Strangers (20 page)
If Faye had thought that it was impossible for Suzanne to be more over-protective of her as a pregnant woman than she already was, she now stood corrected. The woman had actually asked her if she needed help getting from the dining room to the bathroom.
Suzanne’s husband Daniel was even worse. After Faye had managed to visit the ladies’ room unaccompanied, Daniel had met her at the dining room door, fully loaded breakfast plate in hand, and herded her back to her room. He’d been pretty forceful about it, saying things like, “You shouldn’t be on your feet, not after what you went through yesterday,” and he’d waved the plate loaded with quiche and fruit compote like a matador guiding a bull with a red flag.
She’d regretfully turned her back on the noisy dining room, filled with happy eaters and a boisterous little girl crawling beneath the table. She’d been looking forward to a little time watching Rachel play and listening to her talk to her imaginary friend but, confronted with the opportunity to eat in her room in silence, Faye realized that her nerves might not be ready for a three-year-old’s demands on her attention.
Maybe Daniel was right. Maybe she
did
need more time to recover from her adventure in the creek with Betsy.
Faye was reminded that Daniel, like Detective Overstreet, had spent months of his life as the husband of a pregnant woman. He was completely aware that she woke up so hungry that she could be led by the nose with nothing but the aroma wafting from the plate in his hands.
And apparently, Joe was aware of the same thing. As they passed the kitchen door, he emerged with an identical plate in his hand. The expression on his face made her laugh out loud, which was not the best response.
Faye was impatient and frustrated, and it seemed that Joe was suffering the same symptoms, even though he’d been spared the aches and the hormonal roller-coaster. She could tell that Joe wanted to yell at Daniel for rendering his food offering to Faye useless. And she could tell that Joe knew just how stupid it would be to yell at Daniel for doing something nice.
Since Faye was the only person involved who wasn’t carrying a dish, her hands were free. She used one of them to squeeze Joe’s forearm and say, “Thanks for fixing me a plate. Now we have two. You can eat the extra one.”
Daniel, a model of tact, smiled as she thanked him for his help, then disappeared into the kitchen. Joe’s scowl grew a little dimmer, but not much.
***
Faye was ridiculously happy to be standing in the early morning sunshine, watching her team work. Rachel was making mud pies under the shade of a hydrangea laden with blue mop-headed blooms, oblivious to the fact that her mother was watching her every move.
Faye couldn’t blame Magda’s babysitter for quitting. There wasn’t much impetus for a young woman to stick with a low-paying job, not when someone her exact age had disappeared from her workplace.
Rachel was exceptionally well-behaved, and Magda was a formidable multitasker. Thus, there was some possibility that this very important project could proceed on schedule, despite having a three-year-old underfoot. It didn’t hurt to have sympathetic clients. Suzanne had “given” Rachel an entire flower bed, so Magda and Faye had been presented with daisies and petunias at five-minute intervals, all morning long.
There would be no adventures in law enforcement today, because Detective Overstreet had made it clear that Faye had served her usefulness, until and unless something archaeological reared its head.
Half the morning had passed, and nothing particularly archaeological had even surfaced here, where a bunch of people were digging for such things. Faye had walked surreptitiously over to the garden shed and tried the door, because she was bored and because she felt compelled to check every day. It was locked and had been locked since the evening when Overstreet had gotten a search warrant, hoping to find Glynis in there.
Faye had spent many uneventful days like this, so she’d been lulled into expecting to uncover nothing on this day, nothing but uninteresting fill dirt. It was at times like this that lightning often struck.
“What in the hell…?” Kirk said, pulling something the size of his fist from the soil.
Everyone gathered around to look at the elephant figurine.
“Do you think it’s African?” Kirk asked uncertainly, like a young man offering his best guess, but who is afraid that his best guess is just stupid.
“I do,” Faye said. “The carving is intricate and the proportions are very good. This was no cheap souvenir.”
Magda, looking over her shoulder, nodded in agreement.
“What’s it doing here?” Levon asked. “Was it in the fill dirt where the pool used to be?”
“Nope,” Kirk said. “It was under one of the paving tiles. Just like the spear point and the Spanish coin.”
“And the baby things,” Magda said.
“Yeah,” Kirk said, still looking at the little elephant. “Do you think this stuff came to be here naturally—though I can’t really imagine how—or do you think maybe somebody buried it all on purpose. Maybe a kid?”
Faye thought of young Victor, helping Allyce Dunkirk with her gardening. He would certainly have had access to shovels. Maybe he’d been a little bitty kleptomaniac, stealing cool stuff out of Dunkirk Manor and burying it, just for the hell of it. It would explain a lot…
“Faye?”
Detective Overstreet’s voice had a sheepish note to it. She looked up from the elephant in Kirk’s hands and saw Overstreet and Victor standing nearby.
“I know I said I wouldn’t be needing your help any more—”
“You were pretty vocal about it.”
“Yeah. Well, I’ve got another stash of artifacts for you to look at.”
She raised an eyebrow at him.
“They’re at Victor’s house.”
***
So Victor wasn’t homeless after all.
Faye was relieved, up to a point. The fact remained that his house was so substandard that the old man almost might have been sleeping under the stars. She stood between Victor and Overstreet, looking over the house from threshold to rooftop and wondering how long it had been since there were panes in the windows.
Overstreet had expressed concern over whether Faye should walk to Victor’s place, which was ridiculous. If Faye had lingered in the street in front of Dunkirk Manor, she could have seen the shabby house. She could have thrown a rock and hit it.
Faye was astonished that she’d never noticed the little shack. Though standing on a vacant lot overrun with vines and underbrush, it was nevertheless in plain sight at the end of the short street, if you knew where to look.
“Best I can tell,” Overstreet said, “is that this was the gatehouse when Dunkirk Manor was first built. It was probably out of use by the time Raymond and Allyce Dunkirk owned the big house. Old Mr. Dunkirk sold a lot of this property around the turn of the century, so there wouldn’t have been a gate on the street by then. The other houses on this street all stand on plots that used to belong to the Dunkirks. They probably held onto the gatehouse property a little bit longer, but Victor says he owns it now. He says he grew up in it. His parents rented it, but the Dunkirks gave it to him sometime after they died.”
He leaned toward Faye, whispering in her ear. “He may not own it now. I can’t imagine that he’s been paying property taxes. I’ve been thinking that maybe Victor’s mental issues aren’t just due to old age. Maybe the Dunkirks gave him this place because they knew he’d never be able to take care of himself.”
“It’s possible,” Faye said. “I got a title search on the Dunkirk property when I was doing my preliminary work. I was primarily interested in the plot where the mansion stands, but I remember seeing that big chunks of it were sold off over the years. It won’t be hard to find out if they really gave this…house…to Victor.
“House” seemed like a strong word for the place where Victor stayed. Only a few traces of white paint remained unpeeled from its wood frame. Green vines shrouded the entire structure, and they provided enough camouflage to hide Victor’s Piggly-Wiggly basket from passers-by. There was no bathroom, no kitchen, no running water. Maybe there was, or had been, an outhouse in the overgrown area out back. There certainly had been no such thing as indoor plumbing when the gatehouse was built, not in modest little dwellings like this.
And there was no kitchen, maybe because the gatekeeper’s family had always eaten with the servants at Dunkirk Manor. Victor had said he ate in the dining room with the Dunkirks while they lived, at least sometimes. Maybe he ate with the servants the rest of the time. She wondered if his parents had been on staff at Dunkirk Manor while they lived, meaning that Victor had eaten every meal of his life in the mansion until the Dunkirks died and left him alone.
Faye couldn’t imagine Allyce Dunkirk allowing “her” little boy to go hungry, or to fend for himself if she knew he wasn’t able. But the day had come when Raymond and Allyce Dunkirk weren’t able to shield Victor from the world and, for whatever reason, they hadn’t made sure that someone else was going to do it.
Victor was beside himself with joy that he had visitors. He had danced down the street in front of them, crowing, “Come! Come in! Come see me.”
The warped floorboards inside Victor’s front door made it impossible for the door to swing completely open or completely shut. Victor seemed to think this was great, since he told them several times that he loved to be able to come and go at will without taking the trouble to operate the door. There was one window in each wall. Upon closer inspection, Faye found that a couple of them still had some panes.
The gatehouse stood at the end of the dead-end street, so anyone standing at the front window had a clear view of its entire length. This had made sense when the Dunkirks had employed a gatekeeper to monitor comings and goings. Now, it simply meant that Victor knew everybody’s business.
“I saw those people yesterday closing Miss Allyce’s gate, and I runned down there to put a stop to it. I did.”
Perhaps to prevent Victor from suffering another emotional meltdown, Overstreet changed the subject. “Show Faye the things you showed me. She likes old stuff.” Overstreet chuckled. “She likes you, Victor.”
“’Cause I’m old stuff?”
“You bet.”
Victor cackled softly as he pulled several ratty cardboard boxes from beneath a dining table that was missing a leg. As best Faye could tell, he stored the boxes there because the table kept them fairly dry. Faye could see blue sky through some of the holes in Victor’s roof.
As Victor held his treasures up for her to see, one by one, Faye could see why Overstreet had wanted her opinion. Victor had probably found most of this stuff during his daily schedule of dumpster-diving, but not all of it. Beneath a moldy stack of romance novels, Faye saw a leatherbound edition of George Eliot’s
Middlemarch
. In another box, there was a piece of Victorian bric-a-brac, carved in ebony, that might have been part of a music stand. There was a set of carving knives, sheathed in a red felt sleeve, with horn handles. Atop them was a pair of embroidery scissors embossed with the body of a tiny bird, the blades shaped like its dainty beak. A tarnished candlestick had the look and heft of real silver. The slick gleam of an ornate china snuffbox stood out among the dusty junk.
“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.”