In her own free time, Dee pored over the journal and compared notes from her talks with Peterson to maps and references that indicated the location where the diamonds had been hidden. She could only generalize distances when looking at nautical charts that she came across in the navigation locker.
Meanwhile, the steady whir and click of Marion’s laptop from within her little cabin proved that the solitude and fresh sea air was having a significant effect on the advancement of her friend’s novel. She didn’t talk much about it, but the satisfied glow in her gray eyes as she took over Dee’s watch spoke volumes for the effect of the sea on her creativity.
Starr was forever tinkering in the engine room or down in the bilges or simply lounging on deck with a fishing line rigged up for trolling as they skimmed along. Which almost always resulted in something delectable, like a yellow fin tuna that was barbecued off the fantail for their dinner.
Other than an occasional sail repair or rigging change, Dee wasn’t exactly sure what Hawk did in his cabin during the off-watch. But the enthusiasm and vigor he often brought back on deck proved he was not always sleeping.
Which made her wonder if he wasn’t poring over Peterson’s charts and logbook as avidly as she was deciphering the journal. But she wasn’t about to ask him.
Things were fairly smooth and casual between them and after such a horrendous beginning, neither of them seemed eager to “rock the boat.”
They were all on their best behavior.
By the time they reached San Francisco Bay, Dee and Marion had become familiar with the routines of sailing and being at sea and were even learning to adjust the sails.
They were now linked like a chain to the enormous prospects of their expedition. An electric excitement ran like an undercurrent just below the surface of everything they did.
When they finally sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge and into the city of San Francisco, it was a sunny, blustery afternoon. They tied Pandora at the transient docks set aside for visitors at the Berkley Marina along Market Street.
Even though the women put on light, festive blouses in contrast to their jeans and were ready for a shopping spree, they agreed to meet back aboard in the evening for a dinner and night of sightseeing in the famous city.
After two days on a slanted deck, Dee felt good walking on solid ground again. About four o’clock, when they were enjoying coffee in a little espresso stand along the boardwalk, Dee leaned close to Marion. “Don’t look, Mare, but that guy over at that corner table…the tall one with reddish hair and dark suit…I think he followed us here.”
“Oh, gads, Dee, you’re not going to get paranoid again, are you? He’s probably sightseeing just like us.”
Dee shot another look over at him. Her freshly washed curls were twisted up into a new tortoise-shell clip she had bought, and it was a relief to finally stash the black knit cap into her shoulder bag and not worry about the wind, which was blowing steadily against the back of her neck even in this sheltered nook of the little sidewalk cafe.
“He looks suspicious,” she continued to whisper. “Like he works for the Mafia or the CIA or something. He keeps watching us, too.”
He glanced in their direction and she made a pretense of studying the menu card, even though they already had their coffee.
“What if someone turned us in and there’s an APB out on us?” she asked over the top of the coffee-colored menu card.
A momentary alarm flashed over Marion’s face. “Who would turn us in? Listen, even if they did put out an APB, we’ve only been here a couple of hours. Right? This is a huge city, Dee. How would anyone even know where to look? Believe me, it would be some lucky guess if they thought to look in San Francisco. It’s not even in the same state. You didn’t see any police boats following us, did you?”
“You’re right. It’s carrying this stolen ring around with me: that’s what’s doing it. Probably as cursed as everybody says it is. Worse yet, it probably has the same curse as Achen’s stuff.” She gave an exaggerated shudder and set the card back in its holder.
“I’ve never heard of a pharaoh named Achen,” Marion’s gaze fell on the menu-card. She took it from the holder and pointed at a delectable photo of a fudge brownie a la mode. “Wonder how much that costs? But I don’t know how much of that curse stuff I believe anyway.”
“Achen wasn’t a pharaoh, and curses are definitely real,” said Dee. “I thought you used to teach Sunday school.”
“Six-fifty! Can you believe it? You want to split one?”
“Sure.”
“I didn’t teach the kind of Sunday school you grew up in, Dee.”
“Achen’s story has no gray lines of controversy, Mare. It’s in both our Bibles. Guaranteed.”
“That’s what you always say. Next thing you know, we’re arguing differences. But all right, I’ll take the bait. What sort of curse did Achen have on his stuff?”
“Enemy loot!” Dee’s face took on the animation of her enjoyment of storytelling, and she spoke the words like a reporter describing a hot lead. “He thought he could get a good price for it on the gold market, I guess. Even though the Lord said everything those people made was evil, and He didn’t want anyone to have any of it. Can you believe that?”
“Well, I don’t know. I guess maybe he…”
“Achen kept some anyway and buried it under the floor of his tent. Can’t hide from God, though. That’s why it’s the only place in history you’ll ever hear anything about Achen and his family.”
“What chapter and verse is it in?”
“Off the top of my head? Joshua, maybe. Or one of the early prophets.”
“You see, that’s the beauty of memorizing chapter and verse. It’s like an address. With the exact address, anyone can find their way to it, no matter what church they were raised in. You’re talking about this guy like he was down at the New York Stock Exchange just last week. Here comes the waitress.”
“Go ahead and order that dessert.” Dee slid her chair back and got to her feet. “I’m going to take a few more pictures for my column.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be on vacation?”
“A working vacation if I can talk Devlin into it. Like a travel log or something. Because he still thinks I’m coming back in two weeks.”
“How are we going to keep any secrets if you leave a trail in your column publishing everywhere we’ve been?”
“Not until way after we’ve been there. I can’t just disappear for a whole month without telling him something, I’ll get fired. Here…” She took her camera out of her shoulder bag before shoving it toward Marion. “Why don’t you carry the goods around for a while? I’m telling you, they’re giving me the creeps.”
“All right, I’ll do it. But only if you promise not to rope me into an all-night discussion on whether inanimate objects can be good or evil.”
“OK, I promise. Back in a minute.”
****
Marion had become engrossed in the brownie a la mode. By the time she got concerned about Dee, the coffee was cold, and the man at the corner table had left. She left her brownie and searched. She couldn’t find Dee anywhere.
She screamed. Which brought the owner of the cafe out on a run, as if someone was having a heart attack. He told the waitress to call 911 and darted toward Marion, through the labyrinth of tables and into the little knot of onlookers that now surrounded her. Looking relieved there was no body and he would not have to perform CPR, he listened with sympathy as she wailed that her friend had been kidnapped by one of his patrons.
The police arrived. They gave the routine excuses: complaints of missing persons could not be filed until after forty-eight hours unless the missing person was a child, or there was hard evidence that foul play was involved. Because most of the time adult missing persons tended to be missing of their own accord.
“No woman,” Marion insisted, “ever leaves her purse in a cafe of her own accord! Especially one who is on vacation and only stepped out on the st
reet to snap a picture!”
The two officers conferred together for a moment, after which one went back to the patrol car, only to return a few minutes later and whisper something to his partner. “Mrs. Bates,” the officer in charge studied the notes he had just taken. “It looks like we have something of a coincidence here. Did you and Miss Parker arrive in San Francisco today, aboard a sailing vessel named Pandora?”
Marion blinked her gray eyes in a moment of surprise, thought of being evasive and then thought better of it. “Why, yes, we did,” she finally admitted. “But I can tell you right now, we had every intention of…”
“Just a minute, ma’am.” He turned to his partner again. “Steve, who’s handling that?”
“Dispatch said it was a federal case. Couple guys named Eddington and Reynolds were sent out with a couple of ours this morning to check on the marina. No reports yet, though.”
“Okay. Get them on the radio and have them meet us at the station. Mrs. Bates, we’re going to have to take a ride downtown.”
“Am I under arrest?”
“Not at the moment. But there are some pretty hefty charges here, so I suggest you cooperate.”
“What about, Dee?”
“Every officer in the city has their eye out for her, ma’am. She’ll turn up.”
14
Against the Law
“There are so many murders committed, and the police never catch the murderers…” ~ Nellie Bly
“Excuse me,” Dee said automatically when she backed into someone. She lowered the camera, only to realize she was surrounded by strange men who began to force her backwards into a waiting car.
“Hey…what do you think…” In seconds, she was squeezed into the back seat with two men beside her and two more in front.
A moment more and they were speeding away, leaving the crowded little cafe in their wake, where no one even noticed what had happened.
“Dorothy Jane Parker?” Dee recognized the reddish hair of the man in the front passenger seat.
“Oh, no…” she moaned. “Am I under arrest?”
“Let’s see some identification, first.” He grinned a wide toothy smile, as if he had just won a prize. “Then I’ll let you know.”
“I…well, it’s back at the cafe. In my purse. But I have my social security number engraved on my camera…what sort of arrest is this anyway? Don’t you need a warrant or something?”
“Miss Parker.” He flashed a badge and then put it away before Dee had time to scrutinize it. “Does the name Heinrich Keller mean anything to you?”
“It seems to me”—Dee tried to sound firm and irate while her heart was pounding hard enough for the men next to her to hear—”that I have the right to remain silent.”
“It’s up to you,” he said in what she detected as a slight southern drawl. “You can either talk to us here or we can take you downtown.” Then he winked at her.
Dee looked at the man on her left, but he just sat stoic and silent, the thin lines of his mouth pressed together.
“Why couldn’t you just talk to me in the cafe?” She addressed the redhead again. “This is pretty unorthodox, if you ask me.”
“Because the information here is classified. You’re in some trouble. So I suggest you cooperate.”
“I don’t know any Heinrich Keller.”
“Then what were you doing in his safety deposit box?”
Now Dee’s heart began to pound as if it might leave her body entirely. “But that was Nelson Peterson’s box. He’s an old man I befriended at the Wyngate State Hospital. He left those things to me and—”
“How about the Strassgaard ring? Did he leave that to you, too?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact, he did. Because the Strassgaard family was gone before he ever came into possession of those things. Which only happened because he was a deckhand on a boat Goering chartered. He told me he won it gambling with one of his aides, who lifted it from Georing’s personal stash. The guy hid the other jewels in Russia until he could go back for them. Only he never got back.”
“Why was that?”
“Russia isolated itself after the war, maybe…how should I know? Peterson’s mother was Russian, and his father was Austrian, but I don’t know much about him.”
“Peterson was Dutch, Miss Dee. And he wasn’t any deckhand, he owned that boat you came in on this afternoon. He also had a lot of gambling debts he never paid to Goering’s aide, Heinrich Keller. We have reason to believe those two people were one and the same.”
Dee was stunned.
Peterson an aide to Goering…a Nazi war criminal! Someone who would have been tried right along with the worst of them if he had been caught. No wonder he’d changed his name so many times. And to think she had almost “aided and abetted” his escape. How could she have been so gullible as to believe such a story? She could be in some serious trouble, here…
She looked into eyes that were nearly as blue as her own and decided the man didn’t look half as shocked as she felt.
“I thought he was Swedish…Dutch or something,” she murmured, more to herself than her interrogator. “His medical records said his name was Nelson Peterson. He was at Wyngate for nearly five years.”
“He used that name on occasion, that’s how we knew about the box. Hasn’t been any activity on it for years, though. So. Why did you leave Oregon in such an all-fired hurry, Miss Parker?”
“Because I…” Dee took a deep breath and felt the force of a fast and sudden turn into back streets. “Where are we going?”
“Just answer the question, please.”
They passed an industrial warehouse and bumped over railroad tracks.
“I think I’d rather talk at the police station,” she said. “How come none of you are in uniform?”
“We’re not those kind of officers. Now, try to calm down a little, Dee, and think carefully before you answer the questions. Because everything you say—”
“Can and will be used against me in a court of law?” She tried to look past the man on her right (another zombie) and caught a glimpse of a street sign zipping by. “I’m familiar with the rules, Mr…Mr…”
“Eddington,” he supplied. “Why did you leave Oregon so fast?”
“I don’t know what you mean by fast. I always take a vacation after I turn in my yearly scandal piece. You can even ask my editor.”
“Dee…” He shook his head slowly in mock admonition. “Mind if I call you Dee?”
“Really, I’d rather you wouldn’t.”
“Don’t get so hasty now. Answer each question carefully. Let me rephrase that last one for you. Your editor said you were scheduled for Mexico in two weeks, and he couldn’t figure why—”
“You talked to Devlin?”
“Yes, ma’am. We ran your license plates and talked to a lot of people.”
“My license plates?”
“Courtesy of the assistant bank manager back in Oregon. We’ve been watching that box ever since we lost track of Keller four and a half years ago. Now your editor, he couldn’t figure out why you left so sudden. Truth is, he didn’t even know you were gone.”
“But…”
“Just a minute,” he held up his hand to stop the flow of words. “We already know the only commercial cruises out of that little town are fishing charters. So considering the yacht you came in on today, that’s some exclusive fishing trip, Dee.”
“All right,” she relented. “I had no idea accepting that ring was going to implicate me like this. What is it, the missing piece to the Austrian crown jewels or something? If it’s that important, I’ll be happy to give it back. I’m not a crook, you know.”
“Interesting choice of words, the Austrian crown jewels. The Crown Jewels are English.”
“English Crown Jewels, then.”
“But you said, Austrian, Dee. Which proves you know more than you’re letting on.”
“I said I was willing to give it back!” she snapped. “Did you hear that part? Hone
stly! I think you’re all just trying to scare me!”
They pulled into a deserted factory parking lot and stopped next to a side door.
Dee felt a wave of sudden panic. “All right, I’m scared—you’ve succeeded. I’m not interested in keeping stolen goods. Do they belong to someone else? Is that it? If they do, I’ll just give them back.”
They all got out in unison, as if some signal had been given. Dee was pushed toward the door.
“I want to make a statement!” She could not wrench her arms free or keep from being propelled inside. “I’m ready to go downtown! Mr. Eddington!”
“You can call me, Ed.” He switched on a light. “Most people do.”
The little room had no windows. But the single bulb that hung from the ceiling revealed a table, several chairs, and an old metal file cabinet.
The men escorted Dee to a seat, after which the driver and one of the others went back outside.
One of the men who had ridden next to her took off his sunglasses and sat down while Eddington remained standing.
“I could write a letter of apology to the Strassgaard family,” Dee suggested.
“The Strassgaard family no longer exists,” Eddington replied. “They were wiped out in the war. The significance here is that the Strassgaard jewels—and we’re talking a collection that would run something in the vicinity of fifty million on today’s market—was last noted to be in the possession of a certain Heinrich Keller. A Nazi war criminal who was never apprehended. And, I might add, who is now known to have also been a Soviet agent.”
“A Soviet agent! Well, I…I never…” Dee looked from one face to another and then back to Eddington again. “Honestly, I didn’t know any of this about the ring, and I…I certainly didn’t know any of this about Peterson!”
“So, where is he?”
“He died. Several days ago. In Wyngate.”
“Maybe he did, and maybe he didn’t. We’ll have to check that out. Keller is what you might call a master at double identities. As an aide to Goering, he was a member of that elite circle and known to have the ring in his possession. Along with other things the old guy liked to bring along when he traveled. I don’t think I need to tell you, Dee, that your involvement with this fugitive puts you in the position of an accomplice.”
The Pandora Box Page 9