Strangers (18 page)

Harriet took her suspicions of Raymond’s guilt seriously, but she hadn’t been able to assemble the evidence to support it. Faye thought that this failure was noteworthy. If the woman who tracked down a ninety-year-old prostitute and pushed her for the truth couldn’t find proof of Dunkirk’s guilt, then maybe it didn’t exist. Oh, sure, maybe Raymond Dunkirk was guilty. But it was entirely possible that the evidence to prove it had not survived, and so Harriet would never know for sure.

Hardly any evidence had been found in Lilibeth’s hotel suite, which had been so pristine that, again, Harriet suspected something unprovable but logical. The hotel had provided maid service, but the maid had gone off-duty at seven p.m., long before Lilibeth finished primping for a night on the town. Wouldn’t a pampered starlet have left discarded clothing strewn everywhere? Wouldn’t her toiletries have been scattered hither and yon across the vanity? Harriet thought that someone had tidied the room, after the fact.

The only scrap of evidence that had remained in the dead woman’s room was a piece of blank stationery monogrammed with Lilibeth’s initials. An alert policeman had noticed indentations on the paper, made when Lilibeth had written a personal letter on a sheet of paper resting atop this one. It had apparently been a multipage letter, as the indented words began in mid-sentence, and she may never have finished it. The barely discernible words just stopped. There was no
Sincerely, Lilibeth
signed with a flourish at the bottom of the page.

The fragment of her letter had said,

wonder why you stay. The good opinion of society will not make you happy. Look around you and you will see that it is true. Mr. Lestor, Mr. Manson, Mr. Sansing…do any of those pathetic men look happy? Do you want to come to the end of your life and find that you’ve become like them? I don’t. And I don’t want to keep acting for the cameras, pretending that I have a life when I don’t. I want what she has, but I have nothing. I want love. I want you. Surely you can see what must be done. I know you are strong enough.

For decades, people had speculated on who Lilibeth was writing, and Raymond Dunkirk was the only reasonable answer, unless Lilibeth had a secret lover hidden somewhere. Harriet swayed Faye’s opinion in Raymond’s direction with an interesting bit of detective work.

Raymond had inherited Dunkirk Manor and its property and the status associated with the Dunkirk name. But his family’s fortune had never recovered from the expense of building the vast house. When it came to unvarnished wealth, Allyce was the one who had inherited enough money to support their gilded lifestyle. It was entirely possible that Lilibeth didn’t know this, and that she was urging Raymond to leave his wife and install her as mistress of Dunkirk Manor. It was also entirely possible that Lilibeth did understand that life with Raymond wouldn’t be the glittering spectacle for her that it had been for Allyce, who had bankrolled it all. She might have believed that Raymond stayed with Allyce for her money. And it was entirely possible that Lilibeth was right. The fragment of her letter just wasn’t clear.

Much speculation had been wasted over whether Lilibeth’s letter-writing had been interrupted by her murderer, or whether she’d simply gotten up from her desk and gone to the last party of her life, intending to finish writing later. The letter itself was never found. Even the scrap of paper with the impressions of a single page of the letter had disappeared from the police files.

According to Harriet, it was rumored that Robert Ripley had acquired it by bribing a clerk. If so, it had disappeared into the vast collection of bizarre rarities collected by the globe-trotting founder of the Believe-It-or-Not empire. Harriet reported that it was speculated that Ripley’s friendship with Raymond Dunkirk and his obsession with the Lilibeth Campbell case had sparked the interest in St. Augustine that had prompted him to found his first permanent museum of oddities there.

One interesting angle to Harriet’s research was her analysis of the surviving photos of the doomed Lilibeth. They had disproven her most dearly held theory—that Lilibeth had been pregnant at the time of her murder. Faye flipped through the photos at the center of the book. While it was true that the loose, flapper-style clothing of the day could have camouflaged an early pregnancy, and the apple-cheeked ideal of beauty of that day echoed a pregnant woman’s lovely glow, the photos told a different story.

Lilibeth had been photographed several times during the weeks before her death, sometimes wearing scanty harem girl costumes from her movie and sometimes draped in revealing evening gowns made by an exclusive couturier. Her small breasts, flat abdomen, and narrow waist could not have belonged to a pregnant woman…at least, not to a woman who was pregnant enough to be aware of it, back in the days before near-instantaneous testing.

The thought of Glynis caught Faye’s breath in her chest. Her figure had been as slim and girlish as Lilibeth’s, but modern technology had told her she was pregnant, maybe on the very morning she disappeared.

Where are you, Glynis?
Faye wondered.
Are you and your baby safe?

Harriet had been intellectually honest enough to look at the photos and reject her pet theory. She also rejected a variation of it, that Raymond Dunkirk had used his physician’s training to abort their child sometime prior to a tumultuous argument that ended in her death. It simply wasn’t possible for Lilibeth to have been pregnant enough for either of them to know about it, not in 1928.

Joe rolled over and the old bed squeaked. There was no other sound. The contrast between the creaky spring and the still silence reminded Faye that she was living in a house poured of solid concrete. She might as well have been in a recording studio, completely insulated from the noise of the rest of the world.

The silence gave her the focus she needed to do her best work. She felt at her best as an archaeologist when she could leave the twenty-first century behind and imagine herself in a past she’d never seen.

Joe raised up on one elbow. “Have you memorized that book yet?”

“Nah. I’m just looking at the pictures, mostly. Take a look.”

Faye flipped through the photos, looking for scenes of life at Dunkirk Manor to show him. There was no better way to take the traces of the past Joe was digging out of the back garden and make them real.

Besides the photos she’d already seen—of the movie moguls pawing Lilibeth, of Lilibeth lolling by the pool, and of Lilibeth and Raymond under the staircase—Faye found several others to show Joe, some of which were taken by the pool and in the atrium. In one of those, the door to the entry hall was open, giving them a glimpse into a room that hardly appeared to have changed at all.

“That bookcase is gone now,” Joe said, rubbing a finger over the page. “Remember? That’s where the new elevator is. The elevator shaft runs up the turret on the right side of the entry hall. Other than that, everything looks the same.”

The photos showed that the decades hadn’t even brought that small degree of change to the atrium. Even the paintings on the wall and the curtains around the doorways were familiar. A photo series of a dinner party that spilled through the atrium and into both dining rooms showed that neither of those chambers had changed, either.

“Daniel and Suzanne don’t believe in redecorating, not any more than you do,” Joe said. “You folks take historical authenticity to a whole new level.”

Faye, who didn’t even like mopping her historic home’s wood floors with modern cleaner, rolled her eyes at him and said, “Except for the government-mandated elevator and the demolished swimming pool, this mansion might as well have been sealed in amber. The swimming pool bothers me, though.”

“Why? It was just a hole in the ground that’s not even there any more.”

“It bothers me because I didn’t even know it existed. Before we got here, I looked at everything I could find online and in the library. Books. Aerial photographs. Property surveys. Old fire insurance atlases. But I missed the pool.”

“Nobody’s perfect, Faye. I know you’d like to be, but facts are facts.”

Faye ignored his teasing, except for a well-aimed kick at his leg under the sheets. “I need to check the dates on the documents I saw, but there’s no flippin’ way that pool existed more than a few years.”

“Well…as long as you weren’t
wrong…
”

Joe headed for the bathroom and she swatted at his tight butt as he passed. She missed.

Perhaps the answer to the question of the disappearing pool was as simple as the boredom of the very rich. Perhaps Allyce had begged for a pool because it was such a conspicuous luxury to own a home pool in those days. Then, as her friends began to copy her ostentation, maybe she’d turned to Raymond and said, “Swimming pools are becoming so…common. I simply can’t bear it any longer. Besides, we need the space for an oriental grotto. They’re all the rage now.”

Raymond Dunkirk wouldn’t have been the first rich man to spend a fortune trying to keep a difficult wife happy. And in this case, it was his wife’s fortune she wanted to spend. Faye’s guess was that the pool had been a few years old when the photos of Lilibeth Campbell were made in 1928, and that it hadn’t existed much longer after that.

Faye was flipping through the photos yet again when the door burst open. The clatter it made by slamming back against the wall filled the room. Magda thrust her torso through the opening, and the distress on her face caught Faye completely off-guard. She had no doubt that Magda had run full-tilt down the hallway to tell her something terrible, possibly calling her name as she ran, but the massive walls of Dunkirk Manor had soaked up the sound of her voice and made this moment a total surprise.

“We need you both outside. Victor’s very upset. So’s Kirk. And Levon. I’m having trouble keeping them off each other, and I don’t want to have to call the police to settle this. Maybe the techs will settle down if their bosses show up.”

Joe appeared outside the bathroom door and she turned to him. “We need you two. Especially you, Joe.”

Faye knew what Magda was trying to say. Sometimes, the presence of someone very large could quiet down contentious males. But what on earth could stir up mild-mannered Levon and Kirk to the point where Magda was thinking of calling 911?

And Victor? How could police possibly be required to settle him down? Faye was pretty sure she could subdue Victor, even in her current bloated state.

Joe rushed out the service entrance, with the women close behind. Faye found that she could keep up with Magda if she wrapped her arms tight around her belly and ran hard. Rounding the corner of the kitchen wing, the fracas at the garden gate was abruptly audible.

“Open it! Open it!” Victor was rattling the newly locked gate on its hinges. “It can’t be locked, ever again. Mister Raymond said so!”

Everything about Victor was startling. The power of his voice, the depth of his anger, the strength of his withered arms as they rattled the heavy iron gate. People Victor’s age lost their physical power as a matter of course, but Faye wasn’t sure why they seemed to lose their emotional power, too. Not Victor. Ninety years of emotions seemed to be erupting out of his trembling body.

A musician friend of Faye’s had once tried to describe his experience as a performer at a nursing home. “The old folks were there in front of me, sitting in the audience. They must have wanted to see the show, or they wouldn’t have come. But they just watched me, with absolutely no expression on their faces. It was like playing racquetball against a rubber wall. I sent everything I had out there to them, but nothing came back. Did they hate every note I sang? Did they love it, but they weren’t able any more to show me how they felt? Were they listening at all? To this day, I have no idea.”

Victor, on the other hand, had not lost his ability to communicate emotion. Not in the slightest.

Joe’s long legs had already propelled him across the lawn. He grasped Victor and tried to pull the old man away from the gate without hurting him.

As Faye and Magda crossed the gravel driveway, the time-worn rocks bruised Faye’s bare feet and she prayed that she wouldn’t find any sharp objects the hard way. She was suddenly aware that she was wearing her pajamas. They were comfy, but she’d have preferred that her employees didn’t see her wrapped in pink polka-dot flannel.

“Why hasn’t anybody called the police?” Kirk shouted, shaking a shaggy mop of brown hair. “Why are we protecting this bum? Because he’s old? Glynis is missing…maybe dead…and everybody’s tiptoeing around this guy. If a homeless guy my age had been hanging around the scene of a kidnapping for no good reason, somebody would’ve already stuck him
under
the jail.”

Victor tried to take a swing at Kirk, but Joe blocked his arm in mid-punch. “Stop it, Victor. I ain’t going to let you hurt anybody and I don’t want to hurt you.”

“Mister Raymond told me to look after Miss Allyce. Always. Told me I could be her little boy. And I was. She loved me. I loved her. I love her.”

Victor was crying and his nose was running. Joe had his arms pinned, so Victor tucked his head down and wiped his nose on his shoulder, like a child from another time who had lost his handkerchief. “You can’t lock that gate. You can’t! She hates it.”

“Kirk’s right. We’ve been talking about this since Glynis…disappeared,” Levon said. His close-cropped black hair and neatly trimmed beard framed a tormented face. “This old man’s angry and he’s physical about it. He’s not in his right mind. He hangs around here for no good reason.”

He walked over close to Victor and got in his face, which was very brave of him, considering that the man was ninety and he was being restrained by someone the size of Joe. “
Why
is no one calling the police?”

“I
am
calling the police,” Faye said, pointing to the cell phone in her hand as she dialed Detective Overstreet. Whether she agreed with the young men’s suspicions that Victor had taken Glynis was anybody’s guess. She wasn’t sure what she thought about that, herself. Overstreet could quickly get to the bottom of the question of whether it was remotely possible that a frail old man could have stolen young and vital Glynis.