Strangers (19 page)

Faye was curious about other things. What had Victor seen in the years that he was Allyce Dunkirk’s “little boy”? Did that rambling and feeble mind hold the answers to her professional questions about the history of Dunkirk Manor?

“Why?” Victor mourned, his tears audible in his voice. “Why did Miss Allyce stay here, all cooped up? Why would anybody take something so lovely away from the rest of the world?”

***

Overstreet had laughed off Faye’s offer to sit in on his interview with Victor. “I hired you to consult on archaeology and you did that. Exactly how do you think questioning this old man has anything to do with your area of expertise? Well, except that he’s a fossil.”

As an experienced husband, he had fended off her attempt to argue further with a simple, “No,” followed by a refusal to listen anything she had to say on the matter.

Frustrated, she’d been forced to listen as he continued to explain why he was rejecting her help. “I am quite able to talk to a crazy old dude. You need to take those pajamas you’re wearing back to bed and get some rest. I’ve spent my share of time watching my wife have babies, and I’m here to tell you this: You do not need to start that process already exhausted.”

Faye’s sore back was speaking to her, which meant that Overstreet’s last sentence made more sense than she liked to admit. So she’d limped back to bed in her bare feet, grateful that Joe didn’t scoop her up and carry her. He’d spent most of the day keeping her feet from touching the ground, so she was glad he was showing some restraint now.

Back in bed, after a hearty meal of takeout and with a hot cup of herbal tea prepared by her wonderful husband, Faye resumed paging through Harriet’s book. Several of the photos interested her because they featured scenes of Dunkirk Manor’s gardens. Allyce Dunkirk was in all of them, spade in hand. When a woman with Allyce’s money chooses to get dirty, instead of letting the hired help do it, then she clearly loves gardening.

In one unposed photo, she was wiping sweat off her face and laughing at a little boy in worn overalls, holding a watering can in his chubby hands. He was looking at Allyce as if she were a goddess walking the earth. Faye instantly knew that he was Victor.

Unlike the photo of Victor as a teenager, the resemblance wasn’t obvious. It wasn’t even there. Little children’s faces are unformed, cherubic. It takes time for genetics and experience and sun and wind to give people their faces. Still, Faye had no doubt. This little boy loved Allyce, and she loved him. He might have been born to another mother. He might have lived down the street with his blood parents. Nevertheless, he was
her
little boy, and he always would be, even when he was ninety years old.

Harriet’s book included a chapter with short biographies of each of the key characters in Lilibeth’s murder case. Allyce’s story was especially brief, considering that she lived for more than sixty years. She had been born in New Orleans, where she’d entered society at a traditional debutante’s cotillion.

Harriet had dutifully included a photograph of Allyce’s debut. The young woman’s light eyes gazed serenely at the camera, though Faye couldn’t tell whether they were blue or green or grey in the old black-and-white photo. Her slender form was rigidly corseted beneath a beautifully draped white satin gown, and her luxuriant brunette hair was piled high above her finely made features.

Two years after her debut, she’d posed for another picture in white—a wedding gown, this time. She was just as tightly corseted and her posture was just as erect, but there was a softness to her eyes and a gentle smile on her lips. She looked at her husband as if the camera weren’t even there. Faye was surprised to see that Raymond Dunkirk looked just as smitten with her. She supposed that cheaters were capable of love; they just weren’t capable of maintaining it after the initial infatuation wore off.

As Faye had already seen, Harriet’s collection of photos of the Dunkirks was impressive, probably because society people were photographed often, even in those days before paparazzi roamed. Raymond Dunkirk, blessed with the kind of male beauty that grows more rugged with age, but no less handsome, hardly changed over the nearly twenty years between their wedding and Lilibeth’s death.

Allyce’s looks were more affected by time, but not necessarily in a negative sense. In her late thirties at the time of the murder, she had matured into a Jazz Age beauty, with her hair cropped short and her slender body freed from the corset’s whalebones.

Faye would guess that the photo of her in the atrium with Raymond, Ripley, and a teenaged Victor was taken some years after that, but the faint crow’s-feet that were beginning to emerge only served to focus attention on those intelligent eyes. A whiff of sadness showed through the smile she gave the camera, and it occurred to Faye that she didn’t know whether Allyce and Raymond ever had children.

She checked the book, and she found that the mention of Allyce’s most personal tragedy was as brief and circumspect as the rest of her biography. Even Harriet seemed to have felt the age-old proscription against sharing too many details from the personal life of a great society lady. She said only, “Allyce and Raymond Dunkirk had no children, other than a son who was stillborn in 1926. She is also rumored to have suffered a late miscarriage in 1925.”

The silver rattle. Faye looked at the photo of Allyce with her gardening spade in hand and wondered whether there could be any doubt that she had buried her dead son’s rattle and diaper pins in the rear garden of Dunkirk Manor in 1926. A profound sadness settled on Faye, and she wondered whether she herself was too pregnant to read about such things and still keep a level head.

She flipped through the photos of Allyce, paused, then flipped through them again. At times, Allyce had displayed the early twentieth century ideal of female beauty—apple cheeks, rosy complexion, full breasts—that Faye associated with Gibson girls and period Coca-Cola advertisements. At other times, she had the lean sharp glamour of a flapper. She thought of Harriet’s analysis of Lilibeth’s photos for signs of pregnancy, and she wondered…

Grabbing a pen and paper, Faye began sketching a timeline for Allyce like the one that Harriet had drawn for Lilibeth. She found photos of Allyce taken throughout the first twenty years of her marriage, but there was an obvious gap in 1926, when she would have been pregnant. Looking back at 1925, Faye saw a similar gap. No lady of the day would have allowed herself to be photographed in that condition. The only photo of Allyce taken in 1925 showed a heartstoppingly lovely woman with a glowing complexion and soft eyes. The blast of hormones that signaled the beginning of pregnancy could not have been more obvious on her face.

An early 1926 photo showed the same luminous glow, though Faye could have sworn she detected melancholy in those dark eyes. Becoming pregnant so soon after the loss of a child was hard on a woman, body and soul.

With her new insight, Faye worked her way backwards through Allyce Dunkirk’s thirties and twenties, and the pattern was unmistakable. Again and again, the thin, sad woman bloomed into her full beauty, then she disappeared from the photographic record for months, only to reappear, thin and sad. The scenario even recurred in 1928, the year of Lilibeth Campbell’s murder.

Faye believed to the very core of her soul that she understood the tragedy of Allyce Dunkirk’s life.

In that day and age, medical science offered little help for infertility and miscarriage, beyond encouraging a couple to keep trying. If pregnancy resulted, then rest was prescribed—sometimes even bedrest—in hopes that the woman might go to term. Sometimes it worked.

In Allyce Dunkirk’s case, it nearly
had
worked, twice. But in the end, her body refused to give her the thing she wanted, the thing that nature drove her to want so desperately…a child. Instead, she’d had no one to receive that bottled-up love, no one but a philandering husband and the ragged little boy who lived down the street. Perhaps she had poured that love into her art, but she’d been trapped in a time when society didn’t want her to express herself in that way. She had lived among people who wouldn’t even look at the passion she projected on the canvas. If society had bound and gagged Allyce Dunkirk, it could not have silenced her more completely.

Faye couldn’t look at Allyce any more. She closed the book and picked up Father Domingo’s diary instead. Perhaps the priest had been in as much pain as Allyce Dunkirk, but he seemed further away. And his tragedy wasn’t so closely linked to Faye’s own fears, as her delivery date loomed.

She would rather touch Father Domingo’s pain, buffered through the cotton gloves she wore to protect his timeworn book, than spend another moment imagining herself in the shoes of the grieving Allyce Dunkirk.

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.

After the victory at Fort Caroline, our celebration was shadowed by the knowledge of the hundreds of French soldiers who fled into the wilderness. Our new colony, called St. Augustine because land was first sighted on the feast day of the Holy St. Augustine, was vulnerable. It could fall before the onslaught of the remaining French troops at any time.

The Captain-General dispatched men to secure the area. After they had been gone for some days, he felt God stirring his heart in pity for his soldiers. Resolved that he should not remain in the comfort of our camp, but should join the men himself, our Captain-General and Admiral, Don Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, set out with an entourage that included Father Francisco, Father Esteban, and this humble priest.

Marching through water that rose sometimes to our knees, we traveled three leagues along the coast in search of our comrades. The biting insects flew so thick that it was a marvel any of us retained any blood in our veins.

When we found the war party, we learned that our enemies were encamped on the far side of a slow-flowing river. The Captain-General sent men to fetch our boats, and we arrived in time to see a great many of the enemy go down to the water to gather shellfish for food. Believing himself enlightened by the Holy Spirit, our Captain-General resolved to dress himself as a fisherman and go talk to the enemy. It could be, he reasoned, that they were without supplies, and would be glad to surrender without fighting.

As was his way, he put his plan into execution before he had scarce finished speaking. Quickly learning that our adversaries had not had bread for more than seven days, and that the greater number of them were Calvinists, the general revealed himself and ordered them to surrender on pain of death. They proposed to surrender, provided their lives would be spared, but Don Pedro would not agree to these terms.

After further parley, then gave their arms and flags up to the Captain-General himself and surrendered. Don Pedro then ordered the execution of every man among them, hundreds of them. Having mercy in his soul, Father Francisco begged permission to speak to the condemned men, in order to find out whether there were Christians among them who might be spared.

My French is halting, but I can make myself understood well enough. I knew that our Captain-General was a man of quick and decisive action. There was no time to lose before blood began to flow.

I ran from one man to the next, asking each one if he loved God and believed in the one true church. Father Esteban was always in earshot, and even in my short acquaintance with him, I had learned that I dared not speak more clearly than that. If I could have been free of his judging eyes, I would have taken each man by the shoulders and shaken him, crying, “Say it! Just say it. Say whatever will make the Captain-General spare your life.”

But I could not. Or I did not.

As I searched for men I could save, Father Esteban took his inquisition quickly from man to man. “Are you now or have you ever been a Calvinist? A Huguenot? A Protestant?” And one by one, the list of the condemned grew longer.

Father Francisco identified eight Roman Catholics in their number, while I succeeded in saving but four men. Father Esteban spared no one.

Those twelve were brought back to our camp. All the others were executed on St. Michael’s Day, September 29, 1565. The river—pure, innocent, and clear as the day God made it—ran red with blood.

It has been fifty years since then, but that river still bears the name Matanzas, in remembrance of the terrible massacre committed that day on its shores. Perhaps it always shall. When the morning dawned on September 30, 1565, I packed up the possessions I could carry and woke Ocilla quietly, while my brother priests slept. I asked through gestures whether she would like to stay or go.

She did not acknowledge my question as worthy of an answer, only pointing to Chulufi as her way of asking for permission to take Father Esteban’s serving woman with us. It is an everlasting shame to me that I needed a heathen woman to suggest this act of mercy.

Yaraha would not leave Father Francisco. She remained curled on her mat, raising only a hand to bid us farewell.

Ocilla, Chulufi, and I walked away from our encampment and disappeared into the thick jungle which Our Lord has spread over every inch of La Florida. It was a blessing for us on that day, for it covered our escape. If Father Esteban had seen us go, I believe he would have slain us on the spot in the name of the Most Holy God.

In the intervening years, I have forgotten many things. I have nearly forgotten the sound of the native tongue in which I now write. But I have not forgotten what happened on the shores of the Matanzas River in 1565. I do not know why Our Lord brought me to this foreign land, but it was not to watch His human creations be slaughtered. I know in my soul that I was most assuredly not brought here to spread His blessing over that slaughter.

I fear that He brought me here for no reason other than to be a witness to unprecedented destruction. I would have preferred to be His agent to stop that destruction. I would have preferred to be His face in this new world, comforting those who suffer, and perhaps I have fulfilled that role at times. But I fear that my true purpose is simply to tell the story.

In your hands, Reader, you hold the proof that I did try to do that. There have been many failures in my life, and one grievous and damning sin, but I have tried to serve Our Lord, as I promised to do at my ordination long ago.

My only defense when I face Our Lord’s judgment will be this: I tried.

__________

I, Father Domingo Sanz de la Fuente, attest that the foregoing is a statement of actual events.