The Shut Mouth Society (The Best Thrillers Book 1)

by Unknown

  She slipped her hand out from under his. “They didn’t find what they’re looking for.”

  “How do you know?”

  “My dad kept secrets … and he was very good at it.” She picked up the menu. “Let’s eat.”

  “First, tell me what’s wrong. Why are you angry with me?”

  “Nothing’s wrong. Don’t you think I deserve a day or two in a foul mood?”

  “Of course, but I want to help, and you seem to be pushing me away.”

  “There’s nothing wrong. At least nothing I want to discuss.”

  That told Evarts that she did have an issue with him. Did she blame him for getting her involved in this series of tragedies? For her parents’ death? He didn’t know, but he decided to give her a day or two before broaching the subject again.

  The Federalist menu made Evarts cringe, but he ignored price and ordered a steak sandwich. Baldwin chose a Caesar salad with chicken.

  “Why did you say we should follow my parents to find the good guys?”

  “Because you said your parents were basically good people, and I don’t believe Douglass had a mean bone in his body. Something about this whole thing doesn’t make sense. Throughout history, the extended Sherman family has shown an idealist and progressive bent. None of these people have ever demonstrated a penchant for the kind of violence we’ve witnessed. I think we should proceed on an assumption of warring factions within the Society.”

  “You think Douglass and my parents were on the good side?”

  “I do. Douglass said he didn’t belong to the Shut Mouth Society, but it looks like your parents may have belonged, so we follow their trail.”

  “How?”

  “First, tell me everything you know about your parents. Everything, no matter how trivial or how much it hurts. Start at the beginning when you first noticed something askew.”

  The food arrived before she got very far in her story. She looked at Evarts’s steak sandwich with fries and said, “I need a gym. I haven’t worked out in six days, and I feel paralysis creeping up on me. Besides, I need to release some tension.”

  “I saw one above the Starbucks on the corner. We can go after we finish for the day.”

  “I prefer morning workouts.”

  “I prefer surfing in the mornings. Evening workouts hype the appetite for dinner.”

  “There’s no surf here, so we’ll work out in the mornings. Speaking of the beach, I need to go to Macy’s. Other than that beach attire you bought me, I have one and a half outfits.”

  Evarts decided not to argue about the gym. “I need a computer store too. Can you check books out of this library?”

  “Yes, but I hate to limit myself to just a few books. Why do you need a computer store?”

  “I want to mount a camera in that staircase and tie it into your laptop. One in the alley would be a good idea too.”

  “We better eat quick.”

  As Evarts devoured the small steak, all the fries, and even the grease-soaked bread, Baldwin explained that ever since she could remember, her parents had tried to instill in her a deep sense of obligation for less fortunate people or people ignorant of the constant threat of oppression. At about fifteen, she accused her father of patronizing the “little people” and pointed out that noblesse oblige reeked of elitism. Her subsequent rebellion took the form of adopting everything common, including boyfriends.

  She began to seriously wonder about her parents during her first menstrual cycle. Her mother had supposedly taken a trip to visit her sister, but when Baldwin tried to reach her mother by phone to ask her what to do, her aunt said she had neither seen nor heard from her. On her return, her mother had mumbled something about a change in plans, but Baldwin remembered only that her mother had abandoned her in an hour of need.

  This incident represented a pattern. Her parents would individually take off for days and then give the vaguest excuses for their absences. Baldwin grew increasingly suspicious after her father showed her the Boston hideaway. As a senior in a “sophisticated” prep school, she decided her parents had what some people called an “open” marriage.

  Her father always seemed consumed with some complex dealings, but he belonged to the idle-rich class. When he did make time for her, he spent it explaining the intricacies of their nested trusts and elaborate banking arrangements. She interpreted his preoccupation as distance. She never knew their intimate friends, whom they kept separated from their casual social gatherings. Although she could never put her finger on what bothered her, she knew they wanted to mold her into something she didn’t understand. Her independent streak pushed them away for many years.

  “That doesn’t give us much to go on,” Evarts said. “We can try to trace the Greenes from the Roger Sherman Inn, but if they’re in a safe house like ours, it’ll be difficult.”

  “Last Thanksgiving my parents asked me to come back in the summer for an extended stay. My father told me he wanted to explain about our family. I put the trip off because I feared that what he’d tell me would destroy our reconciliation.”

  “What do you think now?”

  “That extramarital affairs weren’t the reason for their unusual behavior.” She absentmindedly picked at her salad and then met Evarts’s eyes. “The Shut Mouth Society could account for all that secrecy.”

  Evarts swallowed the last of his Coke. “My parents never showed any secretive behaviors. Just the opposite: They made an obsessive point about none of us ever having any secrets from the rest of the family. But I did feel they were trying to mold me as well. They’re pretty controlling. I always sensed something was amiss, and I guess my obstinacy about being controlled is my way of rebelling against them.”

  “But you don’t think they were part of a secret society?”

  “I’m certain they weren’t. They wouldn’t even join AARP. They hated organized religion, governments, homeowner associations, even the PTA. They weren’t even pleased that I joined the ROTC in college.”

  “Well, it sure looks like my parents joined the Shut Mouth Society.” She shoved her salad away. “There’s another thing that points in that direction: My parents loved that I became a Lincoln scholar.”

  Evarts drummed his fingers on the table. “We’ve focused on the Sherman family and the Shut Mouth Society, but the encryption came attached to Lincoln papers. There’s a reason those papers have been withheld from the public.” He thumped the table. “Let’s pay the tab and get back to the library.”

  As they walked back, Evarts asked, “If Lincoln had a big secret, what do you guess it would be?”

  She didn’t answer immediately. “Let’s walk around the block.” After a few more moments, she said, “Fort Sumter.”

  “Where the Civil War started?”

  “That’s where the shooting part of the war started. After Lincoln’s election, but before his inauguration, seven states seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. The CSA seized eleven U.S. forts inside its territory on the premise that a sovereign nation had the right to expel a foreign power from inside its borders.”

  When they got to the corner, Baldwin signaled that they should walk straight ahead. “Some historians believe that Lincoln instructed the Republicans in Congress to do nothing to mollify the rebellious states. After his inauguration, Lincoln agonized for weeks over what to do about Fort Sumter, one of the two remaining U.S. military installations in the South. The commander of the fort refused to surrender, and a standoff ensued. The Confederates harassed the fort but didn’t attack. They issued warnings that any attempt to reinforce or reprovision the fort would be viewed as a hostile act of war.

  “Starvation threatened the garrison, so Lincoln told the Confederacy he had dispatched a ship with food and medical supplies only. On April 12, 1861, the day before the ship arrived, the South Carolina militia open fired on Fort Sumter. The following day Congress declared war on the rebellious states. Immediately, four more states seceded and joined the Confederacy.” S
he nodded that they should cross the street. “There’s an ironic twist to the story. The South heavily bombarded the fort for thirty-four hours before the garrison surrendered, but there were no casualties on either side in the battle that started the bloodiest war in our history.”

  “Fascinating, but what could be the big, dark secret?” Evarts asked.

  “A few historians have accused Lincoln of purposely manipulating the Fort Sumter crisis to start the war and paint the South as the aggressor. Abe Douglass subscribed to this theory. A few even suggest he designed his inaugural address to position any forthcoming crisis to the Union’s benefit. They see some of his words as evidence of premeditation.”

  “Any proof?”

  “Circumstantial only.” She pointed. “That’s the old statehouse.”

  Evarts had never seen a more incongruous building. The three-story, red brick building had cream-colored trim and a cream steeple positioned in the center of the roof instead of at one end, like a church. The statehouse looked like a miniature model crowded in on all sides by giant glass and steel giants. A preservation group must have saved the building, but bustling Boston just built right up to its edges and ignored the landmark.

  Evarts’s gaze shifted between the skyscrapers and the little brick building. “It looks like the building’s about to suffocate.” Suddenly, the old statehouse disgorged an unending stream of rushing people. “Where the hell did all those people come from? It looks like a panicked mob scene from one of those B horror flicks.”

  “Subway stop. The street exit comes right up through the old statehouse.”

  Evarts laughed. “A three-hundred-year-old building converted to accommodate a modern conveyance. I might learn to like Boston.”

  “Not such a modern conveyance. They built the Boston T over a hundred years ago. It’s the oldest subway system in the United States. Come here. I want to show you something.” She walked to the front of the building and pointed to the congested street. “See that rock circle in the middle of the road?”

  “Yes.”

  “Five men died on that spot in 1770. The radicals who wanted war with Great Britain called it the Boston Massacre. In truth, a large mob of drunken thugs started throwing stones at eight Red Coats, who fired either in self-defense or by accident. John Adams acted as defense counsel for the British troops and got them acquitted, but that didn’t stop the rabble-rousers from using the incident to enflame hatred for the British and push the populace closer to war.” She turned toward him. “You’re standing on the very spot where those frightened young soldiers faced an angry mob just fifteen feet away.”

  “Hard to imagine, with all these honking cars and scampering pedestrians.”

  “Some historians believe the radicals purposely incited the riot for political gain.”

  Evarts nodded. “An engineered provocation like the battleship Maine anchored in Havana harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, or cutting off Japanese oil supplies.” Evarts turned to face her. “And possibly Fort Sumter.”

  “If you were one of my students, you’d earn a good grade by submitting that as a thesis. Now let’s go back. You need to crack that code.”

  Chapter 22

  When they returned to the reading room, they found everything as they had left it. Baldwin explained that if the room displayed an occupied sign, the librarians would treat it as sacrosanct.

  Over the next four hours, Evarts exhausted Baldwin’s list with no success. He felt frustrated. True, he had dedicated only one full day to the code, but he had started the day convinced that his law book idea would blow this whole case wide open. After some contemplation, he realized he had grown anxious to test the theory on the drive across the country, and that the five days between the formation of the idea and being able to test its validity had built overblown expectations. He had become overconfident because he assumed a hundred-and-fifty-year-old code would appear primitive to a modern cryptologist.

  Baldwin had chased her Skull and Bones lead to more success. One or more Bonesmen always seemed to hover around key turning points in American history. Baldwin saw this as ominous; Evarts thought it common sense that the elite of an elite institution would end up in positions of power. She confirmed that a close connection existed between Yale and the Sherman family, all the way back to Roger Sherman, who served for many years as the college treasurer. She even thought Lincoln’s signing the Land-Grant College Act, which his predecessor had vetoed, might have been a political payoff to Yale or possibly even to Skull and Bones. The act provided each state with thirty thousand acres of federal land for each Senator and House member representing the state. Yale received its federal land scrip before any other college in the nation and grabbed all of Connecticut’s allocation so fast that no other Connecticut college had a chance.

  After returning from the book stacks, Evarts said, “No luck and that was the last book on your list.”

  “You didn’t expect to break it in one day, did you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did.”

  “That was foolish … and unprofessional.” Her voice had an edge.

  Evarts choked down a retort. He was getting tired of her snippiness, but then he remembered that he had decided to give her a few days before bringing it up again. He looked at his watch. “If we’re going to hit Macy’s and a computer store, we need to get going.”

  Baldwin glanced at her own watch. “You’re right, it’s nearly six thirty.” She worked the touchpad on her laptop a moment and then turned it around for him to see. “Copy this list down.”

  He looked at the screen. “Are these law books you rejected from your first list?”

  “Greg, these aren’t rejects. Don’t you think it more likely that the key would be an obscure book?”

  He shrugged. “Probably.”

  “Make the list and then grab two or three of them to check out overnight. We can work at home after dinner.”

  “Home?”

  She looked up, startled. “Did I say home?”

  “You did.”

  “Well, I guess it’s all we’ve got now.”

  “Silver linings.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I like the idea of living together.”

  “I like the idea of living.” She bent back over her work. “Make your list.”

  After checking out their books, they walked a few blocks to Downtown Crossing. The shopping area looked too downscale for Baldwin. Downtown Crossing forbade cars, so foot traffic clogged the streets. The city probably wanted to create a personal, neighborly feel, but a kind of rowdy disorder permeated the district. Scantily dressed teenagers meandered everywhere, the homeless and pretend homeless worked the crowd, and vendors hawked street food at the top of their lungs. Evarts knew the heavy police presence indicated that the retailers had a concern about crime. Downtown Crossing certainly couldn’t challenge Santa Barbara’s claim to the most beautiful downtown in America.

  “Not the caliber of shopping I expected you to suggest,” Evarts said.

  “It’ll do. The upscale shops are on Newbury Street. Too far to walk at this hour. I can find adequate outfits here.”

  Baldwin’s tone was curt, so Evarts headed toward a computer store, telling her that he would meet her later, inside Macy’s. He needed a little time to himself anyway. He had started to chafe under her irritable and dominating behavior. She was getting far too controlling for his taste. If her parents hadn’t just died, he knew he would have reacted in a way that would have ruined any chance of their relationship developing further.

  Evarts thought they had taken some promising steps toward something more than a chance sexual encounter, but Baldwin had been dismissive of any comment or action he took that reminded her of their intimacy. Her behavior might have resulted from the sudden death of her parents, but in his experience, tragedy drove people together, even if only for temporary solace. True, her initial frosty demeanor hadn’t totally returned, but he felt that she held him at arm’s length and
kept their conversation on the business at hand.

  He didn’t expect her to show off her sexual prowess or give him a light kiss when he didn’t expect it, but he found disheartening the erosion of the camaraderie they had shared crossing the country. He thought it odd that he feared losing their intimate conversations more than losing their intimate physical moments. This was a new one for him, but he would think about it later. For now, he decided to leave it alone. Then a thought occurred to him. Perhaps he was seeing Professor Baldwin for the first time. Not Professor Baldwin in front of a class, but the scholar immersed in research and distracted. He could understand that behavior, because when he became engaged in an investigation, he was often accused of becoming distant. The thought gave him hope.

  Evarts bought his supplies at the computer store and went to the men’s department in Macy’s. In twenty minutes, he had everything he needed and wandered around the women’s departments looking for Baldwin. He finally found her when she emerged from a dressing room.

  “All set?” he asked.

  “No.” She discarded an armload of clothing onto a bench. “I need to try on a few more things. I’ll let you know when I’m done.”

  Evarts hated waiting in women’s wear, but he sat down in what he hoped was a patient pose and started reading the instructions on the cameras and the baby monitor he had bought. The simple instructions held no surprises, but he wondered about the technical configuration of her laptop. She had put her case beside him to watch, so he took out the laptop and opened the lid. The computer snapped out of its slumber, and the cursor started blinking. He was about to check the memory and system capabilities when he noticed a file on the desktop titled “notes.” He assumed these were the notes from her research at the Athenaeum.