by K. J. Emrick
Although, he hadn’t actually broken in. We’d checked the door first thing, once I got my senses back. The room door had two locks. The electronic one that opened with a keycard, and a deadbolt that could only be opened from the outside with a key. I’m sure I set that deadbolt. No matter what Officer Halloway wants to imply, I know what to do when I’m in a hotel room. Even if I had forgotten the deadbolt—which I didn’t—then the attacker still had to use a keycard to get into the room.
Which only proved that I’d been right about who attacked me.
“So,” Halloway says, “you were saying that the guy didn’t take anything?”
“No, he was here for the note in the bottle, and I started screaming before he got a chance to take it.”
“Mm-hmm. And that was after you kicked him in the balls?”
“Yes.” I feel my cheeks heating up when I say it. Not one of my finer moments, but honestly, I’d do it again. Doesn’t mean I’ll be embarrassed to say how I saved my neck this time. “I kneed him in the balls.”
At least he sounded impressed by that. “Remind me not to run into you in a dark alley.”
He’s got some sort of tablet device with him that he’s typing notes into, and I’m not sure why he thinks my smashing a guy in the crotch is worth all this typing. Whatever. Guys are sensitive about this stuff.
Jasmine clears her throat, finally ready to jump into the conversation. “Officer Halloway, is it? Can we get on with the business of arresting whoever broke into our hotel room last night? You heard the part where Dell said the guy tried to kill her, right?”
“Sure did,” he replied with a sharp nod. “We take that sort of thing very seriously. So. What was the description of the guy?”
I traded a look with Jasmine. She shrugs. “I was asleep.”
“Uh-huh. And you, Miss Powers?”
“Well…” I needed a minute to control myself. I’d already told him this once. “I was awake, but I couldn’t see him. It was too dark in here.”
Halloway gave us another one of his nods. “Then you see my problem. I already asked the front desk about cameras. Turns out they aren’t working right now. No description, no image, no way of identifying the guy.”
“How convenient,” Jasmine mutters.
“More than convenient,” I say.
The officer’s fingers hesitate over the tablet’s onscreen keyboard. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means, I know who the guy was.”
His fingers start tapping again. “Well, well. Didn’t expect that. All right. So who do you know did this to you?”
“The man who attacked me works here. He was the front desk clerk last night when we came in.”
“Ooh, I remember,” Jasmine jumps in excitedly. “Oh, nuts. Is that who you mean? That Zigzag guy?”
“Zacron,” I correct her.
“Right. Him. He couldn’t take his eyes off that bottle we found. You thought he recognized it, or something.”
“He did recognize it. I’m sure of it.” I step back and hook a thumb over at the chest of drawers where the note is still lying flat, drying out slowly in the open air. “That’s what he was here for, I’m sure of it. I don’t know how he knew about it, but he did.”
Halloway’s expression is the epitome of skepticism, but he goes over to look at the note on the bureau, just the same. He takes a full minute to read it, and then another to read it again. Using his tablet, he takes a picture of it. Then he leans over and reviews it again.
“This was in the bottle?”
“Yes,” I answer him, even though that should be obvious. “I can’t read it all because it’s so old and it’s still drying out, but I have a feeling that little note is more than just some random piece of paper somebody tossed over the side of their fishing boat.”
Tucking the tablet under one arm, he points a finger at the upper corner of the unrolled note. “Think you might be right. That’s a date. 1937.”
My eyebrows went all the way up to my hairline and I stepped over next to him to see that he was right. What I had taken for just another squiggly smudge turned out to be the numbers 1, 9, 3, and…
“How can you tell that’s a seven on the end? Looks like it could be a six. Or a four, even.”
“No, that’s definitely a seven.”
“You sound positive.”
“I am.” He points to another spot on the note. “That name right there is Mabel. Put it all together and that would be Mabel McGowan. She died in 1940, three years after her husband disappeared at sea, in 1937.”
I remembered the stone pillar down by the beach, and what it had said.
After the tragic events of 1937, the beach was donated to the City of Hobart.
So that was what the sign referred to. Mabel’s husband had disappeared at sea, which was a polite way of saying he died. When he disappeared, Mabel McGowan had donated a large part of their land to the city. Like she wanted nothing to do with it anymore.
Why not, I wondered?
Halloway points to the bottom of the note this time. “See the signature?”
I did, but I couldn’t read it now any more than I could when I first got the note out of the ruined bottle.
“That’s her husband’s name,” he explains for me. “You’re probably looking at the very last communication between Orville McGowan and his wife, Mabel McGowan.”
“No… way…” Jasmine breathes.
I wish someone would clue me in. “Are those names supposed to mean something to me?”
Halloway’s hand scratches at the back of his neck. “Can’t believe you never heard that story. The McGowans owned all of the land around here at one point in time. Blue Laguna was originally a plantation, stretching for acres in every direction. Then the family fell on hard times and they gradually sold off plots of land, bit by bit, until they only had the McGowan Mansion over on Pith Street and the beachfront. That was in the 1930s. Real hard luck story. Fast forward to 1937, Orville McGowan disappears at sea. Mabel’s heartbroken and she gives away the beachfront to the town. She doesn’t want to even look at the water anymore. A few years later, she dies too.”
Local history has always been interesting to me, and usually I find it to be really fascinating, but someone tried to kill me this morning. I’m not in the mood for long stories. “It sounds like it would make a great television movie, but I still don’t see how this note comes into it. How did they send notes to each other by bottle?”
He was really into the telling of his tale now. “That’s because you haven’t heard the ending. Mister and Mrs. McGowan had a row one stormy summer night. Seems Mister McGowan was a bit of a spendthrift. That’s one of the reasons why they had to sell off so much of their ancestral lands in his lifetime. Huge amounts of his family fortune went into liquor, but just as much went into his hobby of looking for buried treasure out on the islands just off the coast.”
Okay, so that’s kind of interesting. That’s something else folks don’t know about Australia. We’re not just the big island with Tasmania and New Zealand stuck in the mainland’s orbit. There’s tons of little islands off the coast, some with names, some without, and a few that people have forgotten all about. When the First Fleet came here from England they explored lots of them. Legends still persist about treasure and artifacts buried out there, just waiting for someone to find them. Wasn’t all that long ago that the Van Dieman’s Land Chalice found its way to Lakeshore, when everyone thought it had been lost back in the late 1700s with the wreck of the HMS Sirius, the flagship of the First Fleet.
It didn’t take much imagination to believe there could be anything from historical artifacts to buried gold waiting out there for someone like Orville McGowan to find.
Although, if he died at sea…
“I take it,” I find myself asking, “that he never found any treasure out there.”
To my surprise, it’s Jasmine who answers. “No. Never did.”
“How do you know the story, Jas
mine?”
She shrugs at me. “What? You don’t think I care about things all the way down here at the bottom of the world? I know lots of things.”
“So anyway,” Halloway says, annoyed at being interrupted. “Orville McGowan kept asking his wife, that would be Mabel of course, to come with him on his trips. He swore that he’d found treasure somewhere but wouldn’t tell her where. He used to take trips back and forth to the islands, and he had a habit of taking a special bottle of whiskey with him on each trip. He’d drink the whole bottle, then write out a note for his wife, put it in the bottle and toss it over the side. He knew where the currents went, and most of them came right back to the beach here in town. Used to be a big thing around here, actually. Lotsa people sent notes back from sea that way.”
“Fascinating,” I admit, grudgingly. “Can we get back to the point?”
Halloway sniffs at that. “One night, the McGowans had a falling out. So bad that the neighbors called the cops, and the McGowans didn’t even have neighbors within half a klick. By all reports, Orville told Mabel that if she wasn’t going to support him, then he had no reason to stay with her. He stomped out of their house, got into his boat, and took off for whatever island he thought was going to make him rich. She never heard from him again. A storm rolled in while he was out on the water and he never came home. At this point, after all these years, it’s just history, but back then it was a tragedy. Hobart had a week-long event commemorating his death.”
Well. That is a story. “What, no statues in his honor?”
My little joke didn’t seem to sit well with Halloway. “This isn’t funny, Miss Powers. Folks around here take this story seriously. Very seriously. It’s part of our history.”
“Okay, you’re right, I’m sorry.” I didn’t mean to offend the guy. I was just trying to impress upon him that there’s more important things going on here than a nice story about a party celebrating a man’s death close to a hundred years ago. “Can we get back to what happened this morning, please? Someone came in here, attacked me, and said they were taking the bottle. I’m telling you it’s the desk clerk from last night. No one else even knew we had it here. I just don’t understand why he would want to kill me for it?”
“Don’t you get it?” Jasmine is practically bubbling with enthusiasm. “Look at the note! Those few words we can read didn’t mean anything before but now that we know the whole story, they make perfect sense. Look, look, look what it says in the message! ‘Gold?’ ‘Find?’ Don’t you see it? He was going to find the gold and come back. He probably wanted to bring Mabel back a bit of treasure as an apology for their argument. This note can tell us where the treasure is. We just need to figure out the rest of it!”
I think I rolled my eyes. I tried not to, but I’m not sure I’m ready for a treasure hunt. Several years back some eccentric old coot up in New Zealand left the world a poem that supposedly led to a fortune in buried silver. Lots of people got themselves hurt searching through the outback looking to get rich quick. Lots of holes got dug, lots of people got snakebit, and in the end nobody found anything. You’d think folks would learn.
The two of them are watching me, no doubt wondering why I’m not as excited as they are about a century-old wild goose chase. “Okay, I get it, but I still don’t understand how anyone would recognize that bottle as one that Orville McGowan would’ve used. I mean, sure it’s old, but how would he know what it was, let alone what might have been in it?”
Officer Halloway humphed—actually said humph—and then walked over between the room’s two beds, to where the broken parts of the bottle were still lying on the rug. He took out the stylus for his tablet and pushed them around until he found what he was looking for on one of the three bigger pieces. He picked it up between his thumb and forefinger, careful of the edge, and brought it over to us.
“See this? Where it says, ‘Abe’s Ale?’ That brand’s been out of production for over a decade, but it was the only brand that Orville would ever drink. There’s several empties of his in the Maritime Museum, some even still have the notes he wrote to her. Add in the fact that you found this on Blue Laguna’s beach, and it wouldn’t be a hard leap of faith to recognize this one for what it is. Or, was,” he added, chucking the shard into the dust bin.
“All right, then.” That proved it, then, as far as I was concerned. “It had to be the night clerk. The way he was looking at the bottle, the way someone got into our room without breaking down the door, and now the security cameras are conveniently not working? Now that you’ve told us how he would know the bottle by sight, it had to be Zacron. Maybe he wanted the bottle because he knew it was valuable and he wanted to sell it, or maybe he thought it would lead him to the treasure since that seems to be such a big deal in this town. Either way, it had to be him. So you’re going to go and arrest him now, right?”
That question makes Halloway scratch the back of his neck again. It seemed like a reasonable next step to me, but apparently not so much to him. “Listen, Miss Powers, I don’t know how they do things in that little town you come from—”
“Lakeshore,” I tell him, again.
“Right. Lakeshore. I don’t know how the police do things there, but this is the Hobart detachment of the Tasmania Police. Here, we like to talk to people first before we put handcuffs on them.”
I could give him some pointers about the way my son runs the police department in Lakeshore, and no doubt about that. Somehow, though, I get the feeling it would all fall on deaf ears.
“So, you aren’t going to arrest him?”
“Not without proof, Miss Powers. All you have right now is an accusation. We’ll do a bit of police work before we get into arresting people.”
“Oh, good. That’s fantastic. And in the meantime, what do we do if Zacron comes back?”
“Well, see, he works here,” Halloway says, sarcastically. “So, I imagine he will come back.”
“Unless you do your job and arrest him, you mean.”
“Sure. Look, if there’s any more trouble just dial triple zero and tell the dispatcher where you are. We’ll send help straight away.”
Now, why didn’t that make me feel very reassured?
“Is there anything else you need from us?” I ask him, my expression very carefully neutral.
“No. I’ve got your statements, and photos of the note and the bottle. I’ll let you know as soon as we find this Zacron fellow. Real shame you let this happen. That bottle and that note would’ve meant a lot to the people here in Blue Laguna. Now I’m not even sure the note’ll survive.”
Did he just blame me for this happening? Seriously? “There’s nothing else to say, then. Good day, then.”
“Well, just in case, here’s my card.” He held the card out for me to take and I just glared at him. He shrugged. “So. I’m just going to leave my business card here next to the TV in case you think of anything else. It’s not my personal number, just the number to the station.”
“Of course it is.”
“Listen, I’ll be in touch as soon as—”
“That’s just beaut then, isn’t it? We’ve got it. Why don’t you just go, so you can get to it, hmm?”
I went and opened the door for him, standing there as I wait for him to take the hint and go. Maybe I’m being rude. Then again, maybe I’m treating him exactly like he deserves. Police officers are supposed to help people. They weren’t supposed to make them feel stupid and ignore them after someone just tried to kill them.
My neck is still sore. I feel the bruises starting to come out and isn’t that just going to look lovely in a few hours. I won’t give Halloway the satisfaction of seeing how much it hurts, but once he’s gone and the door is closed again, I rub my fingers gently over the sore spots. Believe it or not, this isn’t the first time I’ve been choked. Not the first time someone’s tried to kill me, ether. Just the sort of life I live.
I imagine this is all pretty new for Jasmine, however.
Looking at her now, I
can’t help but feel a little responsible, just like Halloway said. What would Zacron have done to her once he was done having his ‘fun’ with me? If I hadn’t brought the bottle here to our room none of it would’ve happened. “Jasmine… I’m sorry.”
“For what?” she says, her eyes still on the words of Orville McGowan’s note.
“This was supposed to be a fun filled weekend break for both of us. Instead I picked up this bottle and now there’s someone trying to kill us.”
That sobered Jasmine right up. The smile that had played over her lips while she studied the note fell away and her eyes got really wide. “Oh. I see your point. I sort of slept through it all and missed it but it really happened for you, didn’t it? It’s not your fault, though. I was just so caught up in how this could be a link to Orville McGowan’s treasure that I didn’t think about the rest of it.”
We hugged each other, because that’s what gal pals do to make it right, and then we both looked at the note again, together. Some of the words were clearer now that it had hit the air, but I was still worried about it crumbling to dust. It was a fragile thing, history. Now it would be more important than ever to figure out some way to make the rest of the writing appear.
“You know,” Jasmine says all of a sudden, “if we want information about this note, maybe we should go to the source.”
“The source? Jasmine, Mabel McGowan is dead now, the very unhelpful officer said so, remember. And we know that Orville’s dead, even if there aren’t any statues of him.”
“Yes, it’s even funnier the second time. Ha, ha. I mean, there must be some family left, right? Up there in that mansion of theirs. Where did Officer Unhelpful say it was?”
“Pith Street.” I remember him talking about it. “I suppose we could look online to see if the place is still there. Or the street, for that matter. Between the nineteen-thirties and now a lot of things could have changed. If we’re going to go up there, I mean.”