The Topaz Brooch

by Katherine Lowry Logan

  “Boss, you want the recliner?” Remy asked.

  Penny grimaced as her breath hitched, but otherwise, she didn’t panic. She might never get used to Elliott’s nickname, but she could hear it without wigging out.

  “Ye can have it since it has yer name on it. I’ll sit over here next to our puzzle expert.” Elliott sat at the small desk with two monitors while Kenzie booted up her laptop.

  David crossed the room to a worktable and booted up his laptop.

  “David,” Kenzie said, “pull up the satellite image you used to make the grid.”

  While Penny waited for something to happen, she rested her head wearily on Rick’s shoulder. The flight, the time change, and the anxiety of being back in New Orleans had all combined to zap her energy. She should have turned down the wine, but every time someone asked if she wanted a refill, she kept holding up her glass for more.

  She blinked and refocused her eyes and attention when a satellite image of the burned bald cypress appeared on the large TV screen with overlaying grid marks. Nothing about the picture looked familiar to Penny. If not for the bayou at the bottom of the screen, she wouldn’t have been able to orient herself.

  A sensation that something momentous was about to happen bubbled up inside her, followed by a rush of goose bumps.

  Kenzie typed on her laptop, and after a few more minutes, another image flashed on the screen. “What you’re looking at now is a recent survey of Orion’s Belt by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.”

  “How’d you know about that survey, Kenzie? Even for a puzzle wizard, that was a stretch.” Rick’s comment introduced a teasing thread that chipped away at the tension in the room.

  “Oh, I just snapped my magic fingers,” she said.

  “No, seriously,” Rick said.

  “Matt Kelly just started a lecture series on constellations. The twins got so excited that David bought them a telescope so they could study the night sky. Now, thanks to the twins, I know everything I ever wanted to know about Orion.”

  “Our interest in Orion and Matt’s lecture series is a weird coincidence,” Rick said.

  “Two events are unexpectedly coming together without an obvious explanation,” Penny said.

  Elliott crossed his legs and flicked at the knife-edge crease in his khakis. “Embedded in that definition is a hint that there might be an explanation, which implies there are no coincidences.”

  The discussion was becoming almost too complicated for Penny’s tired, stressed, and alcohol-infused brain to follow.

  Elliott continued, “If fate or mystery or God…or even brooches…can cause coincidences, then the cause is known, and again there are no coincidences.”

  “Then you get into randomness and probability and choice,” Kenzie said.

  Frustrated, Penny cut to the chase. “In other words, we have no idea.”

  “This is a discussion best suited for a night on the houseboat, peacefully floating along the James River. Let’s move on,” Elliott said.

  “Okay, what I want to know is, exactly when did Matt start this lecture series?” Rick asked.

  “The day before Penny disappeared,” Kenzie said.

  “Then it’s no coincidence,” David said.

  Oh, geez. Not again. I need an aspirin.

  David continued, “Either the topaz brooch or the force was active before we became aware of it.”

  It seemed as if time had stopped for a moment, for just a heartbeat, because the discussion was suddenly making sense to Penny. “What are you saying, David? That the topaz pulled me out of the convention center and sent me to the estate sale?”

  Really? She wasn’t just surprised, she was bowled over, and it freaked the shit out of her. Then she remembered the odor inside the Fontenots’ house, and that made the fear ten times worse. Penny’s teeth chattered as a whole string of recent and not-so-recent events that previously seemed random now formed odd connections.

  “When Morgan and I went to the estate sale, the dining room had the same peat smell the brooches produce. The agent said it had started the day before.”

  “You’re shivering, babe.” Rick unfolded an afghan and wrapped it around her, then pulled her against the heat of his body, his arm looped around her waist, securing her to his side. “Yeah, he told us the same thing. But while Pete and I were there, the agent noticed the odor was gone and said it had vanished as quickly as it appeared.”

  She glanced up at him. “The brooch sent out tentacles to lure me into its web. It’s like it has a mind of its own.”

  “We don’t fully understand how the brooches work,” David said.

  “We might not understand how they work,” Penny said, completely alert now, “but they do, and they control our actions. I wasn’t completely convinced of that until the HLA blood test results came back. Now I believe I was singled out to help Rhona. I’m not complaining about that at all. I’m happy I can help. But crap, I hate the idea of being controlled by an inanimate object.”

  “They’re not inanimate, Wilhelmina. They get energy from another source, and that’s what we’re trying to find and put in a lockbox,” Elliott said.

  “So once you capture the source, the brooches won’t work?”

  David shrugged. “We don’t know what will happen. We might even have more control over the other unknown brooches.”

  “How many more are there?” Penny asked.

  “We don’t know,” Elliott said. “At least twelve, but I suspect there are more.”

  “The box the topaz brooch was in once contained a ruby, an amethyst, and amber.”

  “We have those,” Rick said.

  “Do you know why they were created or who created them?” Penny asked.

  “We have a few guesses, but we don’t know anything for sure,” Elliott said.

  Kenzie glared at Elliott. “Tell her. She should know.”

  That made Penny sit up straight, but it did nothing for her shivers except ratchet them up. She looked from one person to the next, sensing they had been keeping something important from her, and now they had to confess. And damn it, she could already tell she wasn’t going to like it.

  “We don’t know why they were created, but they seem to bring soul mates together for a higher purpose,” Elliott said.

  “Well,” Penny relaxed a smidgeon. “I know that’s not true, or I’d still be in the nineteenth century with Jean.”

  Kenzie leaned forward, bracing her forearms on her knees. “Here’s the thing… When I went back to 1944, I met an American B-17 flyer named Lieutenant Joseph “Cav” Cavanaugh, and these guys”—she pointed at David and Elliott—“believed he was my soul mate. David planned to kidnap him and bring him to the future with me.”

  “Obviously, he didn’t,” Penny said, “since you two are together.”

  “Elliott figured out the mistake in time and sent Kevin back to stop a disaster,” Kenzie said.

  “So, you’re saying Jean wasn’t my soul mate.” When Kenzie didn’t answer, adrenaline pumped through Penny’s veins. Was she right about Rick? Were they cosmic soul mates?

  “He’s not your soul mate, babe. I am,” Rick said, gently enough to make her heart lurch.

  “But we’re neighbors. We already knew each other. The whole soul mate business doesn’t make sense. We didn’t need a brooch to bring us together. Matter of fact, right before I disappeared, your office was calling mine to book an event.” Penny looked at Kenzie. “Did you know David before he went back to get you?”

  “He knew my half-brother, but David and I didn’t know each other existed.”

  “Yers is an unusual situation, lass. It’s different from all the others but similar to JL and Kevin’s.” Elliott’s expression was full of sharp edges. He was preparing to argue anything she had to say on the matter.

  “Connor’s too,” Rick said.

  “But if the brooches are in the soul mate business,” Penny said, “then the topaz screwed up with Philippe and Rhona. They were already soul mates
.”

  “And two other questions to be considered are, one, why did the topaz abandon Penny and the Fontenots in the past without any hope of returning to the future, and two, has the topaz abandoned others?” Rick asked.

  Remy put down the footrest and headed toward the kitchen. “Here’re two better questions. Can we get back to the treasure? And does anyone want a beer?”

  Rick looked over at Penny. “Do you want one?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve had enough.” And just like that, the brooch discussion ended—unsatisfactorily, as far as Penny was concerned. She still had questions, and nobody had an answer to the Fontenots’ unique situation.

  “Bring me one,” Rick said.

  “Anybody else?” Remy asked.

  “I’ll take one,” Kenzie said. “David’s drinking coffee.”

  “Bring me a whisky,” Elliott said.

  Remy returned, balancing three beer bottles between his fingers and a highball glass in his other hand.

  “David, pull up the satellite image of the tree park showing your grid.” Remy handed Kenzie one of the bottles, and she took a long pull as the image appeared on the screen alongside the sky map of Orion. “Now go to astronomy.com/stardome and enter the approximate date Penny would have been camping in the swamp. It should give us a map of the sky and show us exactly where Orion was that night.”

  “What time?” David asked.

  “What time do you think you were looking at the stars?” Kenzie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Penny said. “We traveled through the bayou all day. It was fully dark. So maybe seven or eight o’clock.”

  David entered the information, and another map of the stars appeared on the screen.

  “Push the first sky map aside and use the second sky map with the grid marks to overlay the image of the tree park. Align the ancient bald cypress with the three bright stars in Orion’s Belt,” Kenzie said.

  The keys on David’s laptop clicked rapidly.

  “If my hunch is correct,” Kenzie said, “the tree will line up with Alnilam, the middle star in the belt, with Mintaka on the west and Alnikak on the east.”

  David lined up the images until the star Alnilam aligned perfectly with the tree.

  “Now draw lines through your grid from the tree to the other two stars.” Kenzie walked over to the TV. “The treasure should be buried along this line”—she pointed—“or this one.”

  “Or, as you said earlier, there could be two treasures,” Remy said.

  “But Jean didn’t have a computer, so how did he line them up?” Penny asked.

  “Since he was a sailor, it should have been automatic. He looked up at the sky, then oriented his body, so the tree was in alignment with the middle star in Orion’s Belt,” Elliott said.

  “So we don’t need a computer, either, to find them,” Penny said.

  “This is where Matt’s lecture came in handy,” Kenzie said. “You can’t see Orion in May in the Northern Hemisphere. So we need to know how the stars line up in December, which is what we just did.”

  “Or we can come back this winter,” Rick said.

  Everyone grumbled at that.

  “How far from the tree is the treasure buried, if there is one? Do your calculations tell you that?” Remy asked.

  “It depends on what’s growing nearby on both sides of the tree. If there are two treasures, Lafitte would have wanted, I assume, to bury the treasures at equal distances on the east and west sides of the tree. If there are old trees close by, he would have adjusted the distances. We won’t know until we get on-site,” Kenzie said.

  “We can see right there on the grid”—he pointed at the TV—“that other trees are on those lines,” Remy said.

  “What we don’t know is how old they are,” Kenzie said. “Maybe the trees weren’t there when Lafitte buried the treasure. We might need our experts to date several of them.”

  “But this is all conjecture,” Rick said. “We won’t know until we scan the complete grid if anything is buried there or not.”

  “What do you think of all this, Penny?” Kenzie asked.

  Rick gazed at her and brushed his fingertips over the slope of her cheek, making her feel safe and warm…and, yes, maybe even loved. “I can see Jean walking around the site trying to figure out where to bury it, looking up at the sky and remembering our conversation, and then aligning the X-marks-the-spot with stars in Orion’s Belt. It makes sense to me. But who knows if it made sense to Jean?”

  David shifted his focus from the laptop in front of him to the group in the room. “That’s good enough confirmation for me. I’ll print out an updated grid so we’ll know where to start in the morning. If we don’t find anything, we’ll at least have searched parts of it so that we won’t waste our time.”

  “Just curious… At what point will we give up?” Penny asked.

  “Lafitte said if he found anything, he’d bury it near the tree. Is there any other tree he could have been thinking about?” Rick asked.

  Penny’s mind played a fifteen-second video of the highlights of her weeks in the past. “The only other tree of significance was a live oak on Macarté Plantation where Jean and I had a confrontation following the shelling of the Carolina. The tree was close to the Rodriguez Canal, so I don’t see him hiding it there. It’s too public. If we don’t find it in the swamp, then I’d say he never found the torc.”

  “I agree.” Elliott turned up his highball glass and drained it. “I suggest we get some sleep. We need to start early tomorrow morning and try to avoid the intense afternoon heat.”

  “I’ll do the dishes,” David said. “I’ll be up for a while to fine-tune the grid.”

  Kenzie kissed him. “Wake me up when you come to bed.”

  He chuckled. “Why do ye think I’m doing the dishes?”

  Rick stood and picked up empty beer bottles. “Did anybody put the clothes in the dryer?”

  “I did,” Remy said. “I even folded them. You can thank me later.”

  Rick grabbed him in a bear hug, rattling the bottles, and kissed his cheek. “I’ll thank ya now.”

  “Don’t expect that kind of gratitude from me.” Kenzie knocked knuckles with Remy. “Your mère taught you right. Or was that the Army?”

  He grinned. “I didn’t dry your…um…sexy unmentionables.”

  “Leave my bride’s unmentionables out of this discussion, please,” David said, without looking up from his laptop.

  Kenzie smiled. “Well, now, that thoughtfulness deserves a kiss on your scraggly cheek.”

  Remy turned so Kenzie could kiss him, and she gave him a loud, smacking smooch.

  Penny had never been around such an odd group of people. They worked hard and lived dangerously, but an incredible bond of love held them together, and she wanted to be part of it. She stood and folded the afghan. “Do I have a bed, or do I need to sleep here on the sofa?”

  “You can have the front bedroom,” Kenzie said. “It’s at the opposite end of the hall from Rick’s.”

  Rick gave his chest a dramatic whack. “What? Hell, no. Your suitcase is in my room.”

  “I didn’t know which room to take, so I used your bathroom earlier to shower.”

  His eyes moved over her, as tangible as a touch. “Come on. I’ll show you to your room.”

  “Good night, all,” Penny said.

  “Good night, lass.”

  “I’m going down to the French Quarter to meet some friends,” Remy said. “Leave the door unlocked.”

  “Be safe out there,” Elliott said. “Ye’re not driving, are ye?”

  “No. I’ll take the limo. And I won’t leave any condoms in there.”

  Penny glanced at Kenzie, rolling her eyes.

  “Are you directing that comment at anyone in particular?” Rick asked.

  Remy focused on Rick. “If the condom fits, wear it.”

  “You’ve got us confused. You’re the guilty party,” Rick said.

  “Not me. Matter of fact,
Meredith found one in the limo we used for the Kentucky Derby, and it wasn’t mine. I wear an X-large. That one was only a large.”

  Rick’s brows winged up toward his auburn hair, and a light pink blush tinted his cheeks. “That’s the second time tonight you’ve busted my balls in front of my girl. Your time will come. Count on it.”

  Remy laughed as he crossed the kitchen toward the door. “I’m still counting.”

  Rick sailed a throw pillow at the back of Remy’s head. “I can drop you anytime.”

  Remy continued to laugh even as the door closed behind him.

  Penny looked up at Rick. “What’s with you two?”

  “Nothing. We get away with that kind of shit. It’s a way to blow off steam without hitting a wall. It’s harmless. Did you notice none of the others paid any attention?”

  “No, I was too busy watching the two of you act like children.”

  “Well, next time just ignore the kids.”

  Penny stopped at the refrigerator and poured a large glass of ice water, then strolled with him down the hallway toward the staircase.

  “I didn’t even ask you if you’re going straight to Virginia from here for the bone marrow donation,” Rick said.

  “I decided to transfer money out of savings and shut down the company for the summer. I found temp jobs for all my employees so they won’t be out of work, and they can return when I’m ready to take in new business.”

  “You’ve got over a million bucks in jewelry. Sell some of it.”

  “Oh, no. I’ll never sell Jean’s jewelry. I’ve even put out feelers to find the pair of earrings I gave Tommy. I’d buy them back in a heartbeat, even if I had to mortgage my townhome.”

  “So that’s a yes, you’re going to Virginia.”

  “That’s a yes. Charlotte said it’ll take almost three weeks for a full recovery. She invited me to stay at her house.”

  “Her house is like a hotel. There’s an entire wing for visitors. Everybody will be there before we head to the Belmont Stakes the first Saturday in June. If you feel up to it, maybe you’d like to go.”