Smugglers & Scones

by Talbot, Morgan C

  “No, it’s upstairs. Third floor. They’ve got some great stuff on Moore. First drafts, anecdotes, even his own handwritten notes for all his books. He lived through Prohibition here in Seacrest. You should ask Miss Winterbourne if she’ll let you film up there. Might get some good stuff for your documentary. And even though this place is one of the two oldest buildings in town—you should see Laine Manor, man, great artwork—the third floor of Moorehaven isn’t nearly as dangerous as my abandoned old speakeasy, right?” Roddy laughed.

  Devin zoomed in from the left, holding two of Emily’s pastries. “Here. You want me to hold that for you while you eat it?” In response, the camera went black.

  Silence reigned as we all stared at the dark screen. Even though I was the one watching a video, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the camera was hovering behind me, staring at me unblinkingly, recording the fact that I had just realized who the real murderer was, and somehow alerting him to my knowledge. Surely, wherever he was, he had to feel the weight of my gaze at that moment.

  On the video, Roddy had just given away the location of the notes that were stolen the next day, and he had described Laine Manor as capable of hiding a treasured painting in plain sight. Roddy had shared these two facts with only one person, and it wasn’t Devin. The film student had stepped away to get something to eat. That left only the man behind the camera, a man who had been everywhere Devin had.

  It had to be Kyle. Kyle, who had hidden behind the camera, seeing all, saying nothing, all along. Kyle, who had shyly sipped OJ in my kitchen and professed a protective attitude toward Devin.

  “Does that mean he’s the thief, or did he do the murders, too?” Skylar asked.

  Lake crossed his arms, and his voice dropped to that dangerously serious register. “Let’s ask him when we find him.”

  As Lake stepped into the sunroom to interrupt Mallory’s interview, everything suddenly seemed to be taking far too long. I glanced through the library window into the pitch-blackness. What if the killer is out already taking a third life? What if he’s watching us through the windows?

  To distract myself from that rabbit hole of paranoia, I said, “Paul, play some more interviews. Maybe we can find clues about who else the killer might target.”

  “We still have six or seven here. Which one should we watch first?”

  I scanned the names and vaguely recognized most of them. But one stood out. I pointed at the screen. “Geneva Laine. She’s the town matriarch. She actually remembers Prohibition personally. And Kyle’s already broken in to her house once to steal those paintings.”

  Paul clicked play. Geneva sat at the front edge of her wooden chair, eschewing a padded seat and even the comfort of leaning against the chair’s ladder-back. Prim and proper in a classy white dress with lace trim, Geneva held her head high and answered Devin’s questions in a delicate-but-firm tone of voice. Behind her, clearly chosen for the angle, was a portrait of her grandfather, Hieronymus Laine, Sr., one of the town’s founders.

  Devin’s voice asked from off camera, “How about your father, Hieronymus Laine, Jr.? Did he have any ties to the rum-running business?”

  Geneva answered with proud certainty. “Of course not. My father was a pillar of the community. Not a whiff of scandal touched him in all his years.”

  “Did he ever step down to the Lantern to wet his whistle?”

  Geneva tried to shake her head in the negative, but some part of her seemed unsure if that was the correct answer, and she ended up doing an odd head jiggle. “My father had his social obligations, of course. But I’m sure I couldn’t speak to what they were, exactly. And I do know that my father was friends with Andrew Scott, who ran the speakeasy. His grandchildren still live in Seacrest, and his grandson still owns the speakeasy’s property. My father used to play chess with Andrew Scott. Did you know Epicurus, the Greek philosopher for whom the speakeasy was named, was an equalist? He considered men and women to be equals—and slaves as well. So old Mr. Scott let anyone in who could pay. As I understand it, most speakeasies did the same. One of the steps forward for equality, if you ask me, even if it did come at the expense of a shameful time in our nation’s history.”

  Devin’s next question held a smile. “How about you? Have you ever been down in the Lantern? Did you visit with your father?”

  “Are you implying my father let me drink illegal alcohol as a child?” Geneva’s voice fairly bristled. My breath caught. Geneva Laine was in her midnineties. She’d have been the right age during Prohibition to be the little girl Angelina remembered from her memory-dream. And her father had connections to the speakeasy’s owner.

  “No, no, not at all, Miss Laine. I was just wondering whether you were familiar with its layout. If you could tell me anything about its design, what the folks who ran it might have used to draw in their customers…”

  Geneva’s shoulders relaxed. “Oh, you must mean the stars.”

  Beside me, Lake squeezed my hand. I hadn’t even noticed him come back from talking to Mallory in the next room. I glanced over to make sure she wasn’t standing right next to him, brandishing her steely glare in my direction, but she was still in the sunroom.

  Geneva continued, “The stars were my father’s idea, actually. The nights the speakeasy was open, old Mr. Scott would chalk stars on a particular corner of a particular building and draw a chest beneath them. ‘Treasure under the stars’ meant a delivery of whisky had come in, and the speakeasy was open.”

  We all gasped at Geneva’s revelation. Moore had used that exact phrase in his notes.

  The nonagenarian continued. “My father took me down a few times—when the place was not open for business, mind you—and showed me the pretty stars. Gold leaf, he told me. ‘Each star has a name, if you look closely enough,’ he said. The men who furnished the speakeasy carved names into the ceiling before they painted it blue. Many stars are named after their children, their wives, their mothers. But some of the stars have special names and special meanings. I tried to memorize them for fun, but I don’t remember most of them anymore. I do remember there was a special star over by the bar. I climbed up on a barrel to read the name carved in the wall, and Andrew Scott yelled at me. I was quite furious with him for it, considering who my father was.”

  Devin’s voice asked, “And what was the name of that star?”

  “Mesarthim. I’ve remembered it all these years. I thought it sounded like an angel from the Old Testament.”

  Al jabbed a finger at the screen. “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I know what that is. Oh, my God.”

  “What what is, Al?” I asked.

  “Mesarthim.” Paul paused the video, and Al continued. “See, my protagonist, Dieter Pike, always has a different sidekick for each book. In the book I’m writing now, it’s a geeky tech genius, but in my last book, his sidekick was an amateur astronomer who had spotted some suspicious-looking lights in the sky that turned out to be spy drones, and he and Dieter—”

  “Get to the point, man!” Hilt barked.

  Al flinched then nodded. “Right. Sorry. Astronomer. I researched the absolute hell out of astronomy to make my character authentic and—I know, I’m getting to it now. Quit poking me, Skylar—Mesarthim is a double star. It’s the old name for Gamma Arietis, the third star in the constellation Aries. It’s one of the first double stars ever found. There’s a subtle difference between a double star and a twin star, see.” Al demonstrated using his index fingers. “A twin star is two suns orbiting each other. They’re both in the same place, as far as the universe is concerned. But a double star is based on your perspective. From here on earth, we look up and we see two stars right next to each other, but they’re actually light years apart.” He placed one finger near his eye and stretched his other hand out to arm’s length, then turned to each of us, demonstrating how his fingertips seemed to touch only when viewed from the
proper perspective.

  I finally got that tingling epiphany I’d seen so many authors give each other. “Bring your notebooks and phones if you want to take any notes on the other one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old Victorian mansion in Seacrest. We’re going to talk to Geneva Laine herself, and if we’re very lucky, she’ll tell us how to find the treasure, and we can keep Kyle from claiming it.”

  22

  “There’s nothing so dangerous as a classy dame. They have the most secrets, and they protect them the fiercest.”

  Raymond Moore, 1938

  Hilt elected to stay behind to hold down the fort, as he put it. After we told Mallory what we had figured out and that Kyle could be the killer, she took Devin into protective custody and drove off into the night to hunt Kyle down, probably with a furious glare the whole time. Lake wouldn’t let me out of his sight. When Hilt heard us arguing by the front door, he came back down the hallway with a cup of tea in his hand and tossed something shiny in my direction.

  I caught Sadie’s keys.

  Al took one look at them and blurted, “Oh, holy cow, is that the car? The car in the garage? Shotgun!”

  Lake shot him an impatient look. “You ride in back. I’m riding shotgun.” Then he gave me an eager little-boy expression as if to ask, Right?

  I grabbed my coat. “Lake in front, authors in back. It will give you plenty of space to take notes and video.” With a minimum of grumbling, I got everyone loaded into Sadie with hats, coats, pens, phones, and notebooks. We pulled out into the damp night and headed across the river.

  By the time we reached the far side of the nearest bridge, the wind and the rain had both picked up. Fat drops slashed against my window and streaked across the windshield between wiper passes. I maneuvered through the downtown area until we reached the foot of the small rise that lifted Geneva Laine’s historic home above the rest of town. I swung left onto the curving drive, eased between the white iron gateposts, and parked in the small public parking lot facing the sea.

  “She has her own parking lot?” Skylar asked.

  “A few of the nice older homes here in town do tours during the summer, on weekends, that sort of thing. She also hosts a few select events for the town, being our matriarch and all. Geneva is big on civic duty.”

  We bailed out of Sadie, leaving her to fight off the rain, and dashed to the Greek-style portico that fronted Geneva’s fine home. Lake rang the doorbell while the rest of us huddled against the rain that blasted past the Corinthian columns and plastered our backs.

  The door opened promptly, and the delicate smell of vanilla enveloped us, along with the high-pitched, incessant barking of a small white dog. Geneva’s secretary was swathed in lavender, and the soft gray of her hair seemed a pale extension of the color. The little fluff ball at her ankles was actually bouncing into the air with every bark.

  “Augustus, hush!” Maude extended a hand toward us, gestured to the hallway behind her, and said, “Please, come in right away. You must be soaked. That rain blew up out of nowhere. Here, you can hang your things on the coatrack. How’s your uncle, Pippa?”

  I smiled. “He’s fine. Thank you for letting us visit so late. We’ll try to be brief.”

  “Geneva’s in the blue parlor. She usually doesn’t receive visitors back there, but she was already there when you called, and she didn’t want to move. Nonagenarians these days. Please, if you’ll follow me?”

  Lake slid his hand into mine and interlaced his fingers as we followed Maude down the hall. “I hope this works. What if she doesn’t talk?”

  I squeezed his hand. “Don’t worry. I’ve got her number. Why do you think I brought my guests?”

  We followed the secretary down the hall then into a side hall and through a bright-blue door. Geneva Laine sat in an old-fashioned chair, painted white with gold trim with a royal-blue cushion, in front of a small fireplace, also white with gold trim. Its friendly flames flickered happily, casting a classy sort of coziness across the entire room. I paused inside the door, still holding Lake’s hand, and my guests filed in behind me. I didn’t look back, but I heard a couple of pages rustling and a few digital camera clicks.

  Geneva lifted her chin in a subtle greeting worthy of the Queen of England. “Good evening, my dear. Maude tells me you sounded most urgent on the telephone. How may I assist you?”

  “We’ve seen the footage of your interview for Mr. Gilfillan’s documentary, Miss Laine, and we have a few questions for you, the answers to which may help us stop the murders here in Seacrest.”

  Clearly, my statement was not what she had expected to hear. Her cinnamon-hazel eyes widened, and her pale brows lowered. But she didn’t speak right away. I could practically hear her thoughts swirling.

  “Well, get on with it, then. Sit.” She pointed at the nearby blue couch.

  We didn’t have enough room to sit all together, so Lake perched with one thigh on the armrest. Geneva tsked but said nothing more. I tried to keep my explanation short, summarizing what we knew and what we suspected about the killer, his motives, and where he would search next in his quest to recover the treasure. “We’ve come to the conclusion that there must be another location connected to the Lantern—the other half of the Mesarthim double star. And I think you know where it is. If we can get to it before he figures it out, the killer won’t have anything left to kill for, and we can stop the murders.”

  Geneva’s face took on a hard edge, and she leaned forward in her fine chair. “What makes you think I have anything to do with this?”

  “I think you were the girl who named all the stars on the speakeasy ceiling for a very small child named Angelina one night, while her mother, Graciela, hid a priceless painting from the mobsters who were after her. The baby was scared of the dark, so you tried to make her laugh. That was you, wasn’t it?”

  We all waited. Geneva’s mouth opened slowly, but it was another moment before she spoke. “Angelina had the most adorable cheeks I’d ever seen. Like a perfect little doll. I was an only child, and I hardly ever saw other babies in town. I thought she was very brave to go down that tunnel. I never liked it much myself. And her mother kept cooing to her in Spanish.”

  “Spanish? It wasn’t Italian?” Jordan always said she was Italian. Why was her great-grandmother speaking Spanish?

  Geneva’s back straightened. “My father insisted on a proper education for me. I do believe I know the difference between Spanish and Italian when I hear it. Even at the tender age of eight.”

  Paul leaned forward and braced his elbows on his knees. “So where is this tunnel? How do we get to that treasure before the killer does?”

  The matriarch’s eyebrows flicked with amusement. “Ambitious fellow, aren’t you? There was a secret brick built into the speakeasy wall behind the bar. The one with Mesarthim carved in it. It opened the tunnel, which was where old Andrew Scott would hide his barrels of booze during raids. Not that there were many raids in Seacrest in 1930, mind you.”

  There was something tragically poetic about Cecil French’s rumrunner father—Roddy Scott’s real grandfather—delivering smuggled whisky to Andrew Scott—the speakeasy owner during Prohibition and the grandfather Roddy thought he had. They had no idea the tangled problems they left for future generations.

  Skylar leaned forward as well. “Wait, I’m sorry, I don’t understand. In your video interview, you said that your father didn’t have anything to do with the smuggling business. But he was the one who led Graciela to the hiding place for her treasure. Why did she ask him?”

  “Yes, Graciela. I believe that was her name. So pretty. And she didn’t ask him. She asked Andrew Scott, the owner of the speakeasy and the grocery store atop it, and Andrew asked my father, Hieronymus Laine, Jr. Because the other end of the tunnel was Laine property.”

  I bit my tongue to keep from mentioning that owning the far end of a
smuggling tunnel kind of did mean her father was connected to the smuggling business. Now was definitely not the time.

  A soft, reminiscent smile crossed her delicately lined face. “Of the five of you, Pippa has been here the longest, but that’s only been, what, six years or some such?” I nodded. “So none of you recall the glorious lighthouse before it was destroyed. All that remains out on the cliff is the ruin. Well, the ruin, and what lies beneath it.”

  Oh. My. God. “It’s been sitting there in plain sight all along!” I blurted. Like Kyle, its true character lay beneath its visible surface.

  “Of course!” Al threw up his hands. “Lighthouse and Lantern. The double star. Ahh, the hindsight, it burns!”

  Geneva dipped her head in regal acknowledgment. “Indeed. Obvious when you know the answer. It used to be a fine joke among the townspeople. My father chose to look the other way when many of his business associates began smuggling Canadian whisky and using our town as a stopover and emergency refuge during bad weather. He had to keep his reputation clean to protect them. But he understood why they did it. We all had families. So he built the lighthouse in 1919. It wasn’t very impressive compared to some of the other lighthouses up and down the coast. It didn’t even sit very high from the sea. But it would guide the rumrunners safely to the Silver River. He also built a secret sublevel below the lowest basement, deep within the cliff. It was easily accessible from Andrew Scott’s tunnel, but not so easily accessible from the lighthouse basement. That was as far as he could go for the sake of his friends and their families. That’s where Graciela hid her treasure. You need to open the tunnel from the speakeasy and walk to the far end. When the lighthouse fell, the upper basement levels were severely damaged. I don’t recommend trying to clamber down through two floors of decades-old debris. You could get hurt. The outer doors are chained shut, anyway.”