Strangers (3 page)
She rose to her feet and gathered herself together, determined to show a businesslike face to her clients. Guiding them away from the silver rattle, she showed them Joe’s two-colored dirt, studded with broken tiles.
Daniel and Suzanne made the appropriate noises about the interesting information an archaeologist could glean from dirt that looked like…well, dirt…to the ordinary observer.
Glynis clearly didn’t want to just stand around and talk. Ever since Faye and her crew had arrived that morning, she’d made it clear that she found their work fascinating. Once she got wind of Joe’s and Levon’s discoveries, she’d dragged the hem of her spotless ivory pants in the dirt and squatted right down, so that Faye could explain what they’d found. Then she’d gotten her hands grubby and risked the destruction of her manicure, just so that she could fully experience the difference in color and texture between the undisturbed dirt and the scrambled soil that had been used as fill dirt.
There were few character traits that Faye appreciated more than curiosity, so she instinctively liked Glynis a whole lot. Levon’s face was alight as he crouched beside the young woman to explain what she was seeing.
“See the change in color? Here? And here? That’s a dead giveaway. It would have been obvious to Joe, even without the tile fragments to mark the dividing line. “Now, over here—”
Levon shifted Glynis’ attention to the rattle and diaper pins and kept talking without missing a beat.
Levon loved his work, so he always answered questions with a smidge more detail than needed. Glynis seemed to actually be interested in his archaeological minutiae, so ecstasy spread over Levon’s pudgy baby-face. Glynis was also very pretty in an ethereal way that contrasted sharply with the flushed and sweaty archaeologists. From the look in his eyes, Faye would guess that Levon fell hard for the ethereal type.
The shadowed glances Suzanne was casting toward the baby toys showed that she was too creeped out to feel much curiosity. Levon’s monologue was flying right over her head. Faye could see that Daniel sensed her unease, and she wasn’t surprised when they retreated quickly into the big house to tend their paying guests, with Glynis in tow.
Faye was left to wonder what else might be buried with that silver rattle. She’d dug up potentially spooky things like skulls and bones and religious totems and voodoo offerings at various times in her career. She tended to look at them through a scientist’s eyes. They were interesting fragments of the past and no more.
Being pregnant put a different spin on the discovery of a baby’s toy. It made her want to set down her trowel and walk away. It made her wish she were working anywhere but here.
Nothing else turned up before quitting time, but she spent the afternoon hugging her bulging belly just a little tighter than usual.
Alan Smithson was well prepared for his meeting with the county’s growth management people. He was always well prepared for everything he did.
Anything worth doing is worth doing right.
That’s what his late father had always told him. So he’d prepared a top-flight presentation for this evening’s meeting, even though he already knew the outcome. His development application would be approved. A new strip mall would take the place of a scrubby and unkempt strip of natural Florida that was currently earning nothing for the local government in terms of sales taxes and impact fees. The government would benefit substantially from Alan Smithson’s strip mall, and Alan Smithson would benefit substantially more. This was as it should be.
His applications were always approved, no matter what he wanted to build and no matter what county he wanted to build it in. This was because he hired top-flight people to fill out his development applications, people who knew how to say whatever it was that the permitting people wanted to hear.
Alan Smithson did
not
hire people who were more concerned about bald eagles and Indian mounds than they were about their employer’s pocketbook.
His daughter Glynis did not understand this concept. She understood that Daddy paid her credit card balance in full every month, but she didn’t seem to grasp the connection between those pretty dollars and the ugly housing developments and shopping malls that Daddy’s development company built.
Glynis had been spending way too much time with her tree-hugging friends lately. They reminded Alan of his late wife’s do-gooder cronies, but the prattling women of an earlier time had limited their charity work to people so down-trodden that his wife and her friends would have never have even hired them to scrub their toilets. Those unwashed charity cases had never crossed paths with Alan, and they certainly had never hampered his business interests. Glynis’ volunteer work, by contrast, had the potential to be very costly.
Her friends were out-and-out dangerous. They truly thought Alan should shut a project down every time an arrowhead surfaced. Did they know what it cost to have a backhoe and its operator sitting idle while some archaeologist dithered over whether his multimillion dollar project could proceed?
Fortunately, Alan knew which county officials could be bought, and he knew how much they cost. The outcome of today’s meeting was a slam-dunk.
Nevertheless, Glynis’ new obsession was getting tiring, so Alan had found her a boyfriend who could be bought, just as surely as most politicians had a price. And if Lex couldn’t keep Glynis from running off to her historic preservation society meetings and her Audubon Society gatherings and her archaeology club parties…well, there were other men on the auction block. How hard could it be for a red-blooded American man to date Alan’s gorgeous daughter?
Of course, if things got serious, that red-blooded American man was going to have to swallow a bitter pill in the form of a finely detailed pre-nup, but still…Glynis was sweet and she was beautiful and she was loaded. What red-blooded American was going to turn down
that
combination?
Joe and Magda had spent the morning tracing the edge of the swimming pool. Or goldfish pond. Or whatever the heck it was.
Faye guessed that the Art Deco tiles were made in the 1920s, and swimming pools had been popular at that time. Of course, anything expensive had been popular in the status-seeking Roaring Twenties, including reflecting ponds and elaborate fountains, so the jury was still out.
Faye was having a Great Gatsby moment, picturing handsome Jazz Age ladies and gentleman playing tennis in spotless whites and lounging beside a swimming pool while they smoked cigarettes in long holders. At the moment, reality was less enchanting. Daniel and Suzanne were playing tennis in t-shirts and ratty shorts, and the archaeologists were sweating unglamorously as they worked.
Kirk and Levon were clearing dirt off the stone tiles, one by one, that had paved this portion of the garden. Their curving pattern seemed to match the line in the soil that Joe and Magda were following. A web search had turned up lots of photos of pools from the Roaring Twenties. The ones that best matched this site were a long, narrow oval shape that Faye found particularly elegant. Maybe Daniel and Suzanne could propose a new pool with a retro design. The historical review committee should just love that.
Faye hated watching her crew work, while she just stood around and sweated for no good reason. She wished she could be more help, instead of just managing a staff of people who didn’t need her to tell them what to do.
After lunch, she’d succumbed to Joe’s nagging and collapsed into a stylish lawn chair he’d dragged over from the back porch. Magda’s daughter Rachel was playing at her feet, singing to the baby doll in her arms. It was astonishing to Faye as a not-yet-parent to see how much a child could grow and learn in three years. Faye remembered when this little goddaughter of hers had been a fairly useless lump of adorable flesh.
The sun played on the child’s russet hair, and Faye simply sat there and loved her. If she felt this way about someone else’s child, what would it feel like to look at her own?
Magda had stopped teaching summer classes when Rachel was born, and she’d cut her office hours back as far as the university would tolerate. Since she’d waited until she was way older than Faye—forty-five—to give birth, her intended goal had been to enjoy this child as much as possible. Her husband, Sheriff Mike McKenzie, had been on the far side of sixty when this last child was born, so his stated goal had been to spoil Rachel just as badly as he spoiled his grandchildren.
Magda obviously enjoyed the heck out of being Rachel’s mother, but she enjoyed her work, too. She’d seized on Faye’s first big contract as an opportunity to mix business and family and friendship and pleasure.
“Hire me,” she’d said. “I’ll work cheap. It’ll be the perfect summer project for me.”
That offer had silenced Faye’s first objection. She couldn’t afford a Ph.D. other than herself, but if Magda was willing to give her expertise away, who was Faye to say no? Still, there was the question of Rachel. Faye just couldn’t imagine Magda staying in St. Augustine, hours away from her daughter in Micco County, possibly for weeks.
Magda was ahead of her, but what else was new? “If I hire somebody local to watch Rachel while I work, will the boss-lady let me bring my kid?”
Faye silently added up the cost of a full-time babysitter. “I thought you said you’d work cheap.”
“I will. I don’t expect to come out too far ahead, money-wise. But—” She held up a hand and began ticking off the job’s benefits on her fingers. “One, I’ll have some time with my daughter. Two, if I hire a babysitter, I’ll have some time
away
from my daughter. Three, I’ll get to work with you and Joe, which is always fun. Four, you can give me a fancy-schmancy title, so I’ll have a nice-looking consultant job to add to my curriculum vitae. Five, I’ll surely make at least a little extra pocket money to spend on my charming husband.”
Magda had run out of fingers, so she started counting them again. “Six, if my boss-lady puts me up someplace nice, that same charming husband can drive over and spend some romantic time with me, now and then.”
Thinking of their not-luxurious quarters, Faye realized that she’d failed to hold up this part of their bargain.
“Seven,” Magda had continued in her customary relentless manner, “Rachel’s godmother, my boss-lady, will have plenty of chances to take her goddaughter off my hands and practice her childrearing skills.
And
…” She held eye contact with Faye as she stuck up an eighth finger and landed hard on the word “and.” “…you and I can surely get a publication out of this job.”
Motherhood or not, Magda never stopped being an ambitious academic.
“Magda, it’s a routine consulting contract. We’re just digging up somebody’s back yard. What could we possibly find worth publishing?”
“You never know what you’re gonna find. That’s why I love this line of work. And we’re talking about St. Augustine. There are four hundred and fifty years of European history to uncover, and only God knows how long the First Americans were piling up oyster shells beside Matanzas Bay. Besides, you and I have been known to get papers out of just about anything. We wrote up that stuff you uncovered in
your
back yard, you know.”
This was true.
“We published your work on that eagle effigy mound in Mississippi. Well,
you
think it looks like an eagle.”
“It does, and you know it.”
“Pregnancy makes you tart-tongued, does it? I’ve got no excuse for my own tart tongue.”
Both these things were also true.
“We’ll find something worth writing about, trust me. And I’m going to keep bullying you into publishing your work until you see reason. I’ll turn you into an academic, Faye, if it’s the last thing I do. Digging up back yards that probably don’t need digging up is a waste of a fine mind, if you ask me.”
Faye hadn’t asked her, and she was gratified to hear her old friend admit to being a bully. But she didn’t like to argue with Magda, so she just said, “If we find something interesting, I’ll help you with the article. But I doubt it’ll come to that.”
So Magda was here working for peanuts, and Rachel would be toddling around underfoot for a few minutes each morning and afternoon while her hardworking babysitter Lynne took a break. Faye was glad to have them. Maybe she was hormonal, but this just felt like a time when she wanted to be surrounded by her loved ones.
Magda stood up and chortled, “Hey, look!” in the shrill tone she’d cultivated to convince students she was half-witch and fully intimidating.
Faye hauled herself to her feet and shuffled over. “What’ve you found?”
“A pipe. Since it runs that direction,” she said, pointing toward the rear garden wall, “instead of toward the house, I’m thinking they pulled the water right out of the river. The Matanzas is tidal, so this would have been almost like a saltwater pool. Certainly brackish, at least.”
“Unless there’s a well out there somewhere.” Faye followed the line of the pipe with her eyes. “Seems unlikely. Pulling water out of the river would’ve made a lot more sense.”
The two women stood with their backs to the house, wondering whether the old pipes still lay underground and trying to imagine what path they might take if they did. Faye felt like she jumped a foot when the slim cool hand landed on her shoulder. The other hand had touched Magda’s shoulder, and Magda had done the same.
Glynis was the culprit. Faye felt completely stupid for being spooked by someone so nonspooky. By contrast, Magda made it a professional point to be as scary as possible.
Suzanne’s elegant assistant gave the impression that she’d rather be on Faye’s crew than working indoors. She’d already strolled out to the excavation several times that day—before work, at lunchtime, during coffee breaks—just to chat with the archaeologists and watch them work. It made Faye laugh to see Levon wipe his hands and smooth back his hair when Glynis appeared on the back porch.
Faye had let the young people be, chatting with Magda while Levon and Kirk talked to Glynis about their work. The twenty-somethings were friendly enough to the two older women, but their chatter over which nightclub had colder beer and which cell phone company gave the best deal on unlimited Internet access made Faye feel elderly. She’d felt so elderly, in fact, that she spent one of her own breaks learning to text, just to prove that she wasn’t old yet. As if being pregnant didn’t serve the same purpose…
When Glynis saw how badly she’d startled Faye by simply touching her on the arm, she’d lost her breath from laughter.
“Daniel would like to see you,” she said to Faye.
Glynis offered no reason for this summons. Faye was new to business, but she wasn’t stupid. When her client called, she needed to appear promptly and with a smile. She turned and walked alone to the house while Glynis interrupted Levon’s work yet again.
Joe brushed his hands on the rag hanging out of his back pocket as if he planned to escort her. She shook her head as she passed him, saying, “Don’t worry, Joe. I really am capable of walking across the yard.”
It was quite a deep yard, since the old house occupied a city block, but Faye wasn’t concerned about the distance. Walking would probably relieve the pressure of the baby’s weight on various portions of her anatomy. It was the staircase that loomed large in Faye’s mind.
Daniel’s office was on the third floor, and Faye had gotten a good eyeful of the atrium staircase when she first arrived. It was a typical Gilded Age monster—two stories of hand-carved oak balusters and railings and banisters and wainscoting. The stair treads were narrow and the risers were steep by modern standards, a bit of a problem for a woman who could no longer see her feet, and the swooping curves required triangular treads that were downright treacherous.
She counted those stair treads as she climbed. Ripley’s Believe-It-or-Not had been right. There were thirteen of them.
Faye could have been happy, lying on the polished oak ground floor and staring up at the stained glass ceiling overlooking Dunkirk Manor’s grand atrium. Hauling herself up the stairway overlooking that atrium was quite another thing. Nevertheless, her client had summoned her. With sufficient effort, she could get herself to Daniel’s office, and she would by God paste a smile on her face when she got there.
She was halfway up the second staircase, still counting steps.
Seven, eight, nine…
Looking upstairs she could see that, again, there were thirteen of them. Her voodoo priestess friend Dauphine would have cautioned her to skip that last step, because a person’s future was determined by where her feet fell. It was too late. She’d already stepped on the thirteenth step of the first flight of stairs, because it was too much of a stretch for her aching body to skip one for no good reason.
She trod hard on that thirteenth step, and prepared herself mentally to meet and impress her client. She reminded herself to smile.
Her hips might be screaming bloody murder but she was smiling.
***
Faye had paused and caught her breath before knocking on Daniel’s office door, and the man hadn’t seemed to notice her discomfort, so the pasted-on smile must have worked. Unfortunately, their errand required Faye to navigate yet another flight of stairs.
Again, there was a clearly demarcated line where Dunkirk Manor’s housekeeping staff’s responsibility ended. The soles of her shoes had more traction on this last flight of stairs, because no surface could be slick underneath a thick and downy coating of dust. Those dusty stairs had been narrow, twisting, and rickety as Faye and Daniel ascended to the attic. As it turned out, climbing them had been worth every painful step.
Behind a paneled door coated with flaking and powdery white paint, a treasure trove was waiting.
The walls were lined with shelves, and the stuff loading those shelves had overflowed and spilled onto the floor. Somebody had cleaned out a path through the narrow room, so Faye and Daniel were picking their way down the full impressive width of Dunkirk Manor’s kitchen. This cluttered and dusty room looked like most people’s attics, except that it had been the attic of people who could buy anything they fancied for more than a hundred years.
Faye saw trunks spilling over with yellowed silk dresses. She saw moth-eaten buffalo heads and the tusks of elephants. Tucked among the junk were boxes of file folders, probably the complete tax records of a wealthy family, dating to the time when the 16
th
Amendment first turned the Bureau of Internal Revenue loose on an unsuspecting public. Most of this stuff would probably be worth a few dollars at one of the antique stores on San Marco Avenue, but no more.
Still, Faye would have sold her mother for a chance to plunder through it. And her history-loving mother would probably have understood, if she were still around to be sold. Maybe if Faye exercised a little salesmanship, she could get paid for this work that she was dying to do anyway.
“We could curate this material for you, Daniel. Some of the papers might be worth archiving, and there could be artwork that you’d want to display for your guests.” She pointed at a pile of ornate frames sitting in a dormer.
Daniel was silent longer than he needed to be.
“Maybe.” Daniel seemed to waver. “I’m not sure Suzanne and I can afford such a large project yet—not until you finish the one you’re working on now, anyway—but I do have one thing to ask you. I mean…” He swallowed hard. “I have something to show you.”
He waved vaguely in the direction they’d been moving. Then he started walking briskly down the length of a huge room in an attic so big that there was yet another door in the far wall. Faye looked lovingly at the door—what could be behind it?—but forward progress stopped when Joe opened the door behind them.
“You were gone for awhile, Faye, and I got worried. Glynis told me where you were.” He looked at Daniel. “It’s a powerful long hike downstairs from here for a pregnant lady. Maybe you’ve got a freight elevator we can use to get her back down?”
Great. Her handsome and sexy husband was talking about her in the third person, and he was saying that she needed to be hauled around in a freight elevator. Was the romance truly that dead?