped out of the shadows on the balcony above them. She reached for the shining clock, all glass and wood and brass, that sat on a shelf at the head of the stairs. After winding it and lightly touching a finger to a clock face that already displayed the correct time, Suzanne lingered on the landing a moment, extending a tentative foot toward the first step down to the atrium’s ground floor, then drawing it back. She locked eyes with Faye in a way that made Faye pat her bulging middle, as if to make sure the baby was still there.

  The manor’s atrium was as austere and lifeless as ever…until Rachel scampered through. Multicolored light streamed through the stained glass overhead, and it broke into pieces on her shining auburn curls. Her softness soaked up the room’s echoes and emptiness. Her tiny laugh made it simply alive.

  The look on Suzanne’s face tore Faye’s heart out. Faye wondered if Annie’s hair had been auburn. She wondered what Annie’s laugh had sounded like.

  Magda stomped through a dining room door and into the atrium, struggling to keep up with Rachel and calling mother words after her.

  “Stop right where you are, young lady. Right this minute!”

  Musical giggles trailed the little girl as she fled.

  “I’ll call your father. He’ll drive all the way over here from Micco County and you’ll be in big trouble!”

  Rachel never hesitated. She kept running, unable to believe that her doting father would even scold her, much less punish her.

  “Rachel Lillian McKenzie, you’re going to give me a heart attack!”

  Concern spread across the flawless little brow. Rachel stumbled to a stop and turned toward her mother, arms u
p.

  “No, Mommy. No!”

  Magda scooped her off her tiny feet and said, “Don’t run from Mommy. How many times do I have to tell you that?”

  “I be good.” The tiny hand splayed across Magda’s ample breast. “Heart okay?”

  Faye wondered if the tiny child realized already what it meant to have parents who were old enough to be her grandparents. It meant that she would have less time to spend with them.

  The fine lines at the corners of Magda’s eyes softened as she said, “Yes, sweetheart. Mommy’s heart is just fine.”

  Suzanne backed away from the balcony rail, fading into the shadows.

  A hand closed like a vise on Faye’s elbow, guiding her toward her room and her bed. This time it was Joe’s hand, and not Daniel’s, so Faye didn’t mind so much.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Faye and her work crew could hear Overstreet and his technicians rustling through the vegetation on the riverbank behind Dunkirk Manor’s garden wall. She could hear their cursing as, one by one, they lost a boot in the muck or slipped in the slimy mud.

  These sounds told her something about Lex’s murder, something that Overstreet already knew. He had already led a search of the riverbank on the day Glynis disappeared, without finding a trace of human activity. Since a person slipping around in slimy, boot-sucking mud tended to leave a trail, Overstreet had drawn the conclusion on the day of the murder that no one had been sneaking around back there…probably.

  His uncertainty was rooted in the simple limitations of time. Glynis had been reported missing by mid-morning. While others from the department began a search of all of St. Augustine, starting with the street in front of Dunkirk Manor and fanning out, Overstreet and his technicians had begun an immediate search of the manor’s grounds, first by trying to track the movements of people in the vicinity of her car. When the footprints and blood trail failed, they had carefully searched the gardens, front and rear, looking for Glynis or her footprints or her blood behind every bush and tree.