by Sarah Graves
Ellie looked enlightened. “In a cave, below the bluffs at North End. If he timed the tide right, they’d stay dry until…”
“Yep. Get ’em before the tide came in. The rest of the time the cave would be underwater.”
“Is he trying to say he thinks the violin you’ve all been fixated on is in a cave?” Cartwright looked horrified at the idea. “Well, then, of course it couldn’t have …”
Survived, he was about to say, but he didn’t have to. He bent to Mapes again. “But Charmian, where is Charmian?”
Mapes shook his head painfully. In the distance, the howl of an ambulance siren was getting louder.
“Wilbur, have you told anyone else?” I asked. He was fading. “About the map, or the searching you’ve been doing on your own?”
Hecky Wilmot, for instance, with his eye for the main chance and his desperate need for money, so he could get out of Eastport before he became persona non grata on account of his new book. Or Howard Washburn, with his prison buddies and his habit of saying the wrong things to the wrong people.
Or all three of them together, like some ramshackle version of the Three Musketeers, although when I pictured them what came to mind was more like Curly, Moe, and Larry.
I wanted to know how the hell Mapes had gotten hold of the Wellington boots, too, and where they were now. But Mapes didn’t look as if he were in any shape to be playing twenty questions.
And it was a cinch he hadn’t shot himself. For one thing, no weapon was anywhere in evidence.
“Mapes! Dammit, man,” Cartwright said, but Mapes had passed out. The ambulance pulled up the drive, causing the hairs on the dog's neck to bristle aggressively.
I shook Wilbur hard. “But Charmian called you. What did she want?”
He was nearly out cold. “Phone number,” he whispered.
“Wilbur, whose number?”
But then he was gone completely, his breath coming in rough hitching motions that I didn’t like the looks of. A scary growl came from the dog beside me as the EMTs approached.
“Killer,” I said quietly, and the animal relaxed; the key, apparently, was knowing his name. “Come on, Killer, let's go inside and have a biscuit.”
His ears perked and he followed me up the steps amiably, to the obvious relief of the ambulance guys, as Ellie began telling them what little we knew about Wilbur's injury. From inside I watched them load Mapes onto a gurney; they had an IV started and an oxygen mask clapped to his face as they slid him into the rear of their vehicle and backed out fast.
And then he was gone, leaving us all with a question: whose phone number? I tried thinking fast, which was, as usual, a nearly impossible stretch for me, but this time I managed it.
“Someone must’ve picked her up in town the way we first thought. That car she rented is still over at Havelock's garage waiting for a part. And we don’t know Wilbur's the only one she called. Probably she's with whoever she called after she talked to Wilbur.”
But that was as far as I got. It was Ellie who came up with the rest. “Lillian,” she said flatly. “Wilbur's sister.”
Lillian Frey was smart, feisty; a winner, I thought, despite her current difficulties with Jill and her ex-husband. I liked her and I thought she already had enough trouble.
I didn’t want her to be involved in this. “She knows about violins,” Ellie pressed. “Charmian's been seeing her.”
And she kept a gun; something I hadn’t mentioned to Ellie. But now Wilbur had a gunshot wound, didn’t he? He hadn’t had the chance to get to one of his own weapons, apparently.
Meanwhile, Lillian also had a good reason for an unlisted phone number: her ex-husband.
So Charmian might’ve needed to call Wilbur to get it.
“Okay,” I gave in, “we’d better find Lillian.”
Hurriedly, I put some food down for the dog from a sack Wilbur kept under the sink, and fresh water. The eyes of Wilbur's hunting trophies seemed to follow me as I moved.
“We’re going to have to come out here, you know, and walk this animal twice a … Hey, where's he going?”
The dog had inhaled the food in a gulp and whirled, bolting for the door and dashing away down the grassy path leading from the back of the clearing, in its haste nearly bowling Cartwright over from behind. He’d been stomping around the clearing peering keenly at everything, but now he, too, was headed down the path that went into the pasture and brush land out back.
“Mr. Cartwright! Winston!” His only reply was an impatient wave of the carved walking stick.
“We can’t wait for him,” Ellie said. “I don’t think Charmian knows what she's gotten herself into. Somebody's not kidding, and whoever it is hasn’t got the nice manners she grew up with. Or at least,” she added frowningly, “whoever shot Wilbur hasn’t.”
So we piled back into the car; we’d have to return anyway to care for the animal, and we could pick Cartwright up then. From the supplies in Mapes's truck, it was clear that at least the old man wouldn’t starve, assuming he liked saltines and mushroom soup.
“We need to go to your house,” Ellie said as we approached Route 1.
“Why? Lillian's house is—”
She shook her head emphatically. “We still don’t know for sure it was Lillian. And if it was, we don’t know they went to Lillian's house. In fact, that's the last place they’d be if Lillian's up to something. Also, there's something else going on, because why would she shoot Wilbur? He's her brother, for Pete's sake.”
I’d heard of people who would kill their own relatives for money, or for things that were worth money. In fact, back in the city I’d worked for quite a few of them.
But I still couldn’t believe that Lillian was one of them. I nodded, driving and listening.
“And Mapes said Raines already had Jane's diary with the map in it, before he ever opened up your wall. And that means …”
Right, it had bothered me when he said it. Why did he tear down all that plaster if he already had what he wanted?
Ellie spread her hands in a this-is-simple gesture. “Raines didn’t find that invisible-ink book in your dining room wall. He put it there himself.”
The simple obviousness of this hit me like a hammer smashing through old plaster.
“Oh, my God. He put it there for us to find, didn’t he? The same way he hid the other one in the library. Because he’d heard we were a couple of snoopy types. Thought we would have success where he couldn’t, so …”
Clues, he’d left us clues. “But Ellie, we can’t read that one, and he’d have known it. We’ve already tried.”
There was something else we were missing, too, something important, but I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
Ellie nodded firmly. “Right. But maybe we can. I’ve been thinking about that, because of the Fourth of July quilt.”
Any minute now, I was just going to lose my mind completely. “Ellie, what's a quilt got to do with—”
She talked over me. “Remember how I said the quilting is in two colors, the stitching, I mean, and you can’t see the pattern until both colors of it are done?”
I nearly stalled the engine. “Ellie, that's it.” We rushed back to town, slowing only at Pleasant Point, and pulled into my driveway, then ran for the house.
“Because it just makes sense,” Ellie said as we laid the map out on the kitchen table: the invisible ink map from the book we found in the wall. “Doesn’t it? That a man who writes in Latin and further disguises his writing by other means, like invisible ink, might have a few more tricks up his sleeve, too.”
From the refrigerator she pulled the remains of the cabbage water Raines had stored there after making his cabbage rolls. A few minutes later we had our answer: a pattern. But just as in Ellie's quilt, you had to have all of it to see what it was.
“Two,” Ellie said, “different invisible inks.”
With heat and chemicals, the whole thing had come clear. But it still wasn’t an easy read. “It's a map, all right. But I
don’t see—”
Just then Wade came in, his work satchel over his shoulder and his face full of the cheerful know ledge that he had the rest of the day off. “What's up?”
I explained the situation. “We can’t just start looking in caves randomly,” I said. “There are too many of them.”
As I finished, Sam slammed in, too, his face like seven days of rain. “She stood me up. I waited hours for her.”
“Jill?” But of course it was Jill. “Sam, I’m really sorry.”
The words I told you so wanted to come out of my mouth. I clamped my teeth down on them.
“Something very important must have come up,” I said instead. “I’m sure she’ll have an explanation.”
He studied the floor. “I guess so.”
“Oh,” Wade said as he turned the map sideways. “I see. The brown lines are north-south. The purplish lines”—they were the ones we’d revealed by spraying the map with cabbage water—“are east-west. Which makes this… Okay, I get it now. The shoreline from the ferry landing out to Dog Island.”
Ellie and I looked at each other. Dog Island was the northeasterly dot of land just off North End. “Where the caves are.”
“Yeah,” Wade said, unsurprised. “Although they’re probably some different now. A hundred and fifty years,” he explained, “of wind and tides working on that cliff. You’ve got to figure you’re going to get some erosion.”
Then he frowned. “But I don’t see any specific place marked. Anyway, you’re not going to try going in those caves, are you? Because it's almost high tide. You want to wait till the tide's ebbing, then maybe—”
“We can’t wait,” I said, hearing my own words as if from a far distance. Because suddenly it was all coming together for me like the pieces of Ellie's quilt: different shapes and colors.
But just one pattern. “They’re down there. Charmian and Lillian …” I grabbed up the map, now so murderously legible, newly deciphered but telling the same old deadly story: love and money. “We’re just going to have to try to find them without this.”
“I know those places,” Sam said, already gathering his diving gear. “They’ll both drown.”
“Sam.” Wade was hauling rope and the first-aid kit down from the hall shelf. “You told me you weren’t cave diving.”
Sam met my gaze. “Yeah. I did. But I’ve been out there. Jill wanted to go. I’m sorry, Mom.”
“We’ll talk it over later,” I said, and he went out, lugging his equipment.
“Come on.” Wade touched my shoulder, the map in his hand. “Ellie, call George and let him know where we’re going, okay? And then catch up with us.”
She turned to the phone. I followed Wade to his truck, where Sam was waiting.
“Jared Hayes told Jane Whitelaw that he’d hidden a treasure on the island. And he gave her a map to it, too, hanging on to the invisible-ink copy for himself.”
On Water Street we made our way past the storefronts, among strolling groups of tourists, past the fish pier and the Quonset warehouses of the freight dock. Wade aimed the truck toward North End; I glimpsed the yellow buoys of the sailboat race course bobbing on the bay. Finally we reached a stand of white birches marking the beginnings of the wide, grassy bluffs.
“Why did Hayes give Jane Whitelaw a map?” Wade wanted to know, pulling the truck to the side of the road. Over the water, drifts of seagulls circled. Waves boomed distantly, a constant bass note that seemed to come from everywhere.
“Because she wanted it and he loved her, I suppose. But that was his mistake. She double-crossed him. And I think I understand what must have happened next.”
We got out. There was no sign of anyone on the bluffs, but something glittered in the sand by the pavement.
“Charmian's ring.” The blue stone shimmered at me, its milky iridescence cold and somehow malevolent, like a dead eye. I imagined her dropping it, hoping someone might find it.
Holding it, I squinted around. “Where's Lillian's car? They had to’ve come in one. Pulled back into the birch stand, maybe?”
But the tide was running fast, the turbulence of the massive whirlpools far out in the channel testifying to its power. And chances were good that wherever Lillian's car was hidden, they weren’t sitting in it having a pleasant chat.
We could find it later. A path led to the cliffs, through weeds and tall grass. “What must have happened?” Wade prompted me as we sprinted along it.
“The old stories are wrong. Hayes didn’t die the day after Jane. He died the day before, the way Hecky Wilmot says. She was a pirate's child, remember. With pirate instincts.”
We peered over the cliffs. Most of the edge was precipitous, yet studded with trees growing precariously from the soil formed by the crumbling shale. Here the drop was straight down to where the water moved massively far below.
“This is where that other fellow went off,” Wade said, his tone grim, and the strangeness of that event struck me again, too. It was an odd place to try scrambling down for a snapshot, if that was what he’d been doing. But we had no time to ponder it.
“Over here.” Through the trees that clung to the cliffside I could see a steep, slanting sort of trail. The stones and twigs on it were freshly disturbed.
“Jane killed Hayes, or had him killed, because he’d given her the map. So she didn’t need him anymore.”
“And because he’d betrayed her father, the pirate Josephus?” Wade reached a hand up, steadied me as I made my way down.
“No. They did that together. She planned it all, Wade. She meant to be the last one standing, and have the money Hayes stole for herself. After she’d got rid of Hayes, though … Oof.”
I grabbed a protruding tree root, caught my breath as loose shale slid out from under my shoe.
“After that,” I went on when I’d reached the bottom, “she had Hayes's body dumped at Pirate's Cove, where Josephus's ship had been burned to the waterline by the townspeople after he was hanged. It's how the skull ended up there.”
A wave crashed onto the wet rocks protruding from the water, boomed in an explosion of spray, and fell back for another onslaught.
“Probably,” I finished, “it was a kind of joke to her. The pirate wanna-be buried with a pirate ship. God, how she must have despised him with his fake respectability, his pretensions to education. Everything she didn’t have and wanted so badly.”
“What about his head?” Wade swung down expertly. “You think Jane's boyfriends actually cut it off?”
Here at the foot of the cliffs with the water pounding, the waves hurtling in, and the gulls crying, the world of streets and houses seemed like a distant country. “The ocean did that. Two hundred years and a lot of water … the rest of the bones probably just washed out to sea.”
I gazed around at the wild landscape. “But the skull rolled into a backwater, got covered up with peat and silt, and it just stayed there.”
No other human beings were in sight. The footing down here at the water's edge was treacherous, slippery rocks shifting as we tried stepping on them. We covered as much of the narrowing shoreline as we could, but it was useless. There were dozens of openings, no way to tell which ones led to caves or had anyone inside.
Wade shouted inaudibly, his voice swallowed by the pounding of the rising tide, then shook his head and pointed up. It wasn’t as difficult climbing back up the cliffs as it had been trying not to tumble going down, but the earth and rocks were unbelievably treacherous. I slid a few times and once nearly lost it entirely in a clatter of stones, before finding an outcropping I could put my whole weight on.
Finally, I hauled myself up to seize Wade's reaching hand, as he looked out toward the swirling blue channel and the islands beyond. He pulled the invisible-ink map out, scowled at it again as I peered at it with him.
“Look, it shows these cliffs,” I said. “And there's the rocks we were just standing on. The entrances to some of the caves. But…” A stiff breeze off the water made the old paper flutter a
nd threaten to tear; I steadied it. “But if it's a map to something, where's …”
“I still don’t see anything specific. No X to mark the spot. Or if there is one, we’re just not recognizing it. Hayes could read it because he already knew what it indicated, and as far as he knew, he was the only one who would ever need to follow it,” Wade theorized.
So we were stonewalled. Meanwhile, Sam had been pulling on his drysuit, checking his tanks and regulators. But there was nowhere for him to dive. The idea of checking every possible cave remained ridiculous, as he had already concluded.
“If they’re in there, they’re trapped,” he said. “Tide's so high, it's filling the entrances to the caves. Even if there are pockets of air inside, they won’t last. Hear it?”
I hadn’t. But now I realized: the booming sound of the waves was coming not only from the foot of the cliffs, but from the earth beneath my feet, the water hammering inside the rock that was the foundation for this whole end of the island. Filling the caves, making a drum of the earth itself as it pounded with the force of billions of gallons of icy water.
The sound of an engine made me look up.
Ellie arriving, I thought.
But it wasn’t.
Instead, it was the important thing that we’d been missing.
9
It was Jonathan Raines, highballing toward us in Mapes's old pickup truck, with Winston Cartwright riding a massive shotgun and Ellie clinging in the truck bed, her red hair flying.
The truck skidded to a halt and Raines jumped out. I didn’t know whether to kiss him or kick him.
Kick him, I decided. “You faked it,” I said. “You faked your own murder and left us this mess to try to sort out. You lying, sneaking, dirty rotten little son of a—”
“Right. I apologize.” He gazed around urgently. “But I’ll do my penance later, if you don’t mind. Where are they?”
Ellie leapt from the truck bed. “Bob Arnold's gone out to Lillian's place, see if he can find out anything there,” she said as Cartwright lumbered down from the passenger seat.