Who Killed Darius Drake?: A Mystery

by Rodman Philbrick

  Must be I finally nodded off because the next thing I know Mom is standing in my bedroom doorway, calling my name.

  “Arthur, I hate to wake you on a Saturday morning, but you have a guest.”

  “Huh? Who?”

  “Come down and find out. I’ll make breakfast. Pancakes?”

  Pancakes are always a yes. Are you kidding? But not even pancakes make me want to go downstairs and face the music, because I’m pretty sure who the guest must be. I mean, who else?

  The red menace. The freckled maniac.

  What finally gets me downstairs isn’t the pancakes. It’s the smell of bacon. Try as I might I can’t resist bacon, even if it means facing Darius Drake before I’ve had my orange juice.

  Except it’s not him.

  “Deirdre?”

  “Good morning, Arthur,” she says brightly.

  “Huh,” I say. “Hi.”

  I can’t think of the last time Deirdre came to our house. The way it works, according to the divorce agreement, is I spend one night a week with my father at Deirdre’s house, but she never spends time at mine. Not because my mom blames her for the divorce—Mom is way too fair to blame a child for something a parent did—but because, like I said, we come from different planets.

  No tennis outfit for Deirdre today. But very girly. Skinny white jeans and a skinny pink top and her sunshine-colored hair neatly gathered into a ponytail that somehow says she’s all business.

  “Guess who came to see me?” she says, keeping her voice low. “Your friend Darius. The poor kid was really upset. He looked up your father’s new address and tracked me down.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “When I mentioned to you that he officially died in the accident that killed his parents? That he was revived at the scene? I assumed he knew.”

  “He was too little to remember what happened.”

  “I get that now,” she says, looking very serious. “Nobody ever told him the details, so it came as a shock. Apparently he’s deeply embarrassed that something so tragic and personal is common knowledge. He wanted to know what else I’d heard, but really that’s it: He died, and they brought him back. Isn’t that enough?”

  Mom clears her throat. She’s standing there with a plate of steaming pancakes and a look of concern. “I couldn’t help overhearing. It’s none of my business, but just because a patient doesn’t have a detectable pulse, it doesn’t mean they ‘officially died.’ Not if they’re quickly revived. And that was certainly the case with the Drake boy. As I recall he responded quickly to CPR.”

  Deirdre looks excited. “You were there?”

  Mom nods. “On shift at the ER when they were brought in. Nothing we could do for his parents. The survivor, poor little boy, was revived at the scene, so we kept him under observation for several days, until his grandfather arrived to claim him.”

  “Pop Pop,” I say. “That’s what he called his grand-father.”

  “So he does remember?”

  “Not the accident part,” I say.

  “That’s a blessing,” Mom says, setting the plate on the table.

  All three of us dig in. Pancakes, bacon, butter, real maple syrup, what’s not to like? I have two helpings. Okay, three. Mom smiles. Deirdre smiles. It’s almost like we’re a family.

  Which we sort of are, I guess.

  When we’re done, I start to clear away the plates and load the dishwasher like usual, but Mom insists that just this once she’ll take care of everything.

  Deirdre waits until Mom is in the kitchen before leaning forward and speaking in a firm whisper. “One other thing you should know. I told your friend about this guy who came to my school to give a talk on local history? One of his less boring stories was about a treasure hunt. The search for a missing necklace.”

  “The Dunbar diamonds?”

  Deirdre nods happily. “Wouldn’t it be cool if you and Darius found the missing treasure?”

  FIVE MINUTES AFTER Deirdre splits, the doorbell rings.

  “Arthur, can you get that? I have to get ready for my shift.”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  No surprise this time. Darius, with his eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep, or maybe allergies, and his hair even wilder than usual, as if it wants to escape from living on his head.

  He waves a book in my face.

  “See?” he says. “It was there all along. Nothing hidden inside. The clue was the book itself.”

  I carefully shut the front door behind me and edge him out into the yard. The less my mom knows about this the better. “Dude, you need to go home and get some sleep.”

  “Ha! Sleep is overrated. As you probably know, I consulted with your sister yesterday. Remarkable female. She suggested a new line of inquiry that has already proved fruitful.”

  “Yeah. Sorry, but I have chores today.” That’s lame and only sort of true.

  “Our mission supersedes anything as mundane as chores,” he announces, holding the book higher. “Donald E. Dunbar: His Life, Legend, and Legacy. Your sister mentioned the author’s name—apparently he spoke at her school. He may have crucial information, and he lives barely a mile from here.”

  “In a safe neighborhood?”

  “Safe enough.”

  “Then why do you need me?”

  That startles him. As if he hasn’t considered the question. “Are you daft, Bash Man? Help me solve the mystery of who I am and we’ll share the glory of recovering the Dunbar diamonds.”

  “That might not exist,” I remind him.

  “But what if they do?”

  Maybe there’s a good answer to that, one that will keep me out of trouble, but I don’t know it.

  The local history guy who spoke at Deirdre’s school? He lives in Riverview Heights, in one of the houses built for factory workers a hundred years ago. The factories are gone, but the community of tidy brick houses remains, and most of them have been fixed up and improved over the years, so they no longer look quite so identical. For instance Mr. Robertson has converted his one-car garage into an office overlooking a small garden, and that’s where he meets us.

  “Right. This is for a school project, I assume? Have a seat.”

  He waves from his elevated desk, set on a platform surrounded by file cabinets. Like a bunker bristling with books instead of guns. He’s an old dude with feathery white hair and a neatly trimmed white beard and weak-looking eyes blinking behind thick lenses. “Something about the Heights, is it? Local history project?”

  Darius clears his throat. “Not precisely, no.”

  “No? Must have misheard. What then? Speak now or forever hold your peace. I’m a very busy man. Ha! I am Sisyphus, pushing an avalanche of paper uphill. And gravity always wins.”

  What can you say to that except “Huh?”

  “Sisyphus,” the old man says, raising his skinny finger like an exclamation point. “Character from Greek mythology. Doomed to spend eternity pushing a boulder uphill each day, and each day when he finally gets it to the top, the boulder rolls all the way back down. That’s me, trying to keep up with all my assignments. Articles, papers, books, research, lectures. Granted, most of the files are electronic, but still they must be written, they must be read, they must be edited.”

  “Winston Brooks,” Darius finally says.

  “Forger and felon,” Robertson responds brightly. “Charming fellow. I knew him well.”

  “He’s my grandfather.”

  The mouth hidden inside the beard opens with astonishment. “You’re his grandson? Are you, now? Well, well. Seems like yesterday, and yet here you are, nearly grown. Amazing what time does when I’m not paying attention.”

  “We’re trying to locate him,” Darius says. “I have many questions.”

  “No doubt. No doubt. Last I heard he’d been released from prison and moved back into his little place on Rutgers Road. Been meaning to drop by. Haven’t gotten around to it. Busy, busy, busy.”

  Darius says, “He was there until recently, when he got sick
. Supposedly he’s staying someplace else till he gets better. I’m guessing he’s in a nursing home or a rehab facility.”

  The old man looks crestfallen. “I’m very sorry to hear that. Winston and I had our disagreements, but I’ve always wished him well.”

  “The thing is, I’ve contacted every nursing facility in a fifty-mile radius. None of them have Winston Brooks as a patient.”

  The old man thinks about it. “It’s possible your grandfather is using an alias. Quite possible.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  The old man looks from Darius to me, as if trying to decide if we’re old enough to hear something disturbing. Finally he nods to himself and goes, “Because he made such a mess of things. Such a terrible mess.”

  MR. ROBERTSON TAKES the book from Darius, taps his finger on the tattered cover. “It all started with this. My Dunbar bio. The man for whom our fair city was eventually named. Unfortunately the book didn’t sell as well as I’d hoped, but Winston—your grandfather—read it cover to cover. The book gave him the germ of the idea, and soon he was reading everything he could find on the mysterious factory owner. Especially if it concerned the missing necklace.”

  Darius snorts. “So it was always about the money?”

  Robertson shakes his head, amused. “Are you familiar with the fictional Indiana Jones? An archaeologist obsessed with finding treasure? Winston Brooks was the real-life version. He convinced himself that the Dunbar diamonds still exist and if he searched in the right places he would surely find them. But I can assure you that for Winston it wasn’t about the money. It was the hunt, the search, the finding. That’s what motivated him. But of course he needed a lot of money to finance the hunt, and that’s what got him into trouble.”

  “Jasper Jones?”

  “The very one. Runs some kind of investment fund, made a fortune when he was quite young, and then retired to an estate he built on Castle Island. Anyhow, Jones got bitten by the treasure bug, and your grandfather persuaded him to invest money in the hunt for the diamonds. Quite a lot of money.”

  Darius says, “But why did my grandfather need to borrow money? Why couldn’t he just search for the diamonds?”

  “Ah,” the old man says. “We get to the crux of the matter. Winston had his theories about where the necklace might have been hidden, and to do a legal search meant acquiring property rights. Put simply, if he wanted to own the treasure he needed to buy the land where he thought it had been buried. First he bought the house on Rutgers Road, searched it top to bottom, and when that didn’t pan out, he went in another direction. Bought another house and tore it down and dug halfway to China. And found nothing but dirt. It all cost money.”

  “But they say he forged documents.”

  The old man sighs and pauses to wipe his glasses. “I’m afraid he did. Your grandfather subscribed to a particular theory—that the necklace had been buried with the body of Lucy Dare, Dunbar’s fiancée, in a tomb secretly constructed somewhere on Donald Dunbar’s estate. But as I said, he couldn’t dig up the property unless he owned it. Jasper Jones was willing to invest, but only if Winston had tangible proof that the diamonds were really somewhere on the property in question. So your grandfather tampered with an existing document, making it look like a reference to Lucy’s burial place.”

  “He forged it,” Darius says, stone-faced. “So there’s no mistake. He was guilty.”

  The old man nods. “Guilty of believing his own theories. Guilty of promising something he had no certainty of delivering. But yes, guilty of forging a document and using it to obtain quite a lot of money. Poor man, his world fell apart in a single week. On Monday he was arrested. On Tuesday he was released on bail. And three days later his daughter—well, your parents—were killed.”

  I cringe at the phrase, but Darius doesn’t react. Like when it comes to being an orphan, nothing can touch him. Not even when Mr. Robertson goes on to describe his parents.

  “I knew them both,” the old man says, voice softening. “Ellie and David. Ellie was taking care of her little boy—you—full-time while David finished graduate school. American literature, I believe. And when they weren’t working or studying they were singing at various venues around town. Traditional folk music. Lovely voices, perfectly matched. That’s how I knew them, originally. What a shame. What a loss.”

  Darius shakes his head almost furiously, as if to dislodge Robertson’s kindly description of his parents. As if he finds sentiment distracting.

  “Yes, fine, thank you,” he says. “But what about this rich investor? Jasper Jones? What did he do?”

  The old man gets up from his elevated desk and goes to the window, gazing out at his little garden. “He was upset about being deceived, but it was more than that. He was convinced your grandfather had found the diamonds and was concealing their location. Cheating him of the treasure itself.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  Mr. Robertson turns from the window, his watery eyes gleaming. “No, I do not.”

  “Why?” Darius asks. “Why trust a criminal?”

  The old man considers the question. “Because I never thought of him that way. Despite the forged document and his money problems, Winston was in every other way an honest man. He sincerely believed he knew where Lucy Dare was buried. And if he’d recovered the diamonds, one thing is certain: He’d have announced it to the world. He would have alerted the media and held Dunbar’s famous necklace up to the light. That’s who he was.”

  “So he lied and he cheated, but he did not steal.”

  The old man stiffens, as if personally insulted. “You have cause to be angry, young man. More than most. But I know something that apparently you do not.”

  “Yeah?” Darius says, very sarcastic.

  “Your grandfather loved you. You may not remember, because you were so young, but he took care of you for as long as he could. Until the last possible minute. Until the authorities removed you from his home and sent him off to prison.”

  TO BE HONEST I was never much interested in old stuff, or things that took place long before I was born. What’s the point? It already happened. It’s gone, dead, turned to dust. But I must admit, there was some pretty cool stuff in Mr. Robertson’s book.

  For instance, the part about tomb raiders trying to dig up the body of Lucy Dare, Donald Dunbar’s fiancée, who died of influenza. Dunbar has mostly been forgotten, except for old history dudes like Mr. Robertson, but at one time he was really famous. Famous enough to get a city named after his famous factory. A celebrity, although they didn’t call them that at the time. When he was seventeen years old, Dunbar invented a machine that stitched shoes together without the stitches showing. I don’t know why that’s important, but it made him a fortune, and by the time he was twenty years old, he had built Dunbar Mills, which, according to Mr. Robertson, was the largest fine-leather shoe factory in the world, and it employed more than half the people in our little city. High-fashion shoes and ladies’ boots. Expensive stuff. And it made Dunbar very, very rich. In the early days he was seen at all the best places, hanging out with other rich and famous types. Despite numerous opportunities—he was basically the hot bachelor of his day—he never married. Never wanted to, apparently, until he met nineteen-year-old Lucy Dare in 1918, when the First World War was raging in Europe. Or, as Mr. Robertson called it, “the end-of-the-world war” because of all the deadly weapons unleashed by human technology: tanks, flamethrowers, machine guns, bombs dropped from airplanes, poison gas.

  What blew my mind wasn’t the war stuff—I’d read about that before, and it’s sort of interesting in an awful way—but I was shocked to hear about Lucy Dare. She was an orphan. And you’ll never guess where she grew up. The Stonehill Home for Children! Yes! Just like Darius. And like Darius she was thought to be the smartest of the children raised there, and the one with the most potential “to rise in the world, based on her intellect and character.” Mr. Dunbar met Lucy Dare when she organized hospital volunteers
to help care for the returning soldiers, and he fell for her big-time. The kids in my school would say he went wicked gaga. The newspapers reported that the “millionaire mill owner had finally met his match.” He was quoted as saying, “Miss Dare is the most extraordinary person I’ve ever met. She has opened my heart for the first time. It was as if I was blind, and now, through her remarkable eyes, I see all the goodness in the world. Truly, I am smitten.”

  Smitten being the 1918 version of wicked gaga, right? Mr. Robertson provided lots of details from the society pages—the TMZ of the day—but the short version is that before leaving for England on a business trip, Donald Dunbar proposed to Lucy Dare and she accepted. He sailed on the Aquitania, a superfast ship, and sent her telegrams every hour on the hour, “exulting in her beauty, her intelligence, her grace, her goodness.” (Had to look exulting up. Means “celebrating.”) Once in England, the lovesick Dunbar (more like love-stupid if you ask me) did a quick tour of the factories that had used his inventions to manufacture boots and clothing for the war effort, and then stopped briefly in London before departing for home.

  London is where Dunbar purchased the famous diamond necklace, which at the time was appraised for a million dollars, which is like fifteen million now, according to Mr. Robertson. The store where he bought it was in a place called Hatton Garden, the jewelry district, which also happens to be where the machine gun was invented and first manufactured. Interesting factoid, right? Anyhow, it was a fabulous necklace, loaded with diamonds and sapphires. Sky-blue sapphires to match her eyes, he was quoted as saying.

  I know. Sappy stuff. And that’s when it turns tragic, because between the time Dunbar left England with the necklace and returned home—a total of five days—Lucy Dare went and died. She had been directing volunteers at the hospital, where many of the soldiers were returning with a mysterious and deadly illness. It was the start of the great influenza pandemic that would kill as many as forty million people worldwide. At least half a million of those were right here in the United States, and Lucy Dare was one of the early victims.