Flush with her brand new PhD, Faye Longchamp and husband Joe Wolf Mantooth have founded an archaeological consulting firm —just in time for the economy to tank. But a meeting with a couple who run an elegant B&B in an historic home in St. Augustine, Florida, lands the firm’s first big project.
Within a day of their arrival at Dunkirk Manor, a lovely young employee disappears, leaving behind a sinister smear of blood in her car, a collection of priceless artifacts, and a note asking for Faye’s help. Two days later, the missing woman’s jerk of a boyfriend is found floating in the Matanzas River, his throat slashed. The detective in charge of the case believes that the artifacts are key to the crime and hires Faye to track down their origin.
The artifacts Faye and Joe excavate at their work site date from every era of St. Augustine history, and the discovery of a buried cache of children’s toys from the 1920s hits eight-months-pregnant Faye particularly hard. Dunkirk Manor seems haunted in a way that Faye can’t explain.
Then the most stunning discovery is made: the diary of a priest who left Spain in 1565 and was present at the city’s birth. Faye is driven to translate the manuscript. In what seems like an unfolding tale by the Brothers Grimm, Faye and Joe uncover terrible secrets past and present.