Strangers
Page 27
Perfect. When seated, Rachel’s head was several inches below the trapdoor. There were inches of clearance around her in all directions, so she didn’t look cramped. The concrete floor, however, looked hard and Faye needed Rachel to be comfortable in this hole for an indefinite period of time.
“Glynis, do you need both those pillows? Could I borrow one for Rachel?”
“Of course you can.” Glynis lifted her head, so that Faye could take her pick.
Faye left the bed pillow for Glynis—she’d already taken the pillowcase from it—and reached for the square sofa pillow that was just the size to wedge into this hole. Its cover had a Moorish design carefully chosen to blend with Allyce Dunkirk’s exotic Jazz Age décor. Faye lifted Rachel out of the hole and jammed the pillow down into its bottom.
“Look! It’s like Aladdin’s magic carpet, Rachel.”
The little girl clapped her hands and crowed, “Want to get back in my playhouse, Auntie Faye!”
Faye locked eyes with Magda and they both smiled. This plan—convincing a three-year-old that she wanted to hide in a dark pit for an extended period of time—was ridiculous. But if it worked, Rachel could be invisible and safe while they launched their jailbreak. There was nothing more important than taking care of the child in this room. Children. Faye and Glynis needed to take care of their children, too.
That task wasn’t going to be nearly as easy as making Rachel think that her dank pit was a fabulous playhouse.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
More time had crawled past. Faye didn’t know how much.
She’d shown Rachel the trapdoor and told her it was her playhouse’s “roof.”
“Put my roof on, Auntie Faye!”
Faye had said, “Let me ask Mommy’s permission.”
Armed with Magda’s maternal experience, they had slowly dropped the trapdoor, then raised it quickly, despite Rachel’s pleas for them to leave it closed.
“Mommy likes to look at you, honey. We’ll just close it now and then.”
And they had, for increasing periods of time. Rachel had been in ecstasy over this new game.
During periods when the door was open, the women had scoured the room for objects that could pass for toys. An empty water bottle and its cap. Protein bar wrappers made of a glittery foil that Rachel loved to shred and toss like confetti. The cough drops out of Faye’s sweatpants pocket, which Rachel had happily sucked on while shredding their wrappers. The paperback thriller that occupied her for a solid fifteen minutes while she removed its pages one by one, then admired its lurid cover.
Oh, how Faye wished she’d grabbed her cell phone and stuffed it in her pocket when she’d rushed to Magda’s room that morning. Granted, there was no reason to expect that it would work here, when it hadn’t worked in any other part of the house. But it would have amused her to burn up the battery trying. After that, it would have amused Rachel to open it and close it and poke its worthless buttons. Instead, Rachel had to be satisfied with shredding stuff and demanding that Faye lower her “roof.”
It was critical that Rachel be in her hole and out of sight when Daniel arrived, but no one knew when that would be. Glynis was of the generation who used their cell phones for timepieces, so she wore no watch. Her cell phone had been abandoned on the floorboard of her car, leaving her floating free in time for her entire period of captivity. She couldn’t tell them when to expect Daniel, other than to say that it was late at night.
The group could, however, infer when he might come. All three women knew the schedule at Dunkirk Manor. Guests came and went freely through the house, starting at breakfast time and continuing until the front door was locked at eleven p.m. There was certainly no curfew, which would have been ridiculous for any business hoping to attract tourists, but guests were told to use the door on their wing after eleven.
The front door stayed locked until six a.m., when the cook and maids arrived at work. So it was altogether likely Daniel made his nightly visits to Glynis beween the hours of eleven p.m. and six a.m.—more likely between midnight and five, to allow a safety margin in case there might be stragglers or early birds about.
Pinpointing that window of time wasn’t necessarily a simple matter. Faye’s watch was on her nightstand with her cell phone, because she had been interrupted in the act of working in her bedroom on a Saturday morning.
Magda, too, had been interrupted while going about her morning chores, so she had no watch, either.
Rachel, however, was sporting a vintage-design Minnie Mouse watch, a going-away gift from her doting father. The thought of Sheriff Mike’s suffering when he learned that his wife and child were missing made Faye want to curl up in a ball. She’d made a pact with herself not to even imagine Joe’s reaction to the same news.
So Faye’s plan was to entertain Rachel, both in and out of her playhouse, until Minnie’s hour hand pointed to eleven. Then she planned to plunk the child into her hiding place, with the roof firmly closed. She’d likely go to sleep there, which would be a very good thing.
In the meantime, Faye and Rachel could practice a very important game. When Faye said “Now!”, Rachel crawled into her hole and Faye shut the lid. Then Rachel waited, quietly and patiently, for Faye to say, “Rachel…go!”
At this signal, the child stood, pushing the trap door open with her own little head. She crawled out of the hole. This was easier after Faye folded up a couple of towels to serve as a stepstool. Once out, she ran at top speed for the door.
“If I ever say, ‘Rachel…go!’ and you see that the door’s open,” Faye had instructed, “then you run through it and you keep running. Don’t stop for anybody but me or Mommy or Daddy or Uncle Joe. Or Detective Overstreet. You can go to him or any of his police friends. Then you tell them to call 911 and send someone to get Mommy and Auntie Faye and their friend Glynis.”
Faye was optimistic that she and Magda could occupy Daniel long enough for Rachel to make a run for it, even if they couldn’t get themselves out. Unfortunately, she knew that there was no way in hell that Rachel could open the massive front door of Dunkirk Manor. So she instructed the child to run as hard as she could for the guest wing. She wasn’t to let anybody there come near her. She was simply to keep running down the wing, hollering, “Mommy said to call 911!” and right out the back door.
It was hard to believe that Rachel might get this far without being recaptured or rescued, but Faye covered all the bases. If the little girl actually escaped the house, she was to find the sidewalk in front of the house and run toward town, urging everyone she saw to call 911.
Rachel looked happy, leaning against the wall of her pit and hugging her knees.
“Want a story, Auntie Faye! Or a song!”
Good. Rachel was giving her the option of singing something mindless, instead of forcing Faye to rack her brain for an acceptable story. Looking down at Rachel in her pit, Faye found her mind circling biblical stories.
Young Daniel in the lion’s den.
Young Joseph, thrown into a hole by his brothers and left for dead.
A song. It would be much better to sing a song. But which one?
A song from long-ago Sunday School classes bubbled to the top. Slavery was hardly more cheerful than stories of trapped children waiting for death, but at least the story of Moses and the children of Israel ended well. Unless you were a firstborn Egyptian…
Go down, Moses,
Way down in Egypt land.
Tell old Pharoah
To let my people go!
Every time Faye reached down and bellowed out the low notes, “Let my peo-ple go!”, Rachel laughed hysterically. Maniacally, actually. So Faye, who knew an awful lot about three-year-olds for someone who had reached forty without reproducing, sang it again and again. And again.
“Hey,” Magda murmured in a discouraged monotone that worried Faye. “If you even sing one note of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,’ I promise you I’m gonna slit my wrists with this broken piece of water bottle.”
But the song didn’t take up every cell in her brain. It left space for another sad story about people with no place to go and nowhere to hide.
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.
When the first of the pox erupted on my Ocilla’s face, I called the village’s men to me.
A span of ten days had passed while I waited to know her fate, time enough for me to ask myself why Father Esteban would have done this. The Timucua were valued for their labor. The colony at St. Augustine would not have survived without the food the natives produced at the missions springing up across the countryside. If the pox gained a foothold here, it would spread to other villages and to the missions. Why would a man of God deprive St. Augustine and its cathedral of desperately needed supplies?
There could only be one reason. Father Esteban had revealed himself when he told Ocilla to bring me to him. Spain and the Church may not have come to collect payment for my crimes, but Father Esteban had chosen to collect it for them. This murder of countless innocents was calculated to be a heretic priest’s punishment. In a single stroke, it would also eradicate those natives tainted by association with that heretic priest.
The pocked scars on my face had told Father Esteban that this disease would not touch me. Perhaps that knowledge figured into his decision on which pestilence to send. It would have been a mercy to send a plague that would carry me away with Ocilla and her people. My enemy is not a merciful man.
In the days I waited for the pox that I knew would come, I told our warriors what man had sent it and where he could be found, but I waited until I knew beyond doubt what Father Esteban had done before I told them when to strike. When the fever seized Ocilla and she lay shivering on her mat, I told them.
I told them that their enemy was a priest of Our Lord God, just as I am. He came from Europe in a tall ship, just as I did. He was born and educated there, just as I was. And he lives his life according to the same discipline.
They looked at me, still questioning. They still needed for me to tell them when to strike.
Asking God’s forgiveness for a sin I knew to be unpardonable, I asked them if they had not seen me deep in prayer in the mornings and in the evenings and before taking my meals.
They had. Still, they did not take my meaning.
Looking them each in the eye, one by one, I told them that our enemy would also be praying at those same times. Understanding dawned on their faces. They should slay the man who sent them the pox while he was intent on communing with the Most Holy Lord.
I sent them to murder a man of God while he was deep in prayer. I did this, not because I was unwilling to kill him myself, but only because I was old and because I did not know how. When a man lives an entire life as a man of peace, he never gains the ability to make holy war when such a war is justified. So I sent my flock to avenge a lifetime of outrage. Then I went into my house and bade farewell to the only person in this new world who has loved me.
May God have mercy on her soul. And on mine.
__________
I, Father Domingo Sanz de la Fuente, attest that the foregoing is a statement of actual events.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Joe Wolf Mantooth had walked from Oklahoma to the Appalachians alone before he was twenty, tracing the Trail of Tears and pondering the big questions in life. He had decided that there were three.
What are you going to do?
Who are you going to love?
And what are you going to do to make God happy that you spent time here on Earth?
He’d spent some time in North Carolina after that epic walk. He had apprenticed himself to a master flintknapper and he’d learned that he was very, very good at making stone tools in the ancient way, but this didn’t seem like a good answer to the question of making God happy. It didn’t even seem to be a very good way of making a living, so he’d still been stuck on that first question of what he was going to do. And the issue of who he was going to love had been an open question.
Then he’d wandered for awhile and found himself in Florida, with no possessions to his name but a john boat and a tent. Praise God that Faye lived on an island. He’d dragged his boat ashore there, pitched a tent someplace where he thought no one would notice him, and was forever blessed to have been wrong about that.
Faye had found him. She’d let him stay. She’d befriended him and nagged him into working on his education. This had answered the first big question of what he was going to do with his life. In the archaeological world, he was finding that there were actually a lot of people who thought his archaic skills were valuable.
Then after years of his loving her without the first notion that she even noticed, she’d found herself loving him back. It had taken a bullet through each of their bodies to get them to this point, but Joe would happily let himself be shot again if that’s what it took to keep Faye in his life.
And now they were going to have a child, and Joe was sure that taking care of Faye and their baby was the one certain thing that would make God glad he was alive.
Faye had answered all his questions for him, without asking anything in return, nothing but his love. She only needed one thing from him right now. She needed him to find her.
Overstreet had men with rifles on boats in the river, ready to scale the garden wall at his signal. He had men on the street, too. They were as unobtrusive as they could be on a street where traffic was rare and where unfamiliar cars parked on the street were rarer. A hostage negotiator was standing by.
The thought of a hostage negotiator bargaining for Faye’s life made Joe retch.
Overstreet had accomplished all of this in an astonishingly short period of time. The sun was high overhead as Joe and the police officer wiped their feet on the welcome mat and prepared to enter Dunkirk Manor. If Joe had been alone, he would have strolled right in, since Dunkirk Manor was his temporary home. It was Suzanne’s home, but it would have looked funny for her to walk in with Joe and Overstreet, so she’d gone around back to enter through the kitchen door. Since Overstreet’s excuse for coming was to ask Daniel some official questions, then he couldn’t stroll right in. Instead, he reached out and rang the doorbell.
Dunkirk Manor’s doorbell was somber and expensive-sounding, which was hardly surprising. It echoed for a long time. Joe stood there and listened to it, and he thought that no sound in the world could have done a better job of reminding him of the soul-chilling reality of his mission.
Get Faye. Get Rachel. Get Magda. Get Glynis. Bring them out safe. Bring them out alive.
***
Faye had developed a fascination with the peephole in their prison door. It was hard to imagine much sound seeping through its glass barrier, but the peephole still represented the weakest point in their prison. If she pulled the metal cover back, there would be nothing but glass between her and anyone in the entry hall. More accurately, the peephole was two lenses of glass separated by air, which would be a pretty darn good sound barrier, but it was better than trying to shout through the solid concrete wall.
If she put her mouth next to the glass and screamed when there was someone in the entry hall, was it remotely possible that she could be heard?
The peephole had a wide-angle lens, giving her a decent view of most of the entry hall. No one was there.
Of course they weren’t. The entry hall was almost never used. But sometimes…
New guests sometimes came in the front door. Other guests sometimes wandered through this room like tourists. Sometimes, Harriet brought her ghost tours into this very room. Faye decided to stand here by the peephole and watch for passers-by. Then she could test the theory that her screams might be audible through this little chink in their prison’s armor.
&nb
sp; Out of sheer nervousness, she started twiddling with the metal lens cover. It made a slight metal-grinding sound as it slid across the lens, ending with a metal-on-metal clink.
That clink made Faye stand up straight. She slid the cover open again, then closed it. Clink.
She had heard that sound before.
Methodically, she slid the disk back, then slid it closed, over and over. Was it possible that this little noise could be heard in the entry hall?
It was more than possible. Faye had heard it, just as she heard the secret door slide open…just before Daniel stepped out of this very room and grabbed her.
She put her face close to the peephole, hoping that she’d see even a shadow that would tell her someone was out there. Then she started opening and closing the peephole, over and over again.
Grind. Click. Grind.
Grind. Click. Grind.
As Faye repeated the sound, again and again, monotonously and continuously, Magda opened her eyes and turned them in the direction of the noise. Her expression spoke of either murder or suicide.
Faye waved away Magda’s irritation. “This sound can be heard out there. I know it can. So I’m going to keep making it until somebody hears me. If you can’t stand it, then try singing Rachel a song. Your caterwauling might drown out this noise.”
“You don’t like my singing?”
“Nobody likes your singing. Your own child doesn’t like your singing.”
A voice wafted out of the hole in the floor. “I don’t, Mommy. Really.”
Magda launched into “The Eensy Weensy Spider,” anyway. Faye felt sorry for Glynis as she lay in the floor, knowing that she would spend her fifth day in captivity listening to out-of-tune nursery rhymes and a crazy-making string of mechanical noises.