Strangers (2 page)
Somewhere in St. Augustine, Florida, right this minute, someone is murdering history. It happens all the time.
When this city was founded, Elizabeth I was Queen of England. It was a single year after the death of Michelangelo, and the Renaissance had seized Europe with no intention of letting go. In other words, it was a very long time ago.
Since then, the Spanish built their city atop the site of a Native American village. Then the English came and went, and the Spanish came back. And now the Americans have held the land for nearly two centuries.
In St. Augustine, it is possible to drop your car keys and destroy something irreplaceable. Actually putting a shovel or a bulldozer blade into the soil…well, such activities are highly regulated.
Some people resent being told what to do. And some people are capable of doing bad things…evil things…when they have dollar signs in their eyes.
Somewhere in the countryside outside the old city, a bulldozer is scraping away the topsoil to build an upscale development. A human finger bone, a broken war club, a few musket balls, two pieces of a long stone blade, a corroded crucifix, a scattering of silver rosary beads, and a startling amount of very old trash—the discovery of these things causes the developer a moment of consternation, but only a moment. They are quickly discarded.
The man in charge has just one thing to say.
“What the historic preservation people don’t know won’t hurt ’em.”
Faye knew that billions of women had been pregnant in the past. Millions of women were pregnant at any single point in time…including, at the moment, her.
This meant that many, many people were precisely as physically miserable as Faye, and at precisely the same time. This didn’t mean that she should be happy about the fact that her feet hurt. Nor that her ankles were so swollen that they felt squishy to the touch.
Faye’s legs ached. Her back felt exactly as crummy as one would expect, considering that she spent her workdays in the classic pregnant woman’s pose: feet slightly apart and pelvis tilted until her lower back was swayed into the shape of the letter
C
. As much as possible, she kept both hands pressed into that swayback, for support.
Soon, her crew would be finished with the test pits that she was watching them dig, and they could get to work doing some serious excavation. Faye knew she had no business standing on the lip of an archaeological unit and barking orders. If this baby gained one more ounce, her swayback routine wasn’t going to be enough to counterbalance the extra weight. That ounce would pull her forward, right onto her face, which would be bad enough if she were standing indoors on a plush carpet. If Faye plunged forward, landing deep in a dirty hole, the situation would be damn near catastrophic.
The worst part of this situation was the fact that she had a whole month left to be pregnant. More than a month, actually. She was due to be pregnant another five weeks and six days. But who was counting?
No. Those five weeks and six days were
not
the worst part of the situation. Joe…the love of her life, her husband, the man with whom she hoped to spend the rest of her days…
Joe was driving her stark raving nuts.
He asked, “Can I get you a chair?” about every five minutes, despite the fact that she’d told him that sitting made her hips ache.
“Would you like another glass of milk?” he murmured periodically, despite the fact that she’d drunk so much milk to please him that she was pretty sure she was turning into a cow.
And if he brandished any prenatal vitamins in her direction, ever again, she was going to yell at him until
he
was the one with iron-poor blood.
Faye was sweltering. There were two reasons for this. She was very, very pregnant, it was true. But she could also blame geography. In Florida, May was not springtime, no matter what the calendar said. May was full-out summer by any definition that counted, and it always had been…even in 1565, just before the conquistadors stepped ashore in August of that year and founded St. Augustine.
If it hadn’t been for the gracious old homes and spreading trees that dotted this neighborhood, Faye could have looked south and seen the Castillo de San Marcos, the great stone fort that had guarded this old, old city for most of its existence.
And if she’d had a clear view north, she might have seen the very spot where Pedro Menéndez de Avilés once claimed some unspecified but extremely large portion of the New World for His Majesty Philip II of Spain. If a giant were to magically remove all those interfering houses and trees, Joe could have probably shot two arrows and hit both historic sites, without taking a step from where he now stood.
It made Faye smirk to remember that the conquistadors came ashore smack in the middle of hurricane season, when the heat and the mosquitoes and the tempestuous storms must have made the bravest among them wonder whether it would be best to just pack up and head back to Spain.
It was a little early for hurricanes at the moment, but Faye was enjoying the sea breezes.
Actually, the water lurking behind the wall enclosing this garden wasn’t the sea. It was the storied Matanzas River, named for the massacre of men more than four centuries dead. Faye sometimes got the shivers when she remembered the things that had happened in this very old town.
The site her crew was investigating wasn’t nearly as old as St. Augustine itself. Dunkirk Manor was a massive fake-stone Gilded Age mansion, but it was flimsy and new compared to the Castillo de San Marcos. She could hardly expect to find anything at this dig older than a century or so, but stranger things had happened in these parts. She knew an archaeologist who had gotten major publications from a site under the bathroom of an old roadside motel, not far from the spot where she stood.
Faye had the feeling that she could find anything today. And she loved that feeling.
“Sit down, Faye,” Magda barked.
It must be ten o’clock. Faye had made Magda and Joe swear that they would only nag her once an hour, on the hour. And she’d made them promise to take turns. Clearly it was Magda’s turn to tell her what to do.
She was opening her mouth to bark back at her oppressors when Joe said, “Would you look at that?”
This phrase was music to any field archaeologist worth her salt.
He was digging a test pit, and he was hardly a foot beneath the ground surface. The primary reason for a test pit wasn’t necessarily to look for artifacts, though those were always nice to find. Digging a set of narrow-but-deep holes spaced in an orderly grid would give Faye and her crew a good idea of the site’s soils.
Were they sandy?
Here? Practically on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean? Yeah, probably.
What did the stratigraphy look like? Was there an orderly, well-defined sequence of soil layers, or had the soil been disturbed?
Well, they were just about to find out.
Did the people who had used the land over the years leave any of themselves behind?
Faye sure hoped so. She rushed over to see what Joe had found.
As he cleared a razor-thin layer of soil, a sharp dividing line appeared. On one side of the line, the soil was undisturbed. On the other side, it had been churned, a long time before.
Faye, Magda, and their field techs Levon and Kirk dropped everything and watched Joe work. The sea breezes took a break and silence descended.
Joe was stooped so low that his long black ponytail dragged the soil. The sun had risen in the sky while they worked, and it chose this moment to shift the shadow of the tree limb that had shaded Joe all morning. He had to be feeling the heat, but he was too intent on his work to even wipe his face. Sweat from his chin dappled the dusty ground.
Before long, Joe had cleared a few more layers of dirt. Everyone could see that the sharp, straight line between the two soil types continued to slice downward below-ground, and it continued indefinitely in either direction. A few broken bits of tile embedded in that dividing line told a story.
“I think there was a pond or a fountain or maybe even a swimming pool here,” he said, standing up to give his back a rest. He looked at Faye. “Don’t you?”
Faye nodded. Magda took a tile fragment from Joe and studied it a moment. Then she handed it to Faye and cocked one eyebrow, wordlessly testing her powers of observation. Faye was trying hard to behave like her image of a Ph.D.—confident and decisive—and Magda didn’t help matters when she refused to stop acting like Faye’s professor.
The tile was coated with a glaze that was still bright white beneath the clinging dirt. Along one unbroken edge ran a black border in a clean, geometric design that fairly screamed
Art Deco.
Faye ran a finger over the smooth finish and said, “It looks expensive.”
Squinting at the house and at the brick wall surrounding the garden where they stood, Faye said, “If it’s Art Deco, then it’s not old enough to be original to this house. And tiles this nice would have been used for something special. A pond or pool or fountain, like Joe said.”
Scanning the garden again, she said, “We’re right in the middle of the back yard. A fountain or fish pond would have looked nice here, but there’s room enough for a swimming pool. Wouldn’t that be a funny thing?”
Considering that they’d gotten this job because the B&B’s guests had been complaining to Daniel and Suzanne about its lack of a swimming pool, Faye found it rather poetic that Joe might have uncovered one.
Faye thought the planned pool construction could probably still move forward. Surely an old, filled-in pool wouldn’t have enough historical significance to put a halt to the project, even in this history-obsessed town. Her clients would build an elegant new pool, right next to the spiffy tennis court that was Daniel’s pride and joy, and it would have all the most sought-after extras: a hot tub and a waterfall and a bunch of picturesque boulders and a dark paint job that made it look like a natural pond…well, sort of natural.
Then, a few years down the road, this new pool would develop cracks. Its pump and plumbing would grow creaky, and its design would stop being stylish. Someone would say, “I’m sick of cleaning this thing. Let’s just fill it in.” Soon there would be more broken tiles stirred into the soil, and this spot of ground would become an even more interesting place for future archaeologists to dig.
It occurred to Faye that her clients would want to see what they’d found. Even if this wrecked pool was as historically insignificant as she thought, it was still pretty cool. The people who were paying for the work should get a chance to see it.
It only took Faye a moment to fetch Daniel and Suzanne. Suzanne was trailed, as always, by Glynis, who moved so gracefully that her bosses looked lead-footed by comparison.
Faye found the fact that her clients consulted each other publicly over the smallest business decisions especially endearing.
While waiting for Daniel and Suzanne to show her crew around the garden that morning, she’d heard the following exchange, and she’d had the feeling that such conversations happened daily:
“I’ve been thinking we should add smoked salmon to the breakfast menu,” Daniel had asked, touching Suzanne’s arm. “Should we keep serving bacon, too?”
Suzanne had said that bacon was hardly optional, because people expected it, but she couched the statement with a respectful, “Don’t you think, dear?”
She’d then launched into an impressive display of mental arithmetic, calculating how much the salmon would cost and adding in the price of bagels, onions, and capers, because people would expect those, too. And Daniel had watched her silently, still amazed after thirty years by how smart she was. When they finished their decision-making, Suzanne had looked to Daniel for approval, then she’d met eyes with Glynis and nodded, knowing that Glynis would make it so.
Faye and Joe were in business together now, just like Daniel and Suzanne. She’d decided that she could learn a thing or two from this couple. Faye tended to make a decision and tell Joe about it at some undetermined time in the future. Like, maybe, when the bill landed in their mailbox.
As Faye led Daniel, Suzanne, and Glynis into the back garden, she got a sudden, gut-level sense that something had changed. It was as if the sun had moved behind a cloud, but it hadn’t. Its bright rays still shone hard on Joe’s sweaty face. Black shadows clung close to her crew’s legs, under a sun now hanging almost straight overhead. What was wrong?
She rushed to Joe’s expanded test pit and saw Levon leaning over his own test pit, several feet away from Joe’s discovery. He too had found tiles, but they were larger and hewn of rough stone, suitable for wet feet. They’d been set flat on the ground, and Levon had expanded his pit outward, uncovering several tiles before prying one of them up and setting it aside.
No one was looking at the tile he’d removed. They were all looking at the exposed soil where it had been.
Faye’s hips protested as she squatted beside him. “What’d you find?”
The young man gestured at the soil and Faye understood what had disturbed her crew so badly. An infant’s silver rattle protruded from the dirt. A multicolored collection of diaper pins with decorative china heads were carefully arranged in a rectangle beside it.
Why was this so upsetting? Faye felt the dark undercurrent in the air, but it was in her nature to want to explain it. Maybe this cluster of artifacts raised all their hackles because the rattle rising from the dirt looked more than a little like a headstone, and the rectangle of pins looked like they could enclose a tiny grave.
Also, the question of
why
somebody had buried these things hung in the air like incense. They had obviously been put in the ground intentionally.
Faye remembered her grandmother saying that her boy cousins had enjoyed torturing her by burying her dolls and holding mock funerals. But there was no sadistic fun to be had in burying the toy of a child too young to be angry.
She lightly fingered the corroded wire of a diaper pin. Why? What was a good reason to bury a baby’s things?
She could imagine a child playing in the dirt with his baby sister’s stuff. It would have taken a very orderly child to lay out these pins so neatly, but such things were possible.
Faye’s dear friend Dauphine was a voodoo mambo, so Faye had more knowledge of sympathetic magic than the average non-mambo. Maybe this arrangement of baby things was intended to help someone get pregnant. Maybe the voodoo practitioner herself wanted a baby.
Faye knew from experience that when Dauphine thought somebody needed a baby, Dauphine got busy. And she didn’t always ask whether the person being charmed
wanted
to have a baby right then.
A well-timed kick in the guts from the inside reminded Faye that she wanted this child more than anything else in the world, except for Joe. She was glad Dauphine hadn’t asked permission before she worked her magic.
The last possible explanation for the subterranean arrangement of baby things hit Faye like a different kind of kick in the guts. The buried rattle and diaper pins had the feel of a shrine, a memorial to a lost loved one.
Faye knew that if she were to lose this baby, she would never want to look at the nursery full of baby gear waiting for her back home at Joyeuse, not ever again. She could absolutely see herself digging a big hole and throwing in a stroller and a car seat and a playpen. Nowadays, such a purge would take a bulldozer, but babies had required less merchandise in days gone by.
The curved shape of the rattle spoke of Art Deco. Its tarnished silver spoke of money. If the person who buried it had done so out of grief, then that grief might be eighty years dead and gone. Still, it reached across the years to Faye.
