Strangers (21 page)
Faye thought through the movements of all the key players that morning. Something was missing. “Did anybody leave? Did you see Glynis leave? Or Lex? Or anybody you didn’t know?”
Victor shook his head.
Faye turned to Overstreet. “So if Lex didn’t walk out and wasn’t carried out, then someone threw him over the back wall of the garden. That’s the only way I can think of for him to wind up dead in the river. And Glynis…”
“She’s either still in the house or an outbuilding, all of which I personally searched from top to bottom, or she went over the back wall, too.”
A sick possibility presented itself. “Or she’s buried somewhere on the grounds.”
Overstreet nodded and, suddenly, Victor shook himself and let out a shriek.
“Dead? Mister Lex is dead? He was my neighbor. Lived right there.” A clawlike hand waved in the general direction of the Fountain of Youth. “I didn’t know it! Nobody tells an old man anything. And poor Miss Glynis…” He dissolved into hysterical tears.
Faye and Overstreet eyed each other. Victor was apparently telling the truth. Why would he not be? He hadn’t understood the implications of the fact that he’d seen neither Glynis nor Lex leave. He offered no interpretations of what he’d seen. He wasn’t capable of doing that. He’d just told them what he saw.
As Faye spoke soft, comforting words to Victor, she felt sure that his observations would be a help in solving this case. But how?
***
Overstreet knew he needed to face facts. Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth was a help to him, and not only on those occasions when he wanted to ask her about old things carved out of rock. He’d been born into the Leave It To Beaver era, and it stuck in his craw to think about endangering any woman. But she’d gotten herself into trouble while she was doing nothing more dangerous than checking out those old things carved out of rock that he’d hired her to study. And if he judged her character right, she was well able to get herself into trouble any old time. Doing contract work for the police department just gave her more convenient access to danger.
So after they’d left Victor in his hovel, he’d invited her to take a ride so they could talk about the case. All of it, not just the archaeology. They were sitting in the Starbucks drive-up doing that right now, while they waited for their coffees. But that didn’t mean that he intended to let her drink anything but decaf.
“Catch me up on the case,” she said, sucking on the travel cup like she thought she might be able to get some real, actual coffee out of it.
“We haven’t found the first physical clue since we searched her car. That waist-length platinum hair Glynis has is a double-edged sword. If she left one behind, we’d surely see it. But so would the person who took her. If there was any time at all to clean up someplace she’d been, the hair would be as obvious as a neon sign. Any idiot would find it and get rid of it. So no hair evidence.”
“What about fibers?”
“We’re lucky to have the convenience store video, so we know what she was wearing—even down to the brand name, because one of our officers went to the mall and tracked down the outfit. Rich women like Glynis don’t wear their clothes long. A new trend crops up and they send their old dresses off to Goodwill before they’re even sold out at the mall. So we got lucky there. Her blouse was a black-and-white print silk. The pants were black with a small houndstooth check. Again, those threads would be easy to see, but we haven’t seen any, except in her car and her house. Maybe we haven’t been going the right places, or maybe the culprit did a good job of cleaning up. There’s no way to know.”
“No footprints?”
“Nothing beyond what I already told you. Footprints could eventually prove helpful, because both Glynis and Lex wore really pricey shoes. Not a lot of people around here spend that kinda money on their feet. So if we find the print of a five-hundred-dollar loafer, we won’t necessarily be able to prove it belonged to Glynis or Lex, but it sure would be a solid hint that one of them had left it.”
“And that’s it for physical evidence?”
“Well, there was the questionable trace of blood in the garden shed. Remember? Coulda been blood. Coulda been boxwood or poison ivy. Those chemical tests are useful, but they have some damn huge drawbacks.”
“What do you think about Victor’s certainty that nobody steps onto Dunkirk Manor’s property without him knowing about it?”
Faye’s latté had left her with a little milk mustache. Overstreet knew that a real gentleman would tell her, but he apparently wasn’t one of those, because he just answered her question without telling her to wipe her face. “I don’t know. Victor lives in his own little world. But let’s go with it. Say he’s right. What does that really do for us?”
“Well, it lets Dick Wheeler and Alan Smithson off the hook. If they weren’t on the grounds, then they didn’t do the killing or the kidnapping.”
“Do you really want to eliminate them as suspects?”
“Hell, no,” she said, wiping her face with the back of her hand. Feeling the dampness on her upper lip, she shot him a dirty look. “We can’t eliminate anyone, even if Victor is a hundred percent right that nothing went through that gate but Lex, Glynis’ car, and the household staff’s cars. A killer could have been lying in the back seat, with a gun pointed at Glynis’ head. Victor wouldn’t know.”
“Or somebody could have been hiding in the trunk of any of the cars.”
“Exactly. This isn’t like some Agatha Christie locked-room mystery, where there’s no way to get to the scene of the crime other than on foot or by driving one of the few cars known to have entered the property. It’s more like a physics problem…a conservation problem.”
“Come again?”
“Well, you know that matter is neither created nor destroyed. It is conserved. If you look in a big black box and you see a…um…dog, and you look in the black box later and it’s empty, then you don’t have to be a physicist to know the dog is somewhere else.”
“Might be dead.”
“Well, yeah. But the dog…or its parts…are
somewhere
. Fluffy the Poodle didn’t go
poof
and disappear. That’s not the way things work in our world.”
“Dogs are neither created nor destroyed. Check. Except for puppies. They just…happen.”
She looked like she wanted to choke him. “Would you focus?”
He nodded, so she could continue teaching him physics. “So we can treat this case like a black box. We have to presume that the people who came onto the Dunkirk Manor grounds are still there, unless we know they left.”
“Like Glynis.”
“Yes. And we have to think very carefully about ways people could have gotten onto or off the grounds without anybody, even Victor, knowing. Which means that Wheeler or Smithson or someone else could have come and gone over the garden wall. And they could have taken Glynis with them.”
“It would have been hard for Wheeler to do that,” she observed, “then get the river mud off himself in time to be at the Rotary Club in less than an hour.”
“True.”
“Like you said, someone could have been in the trunk of any of the cars that came in that morning.”
“Or the day before, if he found a place to hide and wait.”
Overstreet’s new consultant Faye liked this line of reasoning. He could tell by the way she was draining her tall decaf latté before she spoke. “Yes. But then they’d have had to hide and wait for a chance to leave.”
“We searched the place hard. Even in that big old house, I just can’t believe we missed a place big enough to hide a person.”
“Or two. Glynis has to be somewhere.”
“You’ve checked Wheeler’s alibi out at the Rotary Club?” Faye was obviously still trying to imagine the man coming and going over the garden wall in a business suit.
“Yep. He checks out.”
“Damn. I don’t like him. But Smithson hasn’t got any alibi. Do we really think he would do anything to harm Glynis—his own daughter?”
Without waiting for him to answer her question, she plunged on. “But we don’t really know Glynis is hurt. If Lex was standing in the parking lot yelling at Glynis, maybe hitting her once or twice—”
“—which would account for the little bit of her blood that we found—”
“Yeah.” Faye nodded vigorously. “Yeah. Maybe Smithson stumbled onto an ugly scene between his daughter and her boyfriend. He killed Lex, then dumped his body in the river.”
“But where’s Glynis?”
“Maybe her father hid her, so that she couldn’t testify against him in a murder trial.”
“But how long could he possibly keep her hidden?”
Overstreet had a sudden image of Rapunzel alone in a tower with only her flowing golden locks for company. Wherever Glynis was, how very lonely she must be.
***
Faye looked longingly at the rickety stairs rising to the attic where Father Domingo’s journal had lain hidden for who-knows-how-long. How much would she give for a day alone in that place, plundering for hidden treasure?
Instead, she’d ridden the elevator up to Daniel’s office, for no good reason other than he wanted her to. He’d asked her how the excavation was going and whether the project was on budget. He’d asked her to tell him again about the artifacts they’d found. Then, like everyone else she encountered these days, he’d decided that she looked tired.
Over her protests, he’d taken her solicitously by the arm and escorted her back to the elevator, even going to the ridiculous extreme of riding downstairs with her. They’d paused in the entry hall, with his hand still gripping her elbow, to discuss whether she was capable of walking to her bedroom or to the excavation under her own locomotion.
Faye really thought she might scream. But who would hear her and rescue her from this nuttiness? Joe and Overstreet were just as bad. So was Magda. Levon and Kirk might have been, except they came from a generation that rarely guided a woman from place to place with a hand cupped around her elbow.
She pulled her arm closer to her side, hoping to disengage Daniel’s hand, but it clung like a vise. Faye knew she shouldn’t be so resentful of people who were trying to help her, but she was only human.
Then a shadow fell across the perfectly buffed oak floor of the entry hall. Daniel’s hand relaxed. So did Faye. Maybe she
was
hormonal, but there were times when she just wanted to stand still and look at her beautiful husband.
Joe’s skin glowed with the same bronzed brown of the oak floors. He was as solid and strong as Dunkirk Manor, but he was alive from his dark flowing hair and clear green eyes to his powerful legs and moccasin-shod feet.
“I’m glad you’re back, Faye. Let’s go get you off your feet.”
He thanked Daniel for looking after her and ushered her through the atrium. Ever empty and ever cold, the light in the atrium always seemed wrong. Not quite the filtered light of late afternoon and not quite the warm, shifting glow of candle fire, this light made shadows where there shouldn’t be any.
Before the thought was fully formed in her mind, Faye’s eyes darted to the staircase, looking for Allyce. She saw nothing but shadows, and she felt nothing but the chill breeze of Dunkirk Manor’s modern air conditioning system.
Then, once again, Suzanne stepped out of the shadows on the balcony above them. She reached for the shining clock, all glass and wood and brass, that sat on a shelf at the head of the stairs. After winding it and lightly touching a finger to a clock face that already displayed the correct time, Suzanne lingered on the landing a moment, extending a tentative foot toward the first step down to the atrium’s ground floor, then drawing it back. She locked eyes with Faye in a way that made Faye pat her bulging middle, as if to make sure the baby was still there.
The manor’s atrium was as austere and lifeless as ever…until Rachel scampered through. Multicolored light streamed through the stained glass overhead, and it broke into pieces on her shining auburn curls. Her softness soaked up the room’s echoes and emptiness. Her tiny laugh made it simply alive.
The look on Suzanne’s face tore Faye’s heart out. Faye wondered if Annie’s hair had been auburn. She wondered what Annie’s laugh had sounded like.
Magda stomped through a dining room door and into the atrium, struggling to keep up with Rachel and calling mother words after her.
“Stop right where you are, young lady. Right this minute!”
Musical giggles trailed the little girl as she fled.
“I’ll call your father. He’ll drive all the way over here from Micco County and you’ll be in big trouble!”
Rachel never hesitated. She kept running, unable to believe that her doting father would even scold her, much less punish her.
“Rachel Lillian McKenzie, you’re going to give me a heart attack!”
Concern spread across the flawless little brow. Rachel stumbled to a stop and turned toward her mother, arms up.
“No, Mommy. No!”
Magda scooped her off her tiny feet and said, “Don’t run from Mommy. How many times do I have to tell you that?”
“I be good.” The tiny hand splayed across Magda’s ample breast. “Heart okay?”
Faye wondered if the tiny child realized already what it meant to have parents who were old enough to be her grandparents. It meant that she would have less time to spend with them.
The fine lines at the corners of Magda’s eyes softened as she said, “Yes, sweetheart. Mommy’s heart is just fine.”
Suzanne backed away from the balcony rail, fading into the shadows.
A hand closed like a vise on Faye’s elbow, guiding her toward her room and her bed. This time it was Joe’s hand, and not Daniel’s, so Faye didn’t mind so much.
Faye and her work crew could hear Overstreet and his technicians rustling through the vegetation on the riverbank behind Dunkirk Manor’s garden wall. She could hear their cursing as, one by one, they lost a boot in the muck or slipped in the slimy mud.
These sounds told her something about Lex’s murder, something that Overstreet already knew. He had already led a search of the riverbank on the day Glynis disappeared, without finding a trace of human activity. Since a person slipping around in slimy, boot-sucking mud tended to leave a trail, Overstreet had drawn the conclusion on the day of the murder that no one had been sneaking around back there…probably.
His uncertainty was rooted in the simple limitations of time. Glynis had been reported missing by mid-morning. While others from the department began a search of all of St. Augustine, starting with the street in front of Dunkirk Manor and fanning out, Overstreet and his technicians had begun an immediate search of the manor’s grounds, first by trying to track the movements of people in the vicinity of her car. When the footprints and blood trail failed, they had carefully searched the gardens, front and rear, looking for Glynis or her footprints or her blood behind every bush and tree.
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?”
“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.”