Gossip in the Garden

by Kathi Daley

  “Georgia took Rena into town this morning to follow up on something she said this morning about Vine Street. They hadn’t returned by the time you picked me up, so I’m not sure how the lead worked out, but we are still hoping to find her home.”

  “Vine Street is on the east end of town,” Colt said. “There are a few homes with large plots of land, but the area is fairly remote. I suppose it’s possible that she lives on her own all the way out there, but it seems somewhat unlikely. Although, if she lives with relatives or in a care facility, someone should have reported her missing by now.”

  “So, do you think she does live alone?” I asked.

  “Based on her age and state of mental confusion, I’d think not, but given the fact that I’ve yet to find a missing persons report in the entire state, I would say that living alone is looking to be more and more likely. I suppose the confusion could be new. Maybe she suffered a stroke or something similar that caused her confusion, and until the time of the stroke, she might have been quite capable.”

  “I do feel bad for her. Perhaps we should take her to the hospital. I hadn’t considered the fact that she might have suffered a recent stroke.”

  “If we don’t figure out where she belongs today, we’ll take her to see a doctor tomorrow,” Colt said. “I really hoped she’d remember on her own, but it isn’t looking like she will.” He slowed the truck even more. “Look for a footpath to the right. We’ll need to park and continue on foot.”

  “Is it far once we park?” I wondered.

  “Not really. I seem to remember it was about a fifteen-minute hike. I haven’t been up here since I was a teen, but I don’t remember the path being difficult.”

  As Colt predicted, there was an overgrown footpath to the right. He parked the truck, we loaded the daypacks he’d brought with the water and supplies we’d need, and then set off down the trail. We didn’t have to walk far through the dense forest before a rocky cliff appeared in front of us. Colt remembered exactly where to enter, and led me to a small crack in the rock, which turned out to open into a rather large room. Armed with flashlights, we slowly looked around the interior room.

  “If I remember correctly, there are two arms that veer off from this room. Once we choose an arm, we will come across additional junctions. We’ll need to figure out which direction Patrick traveled if he did indeed access this particular system of caves.”

  “So, we’re looking for white paint.”

  “Exactly. I brought yellow paint. We’ll mark our own path as we go. It’s easy to get lost in here, and I want to be sure we can find our way out.”

  “If we follow Patrick’s markings in, can’t we follow them out as well?”

  “Theoretically, but I don’t want to take any chances. For all we know, multiple people have been in this cave over the years, all with white paint, which might take us in a variety of directions.”

  It didn’t take long for Colt to find the first mark made with white paint. Whoever had made the mark had made an X. The paint looked fresh, which led both Colt and me to believe it could very well have been made by Patrick. Once we entered the passageway marked by the paint, the going was slow. The floor was uneven, and the ceiling varied in height, making travel difficult at times. It was a good thirty minutes before we came to the first junction. There was a mark on the right, so that was the tunnel we decided to travel. Colt made an additional mark with his yellow paint.

  “The further we walk, the more I realize how unlikely it is that anyone hid a fortune in gold all the way out here,” I said. “As you already pointed out, gold is heavy.”

  “I agree, and I would think that Patrick would have realized that as well,” Colt said. “Although it does seem that someone accessed this cave recently, and according to what Buck told you, Patrick said that marking a cave was the reason he was buying the spray paint. Maybe he was looking for something else.”

  “I wonder what.”

  Colt stopped walking. We’d come to another junction. This time, the passageway on the left was marked. The deeper we traveled into the cave, the colder it got, and I had to admit that the further from the entrance we traveled, the more my claustrophobia kicked in. “You don’t think there’s a risk of a cave-in, do you?”

  “These caves had been here for centuries, so I would say the odds of a cave-in are slim, but I won’t go so far as to say impossible.” He started walking again.

  I followed. “That isn’t as comforting as you might think it would be.” The more I thought about the distance that we’d need to travel in case of a cave-in, the more I felt myself begin to panic. I was about to suggest that we just head back when the narrow passage opened up into a large room.

  “Well, will you look at that,” Colt said, shining his flashlight on the walls. Every wall was painted with hieroglyphs that had to have been left by one of the native populations that lived in the area pre-colonization.

  “Wow. These are amazing, and I suspect what Patrick was after all along.”

  Colt took out his camera and began taking a video of the walls. I suspected the pictures told a story, but I had no idea what any of it meant.

  “While this answers the question of why Patrick came out to the cave, it probably doesn’t help us solve his murder,” Colt said.

  I supposed that was true.

  “Let’s head back. I want to stop by Patrick’s house again when we get back into town. I’m curious to see if the maps you mentioned he was interested in led to this cave, or if he was after something else as well.”

  Chapter 11

  When Colt had searched the house after Patrick’s death, he hadn’t been looking for maps, but he didn’t remember seeing any. The house wasn’t large, but it was fairly cluttered, and every drawer and closet appeared to be full, so it was possible the maps were rolled and stashed somewhere. The house had been closed up since the crime scene guys had finished their investigation, so when we first entered, I couldn’t help but notice the stench.

  “We need to open a window or two if we’re going to spend any time in here,” I suggested.

  “Right there with you,” he said, opening the large window overlooking the street at the front of the house.

  “Any idea where to start?” I asked.

  He looked around at the mess. “I guess let’s just pick a room and see what we find. The office is the most likely place to look, but there is the blood to deal with in there, so if you want to take the bedroom, I’ll take the office.”

  “Okay,” I said as Colt handed me a pair of gloves.

  “The house had been released by the crime scene guys, but if you come across anything that looks important, call me in to look at it before you touch it.”

  “I will,” I answered.

  The bedroom was as cluttered as the rest of the house. I opened all the dresser drawers, although I was sure the crime scene guys would have already done as much when looking for the gun that killed Patrick. The closet was full of both boxes and clothing, but again, the crime scene guys must have already gone through the space. I looked around for somewhere they might have overlooked and decided to start my search with the mattress. Not that I thought Patrick had hidden the maps within the mattress, but what about between the mattress and the box springs? It would be a flat place to hide a map, and unless Patrick was a restless sleeper, it seemed to me that it would be a safe place to hide such a thing.

  An exploration of the mattress in Patrick’s room didn’t net me the maps I hoped to find, but a search of the mattress in the guest room was met with success.

  “I have them,” I called out to Colt. “I’m in the guest bedroom.”

  He walked in with a look of surprise on his face. “That was fast.”

  I shrugged. “I just tried to figure out where you might choose if looking for a safe place to hide something you wanted to keep flat.”

  There were actually five maps laid out flat between the top mattress and the box springs of the bed in the guest room. I wasn’t rea
lly surprised that the crime scene guys hadn’t thought to look there. They were looking for a gun, although the space between the two units of the bed would be a good place to hide a gun as well.

  “These look old,” Colt said, carefully rolling the maps so as not to crease them. “It really does smell bad in here. Let’s take these back to my office. We can lay them out on the conference table.”

  Since it was Sunday and the area was patrolled by central dispatch, giving Peach a day off, no one was around. We laid the maps out across the table and then tried to make some sense out of what we were looking at.

  “The maps are old, which we already knew,” I said. “Holiday Bay isn’t even listed as a town on any of these.”

  “I’d say they are at least a couple of centuries old. Maybe more,” Colt agreed.

  “Patrick told me he was a historian and an amateur archeologist, so the fact that he has old maps seems to fit his interests. Still, I wonder what he was looking for.”

  “It’s hard to tell. And it’s equally hard to know if whatever he was looking for had anything to do with his death.”

  I paused to consider this. “Have you seriously considered any motives other than those related to the theft at the museum and the missing diary?”

  “Other than the age discrimination lawsuit that seems to be a dead-end, no. Do you have something in mind?”

  “Not specifically, but to this point, it seems we’ve been focused on financial gain. We suspect that Patrick had a diary that held clues that would lead to a fortune in gold, and that’s a motive. And we know Patrick took artifacts from the museum and we suspect he might have tried to sell them, and on the surface, that’s a motive. The problem with that motive in my mind, however, is that Patrick told me that the gems on the knife handle were fakes, and yet he took the knife anyway. Why?”

  “Perhaps he figured he’d be able to fool whomever he planned to sell the knife to. Maybe he was wrong, and trying to sell fake gems as the real thing is what got him dead.”

  “Maybe,” I acknowledged. “I wasn’t paying all that much attention to what he took since I was most interested in our discussion relating to the Chadwick family, but it did seem that the items I noticed him put in the bag were all adorned with gems. I wonder if any of them are real.”

  “I have the duffle bag and the relics,” Colt informed me. “Nadine asked for them to be returned, but I told her they were evidence until this whole thing is wrapped up.”

  “Where are they?”

  “In the safe in my office.”

  “Maybe we should have someone look at them. A jeweler perhaps who can tell us which gems are real and which are fake. I feel like knowing that could lead us to a motive.”

  “I’ll look into it tomorrow,” Colt promised.

  I looked back down at the maps. I really had no idea if they held a clue, but my gut told me they might. So much about this case just wasn’t making any sense. I felt like if we could get a handle on all the little oddities, maybe we could start to tell a story, and maybe that story would lead to a motive for murder.

  “It looks like someone traced this section of this map,” Colt pointed to an area toward the center of one of the maps.

  I looked closely. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Look closely. See these indentations. It appears as if someone might have put tracing paper over the top of the map and then used a pencil to make a copy. Of course, this could have occurred at any point for any reason, but I suspect if we put paper down and then used the side of a pencil to mark the area, the indentation will come through.”

  “Let’s try it,” I suggested.

  As Colt had predicted, it did appear that someone had traced a line connecting two areas that appeared to have been marked with an X. We found similar markings on two of the other maps.

  “So, now what?” I asked. “These maps are really old, and there are probably hundreds of reasons someone might have wanted to trace a geographic area contained within the boundaries of the map. What does this mean? How can we know if it is relevant to what is going on now?”

  “I don’t think we can know,” Colt replied. “But we have discovered a piece of information to file away for later use should it come up.”

  I leaned a hip against the table. “I can’t say the day was super productive, but it was fun. This is a hard case to crack. I appreciate you allowing me to be part of it. You know how I love to play Nancy Drew.”

  “Maybe you should get a PI license.”

  I laughed. “Like I have time for that. I already have two jobs between my writing and the inn. But I do love to solve a mystery every now and then, so maybe I’ll do just that someday.”

  Colt glanced at the clock. “I told Lonnie I’d come over for dinner. He’s cooking ribs. Do you want to come along? I’m sure Lacy would love to have you.”

  “Okay,” I decided. “She actually did mention something about ribs when we spoke earlier in the week, but I totally forgot. I’m anxious to find out if she found out anything new from the journals she found. She was going to let me read them, but I haven’t seen her yet, although she did mention that she’d skimmed them and found them interesting.” I moved away from the table and stood up straight. “Before we go, I’m going to call Georgia and let her know what I’m doing. I also want to find out if she learned anything new about Rena after their trip into town this morning. I keep hoping that she’ll remember everything she’s forgotten, and we can get her home where she belongs before too much more time passes.”

  Chapter 12

  “Lonnie and I decided to take the kids to church today, and we ran into Christy and Haley,” Lacy informed me. “We chatted a bit while the kids ran around on the lawn. Christy shared with me her opinion that there might be something going on between Mylie and Jeremy.’

  “Something more than friendship?’ I asked.

  She nodded. “Yes, according to Christy. She said that Mylie is seriously considering a move to Holiday Bay and that the reason she seems to want to move has everything to do with Jeremy. Mylie has a house to sell, and she has other assets which would allow her to buy a home in the area if that’s what she decides to do, so moving to Holiday Bay isn’t out of the question for her.”

  “It does seem as if her grandmother left her well off,” I agreed.

  “Christy hopes she’ll move here, so she invited her to stay with her and Haley for a while once her reservation at the inn is over. She talked about how much fun it would be for Mylie to live in the area, but she wants to be sure that residing in Holiday Bay is the right thing for her before she does.”

  Christy really was the sweetest thing. She was always thinking of other people. I could see why Christy and Mylie were such good friends. Both were givers who really did seem to want everyone to be happy. “I guess I should have seen this coming,” I said. “Jeremy and Mylie have been spending a lot of time together, and it seemed when she stayed here in December, a good portion of her time was spent with Jeremy as well.” I paused to consider the situation. “Actually, Jeremy and Mylie would be really good together. They’re both kind and thoughtful. They both enjoy children and are responsible adults. The more I think about it, the more I can see it working out.”

  “I thought the same thing,” Lacy said. “And Christy agrees. Christy and Mylie get along well, and Haley adores Mylie. If things are heading in that direction, this might be a wonderful situation for everyone.”

  I looked toward the BBQ area where Lonnie and Colt were drinking beer and chatting. When I’d first decided to move from San Francisco to Holiday Bay, I was definitely running away from something. I had no idea if I’d even be happy in Maine, but at least every single thing I looked at wouldn’t remind me of what I had lost. And then I met Velma, Georgia, and Lonnie and Lacy. And they made me feel welcome and at home. I met Colt, Tanner and Nikki, and Jeremy and began to feel like I had a new family to help replace the one I’d lost. As I ventured out and became part of the community, I met a lot o
f other people who welcomed me with open arms. Over time, I met Christy, Haley, and Noah, and now it appeared as if Mylie might be moving here. I might not have a husband or children of my own to call family, but the family I’d built since being here really was the next best thing.

  “Something on your mind?” Lacy asked.

  I smiled. “Sorry. I guess I drifted away.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  I shrugged. “Everything is fine. I guess I’ve just had some heavy thoughts going through my head lately, which have made me overly emotional but not necessarily in a bad way.”

  “Care to share?”

  “Actually, I do,” I replied. “When you asked what I was thinking about, it was the fact that while I’d moved to Holiday Bay to escape my life in San Francisco after Ben and Johnathan died, when I got here, I not only found an escape but a family as well.”

  Lacy hugged me. “And we are so very glad that you did. You know how much you mean to Lonnie and me.”

  I nodded. “I know. And you know how much you mean to me.”

  Lacy hugged me again and then took a step back. “Is there something that brought on this introspection?”

  “I guess it’s a lot of little things. Most recently, Colt and I got into a discussion about children. Did you know he doesn’t want any?”

  Lacy paused. “If you are asking me if Colt and I have discussed the subject, no. But I guess I can understand why he might feel the way he does. Colt loves kids and has always been a fantastic uncle to ours. I think that if he’d met someone and settled down earlier, he might have had a handful. But Colt’s almost forty, and he made it clear at an early age that he didn’t think men and women over a certain age should have children. Personally, I don’t agree with him. I know a lot of people who’ve had children well into their forties who are active and involved parents. Unfortunately, that wasn’t Colt’s experience. His dad was thirty-five when Colt was born, and thirty-eight when his sister was born. He wasn’t at all what you would call an involved parent, and when Colt tried to talk to him about being more involved, he used his advanced age as an excuse. Of course, the whole thing about being too old to coach baseball or volunteer as a scout leader was bull squirt. Colt’s dad was a healthy and active male, who simply didn’t want to coach baseball or become involved with scouts.”