Strangers (17 page)

He couldn’t see Faye yet, but he intended to get a lot closer.

***

The creek broadened and picked up speed. Faye was not surprised to see the Matanzas River ahead, the same river that Father Francisco had seen so long ago…the same river where Lex Tifton had floated dead so very recently.

With the river in sight, she sat her butt down in the muck and leaned her back against the creek’s low bank. Her jaw muscles were very glad when she reached up and took the cell phone out of her mouth and checked the GPS function for her new coordinates. Zapping them to Joe, she sent the words she knew he was waiting for:

Chapter Seventeen

Faye was glad that Joe had just picked her up and carried her. She really didn’t want to have to tell him that she couldn’t stand up and she couldn’t walk.

She didn’t know exactly how far he carried her, slogging knee-deep in the Matanzas River. Joe had apparently scouted out the area and knew what she’d suspected, that the river wasn’t visible to Alan Smithson and Dick Wheeler, because he had just scooped her up and started jogging, without hunching down in fear of being found.

Faye didn’t have the energy left to do anything but hang from his arms and drip. She was wet all over. She was muddy all over. But, by God, the cell phone had stayed dry. And it had brought her Joe.

When they reached the car, he had laid her on the back seat, ripping off his shirt and covering her with it. He’d no doubt have ripped off his buckskin pants, too, and used them to cover her, but they were almost as wet as hers.

Then he did something she hadn’t seen Joe do in a long time. He looked at Betsy with a face that was completely baffled.

He’d looked like that a lot when they’d first met. Joe had grown up with parents who didn’t have much use for education. Even if they had, they wouldn’t have bothered Joe with it, because they’d thought he was slow.

How they could have believed something so ridiculous when they saw how quickly Joe absorbed the lessons that nature taught? There was nothing about trees or fish or the motion of the stars or the vagaries of the weather that Joe didn’t understand. He’d just been born with a brain that shut down when it was confronted with a letter or a number.

If he’d been born in 1798, Joe would have been a man among men, the best tracker and the finest shooter on the American frontier. If he’d been born in 1998, he’d have been recognized as dyslexic and handed over to a teacher who knew what to do about it. But he’d been born in 1978, and by the time 25-year-old Joe showed up on Faye’s island, unemployed, homeless, and barely literate, he’d spent all his life being baffled by the modern world.

Faye felt like she’d done nothing but give Joe a home where he could get his bearings, but her friends had opened up his world. Magda had badgered the university into using him as a glorified lab rat in their special education department, and he’d gotten massive amounts of tutoring. Sheriff Mike had been the encouraging, mentoring father that Joe’s own father didn’t know how to be.

Faye felt that her primary contribution had been teaching Joe to drive, which had been an adventure in itself. Joe’s lightning reflexes had been an advantage on the road, except when they led him to slam on the brakes so that he could focus on a street sign that was just too hard to read at highway speeds.

The two of them had survived. And they would survive this day. But the lost-child expression on his face when he looked at Betsy spoke of a man whose world was threatening to crumble.

“I’m okay, Joe,” Faye mumbled from the back seat, aware that she looked completely un-okay and thus she looked pretty much like a liar.

Joe didn’t answer.

Betsy reached over, flipped on the car heater, and twisted the dial to “High.” Faye was grateful, but it was not a good sign that Joe hadn’t already thought to do that.

“Really, Joe. I’m fine.” She rubbed her belly and found that it was soft. The baby stirred companionably inside her, just as it had done for weeks. “No contractions. And the baby seems perfectly okay.”

She didn’t like the way his shoulders were hunched as he put the car in gear and got on the road, traveling way faster than his usual cautious speed.

Betsy reached over the back seat and patted Faye on the knee. She’d been pregnant four times and she’d been married for decades. The reassuring pat seemed to be saying, “Settle down. You’re both safe and so’s the baby. He’ll get over this.”

And Betsy was probably right. But the drive home seemed longer than it was, because Joe didn’t say a word.

***

Faye was shivering. Hard.

She’d shivered before, but she’d never before had this sense that she had completely lost control of her muscles. They shook her, head to toe, and any effort she made to fight back only made things worse. She closed her eyes and told herself to relax, but that effort was just as big a failure.

This was bad. If Joe looked back here and saw her shaking like this, he was going to lose what was left of his mind. Then he was going to take her to the emergency room, and she’d rather eat dirt than go there, not when she was so sure that she and the baby were both perfectly okay.

Betsy was prattling to Joe, telling him reassuring stories about three of her pregnancies and conveniently leaving out the story of the premature baby who almost died. All the while, her calming hand gripped Faye’s shoulder lightly. This helped. If Faye concentrated on that hand, the waves of trembling eased a bit. And she was really loving the blast of the heater as it blew hot air between the front seats.

Then the car stopped and Betsy got out. The heater was still on, but Faye felt like Betsy had taken a lot of warmth with her, until a car door opened and her friend’s smiling face reappeared.

By covering Faye with a dusty tarp that she’d found in the city vehicle’s trunk, Betsy accomplished three things: she made Faye feel cared for, she made her feel a little bit warmer, and she completely hid Faye’s shivering body from Joe. Betsy gave Faye a comforting wink, then disappeared. A moment later, Faye heard the anemic purr of Betsy’s vehicle as the archaeologist drove away.

By the time Joe killed the engine in the Dunkirk Manor parking lot, Faye’s shivering had eased and she was just dead tired. When Joe flung open the car door at her feet and shoved the tarp onto the floorboards, she was actually glad he’d decided not to let her get up and walk. Drowsy, she didn’t protest when he grasped her with his two strong hands and slid her toward him, gently lifting her out of the car.

She was glad that he took her in the kitchen entrance. She didn’t think she could stand the drafty atrium or the cold light streaming through its skylights or the painful energy of the bright expressive paintings on its walls. She didn’t want to hear Joe’s footsteps stop as he stepped from the polished oak floors onto a rug so deep and dense that it absorbed all sound. She didn’t think she could bear the room’s chilly beauty.

She wanted to be in the warm, shabby room where she slept wrapped in Joe’s arms.

He hauled her across its threshold, closed the door, and gently stood her on her feet. She was surprised to find that her legs were willing to hold her up. He took three steps across the tiny room, threw open the bathroom door, and opened the hot water tap. Steam rose quickly as the old claw-footed tub filled.

Joe took the time to carefully adjust the water temperature, just as he would when they gave their baby its first bath. Then he came back to her, unfastening her sodden shirt and pants and bra and panties, peeling them off her chilled skin before helping her into the rapidly filling tub.

Still silent, he pulled off his own pants, soaked by his hike through the river. Naked, he crawled into the tub behind Faye, cradling her against his chest. The tub was old, and its dulled porcelain finish was worn through in places, but it was big enough for the both of them, and for their baby, too.

“When I heard that gunshot…” His voice broke. He tried again. “When I heard the gun…Faye, I was so scared.”

His hand stroked the healed bullet wound near her collarbone. Somewhere near the small of her back, Faye knew that she was touching Joe’s own scar, where a bullet had nearly taken his life. She leaned against him.

Joe leaned forward, resting his forehead on the crown of her head and, finally, he cried.

Chapter Eighteen

Faye knew there were worse things than lying propped up in bed on a weekday afternoon, wearing flannel pajamas and listening to Joe snore. Magda had lent her a hot water bottle, scolding all the while, but Faye paid her no attention. If Magda hadn’t spent most of her pregnancy on bedrest, ordered by the doctor and enforced by Sheriff Mike, she’d have spent the whole nine months digging and hauling and overexerting herself, just like Faye. Magda didn’t tend to find herself in the vicinity of gunfire the way Faye did but, otherwise, their approaches to life and pregnancy were much the same.

Still scolding, Magda had gone outside to supervise the field crew. As usual, she was not behaving like an employee.

“Would you two park your butts in this room and stay here? I’d really prefer that neither of you got pneumonia.” Pausing in the doorway, she’d barked, “Get in the bed and get warm, both of you. I can handle this job, or did you forget I have a Ph.D. and a quarter-century of experience? It’s not like there’s any big trick to uncovering an old swimming pool.”

Then she’d departed, and Faye had felt more like a schoolgirl on detention than a small business owner.

Joe might be sleepy, but Faye was wired. She weighed her options—continue reading Father Domingo’s diary or check out Harriet’s book, which Joe had fetched from the entry hall, right where Harriet had promised to leave it.

She opted for Harriet’s book for several reasons. Father Domingo’s diary wasn’t strictly billable to either of her current projects, so she preferred to work with it in the evenings. Since she worked for herself, she could spend nights, days, and weekends doing billable work, and economics might force her to do that at times. For her mental health, though, it was probably better for her to set some time aside for things that were interesting, but had no impact on her pocketbook. Father Domingo’s diary fell squarely in that category.

Uncovering the source of Glynis’ cache of artifacts had been a huge chunk of progress on her project for the police department. She’d called Detective Overstreet to talk about it, but Betsy had beaten her to the punch. He’d thanked her for the information and listened for a few minutes to her archaeological ramblings about the damage Glynis’ father’s project had done to the site’s archaeology, but he’d cut her off soon enough.

“Betsy and I will figure out a way to deal with Alan Smithson, without letting him know the two of you were involved in finding the source of Glynis’ artifacts. You did a good job locating it, but I’ll take it from here. I’d have never put the two of you in that kind of danger on purpose.”

She’d tried to keep talking, but he’d cut her off. “You did what I asked you to do. If I need more help, I’ll call you. Really, Faye. I will. Would you just let it go? Do some normal, nondangerous archaeology for a change?”

So her police department project was on hold, and she was free to focus on her work at Dunkirk Manor. Harriet’s book would be a quick read. She’d have to take the information in it with a professional grain of salt, but you couldn’t argue with the historical validity of, say, an unretouched photo documented to have been taken in 1928. The photos alone really might give her some new information on the history of the old mansion.

The sound of Joe’s snoring was a comfortable counterpoint to Harriet’s grim tale of a murdered girl. Lilibeth Campbell had been barely twenty-one when she was killed.

Harriet had compiled a timeline of the last ten months of Lilibeth’s life, based on newspaper accounts, dated publicity photos, and written documentation from eyewitnesses. The written documents were the thing that lifted her book above the typical amateur’s attempt to solve a famous historic mystery. For Harriet was not just an enthusiastic believer in ghosts and things that go bump in the night. She was a librarian. And she had uncovered diaries and snapshots and old letters that could not have been available to the police who investigated the murder in 1928.

Harriet’s conclusions? Raymond Dunkirk and Lilibeth Campbell had become lovers shortly after her arrival in St. Augustine, and their affair had led to her death at his hands less than a year later.

She dismissed the police’s suspicions that the starlet had been murdered by one of the three Hollywood moguls funding the silent film that had brought Lilibeth to town, a silent serial melodrama not unlike
The Perils of Pauline.
Faye thought of the creepy photo of the three portly men with their hands on a woman young enough to be their daughter or granddaughter, and she wondered why Harriet was so sure.

There was no disputing the fact that Lilibeth had been found at dawn, dead of multiple stab wounds, after a party that had rocked a popular downtown restaurant until long after midnight. Even without modern forensic methods of estimating time of death, the police had been working within a pretty narrow time window. Unfortunately, few people have air-tight alibis between the hours of three and seven a.m., when even the most insomniac spouse is probably asleep.

Yet all three of the money men—Leo Lestor, Philip Sansing, and Erving Manson—had produced witnesses saying they couldn’t possibly have killed Lilibeth. In fact, they had alibied each other, claiming attendance at a private “party” after the big party, attended only by the three of them and three of the city’s most selective prostitutes. Lurid headlines hinted at a drunken and wanton orgy with the kind of suggestive reporting common to the era—the news stories said nothing and implied everything.

The police had been certain all three of them were lying, which begged the question of which man had done the murder…or whether they all had. During the ensuing weeks, the newspaper had printed photo after photo of Lestor, Sansing, and Manson with their wives, silently begging the reader to notice that none of these women had left her husband after his degrading behavior had been revealed to the world. If the men had really been guilty, wouldn’t their wives have thrown them out of the house out of sheer self-respect? Wouldn’t at least one of them have had the gumption to do that?

The photos of those silent and supportive wives begged a question: Was it possible that there was no private party, no orgy, and thus nothing for the wives to forgive? Except for murder. And perhaps each of the men had convinced his wife that one of the others was guilty.

If so, then any of these men could have murdered Lilibeth Campbell. Or all of them. And, if this had indeed happened, one or all of them had gotten away with murder.

Based on the carefully worded police statements that had survived, local law enforcement was virtually certain that Hollywood had invaded St. Augustine, slaughtered one of their own, then fled, taking their money with them. The police were livid at the old men hiding behind alibis that no one believed.

But Harriet disagreed and, decades after the fact, she had known how to do something about it. She was local. She was related to half the people in town. She was relentless in her search for the truth, when it interested her. And she had the kind of personable manner that said, “Talk to me!” In the early 1980s, she’d combed through the city’s nursing homes until she found one of the three prostitutes, and she’d charmed her into talking.

“Oh yes, honey,” the feeble old woman had told Harriet. “You bet we told the police the truth about being with those dirty old men that night. Me and Connie and Nettie didn’t have no reason to lie. They was too tight to pay us enough money to do that. They didn’t hardly pay us enough for what we
did
do. Believe me when I tell you that it ain’t fun getting roughed up by an old man that’s mad ’cause he can’t…well, that’s all by the by. Mister Lestor and Mister Sansing and Mister Manson wasn’t nice men, none of ’em, but I know for certain sure where they was that night. They couldn’t have killed Miss Lilibeth. Poor little thing.”

So what
did
Harriet think had happened on that long-ago night?

Harriet thought Raymond Dunkirk had killed his young mistress. This theory was the central thesis of her book. He was known to have been at the party at the restaurant with Lilibeth, and without his wife.

Many reliable witnesses had documented his affair with Lilibeth in writing, and their testimony had survived. Raymond Dunkirk had testified that Allyce had been asleep in her room when he arrived home that night, and he was unable to produce a servant who had seen him come in, yet the police never seemed to take him seriously as a suspect.

Faye wondered why, and came up with predictable reasons. He was wealthy and could buy the right people. He was charming and could talk his way out of a murder charge. Most likely, he was just familiar. It was a small town, so everyone knew him, and it’s just so hard to suspect a familiar face of hiding a murderer’s soul.

Faye thumbed through Harriet’s book, well aware of how such things could be subtly skewed. Harriet seemed to be trying to present her evidence dispassionately, like a true journalist, but she was a human being. She chose the things she put in her book and the things she didn’t.

So when Faye’s eyes scanned photos of Raymond, all of which showed a blindingly handsome man turning an unreadable glance on the camera, she wondered about the photos that Harriet didn’t choose. Maybe there had been photos that showed him smiling and laughing…photos that revealed a certain softness that was invisible in the photos Harriet showed the world.

Neither was there any softness in Harriet’s description of Raymond Dunkirk as a person. He was an only child raised by a remote and aristocratic father after his mother fled Dunkirk Manor when he was just seven. He was athletic, winning open-water swimming competitions covering distances that would try a man’s soul. He had ruled local society with his hypnotic charm and his good looks and his ruthless willingness to let a less intelligent conversational partner tie himself into knots with his own words.

Harriet’s portrayal of Raymond Dunkirk made Faye think of the diamond stick pin he always wore in his cravat: His character was hard and finely honed, distractingly brilliant, and not as transparent as one might think at first glance.

Faye’s prejudice against Raymond Dunkirk stemmed from a different source than Harriet’s. If he truly murdered Lilibeth Campbell, then she agreed with Harriet’s unstated conclusion that he belonged in the deepest pit of hell. But even if he didn’t, Faye found that she didn’t like him for another reason. She disliked him for Allyce’s sake.

Raymond Dunkirk had possessed the wealth and the personal charisma to sway the opinions of the people around him. If he had simply said to his contemporaries, “My wife is a brilliant painter. She doesn’t have time to be part of your wives’ bridge parties and she most certainly does not have time to organize any cotillions. She needs to paint,” then Allyce’s ambitions would have been accepted. Begrudgingly, perhaps, but still accepted.

Raymond and Allyce Dunkirk had lived in a time when the role of women in society was being rewritten in bold strokes. In 1925, the United States of America had finally deigned to give Allyce the right to vote. Raymond could have done far more than that. He’d had the money to take Allyce and her art to New York. He could have bought introductions to critics and gallery owners. He could have kicked down the barriers his wife faced, so that she and her work could shine on their own merits.

Instead, he’d kept her in this small town, where she could not possibly have fit in. Faye could see that, simply by looking at the bold, original—and, truthfully, a bit scary—artwork that she had painted and selected for Dunkirk Manor.

Instead of encouraging her in her painting, Raymond had expected a woman with an artist’s temperament to throw his parties and manage his house, looking beautiful all the while. No wonder Faye saw an increasing remoteness in Allyce’s eyes in photographs taken as she passed into her thirties and then into middle age.

And then there had been Raymond’s affair with Lilibeth Campbell. Why? Why would a man turn away from a woman who was still beautiful and who, judging by the tilt of her head and the set of her jaw, was still interesting? Lilibeth’s murder, and Lilibeth herself, had damaged the Dunkirks’ lives in a way that could never be repaired. Harriet found no record that the Dunkirks ever traveled together after that. Even the parties stopped abruptly, and never started up again.

And Allyce just faded away. There were occasional snapshots of her at home in her beautiful garden, but her lovely face graced no more society pages. Faye couldn’t even find any evidence that Allyce continued attending parties. While it was true that women of a certain age were invisible in that society, they were not invisible to the camera’s lens. Strangely, Allyce seemed to be.

Raymond, by contrast, grew more visible to cameras and reporters as the years passed. In his forties, his longtime friendship with Robert Ripley blossomed. Raymond was heard to say, more than once, that Ripley was the brother he’d always wished he could have. This statement was the only trace of the lonely little motherless boy that Faye could find in Harriet’s entire book. It would have humanized him in her eyes, if it hadn’t been from the pain evident in the photographs of Allyce taken during that same period.

Raymond had traveled the world with Ripley, visiting places that Faye knew in her heart that Allyce would have wanted to see…places she would have wanted to paint. They met exotic people with habits that seemed bizarre in the post-Victorian world, and they brought home fascinating things. Actually, they brought home mountains and mountains of fascinating things, the foundation for the museums and “odditoriums” that would give legions of tourists the shivers for decades afterward.

Faye’s favorite photo of Allyce in the years after Lilibeth’s death was of Ripley, Raymond, and Allyce standing in the atrium, draped in the pelt of a lion so huge that it could be wrapped around the three of them. Victor, in his teens by this time, was standing slightly to the side, petting the dead lion’s mane. Allyce looked fresh and alive, so much so that both men’s eyes were locked on her bright face. In that moment, at that moment, Faye thought it was possible that Raymond Dunkirk still loved his wife.