by Penny Drake
“So Victor must have died in 1967,” I finished. “He left several million to his two sons, but I’m not finding stock certificates or anything like that. Sold off to pay debts, I’m guessing.”
Ms. Hawk was down at the far end of the pigeonholes. The last two columns were completely empty, and she was examining the last sets of papers. “These bank statements are for just this year,” she said. “They had a few dollars, nothing more, until just a few weeks ago. Look—a deposit for nine thousand, nine hundred dollars.”
“What?” Zack looked up. He had shifted from pigeonholes to shoeboxes. “Where did the uncles come up with ninety-nine hundred bucks?”
“The bank is required to report any cash transaction of ten thousand dollars or more to the IRS,” Ms. Hawk said. “I suppose they received ten thousand in cash and deposited all but the last hundred to avoid attention.”
“That must be how they paid their property taxes at the last minute,” I mused. “Are there withdrawals?”
Ms. Hawk shuffled through the papers. “Several, including one for almost seven thousand dollars. Property tax payment, I’m sure.”
Zack gasped. “Oh. Oh God.”
“What’s wrong?” I demanded.
There was some frantic shuffling of papers over at Zack’s shoebox. “I think I found the uncles’ wills. Look.” He held up two pieces of paper. “‘I, Howard Peale, being of sound mind and body, yada yada yada.’”
“Does it really say ‘yada, yada, yada’?” I asked. “Doesn’t seem too sound of mind if he did.”
“Har har.” Zack read quickly. “Looks like Howard left everything to Lawrence. Let’s look at the other one…uh huh. Yep.”
“What?” Ms. Hawk said.
“Lawrence left everything to Howard.”
I blew out a heavy breath. “Belinda’s going to love that. People who die intestate are a real pain in the patootie.”
“Patootie?” Zack echoed. “What kind of word is that?”
“One that’s more genteel than the one you were thinking,” I replied primly. “I’m in a ladylike mood for once. What else is in that shoebox?”
Zack rustled through it, sitting cross-legged on the floor with more shoeboxes piled around him. “The uncles’ birth certificates, a death certificate for Victor Peale—Terry was right, he did die in 1967—and…huh. A divorce decree.”
“For whom?” Ms. Hawk said.
“Darlene and Victor Peale. It’s dated 1949, just like that gossip column.”
“Not easy to get a divorce back then,” I said. “Does it say anything about kids?”
More rustling. “Nope. That’s it. But there’s another box underneath this one. Let’s see if…ah! A transcript of a hearing. Whoa. It’s a carbon copy of a document done on a typewriter. Haven’t seen that in a while.”
“Tell us what it says, Mr. Archer,” said Ms. Hawk.
Zack’s eyes tracked quickly across the pages. “Darlene Peale is suing for divorce. Says her husband Victor Peale keeps a strange house. Never lets her throw anything away. Piles of junk everywhere. Mr. Peale never goes out, lives like a hermit, bad climate for teenage sons Howard and Lawrence and ten-year-old daughter Nell.”
“Nell must be Belinda’s mother,” I said. “That gossip column mentioned her.”
“Sounds about right. A social worker testified that the house was dark and dreary, that Nell was pale and sickly, that the boys were overly shy and anti-social.” Zack furrowed his forehead. “Now that’s interesting. The judge granted the divorce and gave custody of Nell to her mother Darlene. But both Howard and Lawrence begged the judge to let them stay with their father. The judge agreed to it because, and I’m quoting, ‘These young men are old enough to know their own minds.’”
“Which is why they stayed with the house and why Belinda and her mother were so far away from it.” I sank thoughtfully onto the squeaky bed. “So let me reconstruct a few events. Victor Peale marries a woman named Darlene in Detroit. Their house is broken into several times by their Chicago relatives. The two branches are stealing some kind of paper treasure back and forth, maybe. The house in Detroit burns to the ground and everyone assumes the papers are destroyed, but they actually aren’t. Victor, Darlene, their two teenage boys and their young daughter all move to Ann Arbor, where Victor has this house built. Victor becomes a recluse, either because of trauma from the fire or because he’s afraid that word of the papers will get out or a combination of both. Eventually Darlene gets fed up with it and divorces Victor. She takes their daughter Nell with her, but their sons—and the papers—stay with Victor. Nell grows up away from her father, marries, and eventually has a daughter named Belinda. Victor dies in 1967, leaving a tidy fortune to Lawrence and Howard. The papers, meanwhile, are still somewhere in the house. Lawrence runs into Zack, here, and offers to show him something, starting with pressed leaves but maybe, eventually, the papers. Before he can do it, however, Uncle Howard dies in bed, and people start breaking into the house again. One of them trips a trap and is suffocated in a pile of magazines. It’s possible everyone involved is looking for the papers. Did I miss anything?”
“That about sums it up,” Zack said. “Except for the fact that if I wanted to hide some valuable papers in this house, I know where I’d do it.”
“Yes,” Ms. Hawk said, and her gaze went to the enormous number of them neatly shelved in pigeonholes. My heart sank, and I did a quick count. There were two hundred columns and twenty rows. That made four thousand pigeonholes. Each hole looked to be about four inches wide, four inches tall, and twelve inches deep. I pulled out my cell phone and called up the calculator function. Each hole had a hundred and ninety-two cubic inches. Multiply that by four thousand holes, divide by one hundred forty-four, and you had something like five thousand three hundred cubic feet of paper to search. And that didn’t include the shoeboxes.
“So what’s the bad news?” Zack asked, trying to peer over my shoulder.
“We’ll be older than the uncles before we find anything,” I said. “There has to be a way to narrow it down. If we knew what we were looking for, that would help a little. I mean, this entire house is organized—in its own weird way—and the uncles wouldn’t stash a treasure someplace where they couldn’t find it themselves, right? So it must be someplace findable. We just have to figure out where that would be.”
“And how do we do that?” Zack asked. “Short of resurrecting Uncle Howard and asking him?”
I gestured at the ticking clock. “Someone’s been winding that thing. I’m willing to bet Uncle Lawrence is still alive. He may even be the intruder we chased. He would know everything.”
“Assuming we can even find him,” Zack grumbled. “And why would he try to hurt you with that avalanche of pans? And why didn’t he report his brother’s death? And did he kill the magazine guy?”
“All questions to ask when we catch up with him,” Ms. Hawk said. “Meanwhile, we could go through the bookcase over there. All the other books in the house are in the parlor, so why are these up here? The answer might be a clue.”
I readily agreed and crossed the creaky wooden floor to the bookcase, carefully stepping around piles of shoeboxes. The room didn’t have anything personal in it. No pictures or posters, no decorations. I didn’t even see any clothes. Did Uncle Lawrence just root around in the hallways to forage for something to wear?
The three of us spread out in front of the wide bookshelf, me on the left, Ms. Hawk in the middle, and Zack on the right. I ran my finger across several bindings.
“These books aren’t dusty,” I said. “Someone reads them regularly.”
“A History of the American People,” Zack read aloud, his head cocked sideways as he looked at titles. “Constitutional History. Great Issues in American History, Volume I and Volume II. How the Constitution Was Created. American History for Dummies. American History to 1877. Anyone seeing a theme here?”
I pulled down a volume at random and flipped it open. The pages fell open to a c
hapter about the establishment and ratification of the United States Constitution. I riffled the pages to see if anything fell out. Nothing did. The flyleaf was inscribed with “Property of Lawrence Peale” written with a fountain pen. I put the book back and took down Your American Heritage. It also fell open to a section about the Constitution. So did American History: A Survey and Great Historical Events of America. In the latter I found an underlined passage:
In 1789, George Washington ordered fourteen copies of the Bill of Rights printed up. He signed them and wrote “1789 Proposed amendments to the Constitution of the United States” on the back of each one, then sent thirteen copies by thirteen horses to each of the colonies so their governors and assemblies could discuss them for ratification. The fourteenth copy he kept with him in Philadelphia.
Weird. I called Zack and Ms. Hawk over to have a look and pointed out that all the books I’d looked at were creased at similar areas.
“There’s even a single volume of the World Book Encyclopedia,” I said, pointing. “It covers the letter C.”
“Another obsession?” Zack said. “The uncles love junk and Constitutional history?”
“The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are written on paper,” I observed. “You don’t suppose…”
“Right,” Zack scoffed. “They have the originals somewhere here in this house and a fake is on display in Washington, DC?”
“The Peales came from Philadelphia,” I pointed out. “That’s where all this stuff came down. The Peale family papers might not be the Constitution itself, but they might be related to it somehow. You yourself told us about that copy of the Declaration of Independence that turned up.”
“What do you two make of this?” Ms. Hawk asked. She was holding a spiral-bound notebook. The wires were bent, the blue cover was battered and half torn off. A pencil had been slipped among the wires. She opened the notebook onto a list of figures. I ran my eyes down it. It looked like a schedule. There were listings for arrivals, departures and number of “parcels” delivered. I took the notebook from Ms. Hawk and leafed through it. The notebook listed two locations—a warehouse in Chicago, and a warehouse in Detroit. At the top of the first page was a set of map coordinates: 41 59’ N, 83 08’ W. Someone had circled them in red.
“What are these coordinates for?” I wondered aloud.
“I’d need a map or computer to pinpoint them,” Ms. Hawk said, “but at first glance, they appear to point toward a spot near the southeastern coast of Michigan, out where the Detroit River becomes Lake Erie.”
I stole an admiring glance at Ms. Hawk. It would have taken me several minutes to figure that out, and that’s assuming I had a map in front of me.
“An island, then?” Zack said. “Or a rendezvous point for a ship?”
“Or both,” I said. I leafed through the notebook some more. “These records start last February and end last May.”
“Exactly when Ms. Harris stopped hearing from her uncles,” Ms. Hawk said. “I wonder if Howard Peale died in his bed in May.”
We searched the rest of the bookshelf but found nothing else of interest. By now it was past lunchtime and my thermos was empty, so we decided to call it a day for now.
Ms. Hawk took the notebook back from me, then picked up the dusty shoebox containing the wills, divorce decrees, and other documents. “I think we should meet with Ms. Harris to discuss these matters. Perhaps she can tell us more.”
Outside, I inhaled the fresh, hot air with appreciation. A gentle breeze stirred the trees and birds sang. It was always a relief to leave the uncles’ cramped, dark house. Zack pedaled away on his bicycle, and Ms. Hawk offered me a lift home so I could clean up and grab something to eat. On the way home, I called Belinda on my cell and asked if she could meet us later at the office. She was only too glad to agree.
Ms. Hawk dropped me off, waved, and backed out of the driveway. Not for the first time, I wondered where Ms. Hawk lived. I had never been to her house—apartment? Condo? Hell, I didn’t even know if she lived in Ann Arbor. All the paperwork I had ever seen had the office’s address on it, and her phone number went straight to her cell. No mention of a home address anywhere. For all I knew, she commuted from Zimbabwe.
I went in, and for the third time in as many days, I peeled off sweaty, dusty clothes and took a shower in the afternoon. I’d have to do laundry pretty soon—I was running out of adventure clothes. A gal only has so many sports bras and khaki slacks.
As I was heading out the door, a sandwich in my hand, my cell chirped. It was Dave, calling to tell me my Jeep was done.
“You had some loose wires around the spark plugs,” he told me. “We just reconnected ’em and the Jeep was fine. Twenty bucks, and you can pick it up in five minutes.”
Wow. How often do you get a call from your mechanic like that? As it happened, Mark, the psychology student, drove up at that moment, and he offered to zip me over to Dave’s. Dave’s garage wasn’t far from Ms. Hawk’s office, so I could make it there in time for the meeting with Belinda if I hurried.
At the garage, I handed Dave a twenty, thanked him, collected my keys, and jumped into my trusty little Jeep. I hadn’t realized how unsettled I was feeling until I was behind the wheel of my own familiar car again. I was just putting the key into the ignition when I saw the box on the passenger seat. It was a metal box, painted a dull blue. What the hell was it? Had one of the mechanics left some weird tool in my Jeep? I put out a finger and poked it.
The lid popped open and a bright blue clown sprang up. I jumped back in my seat, startled. Pinned to one of the clown’s hands was a small white card. It read BOOM!
Chapter Ten
I bolted out of my Jeep, ran back into Dave’s office, and slammed the door. My heart was pounding a mile a minute, and I expected any moment to hear a thumping kaboom from the parking lot. Dave, standing at the grimy computer behind the battered counter, blinked at me in surprise. The pop machine hummed quietly in the corner, and NASCAR race cars whizzed around a track on the TV. Through a giant plate-glass window, I could see Dave’s employees working on half a dozen cars. Parts were scattered about like bits of meat in a Civil War operating room, and I wondered what would happen if the plate glass shattered in an explosion.
“Something wrong with the Jeep?” Dave asked. He’s in his early fifties, silver hair receding at the temples and thinning on top. Like every other mechanic I’ve ever met, his hands are scarred and permanently stained with grease.
I shook my head, pulled out my cell, and punched 911. “I’m at Dave’s Garage in downtown Ann Arbor,” I told the operator. “And I think someone’s planted a bomb in my car.”
That brought Dave around the counter. He dashed for the front door, his eyes wide and white. I grabbed his elbow and jerked him to a stop. “Don’t go near it,” I hissed. “Just keep an eye on it and stop anyone who might get close.”
Dave nodded and stationed himself by the door.
Next I called Ms. Hawk, who agreed that we should postpone the meeting with Belinda. I was just hanging up when sirens screamed around the corner. Two police cars and a white van pulled into Dave’s tiny parking lot. The car shared by Carl dela Cort and Henrietta Flinch parked itself at the curb. A moment later, both detectives dashed inside, their faces tight and drawn. Two uniformed officers followed.
“What’s this all about?” Henrietta asked.
By now I was feeling a little calmer. I had fed a dollar into the pop machine and slugged down most of a Diet Mountain Dew, so the caffeine was steadying my nerves. Valium is for wimps.
“Yesterday afternoon my car wouldn’t start,” I said. “I had it towed here for repairs. Dave said the spark plug wires were loose, and he put them back in. When I came to pick it up, I found a jack-in-the-box on the front seat. I touched it, and it popped open. The clown was holding a note that said BOOM. I jumped out of the car and called you guys.”
“Jesus,” Dave said.
I downed another gulp of Dew. “In light of the pi
ctures, I figured the threat might be real.”
“Someone has it in for you, sweets,” Carl said. His notebook was out and he was scribbling furiously. “You think there really could be a bomb in your car or was this just a warning?”
I cocked my head. Carl’s earlier chauvinistic attitude seemed to have lessened quite a bit. “Dunno. I don’t want to turn the key and find out the hard way.”
Henrietta asked me a couple more questions while Carl talked to Dave, but no new information turned up. Dave said he had no idea where the jack-in-the-box came from, and he didn’t remember seeing it in my Jeep when he parked it in the lot, which had to mean someone had put it there this afternoon. My Jeep hadn’t been locked, so anyone could have walked up.
One of the uniforms spoke into his microphone. Someone crackled an acknowledgment, and outside two men in bulky off-white bomb suits got out of the van. They trundled toward my Jeep. The officers gently but firmly ushered us out of the garage to a safe distance away.
A crowd was gathering around the perimeter tape the cops had set up, and a news van had already arrived. Cars slowed as they passed on the sun-drenched street. A bus rolled by, spewing the sharp smell of diesel exhaust. Someone touched my arm, and I found Slava standing next to me. She was wearing a red blouse and a voluminous pair of white slacks. Her curly black hair had been forced into a long, chunky braid that hung down her back.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, startled.
“I see big crowd gather and come to gawk,” she said without a trace of shame. “Then I see you and know you must be cause. What is going on?”
I gave her a ten-second explanation in low tones that went no farther than the two of us. Slava’s face hardened and she put an arm around my shoulders. She smelled faintly of tobacco smoke.