Then they had searched the house from top to bottom, which was not something that could be quickly done in Dunkirk Manor. The public areas—the entry hall, atrium, dining rooms, parlors—were vast, but they offered no place to hide. The hidden warrens of servants’ quarters and closets and butler’s pantries on the first floor, however, were another story. And the upper floors offered bedrooms and more closets and tiny bathrooms added into odd corners when people began to demand more than one bathroom per floor.
Under the attic lay the storage room where Father Domingo’s book had been hidden for decades. Faye had no doubt that searching this room had not been a quick job for the police. And then there was the room waiting at the far end of that storage room, behind the door that Faye hadn’t gotten the opportunity to open.
When asked whether he and his crew had searched that mysterious room, Overstreet had sighed and said, “I see that you truly do think that I’m an idiot.”
According to Overstreet, that room had also been used for storage, but only of large pieces of furniture, so it had been easily searched. Once all the trunks and armoires were found to be empty, the search was over.
After tallying up the time needed to search the parking lot, grounds, and house, Faye was not surprised to learn that it had been late in the day before Overstreet expanded his search to include the riverbank behind the manor’s garden wall. In that time, the tide had risen and begun to ebb. The Matanzas River was tidally influenced here, so close to the ocean, and its level ebbed and flowed like the sea. Ordinary footsteps would have been washed away at high tide. Deep pits wallowed out by a killer navigating the muck while carrying a body might not have vanished so completely, but Overstreet had found none.
His best guess was that the body had been dumped over the back wall. Then the killer had gotten lucky. The tide had carried the body away, buying the murderer an extra day to…do what?
If Glynis was the killer, she’d had an extra day to run. If someone else had killed Lex and either killed or kidnapped Glynis, then Glynis could be in the river while her killer had enjoyed an extra day to escape. If her father had murdered Lex, then he’d had another day to make sure Glynis was hidden in a secure place and to hope that he’d obscured his trail well enough to avoid being nailed for Lex’s murder.
Or, and Faye had trouble imagining this, if Glynis’ father had killed her in a fit of rage over her environmental activism, she too might have gone over the wall. The Matanzas River might even now be deciding to give her back, the way it had given Lex back. This was also true if Dick Wheeler was the culprit, or someone else whose motives were yet unclear.
If somebody within the brick walls of Dunkirk Manor had done the deed, then that person had suffered through an entire day of knowing that Lex’s body was lying on the riverbank, starting to decay. The killer had spent an entire day thinking about the monstrous thing he or she had done. Daniel, Suzanne, the household staff, the police, Faye, Joe, Magda, Rachel, Kirk—all of them had spent a day in the close vicinity of a corpse, but only one of them had known it. And Victor had presided over the entrance to their haven, watching to see whether a killer had come or gone.
A ruckus on the other side of the garden wall brought Faye running as fast as her tired legs would carry her.
“Look at this!” an unfamiliar male voice cried.
“Great work,” Overstreet was saying as he splashed audibly toward the other man.
Frustrated by the brick wall, which was about as tall as she was, Faye called out to Overstreet. “Harry…it’s Faye. What’s going on back there?”
“A shoe. We found Lex’s shoe. Proves what we already kinda knew—he went over the wall.”
A scenario was playing out in her mind. Some of the scenes were fact. It was well-established that Glynis had arrived at Dunkirk Manor’s employee parking lot alone on the day she went missing. Victor said that Lex had arrived on foot shortly afterward. She saw no reason for him to lie, and this put Lex in the right place to be murdered as part of Glynis’ kidnapping.
At this point, her scenario left the realm of fact…well, except for the positive pregnancy test in Lex’s pocket. Its existence was a fact. It raised the question of whether Lex had intercepted Glynis on the way to work so that they could argue about…what? Had she hidden her pregnancy from him? Had she told Lex, only to see that he wasn’t taking the news well? Had he questioned whether the baby was his? Had he demanded that she get an abortion? Or had she announced her intention of seeking an abortion that he didn’t want her to have?
There was no way to know, but an argument like this could certainly have resulted in Glynis being hit or slapped hard enough to generate the trickle of blood that she left smeared on the car seat. Then what?
Had she defended herself? She’d had a box of weapons on the seat next to her, and Joe had said that Lex’s throat wounds could have been inflicted by the broken stone blade, but it had showed no trace of blood. Had she used the missing half of that blade? If so, where was that weapon hidden? And why hadn’t the killer disposed of the bloodied celt, as well? Maybe, in the heat of the moment, he or she had forgotten about the weapon that had wounded Lex Tifton, but had hidden the blade that finished him off.
The grievous damage to Lex’s body had left no trace beyond the puddle of blood in the parking lot. The damn sprinkler system had flipped on and washed away the killer’s trail from the parking lot to the garden wall, leaving nothing but that puddle of blood, a faint smear of the same blood on the very old stone of the broken celt, and nothing more.
***
Faye enjoyed eating her lunch outdoors. The meal would have been an utterly peaceful moment with Joe, but the reality of their work meant that they were never alone during the daytime.
Levon and Kirk had eaten nearby, without uttering a word to Faye or Joe. Each day that Glynis was gone affected them more, but in different ways. Levon paced, head down, and Faye had twice seen him wiping his eyes.
Kirk just grew increasingly irritable. During their lunch, he had tried again and again to get the sullen Levon to speak, but had been rewarded with monosyllables and a total lack of eye contact. Faye wasn’t sure what she’d do if a fistfight broke out. The how-to-manage-people book that she’d bought as soon as she opened her business had not included a chapter on how to behave if your workplace became the scene of a murder/kidnapping.
Magda had sat on the manor’s back porch, watching Rachel run rampant. Magda was on the lookout for a replacement babysitter and, in the meantime, she was doing a good job of juggling work and motherhood. This didn’t mean that she wasn’t starting to look a little frayed.
Daniel and Suzanne also came and went during the meal, asking politely about their progress on the project. This was understandable, considering that they were paying by the hour. Sometimes it was a struggle for Faye to accurately account for her time, since Daniel and Suzanne could only be expected to pay her for hours spent working toward their objectives. Managing her crew was definitely billable to Daniel and Suzanne. Working with Harry Overstreet was definitely billable to the police department. Reading Father Domingo’s journal wasn’t billable to anybody, but it sure was fun.
Reading Harriet’s book was billable when Faye was scrutinizing every last detail of Dunkirk Manor’s construction and learning about the Dunkirks themselves and their illustrious guests. When she was fretting over the particulars of Lilibeth Campbell’s murder…no, that was not billable time. Not by any stretch of the imagination.
When Betsy’s smile and gray curls appeared at her side, Faye was really happy to see her, but her consultant’s mindset went immediately to the question of “Who am I working for at this moment?”
When Betsy said, “I know something exciting about the artifacts at Alan Smithson’s construction site,” Faye’s mental accountant said, “Police department. This conversation should be billed to the police department.”
Then Faye herself said, “What do you know? How exciting is it?”
&nb
sp; “Well, you remember our thrilling adventure in the wet ditch?”
“I do.”
“And perhaps neither of us was at her best that day?”
“I sure wasn’t.”
“Well, I confess to filling my pockets full of something I shouldn’t.”
Since Faye had brought home a musket ball for analysis, she couldn’t exactly take potshots at Betsy for this.
Betsy held out a plastic box, and Faye could hear things bumping around inside that were probably fascinating. Betsy opened the box and Faye laughed out loud.
There, nestled among broken pieces of European transferware from the mid-16th century, there was a single bead. It was silver and filigreed, and Faye was prepared to swear that it was identical to the rosary beads that Glynis had wanted her to see. Joe leaned over her shoulder to get a look.
“Magda! Get over here!” Faye barked.
Magda scooped up Rachel, settled the child on her broad hip, and loped over to join Faye. Unbidden, Levon and Kirk joined them. Unlike the others, they didn’t understand the significance of the tiny bead in terms of solving Glynis’ disappearance, but they knew what they were looking at, from a historical standpoint.
“Damn,” Kirk said.
Faye thought that this observation pretty well summed up what they were all thinking, as archaeologists.
As a consultant for the police department, Faye was thinking something completely different. She was thinking that Smithson’s construction site was now inextricably tied to the artifacts Glynis was carrying on the day of her disappearance.
***
By three o’clock, Faye’s energy was flagging. She knew it was true. She couldn’t hide it. She hated these facts.
She’d been sitting in a lawn chair for an hour. She’d scolded Levon twice for sloppy technique, which had resulted in a quick improvement of Kirk’s work. And she’d spent a pleasant few minutes looking over yet another odd artifact Magda had found beneath the tiles of the old pool deck—a lovely blown glass vase small enough to cradle in one hand and big enough to hold a single perfect rosebud. Though still crusted with dirt, its luminous blue glass looked old and expensive.
She’d also had a quick phone conversation with Overstreet, and that quarter-hour could clearly be billed to the police department.
He’d said, “The county’s historic preservation guy has been alerted to the need for him to visit Smithson’s project. It’s a big place—acres and acres—but thanks to you and Betsy, he’s going to know exactly what he’s looking for and where it is. They’re gonna shut that construction project down for a good long time. I feel kinda bad doing this to Smithson, what with the fact that his daughter’s being missing and all—”
Faye wasn’t about to let him get away with this bald-faced lie. “No, you don’t.”
“Well, you’re right. I don’t. I’ll do everything I can to find that girl, but I don’t like her father.”
Faye couldn’t argue with him. And she couldn’t sit in this uncomfortable chair another minute, either. As much as she hated it, her company’s president and CEO needed to go off the clock, so she could go inside and take a nap.
***
Faye was not a good napper. She lay on the bed, aware of every pressure point—shoulder blades, pelvis, skull, elbows, and heels—as it dug into the worn-out mattress. Other pressure points, mental ones, bothered her, too.
Now that she had an awe-inspiring view of a dingy ceiling, instead of the bright blue sky, she was wide-awake. Maybe Harriet’s book would entertain her while she rested her aching bones.
Turning to the back of the book, Faye saw a floor plan of Dunkirk Manor. She’d certainly seen one of those already, though she’d concentrated more on the grounds where she’d be excavating than on the house. True to form, Harriet’s book was value-added. She’d taken the bare-bones plan of the house that Faye had been able to find at the library, and added commentary she’d gleaned from research and from conversations with elderly folk who remembered the Dunkirks’ glittering parties.
Harriet had hand-drawn the original footprint of the house onto the plan, showing where the bedroom wing had been added after ghosts disrupted the first owners’ wedding night. She’d marked the location of each piece of furniture, as shown in old photos. Faye was struck by the fact that, in the house’s public rooms, the original furniture still sat in its original locations.
She smiled. We wouldn’t want to disrupt the ghosts by moving things around, would we?
A note near the manor’s front door said, “Conversations in the 1970s with retired household staff yielded multiple statements that the original purpose of the turrets was to serve as cisterns. They are said to have provided running water to the first and second floors. Bathrooms were rare in those days, particularly on upper floors.”
This was a cool fact that would add a bit of human interest to her report on the property. When people stopped to think about life without bathrooms, they unanimously agreed that life was better with them.
A room on the second floor was labeled, “The Nursery.” It was closet-like, with no window, opening only into another large bedroom. By Faye’s best guess, these rooms had been converted into the living room of the owners’ suite where Daniel and Suzanne lived.
She remembered sitting in that area, surrounded by people worried about Glynis on the very day that she disappeared. Picturing the room, Faye remembered the wide bank of windows overlooking the front yard. She remembered the suite’s front door, which opened onto the hallway and faced the windows. She remembered a door into the suite’s kitchen and dining area. But she didn’t remember a door on the wall facing the kitchen door.
Squinting at the floor plan, she decided that the wall between the living area and the old nursery had been removed to enlarge the space. Perhaps the Dunkirks had done it themselves, when they finally recognized the truth: there would be no babies sleeping there.
Faye remembered how lovely little Rachel had looked, running through the atrium, and she realized that no child had lived in this house since lonely Raymond had watched his mother walk away. Only Victor had graced the house with bubbling youth, and his presence must have hurt Allyce and Raymond in an undefinable way. He wasn’t theirs. And, if Faye could believe her suspicions that his mental state wasn’t just a function of age, he wasn’t…right.
Allyce could love a child like Victor with all her heart, but she couldn’t give him her hopes. She couldn’t dream that he would grow up to be the handsome, intelligent, and masterful man that her husband Raymond seemed to be. He was a forever child, someone to love and grieve over. And he had other parents, whose rights superseded the rights of a woman with all the love and money in the world.
It was hard to imagine that he’d fallen through the cracks, with both his parents and the Dunkirks to care for him. His parents had died without providing for him, and perhaps they weren’t capable of it. And the Dunkirks, who might have made sure that he never wanted for anything, simply didn’t.
Her eyes stung a little, thinking of Victor and wondering if she could do anything to help his situation now. Maybe the best place to start would be to check with shelters that could provide a much better roof for his head. And food—now that she’d seen Victor’s home, she had to wonder what on earth he ate. He’d lived in St. Augustine so long that he surely knew the location of every soup kitchen and charitable restaurateur, but this was no way to live the last years of a long life.
She picked up her laptop, planning to look around for social service agencies, then indulge herself by rambling around the web in search of Robert Ripley and his Believe-It-or-Not empire. She’d gotten as far as typing “s-o-c-i-a-l s-e-r-v-” when the door opened.
Joe stood there, loaded down with bed linens, towels, and a loaded plate. “I bumped into Daniel down the hall. He said that Suzanne sent you these.”
“We will never again have clients who care so much about our well-being. You know that don’t you? Usually, their attitude is,
‘Would you finish this project already? And I don’t know why you can’t work for fifty cents an hour on Christmas!’”
“They’re very nice people. And I think they’re so, so sad about their daughter Annie. Always will be. Seeing you healthy and strong and ready to have a baby makes them happy, maybe. And that makes them want to help.”
“They really are kind. But you know what, Joe? I’m not hungry and I think maybe Victor might be. He’s just a few steps down the street. Would you take that plate to him?”
Feeling like maybe she’d staved off Victor’s needs for a few hours, she went back to her computer and dropped a few emails to some people who might be able to help him for longer.
Then she crawled the web, reading about Robert Ripley’s travels to places she wanted to go—China, Madagascar, Brazil, Morocco. She dozed off, dreaming of touring exotic lands with a baby strapped to her back, and she stayed asleep until Joe came back with another plate of food that she was hungry enough to eat.
So sleepy by the time she finished eating that the last forkful just looked too heavy to lift, she dozed off again. When she opened her eyes, Joe was asleep at her side. It was midnight and she was wide awake. Quietly, she pulled on her robe and a pair of cotton gloves. She crept out into the nearest dining room and laid Father Domingo’s book on the ornate tablecloth.
The dining room was a bit spooky, perhaps, but Faye didn’t believe in ghosts…much. At midnight, her logical mind was a bit less resistant to such things, but no matter. Faye felt sure that the ghosts of Dunkirk Manor confined themselves the atrium, walking endlessly in circles around the balconies and climbing for all time on staircases that had no end.
Strangers Page 21
