Strangers (9 page)
From the journal of Father Domingo Sanz de la Fuente
Translated from the Spanish by
Faye Longchamp-Mantooth, Ph.D.,
and Magda Stockard-McKenzie, Ph.D.
The natives who foolishly tempted my countrymen with gold were anxious to feast us. They urged us to pass the night with them, but our leader declined, as he was anxious to deliver the good news of treasure found.
When our Captain-General and Admiral, Don Pedro, saw the two tiny golden prizes, he rose from his seat and made a plan to go ashore immediately. He himself led a party of men to the village, taking with him a goodly quantity of linen and knives and other little things of that sort. These gifts bought him the location of the French settlement, a piece of knowledge that would cost many Frenchmen their lives.
While we were in transit, the natives had fetched one of their number who had traded with the French and thus spoke some of their language. I was able to communicate with him, to a degree, and thus added a sin to my soul so large that it challenges my faith in our Savior’s ability to forgive it. I learned that a party of the French remained five leagues behind us, at the precise spot where God conducted us on the day we first sighted land. Hundreds of men died because I passed that information to Don Pedro.
God help me, but I never once considered the consequences of those words as they crossed my lips. Or, if I did, I excused myself with the knowledge that we Spaniards serve the Lord with so much more purity of spirit than the French ever could. How ironic it was that the French flagship was named the Trinité!
On our first encounter with the Trinité, we expected her immediate surrender, as they were accompanied only by a single galley, and we were five ships. Yet in the midst of parleying, they abruptly shipped their cables, spread their sails, and passed through our midst.
The Captain-General called after them to drop their sails by order of King Philip II, and he received an impertinent answer. Perhaps this behavior was prompted by the Captain General’s assertion that we had come to protect the rightful territory of the King of Spain, and also to hang all Calvinists.
We fired our cannons upon the retreating French and I saw a single shot carry away five or six men. Though we gave chase all night, they maneuvered so well that we could take neither the flagship nor its galley. Even Father Francisco was heard to say that the miserable devils were very good sailors.
__________
I, Father Domingo Sanz de la Fuente, attest that the foregoing is a statement of actual events.
A few quiet words emanating from her cell phone in Joe’s voice…Faye had no other evidence of the arrival of the police. They weren’t visible out her window. The stout walls of Dunkirk Manor blocked their voices and the sound of their tires on the gravel.
A few minutes after Joe phoned to say, “They’re here,” she had seen a reflected glow where their flashlights played on the vine-covered garden wall. Other than that, the police could have come and gone, and she would never have known.
Time dragged and stopped. Were they finding Glynis right now? Or Lex? Were either of them still alive?
Her phone, over-loud, broke the silence. “There’s nobody in the shed, and nothing in there but yard trash and tools and the gardener’s stuff.”
Joe sounded tired, devastated. In her mind, and just as surely in his mind, Glynis had been in there, safe and waiting for them. Faye didn’t know whether she’d thought Lex might be in there. Half the time, she thought that Lex was the kidnapper—or worse—and she was convinced that he was either with Glynis or on the run from a murder charge.
The rest of the time, her sensitive, feminine side—and she did have one—reminded her that large volumes of blood that wasn’t Glynis’ had been found. The man could have bled to death just a day before. Faye reminded herself to give him the benefit of the doubt.
She crawled into bed, not because she thought she might sleep, but because it would make Joe happy if he saw here there.
Overstreet had called Faye at seven sharp. She knew he thought he was being considerate by giving her time to sleep, but she’d been waiting for hours to hear from him.
“You didn’t find
anything
?” she asked, even as she hated the edge to her voice.
“Not much. The shed is original to the house, so that dirt floor is packed so hard it might as well be stone. There’s a sink and a drain in the floor and a hose, because Suzanne and the gardener pot some pretty good-sized plants in there. The shelves are overflowing with stuff, but the floor’s pretty clear, except for some landscaping rocks and a big pile of cedar branches and boxwood trimmings smack in the middle. Suzanne says she makes decorations for the bed-and-breakfast out of the stuff the gardener prunes out of the yard. Seems kinda cheap for somebody that owns a place like this, so I’m not actually sure I believe that…”
“No, Suzanne makes beautiful floral arrangements. She’s telling the truth. But can’t you move the stuff and look for evidence under it?”
“Now, you know we did that. It was such a big pile there could have been…anything…under it.”
It was odd to hear a police officer be delicate about saying there could be a dead body in a pile of trash. She’d noticed that, as she got more pregnant, people got prissier.
“Did you find anything under it? Hair? Blood? Footprints? Fibers?”
Maybe if she got him to focus on something specific, he’d drop the prissy act.
“Hair? No. And Glynis’ hair, in particular, would be hard to miss. White-blonde, and more than two feet long, if her pictures are any indication.”
“Yep. If you saw a full-grown hair from Glynis’ head, you’d know it.”
“We got no fibers, either. As for blood, well…that pile of yard trash is a problem.”
“Well, shove it out of the way and spray that luminol blood-detecting stuff on the floor. Or won’t it work on dirt?”
“Shall I just hand you my badge and quit the case? Of course, we moved the yard trash and used luminol. We didn’t get much, but it did fluoresce faintly in a couple of spots. Unfortunately, there’s quite a long list of things that can cause false positives with luminol. Cedar and privet—also known as boxwood—are both on the list. So’s poison ivy, but here’s hoping we didn’t get into any of that. We’ve got troubles enough.”
Joe came in with two plates piled high with rich and expensive breakfast food. Faye snagged a cup of coffee as he walked past. He stopped and swapped cups with her. Apparently, she’d nearly swiped his caffeine.
“So you can’t say for sure whether there’s any blood in the shed or not?”
“I really don’t think there’s any blood out there. Even if there is, it ain’t much, and we didn’t find anything else. All we did was alienate Glynis’ formerly cooperative employers.”
It occurred to Faye that Daniel and Suzanne also employed a gardener, the man who had reported Glynis missing. That didn’t necessarily mean that he was innocent of her abduction.
“Do you think the gardener knows more than he’s saying?”
“Well, if we’d actually found anything in the gardening shed, I’d have his butt across the table from me right this minute, and he’d be telling me
everything
he knew. But I actually think the gardener’s okay. He has a decent alibi. A hardworking guy…lives fifty miles out in the country. Drives into town every day, which can’t be fun.”
“Gas prices must be brutal on a gardener’s salary,” Faye pointed out.
“No kidding. Anyway, we have video of him from the morning Glynis went missing. At the most likely time for her disappearance, he was gassing up his truck forty-five miles from here. We have video of Glynis getting gas that morning, too. When you put the time and location of the video of the gardener up against the time and location of our video of Glynis, there’s just no way to put him in town at the right time.”
Faye said good-bye and scanned the morning paper, and she saw that Overstreet had revealed some details about Glynis’ disappearance to the reporter, in hopes that an eyewitness would come forward, but he’d also kept some things to himself. Faye read every word, hoping that the answer to the puzzle would jump off the page at her. No luck.
The news story confirmed reports of the existence of the convenience store video Overstreet had mentioned. The clerk was a high school classmate who knew her well, and the store’s surveillance cameras corroborated the clerk’s story. Those same cameras showed that Glynis had been alone in the car when she arrived at the convenience store and when she left. The car’s gas tank had still been full when it was found in the employee parking area at Dunkirk Manor.
The article mentioned that the driver’s seat was smeared with blood. Apparently, Detective Overstreet had decided that the presence of the artifacts was nobody’s business but his and Faye’s, because the reporter didn’t mention those. No mention was made that a goodly volume of blood that wasn’t Glynis’ had been found at the scene.
A brief allusion to evidence collected outside the car didn’t give away much, either, saying only that “there is a possibility that Ms. Smithson left the vehicle on her own power, but it is impossible to confirm this or to determine whether she was alone at that time.”
Faye trudged to the worksite, where her crew was in the process of expanding the test pits in the area of the possible pool. She was lost in thought, still in the process of planning her day. Overstreet had given the consultant’s contract to Joe during his early morning visit, so her timesheet for the day would be divided between two clients. This was a heady feeling for the owner of a fledgling start-up. But what was the best way for her to help Overstreet with his investigation?
Faye’s interpretation of Glynis’ note was that someone had dug up the dagger and celt and other artifacts, and that Glynis thought that person was hiding the location of a possibly important archaeological site. Perhaps Faye’s most useful action would be to try to find out where that site was. It wouldn’t be the first time a person had covered up an archaeological site that might prevent a valuable piece of property from being developed.
Joe’s voice broke into her thoughts. For the second time in three days, he was saying, “Hey! Would you look at that?” The excitement in his voice told her that his passion for archaeology was his own. He hadn’t just fallen into this profession because it was what his wife did.
He carefully pulled a small object from the soil and held it up for everyone to see. Faye hurried over and he held out his hand to show her something resting on his palm.
In its current condition, the artifact looked like a black crusty disk. A nonprofessional might not even recognize that it was a coin.
“Let me take it inside,” Faye said. “I can start cleaning it up. While it’s soaking, I won’t be wasting my time. I can work some more on translating Father Domingo’s story.”
Joe shot her an unreadable look. Knowing him as she did, she figured he was thinking that she’d be better off in a straight chair, hunched over a book, than she was right now, kneeling in a dirty excavation. He nodded once, and she retreated, coin in hand.
***
After some time spent soaking, the coin looked a lot less like a black, crusty disk and more like a silver, crusty disk. It was Spanish.
Of course, it was Spanish. Florida joined the United States in 1821, and St. Augustine
still
hadn’t lived under the American flag as long as it had under the Spanish colors.
The coin was crudely shaped, like the “cobs” that were hand-stamped in Mexico on disks sliced from round bars, and those could date back to the 1500s. She couldn’t make out a date, but then she could hardly even see the Spanish shield that covered the back of the coin. Four or five centuries could be hard on a thin slice of silver.
She was pretty sure it was a four-
real
coin. The romantic in her wished it had been an eight-
real
coin, because it would have been just so cool to find a piece of eight. The very words carried with it a whisper of pirates and tall ships.
Nevertheless, it was an exciting find, and an unexpected one. As far as she knew, this property had been undeveloped until the late 1800s, long after Spanish money had dropped out of circulation in Florida, but maybe its last owner had been strolling through the woods and this thing simply dropped out of his pocket.
Rushing out to show Joe how pretty the coin was, without its top layer of grime, she was astonished to hear him say, again, “Would you look at that?” He had found a shapely and unbroken tool made of chipped red stone, hardly two feet away from the spot where he’d found the Spanish coin.
Most days, archaeology is a colorless, dirt-brown science. The most spectacular find of the day might be a dried-up corncob that someone gnawed in colonial times. More often, a day might pass with nothing that reached even that level of excitement. This site—with its shiny black-and-white tiles and its silver coin and a silver rattle and a handful of colorful china safety pins and, now, an unusually pretty carmine-red stone scraper—had a Kodachrome quality that you might expect in the movies, but not in real life.
Wondering what on earth might have happened here to leave behind such exciting finds, Faye dropped to her knees beside Joe.
“Where exactly did you find this stuff?”
“Here,” he said, stretching out a big, well-shaped hand adorned with ground-in dirt. “And here.”
Faye’s heart sank, just a little.
The scraper had been in the undisturbed earth that had lain underneath a stone tile for decades. The Spanish coin, though, had been hiding in the area of churned earth where the swimming pool had been. So it had only been on this piece of property for maybe seventy or eighty years. Maybe less. This was disappointing, but sadder still was the possibility that the fill dirt brought here eighty years before had come from someplace where the Spaniards and their pieces of eight had collided with Native Americans and their finely chipped stone tools.
Any artifacts found in that fill dirt had lost most of their history when they were dumped in this hole. But that didn’t mean that Faye didn’t want to find out as much about them as she could.
Now Faye knew what she was going to do with her day. She was going to talk to some people with workboots-on-the-ground experience in St. Augustine. Local archaeologists were accustomed to sites layered with hundreds of years of debris from four or five separate cultures, and she needed their help. She might only have two names on her client list, but she had some fascinating artifacts in-hand—the rattle and the diaper pins, and especially the rosary, the celt, the scraper, the musket balls, the stone blade, the silver coin, and that fascinating journal. Not to mention a possibly human bone. And it was still only Wednesday.
It was starting to look like Faye would need to read up on all of American history to do a decent job for her clients. This was definitely going to cut into her profit margin.
***
It wasn’t every day that a woman got paid to visit The Fountain of Youth.
Faye had been there before. Every schoolchild in Florida took a pilgrimage to St. Augustine, and those field trips almost always included a visit to The Fountain of Youth. The venerable tourist attraction featured moth-eaten models of nearly naked Native Americans, which never failed to ignite giggles from preteens. Standing beside them were life-sized models of armor-clad Spaniards. Well…more or less life-sized.
Faye used the term “more or less” because the plastic chief of the Timucua and the plastic leader of the conquistadors stood eye-to-eye. Modern science believed that the Timucua ate so much better than the sixteenth-century Spaniards that the natives must have looked like giants towering over the men from Spain.
The other exhibits, a big creaky globe showing the path of European conquest of the Americas and an even creakier planetarium, looked exactly the same as they had when Faye was twelve, so she felt no need to tour them. Her superstitious side sent her into the Spring House to take a sip from the sulfurous spring that a century of tradition and hucksterism had proclaimed to be the Fountain of Youth. Granted, Faye had drunk from that spring during her last visit, in 1982, and she was still aging. But it never hurt to hedge her bets.
After swigging the sulfur water, Faye headed through the beautiful gardens, past the bleating peacocks who lived there, and toward the river, where the
real
history was.
She felt absolutely wonderful. Maybe it was the water. More likely, she was, praise God, entering that last phase of pregnancy—the one where the nesting hormones flowed freely and women suddenly decided to scrub their whole house from top to bottom, even behind the refrigerator.
She was also feeling a guilty thrill of independence. Glynis’ disappearance had rendered Joe barely capable of letting her out of his sight, but he’d been willing to drive her here if she promised to be good and stay within eyeshot of a crowd of tourists at all times.
Or maybe it was the fresh air blowing off the river that made her feel so alive. It stirred the red hibiscus flowers studding the garden of the Fountain of Youth. The animated conquistadors in the Spring House might be cheesy, but Faye couldn’t fault the place for its gardens. Palm trees swayed overhead. Aged anchors and cannons sat tucked amidst tropical foliage. And in the distance flowed the broad Matanzas River.
An entrepreneur had decided in 1901 that the spring on this property—which she coincidentally owned—was the actual Fountain of Youth visited by Ponce de Leon. This was an interesting hypothesis, since modern historians believe he never set foot within a couple hundred miles of this spot. It was God’s cosmic joke that the woman’s property
was
the site of another, inarguably historic, event.
In 1565, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés had stepped ashore right in this very spot, said hello to the Indians who were already here, and founded the first permanent European settlement in the territory that became the United States.
Dr. Elizabeth Schneider, St. Augustine’s city archaeologist, had inherited the job of overseeing the archaeologists ferreting out the secrets of this place that she called “Ground Zero for the European Invasion.” And yes, she knew that there were other spots whose proponents thought had a better claim to the title, and she was happy to debate them at a moment’s notice.