“Just Daniel. I crawled to the front porch and up the steps. Had to pull myself up and stand on my good leg to open the door. Tried to open it, anyway. Should’ve rung the doorbell so everyone in the house would hear, but I just wanted to get inside. To get away from Lex. But the door’s too damn heavy for somebody with one good leg and a bunch of broken ribs. Opened it a crack and it slammed shut on me. Did it again. And again. Daniel was in the kitchen and I guess he saw the door opening and shutting on the security system. No other way for anybody to know, not when the door between the entry hall and the atrium is closed. Nobody saw me outside. Nobody could see into the entry hall from the inside—”
This was true, because none of the guests and staff had reported seeing Glynis that day, even for an instant.
“He pulled me into the entry hall. Talked me down, ’cause I was hysterical. I told him what Lex had done, and he whipped his cell phone out of his pocket, ready to call 911. If I’d just shut up then…but I didn’t. I told him why Lex had beaten me. When I said I was pregnant, the weirdest look came into his eyes. He just said, ‘A baby. You’re going to have a baby.’ And there was another weird second, like he was thinking this thing through. I should have run then. Only I couldn’t have run if I tried.”
“How could you possibly have known what he was thinking?” Magda said in her best don’t-be-ridiculous voice. “This…” She gestured at their concrete prison. “This is insanity.”
Glynis shook her head back and forth once, twice, too many times. The motion made the tears on her face take one crazy turn, then another. “There had to have been some way to keep this from happening. I don’t know. But as soon as he learned I was pregnant, the phone went back in his pocket and he changed his tune. He said, ‘Domestic abusers are unpredictable. I need to hide you. Let me put you someplace he’ll never find you, until we can get the police here.’”
Faye looked around her at the impregnable walls hidden behind an invisible door. Daniel had been right about one thing. Lex would have never found her here.
“So he reached behind the grandfather clock and did something and that door opened up. I walked right in. Well, I limped right in, with Daniel’s help, but I got in here just as fast as I could go. I was so scared and so glad to be safe. Can you believe that I put myself in this godforsaken hole?”
Magda plopped down beside Glynis and placed the girl’s shining head gently in her lap. A loose strand of hair slipped from that head and floated to the floor. “Yes, I believe you. When the man you love threatens you and hurts you, you’ll run anyplace to be safe. But it never works. You still love him, wherever you are. And you’re trapped there until you figure out that you’ve got to leave him.”
Faye’s jaw dropped and Magda said, “Don’t look at me like that, Faye. You thought maybe I was some kind of middle-aged virgin when you introduced me to Mike? Yes, I had a life before you met me, and yes, it wasn’t a walk in the park, surrounded by roses and petunias.” Turning her attention back to Glynis, she said, “You did the right thing, going for help. It sucks that you ran to a psychopath, but this is not your fault.”
Magda opened a bottle of water and lifted Glynis’ head. “You need to drink something. For the baby. Can you do it?”
Glynis nodded and did as she was told. As she drank, Magda gestured at the little girl clinging to her leg. “I will never, ever let this child see me let anyone mistreat me, and I certainly will never let her watch me go back for more. I love Mike with all my heart, and I can no more imagine him lifting a hand to me than I can imagine the sun stopping in its tracks. But if he ever did it, even once, he would be treated to a good clear view of the front door slamming behind me. Behind me and Rachel.”
Glynis let the water bottle drop and Magda pushed it back to her lips. “Drink up. Faye and I are going to get you out of here, so that you and your baby can have the good life you both deserve.”
Faye looked again at the impregnable fortress around them and wondered how in the hell they were going to do that.
Rachel left her mother’s side and sidled up to Faye, whimpering, “Want a story, Auntie Faye. Tell me a story.”
How many stories had she told Rachel over the past three years? Why couldn’t she think of just the right one for this occasion? Faye herself was terrified, but there wasn’t a chance in hell that she would fail to offer Rachel any comfort she wanted. A story…what story could she tell her here?
Her mind went straight to Rapunzel and then to Sleeping Beauty. She couldn’t stop it from going there, but she pushed those fairy tales as far back in her skull as they would go.
Snow White…running for her life from a murderous woodsman?
Cinderella…imprisoned and forced to slave for her hateful stepmother?
Hansel and Gretel…driven from their home to starve, then fattened for the dinner of a witch?
Why were children’s stories so terrifying? Because children couldn’t be allowed to wait until they were grown-up to learn that the real world harbored danger?
Faye couldn’t think of a single traditional story that she was willing to tell Rachel right now. Her mind wandered toward the true stories that had occupied her mind lately.
The murder of Lilibeth Campbell.
The betrayal and slow deterioration of Allyce Dunkirk.
The destruction of America’s native people when the Old World collided with the New.
Faye rejected the truth in favor of singing Rachel her ABCs and following that up with some innocuous nursery rhymes, the ones about candlesticks and cats and fiddles and plums. There might be adult themes buried in those old songs, but Faye didn’t know them and neither did Rachel.
Unfortunately, singing nursery rhymes didn’t occupy Faye’s entire brain. Her voice might be delivering a spritely rendition of “Mary Had A Little Lamb,” but her mind refused to stay out of those shadowy passageways where priests participated in massacres and where gold trumped God.
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.
My path to hell was not long nor crooked. I fell from God’s benevolent grace in a single instant.
For some years, I pursued my shaman’s work, but I comforted myself by saying that I did it for God. Each tincture of an unfamiliar herb, dropped into the mouth of a grievously ill infidel, held the hope of saving that infidel’s life so that he might someday find the grace of God.
And some of them did. I did not preach conversion to my gentle hosts. It seemed somehow wrong to flee the vengeful faith of men like Father Esteban, only to try to create it anew here. Instead, I set aside my role as priest and sought only to worship Our Lord quietly.
Despite my silence on matters of faith, the Timucua grew curious about my time spent in prayer. They asked endless questions about the rosary that I touched with such veneration and the worn book of scriptures that rarely left my hand. The time came when some of them asked to be like me, and I was a priest once more.
I began celebrating the Mass as best I could. The bread was made of maize and the wine was squeezed from wild grapes and berries, but I believed. I believed in what I was doing. A priest without belief is nothing.
My prayers came to center around the Timucua and their future. As best I could tell, they had no future. There were murmurings among the men, rash murmurings that preached war. They were so sure that they could drive the Spanish away through sheer valor. I know exactly how much valor armed with stone weapons is worth when it is aimed at men wrapped in chain mail. Nothing.
The voice of God echoed in my prayers and told me what I must do. I must seek peace, even though the peace would end badly. The Timucua would be ground into the earth by the Spanish, regardless of whether they fought back. If I could convince them of the futility of war, then perhaps more of them would live a little longer. This was the best hope I could find for them, and it is not mu
ch.
I devised a ceremony that was warmly accepted by these people who so loved ceremony. When a wild-eyed young man preached war and fear, I taught him to break his spear into two pieces and bury it. If he had managed to scavenge a bit of Spanish war gear—a knife, a musket, an ax—I implored him to bury it with his own hand-made spear. Sometimes, those wild-eyed young men agreed.
I traveled the countryside, free of the fear of retribution from Father Esteban, exiled as he was in Dominica. Many weapons were broken and hidden in the ground, never to be used again, but other warriors were making more ceaselessly.
In the end, there are always more weapons. But, perhaps because of me, there were people whose lives were longer and happier than they would have been with fewer weapons above the ground. I can hope for no more than that.
I became an old man and never noticed, because I was preaching peace and tending to other things. Then came the cold winter day when Ocilla ran to me, weeping and wrapped in a Spanish blanket I didn’t know. She had seen Father Esteban, who had returned from Dominica to build missions for the Church. With him was Yaraha, who Ocilla said now lay in the house she had shared with Father Francisco, covered with the pox.
Ocilla wept bitterly, because she knew that Yaraha would die, but her face shone with gratitude to Father Esteban, who had given her this blanket. He had told Ocilla to bring me to see him, and he would give us more blankets than we could carry, enough for the entire village.
The Timucua were in a grievous state of poverty, and I with them. The waves of pestilence, year after year, had killed the young men and women who should have been growing food and making clothing for the rest of the tribe. Ocilla could not have imagined refusing the great gift of a blanket, no more than she could imagine the murderous intent in the man who gave it, but I knew in my soul that it carried the pox. Why, other than revenge, would Father Esteban have sought us out again after all those years?
I had known the man for a short time, decades in the past, but I had no doubt that he had taken a blanket from a corpse and wrapped it around my Ocilla. Days would pass before I had proof, but the gift of a blanket told me all. Father Esteban was not a generous man.
I spoke to Humka of my fears, and this was a sin. None of the Timucua would have considered that Ocilla’s sickness had been, in its way, an act of murder. They would never have conceived of the necessity for revenge without my words. Humka and I decided that Ocilla and I would remain in our hut, alone, until all danger of infection was past. He would leave food and water outside our door every morning. This was a generous use of days that might be his last, if the pox had come to our village. He had been standing beside me when Ocilla ran to us with her news. If she was to die, he very likely would die, too.
Unspoken was our knowledge that these precautions were useless if the plague was upon us. There was no possibility that the sickness could be contained. Ocilla had shown Chulufi her beautiful new blanket before she showed it to me, and Chulufi had run to all the other women to share the news. Perhaps we could have ordered everyone in the village to remain in their own huts, but the damage was done. And in this time of famine, who could have found the food to feed them all while they sat alone with their families, waiting to learn their fates?
I spent those days of Ocilla’s quarantine in conversation with her, my lifelong friend. I watched her face for the deadly pockmarks, and thought ceaselessly of all her years of faithful kindness to me.
No Spaniard would have called Ocilla beautiful. Her face was curiously flattened, with broad cheeks and protruding teeth, and she was taller than me by a handspan. But no Spaniard ever knew such sweetness. When it was too late, I came to believe that it would have been no sin to love her. Even if it had been sin, my other wrongs would have far dwarfed that small one.
For I spent those last days with Ocilla contemplating a most monstrous sin.
__________
I, Father Domingo Sanz de la Fuente, attest that the foregoing is a statement of actual events.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Joe had rubbed his hands all over the wall that Faye said was hiding two terrified women and a child. He had removed and replaced picture frames. He had pulled a sofa away from the wall, checking behind it and every other stick of furniture. He had stood back and studied the wall and the crown molding above it and the baseboard where it met the floor. As best Joe could tell, it was all solid.
If someone had closed up a door in that wall, then it had been done right, by filling in the open frame, then plastering over it. This meant that the former nursery was completely inaccessible, unless someone had carved an opening in the concrete wall on its far side, opening into the room one door down from the owners’ suite. Joe doubted it, but he was going to try to get in that room and check, just as soon as he was finished in here.
On the other hand, if someone had filled a frame in this wall with a hidden door that could be opened, then that had been an amazing job of masonry and carpentry.
After studying every square inch of that wall a second time, and again failing to find an opening, Joe had studied all the others, even the one with the window in it, trying to figure out where three human beings could possibly be hidden. Thwarted, he was now trying to choose his next step: search all the other rooms? Or roll up the carpet and study the floor in this one? Maybe there was a trap door leading to a secret passage that led into the old nursery…
Then he heard the click of a latch being released. Still focused on getting into the nursery, Joe whipped his head in the direction of the solid plaster wall, but there was no slowly opening secret door to be seen.
Then the door to the hallway, the non-mysterious door that Joe had just entered, began to swing open. Light on his feet and silent-moving in his soft-soled moccasins, Joe leapt to the wall, flattening himself behind the opening door.
Suzanne stepped through.
***
“Daniel said I could always have another baby, after I gave this one to Suzanne. He said it lots of times, like that should make me feel better,” Glynis said. “And he said I was young and that nine months wasn’t such a big piece of my life to give up, so that Suzanne could have my baby and be happy again.”
“He’s crazy, sweetheart,” Magda said. “Don’t listen to him.”
Faye was only half-listening. She was assessing their options. They weren’t getting out through those little holes where pipes had once run. They weren’t getting out of the hole in the floor that went nowhere. Faye’s eyeball calculations said that even if she stood on Magda’s shoulders, and then Magda stood on Glynis’ shoulders, they’d never reach the lowest of the maintenance doors above them.
Besides, Glynis could hardly be expected to hold anyone up, not with cracked ribs and a messed-up leg. The thought of big-bellied Faye supporting anyone else or balancing on top of a human pyramid was comical in a painful way.
One thing was clear—if they were going to get out of this place, they would be leaving through the door that brought them in. Faye had run her hands over the door and the wall around it, time and again, looking for a way to spring their trap. She’d found no openings except a tiny, metal-rimmed hole in the door about five feet from the floor.
It was a peephole, and it was probably the answer to Faye’s question of how Daniel could be absolutely sure there was no one around before opening the door. Even the peephole was camouflaged with a small metal disk. Faye would bet money that the disk, smaller than her smallest fingernail, had a fool-the-eye woodgrain finish on the other side. She’d painted many a faux woodgrain in her day, reproducing the decorative paint finishes her home had boasted in its payday. A good artist could make that peephole practically invisible.
Faye looked around the room and didn’t see anybody who could pour herself through a hole smaller than a dime, not even Rachel. It was a fair measure of her desperation that she even looked, but there was a solid reason for that desperation. Another horrifying facet of their situation had occurred to her.
When Magda went missing, Faye had been so sure that she knew where Daniel and Suzanne were holding her that she’d sent Joe running headlong into danger. He’d probably already burst into the very home of her kidnappers. They could be holding him at gunpoint right now. If he’d miraculously missed walking into that trap, then he was probably searching that apartment high and low for an entrance to a secret room housed in the old nursery…which certainly might exist, but Magda and Rachel weren’t in there. Neither were Glynis and neither was Faye.
Not that Joe had any inkling that Faye was in trouble. And not that he had any inkling that she hadn’t called the police, so the cavalry was not going to be topping the hill, with its bugles blowing and its flags flying. Unless Faye could find some secret latch to pry this door open, Joe was on his own. And he didn’t know it.
She kept looking, but all she saw was a stout wooden door embedded seamlessly in a concrete wall, with no weakness but a tiny little peephole.
***
Stomping on his revulsion at the notion of manhandling a woman, Joe stepped from behind the door and had a hand over Suzanne’s mouth and her arms pinned at her sides before she’d taken a breath. He used his foot to close the door quietly behind her.
“You’re going to tell me where they are, and you’re going to do it now. Quietly.” He eased a hand from her mouth, ready to clamp down if she took a breath to scream.
She answered him, obediently quiet, but with a surprising fierceness. He should have known that a woman who had made a career as a trial attorney had not morphed completely into a meek thing with no thought beyond the beauty of her gardens and flower arrangements. She looked him in the eyes and hissed “Where who are? What are you talking about? Let me go!”
Suzanne seemed to have taken a self-defense class, because she launched into a sequence of moves that she’d obviously rehearsed. He could tell she was trying to stomp on his instep, drop into a crouch, shift his center of gravity over her leg, and shove him down, because he’d taught Faye to do the same thing.
Strangers Page 24