Strangers

by Mary Anna Evans

  “Will it help me with this job? Because I’ve got a stack of books taller than I am that I’ve got to plow through before I write my report.”

  “Sure it will. It’s got lots of pictures of Dunkirk Manor and the Dunkirks themselves, but it’s got even more pictures of Lilibeth Campbell, ’cause it’s about her. Every scrap of information, every rumor, every ugly innuendo…if the gossips of St. Augustine ever said it about Lilibeth Campbell, it’s in this book. I know, because I wrote it and published it myself. They sell it at the gift shops around town, and it earns me about enough to pay my light bills. Which actually ain’t bad for a book that has mostly local appeal.”

  Faye wasn’t sure a book written to satisfy the lurid curiosity of the average tourist was going to be a good reference for her report. This was surely the reason that snobby Rosa had not brought her Harriet’s book to study, though she must have known of its existence. There was no way that Rosa would shelve it in her collection.

  She searched for a polite way to decline the offer. “Lilibeth Campbell will just be a footnote to my report, if she belongs in it at all.”

  “Yeah, but I’ve got pictures of the house in that book that you can’t find anywhere else. I’m local and I know everybody. People dug through their old family albums and lent me amazing stuff that they’d never show an outsider. I doubt photos exist of the servant areas of the house—who would have thought they were worth wasting film on?—but I’ve got pictures of everything else.”

  Photos of the house that didn’t exist elsewhere? Now Faye wanted Harriet’s book. She wanted it badly.

  “Shall I come to your house after you get off work at the library?”

  “Nah. I eat supper in the old city, then go straight to my early evening ghost tour. But I keep copies in my car. I’ll just drop off a book on my lunch hour. Look for it on a table in the entry hall.”

  Faye was trying to say “Okay,” but she was being drowned out by Harriet’s infectious laugh. Instead she said, “What? What did I say?”

  “Nothing. I was just fixing to say you might want to grab the book sooner rather than later. Otherwise, you might have to walk through that spooky atrium after dark.”

  “Very funny.”

  “She was there last night, Faye. You know she was. But somehow, I don’t think Allyce would hurt a pregnant lady. I think she’d take care of you, actually. Read my book. You’ll see.”

  And with an ethereal “Bye!!!” like the chime of a bell, Harriet hung up. Faye was left to wonder just how anxious she really was to walk through Dunkirk Manor alone after dark. Even for a firm-minded scientist, the atrium would be a different place after the sun left the skylights and there was no light to be had beyond the dim wall sconces that had been gaslights when Allyce Dunkirk was the woman of the house.

  ***

  Overstreet was spending the day interviewing the ne’er-do-wells of St. Augustine, and he had expressly forbidden Faye to participate. “You’re my archaeology consultant. These guys may be deadbeats, but they’re not dead and buried, so they have nothing to do with archaeology.”

  When she’d opened her mouth to argue, he’d cut her off. “Doesn’t it bother you that whenever something awful happens—a woman disappears or a man is murdered or a child is molested—the police can immediately think of a dozen ‘people of interest’ that they’d like to talk to? I’m going to talk to twelve people today for no reason except that I think they’re capable of harming Glynis or killing Lex or that I think they might know who did. That doesn’t bother you? Well, it keeps me awake at night. I do not need your help today, but thank you.”

  He had, however, agreed with the notion that had struck her around midnight. Their plan for the previous day—to visit active construction sites to see if any witnesses might want to talk about any archaeological sites that were being concealed—had been poorly thought out. Those witnesses weren’t going to talk to her in front of a policeman.

  He’d conceded that point, but vetoed Faye’s first idea, which had been for her to go alone. She’d vetoed his counter-suggestion for her to take Joe, because she just couldn’t spare him from the Dunkirk Manor project. The businesswoman in Faye just loved it that her new business was already having to juggle two projects.

  They’d managed to agree on a third plan: Faye would take Betsy along. Both agreed that a sixty-five-year-old woman didn’t offer a huge degree of protection, but there was safety in numbers.

  Safety aside, Betsy knew the archaeology of the area and she’d had dealings with most of the land developers and construction companies that they might run across. And, though sites outside the city weren’t within her purview, she had a collegial relationship with the county’s historic resource specialist and it wasn’t unusual for her to visit a site that might relate to work she was doing within the city limits.

  So Faye was sitting in the passenger seat of Betsy’s city-owned vehicle, chatting with the woman who had maybe the coolest job in Florida. Maybe in the whole United States of America.

  “You know, Faye, I’ve been thinking about those silver filigree rosary beads. They remind me of a doublet button I found near the Castillo. The work is far finer than any I’ve found before. Likely, it came from Europe and was worn by a very wealthy man. I think the rosary beads were just as much of a status symbol.”

  Faye wondered how many places in the New World were littered with artifacts as stereotypically associated with the Renaissance as doublet buttons. It was too bad lace ruffs and farthingale petticoats didn’t last as long as metal buttons. If they did, Betsy could have probably dressed Queen Elizabeth I by now.

  With Betsy’s help, they’d made short work of the property development files, selecting three construction sites to visit personally. With her local knowledge, Betsy had eliminated two other active projects out of hand, because she knew for a fact that they were being built on land that had been created in the mid-twentieth-century by dumping fill dirt into a salt marsh. Modern wetlands regulations would have never allowed that, but what’s done is done. Faye figured that this created land was as good a place for upscale condominiums as any.

  “I guess Glynis’ mystery artifacts could have come from one of those sites,” she pointed out. “They’d have just been stirred up in the fill dirt that was hauled in from God knows where.”

  “Yeah, but that would make them fairly useless in terms of figuring out how they fit into local history, which would mean Glynis’ efforts to preserve them were pointless.”

  “The person who took her wouldn’t necessarily know that.”

  “Yeah,” Betsy said. “Bummer.”

  Faye knew Betsy was old enough to remember when “bummer” was the latest slang. The woman was still just hippyish enough to say it without sounding stupid.

  Though she hated to turn her back on the sites built on fill dirt, Faye knew they needed to focus on the places most likely to yield results. “I get the impression that Glynis was savvy enough to know what makes a site significant.”

  “She certainly knew enough to bring you artifacts that had the potential for significance, every last one of them.”

  “You got that right. They’re flippin’ gorgeous.” Just thinking about those filigreed beads made Faye want to go fondle them. “So let’s assume she knew what she was doing. Let’s stick with locations where those artifacts could have come from an undisturbed site from the sixteenth century. Because finding a site like that would disrupt a construction project for a very long and expensive period of time. Glynis grew up with a father in the construction business. If she was concerned enough to come to me with those artifacts secretly, then she felt like she needed to hide them from someone…someone who understood how much they could cost a construction business.”

  “Times are tough.” Betsy’s curls flopped, detracting from the gravity of her sage nod. “A person on the brink of bankruptcy could be a dangerous person indeed.”

  Their first stop had been quick. The project was a gas station b
eing renovated to include a drive-thru fast food joint. The existing store was to be demolished and rebuilt, but Faye and Betsy found that site work hadn’t even started yet. The entire property was covered in concrete pavement that had been there for forty years, from the looks of it. If Glynis’ artifacts had been dug up in Faye’s lifetime, it hadn’t happened on that spot.

  The second stop had been equally quick. The residential development was to be a riverfront subdivision catering to the richest of the rich. Unfortunately, the file said that the developer had been scheduled to break ground on the development’s infrastructure in October 2008, the very month when the stock market took the fortunes of the richest of the rich straight into the toilet, along with the smaller bank accounts of nearly everybody else in America. Faded surveyors’ flags and occasional traces of spray paint marked the locations of the roads and sewer lines that would have served this community of mansions.

  “They never even broke ground,” Betsy had said. “Somebody lost a lot of money here. A lot of somebodies—the developer, the bank, the investors…”

  “They’re still losing it. Every day this property sits here unused is a day somebody’s paying interest on the money spent to buy it.”

  “Yep,” Betsy agreed. “But if their bulldozers never came in here and scraped up any soil—and as far as I can see, not the first spadeful of dirt was turned over here—then Glynis’ artifacts came from somewhere else.”

  “So where do we go next?”

  “Right down the road, actually. It was going to be a planned community—houses, retail stores, office buildings, golf course, everything. The houses and golf course will have to wait for the economy to recover, but some of the stores and offices are still worth building. More than that—I’d guess the stores and offices probably have to be built.”

  “Because generating a little income from them may be the only way to be able to pay the interest on the property until people can afford to buy houses again?”

  “Bingo. And I think you may know the developer.”

  “I only know one developer in this town. Alan Smithson.”

  “Bingo,” Betsy said again.

  “So where’s he building the stores and offices?”

  “It’s not real far as the crow flies, but we’ll have to drive a bit. Smithson’s engineers had to get pretty darn creative to keep control of the water on these two properties. They’re flat and low and the drainage is iffy. Paving a big chunk of land will leave a lot of rainwater with no place to soak into the ground. My guess is that Smithson’s planning a retention pond or three. He’ll stick a fountain in the middle of each of them, then jack up the price of the properties on his fake lakes by calling it ‘waterfront property.’”

  They drove a wide circle around a freshly dug pit, then Betsy parked her car under a shade tree. “Here’s where they’ll build the office/retail center. We haven’t come far. See? You can still see the survey flags for the residential development, on the other side of that big hole in the ground. Doesn’t look like much, does it? This particular mudhole—I mean stormwater retention pond—will be hidden behind the commercial buildings, so there’ve got no need to make it look pretty.”

  And it didn’t, for now. Faye knew that plants covered disturbed land with lightning speed in sunny Florida, so this long, narrow pond—which was a nice word for ‘ditch’—would look better soon. If she were an alligator, it might look like home already.

  Her heart sank. The fact that so much earth had already been moved here made it a real possibility that she and Betsy had done what they set out to do—find the source of Glynis’ artifacts. But the sheer volume of disturbed earth worried her.

  Acres of land had been cleared and graded, with high spots scraped down and low areas filled to the same height. Soil from the retention pond had probably already been used to level future roads, and their paths might cut straight across the spot where more rosary beads and the other half of the broken stone blade were waiting. All that history might be gone already, despite the risk that Glynis took to save it.

  Betsy didn’t look as daunted as Faye felt. She’d grabbed two trowels out of her car trunk and was stepping down the sloped side of retention basin. “Let’s see what the soils are like here, anyway. We might learn something useful.”

  Faye found the next hour totally pleasant in a totally geeky way. She and Betsy prowled the bottom of the basin, scraping at the walls and checking out the soil horizons. At one end, the pond was constructed so excess water overflowed during heavy rainfall into a more-or-less natural creek. In that area, the two archaeologists hit paydirt.

  “Oh, oh, oh, oh…oh, look.”

  Faye rolled her eyes at her own articulateness. What was she going to say next?

  Oh, oh, look. See Betsy dig. See Betsy and Faye dig up a wad of priceless artifacts.

  Because protruding from the creek’s banks were bits of multicolored pottery and at least one lump of metal. The hard glint of sunlight on broken flint and chert spoke of hand-chipped tools. Both women whipped out their cell phones and took pictures, then Faye gently tapped the metal lump with the tip of her trowel. A musket ball rolled out of the creek bank and rested at her feet.

  She almost crowed like a rooster. Then she put the thing in her pocket. Comparing the size and weight and metal content of this musket ball to the ones in Glynis’ stash would go a long way toward being able to say, “Yes. Those artifacts came from here.” And that would go a long way toward helping the police figure out who took Glynis and why.

  It took the sound of a car engine to remind them that they didn’t strictly have permission to be where they were. Overstreet had okayed their plan to go out to a project site and talk to the people working there. He had not approved any cockeyed scheme to go out and duplicate the action that might have gotten Glynis kidnapped, but there they stood—rather, squatted—poking around in something that might cost Alan Smithson his company and his fortune.

  Faye eyed Betsy silently, and they didn’t have to say a word. Both women knew that it would be an excellent idea to just hang out for a while in this mudhole and hope nobody up there noticed them.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Faye thought that cell phones might be the biggest technological advance since the printing press.

  Stored in Faye’s phone was a photo of the spot where Glynis found the artifacts that might have gotten her kidnapped. Yeah, it was a logical leap, but Faye was willing to take it, until lab analysis of that musket ball proved her wrong.

  Since her phone was tapped into the Internet—well, maybe that was the biggest technological advance since the printing press—the photo had already been flung at the speed of light in the general direction of Detective Overstreet, with a copy to Joe and another copy to Betsy’s assistant.

  Because Faye was forty, and thus not born with a cell phone welded to her hand, she had forgotten the tiny boop her phone made when she pressed each key. So with her first keystroke, an unnatural boop had echoed through the quiet air that caressed this pristine bit of nature.

  Betsy had locked eyes with her, both of them sure that they would be discovered by the criminals having a casual conversation just a few yards away from the lip of the retention basin where they hid. But they had been lucky.

  They had also been lucky in their choice of a parking spot. The car, clearly labeled City of St. Augustine, must have been hidden by the tree above it and the vegetation around it, at least from the vantage point of the newcomers who seemed to believe they were alone. This was good, because those newcomers would not want anyone who worked for the city to see the artifacts hanging out of the wall of this overgrown ditch. And they would not want anyone at all to hear the conversation they were having right this minute.

  How unfortunate for them that Betsy was using the Record function on her phone to document that conversation while Faye sent photographic evidence of their wrongdoing all over the World Wide Web.

  Having turned off the booping function on her
phone, Faye had finished sending the photos to Joe. Now she was considering using the phone as a sort of periscope, sticking it up over the lip of the ditch where they were trapped and taking a few seconds of video that would have told her and Betsy who was up there. But there was no way to do that without a risk that a flash of sunlight reflected off the phone’s glass face might attract the men’s attention.

  Betsy seemed pretty sure she knew who was there, anyway. At the first sound of the first man’s low, cultured voice, she had thumb-typed for a second, then held her phone so that Faye could see the screen.

  Alan Smithson.

  Faye agreed with Betsy. She’d only heard Glynis’ father speak once, but the voice was memorable.

  The other man’s tone was more agitated and excited, and his words carried better.

  “I thought you were paying Lex to keep her quiet. Under control.”

  “Lex found that Gwennie was her father’s daughter. Neither of us knuckles under to pressure. Even if her little political temper tantrum was at my expense, even if it did cost me money I could have spent on another pretty sportscar for my little girl, I didn’t care. She was busy showing the world what a Smithson is made of. Keep my Gwennie quiet? Under control? What was I thinking? Lex never had a prayer.”

  “But she cost me the election. She cost me everything I’ve worked for.”

  The word “election” caught Faye’s ear. Faye typed Dick Wheeler? into her own phone. Betsy read it and nodded.

  Alan Smithson wasn’t buying into the defeated politician’s accusations. “My daughter is beautiful and charming, but she did not go into the voting booth with every last person in the county and help them mark their ballots. She didn’t help you any, but you lost your own election, Wheeler.”

  “I didn’t have a chance, not with her telling the world that I thought we should open brothels and crack houses in the Castillo de San Marcos—which is a National Monument and thus not really any concern of county government, by the way. So I resent losing my seat because of it.”