Strangers

by Mary Anna Evans

  She saw the concern on his face, and she answered him. “I’ve known something was wrong with Daniel all week. I’ve blamed it on worry over Glynis, but something just wasn’t right—something deep and ugly that he couldn’t tell me about. There’s always been a part of Daniel that I couldn’t reach. Since Annie…that part has nearly taken him over.”

  She looked at Joe and read his doubts. “We’ve been married twenty-seven years,” she said as if that explained everything.

  Joe had been married a year, and that was long enough for him to know the depth of the marriage bond. The part of him that knew when Faye had a headache, before she said so, believed that Suzanne had sensed Daniel’s deception.

  “His response to Glynis’ disappearance has been just…wrong,” she said. “He’s ordinarily a very protective man, very concerned about women, but he’s been very brisk and businesslike about this, until I cry. Then he freaks out, saying ‘She’s fine, baby, she’s fine. I just know it. You can’t tear yourself up this way.’”

  She looked at Joe and Victor as if she’d just offered inarguable proof. Joe was trying to think of a nice way to ask her to be more convincing.

  Again, she saw his doubts, so she tried. “It’s like someone took my husband and put someone else in his bed…in his body. He paces. He hovers over me and asks if I’m okay about twelve times a day. He’s taken a midnight walk every night since Glynis has been gone. He never does that.”

  Joe thought the midnight walk was marginally more convincing evidence. Daniel had to visit Glynis sometime, to take her food and water and make sure she was okay.

  Suzanne seemed to sense that she was making better headway with Joe by giving him documentable facts instead of feelings, so she plunged ahead. “The maids told me yesterday that several blankets have gone missing.”

  Joe nodded. Blankets could be counted and Glynis needed something to sleep under. This was a reasonable clue for Suzanne to hang her suspicions on.

  Then she returned to the realm of intuition, but she went to a particularly bone-chilling part of that realm. “The day after Glynis disappeared, Daniel started telling me that he thinks maybe we can adopt after all, even though we gave up on that years ago. ‘I just feel in my heart that we can get a newborn. And maybe a brother or sister, too…an older child, instead of an infant,’ he said.”

  So he’d had his eye on Rachel for days.

  “Other times, it’s something like, ‘It would probably be easier to get a baby who wasn’t white…biracial, maybe.’”

  The man had been calmly discussing the kidnapping of his child. Faye’s child. Joe felt his heart turn to iron.

  “It all adds up.” Suzanne squared her thin shoulders. “I know Daniel. Sometimes I know him better than I know myself. I believe I know what he has done. I care deeply for Glynis and we have to do whatever it takes to find her. And Faye. And that poor little girl and her mother. Let’s stop wasting time and just do it.”

  ***

  It had taken the better part of an hour for Glynis, drifting in and out of consciousness, to tell Faye and Magda about Daniel’s creative methods to keep her captive and alive. Or at least Faye thought it had been an hour.

  Time didn’t mean very much in the dim light of Dunkirk Manor’s tiny prison. It was possible that the angle of light coming through the tiny windows high at the top of the turret had changed, but Faye couldn’t tell. She couldn’t even bring herself to care much, and this worried her. Curiosity and attention to detail had saved her life in the past, and she couldn’t let them fail her now.

  “He brings food and water in a brown paper grocery bag. There’s always one plate of hot food—leftovers that he warmed up in the kitchen—and a bunch of protein bars. Lots and lots of vitamins in protein bars…” Her voice took on a mocking edge. “He’s very concerned about my health. Since I’m making his baby and all. See the medicine bottles over there? Prenatal vitamins, plus an extra bottle of Vitamin D. Because he knows I’m sure as hell not getting any sunshine in here.”

  Faye was actually glad to hear the anger in Glynis’ voice. They were all going to need some fight in them today. Because Faye did not intend to sit here for a month, eating protein bars and waiting to have her baby, so she could die.

  Glynis wrapped her arms even tighter around herself and clenched her fists harder. Faye wouldn’t have thought that possible. “How many nights have I been here?”

  “You were taken on Tuesday morning,” Faye said. “It’s Saturday morning now.”

  “So that’s four nights.” Glynis looked like she was trying to remember a series of nights that had all been the same, trying to count them and make them her own. “He brings a fresh bucket of water every night, so I can wash my face and hands, and he leaves it, so I can have a wet cloth to help keep me cool in the daytime. It takes him two trips—in with the bag of food and maybe some blankets or whatever. Then out with the bedpan. And then back in with the clean bedpan and the bucket of water.”

  Faye was thinking, and she was very glad that her brain had returned. Tonight, there would be two able-bodied women waiting for Daniel…well, one able-bodied woman and Faye.

  “A little at a time, he keeps bringing me stuff to make this place liveable. A couple of nights, it was blankets and towels and a pillow to fluff up my bed. One night he brought me some books.” Glynis pointed to a stack of paperback novels that probably came out of the bed-and-breakfast’s library. “Today, he brought an iPod, loaded it with this week’s Top 40.” A wry smile peeked through. “I like metal. Suzanne would have known that. That’s why I think she has no idea what he’s done.”

  “That’s useful information. Not sure what we can do with it, but it’s good to know that he’s working alone.” Magda patted the sleeping Rachel’s head. “I suspected it already, though. A woman would have done a better job of making this cell homelike for the mother of her child. Suzanne’s so domesticated that she would’ve been knitting you some doilies for this charming little apartment.”

  “I’m so glad…no, relieved…that Suzanne didn’t do this to me.” Glynis reached up a hand to twiddle with her hair. “She’s been almost like a mother since I came to work for her. I was so little when Mom died. I’m worried about Suzanne. She’s sleeping beside a crazy man who’s capable of…well, look around you.”

  Faye didn’t want to look around her. She wanted to come up with a plan to get all four of them out of this hellhole.

  “Okay, ladies,” she said. “We’ve got a jailer who’s not very good at his job. If Glynis could get up and walk, she’d have already figured out a way to get out that door when he leaves to get his second load of stuff.”

  Magda nodded. Faye could tell that she’d already come to the same conclusion.

  “We outnumber him. If he had any good sense, he’d have tied us up. If he has any good sense, he’s already worried about that critical moment when he opens that door for the first time tonight. What will we have in store for him? But we know he’s unbalanced, and he might have convinced himself that we’re all happy to stay in this cell and make babies for him. I say that Magda and I position ourselves on either side of the door, ready to rush him when he comes back. It could work. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  Nobody answered, but all three women remembered the butcher knife.

  ***

  Joe had fled, leaving Suzanne in the relative safety of Victor’s little house. Overstreet had wanted him to wait there until he arrived, but Joe couldn’t make himself waste even those few minutes. Suzanne was critical to their plan, so Joe told Overstreet to pick her up at Victor’s and meet him in Dunkirk Manor’s back garden. The garden shed had been bothering him ever since Glynis disappeared. Ever since Daniel had inexplicably locked it. He needed to search the shed one more time for clues, and he desperately needed to see whether Faye was in there.

  Joe went straight to his and Faye’s corporate toolbox in the back garden of Dunkirk Manor and grabbed some boltcutters. Overstreet might n
eed a search warrant to search the shed, but Joe just needed the right tools.

  One snip, and the padlock was gone. Joe let his eyes adjust to the dim light in the shed. He saw that Faye was not there, and his heart broke.

  He assessed the size of the space. It looked right. So there was no secret room in the shed where his wife could be hidden.

  The sprinkler system controls on the wall mocked him. Those sprinklers had obliterated Lex’s killer’s trail. Daniel’s trail. Realizing that Daniel knew full well where the controls were, Joe wondered whether anyone had thought to ask the gardener about the irrigation schedule. Maybe it hadn’t been a coincidence that the killer’s trail was washed away. Maybe Daniel had simply stepped in here after disposing of Lex’s body and turned on the water.

  Daniel had certainly locked this shed on the evening Glynis was kidnapped, after the police searched it, and it had been locked ever since. Why? The police had found nothing.

  Was Daniel moving Glynis from place to place? That seemed dangerous and unnecessary. Maybe there was some other reason for the lock. Maybe there was something in here worth finding…

  His eye rested on a towel-sized piece of blue tarpauline, wrapped around a pipe leading away from the sprinkler system. Lex’s body had been wrapped in a blue tarp.

  Joe’s eyes scanned the shelves and saw a stack of multicolored towels, and another stack of drab brown coveralls. The colorful towels stood out in the drab, dirt-floored space. If a tarp—a full-sized, bright-blue tarp—had been folded and stored on one of those shelves, it would have shone like a beacon. The absence of that bright blue object would only be obvious to someone who expected it to be there.

  Suzanne clearly had spent a lot of time in this shed over the years, arranging flowers and potting plants. Did Daniel decide she needed to stop those visits, because something had changed and he knew she would notice?

  And maybe there had been other subtle changes. Maybe the pile of greenery in the middle of the shed had been moved or spread out to cover something suspicious, like the slightly bloodied spot where a murdered man was wrapped in a tarp before being dumped in a river.

  Joe had killed a lot of animals. It’s not that easy to drive the life from a large, strong being. Lex’s injuries had included a terrible throat wound and a head wound that was significant but not lethal. He was confident, based on the smear of blood on its surface, that the broken celt had delivered the wound to Lex’s head.

  The killer had left that celt at the scene. Daniel. Daniel had left it at the scene. Was there something else he needed to hide? Why was Daniel limiting access to this shed?

  Joe pictured Lex, unconscious on the ground, as Daniel cast the celt aside. Or Glynis. Maybe she’d struck back at a bullying Lex with the broken celt and then dropped it as Daniel happened on the scene. That might explain why Daniel hadn’t hidden that weapon—he’d never used it.

  No matter who dealt the blow to Lex’s head, seconds would have passed. Maybe a minute. And still Lex was not dead. Unconscious, but not dead. Panicked, maybe Daniel had picked up something sharp and precise to deliver the killing blow. This was the bloodletting that had left a great amount of B-positive blood soaked into the parking lot’s soil.

  No physical evidence that Overstreet’s investigators had found at the scene explained the throat wound. Where was that weapon?

  Perhaps it had left the scene with Daniel and his victim. Daniel was aging, but he was tall and still strong, and he retained a bit of the light grace of a tennis player. He could have hauled Lex’s body to its feet, bent forward, and carried him on his back, arms over his shoulders and feet dragging on the ground. It would have looked like a scene from an Old West movie, where a cowpoke was dragging his dead friend from the range, but who would have seen it? The route from the parking lot to the garden shed wasn’t visible from the street or the guest wing or the service wing or the kitchen or the dining room.

  What would Daniel have done about the blood? Surely he would have gotten blood on his clothes.

  The brown jumpsuits on the shed’s shelves gave him that answer. So did the garden hose and the drain in the floor where Suzanne repotted and watered her plants.

  If Daniel had been lucky enough not to be seen by an arriving employee, he could have gotten Lex to the shed and wrapped him in a tarp to contain the blood. Most of the back garden wasn’t visible to people inside the house. Presuming Daniel moved quickly, he could have loaded the body on a garden cart and dumped it over the rear garden wall within a few minutes. It was only an okay hiding place, but the tide was with him. The shifting waters of the Matanzas River had taken Lex Tifton off his hands.

  He would have needed to hose himself down and get rid of the wet clothes. Probably he did that before dumping the body, throwing them over the wall where the river had taken them. Did he do the same thing with the murder weapon? Probably.

  But what if he forgot? Overstreet’s people hadn’t found a murder weapon on the river bank or wrapped up in the tarp with Lex’s corpse. Joe needed to remember that Daniel was not a hardened criminal. He had almost certainly made some mistakes.

  Overstreet had said that his techs had found traces of something that might or might not be blood on the shed floor, but only traces. That tracked with the notion that the body had been wrapped in a tarp that captured most of the trace evidence. What other evidence might remain?

  Joe’s eyes alit on the pile of landscaping rock. The first weapon, the broken celt, was made of rock. Maybe the second weapon, the sharp object that had destroyed Lex’s throat, had been made of rock, too.

  He studied the rocks for color and shape and surface texture. They were mostly limestone, chalky and mottled gray. He turned the rocks over one by one. None of them looked dangerous. None of them seemed to have a history of murder. And then, hiding beneath a large chunk of limestone, he found a smaller piece of brown rock that was smooth and honed to a fine edge.

  Joe lifted the big chunk of limestone from the rock pile, so he could get a better look at the sharp rock beneath it. He refrained from touching it, because he recognized it for what it was: a murder weapon. It was a chunk of flint with a vicious point, and he would bet money that its fracture plane would mate with the broken end of the stone blade that Glynis had wanted to show Faye.

  If Suzanne had harbored any doubts of her husband’s guilt, this cold piece of rock should ease her mind. This was good, because they needed her cooperation if their plan to get Daniel out of the house before he could harm his hostages was to succeed.

  Joe backed out of the shed, just in time to see Suzanne and Overstreet approach. He gestured for them to come in the shed and see what he’d found.

  As soon as Overstreet had all his officers in place, they were going in. Joe intended to have Faye and Magda and Rachel and Glynis out of that place before Daniel knew what hit him. It was time.

  ***

  Faye stirred from her somnolence. How long had it been since someone spoke?

  She’d been thinking through their plan. She was positioned by the door’s hinges and Magda was waiting on the side that opened. Magda would be calling the shots on the timing of their attack, based on whether she thought she could get control of the knife.

  Options for weapons of their own were slim. She and Magda had busted open a water bottle and crafted the sharpest shards of plastic that they could manage. They had pulled the pillowcase from Glynis’ pillow, and Magda waited with the pillowcase in hand. If she could manage it while avoiding the knife, she would drop the pillowcase over Daniel’s head and kick him hard in the groin, hoping to immobilize him long enough so that she and Faye could get Glynis and Rachel out. Faye, hiding behind the door, would help her restrain him in any way she could.

  This was the weak part of the plan, because moving Glynis was not going to happen quickly. The best way seemed to be for Faye and Magda to each grab a corner of the pile of blankets where she lay and simply tug. If the door could be kept open and if Daniel could be eliminated as
a threat, then they could haul the princess out of her tower on a litter of blankets and towels.

  The effort of this might throw Faye into labor, but if having her baby a month early in the safety of a hospital was the worst outcome of this predicament, she could live with that.

  There was an alternative plan, and Faye wasn’t sure that she didn’t like it better. If Magda judged that she couldn’t control that knife, then Daniel would be allowed to make his first visit as usual. Faye hoped that he would be lulled into security by their apparent docility. But as the door closed behind him, Magda would surreptitiously position a water bottle cap in the frame of the closing door. If Daniel were sufficiently preoccupied by transporting the bedpan, then maybe he wouldn’t notice the door fail to close completely. After waiting a minute to let him go someplace to empty the bedpan, then Magda might be able to get a grip on the slightly open door and pull it toward her. If she could tug it open, they’d make a rush for freedom.

  This plan required Daniel to overlook the fact that the door was slightly ajar but, otherwise, Faye liked it a lot.

  Faye’s eye fell on Rachel. Here was the fatal flaw in any plan they might make. If Daniel grabbed Rachel, then they would surrender immediately, no questions asked. And he knew this.

  With Rachel’s safety in mind, the little trapdoor in the floor that led exactly nowhere…this little trapdoor began to look very different. Faye knelt beside it and lifted the door.

  She squinted at the hole and she squinted at Rachel. Yes. The child would fit, with a little room to spare for comfort.

  “Rachel! I’ve found you a playhouse!”

  The child toddled over and Magda stirred, fixing a “What in the hell are you up to?” stare on Faye.

  “Let’s see if it’s big enough for you. You’re getting to be such a very big girl.”

  Rachel had grown so much, and Faye had grown so much in a different way, that she could hardly lift the child. Little feet dragged the concrete floor as Faye moved Rachel to the little pit and lowered her in.