“I broke a window. Okay? In the bird room.”
That agreed with Sherri’s report. “So, you lied to me the last time I asked about the holes.”
“I was thinking about owning up, but then Samantha staged her big confession scene.”
“Upstaged you, did she?” Liss fought a smile as she helped Boxer carry his possessions out to her car. “Never mind. Did you find anything?”
“No.”
Once they were outside the trailer, Liss opened the hatchback and folded down the seats to make more room. Two more trips completed the loading. Having collected everything he’d come for, Boxer returned to the trailer only long enough to lock the door, then climbed in on the passenger side.
Liss took her place behind the wheel. “How did you get in the second time, when you dug up the skeleton?” When silence ensued, she started the engine, but she gave him a hard look before pulling out of the driveway. “You couldn’t have opened the tunnel entrance from the outside.”
“Blame it on the cops,” he muttered.
“Okay. Blame what on the cops?”
Boxer was slouched as low on his spine as his seatbelt would allow. Liss fought the urge to tell him to sit up straight. From his posture, he was either embarrassed or feeling rebellious. Maybe a little of both.
“I went back out there after the local cops fixed the window and left. The back door was unlocked.” He responded to Liss’s skeptical sideways glance with another shrug. “Somebody got careless.”
“So you just waltzed right in?” Liss’s hands clenched on the steering wheel. “Boxer, there’s a murderer on the loose. Didn’t it occur to you that he might have—?”
“What? Returned to the scene of the crime? That only happens in books. Besides, how would anybody but the cops get in?”
“Maybe he picked the lock. How do I know? The point is, you took a foolish risk.”
“There was nobody there, Liss.”
“Are you sure?”
His silence spoke volumes.
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You broke a window, got in, did some digging in the basement, then had to stop because Sherri and I discovered the holes.”
A nod.
“Then you went back and found the door unlocked, so you went in again and started digging again, only deeper?
“Well, first I opened up the tunnel, so I could get in and out. Then I made sure all the doors were locked. I didn’t want anybody interrupting me while I was treasure hunting, did I? I was startled when I turned up bones instead of gold.”
Liss pulled into the driveway beside Moosetookalook Scottish Emporium and killed the engine. Then she folded her arms on the steering wheel and let her head fall forward on top of them. She felt like banging her forehead against the hard plastic.
“You okay?” The bewilderment in Boxer’s voice was genuine.
Liss straightened and glowered at him. “Did you even look around first, to be sure there was no one in the house? Or did you just trot merrily down the cellar steps?”
“I never once ran into anyone else out there. Not when Ned was still alive and not afterward.”
“Dumb luck, mister! You had no idea how that door came to be unlocked. You took a terrible risk.”
Boxer paled as he thought back on that day. “I didn’t hear anyone in the house.”
“But you went straight down to the basement, right?”
He nodded. “I looked things over, and then I went looking for a crowbar. There are all kinds of old tools over in the corner by the furnace.”
“So it was a while before you started ripping the boards off to unblock the tunnel entrance. Whoever was in the house must have left before you started making so much noise.”
Boxer blew out a breath. “The door was already locked again when I went to check on it. I thought I’d thrown the dead bolt and just didn’t remember doing it, but I guess. . . .”
“Yeah. I’m going to have nightmares about this,” Liss added in a mutter.
She got out of the car and Boxer followed suit. She didn’t ask him any more questions until they’d carried everything up to Margaret’s apartment.
“Did you find the skeleton that same day?” Liss asked when she’d put the kettle on and had found two packets of instant hot chocolate in her aunt’s kitchen cabinets.
Boxer’s non-committal grunt was no answer.
“How many times, exactly, did you go out there after you discovered that unlocked door?”
“A couple. I told you how hard the ground was. But that spot looked a little different somehow. The dirt was off-color. Guess we know why now, but I was hoping for a pot of gold. I got out of there pretty quick after that skull turned up. I haven’t been back since.”
“You used the tunnel to get in and out?”
He nodded and thanked her when she handed him one of the steaming mugs. He blew on the hot liquid to cool it.
“Ever snoop around upstairs?”
“Not so you’d notice.”
Liss had the feeling he was holding something back, but she couldn’t imagine what it might be. “Anything else I ought to know?” she asked as she heard her aunt’s footsteps on the stairs.
“Nope, but I’ve got a question for you.”
“Let’s hear it.”
He grinned at her. “You got any cookies to go with this cocoa? I’m starving.”
The Emporium was quiet the next morning. There wasn’t a sound from the apartment above. Boxer was in school and Aunt Margaret had already left for work by the time Liss went through her usual routine of booting up the cash register and her laptop. She checked the website for new orders and, finding none, clicked on her favorite search engine.
Time for some research.
Trying to find out where the legend of Blackie O’Hare’s “treasure” had originated was painstaking work, complicated by the fact that if she didn’t enter the right search string, nothing relevant came up. Changing a single word could make a huge difference. She played with assorted combinations all morning without finding much in the way of solid information. She gave up by lunchtime.
Sherri phoned at one. “Nothing yet on missing antiques,” she reported. “Jeff and I are going out to the Chadwick mansion this afternoon to start checking the contents against the inventory, but I thought you’d like to know that the bones from the basement turned out to be one of Blackie O’Hare’s alleged victims.”
“We assumed that. Didn’t we?” That was part of the reason Liss had been surfing the Web. She’d wanted more information on the late mob hit man.
“Now we know. We also know that Blackie was here in Moosetookalook at least once after his wife died . . . to bury the body. But the important thing is that the remains were left in the cellar decades ago. They have no connection to Ned’s murder.”
Liss wasn’t so sure about that.
Chapter Fifteen
When a second attempt also failed to find anything useful online, Liss broke down and returned to the library. She waved hello to Dolores and headed directly to the file cabinets that contained the folders full of clippings. She wasn’t surprised when the librarian followed her and watched with blatant curiosity as Liss extracted the one labeled with Blackie O’Hare’s name.
“Something I can help you with, Liss?” Dolores asked.
“I’m good for the moment, thanks.”
She carried the file to the nearest table and sat down, hoping Dolores would take the hint and go away. She should have known better. Every time she glanced up, it was to meet the librarian’s avid gaze.
Ignore her, Liss told herself. Skim through the material and get out.
But skimming wasn’t possible. The yellowed clippings in the file folder covered everything from Blackie’s marriage to the Chadwick heiress to his trial and imprisonment, to his eventual murder while still in jail. This last had taken place at about the same time Liss started college. She was surprised, initially, to realize that Blackie had died so long ago. It had
apparently taken several years to settle his estate and almost as many more for the town to go through whatever legal maneuvers had been necessary to seize the property for unpaid taxes.
The list of crimes Blackie had allegedly committed was long and chilling. Liss came across more than one hint in the press that he had killed more people than the police knew about. An involuntary shiver racked her as she remembered the bones in the cellar of the Chadwick mansion. It seemed that Blackie had been very successful in his career as a hit man for the mob.
Dolores had filed an entire page from one Massachusetts newspaper. Liss unfolded it and discovered in-depth coverage of the investigation into Blackie’s death. The paper was published in the town where the prison was located, which accounted for the local interest.
Blackie had been stabbed, but although the other prisoners had been subjected to repeated questioning over a period of several months, prison authorities had not been able to determine who had wielded the fatal knife. Liss supposed that many people, especially the families of Blackie’s victims, felt he’d deserved his fate. Some probably wanted to give a medal to the person who removed Blackie from the earth. Liss sighed as she refolded the page in quarters, once more hiding the final chapter of Blackie’s life on the inside. Nothing was ever solved by more killing.
What had she expected to find? Liss had to admit that she had no idea. It had seemed logical to look into Blackie’s history, since so much of what had happened seemed to revolve around the search for his “loot,” but the only conclusion she’d come to was that there probably wasn’t any treasure at all. Nowhere in anything she’d read had she found mention of missing money or jewels or gold . . . or anything else of value.
Blackie, for all his faults, had not been a bank robber or a cat burglar. He’d done one thing and done it well and had been well paid for it. He’d also spent a fortune on lawyers after his arrest.
More and more, as time went by, Liss felt certain that the only thing he’d buried in the basement of the house in Moosetookalook had been the body of one of his victims.
Abandoning her quest, she started to gather up the clippings and photocopies of articles about Blackie O’Hare. They were spread all over the surface of the library table.
“Those were in chronological order to start with,” Dolores said.
Liss jumped. The librarian was standing right behind her. “For heaven’s sake, Dolores! You scared me out of six years’ growth.”
“At your age, you should have stopped growing,” came the tart reply. “I mean it. Put those back in the order you found them or let me do it. It’s common courtesy to the next library patron who wants to look through that file.”
Since Liss saw her point, she took the time to sort and rearrange, finishing up with the last item in the stack, the folded page from the Massachusetts paper. She was just tucking it back into the file folder when a name caught her eye.
Lowell Danby.
Liss frowned. Wasn’t he the man Chase Forster was looking for on a probation violation?
Curiosity compelled her to read the entire piece, which was printed on the back of the page with the story about the investigation of Blackie’s murder. It was short and to the point. Lowell Danby, age forty-three, had been released from prison because his conviction for armed robbery had been overthrown on appeal.
“What are the odds?” Liss murmured.
She didn’t believe in coincidences and Lowell Danby was not a common name. It was a pretty good bet that the man who’d been in prison with Blackie O’Hare in Massachusetts was identical to the one who, a dozen years later, spent time incarcerated in a correctional facility in Maine with her cousin Ned. She wasn’t sure what significance this conclusion had, but was certain it meant something.
With the clippings all neatly rearranged in chronological order, Liss returned the file folder to Dolores and headed back to work. She might have to return to search through the library’s collection of Maine newspapers on microfilm, but first she intended to give the Internet another try . . . away from Dolores Mayfield’s prying eyes.
At the Emporium there were no customers to distract her. Liss typed Danby’s name into a search engine and grimaced at the number of hits it generated. She put the name in quotes and tried again, narrowing the field from thousands to mere hundreds. On impulse, she clicked on IMAGES and was instantly rewarded. Three .jpg files came up and only one of them showed a person.
The thumbnail was too tiny to see well. Liss clicked on it and was taken to a newspaper site that wanted her to sign up and pay a fee before she searched further. Liss tried SEE FULL-SIZED IMAGE instead, then enlarged what popped up on her screen by tinkering with the setting she usually left at 100% to view websites. Unfortunately, the only thing that increasing the size of the image accomplished was to make the photo of “Lowell Danby” blurrier. She could make out little more than a bushy head of light-colored hair above eyes and a nose.
Liss stared at the screen, trying to put her finger on why she felt there was something familiar about the man’s face. Had she seen him in Moosetookalook? It was not impossible, but she could not recall. She let her gaze rove over the shelves and racks full of Scottish imports, not really seeing any of them, with the nagging sense that somewhere, sometime, she had met this man in person.
“Overactive imagination,” she muttered. The figure in the photo could be anyone.
Still, if Danby had known both Blackie and Ned, then there was a possibility, however slight, that he could have been involved in Ned’s death. It was a leap, and Liss had no facts to back her up, but if Ned had moved into the mansion to hunt for Blackie’s treasure, why not Danby? Maybe they’d been working together. Maybe they’d found the cache of cash and quarreled over splitting the loot. Or maybe Ned had been blackmailing Danby, threatening to turn him in for probation violation and send him back to prison. If either guess was accurate, Lowell Danby would have had a reason to kill her cousin.
Liss wasted no time sharing her theory with Sherri Campbell, but it was nearly a week later before Sherri offered any update on the case to her civilian friend. Meanwhile, Hilary Snipes remained in jail, still charged with Ned’s murder.
“It looks as if Ned did know Lowell Danby,” Sherri said between sips of coffee. “They worked in the prison woodworking shop together.”
“Woodworking? I thought prisoners made license plates.”
“Some do. Some make furniture. Others make clothing. You should visit the prison store sometime. The prices are really good.”
“Ah, Sherri—we’re trying to open a storefront that sells custom woodworking products right next door. We don’t need you to shill for the competition, thank you very much.”
Sherri chuckled and helped herself to a slice of apple loaf, another specialty of Patsy’s Coffee House. She and Liss were ensconced in the cozy corner of the Emporium. It was a Tuesday morning in April and they had the place to themselves.
“So,” Liss summarized, ignoring her own coffee. “You’re saying that Ned would have recognized Danby if he ran into him after they were both out of jail.” That went along with her own thinking.
At Sherri’s nod, Liss continued. “If Ned knew there was a warrant out for Danby—”
“But how would he know that?” Sherri interrupted.
“Wouldn’t it be posted at the probation office?”
“Doubtful. Besides, Ned opened his bank account before he reported in to Chase Forster.”
“Darn. I really liked the idea that Ned was blackmailing Danby with the threat to turn him in.”
“It’s still a possibility. Or maybe Ned knew something else about him. Or maybe, as you also suggested, they were in this together.” Sherri shook her head as if amazed by her own credulity. “I’m as bad as you are when it comes to speculating, but it makes a crazy kind of sense that if Danby knew Blackie in Massachusetts he could have heard something about buried loot from him. The horse’s mouth, so to speak. Years later, Danby met Ned, got to talki
ng, discovered that Ned was from Moosetookalook and that he knew all about Blackie’s house and the legend of hidden treasure. Sure would explain those holes dug in the cellar floor.”
Liss covered her silence by sipping coffee. She had no intention of betraying Boxer’s confidences. What harm did it do to let Sherri think Danby had been the one who’d uncovered the skeleton? That Danby had been in the house was all too chillingly possible. If he’d been the one who’d left the kitchen door unlocked, then Boxer had been lucky indeed not to have run into him.
“There is another possibility,” Sherri said. “In fact, it’s the real reason I came by today. We finished taking inventory at the Chadwick mansion.”
“And?”
“There are several items missing—all valuable, all easily portable. Of course, we have no idea when they disappeared from the house. It could have been anytime in the last couple years.”
“Since the town seized the property for back taxes.”
“Right.”
“Do you think Ned might have caught Danby robbing the place?”
Sherri gave a shrug that was eerily like Boxer’s. “Could be. It’s equally possible there’s another explanation that has nothing to do with either Ned or Danby.”
“And for all we know, Danby may have fled to Canada or Mexico or Timbuktu months ago.”
“Yup.”
They drank more coffee.
“So, what’s gone missing?” Liss asked after a short silence.
Sherri pulled a list out of her pocket and handed it over. Liss skimmed the items, stopping when she came to brown oil lamp from bedroom two.
“Oil or owl?” she asked, showing Sherri the item.
“No idea. We were checking against the inventory descriptions. Do you remember seeing an owl in one of the bedrooms? Don’t tell me it was another of those creepy stuffed birds!”
“If it’s what I’m thinking of, it’s an owl-shaped brown glass chimney on a small electric lamp. From the early twentieth century, I think. I assumed it was supposed to be used as a nightlight. The important thing is that it was still there in late September when Dan and I paid our first visit to the mansion.”
Vampires, Bones and Treacle Scones (A Liss MacCrimmon Mystery) Page 20