Strangers

by Mary Anna Evans

  “Well, I’m not sleeping nights. And there were only a few places where family records had been stored, so at least I knew where to start looking.”

  Suzanne clasped her hands together in front of her abdomen. It was a controlled pose, and it brought the lawyer in her back to life. Suddenly, Faye was certain that Suzanne would survive the tragedy of her husband’s madness. She had survived the loss of a child, so she was stronger than she looked. Suzanne might do any number of things with the rest of her life. She might decide to continue operating the B&B. She might go back to practicing law. Or she might do something completely different, like open a florist’s shop. But she would be okay.

  “I found that Raymond had set aside money for Victor,” said the attorney who was emerging from retirement very nicely. “Quite a lot of it. Income from that money went to an account at a bank not a quarter-mile from here. The bank tellers there were instructed to give Victor his money in cash every Friday when he came for it. And at least a dollar of it was always supposed to be in dimes.”

  “That’s amazing service.”

  “Remember, it was the 1950s, and this is a small town.”

  “Did Victor just get lost in the shuffle over the years, as the old bank tellers retired and died?”

  Suzanne nodded vehemently, and Faye knew that she’d reached the crux of her story. “Yes. But it was more than that. Raymond left instructions for his law firm to pay Victor’s property taxes and other bills out of his account, then distribute the rest in cash for his food and incidentals. Faye, that’s riverfront property. Do you have any idea what the taxes are like?”

  Having struggled to pay her own property taxes, Faye did.

  Suzanne continued her story. “Raymond was a brilliant man who handled his money well. He came through the Great Depression smelling like a rose. But he had no way to know how long Victor would live. And he had no way to know how low those property taxes would drain Victor’s inheritance. These days, it’s easy to pay Victor his income in dimes.”

  “Dimes! I have a whole lot of dimes!” Victor said, poking his head in the door. “When are you coming to see my room? That’s where I keep my dimes.”

  “Raymond Dunkirk’s will was carefully and lovingly laid out. Allyce was sent to the most comfortable asylum in Florida, and fresh flowers were sent to her room every day for as long as she lived. Victor was given a place to live and a financial legacy.”

  Suzanne smiled at the impetuous old man, who was jumping up and down in his eagerness to show Faye where he kept his dimes. “He loved them both, I think. I’ve come to forgive him for betraying my Great-great-aunt Allyce.”

  The archaeologist in Faye began to think in terms of time. The events in a person’s life stacked up, bit by bit, just as surely as layers of soil covered the past. The last layer of Allyce Dunkirk’s life was represented by the asylum, and that starkness was softened by her dead husband’s flowers.

  Digging deeper in time, the layer below the asylum was represented by Allyce’s twenty years as a recluse. Her years spent as the hostess of glittering parties had ended when Lilibeth Campbell died, as suddenly and surely as the closing of a garden gate.

  Excavating the layer below those reclusive years brought Faye to the early years of Allyce’s marriage, a time when she was young and beautiful and rich, but she couldn’t save the children she lost, one after another. The parties, the friends, the jewels, the beautiful clothes…in the end, they hadn’t meant that much. But the watershed moment that coincided with abandoning that socialite’s life hadn’t been the death of her last child. It had been the death of her husband’s mistress.

  Something horrifying began to nibble at Faye’s mind. Suzanne kept talking, and her words served only to solidify Faye’s suspicions.

  “I think Allyce’s mind was already gone by the time her husband met Lilibeth Campbell. Great-great-uncle Raymond was a human being and he needed companionship and romance, but my heart—and the detailed provisions for her in his will—tell me that he never got over loving Allyce. He died thinking he’d taken care of her, and of Victor, too. The image of flowers being delivered to an insane asylum, year in and year out, from a dead man to his widow…that image softens my heart toward Great-great-uncle Raymond.”

  “Flowers. Oh, she loved flowers.” Victor beckoned, and they followed him to the servants’ wing. “And she loved to paint. So much.” He opened the door with a flourish. On the room’s far wall was an oil painting of a small boy with Victor’s eyes. “After she stopped going places, she didn’t do much but paint and plant things.” Lowering his voice, he leaned in their direction. “Sometimes…sometimes, she planted things that wasn’t flowers.”

  The sad little shrine made of baby things leapt to Faye’s mind and she held Michael closer.

  Leaning in still closer, Victor said, “After awhile, she got to where she’d take things, just to have something to bury.” Quickly, he added an excuse for his almost-mother. “O’course, she wasn’t in her right mind by then. She was a lady, not a thief. But nobody coulda resisted the wonderful things Mr. Ripley used to bring over here to show Mr. Raymond. Stuff from India and Zanzibar and Siam, all of it carved out of wood and ivory and jewels and covered in gold. You couldn’t blame Miss Allyce for taking some of it.”

  Faye would have given her eyeteeth to have dug up some of Robert Ripley’s exotic plunder in the back garden of Dunkirk Manor. Or maybe she had. A knife carved of carmine stone and an exquisitely proportioned little elephant came to mind…

  “Mr. Ripley loved her, too. No man could help loving Miss Allyce. He always spoke to her so kind, so respectful, even after she stopped talking back. He stopped bringing the really good stuff here, but he kept bringing interesting little things for her. They was gifts, but he didn’t tell her. He’d just leave them laying around and let her take ’em. Such a kind man.”

  Faye thought of Allyce Dunkirk, deep in madness, prying up tiles around her backyard pool and burying her treasures there. She did her best to admire Victor’s box of dimes and listen to him enthuse over his comfy new bed, but Allyce’s story was playing in her mind, year by year. Distracted, she followed him and Suzanne as they trooped back toward the dining room where Faye’s baby shower was going on without her.

  “It tore Miss Allyce up when Mr. Raymond filled in that swimming pool. She did love to swim.”

  Raymond Dunkirk had sent flowers to a wife too deep in madness to even speak. The evidence said that she was already dropping into madness when he destroyed that pool, shortly after Lilibeth Campbell died. Why would such a tenderhearted man have taken away one of the few pleasures his fragile wife could still enjoy?

  A cold finger touched her spine. Faye finally understood, deep down, why Raymond Dunkirk had destroyed his wife’s cherished pool. And she was pretty sure she knew why the description of Lilibeth Campbell’s body had said that her wounds had been wiped clean. Perhaps those wounds hadn’t been wiped at all. Maybe the blood had been rinsed away, even as they were being made. Maybe Lilibeth had been knifed to death while submerged in Allyce Dunkirk’s beloved swimming pool. And nobody had more reason to want Lilibeth dead than the lady of the house.

  Victor prattled on and confirmed every awful image in Faye’s mind. “After Miss Lilibeth died in that pool, Mister Raymond couldn’t stand to look at it. It was a long time before he could even look at Miss Allyce, after she killed that young lady. She was wrong to kill her, o’course, but so many people had told Miss Lilibeth to be careful. She would do most anything to get pretty things, little Miss Betsy would, and I think she wanted Miss Allyce’s pretty things. Wanted her husband, too. Maybe that’s why Miss Allyce buried stuff. So’s she could keep it to herself. And maybe that’s why she killed Miss Lilibeth. So’s she could keep her husband to herself.”

  Suzanne stood gape-jawed in the dining room door, staring at an old man who was oblivious to the effect of what he’d just said, but Faye just clung to Michael. Allyce Dunkirk’s guilt was no surprise to Fay
e. Part of her had known the truth since the day she made the timeline of Allyce’s life by studying the photographs documenting her slow deterioration. The answer had been waiting in her subconscious until Suzanne delivered the last telling bits of information: Allyce’s madness, her final days in an asylum, and the river of flowers that flowed to her from her loving husband.

  Every head had turned in their direction. There was no sound, other than the sumptuous clink of someone’s silver fork hitting a china dessert plate.

  Harriet was on her feet. “Allyce Dunkirk killed Lilibeth Campbell?”

  “Well, o’course she did. I thought everybody knew that. Mister Raymond did, and me, because we was both there. And those Hollywood people knew. Well, maybe everybody didn’t know, because I remember hearing the Hollywood men saying stuff to Mister Raymond like, ‘This can’t get out!’ But I know the police chief knew. ’Cause he told Mr. Raymond that he would be holding him to the promise of a gentleman. I heard him say that. People don’t think I’m listening. Don’t even see me standing behind them. Lots of times, I am.”

  “What promise was that?” Faye asked.

  “That Miss Allyce would never set foot off this property. This would be her jail and Mister Raymond would be her jailer. It was the right thing. You couldn’t imagine a lady like her in jail or locked in the asylum.” A shadow crossed his face. “My folks used to talk about putting me in an asylum. They did. Miss Allyce and Mister Raymond wouldn’t let ’em. They gave me my house, so I’d always have a good place to live. It woulda been wrong to lock Miss Allyce up, not when she couldn’t help what she did. That’s what the police chief said.”

  Faye remembered the Dunkirk’s glittering wealth and thought that, yes, money could buy justice in those days. It still could.

  “On the day he finally did send her away, because he was dying, Mr. Raymond opened that garden gate and walked outside to the car with her. He was so sick and frail. He didn’t even get dressed. Just walked beside her in his pajamas, leaving the gate open for the first time since he dived down under the water and tried to save Miss Lilibeth from Miss Allyce and her knife.”

  Harriet drew an audible breath.

  “He give me everything sharp in the house to keep for him after that, everything but the knives locked up in the kitchen. He did.” The old man gave an emphatic nod. “Nobody coulda stopped her, you know. They thought she was asleep, him and Miss Lilibeth, when they snuck out there to swim under the moon. Mr. Raymond was high in the air, doing a jack-knife dive, when Miss Allyce ran out of the shadows and started stabbing that poor young lady. Both ladies fell in the pool, and still she kept a-stabbing. They all thought I was in bed, too, but I wasn’t. I saw.”

  Faye found herself feeling pity for Raymond Dunkirk. Maybe Suzanne was right. Maybe his wife, the Allyce who he’d loved, was already dead when he betrayed her with Lilibeth. Maybe the real Allyce had been lost to madness long before.

  “Mr. Raymond was a man of his word. He made sure Miss Allyce was locked up for always, but he was good to her. She had nice people with her all the time, and their job was to make her smile. It was my job, too.”

  Harriet sat down with a plop.

  “After the car drove Miss Allyce away, he said to me, ‘Victor, you live in the gatehouse, and your job is to guard this gate. Don’t you ever let anybody close it again. Ever.’” He gave an emphatic nod. “I didn’t, not until this week. And I did try to stop them.”

  Suzanne put a hand on his shoulder. “Yes, Victor. You did.”

  Faye turned her eyes to the open passageway from the dining room into the atrium. She had denied it to Harriet, and she would continue to deny it to anyone but Joe, but she had sensed Allyce Dunkirk’s presence in that room. On the day that she’d stood in the doorway with Harriet while a cold wind swept past her, she’d felt a presence whose grief and pain was almost three-dimensional. She didn’t know what that presence was, but it had been real.

  At times, while she’d sat imprisoned in Dunkirk Manor’s turret, she’d felt that presence again, grieving over her, grieving over the plight of Magda and Glynis and all three of their children. But she didn’t feel it any more.

  And what of Father Domingo? Was he resting?

  Faye didn’t know. But she thought of the broken celt and blade that Glynis had brought to her. She remembered Betsy’s statement that she, too had unearthed a broken weapon in this same county. And she thought fondly of the two halves of a shapely spear point that Levon had dug up while Faye rested in the hospital. The broken weapon had been buried in a portion of the garden thought to have been undisturbed in recent centuries, even by Allyce Dunkirk and her little gardening shovel.

  She liked to think that Father Domingo had presided over the burial of these weapons, during the years when he traveled among the Timucua and urged them to lay down their arms and live in peace. She liked to think that she had walked on the same ground as the renegade priest, alongside the self-same river.

  Maybe the old heretic was at rest, but Faye would rather believe that he lingered here, watching over the sick and the weak. The world could use a few more heretics like Father Domingo.

  Faye looked around her at the fine interiors of the old mansion. Dunkirk Manor was newer than Faye’s ancestral home, Joyeuse, and it was even more stoutly built. There seemed to be no good reason for the fact that Joyeuse felt warm and alive, yet Dunkirk Manor seemed to steal the life from the very marrow of Faye’s bones. She was glad that Michael would never pass a single night here.

  It was time to go. Faye intended for Michael’s first night alone with his parents to be spent at Joyeuse.

  GUIDE FOR THE INCURABLY CURIOUS:

  A PERSONAL NOTE TO TEACHERS, STUDENTS AND PEOPLE WHO JUST PLAIN LIKE TO READ

  This readers’ guide is my chance to talk directly with the people who enjoy reading Faye’s adventures as much as I enjoy writing them. Composing the “Guide for the Incurably Curious” has become a rite of passage for me. It means that I’ve finished a book that has consumed a year of my life. And it’s my chance to put some thought into what that book means.

  I always want to know what questions my books leave behind in the minds of the people who read them. Because no book can answer every question for every person. Certainly no novel can. Part of a novelist’s art is deciding what to reveal and what to withhold. It is part of my job to leave you with space for wonder.

  I write fiction. I make a lot of this stuff up. But I write stories about a woman who loves history and archaeology, and it’s important to me that my made-up stories about Faye coexist plausibly with the real world. As a novelist, I also put a high value on the facts that underpin my story. If my readers recognize that the laws of physics and the flow of history are not violated too terribly in my stories, then they can believe the more implausible twists that are inherent in fiction. In other words, if Faye behaves like a real-life archaeologist, my readers are much more likely to swallow the notion that she stumbles across a murder victim every now and then.

  When I do speaking engagements, certain questions get asked over and over. “Are the Choctaw folk tales in Effigies real?” (Yes.) Or “Where, exactly, is Joyeuse?” (Reader, Joyeuse exists only in my imagination and yours.) In this guide, I’ll try to anticipate questions I’d expect to hear from readers of Strangers and I’ll ask some questions of my own. I visit many classrooms and book groups over the course of a year, and these are the kinds of ideas people like to toss around. If you or your class or your book group would like to chat further, contact me at maryannaevans@yahoo.com. I answer all my e-mail, when humanly possible, and I’d love to hear your responses to some of these questions.

  What did you think of Faye’s transition into a Ph.D.-holding business owner? Faye’s struggle to find a way to finish her education was a central theme in Artifacts. Relics was probably the book that illustrated most clearly her struggles to be taken seriously as a student of archaeology. In the next three books, Effigies, Findings, and Floodgates
, Faye was doing archaeological work that she hoped would help her finish her dissertation and her doctorate. Still, I didn’t want to leave her in school forever.

  I’ve resisted settling comfortably into a predictable format for the books in this series. I loved the Florida island setting of Artifacts, but I purposely took Faye on the road to Alabama and Mississippi before setting another book on Joyeuse Island. I sent her back to school, so that I wouldn’t fall into the rut of writing book after book about a black-market archaeologist working on the edge of the law. (And sometimes falling off.) I took a big risk in resolving the romantic tension that sizzled between Faye and Joe for four books, but I didn’t want to take the mirror-image risk of letting their relationship grow stale.

  So Faye’s professional life has now progressed through a six-book story arc, from an amateur archaeologist to a student to a Ph.D.-holding consultant. I really couldn’t see Faye as a professor, so I gave her a corporation to run. My editor liked this plan, because she said she thought it would be interesting to watch Faye juggle the demands of a business-owner. As the book progressed, I realized that Faye and Joe would make good partners, but that they probably would take different approaches to running a business.

  The thing about Faye’s new enterprise that pleases me most as a storyteller is the fact that a consultant does what she’s hired to do, and those jobs can vary widely. If I want to send her to Rome for a job, I can do that, as long as there is a plausible reason for someone to hire her. Even better, she is now in a position to be hired by police departments for cases that require the expertise of an archaeologist. Imagine how happy I am to realize that her new career has eliminated the problem of explaining to you why my intrepid heroine has stumbled over a dead body…again.

  Could you tell that Faye was sick and tired of being pregnant? I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book written from the point of view of a woman who is entering her ninth month of pregnancy. As a mother of three, it was an interesting exercise to imagine how advanced pregnancy would affect the things that Faye must do for her work and, in the end, to save her own life.