by Eva Gates
Silence again. It seemed to me as though Sergeant O’Leary wasn’t going to show himself tonight.
Not that Sergeant O’Leary exists, of course.
“How long are we going to sit here?” Theodore asked.
“As long as we have to,” Louise Jane answered. “The spirits can be very shy. They are unaccustomed to speaking to living people.”
“Yeah,” Grace muttered. “If I hadn’t spoken for a hundred and fifty years, I’d have trouble getting a word out too.”
I bit my tongue in an attempt to suppress a giggle. Louise Jane was rapidly losing control of the situation. She hadn’t chosen her séance attendees well; she should have brought less cynical people.
A high-pitched, unworldly howl broke the hush. A crash rang out, to be immediately followed by a tower-shaking roar of thunder. My giggle turned into a scream. The circle broke as I pulled my hands in and pressed them to my chest. My heart pounded. Theodore shouted, “Oh my gosh! Someone’s here!” Grace gasped and leapt to her feet. Louise Jane’s voice quivered as she said, “Don’t break the circle.”
The howl came again, followed by another crash.
“That’s coming from downstairs. Charles!” I scrambled across the room, threw open the door, and ran out of the apartment. I felt, as much as heard, the others struggle to their feet and follow me.
The light from Louise Jane’s candle didn’t reach the staircase. Far below a night lamp burned in the alcove on the main level, but I didn’t need any more light. I know this building so well by now, I can navigate it in the dark. I ran down the stairs, twisting and turning with the spiral, my bare feet light on the solid iron beneath them. Behind me, someone slipped, and I heard a thud accompanied by a yelp of pain.
“Theodore!” Grace called. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Don’t worry about me. Help Lucy.”
“I can’t see a blasted thing,” Louise Jane said.
Another crack of thunder sounded at the exact moment a flash of lightening lit up the main room. The storm had arrived, and it was directly over our heads.
I jumped off the second-to-last step. The whiteboard I’d put up by the magazine rack to advertise Settlers’ Day lay on the floor; Charles crouched beside it. His back was arched and every hair stood on end.
I let out a long breath and my heart began to slow. Charles, probably because he was mad at me, had knocked over the whiteboard. Upstairs, in our heightened state of alert, waiting for something frightening to happen, with the storm raging around us, we’d seriously overacted to a bump in the night.
The room was flooded with light as Grace hit the switch. “What happened?” she said.
“They were here.” Louise Jane’s voice was full of awe. “Not upstairs, but down here. We have to continue with the séance, right now. Here, on the main floor. Put that light out.”
“I’m okay,” Theodore cried. “Don’t worry about me.”
I realized Charles wasn’t even looking at me, and he didn’t have his habitual self-satisfied smirk when he’d managed to convince me to do what he’d wanted all along.
He was staring at an object on the floor, half underneath a bookshelf.
I knelt down and pulled it out.
It was a tiny flashlight.
Chapter Sixteen
The flashlight was small, about an inch and a half long, with a small metal circle attached to it. The sort of thing you’d fasten to your key chain. I had one just like it for illuminating the lock in case the light over the front door hadn’t been turned on, but mine was bright pink, and this one was black with a gold band around it.
I threw open the front door. The great first-order Fresnel lens high above us had gone into its 22.5-second dormancy, and all was dark except for two beams of white light illuminating the base of the tall red pines lining the lane and two glowing red lights heading rapidly in the direction of the highway.
A car.
At that moment rain began to fall. It didn’t build slowly, starting with a drop here and a drop there, but came in a torrent as though someone had turned on a giant tap in the sky. Lightening lit up the grounds around the lighthouse, and my ears pounded from the roar of thunder.
I’d left my cell phone upstairs, on my night table. I ran for the desk phone, hoping the line would still be up in the face of the storm.
“What are you doing?” Louise Jane said. “We have to get back into the circle. They’re here. They want to talk to me.”
“The only thing here tonight was a flesh-and-blood intruder. I’m calling the police. Don’t touch anything.”
The whiteboard crashed to the floor, and I whirled around with a yelp. Grace leapt back, holding her hands in the air. “Sorry, it slipped. Just trying to help.”
I decided to call Sam Watson himself rather than go through 911. I’d earlier tucked his card into the top desk drawer. He’d written his personal cell phone number on the back.
He answered at the first ring. “Watson.”
“It’s Lucy, at the library. I–I’m sorry to bother you so late.” I glanced at the clock on the wall. To my surprise it was eleven thirty. Louise Jane and the rest had been here for an hour and a half. It had felt like minutes.
“What is it, Lucy?”
“Someone tried to break in. They did break in, but Charles scared them off.”
“You mean that cat?”
“He can be quite frightening, if he wants to be.”
“Are you all right, Lucy?”
“Me? I’m fine. Charles is fine too. I didn’t see who it was, but it has to do with the death of Jeremy Hughes and the theft of the journal pages. It has to—don’t you think?”
“Are you alone?”
“Some of my friends are here. There are four of us. Not including Charles.”
“That’s good. Tell everyone to stay put. I’m on my way. Don’t touch anything.”
I hung up the phone. “We’re not to touch anything.”
“As this seems to have been a lost cause, and now you’ve got Sam Watson coming here, spreading cynicism everywhere he goes, I’m going home,” Louise Jane said. “We’ll try again tomorrow.”
“We will not,” I said. “I’m never going through that again.”
Louise Jane’s expression indicated that she had other ideas, but she wisely said nothing. I was not in the mood to argue. “Sam wants everyone to stay here until he arrives.”
Theodore had dropped into the wingback chair next to the magazine rack. He rolled up his pant leg and poked at his ankle. His ankle, I couldn’t help but notice, was as thin as a twig. “Nothing seems to be broken,” he said.
“That’s good,” I said.
“Fortunately, this time I have a good alibi,” Louise Jane said. “No one can accuse me of trying to break into the library.”
“I don’t know,” Grace said. “We had our eyes closed, like you told us to. You might have slipped away.”
“And it was dark,” I added.
“It wasn’t that dark,” Louise Jane said. “I didn’t break the circle of hands. I could hardly have gone downstairs and run back up to—”
“We’re kidding,” Grace said. “Relax. I’ll testify you were with us the whole time.”
Louise Jane sniffed. “Most amusing.” She did not care to be made fun of.
“Any chance of a cup of coffee while we’re waiting, Lucy?” Theodore asked.
“I suppose that would be okay. I don’t think our intruder got any further than this room.”
“I’ll get it,” Grace said. “I know where everything is. You wait here for the police.”
We didn’t have to wait long before I spotted headlights coming up the driveway. Two pairs of headlights, breaking through the pounding rain. Watson was in his own car, but he was followed by a cruiser. The desk phone rang and I answered it.
“Stay inside, Lucy,” Watson said, “while we check out the grounds.”
“Okay.”
Theodore, favoring his l
eft foot, and Louise Jane, Grace, and I gathered at the window to watch as Sam Watson and Butch Greenblatt shone their flashlights around the parking lot, the path, and then the steps. Overhead, jagged bolts of white lightning filled the sky, turning night into day; thunder roared, and the rain fell in steady sheets.
Eventually, the police officers came in, bringing a lot of water with them. “Did you find anything?” I asked.
Butch shook off raindrops like a dog who’d been for a swim. Watson stood in a spreading puddle of his own making and said, “No. Until this very moment, it hasn’t rained since Monday, so we’ve not got much of a chance of finding any tire tracks. We checked the fence around the construction site, but nothing seems out of place there. You think you saw a car driving away?”
“Definitely,” I said.
Watson glanced at the crowd of people behind me. I was aware I was still in my pajamas.
“Having a sleepover?” he asked.
“Something like that,” I said.
He raised one eyebrow. “Teddy? Want to explain what you’re doing at this sleepover?”
“Wasting my time, it would seem.”
“If you must know, Detective,” Louise Jane said, “although it has nothing to do with what transpired here tonight, we were putting our heads together one more time to try to figure out what the coded page is attempting to tell us.”
“Not that again,” he said. “It’s not attempting to tell you, or anyone else, anything. Otherwise it wouldn’t be in code, now would it? Want to tell me what happened?”
Theodore, Louise Jane, Grace, and I spoke at once. Watson lifted his hand. “One at a time, please. Lucy?”
“We were upstairs … uh, talking. Charles was being annoying, so I put him outside the apartment and shut the door on him. He must have come down here. We heard a crash, which was probably that falling over”—I pointed to the whiteboard—“and Charles started howling.”
“Scared the life out of me,” Grace said.
“Scared the life out of our intruder also, I suspect,” I said. “We came running down to see what was going on, and I saw that.” I pointed to the small flashlight on the floor. “Then I ran to the window and saw a car driving away.”
Butch pulled an evidence bag out of his pocket and used it to pick up the flashlight. “Do you recognize this?” he said.
“No,” I said. The others shook their heads.
“I’ve seen plenty of ones like that at the convenience store and discount stores,” Theodore said. “They’re very common.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t there earlier?” Watson asked. “Maybe someone dropped it during the day.”
“Pretty sure,” I said. “Whoever’s last on the circulation desk at the end of the day does a quick sweep after closing. We find all sorts of interesting things people have left behind. That wasn’t me today, as I wasn’t working, but I had a quick look around before going upstairs. I would have seen that if it had been here. I did not. Therefore it wasn’t. Here, I mean.”
“How did this person get in?” Watson asked. “The door doesn’t seem to have been tampered with this time.”
I grimaced. “I forgot to lock it.”
He raised one accusing eyebrow. “You forgot to lock the door? After everything that’s happened here, you still forgot to lock up?”
“I wasn’t expecting my visitors to stay long. Sorry.” I’d run after Louise Jane, intending to make her turn around and leave. Instead, we’d all trooped upstairs, and despite our new lock and sturdy new door, an intruder had marched in.
Watson shook his head. Rainwater flew.
Charles jumped onto the nearest bookshelf and settled down to wash his whiskers with an air of satisfaction. Once again, Charles had saved the day.
Watson studied the four of us in turn. “You were all together the entire time?”
Grace, Theodore, and I nodded. Louise Jane puffed up her chest in indignation, “If you are attempting to accuse me, once again, of—”
“I’m not accusing anyone,” Watson said. “I’m asking.”
“We were together the entire time,” I said. “No one could have left the fourth floor without the others noticing.”
“What do you mean by once again, Louise Jane?” Theodore asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Any idea what this person might have been after?” Watson asked.
I’d been thinking about that while we waited. “If it wasn’t a common or garden thief, after whatever they think we might have left lying around—”
“Which, for now we will assume it was not.”
“Right. Then they have to be after Mrs. Crawbingham’s diary. Whoever took the code page and the map must believe they need the rest of her diary in order to solve the code.”
“Where’s the diary now, Lucy?”
“Bertie put it in the rare books room, and that room’s always locked unless someone’s working in there.”
“Let’s have a look and see if it’s there,” Watson said. “You might have surprised the intruder on their way out, you know, not coming in. Lucy, you show me. The rest of you, wait here. Need I point out that I expect you to keep knowledge of this conversation to yourselves?”
Grace, Theodore, and Louise Jane nodded enthusiastically.
“You can count on my discretion, Detective,” Louise Jane said, “in this as in everything. I know how to keep a secret, and my knowledge of Outer Banks history and—”
“One minute,” I said. “I have to get the keys.” I ran upstairs. While there I took the opportunity to throw a sweater over my pajamas and slip shoes onto my bare feet. I keep a complete set of keys in the apartment, in case of a fire or emergency evacuation in the night. I grabbed them out of the kitchen drawer and ran back downstairs.
Watson and I went up the back staircase. We found the door to the rare books room securely locked and everything inside neat and orderly. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed. I unlocked the main cabinet. Mrs. Crawbingham’s diary lay there, as enigmatic as ever. I studied it for a brief moment, wondering if this little bit of old paper and aging leather really was worth killing over.
“All is as it should be?” Watson asked.
“Apparently so,” I said. “If the person who was here tonight was after the diary—and we don’t know that for sure—they likely would assume it was still in Bertie’s desk drawer, as it was on Monday.”
“Bertie’s office next,” Watson said.
That door wasn’t locked, but when I opened it, we could see that it was undisturbed. Bertie hadn’t yet replaced the broken lock on her desk, and all it now contained were boxes of paper clips and staples and her secret stash of chocolate bars and peanuts. The cabinet in which she kept budget papers and staff records was locked. I did not have a key for that.
Satisfied our intruder had not gotten this far, we rejoined the others.
“Have you tried reading it backward?” Butch was saying. “That’s how they solved it in Journey to the Center of the Earth, wasn’t it?” Louise Jane had taken her copy of the code page out and was showing it to him.
“We’ve tried that,” she said. “I’m working on the premise that it’s not in English. Your ancestors were German, weren’t they? Do you see anything Germanic about it?”
“Even my grandfather didn’t speak German,” Butch said, “much less me or my brother.”
“If I never hear another word about that blasted code,” Watson muttered to me, “it will be too soon.”
“Can I have a copy of that?” Butch asked Louise Jane.
“I’ll get Lucy to make you one,” she said.
“I will not,” I said. “It was given to you on the grounds that you don’t show it to anyone, Louise Jane.”
“I wouldn’t call Butch just anyone. He can be trusted, can’t you, Butch?”
Butch tried to look trustworthy.
“Of course,” Louise Jane said, “it would help if we had a copy of the map.”
“The map
…” I said.
“What about it? What have you remembered?”
“I don’t know. Something about the map popped into my head. It’s gone now.”
“Well, get it back,” Louise Jane ordered.
Watson cleared his throat. “If we can return to what brought us here tonight …”
Butch had the sense to look embarrassed. Louise Jane, who was never embarrassed by anything, nodded and said, “Please continue, Detective.”
“Did you find anything in the back?” Grace asked.
“No,” I said. “Looks like they didn’t get that far, thanks to Charles.”
Charles preened.
“You should give him an extra serving of kibble tonight,” Theodore said.
“Meow,” Charles said.
“I don’t know why I bother,” Watson muttered.
“Sorry,” Grace said. “Don’t mind us. I for one am not doing very well at coming down from such a fright.”
“What are you thinking, Detective?” Theodore asked.
“Unless I have reason to think otherwise, I’ll assume this is related to the death of Jeremy Hughes and the theft of the diary pages. Our intruder might have come here tonight intending to break into the library, or he might have been watching and found the door fortuitously left unlocked.” Watson glared at me. “Regardless, he came inside. He or she. It would appear he was startled by Charles and dropped the flashlight. He panicked when he heard the lot of you coming, and ran off. We can hope he, or she, didn’t wear gloves, and we can get some prints off the flashlight. None of you touched it?”
We shook our heads.
“Have you thought of anything else I should know?”
Louise Jane, Theodore, Grace, and I chorused, “No.”
“Good night then,” Watson said. “You will lock the door, won’t you, Lucy?”
“Yes,” I said meekly. “Uh, one thing, please.”
“What?”
“Can you please not mention this to Connor? Any of you. I don’t want him worrying about what’s going on here at night.”
“I see no need,” Watson said. “I’ll make a report, of course, but as no harm has been done, it’s unlikely His Honor will hear about it.”
