“It’s not about the money.”
“What more could you possibly want from us?” Michael implored.
“Answers. Reassurances.”
“It appears you’ve already uncovered a great deal on your own.” Aaron’s tone was almost approving.
“I’ve only figured out parts of this maddening puzzle. And in doing so, I’ve also come across some information you might find useful. But this needs to be a two-way street. I need to know what happened to Ashley and Vince. I need to know if they’re safe. And I think you’re in a position to tell me.”
“Ah, if that were only the case.” Aaron nodded at Michael, and from his pocket he withdrew a folded-up piece of paper and handed it to me.
“This letter was sent to Aaron from the woman you knew as Ashley.”
My gaze moved suspiciously from man to man as I unfolded it. Yet, as soon as I read the first two words my heart began to race. This was the remainder of the letter I’d found just a corner of in the bottom of a trash can. It had to be the same one Cindy mailed to Aaron from Albany. One more piece falling into place.
Sorry we left before getting in touch. We were in a rush. O’Henry could no longer be trusted to pay our rent. We had to leave our bicycles behind. You will find them and bring them to us. Look for the woman we stayed with. Fondly, Percy Bluff
I retrieved the corner of the letter I’d found and held it beside the note Michael had handed me for comparison. “Same handwriting, same first words. She must have written a draft letter and destroyed it. But it’s rather cryptic.”
With only those written words to go on, I wouldn’t have been able to figure out a message, let alone that they should look for a rope. No doubt Aaron and Michael had had some guidance, and I didn’t have to work too hard to reason out from whom. But I still didn’t understand why.
“The man you call Vince was studying criminology,” Aaron said.
“Criminology? Hmm.” I felt a stab of betrayal.
“Not the story you were given?”
“Vince told me he was going to teach.” I chewed the inside of my lip. “But how could they have been so certain I’d take the rope?” I said this more to myself, but Aaron responded.
“Perhaps they never intended for you to remove the rope. But it’s a reasonable assumption that the bikes would be returned to you eventually since this was their last known place of residence.”
My head was spinning. This revelation was way offline from the conclusions I’d arrived at, though my formula included as much guesswork as facts.
“How did you know to come to Whale Rock? To look for me?”
“I will admit, we had a bit of luck in that regard. There’s a small GPS tracking device attached to Whistler’s collar.” He clapped his hands and shouted. “Come!”
The dog swiftly obeyed.
“Good boy.” I gave him a praising head rub before examining his collar to find a barely detectable tab on the inside. “Huh?”
“After we arrived in Whale Rock, it wasn’t hard to determine your connection. Percy’s Bluffs is quite famous around here.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but he held up his hand to stop me. “To anticipate your next question, it was only by chance Michael saw the notice of your exhibit in a storefront window.”
“Well, that certainly does solve one mystery.” It also opened up the door to many more questions. Still I needed to stay focused on more important matters. “But actually, my next question was going to be how did you know to look for a rope?”
“If this is to be a two-way street, it would be my turn to ask the next question.”
I nodded begrudgingly.
“They had in their possession something of great importance, something they would have been protecting. Do you know anything about it?”
“The coins?” I asked.
Aaron frowned.
I pulled the phoenix coin from my pocket and showed it to Michael.
“She has one of the Greeks.” He placed it in Aaron’s hand. This time I could clearly make out the Temple “T” on his ring.
A ghost of a smile passed over Aaron’s lips as he caressed it. “That’s not what I’m looking for. However, they are indeed quite valuable.” He frowned again and asked, “How did you come to have this?”
“They used it to pay someone to run an errand for them. Actually, it was to mail this letter to you. They also traded one for a statue of Winnie the Pooh.”
“How large of a statue?” Aaron cocked his head with interest.
“Maybe a foot high by eight or ten inches wide. Bronze. Heavy.”
He shook his head. “It’s probably solid. Besides, not big enough.”
“For what?” When there was no answer, I said, “It’s my turn to ask a question.”
“Could you ask a different one?”
“Okay. Why would they bury the coins?”
“I can’t see any reason they would.” Aaron’s forehead wrinkled. “Did they bury something?”
“Yes.”
He leaned forward. “How do you know? Where was this?”
“As I mentioned, they bartered for this bronze statue and bought some plants to decorate a gravestone in my family cemetery here on the property. I discovered they’d buried something and used the statue to cover it up.”
“But you don’t have what they buried.” It wasn’t a question.
“Whatever it was, they removed it before I went looking.”
“Are you certain it was they who removed it?”
“Who else?”
“God be good, let’s hope it was them,” Aaron mumbled.
“Was somebody else looking for whatever it is they buried?” I asked, but again my question was ignored.
“Can you take us to this gravesite before we leave?”
I nodded, then asked, “The young man who showed up here with your dog and called himself Vince Jacobson—is he your grandson, Jason?”
Aaron sighed heavily before he spoke. “Jason Jacob Prince. The best part of my life. We were very close. After my daughter died, Jason came to live with me.”
I felt sorry for the man, who had aged a decade in the past few minutes.
“What about Ashley?”
“Jason’s wife? Her real name is Laura Ashton Prince.”
“Why the names Vince and Ashley Jacobson?”
Michael shrugged, “We didn’t know they were using these names until we got here. But I can guess—Viola and Prince, to come up with Vince. Ashley taken from Laura’s middle name of Ashton. Jacobson from the obvious.”
“Clever, but amateurish nonetheless.” Aaron shook his head in annoyance. Still, it confirmed my theory.
“And her family is from Birmingham?” I asked.
“How on earth did you determine that?” Michael asked.
I told them about her mentioning the statue of Vulcan.
“Were they in the Witness Protection Program?” Despite Brooks having denied it earlier, I put it out there.
Michael made a face, and I prepared for my suggestion to be rejected again.
“Maybe they wouldn’t be in this mess if they had been.” Aaron let out a deep sigh. “I don’t suppose there’s any harm in her knowing.”
“Knowing what?”
“They were actually being prepped to enter the program when the situation turned on them, so to speak,” Michael answered.
I wasn’t so far off the mark, after all. This acknowledgement filled me with a small sense of validation. Both Brooks and Daniel had eschewed my theory—presumably, Brooks hadn’t known, but I wondered if Daniel had been trying to divert my path because I was getting too close to a truth that would have exposed his duplicity.
“But they’d gone rogue.” Aaron shook his head.
“And went to Albany?”
He nodded. “They were put in touch with a private protection agency. A man named Henry Beamer was their security officer. Thus, the reference to O’Henry.”
Henry Beamer was the man
from Albany who’d checked into Hilliard House. “They were frightened of this man?”
“Frightened?” Aaron considered the question. “I hope not. But it appears from their message they no longer trusted him.”
“They were worried enough to send an SOS to Aaron,” Michael added.
I chewed on this bit of information. “So, feeling vulnerable in Albany, they came up with the fake identities on their own?”
“Evidently. They must have felt it safer to take their chances elsewhere, alone.”
“I still don’t understand why they’d insist the letter be postmarked from Albany. Wouldn’t a Whale Rock zip code be more helpful to you in finding them?”
“Possibly, but it was preestablished that any correspondence from Albany would be treated with utmost urgency. Because I travel extensively, my secretary was instructed to immediately contact me about any letter with an Albany postmark. Otherwise, my personal correspondence was to remain untouched until I returned.”
“And since they couldn’t risk being seen in Albany, they paid someone to deliver the letter for them.”
“A logical deduction.”
“But you didn’t show up for weeks after their disappearance.”
“It seems the person they entrusted to mail the letter forgot to affix a stamp. It’s lucky I even received it. I hope you didn’t pay dearly to get that coin back.”
He was a shrewd man. My thoughts turned briefly to Cindy. To drive all the way to Albany and then not even check to see if the letter was stamped?
“So, the reason they went on the run has something to do with whatever they hid?” I asked. “Have you discussed any of this with the FBI?”
Both men were silent far too long, which was answer enough. It was Aaron who eventually spoke.
“The authorities in Boston are of the position there is no message on the rope; that it’s a series of knots, nothing more.”
I was burning at the thought of Daniel taking part in those discussions. Yet another deception.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“I believe the rope holds the key to finding out where my grandson is. And perhaps the good fellows of the FBI just aren’t good enough to decode it.”
This made me smile.
“Now, I’ve answered a number of your questions and I need—or rather, Michael needs—to look at the rope they left.”
Clearly my friends had wanted Aaron to find the rope and the message it contained, so I could no longer deny them access. I escorted them to the kitchen and brought out the rope.
We sat together at the table while Michael examined the rope, comparing it to a sheet of paper he’d extracted from his messenger bag. After nearly half an hour of deep concentration, he set the rope down, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and admitted defeat.
“Nothing’s coming of this, even with these notes from the FBI about the knots.”
“Maybe you’ve done a better job coming up with some kind of message?” Aaron suggested.
“May I?” Michael handed me a photocopied page of knots similar to the ones I’d downloaded. When I was first teaching Vince to sail, I’d loaned him my father’s original copy of The Art of the Sailor, a basic handbook with illustrations of sailing knots. Unfortunately, I hadn’t found it among the belongings Ashley and Vince had left behind.
I opened my folder and quickly appraised the notations before sliding the top sheet of paper across the table for Michael to translate to Aaron while I explained.
“There are three sets of knots, each separated by a length free of knots. Let’s take the first set. See where I’ve listed the knots in order?” I pointed to each knot on the rope as I recited the names. “Ashley stopper. Grief knot. Half hitch. Eye splice. This one I believe is a noose knot but it looks different since it’s not at the end of the rope. This one isn’t used in sailing, but a consultant working with the Whale Rock police determined it to be a savoy knot. And lastly the thief knot.”
I pulled out another page where I’d written A–G–H–E–N–S–T and showed it to Michael. “This is an anagram using the first letter of each knot. To me they’re nothing more than a jumble of letters, but to someone who knew them more intimately, it might hold a special significance.”
Michael read the letters aloud and sounded them out before asking, “Does that mean anything to you, Aaron?”
The older man moved his lips as he mentally repeated the letters. Then he shook his head.
“What about this second set of knots?” Again I recited the names followed by an anagram. “True love. Eye splice. Whistle knot. Eye splice. Bowline. T-E-W-E-B.”
“At one point I thought the actual names of the knots might have told a story. Especially since one of the knots was an Ashley stopper. But since you didn’t know the new names they’d assumed, following that track doesn’t work.” I flipped through the downloaded pages. “The problem with deciphering knots is that some of them have more than one name. For example, the bowline is also known as blindman’s knot.”
Aaron made a face. “You might be on to something. Could it be about Whistler and me?”
“Possibly. If these knots do have a secret code, it’s safe to say that Vince was more adept at coming up with them than we are at decoding them.”
While the men conferred about what I’d written, I fiddled with the rope that had been left tied to the bicycles. I then pulled out the piece of rope I’d retrieved from the trash the day I found the corner of Ashley’s letter, hoping it might hold a clue. As I compared them, I noticed that on the practice rope, a grief knot had been used in place of a thief knot.
“Can you please pass my notes back to me?” I made a correction to what I’d first written. “I wonder if Vince mixed up two of the knots, which would be easy to do since the grief knot and thief knot are very similar. If he confused them, it changes the anagram.”
I pushed the paper back for them to see. “Look what it says when I correct it.”
“A-T-H-E-N-S—G. Athens.” Michael said to Aaron, who was smiling broadly for the first time since I met him.
“Athens, Georgia? Is that where they’ve gone?” This fit with none of the facts I’d gathered.
“What are these other notes?” Michael ignored my question and pointed to my scribblings about the last three knots on the tale of the rope.
“The first is an eye splice, the second is a rapala knot, which is used in fishing. It took me awhile to figure that one out. And the last is another grief knot. Or it’s a thief knot, depending on if he was making it correctly.”
“ERT or ERG.” Michael said to Aaron, who frowned and shook his head again.
As I studied those last three knots intently, something finally clicked into place. Percy and Celeste had been adamant in their message, repeatedly opening up my laptop to the photo of Ashley and Vince in the cemetery. But I hadn’t understood until just this minute as that sweet familiar aroma filled the room. Eye splice = Look. Rapala knot = R. Thief knot = T. Look at R.T. Look at Robert Toomey.
“Any thoughts?” Michael asked me.
“None whatsoever,” I lied, glad Aaron was unable to see my face. He wasn’t telling me everything, so why shouldn’t I keep this possible clue to myself? I might need to use it as a bargaining chip later.
* * *
An hour later, the transaction had been completed. Funds had been transferred into my Seaman’s Bank account, and Lu had been instructed to package up and send the portraits of the Jacobsons to the Montana address. The three of us were now standing at the grave marker for Barnacle Boy.
“He was an unknown boy who washed up on our shores. Folks around here always referred to him as the Barnacle Boy. Nobody ever figured out who he was or where he came from. Ashley and Vince had been moved by the story. When I first discovered what they’d done with the plants and the statue, I’d assumed it was a tribute to a poor little boy whom nobody knew. I felt it was a private gesture and never mentioned it to them.”
Now I was wi
shing I had. Perhaps then they would have confided in me.
“A gesture of some significance.” Aaron’s sightless eyes could still show emotion.
“It’s solid. No secret hiding compartment.” Michael had turned the statue of Winnie the Pooh onto its side. Then with a small shovel he’d brought from the car, he proceeded to dig up the area under where the statue had been standing guard. I understood their need to check for themselves, but I also knew it would be a fruitless endeavor.
“What’s the harm in telling me what you think might’ve been there?” I persisted.
“Some secrets are best left buried.”
Hadn’t I heard that enough lately?
“And that is all I intend to say on the subject.” It was spoken with solemn finality.
Aaron had what he needed from me, and I had nothing left to barter with, at least nothing I was certain of at the moment. I stole a quick glance over at Robert Toomey’s grave, wondering what my young friends might’ve left there.
“Ashley was obviously disturbed when she came across this marker, and you called their selection of the spot a gesture of significance. How so?” I asked.
“Remind me again how the marker reads?”
I did the honors. “Bless this unknown boy who washed upon our shores.”
“It’s not a happy story,” he cautioned.
“My family has managed to survive by clinging to the fibers of its own heartbreaking tales.”
“Very well. If you insist on knowing.” Aaron sighed deeply. “My daughter-in-law lost a younger brother to a drowning incident when he was six years old. She was eleven at the time and was swimming with him when they both got caught in an undertow. Her father nearly drowned trying to rescue his children, succeeding in saving only her. It wasn’t until weeks later that the little boy’s ravaged body washed up on shore, discovered by strangers. She always felt responsible for the drowning.”
“No wonder she reacted so strongly when she first saw Barnacle Boy’s stone,” I whispered, my eyes held tightly shut as I tried to imagine the burden Ashley carried with her.
“Her parents had another son, a late-in-life baby, of whom she’s become extremely protective. I suppose it’s quite hard for her not to be in touch with her little brother now.”
House of Ashes Page 31