by Marie Morin
Every drawer and cabinet that she'd found in the house had a purpose, and every drawer and cabinet was used for that purpose, and not for tucking away things Thor might want hidden.
That only left his desk as far as she could see.
It was nearing the end of the quarter and she knew they would be leaving before long on the dig when Thor had to go out of town to give a lecture. He'd tried to talk her in to calling in sick and going with him, but she'd declined. It was only for one night, but that happened to be a busy night at the restaurant. She couldn't leave her boss short handed after he'd bent over backwards to accommodate her.
It wasn't until she dropped Thor off at the airport that it occurred to her that fate had stepped in and given her the opportunity she'd been waiting for. She barely had time to drop him off and race to work, however.
The moment she walked in the door that night, the open door of the office called to her. Anxiety washed through her, as well.
What if he figured out she'd been in his office plundering?
She shook that thought off. She'd just have to be very careful that she placed everything back exactly as it had been before she touched it.
Her courage nearly failed her when she stepped into the office.
Resolutely, she tamped her lily-livered attitude and moved inside, flipping the light on. She barely glanced at the book shelves that covered three walls. Except for the rolled scrolls, she could tell at a glance what everything on the shelves was.
The desk was the goal.
She'd already shoved his chair back and plopped down in it before it occurred to her that she'd just made her first error. Had the chair been pushed under the desk? Or just sitting before it? Would Thor remember whether he'd pushed the chair in or not? Was the way he left his chair such a habit that he would know instantly that it had been moved?
She thought it over a little frantically and finally decided to worry about that little detail later.
She nearly snatched the middle drawer clean out of the desk. She was nervous, and it moved easier than she'd expected. When she jerked it out, everything in the drawer shifted toward her. She looked down at it in dismay for several moments, her hands over her mouth. When she'd ceased hyperventilating, she saw that there was very little in the drawer beyond typical office supplies. Aside from paper clips, rubber bands, staples and the like, there were only a few papers and those pertained to the college.
Straightening everything up again, she closed the drawer carefully and opened the top drawer on the right. There were six leather bound books in it. She lifted them out carefully and set them on top of the desk. After calming herself, she made a mental note to stack them in reverse as she looked at them, and then reverse the order when she put them back.
The first was a record book ... for tax purposes, she supposed. It didn't seem to have anything in it but numbers. After flipping the pages to see if anything had been tucked between them, she set it aside and checked the next one. The second book was older, but basically the same thing, accounting of some kind.
She discovered all the books were accounting books, each one older than the one before. The last one dated back to the middle ages. As intriguing as that was, however, she was looking for something about his late wife.
She returned them to the drawer, careful to stack them as they had been, oldest to most recent, and opened the next drawer.
The second drawer contained a metal box, like a cash box. Pulling it out, she set it on top of the desk and checked the drawer to see there'd been anything behind it. There was leather pouch toward the back. Pulling it out, she loosened the tie and poured the contents onto the desk.
Loose jewels and gold coins poured onto the desk top. Cassie merely gaped at them for several moments. “They have to be fake,” she muttered. “Nobody could be so unconcerned about the value of genuine golden Spanish doubloons as to stuff them in a pouch and toss them in the back of a drawer."
Shaking her head, she gathered everything up and dropped it in the pouch again, checking the desk carefully to make certain she hadn't missed anything. When she'd tied it up, to the best of her memory, as it had been tied, she placed it carefully in the back of the drawer and turned her attention to the metal box. She almost passed out when she opened it.
It was filled to the top with money.
She slammed it closed, fastened it and returned it to the drawer.
Why would he keep so much cash lying around?
It wasn't even in a safe.
The possibilities just made her more nervous. She was tempted to get up and leave right then, but what other chance would she have to look? Besides, now she'd begun to wonder just what kind of secrets Thor did have hidden in his office.
The last drawer was a filing drawer. Cassie stared down at it for several moments and finally got out of the chair and pulled it out. The first file had legal papers in it and Cassie's heart skipped several beats as it occurred to her that this might be just the thing she'd been looking for.
Thor's birth certificate was on top. She took it out and studied it. The birth date wasn't a surprise ... at least not any more. He'd had to furnish his date of birth when they'd gotten married. She still found it hard to imagine he could be forty nine years old when he looked more like-thirty maybe, but obviously it was a fact, and a matter of record at that. He'd also furnished his place of birth, Norway, which had been nearly as big a jolt as his age.
She slipped the birth certificate back into the folder and glanced through the other papers in the folder. The last one gave her a jolt.
It was a death certificate for a man named Thor Severnson, who'd been a professor of archeology at a Norwegian Institute. She thought at first that it was another copy of his birth certificate, except that it wasn't in English. Then she noticed the date didn't match and that parents names weren't listed. Unfortunately, she couldn't read Norwegian, but she was almost certain it was a death certificate. It had the word døden on it and the date wasn't his birth date, it was obviously a records document, so what else could it be?
Shoving it back into the file, she flipped cursorily through the ones behind it. There were several files that contained papers in various languages. In the back of the file drawer, she found another metal box. It was roughly the same size as the other box and she almost decided not to look at it at all. Finally, she grabbed the handle, dragged it out and set it on the floor in front of her.
It didn't contain money. She stared down at the cards and folded papers for several moments blankly. Finally, she grabbed a handful at the front and, holding them in one palm, began to carefully thumb through them.
The first one sent a jolt of shock through her. It might have been a driver's license. She wasn't sure because it wasn't in English. It was a picture ID, however. It was a picture ID of Thor, except the name on the card wasn't Thor Severnson. And the date on the card predated the date on the Norwegian death certificate.
A wave of nausea washed over her. She was too stunned even to guess what it might mean, particularly when coupled with the amount of ready cash, loose jewels and valuable coins. After a moment, she swallowed with an effort and continued looking, discovering what looked like fifteen different sets of identifications. They cut across the US into Canada, then to Great Briton and Europe.
All of them were identification papers of some kind. All of those that had a picture had Thor's face on them. All of them had different names and different dates.
And some of them dated back over a hundred years.
When the phone rang, Cassie jerked guiltily, throwing the cards in every direction.
“Oh my God! Shit! Fuck!” she cursed, scrambling to gather the cards up.
The phone kept ringing. It had to be Thor.
She stared at it for several moments. She didn't want to pick it up, but if she didn't pick it up then he'd wonder where she was.
Dropping the cards, she grabbed the phone. “Hello?"
“Hi."
“Thor
?” she said shakily.
“What's wrong?"
“Wrong?"
“You sound out of breath."
“Oh. I was in the shower. I had to run to catch the phone."
There was silence for several moments. “What are you wearing?” he asked huskily.
“Uh ... a towel."
He fell silent again. “I wished you'd come with me. I miss you."
“I miss you, too,” Cassie said, glancing around uneasily at the cards and papers scattered all over the floor.
“I don't want to keep you standing around wet. You'll catch your death. I'll see you tomorrow afternoon."
“Be careful."
“You too."
It was a little late for her to be careful, she thought fearfully.
She was never going to get the fucking cards back in the same order!
She was crying so hard by the time she'd finished gathering them up, she couldn't even read them. Mopping her eyes on the sleeves of her shirt, she peered at them, trying to figure out the order, trying to at least get all the ones together that seemed to be for the same person. That thought made her burst into fresh tears.
Why did he have identification papers in so many names, dating so far back, she wondered? What reason could he have for having them?
Abruptly, something occurred to her that dried her tears with a ray of hope. “The dates!” She grabbed up the ones she'd already sorted and checked the dates again. Relief swept over her.
She felt so silly! Most of them were older than he was. He was born in the fifties and the majority were from before that.
It must be just some kind of collection, maybe a practical joke kind of thing? Like getting one of those fake newspapers printed up with a person's name in the headline?
Thor didn't really seem the type to have ever played a practical joke, but what did she know? She'd only known him a few months. Maybe, when he was young, he had been like that?
But then what was all the cash for?
Mopping her eyes, she decided she was just going to have to ponder the puzzle pieces for a while until she figured it out. Now was not the time. Right now might be her only chance to find as many puzzle pieces as she could, and she still hadn't found anything at all about his first wife.
Chapter Eighteen
There were deeds, bills of sales, wills, birth records, death certificates—basically pretty much every sort of legal paper imaginable. Each file was separated according to ownership.
She thought it must be people he'd been researching for some reason.
It was odd, though, that there wasn't a single marriage certificate in the lot.
Single men through history?
Thor was going to know she'd been snooping through everything if he looked, despite her efforts to straighten it, but she clung to the hope that he didn't actually look at the documents that often. It could be months before he did, and if it was a long time, maybe he wouldn't remember what order they'd been in?
She didn't find a wedding album or any pictures of any kind. Just legal documents.
When she'd straightened the drawers the best she could, she closed them and decided to glance at the ledgers again.
She started with the oldest this time. It was handmade. It had been sewn together with some something like thin leather strips. The heavy covering was of worn leather, and it was entirely handwritten in some language other than English. As if she'd opened a box to discover there was a spider in it and the startled spider had leapt at her, the name in the front of the book just seemed to jump out at her.
Francois, Duc du Maurier.
She knew it had to be a coincidence, but it sent chills crawling up her back and into her scalp as if someone had walked icy cold fingers up her spine.
Francois was probably a pretty common name in France even now and had probably been more common during medieval times when they seemed more interested in traditions than giving their babies uncommon names—it dated from the early medieval period and spanned several hundred years ... which she thought was odd until it occurred to her that the name could've belonged to generations of du Mauriers.
It made her feel strange to think of people keeping records like this so long ago, almost as if she was occupying the same space with the person who'd written it, except in a different time, which, of course, was absurd. She was pretty sure it was written in French, maybe Spanish. The languages were similar being ‘romance’ languages that had sprung from Latin. For that matter, it could've been written in Latin, she supposed. She knew Latin, but the handwriting was so strange it would've been difficult to read if it had been English.
She supposed, however, that it was something like an inventory of valuables; so many cows, pigs, sheep and so forth.
By the time she'd made her way through to the most recent book, she'd realized the only thing the books had in common was that they were all ledgers, inventory, money, although the older ones had more ‘things’ than money. They weren't all in the same language. They were all in different names.
They were linked, though.
They spanned roughly a thousand years, consecutively. Each one took up on the date following the last recorded in the previous book.
She made another unnerving discovery when she started flipping through the newest. It was Thor's handwriting.
They were all written in Thor's hand writing.
The balance in the final entry had so many zeros behind it she wasn't sure what the number was.
She'd never even had a checking account, however. She didn't know what an accounting ledger was supposed to look like. Maybe it was so many decimal points?
She was more interested in the handwriting, but she also wasn't a handwriting expert. It looked like his hand, but why would he dummy up ancient ledgers?
Was he was some kind of antiquities thief? Someone that forged ancient documents and sold them for tremendous amounts of money to museums and collectors?
The nausea rolled over her again, but she resolutely dismissed it. She wasn't going to allow herself to jump to any conclusions. There could be very reasonable explanations for all of it.
It wasn't just because she loved Thor that she was trying to find excuses.
She put them back, straightened them, studied them. It seemed a little late to be worrying about putting everything back carefully, but she reasoned that the ledger on top was something he seemed to update pretty regularly. Except for that and the cash box, he might never even notice the other things.
She hoped he wouldn't, anyway.
Unfortunately, she hadn't found a single thing about his late wife, which had been her reason for breaching his privacy to begin with. She'd checked every drawer and every document. She'd even checked the bottoms of the drawers.
She wondered if he had a safe.
Not that that was likely to do her any good. If he had a safe it was almost certainly locked—maybe. Either he didn't have much faith in locks and didn't think there was a lot of point to using them, or he was the most incredibly careless person about money and valuables that she'd ever seen.
She felt like she was fucking rich if she had a hundred dollars in her wallet, and knew where it was at all times if it didn't have more than a dollar in it. In fact, the lower the ‘cupboard', the more desperately she hung on to it.
Was that it? He had so much he just didn't worry about it?
How could anybody have so much they didn't worry about it?
He had a very large, very expensive house, but it wasn't a mansion. And yet, it was filled with priceless antiques. She had only looked upon them from the viewpoint of a lover of ancient artifacts, not from the perspective of monetary value. The objects in his great room were probably easily worth hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe as much as a billion. Maybe billions.
It was staggering to think of it.
If he was a thief, he had to be one of the most successful ones in history.
Shrugging it off, she got up. It was late. She ha
d to pick Thor up at the airport tomorrow afternoon. She needed to finish looking, check everything carefully, and get out.
Standing in the middle of the room, she looked around. If he had a wall safe, it had to be hidden behind the books in the book cases. As she moved around the desk toward the nearest bookcase, however, she brushed against a scroll that was protruding from the shelf. It started an avalanche and her heart leapt into her throat as she watched them pour off onto the floor.
Some of them, she knew just from glancing at them, were ancient. She held her breath, wondering if they would shatter and turn to dust. Most of them simply rolled off and bounced, but a couple struck on end and crumbled tiny pieces off. “Oh God!” This was getting worse and worse!
She wondered if she should just try to stage a break in?
“No! That won't work. A burglar would go right for the cash box."
Feeling close to tears again, she gathered the rolled up pieces of skins and early forms of paper and set each on the shelf carefully, one by one.
She found their wedding certificate. When she'd unrolled it, she sat down on the floor and cried. Thor was going to kill her, or divorce her, or kill her and divorce her. And she didn't even know who she was married to anymore!
Sniffing, mopping her eyes with the tail of her shirt, she put all the scrolls up except the ones she'd damaged. Those, she decided to open carefully to see just how much damage she'd done.
A wave of dizziness washed over her the moment she touched the first one. She paused, rubbed her eyes and glanced at the clock. It was 2:00 AM. No wonder her head was swimming!
Shaking it off, she carefully unrolled the scroll.
It was a wedding contract between Francois, Duc du Maurier, and Cassandra of Orleans.
She thought she was hyperventilating. The dizziness that washed over her was far worse than before. She felt herself falling through blackness.