by Eva Gates
At that moment the lighthouse light flashed high above us. Connor had stood up to talk to Detective Watson, and he caught the reflection of the light on something lying in the grass in the shadows at the base of the tower. “Hey. What’s that?”
It was a sledgehammer. Almost certainly the one that had done the damage to our front door.
Officer Rankin, who’d been silently listening to us, took a step forward.
“Don’t touch it,” Watson said. “I’ll send someone for it.”
“It might have been left by the construction crew,” I said. “After they finished for the day.” I didn’t believe that, but I wanted to point out the possibility.
“I know George Grimshaw,” Watson said. “He’s not careless with his tools, and he doesn’t let his crew be. You two wait here.” He turned to Officer Rankin. “Get a forensics officer to have a look at that, and then go up to the highway and prevent anyone from coming in who’s not with us. Except for Albertina James. Tell Ms. James and everyone else to park over there”—he pointed—“next to the marsh. No closer.”
“Why?” I asked.
“It rained earlier tonight. If we’re lucky, we can get some prints of the car our person of interest came in.”
Watson went inside and Officer Rankin trotted away.
Connor sat back down and cradled my hand in both of his. A small overhang protects the top of the steps from the rain, so at least we weren’t sitting in a puddle.
An officer walked up, grunted a hello to us, took some pictures of the sledgehammer, and then bagged it and carried it away.
We didn’t have long to wait before Bertie arrived. She parked in the far corner of the lot, as directed, and we watched her jog across the lawn. “What on earth has happened now?”
“Jeremy Hughes,” Connor said. “In your office. He’s dead. Probably killed by a blow to the head.”
Bertie groaned and dropped beside me.
“He has to have been after the notebook,” I said. “Your desk drawer was broken open. The box is still there, so it’s likely he was interrupted in the act.”
“That notebook is someone’s diary. A record of their day,” Bertie said. “Hardly something to kill a man over.”
“Perhaps,” Connor said. “Perhaps not. I’m not saying there’s anything to that map or the coded writing, but some might think it significant that more than a hundred years ago someone went to the trouble of burying the box at the base of the lighthouse.”
“It wasn’t buried,” Bertie said firmly. “It fell in and got covered up. Much ado about nothing.”
I didn’t reply. It was a considerable amount of ado to whoever killed Jeremy Hughes.
“Jeremy wasn’t the only one here tonight,” I said. “Someone killed him, and your office is a wreck.”
“What you do mean ‘a wreck’?”
“Jeremy and his killer must have fought,” Connor said. “Whether they came together or just happened to arrive around the same time is something Sam will have to figure out.”
The three of us sat in silence for a long time. We watched forensics officers moving around the parking lot, shining bright lights onto the ground. They seemed to have found something on the other side of the path from Connor’s car, which caused a lot of interest. They did the same on the walkway, searching for footprints, but they didn’t have much luck there. Connor and I had run up the path, followed by numerous police officers and the ambulance crew. The prints of anyone who’d gone before us would have been stomped on.
Eventually, Sam Watson came out. Butch was with him, and he gave us tight smiles. “Let’s talk,” Watson said. “Tell me about this notebook and why this man Hughes would have been in your office after dark.”
Bertie outlined the finding of the tin box and opening it. She told him about the crowd in her office who’d come to see it.
“I told them to come back tomorrow when Charlene could supervise the handling of it, and then I shooed them all away. I locked the box in my drawer and—”
An image flashed through my mind, and I sucked in a breath.
“What?” Watson said.
“I remember now. Bertie, you put the notebook in the box first and then placed the papers on top. You didn’t tuck the papers back into the diary where we’d first found them.”
“I don’t remember,” she said, “but if you say so.”
I turned to Connor. “While you checked on Jeremy, I looked into the box. I didn’t touch anything else. I saw the notebook. But I did not see the map or the mysterious code page.”
* * *
Watson escorted Bertie into her office so she could see if anything had been taken. I leapt to my feet to accompany them, and the detective told me to sit down.
Connor and I held hands, watched the police activity, and waited.
We didn’t have to wait for long. When they rejoined us, Watson’s face was, as usual, impassive, but Bertie gave me a shake of her head before she dropped onto the step beside me. “Gone,” she said.
“Can you describe this map and the page with the strange writing?” Watson asked.
“I can do better than that.” I pulled my photocopies out of my bag and handed them to him.
He studied them, flipping back and forth between one page and the other, as Butch looked over his shoulder. “It’s nonsense,” Watson said.
“Might be a code of some sort,” Butch said, “Like in Journey to the Center of the Earth.” Butch and his girlfriend Stephanie were members of my book club.
“CeeCee’s reading that book now.” Watson’s wife also came to the club. “Let’s not try to make things more complicated than they already are.” He waved the paper in the air. “This is a page out of an old book that makes no sense. Who else knows about this?”
“Pretty much half of Nags Head,” Connor said, “and those who didn’t hear about it today will by tomorrow morning. Word’s spreading that a treasure map has been found. You said yourself they’re talking about it at the police station.”
Watson rolled his eyes toward the night sky. “I’ll keep this,” he said, “if that’s all right.” I knew he wasn’t asking my permission, but I answered anyway. “Sure. I have the photos on my phone.”
“Send me the pictures so I have as close to an original as I can get.”
I did so while Bertie told them about the after-hours meeting in her office and who’d been there. “It was arranged that the historical society, including Jeremy Hughes, could make a closer study of the notebook tomorrow. They were due at nine o’clock, as soon as we open. There was no reason for him to come sneaking back.” She glanced at the shattered door. “And break in.”
“He might have hoped you or I’d still be here and give him a sneak peek,” I said. “But he was going to see it tomorrow at any rate. It seems excessively dramatic to break down the door.”
“You never know what people will do with enough motivation, Lucy,” Watson said.
We all turned and looked at the shattered door. Jeremy, or whoever else might have been here tonight, had not bothered trying to finesse the lock. He, or she, had simply smashed the door open using a sledgehammer. They would only have done that if their intent had been to steal the contents of the tin box.
Watson would ask George Grimshaw if the sledgehammer was one of his, but I thought it unlikely. Everything the construction crew used was either taken away at the end of the day or locked securely behind the wire fence. That fence showed no signs of having been tampered with.
“At least two people were here tonight,” Watson said. “Which one opened the door—Hughes or his killer?— is one of many questions.”
He asked Bertie for the names of everyone who’d seen the notebook. Including George and Zack and their workers, library staff and patrons, two board members, the people from the historical society, and the Blacklock College professors, it made an impressive list.
“Louise Jane McKaughnan and Theodore Kowalski were here too,” I added. “Louise Jane when th
e box was found, and later when we gathered in Bertie’s office, but Theodore was only here for the initial opening of the box.”
“All the usual suspects,” Watson muttered.
“When the meeting ended,” Connor said, “Jeremy Hughes asked me if I wanted to go for a drink. I declined, as Lucy and I had plans.”
“That’s not exactly right,” I said. “I’d forgotten about that until now. Jeremy didn’t make the suggestion. Curtis Gardner did. And Jeremy said okay.”
“Do you know if they went for this drink?” Watson asked.
I shook my head. “I didn’t see anyone leave.”
“If they did, they must have met up after,” Connor said. “They came in separate cars, and both cars were gone when we left.”
“Diane asked Curtis to drop her at home first. Something about dinner with her parents,” I said.
“I’ll have a talk with Curtis Gardner, then. But first, Bertie, I need you to come back with me into your office and see if anything else is missing. Lucy, you can go upstairs if you promise to say there for the rest of the night.”
“We can’t leave the door like this,” Connor said. “I’ll call a locksmith and see if someone can get over here tonight to fix this door and install a new lock.”
“Thanks,” I said, and then, turning to Watson, “Can I get Charles out of the broom closet?”
“Yes, please. Half of my officers say they can’t hear themselves think over that racket, and the other half think I’m being mean to the poor kitty.”
Bertie stood up and brushed at the seat of her pants. “Will we be able to open the library tomorrow, Sam?”
“So far, I see no reason not to, although I’ll have to ask you to stay out of your office. I’ll call you when we’re finished tonight, to let you know.”
Bertie and Watson went inside. Butch trotted down the path to talk to the forensic officers who were preparing to take casts of whatever they’d found in the parking lot.
Connor and I stood together, conscious of the buzz of people all around us.
He rubbed at the top of his head, leaving his hair sticking up in all directions. “I wish this hadn’t happened here,” he said. “Not again.”
I resisted the urge to pat his hair back down. “But it did. Don’t worry. I promise to stay completely out of it this time. I’ll let Sam Watson handle it. I won’t so much as speculate about what might have happened. Not even to myself.”
He gave me a smile. “I can’t see that promise lasting for long. It’s late—time for me to be off. If you’re okay? I’ll call that locksmith now, but I can take you to Ellen’s if you don’t want to spend the night here. She never minds late-night guests.” Ellen was my aunt Ellen, my mother’s sister. Although I grew up in Boston, when we were children, my brothers and I spent a good part of every summer in the Outer Banks with Ellen; her husband, Amos; and their three kids. She and I were very close. Sometimes I thought I was closer to her than to my own mother.
“I’ll be fine.” I held my arms up and out to indicate the solid bulk of the building behind me. “Safe as lighthouses.”
He smiled at me. My heart rolled over. I slipped my hand into his, and we walked to his car. A few feet away, Butch crouched down, studying a tire track in the fresh mud left by the storm.
“See anything?” Connor asked.
“We’re lucky that storm blew in and then blew out again so fast,” one of the forensics officers said. “The only prints we should find here were laid down this evening.”
“Are tire tracks individual?” I asked. “Surely they’re mass produced?”
“Every type of tire for every model of car has its own markings,” Butch said. “Obviously, a heck of a lot of them are the same, but tires wear in distinctive patterns. So yeah, if we find something to match this with, we might get lucky. It all helps to build a case.” He pushed himself to his feet. “The meeting in Bertie’s office ended before the rain began?”
“Yes.” I said. “It was at least an hour after that before it started to rain. We were at Jake’s.”
“You were the last ones to leave here tonight?”
“Yes, we were. Jeremy returned after everyone was gone. Jeremy and whoever was with him.”
“Or whoever followed him,” Connor said.
“That’s his car over there,” Butch said, indicating the one on the other side of mine. “The plate’s registered to one Jeremy Hughes of Nags Head.” He rubbed at the dark stubble on his chin.
“What is it?” I asked. “Something’s bothering you, I can tell.”
He gave his head a sharp jerk, telling us to follow, and took a step away from the forensic officer who was preparing to make a cast of the imprint. Butch kept his voice low. “I recognize that tire print.”
“How can you?” I asked.
“It’s an old tire, badly worn on the inside, meaning an alignment hasn’t been done in a long time. It had a puncture recently when a nail went into it and a temporary patch was put on.”
“That should make it easier to find than if it had been a new tire,” I said.
“Thing is, Lucy, I’m pretty sure I fixed that puncture myself about a week ago. I told the owner to get her tires changed immediately. Obviously that didn’t happen.”
“Her?”
“Louise Jane.”
Chapter Seven
I stood by Connor’s car for a long time, wrapped in the warm strength of his arms.
Louise Jane and I had never gotten on. She wanted a job at the library and refused to believe I hadn’t snatched the one she deserved out from under her nose. She tried to frighten me away by making up stories of the haunting of the lighthouse in general and my apartment in particular, and in turn I didn’t take her at all seriously.
But I’ve never believed she has any real malice in her, not even toward me, and I couldn’t believe she’d have fought with a man over an old book, killed him, and driven off into the night.
“You’re sure you’re going to be okay tonight?” Connor said into my hair. “I can … stay, if you like.”
I shook my head. Connor had only ever been into my apartment once, to doze in an armchair and watch over me after I’d been attacked one night.
Our relationship was new, and we were still finding our way. But I had the feeling, and I think he did too, that this could turn into something deep and truly meaningful. I was determined not to rush into anything.
I was certainly not going to invite him up tonight, not with Butch Greenblatt, Sam Watson, and the rest of the police department watching us.
Reluctantly, I pulled myself out of his arms. “Safe as lighthouses,” I said again, trying to sound cheerful.
He bent down and kissed me. I settled into the kiss. He put his arms around me. I was about to settle even further into the kiss when someone called, “Hey, you there! Rankin, or whatever your name is, bring that light over here.”
Connor and I separated, feeling like teenagers caught necking behind the school bleachers after class. We grinned sheepishly at each other, and I stepped away. “Besides, you have reading to do if you’re going to be ready for book club on Wednesday.”
“I’ll call you first thing tomorrow,” he said. He got into his car. The BMW roared to life, the headlights came on, and Connor drove away.
I went back to the lighthouse, intending to grab Charles and head upstairs. Instead, Butch and Watson came out as I put my foot on the first step.
“Lucy,” Watson said, “you told me Louise Jane was here earlier, when everyone was in Bertie’s office examining the notebook.”
“That’s right.”
“She left before you did?”
“I didn’t see her go, but when I came out, her car was gone.”
“That was before it rained,” Butch said. “So that track wasn’t laid down prior to this meeting.”
“You’re with us, Lucy,” Watson said.
“I’m what?”
“You can come with us. I want to pay a call on L
ouise Jane.”
“Now? Me?”
“It’s late and we’ll probably get her out of bed. I could take a female officer with me, but they’re all tied up at the moment. You’ve seen this map and the so-called code page, and I haven’t, except for your reproduction. If Louise Jane has them, you’ll recognize them. You know Louise Jane as well as anyone. I want your reaction when we talk to her.”
I felt my chest swelling with importance.
Detective Sam Watson wanted me along on his investigation. He valued my opinion.
“Besides,” he said, “I see no point in telling you not to interfere. You will anyway.”
My chest deflated. I decided not to tell Watson I’d promised Connor I wouldn’t get involved. I never intended to find myself investigating murders. That just seemed to happen to me.
Somehow, I never ended up dead because of it, although I’d had a couple of close calls.
“Bring a car around,” Watson told Butch. “We’ll meet you at the edge of the marsh.”
While we walked to the meeting point, Watson said to me, “Do you think this map means something, Lucy?”
“I honestly don’t know, Detective, but I find it hard to believe it’s anything important. Someone drew a rough sketch of the Outer Banks, which was a common enough thing to do before mass-produced maps were available at every gas station and long before Google Maps and GPS. Maybe they marked things on it that were important to them—places they’d seen or where they’d done significant things. The sort of things that aren’t important or meaningful to anyone else. Where they met a future wife or husband for the first time, a first kiss …”
“It doesn’t matter—not to me,” he said, “if this map shows the route to an underground passageway leading to secret vaults of the Bank of England.”
“I didn’t know you were a Sherlock Holmes fan, Detective.”
“What?”
“That’s the plot of The Red-Headed League.”
“I might have read a few of the stories. Anyway, it doesn’t matter what it is. All that matters is someone may have considered it to be important enough to kill over.”