by Eva Gates
“Thanks,” I said. “Butch?”
“I never discuss police business in personal conversations, Lucy. You can count on me.” He gave me a wink and followed the detective out.
I stood in the doorway, watching them walk up the path, heads close together as they talked. Rain continued to fall, but the storm was moving on, leaving puddles the size of small lakes in the parking lot.
“Turn out those lights, and we can get back at it,” Louise Jane said. “I can only hope Sergeant O’Leary and his fellows haven’t been scared off.”
“My ankle hurts,” Theodore said.
“I’m beat,” Grace said. “I’m going home.”
“It’s just you and me then, Lucy,” Louise Jane said.
“No.” I said.
“It’s worth a try. Even with just the two of us, we might be able to make a powerful enough circle to convince the spirits to return.”
“If you don’t leave, right now, this very minute, I’ll call Butch to come back and arrest you for trespassing,” I said.
“Perhaps we can try another time then,” she said. “I’ll agree there’s been too much activity for the spirits tonight.” Louise Jane almost ran out the door.
Grace wiggled her eyebrows at me, and then she held her arm out to Theodore. “Here, lean on me.”
“Not quite the excitement I expected, but exciting nonetheless,” Theodore said, accepting Grace’s arm.
“How did you two get roped into this anyway?” I asked.
“Louise Jane phoned me,” Theodore said. “She told me she had an idea for finding the stolen items and needed my help. I assumed she meant help searching historical records.”
“I was expecting to play bridge,” Grace said.
“Bridge?”
“She called and said she needed a fourth for tonight. I thought she meant a fourth in bridge. When she said to meet her here, at the library, I assumed a bridge club was having an evening. Sorry. Next time, I’ll ask for details. I did think ten o’clock was late for bridge, but I don’t have school tomorrow, so …” Her voice trailed off.
“I’m glad you were here, both of you,” I said. “Who knows what might have happened if it had been just the two of us.”
“Who knows what might have happened had Charles not been on the ball,” Grace said.
Charles washed his whiskers.
I locked the door behind my friends, tested to make sure it was secure, and then I went upstairs. Charles held his tail high and ran nimbly up the railing ahead of me.
Before collapsing into my bed, I opened a tin of salmon and dumped it into his bowl.
Chapter Seventeen
“No one by the name of Crawbingham ever lived on the Outer Banks,” Phil Cahill said.
“They might have visited, of course,” Lynne Feingold added, “but they didn’t live here.”
“That’s worth knowing,” Charlene said, “but it doesn’t tell us much. Maybe she vacationed here or came to visit friends. My research found records of a family over near New Orleans by the name of Crawbingham. They had a mighty big plantation in the years leading up to the war, but the family seems to have died out in the decades following.”
“Might be them,” Phil said. “The women and children of wealthy Louisiana families often spent the worst of the hot, disease-ridden summer months away from home.”
“Even if that was the case,” I said, “and we don’t know it was, it makes no sense to me that a wealthy Southern antebellum woman would keep a weather diary. Surely she’d have preferred a record of parties and dances and dinners and what everyone was wearing.”
A smile touched the edges of Charlene’s mouth. “Maybe she wasn’t interested in those things, Lucy. Maybe her secret lover, the one her family disapproved of, was a fisherman, and so the movement of the weather was the most important thing to her.”
I pretended to be shocked. “Charlene Clayton! What sort of historian are you? Making up stories of doomed lovers.”
She grinned at me. “I’m forced to admit, as a historian and academic librarian, I’d have preferred a record of dances and dresses and what food was served at such things. But I can imagine in the absence of facts.”
“I don’t think we’ll ever know,” Lynne Feingold said with a deep sigh, “what it all means. Poor Jeremy. He died for nothing.”
Phil snorted. “Jeremy died trying to steal a historical document for his own ends. Good riddance to him, I say.”
“You can’t mean that!” Lynne said. “We don’t know what he was doing here that night. Perhaps he suspected someone intended to steal the dairy, and he came in an attempt to prevent them.”
“Then he should have called the police. Or at least Bertie here. No, he was up to no good. Face facts, Lynne, the man was trying to find a way to pretend he was a big man around town.”
“May I remind you that Jeremy provided the funds to put on Settlers’ Day?” Lynne said.
“I don’t need to be reminded.” Phil leaned back in his chair. “Again.”
Bertie coughed lightly. “Can we please continue? We’re getting off-topic here. Again. Mabel, transportation for the guest speakers has been arranged?”
“Under control,” she said. “I never have to be asked twice.”
The meeting continued. The arrangements for the Settlers’ Day Fair appeared to be in place. The Historical Society committee had everything under control, and best of all, I didn’t have any responsibilities. The event was being held on Sunday, when the library was closed, so no one needed to be at work inside.
“The weather report looks promising,” Bertie said as she put the last tick mark next to her list of items to be discussed.
“Thank heavens that dreadful heat has broken,” Lynne said.
“Quite the storm last night,” Phil said. “A few trees came down, some houses were flooded, and some cars hit by flying debris, but not much real damage. It could have been a lot worse.”
Bertie and I exchanged glances, but we didn’t say anything. I’d told no one but her, Ronald, and Charlene about the break-in last night, and didn’t intend to.
I’d spent a restless night, listening to the storm retreating, running lines of indecipherable code through my head, and wondering who could be so desperate for those pieces of paper they’d kill to get them.
If they had killed to get them. It was possible that the disappearance of the code page and map had been incidental to the murder of Jeremy Hughes. Something the killer grabbed on the way out the door or stuffed in their pockets to look at later.
What of the diary? Why would the killer—if last night’s intruder had been the killer—come back for it? Did they think the clue to the code would be found within? We’d thought of that, and Charlene had gone through the diary page by page, searching for something. Anything. But all she found were dates and recordings of the weather and the movement of the tides.
Mrs. Crawbingham had been a particularly focused individual if all she cared about was the weather. I considered that for a while. Was it possible she was a far more detailed diarist, and she kept her personal thoughts, ambitions, and dreams secretly in the pages of another book?
Was there another book?
If there was, it had almost certainly been lost to time.
And what of the map itself? How important was it in all of this? I’d thought of something when I was downstairs with Watson and Butch, but whatever it was had disappeared before I could put my finger on it. Something about the map …
I’d finally fallen into a disturbed, restless sleep. As Charles snoozed beside me, I dreamt I was frantically trying to write something dreadfully important in the sand as waves washed my words away.
“It’s going to be a marvelous day.” Mabel Eastland got to her feet, pulling me out of my thoughts. The rest of the historical society scrambled to follow. “I hope you’re coming in period dress, Bertie.”
My boss’s eyes twinkled. “I might be.”
“What about you, Lucy?”
Mrs. Eastland asked.
“Me? I haven’t given it a thought. I don’t have anything to wear.”
“You don’t have to dress as an antebellum lady, all crinolines and petticoats. We’re celebrating all the settlers to our land, from the first Native Americans to the most recent escapees from the concrete jungle.”
“So I can wear my own clothes? I came here from Boston a year ago.”
“The point of a costume,” Lynne pointed out, “is not to look like you do every day. It’s not a costume if no one knows you’re wearing one.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, intending to do no such thing.
“I have some ideas,” Charlene said. “Let’s talk about it, Lucy.”
“Are you coming in costume?” I asked her.
“Oh yes. I have just the thing. Something I’ve been saving for the right occasion.”
Bertie’s phone rang, and she reached for it. “Hold on a minute, Lucy. I want to talk to you.”
“I’ll show you out,” Charlene said to our visitors. “I’m bringing my mother on Sunday, and she’s very much looking forward to it.”
“Good morning, Eddie,” Bertie said into the phone. She listened for a minute as her eyes opened wider and wider.
“We certainly did,” she said. “How did you come to hear about it? It’s not been picked up by the media.”
I couldn’t hear what was being said on the other end of the phone, but whatever it was had taken Bertie by surprise.
“Yes, I think I should, but I can’t exactly phone to make an appointment. Can you do that for me?” She made a “hold on” gesture to me and drummed her fingers on her desktop. “Good. If we leave now, we can be there before noon. Are you still planning to come on Sunday? See you then.” She put down the phone.
“What?” I asked.
“I asked you to stay back so we could complete your performance review. That will have to wait.” Bertie pulled her handbag out of her desk drawer—the one with the broken lock—and stood up. “That was Eddie.”
“What happened?”
“He gave one of his fellow professors a ride into the college this morning.”
That didn’t sound all that earth-shattering to me. “So?”
“Said professor’s car had to go to the repair shop to have a new window put in. Seems the back passenger window suffered some damage in the storm last night when a branch flew into it.”
I still didn’t see that it mattered. “What of it? Phil said trees and branches were down all over.”
“All over the Outer Banks, yes. Nothing like that happened in Elizabeth City, Eddie tells me. Only a light rain fell last night.”
“Oh, I get it. I assume you’re talking about Professor McArthur. She, or her car, might have been in the Outer Banks last night. You think—”
“Not McArthur, but Hoskins. I think it’s worth a trip to Elizabeth City. You can come with me. Someone broke into our library last night, and I’d consider finding out who that was to be library business. Wouldn’t you?”
* * *
Bertie called Charlene’s office, quickly explained our errand, and asked her to take the desk for most of the day.
In preparation for Sunday’s Settlers’ Day festivities, the children’s programming today was all about Outer Banks history. As we left the building, a steady stream of primary school children and their parents was arriving. Some of the children were in costume—I saw plenty of pirates and location-inappropriate cowboys and cowgirls. Ronald wore his own pirate costume, complete with black eye patch and stuffed parrot fastened to his shoulder, to greet his patrons.
As we walked to my car, we passed the Washington twins, tearing up the walkway. They were dressed in neat white caps and brown aprons over dresses in a checked yellow-and-brown pattern that trailed in the dirt. The dresses had high collars, long sleeves, and rows of small buttons up the front. Their mother followed, wearing jeans and a T-shirt. She gave us a smile and said, with one eye on a little girl in a repurposed Halloween princess costume, shouting at the twins to hurry up, “Do you think I’m overdoing historical accuracy?”
“It’s important,” Bertie said, “to remember that we’re not all descended from royalty and wealthy land owners. Our ancestors built this land with a lot of hard work, and sometimes not much to show for it. You’re right to teach your girls to be proud of that.”
She grinned at us. “Thanks. They’re dressed today as their father’s great-grandmothers would have been when the family were members of the Freedmen’s Colony. Neil’s mother made the outfits.”
“What about your ancestors?” I asked. “When did they arrive?”
She spread out her arms. “I’m it. I was born and raised in Chicago and first came here in 2002 for a summer job with the National Park Service. I loved it so much, I moved here as soon as I finished college. I met Neil shortly after that and never wanted to leave.”
“The story of all settlers,” I said. “We come from other places and do our best to make it in our new home.”
“Charlotte wanted to come as a Native American princess, and Emily as Orville Wright, but I convinced them those outfits might be better saved for another occasion.”
Bertie and I laughed and continued on our way.
* * *
“What’s your plan?” I asked my boss once we were on the highway heading out of Nags Head.
“You are assuming I have a plan,” she said. “I do not. Perhaps I’m simply, and naively, hoping Norman Hoskins will break down in the face of my righteous indignation and confess all.”
I laughed.
“I’m afraid you’re right,” she said. “My sense of Norm and Lizzie is that she’s the one who calls the shots, and he simply goes along with it. Breaking and entering is a felony, and if I can convince Norm he doesn’t want to go to jail because of some plot of Lizzie’s, he might tell us what they’re up to.”
“We aren’t even sure he, or his car, was at the library last night,” I pointed out. “He might have been in the Outer Banks on other business.”
“That’s what we’re hoping to find out,” she said. “Absence of evidence is not—”
“Evidence of absence.”
“Precisely.”
“How do you know he’s going to be available to talk to us?” I asked Bertie. “He might have classes or seminars or student appointments. Are we going to hang around all day? If he knows we’re waiting, he might sneak out the back door.”
“I’m better at subterfuge than that, Lucy,” Bertie said with a chuckle. “Eddie used the college’s online appointment system to reserve a half an hour of Hoskins’s student consultation hours at twelve thirty. I could have any time slot I wanted, Eddie said. Norm’s appointment book is almost completely empty, as it is every day. His students don’t normally bother wasting their time talking to him. Or so Eddie tells me.”
As someone who worked for years in the libraries at Harvard, the physical appearance of Blacklock College doesn’t impress me much. Most of the buildings were built in the 1960s and 1970s: blocks of solid gray concrete with small, narrow windows and not a touch of history or charm. But a university is more than weather-worn stone buildings and clinging ivy. Students lounged on the grass of the common, reading, gossiping, or flirting in the shade of white oaks and sugar maples, or tossing around footballs in the hot sun. On a Friday in summer, not many people were around, but there were enough to give it the feel of the best of college life. It was quarter past twelve as Bertie and I crossed the grassy common, heading for the languages building in which the North Carolina history department had a small office. We took the elevator to the third floor and emerged into a narrow hallway. The paint on the walls was chipped, and the industrial carpet needed to have the dust pounded out of it. All the doors running off the hallway were shut, and the dim bulbs in the ceiling barely broke the gloom. The door we were after—the one marked Professor Norman Hoskins—was situated next to a utility closet. Bertie knocked lightly and pushed
the door open at the grunted command “Enter.”
Norman Hoskins’s office was much like the man himself: nondescript, boring, beige. The potted plant on the windowsill appeared to have abandoned all hope. The books on the shelves lining the walls were covered in a thin layer of dust. Three coffee mugs, half empty under a layer of curdling cream, sat on his desk amid piles of papers and magazines.
He looked up from his computer and blinked.
“Good afternoon,” Bertie said. “May I?” She gestured toward a chair and, without waiting to be invited to take a seat, did so. It was the only visitor’s chair in the office. I leaned against a wall. Norm glanced between Bertie and me. His eyes flicked toward his computer, confirming something on the screen. “I’m sorry, Ms. James, but I have a student arriving shortly for a consultation.”
“No student,” Bertie said. “Just us.”
He glanced at the computer in confusion.
“Professor McClanahan was kind enough to mark off some time in your … busy schedule,” Bertie said.
“That was an unusual thing for him to do. What do you want?” His eyes darted between Bertie, me, the computer screen, and the door. He knew, I thought, why we were here. I crossed my arms over my chest in an attempt to appear formidable. I thought of myself as Bertie’s enforcer.
“Let’s get straight to the point, shall we?” Bertie said. “You failed in your attempt to get Mrs. Crawbingham’s diary last night. If you’d simply asked to be allowed to study it, we would have given you permission to do so at a later date. Therefore, I have to ask why you thought it necessary to break in and attempt to steal it.”
If anything, the air-conditioning in this office was turned up way too high, but beads of sweat began popping up on the professor’s forehead. He flicked through the stack of papers on his desk and avoided our eyes. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. If you’ll excuse me, I’m a very busy man.”
Bertie leaned back in her chair and settled herself comfortably. The colorful folds of her long cotton skirt swirled around her legs. “Lucy, here, can identify you. She saw you quite plainly. Didn’t you, Lucy?”