Secrets of the Old Church

by E. A. House

  “History of Saint Erasmus Catholic Church, 1713 to 2016,” Chris read. “This is the church today?”

  “This is the church that sort of absorbed the Santa Maria de la Mar mission and two others and became Saint Erasmus years after the shipwreck,” Carrie explained. “Then that church, and most of its records, were moved in the eighteen hundreds, and then again in the early nineties. But if the record does survive, this is who will have it.”

  “And what kind of records are we looking for?” Chris asked. He’d been paging through one of the books on Florida history and stopped on a full-color photo of a hand-drawn map, realizing that Aunt Elsie’s note had not indicated what kind of eyewitness account they were looking for, except that if they found a video they were doing it all wrong. Carrie pulled a book on local genealogy out of the pile and handed it over.

  “Parish Register?”

  “Church record of births, deaths, marriages, and other notable events,” Carrie said. “Mrs. Greyson talked my ear off about genealogy research when I checked it out; apparently they’re super useful if you’re trying to find missing relatives. And before you ask,” Carrie added, “yes, I let Mrs. Greyson think I was interested in genealogy. Otherwise she’d have wanted to know why I was checking out so many books on local history, and insisting it’s a school project only goes so far.”

  “Right,” Chris said. The sidebar on the printout from Saint Erasmus’s website listed the church’s weekly events, and there were a lot of them. “So we just have to figure out a way to get into a church that is currently in regular use, find where they keep their oldest and most delicate records, and get a description of the location of the wreck from those records before anyone starts getting suspicious.”

  “Well,” Carrie said mildly, “I never said it was going to be easy.”

  THEY HAD TO GO IN TO THE POLICE STATION AND give statements the next day, which shouldn’t have been anything more than a formality. Detective Hermann was simply being careful about getting everyone’s stories straight when they weren’t all panicking and in the Kingsolvers’ living room. And it would have been—Chris was almost embarrassed by how easy it was to recount the disastrous mess on the previous Monday night to a good-natured officer without mentioning the missing locket—but then someone decided it was a good idea to walk Cliff Dodson out right in front of him, and parked the man at the front desk while the officer who was escorting Dodson filled out paperwork.

  And even that wouldn’t have been too much of a problem—Chris wasn’t the type to charge across a police station and attack someone in the name of revenge—except Dodson wouldn’t stop looking at him. Chris lost track of the questions Officer Jackson was asking him and found himself in a staring contest over her head, and finally Dodson broke first.

  “You really don’t know about him, do you, kid?” he asked. Officer Jackson looked up and turned to see Dodson, paled, and got quickly to her feet.

  “Stay there,” she said to Chris, and ducked into the conference room where Detective Hermann was working.

  “Don’t know about who?” Chris asked as soon as she was out of earshot. The officer filling out the paperwork—probably to transfer Dodson to the county jail—was sure taking his sweet time doing it.

  “You should never trust authority figures,” Dodson said instead of answering. “Listen kid, you’re smarter than I expected but if you can’t figure out who’s on your side you aren’t gonna make it.”

  “What?”

  Dodson cast a furtive glance around the room and leaned closer. “You should give up the search, kid,” he said in a whisper. “It’s gonna get you killed.”

  “What are you talking about?” Chris started to ask in a furious whisper, terrified that Dodson knew about the San Telmo and equally terrified that his best chance of finding the person who was behind his aunt’s murder was about to clam up. But then Detective Hermann came out of the conference room and marched directly over to the officer filling out paperwork, grabbing him roughly by the elbow. There was a short, furious conversation—Detective Hermann kept his voice too low to be heard but the tone sounded angry and the officer who’d been filling out paperwork went from annoyed at the interruption to shamefaced to horrified in quick succession—and then he escorted Dodson into another room, scowling furiously.

  “Idiot,” Detective Hermann muttered, half to Chris and half to himself. “I have no idea what he was thinking, putting Dodson in the same room with you.”

  Chris had a suspicion, but he didn’t tell it to Detective Hermann because it wasn’t fair—or safe—to tell the police detective that you thought one of the police officers might have been trying to scare you. It was the sort of thing that happened only in bad action movies.

  The other thing that often happened in action movies and that was now happening with frustrating frequency in Chris’s own life was the horribly complicated juggling of all the different lies Chris had told to different people. His parents knew one version of what had happened on Monday, Maddison knew a more detailed but still different take, and then there was Professor Griffin, who turned up bright and early Wednesday morning to pick up his keys.

  He had called and left a message Tuesday afternoon, apologizing for the inconvenience but explaining that he’d been called in to deal with a minor disaster involving the submersible and would have to delay picking up his keys until Wednesday. Chris had been failing to sleep for fear of nightmares, and his parents had been having a joint panic attack and discussing home security systems over Skype with Carrie’s mom and dad, and nobody had heard the phone ring. And then, on Tuesday, nobody had been sure what to tell Professor Griffin, or even if they should, and the end result was their oldest family friend wandering into a minefield with no protective gear.

  He’d never actually done that, although there had once been a terrifying day Professor Griffin had waded into a bunch of stingrays with no protective gear. Chris couldn’t help but be reminded of that incident when Professor Griffin turned up with an offering of carrot and apple muffins.

  He looked tired and his hat was on backwards, which was okay with a ball cap but did not work with a captain’s hat, and was how Chris knew Moby had almost sunk again. Professor Griffin always had three or four different research projects going on at once, and for the past year and a half all three of his projects had involved mapping the sea floor just off the coast. Because of the limits of academic budgets, all three projects had to make due with only one submersible, and a shoddily built one at that—although if you said so to Professor Griffin’s face he would fake a fainting fit. Moby circled between the three different projects on an intricate schedule that was regularly ruined by the submersible getting lost or stuck somewhere.

  Once, Moby had been mistaken for a bomb by an overenthusiastic team of Navy Seals doing parachuting drills over the ocean, and only Aunt Elsie’s friendship with half of the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary had saved the college from getting stormed by a special ops unit. Professor Griffin had ended that day with his hat on inside out, so in the grand scheme of things his having it backwards wasn’t that bad of a sign.

  “So,” Professor Griffin said, trading the muffins for the keys and twirling his hat in one hand, “I really must apologize, I had to attend to an unexpected development involving Moby and a flotation device and never did get back to you about those keys.” He paused and brushed flecks of Styrofoam from his hat. “Never, by the way, leave Ph.D. students alone with expensive equipment when they’re sleep deprived,” he explained. “The results aren’t pretty and they make you leave foreboding messages on answering machines—I didn’t mean to traumatize you, by the way.”

  He was clearly not expecting Chris and both his parents to begin laughing hysterically.

  “Do you think we should tell him about the letter?” Chris said to Carrie later that afternoon in the municipal park halfway and a bit between their houses and Maddison’s.

  They were supposed to be meeting Maddison, so they could talk, face
to face, about what had happened on Monday, and also to also have a joint freak-out if they needed one. They were in the park because hanging out at home was getting smothering, and Carrie had managed to get her parents and Chris’s parents to agree that they were unlikely to be attacked in the municipal park. Plus, Maddison had never been.

  “And anyway,” Chris had pointed out, “the person who was trying to kill us is in police custody, so there’s nothing to worry about, right?” His parents had not been reassured and he himself was starting not to believe this—even if Detective Hermann wasn’t responsible for Cliff Dodson being able to give Chris that cryptic warning, someone in the police station still was. Did they need to start suspecting the police?

  He’d brought the subject up with Carrie, who’d been less than willing to suspect the police and had reminded him that they weren’t sure the danger was passed, and they were now arguing about the pros and cons of telling Professor Griffin.

  “Aunt Elsie said not to trust anyone,” Carrie reminded him, picking absently at a swath of Spanish moss. Caliban Park was small, but it had a couple of walking trails and just enough trees to give the illusion of wildness, plus when they’d moved the playground from one side of the park to the other and updated it they had not torn down or fenced off the old slide-swings-and-treehouse. It was in this that Carrie and Chris were perched, hiding in the Spanish moss.

  “We’re going to have to trust someone,” Chris pointed out. “If only because we’re a little young to go treasure hunting by ourselves. And we don’t know anyone else who has access to a boat.”

  “Oh, I see,” Carrie said. “We need to tell the professor because we need his boat.”

  “Well, we could just tell him we needed to borrow his boat for, I don’t know, a school project,” Chris suggested sarcastically. “And just happen to find a sunken ship while we’re at it—and maybe we’ll get lucky and the ship will be run aground somewhere on dry land.”

  “They make seasickness medication, you know,” Carrie said sweetly. “You just have to carry it with you. We live in Florida, you should expect to be exposed to the ocean at any time and be appropriately prepared.”

  Chris threw a twig at her, because it had only been once and he only ever got seasick on really, really choppy seas.

  “It’s just that I don’t actually lie to people all that much?” Chris tried. “I mean, I’m not perfect and I know that. But . . . ” He paused, trying to decide how to put it.

  “You’re a loveable slacker, not a heartless schemer,” Carrie said.

  “Yeah—a what schemer?”

  “Scheming, conniving, etcetera,” Carrie said with some venom, so Chris wisely decided to leave the point alone. Sometimes Carrie got teased for being a grade-A perfectionist.

  “I just don’t like lying to Professor Griffin,” he finished. Carrie made a vague agreeing noise and then something Chris had said must have occurred to her, because she gave Chris yet another liar, liar, pants on fire look.

  “You mean, you don’t like lying to Maddison,” Carrie said, and Chris groaned and nodded. “I don’t like lying to her, either,” Carrie admitted. “But—you realize how much of an epic tangle you’re going to get yourself into if you tell her everything?”

  “One that will be worse than the tangle that happens when she finds out all on her own?”

  Carrie hissed. At almost the same moment her phone chimed, and she answered it with a chipper, “Hey, Maddison!”

  “Yeah, no, we are at the playground at the park, we’re just not at the new one,” she continued after a minute, as Chris squeaked and blushed as though Maddison had actually caught him lying. He was even trying to politely tamp down his crush, so why had his cheeks not gotten with the program? “It’s—do you see the bike trail?” Carrie continued, blissfully unaware of Chris’s internal argument. “We’re just off the trail by that giant clump of ferns. Yeah—no, it’s not haunted. I mean, as far as I know it isn’t haunted, we only used to come out here every weekend when we were in elementary school.”

  “Still, it looks it,” Maddison said from beneath them, and Chris peered over the railing to find her giving one of the faded plastic swings an experimental push. She looked up, saw him, and waved, then trotted over to the treehouse.

  “How many spiders are up here?” she asked with one foot on the ladder.

  “Chris makes me sweep them all out before he’ll come up,” Carrie said cheerfully, giving Maddison a hand up. The treehouse was really part of the play set and not in a tree, and it was basically a box, with a simple wooden ladder on one side and a green plastic slide on the other. Chris was sitting along one wall and Carrie, who secretly liked living dangerously, had her back to the slide, which meant she was perfectly placed to pull Maddison up.

  “Hey!” Chris protested, shifting over to make room; the treehouse was not built with three teenagers in mind. Maddison’s head was brushing the seam in the ceiling and possibly collecting spiders, and Chris’s knees were almost touching Carrie’s. “I . . . their legs are so squiggly,” he said. Maddison gave him an understanding grin and settled cross-legged with her back to the ladder, and then they sat there, the three of them, clearly wondering how exactly to broach the subject of what had happened since they’d last met.

  “Soooo,” Maddison finally said to Carrie. “I did not know you knew your way around guns.”

  Carrie sighed. Chris snickered. Maddison looked between them and said, “Wait, is this something to do with the handgun Mrs. Hadler has in her desk?”

  “Seriously?” Chris demanded. That was supposed to be a myth!

  “I told you,” Carrie said. “Mrs. Hadler led a very interesting life before she became a school secretary!”

  “Well, Dad was impressed,” Maddison said, but with a slight hesitation that suggested to Chris that she wasn’t sure about bringing her father into this. “And according to him, you made a favorable impression on the police detective.”

  Carrie groaned.

  “But what I want to know,” Maddison continued, “is what the heck actually happened that night. I mean, Dad said it was some guy after the Archive’s gold, which—does the Archive even have any gold?”

  “Couple of gold coins and I think a candlestick or two,” Chris said absently. He was trying to give Carrie a significant look with his eyebrows. He wasn’t going to get a better chance to tell Maddison. Carrie, of course, was stubbornly refusing to catch his eye. Well then, he’d just have to do it himself.

  “Actually,” Chris said, while Carrie finally caught his eyes to give him a warning and concerned look. “Um, we might actually have an idea why he was after us? I mean, a better one than the police do.”

  Carrie grimaced, and then quietly backed herself onto the playground slide and disappeared out of sight.

  “Really?” Maddison asked, after a long moment of staring in puzzlement after the suddenly disappearing Carrie. She sounded concerned. Chris didn’t blame her; he was concerned too.

  “Yeah,” Chris said, and then there was nothing for it but to bite the bullet. “So, when our aunt died she left me a letter in . . . in code, and it said that she wanted us to get something from under the floorboard in her office. That was the box we found last Monday—it unlocked when we used Carrie’s locket as a key—but we didn’t know about that until we found it.”

  Maddison nodded, once.

  “And,” Chris continued, aware that he was waving his hands around but not sure how to stop, “when we opened the box there was another letter in it, telling us that she’d been m-murdered, and that it was because of the stuff she’d left in the box, which was”—Chris took another deep breath to try to slow himself down, because he was doing that nervous thing where he babbled at a hundred miles an hour—“notes she’d been taking when she was researching the last exhibit she put together, when she found an actual eyewitness account of a sunken treasure ship.”

  Maddison stared at him. Then, very carefully, like she suspected she knew what
the answer was going to be but hoped she was mistaken, she asked, “Was it the San Telmo?”

  “Yes,” Chris admitted, and then watched in horror as Maddison’s face crumpled. “I—” he started to say, with no idea how he was going to end that sentence, when Maddison held up a hand. She was fighting back tears—why was she crying?—and shaking her head.

  “I—I can’t . . . right now,” she stammered, groping blindly for the open doorway. At some point she had gone white. “I’m sorry, Chris,” she continued, wiping a hand furiously across her face, and her voice went hard, suddenly. “I need to be somewhere else right now.”

  If she actually used the ladder she skipped every other rung, before hitting the ground layer of weed-overgrown woodchips with a heavy thunk and a gasp that was more about anger than any pain from her landing. And then she didn’t bolt, exactly, but stalked away, angry, her back straight. Chris was left gaping.

  “Wow,” Carrie said quietly into the shocked stillness. Had she really been on the swings this whole time? “That went even worse than I thought it would.” But she was already climbing up into the treehouse to give Chris a hug, so he could very definitely not cry into her shoulder a bit and have it be an unacknowledged secret.

  The problem, when all was said and done—which was in and of itself the problem, Carrie pointed out, he’d went and said what they’d done—was that Chris didn’t know why Maddison was upset. More specifically, he didn’t know if it was the San Telmo, the fact that he’d lied, or some other combination of factors that had her so upset, and he definitely didn’t know how to find her and fix it. She turned up to work at the school the next day as usual, and was, Carrie reluctantly informed Chris after he pestered her all night, perfectly polite, if a bit withdrawn.