Strangers (14 page)
The vampire was unexpected.
In her lifetime, Faye, like all Americans, had seen many people parading around outdoors in sweeping capes and an unhealthy pallor. But always in October, never May. Well, maybe occasionally outside movie theaters when certain movies were playing.
The woman on the front doorstep of Dunkirk Manor looked out-of-place, standing in front of a froth of Suzanne’s white daisies and pink sweetheart roses while dressed in jet black satin. There were a dozen people standing around her, dressed normally (for tourists) in shorts, sandals, and t-shirts with risqué sayings across the chest. They seemed to see nothing odd in the woman’s clothing, not even when she called their attention to it by spreading the cape wide with both arms, then crossing them across her chest to furl it around her body.
Faye usually parked in the employee lot but, since she’d left that morning, Daniel had finally gotten the garden gate closed and a keypad installed. With no access code, she and Joe had no choice but to park on the street.
After conferring for a moment in the parked car, they’d decided they’d rather pay for takeout than eat yet another meal from the bounteous leftovers of Dunkirk Manor’s breakfast. So Joe had driven away to scout out nearby restaurants, and she was on her own, with no way to enter Dunkirk Manor other than to wade through the crowd on the porch. So she did so.
The cape-wearing woman was delivering a speech that she’d obviously given a hundred times, but her delivery was fresh and convincing.
“Thank you for joining me for this evening’s ghost tour. The costume’s just for fun…and it
is
fun, isn’t it?” she said, twirling in place to spin out the hem of her trumpet-shaped skirt. “But I’m serious about ghosts, and this city is full of them. We begin our tour tonight with Dunkirk Manor, one of the most haunted homes in town. Our tours begin at dusk and I’m here to tell you that I start here because I want to move on before the sun goes all the way down. I’m afraid of this place after dark.”
She paused to let her customers titter and whisper among themselves. Faye took this opportunity to politely wend her way through the crowd toward the front door.
The vampire assailed her as she approached the door. “Faye!”
Faye was pretty sure that she didn’t know anybody with fangs.
“It’s me, Harriet!”
And indeed it was. Faye recognized the librarian’s long frosted hair and trim figure, but her daytime look had lacked the gothic glamour and exposed cleavage of these vampire threads.
Harriet gave her a quick hug and whispered in her ear. “I’d love to talk to you sometime about the inside of this house. I’m only allowed to take my guests into the entry hall for the tour.” Then she turned her attention back to the paying customers.
“Dunkirk Manor is one of the poured-concrete buildings characteristic of St. Augustine. When Henry Flagler brought his railroad down the east coast of Florida in the late 1800s, opening up the Sunshine State to tourists…like you wonderful people—” Harriet gave her audience a welcoming smile. “—he chose our city as the grand destination. And in those days, the word ‘tourist’ wasn’t in common use. Here in St. Augustine, we were still using the older word, ‘stranger,’ which I find interesting as a real-life librarian. If you start researching the history and etymology of the word ‘stranger,’ you find yourself taking a side trip through synonyms to ‘guest’ then through ‘host’ and even to ‘ghost.’ So bear in mind as we enter the house that we may not be the only ‘strangers’ in the room.”
The tourists laughed.
“Our next stop,” Harriet continued, “is St. Augustine’s city gate, one of the most haunted places in town. I see it as a symbol, because this place is one of the first gateways from the Old World to the New. This is where the European invaders stepped ashore and stayed. And when you think about ghosts and guests and strangers…well, from the First Americans’ point-of-view, weren’t the Europeans the ultimate strangers?”
She flung open the front door, motioning to Faye to enter ahead of them. Faye hadn’t used the front door since she first arrived, and the sumptuous entry hall seemed cold and empty and filled with echoes, compared to the warm conviviality on the flower-draped front porch.
“As I was saying, the poured-concrete construction of Dunkirk Manor is characteristic of Gilded Age St. Augustine. Henry Flagler’s Hotel Ponce de León was the nation’s first major poured-in-place concrete building and it was among the first major buildings to have electricity. I’m told that Flagler employed electricians whose only job was to go from room to room, turning the lights on and off for the hotel’s guests…tourists…strangers…ghosts. Whatever.”
Motioning her tour group into the house, Harriet flicked the wall switch and the electric wall sconces flickered spookily. “Don’t tell the owners I did that, Faye.”
“I’ll take your secret to the grave.” Faye was tickled to see that her weak ghost joke got some giggles from the tourists.
“Dunkirk Manor is the home of several ghosts. The first Dunkirk couple who lived here are said to have shared their wedding night with a bunch of angry spirits who whispered in their ears for hours in foreign languages that neither of them recognized. They moved to another room, then another, but the constant chatter continued until dawn. Mrs. Dunkirk announced the next morning that she was returning to Pennsylvania on the first train and invited her husband to join her. This put Mr. Dunkirk in a major bind. As one of Henry Flagler’s top officers in the East Coast Florida Railway, he made plenty of money, but you can see how even a rich man could sink his entire fortune in this house.”
Harriet extended her long arms toward the walls, covered from polished floor to high ceiling with hand-crafted woodwork. “And he had no hope of selling it, because nobody in town had enough money but Henry Flagler, and Flagler had his own mansion. Mr. Dunkirk persuaded his bride to go to her parents’ home in Pennsylvania for a few months while he consulted a priest for an exorcism. The priest said the place was full of really pissed-off Timucuans who had been killed off by the Spanish. He did the best he could, but he advised Mr. Dunkirk to just give the house over to the ghosts at night. The priest told him that if he built a bedroom wing to the rear, he was pretty sure that the ghosts and demons would leave the young couple alone there. You can see in this photo that the rear wing isn’t made of poured concrete. It would have cost too much to bring the masons back out to the property, and Mr. Dunkirk had already blown all the cash he could afford.”
She held up a large book with a color photo of Dunkirk Manor’s rear garden. Faye had spent two days in that garden without paying any attention to the rear wing, but Harriet was right. It was a wood frame structure protruding from the opposite side of the main building from the garden gate and parking lot. Its design was rather plain for the late Victorian era, and it looked out of place stuck onto the back of a building that was otherwise perfectly symmetrical—twin square turrets on either side of a vast rectangular block of a house, with a central rear wing housing the kitchen and servants’ quarters.
Faye knew that the interior was just as symmetrical, with the rectangular atrium surrounded by double parlors and even twin dining rooms. The kitchen wing, though larger, balanced the entry hall nicely, and the two identical turrets towered above it all. How interesting that all the bed-and-breakfast guest rooms were in the new wing. Daniel and Suzanne slept in the main house, and so did the archaeology team, but not the paying guests.
“I think Mrs. Dunkirk never intended to come back to Florida, but apparently the ghosts didn’t disturb her entire wedding night. She returned to St. Augustine in time for her only child, Raymond, to be born, right here in this house.”
“But probably in the rear wing,” said a gray-bearded man.
“Probably,” Harriet said with a laugh. “They say that she lived here until young Raymond was seven, then went home to Pennsylvania for good. The boy stayed here, to be reared by his father and their servants.”
Faye remembered Raymond’s black eyes. They had stared coolly out of both photos she’d seen of him, unreadable. Maybe the nameless emotion in those eyes had been the loneliness of a boy whose mother had abandoned him. She shivered, wishing she could just go to bed and lie under the covers until she got warm.
Dummy,
she thought.
You can. You’re not part of this tour. Stop listening to Harriet’s silly ghost stories and go to bed.
She stepped politely through the crowd and put her hand on the door that opened into the atrium, nodding good-bye to Harriet. Turning its polished brass knob, she took a step into the atrium and stopped abruptly, startled by the whoosh of cold air rushing through the doorway.
Harriet was close behind her, saying, “This is a rare opportunity. I’ve been in the atrium a couple of times, during fundraisers given by the non-profit that maintains the house. The place is simply magnificent. Everybody try to take a peek while Faye has the door open.”
Faye cooperated by lingering longer than strictly necessary on the threshold, willing to give the crowd a chance to see the house’s crowning glory.
“This room is considered an architect’s marvel. Its proportions are perfectly calculated to make it seem even more vast than it is. The stained glass of the atrium ceiling, made in a peacock feathers pattern, was based on a design by Louis Comfort Tiffany,” Harriet said, pointing upward, over Faye’s shoulder. “Like the rest of the house, the atrium is perfectly symmetrical from left to right, as if a mirror were placed in the center of the room, just between the matching staircases leading to the balconies that surround the second and third floors. And try to get a glimpse of the artwork, if you can. You can get a taste of it in here,” she gestured to the bold paintings that ringed the entry hall walls, “but everything in the atrium is on a monumental scale, and that includes the art.”
Faye hadn’t noticed the size of the paintings on her first visit to the atrium. They were the right size for the room, so their scale didn’t call attention to itself, but that room was immense. The painting to her immediate right, a surreal landscape under a bronze sky studded with sun, moon, stars, and comets, was taller than she was. The subject, a young man with a flowing beard and long red hair, was shackled to a spreading oak tree.
“All of the art was chosen by Raymond’s wife Allyce, who was a talented painter in a day when women of her class weren’t ill-mannered enough to compete for gallery space or public attention. Since Allyce and her husband were the second generation to live in this house, and since Allyce as an artist was drawn to the new and avant-garde, she chose expressionist paintings that seem like anachronisms in this late nineteenth-century room. But I like the unsettled feeling they give, and the rich wood paneling sets off their stark colors. See the painting on that far wall that’s mostly red and black?”
Faye saw it, dead center between the staircases, glowing like an ember.
“It was painted by Edvard Munch. You know…the man who painted
The Scream.
”
“
The Scream
gives me the creeps,” said the gray-bearded tourist.
“It’s nothing but some pigments smeared on cardboard,” was Harriet’s breezy response. “If it gives you the creeps, that’s because the artist knew how to tap into your soul. Allyce could recognize that kind of talent. Munch isn’t the only painter represented in this room who went on to be recognized for his genius. Allyce had the eye of an artist and she had money. My undergrad degree is in art history. I’d dearly love to give a tour of this house, top to bottom, just for the art. The owners won’t let me, because they’re afraid I’ll disturb their guests.”
The over-air-conditioned air in the atrium was chilling Faye to the bone. It was time to leave Harriet and her tourists to their ghost tour. As she stepped through the door, the light changed subtly. She supposed the atrium’s stained glass ceiling was lit by a collection of skylights, and perhaps they had brightened because the setting sun came out from behind a cloud. Or maybe the streetlights outdoors had flipped on as dusk settled. In any case, the whole room changed before Faye’s eyes.
The shadows shifted under the staircases and Faye was suddenly hyper-aware that she was looking at the very spot where Raymond and his mistress, Lilibeth Campbell, had once stood. And above them, his wronged wife had strode up the staircase to have a word with the bandleader, probably because his musicians’ work didn’t meet the standards of an artist who was forbidden by society to share her own art with the public.
At that instant, Suzanne appeared on the second floor landing, heading upstairs. She was so preoccupied that she never acknowledged Faye standing below her, or even noticed that she was there at all. Suzanne’s face was drawn, and she fingered her collar nervously with a pale, white hand. She couldn’t have looked less like the photo of her great-great-aunt Allyce, who had strode confidently up that same staircase to chastise an errant conductor, but Faye still felt like she’d seen a ghost.
The moment passed quickly, and the bored mumbling of the tourists behind her told Faye that they’d seen nothing, felt nothing. She became aware of a hand gripping her arm, and she knew that Harriet
had
felt something. Rationality told her that she and Harriet had seen the photograph of Raymond and Lilibeth and Allyce in this very room, and that they’d both experienced a split-second of
déjà vu
, for the simple reason that they
had
both been here before, in a very real sense.
Nevertheless, Faye did not linger in the atrium, and she didn’t tarry as she made her way toward her room. Joe would be back soon with their supper, and she wanted nothing more than his comforting presence and the humdrum taste of run-of-the mill takeout food. Then she wanted to put on her voluminous pregnancy nightgown and a pair of cotton gloves, planning to forget the betrayed Allyce and lose herself in the story of a long-ago renegade priest.
In the quiet of the dusty, dun-colored hall, her bedroom waited. It hadn’t occurred to Faye before, but she heard nothing from the other archaeologists at night. No television noises seeped through the walls, not even the beeps and blats of an evening game show. Even little Rachel didn’t make enough noise to invade Faye’s nighttime privacy, and that was impressive, considering how much noise the child could make in the daylight. This house’s interior walls must be of the same concrete as its façade, even here in the servants’ quarters.
