by K. J. Emrick
Cookie tried to edge over to Jerry. She could see blood on his neck where he lay face down. She needed to check on him. He wasn’t waking up. If he was hurt that bad he needed help…
“Uh, uh, uh,” Archie said, stepping between her and Jerry. “None of that. I need you to do something for me first.”
“And then what?” Cookie snapped. “You’re just going to let me and Jerry go? You’ll turn yourself in? What are you even doing here!”
“Calm down, now. You’ll give yourself a heart attack.” He actually smiled at her, and she wanted so badly to smack that look off his face. “What I’m doing here, since you asked, is looking for something. I know it’s here. I want you to tell me where it’s hiding.”
“So it’s true. You were coming down here to find something. Is that why you wanted those newspapers? You thought they would tell you where to find… whatever it is?”
Archie scowled and tossed a hand through the air. “Bah. The newspapers were a dead end. All that work to get our obedient police chief to steal those discs from the library and there wasn’t a single thing in there that was useful. I mean, I found out a lot of family history, sure, but that isn’t going to help me find it.”
“Find… wait. Family history? Your family history?”
His smile widened. “Haven’t figured it out yet, have you? Did you seriously think it was our mayor who killed the police chief? I’m actually kind of hurt that you didn’t even suspect me. Quinn is so… straight-laced. Plus, she’s got that whole smarter-than-thou thing going on. It’s really very annoying. Maybe I’ll find some way to, you know, have her replaced. Like I did Chief Santimaw.”
Cookie’s mind was reeling. She was worried for Jerry and scared for her own life but the things Archie was saying had the pieces of this mystery swirling around in her head, reshaping themselves and fitting together again in totally different ways. She and Jerry had assumed it was the mayor who asked Rick Santimaw to steal the newspaper discs because who besides the mayor could order the chief of police to do something like that?
The town selectmen could. That’s who.
Archibald Winters was a selectman. He was part of the town council, which meant he had keys to all the municipal buildings. Archibald Winters had taken the phone call from Jerry meant for Quinn. Archibald Winters had said…
Had said… his family history…
“The Merriams are your family.” Cookie couldn’t believe this. “You’re a great grandson to Jozebus!”
“Not something I like to advertise, but yes. I am. Old Jozebus had three sons, you see. One of them was the father of our most famous citizen, George Merriam. One of them died in that blistering fire on Main Street. Then there was a third one—”
“Solan!” Cookie remembered now. The morning she’d taken over Danishes to George, he’d told her all about his Grandpap’s family, including the three children of Jozebus and Hester. Including Solan, who had married young and moved out of the area.
Archibald was Solan’s grandson.
That brought up so many questions in Cookie’s mind. So many things to ask, but the only one that came out was the one foremost in her mind. “Did you know this cellar was here?”
He shrugged. “I’d heard stories from my dad. He didn’t know either, of course, because the family had moved on from their butcher shop business long before.” He walked over to a wall, pushing at the stones randomly. “I thought it was here, but I wasn’t sure. I even gave you that permit to expand your building with that storage shed out back hoping you’d dig down and find something but you didn’t, did you? Still… I was hoping.”
“Hoping for what?” she asked, inching closer to Jerry.
He ignored her, like she hadn’t said anything at all. “Imagine. All my life I heard I was part of the Merriam family of Widow’s Rest. Only, my side of the family is considered sort of the black sheep. We left town, after all. We dared to think bigger than this little slice of American pie and we were ostracized for it. I’ve spent all my life knowing I was part of one of the richest families in New England but not being able to step up and claim what was rightfully mine.”
Cookie kept her eyes on him as she moved. “What are you talking about? I’ve been to the retirement home where George Merriam lives. He’s hardly swimming in riches.”
“That’s because no one else in the family knows the secret.” He turned around, freezing Cookie in her tracks. “How do you think great grandmother Hester Merriam had all that money to donate to the town after she killed Jozebus? Oh, I know she killed him. She only told one of her sons what she’d done, and that was my grandfather Solan. He was her favorite. You were right about her killing him. I just can’t believe you figured it out. She murdered him, and locked him down here in chains to rot, like a side of beef. Then she boarded over the wall and told everyone it was because her son had died in a fire and her husband had died at sea and she just couldn’t carry on with the shop anymore.”
He came right over to Cookie, making her back up, and away from Jerry again. “But she still had money, didn’t she? Lots and lots of money to donate to rebuild the town. Enough that they renamed the place in her honor. Widow’s Rest. Ha. What a farce. If they’d known she was a murderer, they never would’ve accepted a dime from her. So tell me, Cookie, where’d her money come from? Certainly not from the income a butcher shop afforded. No. She had another source of income.”
“Please Archie, let me check on Jerry.”
“This other source of income,” he said, ignoring her again, “was silver.”
Cookie heard Jerry’s voice in her memory, as they were reading through the newspapers. They had read articles on several things, including mining rights for silver right here in Widow’s Rest. “You’re saying Hester Merriam struck silver when she dug this root cellar?”
“Yes, I am. They were saving the money for their future. Only, Hester went a little nuts and destroyed her future. She told Solan about the silver, and he told his daughter, who told my mother, who told me.” He began pacing, back and forth, still in between Cookie and Jerry. “I’ve waited, all these years, to find her secret stash. I know she buried some of it here. I know she did! She was a shrewd woman, Hester Merriam. See, she didn’t just seal up this cellar to make a grave for her husband. She sealed it up to hide part of her fortune.”
That’s what all this was about, Cookie realized. Money. Silver. Now things were making sense. “You killed Rick Santimaw because he knew about the silver.”
“He did, he did. Yeah. See, stealing from a library was beneath our good friend the police chief. The only way I could get Rick to do that was to promise to pay him. A lot. He didn’t think I had it, I had to tell him where the money would come from, and so on and on. He knew and I couldn’t risk him telling anyone. Despite agreeing to take my money Rick Santimaw was what we refer to as a straight arrow. The law meant everything to him. For me… it’s a little more gray.”
Without looking, he raised his foot and swung it backward, kicking Jerry in the chest.
“Don’t!” Cookie cried out. “Please, Archie, you don’t have to do this. We don’t know anything. I didn’t even know this place was here!”
She was starting to sound like a broken record but she didn’t care. It was true. If there was silver in this room she had no idea where it would be.
He studied her face. “You’re telling the truth, aren’t you? Have you even looked?”
Cookie nodded. Her hands were starting to tremble and she wasn’t sure if she should trust her voice. Jerry was so very still. There was blood, and he wasn’t moving…
Archibald slammed the side of his fist into the stone wall of the stairwell. “I know it’s here! You see my blood right there? Right there on that bottom step. I bled for this. I fell on those stairs and scraped my shin up and I bled for this! I’ve killed for this! You tell me where that silver is or so help me God I’ll kill again. This time, it will be your fiancé!”
“Don’t!” she shouted. “
Please don’t do this! We don’t know where to… look…”
Something clicked in her head. Cookie wondered if it could be that simple, or if it even mattered. Archibald was going to kill Jerry. He was going to kill her. If he’d killed Rick Santimaw after promising to pay him off, there was no way that he was going to let them live.
“What is it?” Archibald asked her. “I see that look on your face. You know something, don’t you? You know something, Cookie. You tell me what it is. Where’s my silver?”
She couldn’t tell him. She couldn’t say what she had just figured out or she was dead, and so was Jerry.
But if she didn’t get some help for Jerry, and right now, she was afraid he was going to be dead anyway.
“Tell me!” Archibald screamed at her. Then, when she didn’t say anything, he dropped to his knees and picked up Jerry’s head by the hair and put his other hand around Jerry’s throat. “Tell me!”
“No don’t do it!” Now she didn’t care what would happen next. She had to tell him where to look. She couldn’t let him hurt Jerry again. “I’ll tell you. Just… let Jerry go. He never saw you. He doesn’t know you’re here.”
“Talk,” he said to her, “and I’ll consider it.”
Cookie steeled herself. This was it. She was going to give her life up to save Jerry.
She clasped her hands together, held them together tight, and she could feel the hard circle of silver around her ring finger. The ring that Jerry had put on her hand. If she was right, and if the mentally unhinged Archibald was right, then her ring wasn’t the only silver down here. She braced herself, knowing that whatever happened next, she would have done everything she could to save Jerry’s life.
“All right,” she breathed, fighting back the tears. “I’ll tell you.”
Clank.
The noise was hollow, and metallic. At the same time, Cookie and Archibald looked up the stairs.
Clank. Clank.
Rolling down from above, one step at a time, one of the cooking pots from the kitchen came bouncing towards them.
Clank, Clank.
All the way up at the top of the stairs, Cream stuck his head around the door, smiling with his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth.
“Well,” Archibald said. “There’s something you don’t see every day.”
Cookie was already moving when the pot reached the bottom of the stairs. Cream had bought her the time she needed to save herself and Jerry too and she wasn’t going to waste it. The frying pan was only a few feet away, laying where it had dropped. She lunged over and scooped it up by its handle. Archibald looked back just in time to see the old frying pan racing towards his face…
He fell harder than Jerry had, smacking his skull against the hard stones of the wall on the way down. The crunch of breaking bone was audible in the silence.
Cream padded down to the last stone stair, right over Jerry, sniffing at him as he went from one side of the step to the other. Then he looked up at Cookie and huffed.
Jerry stirred at that exact moment, moaning and curling in on himself, lifting a hand to the spot where Archibald had smacked him.
Cookie dropped the frying pan and fell to her knees at his side. His eyes blinked open when she touched his face. She could hardly see him through her tears but it didn’t matter. He was alive. He was going to be all right so long as she could get him to a hospital soon. She had to call people. She had to call for the police and she had to call for an ambulance and then there was the mayor and… and…
Cream bounced up on his front paws, whining for her attention, until she caught him up in her arms and squeezed him tight. “You saved us, Cream. You wonderful, amazing, incredible little dog you. Thank you. Oh, thank you so much. I love you, Cream.”
He barked, and licked at her hands, and she knew he was saying those words back to her.
***
“Are you sure about this?”
“No,” Cookie told him. “I’m not. How’s your head?”
Jerry gingerly touched the spot at the back of his skull. There were four stitches there to remind him he needed to watch his back.
Of course, Archibald’s injury had taken eight stitches. Cookie was very proud of herself when she heard that.
“My head’s fine,” Jerry told her. “I think we need to have yours checked, though. Do you really think there’s silver down here?”
“Archie did.”
Holding the hanging blankets aside, Jerry opened the door to the secret cellar for her. “Archie also smacked me with a frying pan, killed Rick Santimaw, and threatened to kill you and me. I’m not putting a lot of stock in anything Archibald Winters said. Even if he is a member of the Merriam family.”
“What did George say when you told him?” Cookie asked, carefully moving down the stone steps carrying a pry bar.
“He told me a story about his grandfather and a sausage grinder.” Jerry hefted the shovel up so the blade wouldn’t scrape on the stones. “Not sure he really much cared one way or the other.”
Cookie nodded. It was exactly three days since the chaotic end of the centennial celebration that had seen the death of the town police chief and the arrest of his killer, who had turned out to be a relative of the woman the town was named after. The mayor was… less than thrilled about the news stories coming out of Widow’s Rest. There had been rumors going around that she was going to organize a vote to have the town’s name changed again.
Cookie couldn’t blame her, but at the same time all those articles and television news stories and internet posts had brought hundreds of tourists to town. Not that she was happy about seeing her sales figures increase because of a man’s death, but changing the town’s name would only feed the frenzy. Maybe she’d mention that to Quinn the next time she saw her. Then again, if Quinn thought she was so smart, maybe Cookie would let her figure it out on her own.
Hamish had gone back to culinary school, and the goodbyes between him and Clarissa had been bittersweet. Cookie had stayed far enough away that she wasn’t imposing on their whispered words and their gentle kisses, but close enough that she could hear what they said anyway. She might not have to live vicariously through her granddaughter but that didn’t mean she couldn’t enjoy the first blush of romance through Clarissa’s eyes.
Before he left, officers from the state police organized crime division had arrested the two men who had beaten him up. After finding the records of their illegal gambling enterprise, the case had made news headlines of its own. It was doubtful those two would see the outside of a jail cell for several years. Hamish wouldn’t have to worry about them ever again. Neither would Hamish’s father. For now, that issue was resolved.
Cookie was very proud of Jerry. A man who used the authority he’d been given to help people was the best sort of man, in her opinion.
“All right,” he said to her now. The room was bright under the emergency stanchion lights again, and they were standing in the middle of the room by the end of the stairwell. “So where do you want to begin, oh great treasure hunter?”
With the tip of her pry bar, Cookie pointed at the spot where she wanted to start looking.
The bottom step, where Archibald’s blood still stained the cracked stone.
It had occurred to her, standing here with Archibald’s hands around Jerry’s throat, that the only stones they hadn’t checked in this whole entire room were the stones they walked on every time they came down here. The old, worn stone steps.
Jerry shrugged. “Good a place as any. Here. Give me that.”
He traded the shovel to her for the pry bar, and then crammed it into the crease of the stones. Using his weight, he shoved down on it, levering the stone out of position with a cracking noise like a gunshot.
“Well. That was easier than I thought it would be.”
Dropping the pry bar down to the floor, he bent to pull the stone up and aside.
Cookie looked into the opening underneath. She reached down to take Jerry’s hand, and he
held hers tightly.
“I love you Jerry Stansted,” she told him.
Reaching into the empty space, Jerry took out a solid lump of shiny metal from among several. “I love you too, Karen Williams. And I’m not just saying that because you’re now a rich woman.”
“Oh? Then why are you saying it?”
Standing up carefully because of the ceiling, he handed her the raw silver ingot. “Because you’re the only woman I can imagine spending the rest of my life with. That’s why.”
The lump was heavy in her hand, but she held it tight as she fell into his arms. “Then I suppose we can expect to have many more adventures together.”
“For the rest of our lives,” he agreed. “Let’s just try to keep from nearly dying in the next one, okay?”
“Deal,” she said. “Mystery, and fun, and excitement, but no death.”
“Not until we’re old and gray. All right?”
“Hey now,” she told him. “I’m already gray.”
He hugged her tighter. “True, but you aren’t old.”
Cookie laughed, because he was right. She had never felt so young.
Epilogue
All told, there was just about three thousand dollars’ worth of silver hidden under the first three steps. The others just opened up onto empty space. All that trouble that Archie had gone to, breaking and entering, murder and attempted murder, for just three thousand dollars. Would he have thought that it was worth it, Cookie wondered.
Rather than keeping the find, Cookie gave the money to its proper owner. George and Batina. There was a lot of conflicted emotion the morning she brought it over, packaged in a pastry box, on top of another box full of more Danishes. George had seen the body of his murdered grandfather uncovered, and discovered that his grandmother was responsible for killing his Grandpap, and then found out that he’d been living in the same town as his long lost relation after that relation had also been arrested for murder.