by Mae Clair
“The first round of clues,” Pellar announced after Clarice left. He waited while they stared at the bowl, then cleared his throat. “Each round will contain some solutions which are difficult and others that are relatively easy. Your particular experience will depend on the luck of the draw. Each clue will require you to retrieve something. It may be found here on the estate, or in the neighboring town. Remember the item must be presented by eight tonight in the circular dining room, in order for you to proceed to the next round. Anyone arriving after eight will be disqualified. Any player not retrieving his or her item will be disqualified.” He smiled tightly. “Good luck.”
Tarvick stood up, ready to advance on the bowl. “Who draws first?”
“We’ll proceed in the order you arrived yesterday. Brody, then Ms. Holt, followed by Mr. Tarvick and the Franklins. Ms. Cassidy arrived right after Ms. Holt, but Dr. Cross strolled in dripping wet after three AM.” Pellar sent him a pointed glance. “That makes the good doctor and his pretty partner dead last.”
Elijah stood and paced to the bowl. “You really should demand a refund from that charm school, Felix.” He waited while the others drew their clues. When only one envelope remained, he quirked an eyebrow at Reagan. She shook her head and he pulled it out of the bowl.
Livy and Alan Franklin hurried to the railing, reading their clue together. Brody read his through once, then crumpled it in his hand. Monica read hers over and over again, all the while biting her lip. Tarvick looked grimly determined after reading his. With a grin for Reagan, Elijah slipped the envelope into the back pocket of his jeans unopened.
Pellar looked perturbed. “Dr. Cross, it would help if you’d read it.”
“What’s the rush? I have until eight o’clock.”
Hearing the calm confidence in his voice, Monica blanched. Brody scuffed a finger under his nose and grinned. Even Reagan allowed herself a smile at Pellar’s blankly owlish stare. It took a moment, but the fussy staff manager recovered.
“Very well. You’re all free to go.” He motioned hastily with his hands as if shooing away a bothersome flock of birds. “Go on. Off with you.”
Elijah caught Reagan’s hand and headed for the front door. Her fingers felt warm and inviting in his, and for a moment he was tempted to wrap his arm around her shoulders. “We’ll have to take your car. I called Triple A about my Jeep, but it won’t be ready until the end of the day.” He caught the fresh scent of her shampoo and the cucumber soap she’d used for her shower. The combination sent a pleasant tingling deep into his groin. If they wanted to win Sothern’s crazy treasure hunt, he was going to have to concentrate a lot harder on what mattered.
“Where are we going?” Reagan asked. “You haven’t even read the clue.”
“I need a soda,” Elijah said. “Not that fizzy brown stuff. We’ll go into Serenity Harbor to the Soda Shack, and look at it there.” He cast her a sideways glance. She hadn’t yet pulled her hand from his, a realization that bolstered his confidence and made him grin. “I think better on grape.”
* * * *
The thought of drinking grape soda at 9:30 in the morning curdled Reagan’s stomach. Elijah was on his second, in no hurry to open the clue, when she sighed in exasperation and demanded to see the envelope. “You might be certain you can solve it by eight o’clock, but I’m not so sure. I’d like every minute I can get.”
They were seated near the window of a small drink bar called the Soda Shack. Above their heads, a colorful assortment of posters was plastered on the ceiling, covering the surface end to end. Advertisements for local restaurants, boardwalk amusements, boutiques and shops, blended with bright blue tables and wooden stools. The tiny dockside stand offered light breakfast fare, coffee, espresso, and blended fruit juices, but was best known for serving fifty-three varieties of soda. Everything from standard cola, root and birch beer, to the more extreme strawberry, chocolate-banana and blueberry. Elijah seemed in heaven with an old-fashioned, frothy grape.
Reagan held out her hand. “Give me the envelope, Elijah.”
“Oh, ye of little faith.” He dug it from his back pocket and slid it across the table. She slipped her finger beneath the gold foil seal and eased it open. The paper inside was tri-folded. With a glance for Elijah, she smoothed it flat on the table, then read the single line, printed in the center aloud: Nineteen, minus one, equals twenty. Confused, she turned the paper over, looking for more, but there was nothing. She peeked inside the envelope, also empty.
“That’s it?” Her voice cracked. “What kind of ridiculous clue is that?”
Elijah sucked soda and air through a straw, reaching the bottom of his oversized cup. “Probably not one of the easier ones.”
She frowned. “You said not to worry. That you could solve it.”
“I will. We will.” He grinned. “How about a stroll on the beach?”
“Elijah.” Was he really that flippant, he didn’t realize what was at stake? “How can you even think about walking on the beach? We have to solve this.”
“Salt air helps me think.”
“I thought grape soda did?”
“That too.” He stood and tossed his cup in a trash bin. “Come on. You need to relax.”
She hesitated. He was confident, an emotion that made her believe in him. He was also brilliant. If anyone could make sense of the line, he could. Still uneasy, she grabbed the paper and envelope and shoved them in her purse.
They left the Soda Shack and the fishing docks and strolled across a two-lane road to the beach. Sand lay at the edges of the asphalt, scattered over the blacktop like last winter's road salt. Joggers and early morning bikers kept up a sparse but steady stream of traffic parallel to passing cars. Reagan noticed a few out-of-state plates, but it was still early in the season. In Maryland, tourist traffic would already be kicking into high gear, but the season came later along the New England coast. They passed a bakery clogged with morning commuters, a newsstand, grocery store, and a watch repair shop. The latter had a weathered clock face suspended above the door. Black, ornate hands and stark Roman numerals gave it an old fashioned look. Reagan noted with a sinking sensation that the hands pointed to 9:53. Nearly two hours had passed since Pellar had given them the clue and they were no further along than when Elijah first stuffed the envelope into his pocket.
She tried to think positively. He was brilliant, if a bit quirky. Between the two of them they could solve the silly thing before the deadline.
When they reached the dune break, Elijah pulled off his shoes and rolled his jeans. She followed suit and they walked side by side to the beach. The ocean roared in her ears, fierce and loud, teeming with the residual effects of last night's storm. Debris littered the sand, dragged to shore in the churning waves of the night's high tide. Seaweed and kelp, water-smoothed pebbles, broken shells. She stepped around the remains of a hard-shelled crab, eaten by some predator, then left to bleach beneath the hot morning sun. The ocean was harsh, devastating and beautiful at the same time. The breeze raked through her hair and skimmed over her face with the salty kiss of air-borne brine. Beneath her toes the sand was cool. By midday it would carry the trapped heat of the sun.
“I remember when I was a little girl and my parents took me to the beach,” she announced, influenced by her surroundings. “The sand would get so hot I’d make my father carry me to the car at the end of the day.” She grinned wistfully. “I’ve always loved the water. Baltimore was as close as I could get to the ocean and still afford the mortgage payment. What about you?” She smiled up at him. “I guess to be a marine archeologist you have to be in love the sea.”
He nodded. “When I was four, my sister read me a story about a sailor who got lost at sea and used the stars to find his way home. After that, I became fascinated with ships, old vessels and anything buried in the water. I had my first scuba-diving lesson a year later. It’s always been connected.” He looked at her, his eyes unusually bright. “The stars and the sea. At least for me.” He stopped walk
ing. The water lapped around his ankles, splashing the cuffs of his rolled jeans. “My father took me on boats whenever he could, but we didn’t have a lot of money and what we did, went to my education. I didn’t have free time with all the studying I did.”
Understanding tinged with sadness flooded Reagan. He’d accomplished so much in his young life. A doctorate, the respect of his peers, a writing career and lecture circuit. Yet he’d missed out on his childhood, swallowed up in textbooks and exams. The wind snagged her hair and blew it into her face. She tucked it behind her ear. “What about your mother?”
Elijah glanced out over the waves. “She died when I was eight. A car accident. My sister, Eden, took off two years later. She was ten years older than me, and I think my dad depended on her too much. He fell into a black period after my mom died. He eventually got over the funk, but his attitude drove Eden into running with a bad crowd. I haven’t heard from her in fifteen years. I don’t know if she’s alive or dead.”
Reagan stared, speechless. “You mean…she just left? Never even tried to contact you?”
He shrugged. “Like I said, she hooked up with a bad crowd. Drugs do crazy things to people.” He slipped his arm around her shoulders and started walking again. “It’s all ancient history. I’d rather talk about a certain beautiful redhead, and all the ways we could get into trouble together.”
She doubted it was as trivial as he made it seem, but respected his privacy. “Elijah, you’re supposed to be thinking about the clue.” She elbowed him in the ribs.
“Okay.” He dropped his arm and caught her hand. “Do you like to jog?”
“What?”
“Come on.” Before she could protest, he tugged her along, picking up speed as he jogged down the beach. Reagan ran at his side, uncertain what this new burst of activity signaled. All she wanted to do was talk about nineteen, minus one, equals twenty and he was playing recreational guide. For the life of her, she couldn’t fathom the problem, or even begin to decipher its backward logic.
A half hour later, Elijah insisted they take a fishing boat on the water. It took ten minutes of driving to find a suitable marina with rentals. After ninety minutes of cruising around the bay, they finally stopped for lunch at a sandwich shop and Elijah asked to see the clue.
Reagan blinked. It was half past twelve. “You actually want to look at it?” She made no effort to ease the tart edge in her voice. The waitress had already taken their orders for crab cake sandwiches and fries, and left them with drinks. Lemon water for her and iced tea for Elijah. “You don’t want to go parasailing or anything first?”
“My head’s clear now, and I’ve had a chance to mull things over. Sorry. It’s the way I think.” He dug his glasses from his pocket. It was a miracle they weren’t broken. “Give me the clue, and give me something to write with.”
Still miffed, she passed him the envelope. A few seconds of rummaging in her purse produced a pen. Elijah slid on his glasses, unfolding the paper between them so they could study it together.
“It’s a trick question,” Reagan said. “It has to be. Nineteen, minus one, equals twenty. What kind of nonsense is that?”
Elijah scratched the equation across the paper, circling the number twenty. “The answer is already in the clue.”
Reagan frowned. “I’m not following you.”
“Watch. Nineteen in Roman Numerals is XIX.” He wrote it on the paper, drawing a line through the I. “Remove one and you’re left with XX. Twenty.”
She leaned back in her seat, feeling foolish now that she saw the obvious. “I told you it was a trick question. It still doesn’t mean anything. Sothern is playing games. Twenty what?”
“I’m not sure. Is it twenty or is it XX, indicating something fixed? Absolute.”
“You’re losing me again.”
“I’m tossing around theory. Speculating. It helps me think.”
“Like grape soda and jogging?”
He grinned. “Look at it this way. An absolute is something that is perfect and complete, fixed in nature. An ultimate basis in reality that can’t be changed. Take time as an example. It flows in a set pattern from past to present and future, and can’t be altered. Even though it’s constantly in motion, its properties are inflexible and irreversible.” He continued to rattle off facts and explanations.
Reagan stared, taken aback by his intensity. His brain had kicked into overdrive and forgotten to invite her along for the ride. She followed part of what he was saying, but got lost halfway through his logic, delivered at rapid machine-gun speed. His eyes, always a vivid blue, were threaded by turquoise. She hadn’t realized he could talk so fast, especially when he strayed off topic and started rattling on about time-space continuums, world lines and particles. It was time to step back from the clue and slow him down to a speed suitable for mere mortals.
“Slow up a minute, Mister Incredibly Blue Eyes.” She smiled disarmingly. “Are you forgetting our clue?”
His mouth jerked with a quick smile, her subtle flirting catching him off guard. “Reagan, are you flirting with me?”
Was she? What the heck prompted that? She dipped her head. “It’s the glasses. They make you seem less dangerous. A little nerdy.”
He took them off. “Nerdy is bad?”
“Nerdy is sexy. At least on you.” She flushed. “I can’t believe I’m talking like this. Let’s get back on track.”
“I like the track we’re on.”
She studied him across the table. He was so distressingly good-looking, glasses or no glasses, it left her stomach doing flip-flops. Taking a deep breath, she plunged ahead. “I guess it’s obvious we’re attracted to one another, but there’s the small matter of this treasure hunt and Rook’s journal. I promised my uncle, Elijah. I don’t want anything to interfere with that. Not even what I might feel for you.”
He raised an eyebrow, something she was coming to recognize as habit. “Might feel?”
She shifted uncomfortably. The conversation was getting too personal. “We haven’t had a chance to explore it.” Had she stepped over the line by telling him their attraction was mutual? “And we can’t. Not until this is over.”
He sighed, shoving on his glasses. “You realize that’s like dangling a steak dinner in front of a starving man. You want me to wait a week?”
“A week isn’t that long, and you’re certainly free to walk away. It’s just…” She swallowed, awkward again. She’d never had to spell things out so concisely. “If you want to explore it…when this is over, I’m willing to, um…”
He grinned. “You are so incredibly gorgeous when you’re tongue-tied. I bet if I kissed you, you’d talk a mile a minute, threatening to disembowel me.”
“Probably.” She stifled a smile. “Don’t even think about it. You are not going to sidetrack me. I need you to be brilliant, not charming and sexy. I still don’t understand what we’re looking for…Xs, 20s or absolutes.”
He slumped against his chair. “Absolutes. Night, day, time, infinity, truth.”
“You mean a concept?”
“Maybe. Or maybe something that represents a concept. Since we have to retrieve a specific item for Pellar, there has to be a concrete solution at the end. Something finite. My guess is that it ties into the Roman numerals in the question.”
Reagan felt bewildered. It was too much to sort through, and not enough time to do it correctly. She thought about the big clock on the watch repair shop and imagined the heavy black hands pointing to eight PM. Game over. You lose.
She sighed. Her brilliant partner had figured out the answer, but not the means of obtaining it. An absolute and Roman numerals. Where in creation did one find a solution like that in sleepy-eyed Serenity Harbor?
It struck her like a thunderbolt from the blue.
“Elijah.” Her heart skipped a beat. Could it really be as simple as she hoped? “You said time is an absolute.” He nodded, and she hurried on, encouraged by his intent blue eyes. “There was a watch repair shop acro
ss from the Soda Shack. It had a large clock outside with Roman numerals on the face. You don’t think whatever we’re looking for…”
Elijah grinned and took her hand. “I think you’re a quick learner, and that’s as logical as anything else I’ve heard.” He pressed his lips to her palm. “If we solve the clue early, do I get a kiss as a reward?”
She shifted gears. “Why? You weren’t interested last night.” She tried to keep the sting from her voice, but it hurt to remember how he’d left her aching for his kiss. How confused she’d been by his abrupt departure.
He laughed. “Not interested? Reagan, if I’d stayed one minute longer…if I’d kissed you, I wouldn’t have been able to stop. How much control do you think I have? You were half naked.”
She flushed. So, she had gotten to him. She lowered her eyes, inordinately pleased. He’d gotten to her too, but she wasn’t going to admit she’d spent the night dreaming about him. Fortunately, their food arrived and she was saved from commenting.
* * * *
Later, they drove to the watch repair shop and wandered inside. It was small and cluttered, boxes of old watches and tools littering a single counter. A gray-haired man greeted them and asked how he could help. Reagan took a stab in the dark. “Do you have a package for Eric Sothern?”
“Sure thing.” The man disappeared into the back and returned a moment later with a small box, secured with twine. “There you go. Already paid for. Give Mr. Sothern my best.”
Elijah took the package, but waited until they were in the car before he snapped the twine. He slid behind the driver’s seat and inserted Reagan’s keys into the ignition.
“Well?” she asked, watching as he lifted the lid on the package.
His mouth tightened as he stared at the contents. After a long moment, he passed her the box and started the car. “You were right. Time, absolute. Guess we found what we needed.”
She looked inside the box, delighted by the old-fashioned pocket watch nestled within. It was gold-plated and carried the raised relief of a sailing ship on the cover.
