Strangers (27 page)

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.

***

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.

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.

***

A ripple, a vibration, an echo. Faye felt it coming through the peephole. She felt it as much on the skin of her hands and face as she did with her ears.

A bell. A chime.

Was the grandfather clock ringing a new quarter-hour? Were all the other clocks in the house chiming in?

Or had somebody just rung the doorbell?

Faye ramped up her assault on the peephole cover. She slid it back and forth, clicking it hard when it reached the limit of its range of motion, then twisting it back and trying again.

She was going to
make
somebody hear this thing.

It occurred to her that Daniel might be the someone who heard, and it might bring him into their prison before his regular midnight visit. They needed to be prepared for this possibility.

“Magda. I hear something. Close Rachel’s roof. Drag Glynis over here close to the door. And get in your position.”

Glynis cried out when Magda lifted both corners of her makeshift bed and tugged. Without Faye’s help, she wasn’t strong enough to move the wounded woman gently. She could only lean back with all her weight and pull hard. Faye wished that she believed it possible that anyone outside could hear Glynis scream.

Grind. Click.

Faye called out for help in the only way she knew, by making a little tiny noise, over and over.

***

Daniel didn’t so much hear the clicking. It was more that he felt it.

Someone was at the door. It made him nervous to usher them past the place where the three women waited with his children, but it shouldn’t be a problem. There was no way anyone could hear them scream.

But the metallic clicking penetrated their prison walls just enough to rattle him.

He needed to answer the doorbell. His guests might just barge in, if he left them out there too long.

Would they hear the clicking? Would they write it off to the ticking grandfather clock? Would they comment on it to him? Would they mention it to anyone else?

He knew the anxiety showed on his face, but he had no choice. He pulled open the front door and said, loudly and brightly, “Welcome to Dunkirk Manor!” Then he kept talking—prattling, actually—saying anything that crossed his mind, just to cover the barely discernible noise. He reached in his pocket and began fiddling with his loose change, in hopes that the metallic clinks would mask the tiny noise his captives were making.

And he began weighing his options.

He had too many prisoners. Magda would have to go. And, regrettable though it was, the other two women would need to be bound and gagged until he had their babies in hand. Then he and Suzanne could take her family fortune and flee to some foreign country where no one asked questions and where the American dollar still went a long, long way.

***

The echo of Dunkirk Manor’s doorbell rang in Joe’s ears. He suspected that his ears were ringing, anyway, out of panic and dread.

Joe was accustomed to being able to hear wild animals breathe. Now, all he could hear was the rush of blood in his ears.

The mansion’s door swung open, quiet as a breath, and Joe followed Overstreet into the entry hall. Daniel was talking, asking Overstreet if he’d made progress on Glynis’ case. His high-pitched voice, his flushed face, and the incessant jangling made by his hand shuffling through the coins in his pocket…all these things made Joe crazy.

Something else was jangling. Joe moved his head from side to side, trying to pinpoint its location, but it was too faint.

Overstreet didn’t hear it. Joe could tell. His eyes were completely focused on the kidnapping suspect at his side.

Something about the rhythm of the faint noise made him think of Faye.

The three of them passed through the entry hall and into the atrium, and Joe lost the sound. There were two clocks in the atrium, one on each balcony. Both of them ticked loudly, for precision-engineered timepieces. But he didn’t hear anything that sounded like Faye.

***

Faye saw three people move past the viewfinder. They were blurry but, if forced to guess, she’d say that two of them were Detective Overstreet and Daniel. One of them, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was her husband. No one moved like Joe.

All three of them had passed into the atrium now, joining Allyce Dunkirk’s ghost.

Anybody but Faye would have stopped her noisemaking foolishness after that, since it had so clearly not worked. But Faye knew that Joe was out there.

Grind.

Click.

***

Daniel’s beloved wife Suzanne appeared in the atrium, standing in the dining room entry. She greeted the three of them warmly, and Daniel saw an opportunity.

He gestured at Joe and Detective Overstreet, saying, “Darling, would you take our guests into the dining room and pour them some coffee? I’ve got some things upstairs in my office that I want to show them.”

Daniel was confident that his wife would show her habitual hospitality skills, buying him ten minutes alone. He backed through the open door behind him into the entry hall, knowing that they’d presume he was taking the elevator. In a single motion, he retrieved the butcher knife hanging on a hook behind the grandfather clock, slid it into a barely visible seam in the paneled wall, and triggered a latch hidden within that wall.

The hook had been designed to hide a long thin sliver of metal that served as a key, but Glynis, by throwing a screaming fit, had forced him to arm himself. Fortunately, his weapon opened the door just as well as the key had.

The hidden door swung open and he was inside the turret within five seconds of leaving Joe and the policeman with Suzanne…less…so quickly that the little pregnant woman standing on the other side of the door sprawled in the floor. Why couldn’t she be more careful when she was carrying his child?

Daniel brandished the knife. “How hard is it to sit in here and
be quiet
?
All of you.
I heard you making that noise.
I heard you.
You have to stop it.” He focused his eyes on Faye. “You
must
stop it, because you’re going to make me hurt you. You’ve
already
fixed it so that I have to tie you all up, even…”

His eyes raked the room.

“Where’s the child? Where’s the
little girl?
”

Suzanne needed a child. Suzanne was everything in his world, everything. Nothing had been right since Annie died, and Daniel was doing everything he knew how to do to make it right. There were two babies in this room, waiting to be born, and they were guarantees of a family. He and Suzanne had always wanted a big family, but no child had ever come to them except Annie, and even she only stayed ten years.

The babies were…
necessary.
He wanted the babies desperately. But they might turn out to be boys. The only way to make things right, really right, was to replace Annie. Little Rachel was unquestionably a girl, so she was essential.

And she wasn’t here.

***

Faye shook her head, trying to gather her wits after suddenly being knocked hard to the ground. Her body hurt from navel to knees after striking the concrete floor with her pelvis. She thanked God that she was sitting on Rachel’s trapdoor, because she could think of nothing worse than for the little girl to appear right this minute.

Then something happened that was almost as horrible as watching Rachel reveal herself to a killer. Her whole middle spasmed, as if her body were trying to cave in on itself. So this was what a labor pain felt like.

“
Where…IS…she?
” he bellowed, reaching for Magda as she crouched by the door.

Faye watched in horror, breathless and panting. She needed to do something, anything, but she couldn’t. Not until this contraction passed and she could rise to her feet.