For a time, I intended for Faye to be in the earliest stages of pregnancy in Strangers. She might even be unaware of it until the final scene, when she realizes why she’s been feeling so weird and redoubles her efforts to save herself from the bad guy, because now she has to protect herself and her baby.
But it just didn’t work. I tried to write it that way, but realized that the reader would be in on the secret as soon as I mentioned that Faye was feeling queasy or tired. Then Faye would be looking like an idiot for about three hundred pages, while my readers were yelling, “Take a home pregnancy test, dummy!” I was rather proud of myself for making one of those tests an important clue.
As I launched into a story about a woman on the verge of becoming a mother, I learned something very quickly. Being extremely pregnant is like having an elephant in the living room. You can’t ignore it, and neither can anybody else. It affects your ability to do your job. It affects your ability to even move through a crowded room or up a flight of stairs. And even when I wrote scenes from other characters’ points of view…well, they couldn’t ignore it, either, and it affected their behavior toward Faye.
I decided to just go with it. The key to writing realistic characters is having them behave like real people, and real people do notice when someone in her thirty-fifth week of pregnancy waddles by. When I was in that condition, a stranger once said within my earshot, “She looks like she’s about to pop.” Gee, thanks.
As a part of Faye’s character arc, this pregnancy is very important. She admits as early as Artifacts, six years before the events in Strangers, that she wants a baby very much. In the meantime, we’ve watched her suffer some significant romantic travails, and her age is much on her mind. After writing six books about Faye, I found that I wanted her to have this baby almost as much as I would if she were a flesh-and-blood, real human woman who was suffering from the demands of her biological clock.
Last but not least—I think Joe is going to make a really cool father.
How did the long history of St. Augustine work as a backdrop for this story? And did you enjoy Father Domingo’s journal? I like to work with nooks and crannies of history that are interesting, but not very well known. It’s hard for Americans to get our modern brains around how far away in time the 1565 founding of St. Augustine is from us. For example, I originally wanted Glynis to bring a bayonet to Faye. “Spanish bayonet” is such a common phrase in Florida that we have appropriated it to name a very sharp-pointed plant. But I learned that bayonets, which seem a bit primitive to us, are relatively modern weapons. The Spanish did not have them when they came to Florida in 1565.
Another way to get perspective on the age of St. Augustine is to realize that it was founded more than two hundred years before the American Revolution. So its Spanish founders were as remote to our powdery-wigged, knee-pants-wearing Founding Fathers as those Founding Fathers are to us.
This antiquity presented me with a unique problem. There was just no way to shoehorn all of it into one book about a modern-day archaeologist. So I had to pick and choose. I loved the glamour of old Hollywood, so when I learned that silent movies had been filmed in St. Augustine, I knew I would use that fact, without a doubt. The story of Lilibeth Campbell, Raymond Dunkirk, Allyce Dunkirk, Victor, and the Hollywood moguls is completely fictional, but I hope it reflects the glamour brought to St. Augustine in the Gilded Age by railroad baron Henry Flagler.
When I stumbled across an English translation of the real-life journal of Father Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales, telling of his adventures on the way to the founding of America’s oldest permanent European settlement, I knew that I wanted to use his story. But how?
It has been my personal policy not to muck about with the lives of real people in my books. It’s disrespectful and, in the case of historical figures, it clouds the facts. My solution to this problem was to create my own Spanish priest and put him at the real Father Francisco’s side, gathering experiences that he would record in his own fictional journal. I also created Father Esteban to serve as a foil for my sympathetic renegade priest, Father Domingo.
Father Domingo’s story of his tumultuous trip from Spain to Florida is modeled closely on the real journal of Father Francisco. (If you’re interested in reading his reminiscences, a quick web search for “Father Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales” will take you there.) When I depict Father Francisco’s actions during that trip, they are very near to the actions he described in his real-life journal. And Father Francisco really did save some men destined for massacre at Matanzas in the way I described. Still, the real Father Francisco was a man of his era in his views of people of different faiths from himself, and I wanted to tell the story from the point-of-view of a man ahead of his time. I wanted someone to bear witness to the tragedy of the Americas—the death and destruction of her native people.
In the end, I found that I couldn’t tell the story of St. Augustine without touching something old and painful, the unimaginable suffering of Native Americans due both to warfare and to disease. In a way, I think those diseases were the biggest tragedy. Even if armed conflict over territory and gold could have somehow been avoided…even if the people from Europe had come in utter peace…the diseases that they brought with them would have still killed the native people in droves.
The last full-blooded Timucuan died in Cuba in 1767.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Map
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Guide for the Incurably Curious:
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Strangers Page 31
