by Nic Saint
“I can see that,” he said, and she thought he really was a very nice man. Not marriage material, of course, but perhaps he could enter the friend zone at some point in the near future, and leave the friendly neighbor zone, in which she’d had him sequestered up to this point.
“My wife—God rest her soul—said I was quite the gardening prodigy.”
“Is that a fact?” Gresham hadn’t mentioned his late wife before.
“Of course she only very rarely got to see me ply my trade.”
“Has she been gone a long time?”
“Oh, yes. Over thirty years.”
“And you never considered… remarrying?”
Gresham smiled wistfully. “After Olivia passed away I buried myself in my work. Kept myself sane that way. And then when I retired… Well, let’s just say the number of women interested in becoming the second Mrs. Seeming had dwindled considerably by that time.”
He gave her a hopeful look and she gave him a sweet smile in return. No way was she ever going to marry this dude, but as long as he thought he had a chance… It was always handy to have a man around, especially one as eager as Gresham to do her bidding.
“Oh, Gresham?” she asked now. “If you could help me put up those trellises I bought yesterday I’d be forever in your debt.”
“Oh, sure thing!” he exclaimed gratefully. “It will be our little project.”
“Perfect,” she said, well pleased. While they worked on the trellises, she could grill him some more about his past, and about the other neighbors, of course. Her granddaughters often accused her of possessing a morbid curiosity in other people’s personal lives, but to her it was simply a healthy interest in those nearest and dearest.
She knew from experience that people simply loved to talk about themselves, and all she did was allow them that simple little pleasure. Besides, as a new neighbor and resident of Happy Bays, it was imperative she got the lay of the land, and who better to get it from than a long-time resident like Gresham Seeming? He would be able to fill her in on all the little ins and outs that go into living in this nice little town.
Chapter 4
Karie Nelson was a sturdy woman in her early forties, and quite used to running a household. She’d been doing it professionally for over twenty years, and as the housekeeper of Yehudi Brevity, the well-known banker, she was well versed in her employer’s affairs. So when he asked her to take care of a little business for him, she’d readily agreed. So she’d set herself to the task—however unusual she thought it was—without uttering a protest.
It had been a two-person job, and she and Orrick Fibril, Yehudi’s gardener, had done it marvelously, she thought. And as she wiped the sweat from her brow, she looked up at the sky. Rain was coming, but not just yet, and before it came this muck would dry up nicely, and then nobody would be any the wiser of what lay beneath, which was just what Yehudi wanted.
The Brevity household, which only consisted of one man, was the best position she’d ever had. Yehudi ran a very loose ship, and as long as the work was done, he was satisfied. In comparison to earlier employers she’d had, he was a dream to work for. Before, she’d been constantly monitored and chastised for putting a foot wrong, which wasn’t exactly conducive to a healthy working relationship, all that bitching and nagging undermining her self-confidence and then some.
Yehudi wasn’t like that. Quite the contrary, in fact. He often complimented her on a job well done. She hoped he’d live a long and happy life, so she could keep on working for him until the day she retired. She so didn’t want to have to go out there and find another position, and having to get acquainted with the quirks and foibles of yet another employer.
She set foot for the house, humming a little tune which might or might not have been ‘Let It Go’ of Frozen fame. And as she was about to enter the kitchen, she saw that Orrick was just about to follow her example, only he was still wearing his rubber boots, mud sticking to them in thick, fat clumps. She planted her hands on her sides. "Orrick!" she exclaimed.
“What?!” the man growled, looking up. He was a brutish specimen with a scruffy beard and a squint, and had a habit of conversing in monosyllables.
“Please remove those boots. I cleaned the kitchen this morning.”
The gardener stared down at his boots, as if seeing them for the first time, and growled something under his breath. It signified he’d grasped the meaning of her words and would perhaps even consider complying.
She shook her head and stepped into the kitchen, Orrick right behind her.
And as she entered, her eyes fell on the lifeless figure stretched out on the floor—the floor she’d cleaned so nicely that morning. The shrill and piercing cry she uttered was only trumped in volume by the loud growl of surprise from Orrick. And as they both stared down at the massacre before them, she knew that her dream of remaining in Yehudi’s employ until she reached the age of retirement had been a pipe dream. Her employment was terminated already, just like the life of her employer. And judging from the hatchet that was firmly lodged in his forehead, it wasn’t hard to figure out how he’d died.
Chapter 5
I was happy to find in Ernestine a much more attentive audience than Edelie. Stien, at least, seemed interested in this new client I’d found for our business. She understood that Flummox, Inc would never prosper if we didn’t go out there and prospect, and not spend our days reading books.
“So this Captain Suggur knows where the treasure is buried?”
“Inside his ship, which is resting three hundred yards from shore.”
“In several feet of water, probably,” said Ernestine thoughtfully, pushing her glasses up her nose. “Which means we’ll need divers. Can you dive?”
“No, I can’t,” I said, not having given this part of the mission much thought. “Can’t we just, you know, raise the ship with witchcraft alone?”
Ernestine gave me a dubious look. “Doubtful,” she said. “Very doubtful. Though we could give it a try. Are you sure the treasure is still on board?”
“Captain Suggur seems pretty sure it does. And if he doesn’t know, who would? He’s been keeping guard of this ship for two hundred years.”
“Two hundred and forty,” muttered Ernestine, “but who’s counting?”
“Captain Suggur, apparently. He’s a shadow of the man he used to be.”
“Ghosts, as a rule, are very shadowy creatures.”
“I know. He’s not the first ghost we’ve met, remember?” One of our previous clients, a rock star, had died on our watch, and we’d worked with her ghost to solve the mystery of her death. It was a novel experience, but pretty interesting, if you’re into that kind of thing, which we obviously were.
“So how much have you negotiated for?” asked Ernestine now.
I stared at her. “Negotiated for? What do you mean?”
“How much is Suggur paying us? We are in the for-profit business, Estrella. If we take on this job, we need to get paid.” When I simply stared at her, she groaned. “You didn’t even ask him, did you?”
“Well, it might have slipped my mind,” I confessed. “Though to be honest, why would I ask the guy to pay us? We’re simply doing him a favor.”
“Oh, Strel…” said Ernestine reproachfully.
“He’s in a really bad way! You should have seen him!”
“So? If we don’t get paid, we’ll be in a really bad way, too.”
“Look, why don’t we just consider this part of us giving back to the community? Like Bill and Melinda Gates. They’re giving away millions!”
“You have to make your millions before you can give them away, Strel,” Ernestine pointed out. “We haven’t made a single cent yet.”
Well, she was right, of course. The rock star client had died, and her daughter still hadn’t paid us a fee commensurate with our services. Truth be told, her mother had died on our watch, in front of our eyes, which probably wasn’t what she had in mind when she hired us to serve and protect.
&
nbsp; “So far we’ve been scrounging off Gran,” said Ernestine, as if I didn’t already know that, “and we simply can’t go on like this. We need to pay our own way, Strel. We need to find paying customers, not charity cases.”
“I know, I know,” I grumbled. Then I got a bright idea. “Why don’t I negotiate for a percentage of the treasure?”
“You mean like a finder’s fee?”
“Sure. What about ten percent?”
“Ten percent of what? How much is this treasure worth?”
I stared at her dumbly.
“Just give me a ballpark number.”
“Um… adjusted for inflation?”
She stared at me. “Strel! Didn’t you even ask what the stuff is worth?”
“No, as a matter of fact I didn’t. It just didn’t seem proper.”
She rolled her eyes. “Proper?”
“The guy died, Stien! It’s not nice to discuss money at a funeral.”
“He died two hundred and forty years ago. He’s had time to get over it.”
I shrugged. “Besides, everybody knows what these treasures are worth. Millions, probably, maybe even billions. All gold and diamonds and… gold.”
“Oh, Strel,” she said, slapping her brow. “Not only did you take on a charity case, you didn’t even ask the most basic question: what’s inside that treasure chest?!”
“Duh. Treasure, obviously.”
“It could be some old documents.”
“Documents? You mean like a diary?”
“I mean like a sealed message from the King of England to Governor Dockland. Instructions for his campaign against the Patriots.”
“Doubtful,” I muttered, though she could be right, of course. Maybe this so-called treasure was simply a communiqué from King George. Best wishes and some words of encouragement for his troops to keep up the good work.
“Ten percent of nothing is still nothing,” Ernestine said, rubbing it in.
“Look, I’ll ask him, all right? I’ll ask Suggur what’s inside this treasure chest of his and I’ll negotiate a nice fat commission for Flummox, Inc.”
“I’ll go with you,” Ernestine said. “Or better yet, we’ll all go, and see if this Captain Hayes Suggur is on the level. Something tells me he isn’t.”
“And I’m telling you he is,” I told her, peeved she had such little faith in my capacity to judge the man’s character.
“We’ll go together. We need to figure out how to raise this ship, or how to get inside its bowels and retrieve this treasure chest.” She looked thoughtful again, which is her default expression. “Spear knows how to dive,” she said.
I grinned. “How do you know? Have you been diving into the sack with him?”
She looked properly ticked off. “Nothing of the kind. All we’ve done so far is…” But then she muttered promptly. “… none of your damn business.”
"So he knows how to dive, huh? I'll bet there's plenty of people who know how to dive, Stien. This is Long Island. Home to whalers and fishers. And duck farms."
She stared at me. “Duck farms?”
“Ducks can dive!” I cried. “Everybody knows that!”
She shook her head. “Look, we can’t just ask anybody. The moment they find out we’re diving for treasure they’re sure to notify the authorities, and we’ll be forced to give up the treasure. No way to hand it over to Lord Dockland’s descendants. No, we need Spear. Spear knows how to keep a secret. Spear is a lawyer,” she told me in that lecturing tone she likes to use.
She was right. Lawyers do know how to keep a secret. In fact I’m pretty sure they’re obligated to. Just like doctors and priests and, um, dentists.
“Of course we’d have to tell him what’s going on,” she said, biting her lip.
“You just told me he knows how to keep a secret.”
“Yes, but how can I tell him we got this information from a ghost?”
I gave her a keen look. “He doesn’t know… that we’re witches, right?”
“Of course not, Strel. Who do you think I am? A blabbermouth?”
“I don’t know what you do with your mouth when you’re with Spear, and frankly I don’t think I want to know,” I told her. “All I know is that he probably won’t believe you anyway.”
“You’re right about that. Spear doesn’t even believe in Santa Claus. When he was eight he already figured out Santa was a figment of his imagination and asked his parents point blank to hand him his presents without this fanciful bearded intermediate from now on. Cut out the middleman, he told them, and simply add the guy’s fee to the net worth of my present.”
“I see. A true romantic at heart.”
“Spear is very romantic,” she told me huffily. “He gave me a desk organizer for my birthday. To organize my desk,” she added for clarity’s sake.
“That is romantic. My heart would be all aflutter.” I rolled my eyes. “Anyway. What do we tell Spear? How did we find out about the treasure?”
A deep frown had appeared on Stien’s brow. “We’ll simply have to lie. Um… what about we tell him we found some old treasure map in the attic?”
“I like that. Like in The Goonies or something.”
“Only we accidentally destroyed the original map.”
“That’s bad.”
“But fortunately I took ample notes.”
“Oh, that’s good.”
She looked at me hesitantly. “Will he buy the ruse? Spear is very clever.”
“Sure he will. And even if he doesn’t, he’ll still have to defend us in court and pretend we’re innocent. Lawyers are like that.”
She gave me a dirty look. She doesn’t like it when I diss her profession. Or her boyfriend. “So where’s Edie? We need to tell her about this.”
“I already did. She didn’t seem interested.”
“Mh.”
“Mh what?”
“She’s holed up in the attic again, huh?”
“Isn’t she always?”
“Not lately. Haven’t you heard what Gran said? That Sam called again?”
“Yeah, so?”
“So they had some kind of argument and Edelie has been refusing his calls ever since. They haven’t spoken in days.”
“That’s too bad,” I said. “I like Sam. He’s a great guy.”
“Me too. And what’s more, Edelie likes him too. A whole lot, in fact.”
“What happened?” I asked, as usual the last one to find out.
Ernestine shrugged. “She won’t say. But it’s got to be something bad, for she’s been moping and locking herself up ever since.”
“Oh, poor Edie,” I said, directing a look at the house.
“We need to get her out of her slump, or else it’s just you and me.”
“Impossible,” I said. “It’s not the same without Edie.”
Not to mention that Flummox, Inc was a business of three, not two. Or the fact that if we needed to use witchcraft, as we invariably did, we had to combine our powers if we wanted to get any kind of result. We could use witchcraft on our own, but that usually led to a lot of trouble. Well, when we worked together we also made a mess, but then from time to time we didn’t.
“Why don’t I call Sam,” I said, “and find out what’s going on? We need Edie healthy, happy and functioning if we’re going to pull this off.”
“And I’ll talk to Edie. See if I can’t cheer her up.”
“Deal,” I said, holding up my hand for a fist bump. Unfortunately the gesture was apparently alien to Ernestine, for she merely stared at my fist, and then trudged off, shaking her head all the way to the house.
Chapter 6
When the police finally came they came in numbers, which didn’t surprise Karie. She’d known that her employer was some kind of big cheese on Wall Street. The first policeman to arrive, however, was a disappointment. A stringy officer with thinning hair and a vacuous expression on his face introduced himself as ‘Officer Scattering of the Happy Bays Police Department, ma’am, here to se
e about the dead man.’
She ground her teeth once or twice before letting him inside. “Follow me,” she told him rather curtly as she led the way through the large mansion with its myriad of corridors and rooms. She clutched a handkerchief in her hand and dabbed her eyes. She hadn’t stopped crying ever since she and Orrick had made the awful discovery.
The policeman cleared his throat. “So you are…”
“Karie Nelson. I’m Mr. Brevity’s housekeeper.”
“And you found the body together with…”
“Orrick Fibril. He’s Mr. Brevity’s gardener.”
“Did you touch anything, Mrs. Nelson?”
“Miss. And no, I didn’t touch anything, and I told Orrick not to touch anything either. I’m a big fan of CSI, Officer Scattering. I know how to preserve a crime scene.”
He stared at her, a little dumbfounded. “That’s… great,” he finally said as she led him into the kitchen. “How did you know he was murdered, Miss?”
She merely gestured with her head to the body, still prominently on display on the floor, the hatchet still conspicuously sticking out of Yehudi’s brow.
“Oh. Right,” muttered the cop when his eyes landed on the body. “I see.”
“He was a fine man and a great employer,” she said, a little unnecessarily.
“Sorry…” The cop gulped once or twice, his prominent Adam’s apple jumping two inches before settling down again. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” she said primly, then blew her nose noisily. And just as she did, the doorbell rang, and she was off again through the maze.
This time she found two policemen on the doorstep, one big, one small.
“I’m Detective Barkley and this is Detective Farrier, ma’am,” the tall one said, producing a shiny badge. “NYPD. You reported a murder?”
“Yes. Yes, I did,” she said, surprised. “I didn’t call the NYPD, though.”
“Yehudi Brevity was a resident of the City of New York, ma’am, and a personal friend of Mayor Putin, so we were called in straightaway.”