by Eva Gates
Patrons lined up at the desk, and Bertie checked out their books. Ronald had left at four, after wrapping yellow barricade tape around the children’s construction site.
“I’m looking forward to Settlers’ Day,” one of the patrons said as she hoisted her stack of cookbooks. “Is Louise Jane going to be telling stories?”
“I don’t think so,” Bertie replied. “The historical society has arranged for several speakers, including a college history professor.”
“I hope he or she is better than other speakers they’ve had. I went to a lecture at the society a couple of months ago. That’s an hour and a half of my life I’ll never get back. Driest bunch of facts I ever have heard.”
“The history of the Outer Banks is exciting,” her friend said. “That speaker made it sound so deadly boring I fell asleep.”
“Then again,” the first woman said with a laugh, “you fell asleep in Mamma Mia.”
“I’d had a rough few nights before that.”
“Regardless of the speakers,” Bertie said, “it’s going to be a fun day.”
The two women left, chattering about what they were going to wear on Sunday. I heard, “Probably too hot for a bustle.”
“Is Ronald going to open the children’s construction area on Sunday?” I asked Bertie when the last of the patrons had left.
“He says better to have it available and someone keeping an eye on it than tempting kids to crawl under the tape.”
“Not exactly historically accurate for Settlers’ Day.” Charlene’s expression was disapproving as she headed for the door, briefcase in hand. “Dump trucks? Earthmoving equipment? Hard hats?”
“Happy and occupied children,” I said.
“Worth having some historical inaccuracies then,” she replied.
Louise Jane liked to make a dramatic gesture on arrival, throwing the door open and posing in the entrance, but our new door was heavy enough that she had to tug at it, which spoiled the impact considerably. “I can’t believe it took all day to get a set of tires replaced,” she said when she eventually made it in. “Take my advice: don’t go to Fitzroy’s Garage. He wouldn’t take me first, said he had people who’d made appointments to see to. Imagine the cheek! His mother was a second cousin of my uncle Albert, the one we always called Bertie—like you Bertie, I’d forgotten that until now—and rumor says he—Uncle Bertie—wanted to marry Lydia Fitzroy, but her family put a stop to it because she was too young.”
I didn’t bother to try to figure out the degrees of relation between Uncle Bertie and Lydia Fitzroy and Louise Jane.
“You’d think close family would get some sort of privileged service, wouldn’t you? It’s not as if I was expecting a discount or anything. Although that would have been an awful nice gesture. I told him I had an important meeting to get to, but oh no, I had to take a number and wait. I sat there all day. I would have gotten up and taken my car someplace else, but I was afraid the cops had been told to be on the lookout for me and I’d get pulled over.
“Now, where were we? Oh yes, Jeremy Hughes. No loss to anyone, but the theft of the map and code page certainly are. What have you done about finding them, Lucy?”
“Me? What makes you think I’ve been looking for them? The police are investigating.”
“They’re investigating Jeremy’s murder. Probably not looking awful hard for the stolen items. Okay, if I must. Let me see that code page. I trust you were sensible enough to make a copy of it.”
“Well, yes, but …” I threw a questioning look to Bertie, but she wasn’t looking at me. The door opened, and a bright smile leapt into my boss’s eyes.
“Good afternoon, everyone,” said Professor Edward McClanahan.
Bertie jumped to her feet. “Eddie! This is a surprise. What brings you here?”
“Skullduggery of the darkest order, my dear.” He came around the desk and gave Bertie a peck on the cheek. She turned various shades of pink and red.
Bertie and Eddie had been a couple way back in their college years. That ended largely because he was almost the movie definition of an absent-minded professor. He even looked the part, with his mane of curly white hair; salt and pepper mustache, curling at the ends; rimless glasses with thick lenses; and tall, thin, stooping frame.
He and Bertie had reconnected last October when she and I had gone to Blacklock College, where he taught ancient Greek and Latin, in search of gossip—I mean important information—about Professors McArthur and Hoskins.
“Hi,” Louise Jane said.
“Nice to see you, Professor,” Charlene said.
He nodded politely to Louise Jane and Charlene, clearly not remembering where he’d met them, which had been at Jake and Josie’s wedding.
“What sort of skullduggery?” Bertie asked.
The professor glanced at Louise Jane, Charlene, and me.
“It’s okay,” Louise Jane said. “You can talk freely in front of us. No secrets are kept from me in this building. Right, Bertie? I said, isn’t that right, Bertie?”
“Uh, right,” Bertie said.
“I assume you mean Lizzie and Norm are up to something,” I guessed.
“I do,” he said. “As you know, their positions at the college are tenuous, to say the least.” At the time of the death of Jay Ruddle, North Carolina History—that is, Professors Elizabeth McArthur and Norman Hoskins—had been in danger of being eliminated from the curriculum so Blacklock College could concentrate on their main focus, which is ancient and modern languages. The Ruddle collection would have been an invaluable boost to the professors’ efforts to keep the North Carolina History Department—and their jobs—alive. They hadn’t secured the collection, nor had we, and they would be on the lookout for another way of proving their importance to the college.
Our mysterious little diary might well be it.
“What’s happened now?” Bertie asked.
“I took the liberty of printing off an article that was published this morning in the college’s online newspaper.” The professor fumbled in the pockets of his seersucker jacket. Out came a set of keys; a cigarette lighter, although he didn’t smoke; a packet of tissues; two pens; a pencil nibbled down to the stub; a worn brown leather wallet, bulging with scraps of paper; a flat black rock; another rock, this one round and white; a pair of reading glasses; and a pocket Greek–English dictionary. “Now,” he muttered to himself, “where did I put it?”
“Maybe tucked in that little book?” Bertie suggested.
He checked and proudly produced a computer printout. “Ta-da.”
Bertie smiled at him.
He unfolded the paper and said, “I won’t bore you with the tedious overly formal language and barely disguised slander. Or is it libel? I always forget.”
“Libel is something in print. Slander is spoken words,” Charlene said.
“Yes. Libel. The gist of this piece is that Lizzie and Norm are accusing you—the unnamed director of this library—of staging the stealing of pages of the diary in order to keep them from—and I quote—‘undergoing an unbiased, independent, professional examination.’”
“Phooey to them,” Bertie said. “No one cares what those two have to say.”
“I think you should take this seriously, Bee. I chose to confront them upon reading this, and they told me they’d been in contact with the police.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said.
“Because,” the professor added ominously, “whoever stole the pages is likely to be the same person who killed this Mr. Hughes.”
Bertie sputtered. “No one, least of all Sam Watson, is going to think I broke down the front door of my own library and smashed the lock on my own desk in order to sneak something out of it that I’d put there myself, and then murdered some innocent passerby who just happened to wander through the building after closing.”
“Put like that,” Charlene said, “it does sound pretty stupid.”
“It sounds ludicrous,” I said.
“The police wi
ll have to take their observation into consideration,” Professor McClanahan said.
“First the cops accused me, and now you, Bertie,” Louise Jane said. “This is getting too close to home.”
“They accused you of killing Jeremy?” Charlene said. “I didn’t know that. Why?”
“No reason.”
“There has to have been a reason.”
“Let me rephrase that,” Louise Jane said. “No reason that is any of your business.”
“I’d say whatever happened here that night—any night—is the business of us all,” Charlene replied. “How did you get that bruise on your face anyway? It’s a bad one.”
“Not in a fight to the death, I can assure you of that.”
“Let’s not squabble,” Bertie said. “None of us did it, and we’d all be more than happy to see the pages returned. In that, Eddie, you might be able to help us.”
“Happy to, my dear. How?”
She patted her hips. At work, Bertie usually wore long colorful dresses with voluminous pockets stuffed with everything she might need in a day. Those pockets, I thought with a hidden smile, were somewhat like the professor’s. She found what she was looking for and produced her copy of the code page. “Fortunately, Lucy had the brilliant idea of taking a photograph of the page that seems to be written in code and the map. We have that at least.”
“I have to get off home,” Charlene said. “Good luck with it, everyone.”
“See you tomorrow,” I said.
Bertie handed the printout to Professor McClanahan. Louise Jane leaned over his shoulder. “It’s in code,” he said.
“Really, Eddie, is that all you can say?” Bertie said. “We know it’s in code.”
“We’re guessing it’s in code,” I said. “It might be the ramblings of someone who can’t read or write.”
“Unlikely, with handwriting this precise,” he said.
We were quiet for a long time. I pulled out my own copy and once again tried to find a recognizable pattern.
“Is it in English, do you think?” Bertie asked.
“One of the modern Western European languages, I’d say,” the professor replied. “There appear to be no accents on the letters, or tildes.”
“Which means it’s probably in English, right?” I said.
“Not necessarily. The substitution might be replacing accented letters with different ones.”
“Meaning an e with an accent is being replaced by a different letter than an e without?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Oh good.” I threw up my hands. “More complications.”
“We need the key,” he said.
“That’s the problem,” I said. “We don’t have the key, and we don’t have the slightest idea where to find it or what it might be. If there even is one.”
“It’s probably lost,” Louise Jane said. “Lost forever, as it was known only to the coder and the person the message was intended for.”
“May I take this with me?” the professor asked. “I might be able to find some sort of pattern if I spend some time with it. I was rather good at word puzzles when I was younger.”
“Please do,” Bertie said.
“Make a copy for me too, Lucy,” Louise Jane said. “If there’s some reference in there to Outer Banks people or locations, I might be able to figure it out.”
I glanced at Bertie, who gave me a nod. “The more the merrier,” she said. “We’re getting nowhere, and fast. Louise Jane, I’ll let you have a copy, but only on condition that you don’t share it with anyone.”
Louise Jane put on her innocent face and crossed her chest. “Promise.”
“I do not want word getting around, more than it is anyway, that we have a guide to buried treasure. People won’t wait for the clue to be deciphered before descending from far and wide and digging up the lawn.”
“That’s not what that mess outside is?” Professor McClanahan asked. “If not, you have very big moles around here.”
Bertie shut down the computer and said, “Louise Jane, good night. We’re locking up. Now. Lucy, I’ll see you tomorrow. Eddie, as long as you’re in town, you may take me out to dinner.”
He bowed deeply. “It will be my pleasure.”
* * *
I nipped upstairs, changed into my bathing suit and a beach wrap and flip-flops, grabbed a towel and my book, and jumped into my car. I was turning into the parking lot at Coquina Beach when my phone rang. I answered it, using Bluetooth, while I found a parking space. It was late in the day, but the intense heat lingered, and plenty of people were out taking advantage of the slight wind coming off the sea. “Hi, Charlene.”
She didn’t bother with pleasantries. “How could you do that to me, Lucy?”
“Do what?” I switched off the engine. The air-conditioning died, and sticky heat instantly began filling the car.
“I told you about Jeremy Hughes and me in the strictest of confidence.” She spoke rapidly, almost biting into each word. “I thought you, of all people, would have understood that.”
“Charlene, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Honestly, I don’t.”
“You told Detective Watson. You went to the police station earlier today, and you told him. I never thought you could be so mean as to betray a confidence.”
“But I didn’t. Your name didn’t even come up when I was there. What’s happened?”
She let out a long breath. “You didn’t mention it?”
“No. I didn’t. Not to Watson, and not to anyone else. Please believe me.”
“Then I’m sorry. I guess I’m just upset. Bye.”
“Wait! Wait. What’s going on?”
“He’s on his way here. Watson. To my house. He sent an officer around to pick me up, to bring me to the police station. I can’t go; I can’t leave Mom alone, and the neighbor who helps out in an emergency isn’t at home. So he’s coming here.”
“He probably wants to talk to you about security at the library on Monday night,” I said. “I’m sure that’s it. He’ll ask if you know about a spare key or anything.” I wiped sweat off my forehead.
“He said he wants to discuss my relationship with Jeremy,” Charlene said.
“Oh. How about if I come over? I’ll stay with your mom if … if he wants you to leave with him. I can be there to run interference if you need.” I switched the engine back on and checked my mirrors and backup camera. A family laden with beach chairs, umbrellas, coolers, water toys, and sand-covered kids with red faces, lumbered slowly behind me. “Watson and I have an understanding.” What sort of understanding I didn’t know. Sometimes he didn’t seem to mind—too much—when I got involved in his cases. Sometimes he got downright angry. He would not be happy to see me pop up at Charlene’s.
Too bad.
The family passed, the dad giving me a weary wave of thanks, and I backed out. “I won’t be long,” I said. “I’m halfway to your place already. How long ago did you speak to him?”
“I called you as soon as I hung up. The police officer who’s here didn’t want me phoning you, but she had no authority to take my phone away. I’m hiding in the bathroom. Fortunately, Mom’s taking a nap before dinner.”
“I might beat him then. I’ll be there in a couple of minutes. If not less.” I disconnected the call as I turned right onto Highway 12 and sped toward town. Traffic was heavy with people returning to their hotels or vacation homes for dinner, but I didn’t have to go all the way into town. I turned right into South Old Oregon Inlet Road, heading for the small collection of streets and houses located south of Whalebone Junction and the bridge to Roanoke. If traffic was bad in town, and it likely was at this hour, I had a good chance of getting to Charlene’s before Watson.
Instead, I arrived at the same time. We parked nose to tail on the sidewalk outside Charlene’s house. A police cruiser filled the narrow driveway. Watson got out of his car and stared at me. I almost said, “We can’t go on meeting like this,” but decided discretion was the
better part of valor and held my tongue. I felt rather exposed in flip-flops and a wide-brimmed straw hat, wearing nothing but a red tankini under a loose black beach wrap.
“What brings you here, Lucy?” he asked.
I tugged the wrap tightly around me. “Charlene called me. She needs emotional support as well as assistance with her mother. You know her mother’s house-bound, don’t you?”
“I am aware of that, thank you, Lucy.” He threw up his hands. “What the heck. You might as well come in now that you’re here.”
We walked up the front path together and climbed the long wheelchair ramp to the veranda. This close to the sea, the house was built on stilts, with an open carport tucked under the building, containing Charlene’s small car and an assortment of garden supplies and the usual junk everyone has. Officer Holly Rankin opened the door before Watson could knock, and she threw me a questioning look. “I’m here as Charlene’s friend,” I said.
She stepped back and we walked into Mrs. Clayton’s sitting room. The blinds were open to a view of the small backyard, and the house was comfortably cool. At the same time the wheelchair ramp had been installed, the inside of the house had been renovated to accommodate Mrs. Clayton’s needs. The living and dining rooms were moved upstairs, and most of the main level was converted into a bedroom and TV room. A large, comfortable medical chair sat in front of the huge flat screen TV. A cabinet in the far corner held neatly organized medical equipment, and pictures of Charlene and her mother through the years filled the tabletops and the walls. I glanced at what was almost certainly Mr. and Mrs. Clayton’s wedding photo: she, glowingly beautiful in a white lace dress; he, standing tall, handsome, and proud at her side. Charlene saw me looking and gave me a smile.
