Barefoot in the Dark

by Suzanne Enoch

  “Whether we gathered any evidence or not, that was quite exciting,” Norway exclaimed. “I expected every shadow to leap out at us!”

  Once she had an armful of equipment, Samantha turned around again to face an awake and alert Yule. “It was kind of slow from our end, Yule. Did you notice anything at all? I know it’s hard to watch all the feeds at the same time.”

  “I didnae notice anything, nae,” he said, pushing to his feet. “But I cannae guarantee that nothing got by me.”

  “Thanks for being a first pair of eyes,” she said. “I’ll go over everything again whether you noticed anything weird or not, just to be sure.”

  Donner set his EMF detector down on the table. “Well, if y’all don’t mind, I’m going to bed. I have a feeling tomorrow’s going to be busy.”

  “Keep the walkie-talkie on, Tom,” Rick said. “I think we all should, at least until we get the wi-fi put in. Let’s say channel three.”

  The attorney hefted his radio. “Ten-four. But for God’s sake give me at least an hour or two of sleep.”

  “I may give you as much as three hours,” Rick returned. “Let’s say eight o’clock. That’s...” He checked his watch, “five hours. We’ll meet for breakfast.”

  “Consider me asleep, then. Good night, all.”

  “Us, as well,” Reggie put in. “We have a full day of recordings to review and exploring to do.”

  That made Rick clench his jaw, but he nodded. “Good night, then. You as well, Yule. We’ll see to this mess tomorrow.”

  “Aye, m’laird. Good night.”

  Once they were all gone, Samantha sat to shut down the stationary cameras and disconnect the feeds from the monitor, then make sure all the portable equipment was turned off. When she looked up, Rick was leaning against the wall by the doorway, gazing at her. “What?”

  “Yule was asleep, wasn’t he? That’s why you blocked the doorway and started making all that noise.”

  “The man gets up at like five o’clock in the morning. This is way past his bedtime.”

  “I wasn’t criticizing him for dozing off. It was just a nice gesture. He would have been embarrassed if we’d caught him snoozing.”

  She nodded. “Thanks.” Retrieving her thermal camera and some headphones, she stood again. “Ready?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Not all of us are creatures of the night like you are.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m a lot less nocturnal than I used to be.”

  Rick slung an arm around her shoulders as they left the room. “And I’m very glad of that. But you’re not too tired, I hope.”

  “I have chafed thighs, dude. You can have me from the waist up.”

  “That’s where some of my favorite bits are,” he returned, “but that’s not what I meant.”

  “No?” she asked, leaning into his ribs.

  “No. In the village I found graham crackers, marshmallows, and chocolate bars. They’re up in our bedchamber by the fireplace.”

  “S’mores? You hunted down s’more fixings?” His art collection fascinated her, his money (and the way he could simply spend it without somebody coming calling to ask where he’d gotten it) made things both easier and more difficult, but the small things, the ones even she could never expect – they were why she’d fallen so hard for him. Why she fell for him every damn day.

  “Well, it might have been a little more complicated than that, but yes. I thought it might be a nice way to wind down from a long evening of ghost hunting.”

  “You just made all my feelings happy.”

  He smiled as they walked together down the long hallway. “You called Walter the minute Tom showed up, didn’t you?”

  Okay, she was definitely going to have to come up with some new moves. “Maybe. Did you notice how swell Norway and Reggie and I were getting along?”

  “Yes, I did. When does Walter arrive?”

  “Sometime in the morning, I would guess.”

  “Will Aubrey be joining us, as well?”

  She shrugged against his side. “I don’t know. Stoney thinks I adopted Aubrey without checking all his papers first, so probably not. I could be wrong, though.”

  “Any idea what we’re telling my family Walter does for a living? Other than help you with ghost hunts, of course.”

  “He’s an antiques dealer,” she responded promptly. “It’s even the truth.”

  “Technically he’s an antiques fence. That’s not quite the same.”

  “Yes, it is. Money changes hands, and the buyer gets the goods. But I prefer s’mores to semantics, unless you want to spend the rest of the night lamenting and arguing over my life choices.”

  He didn’t seem to be angry. In fact, he dragged her even closer and kissed her forehead. “Tom said it was too quiet in Palm Beach with us gone.”

  “He missed us?” She snorted. “He missed me?”

  “He would eat his own tongue before he admitted that to you, so be nice about it. I figure perhaps Walter feels the same. But when Tom goes, Walter Barstone goes.”

  “Deal.” Freeing himself, she pushed open their bedchamber door. “But first, s’more me.”

  “With pleasure, my lass.”

  14

  Sunday, 8:19 a.m.

  “No. Read that last part to me again,” Tom said, his Texas twang intensifying as his frustration increased. He banged the phone’s receiver on the desk. “Mansour? Hello?... No, I didn’t catch it. I need the last paragraph again.”

  Across from the desk, Richard sat in the deep window sill of his office and watched the sun edging into the southeastern sky. “Tell him to email it. After breakfast we’ll go down to the pub.”

  “Man—Mansour? No. Just no. Email it. I’ll get back to you in an hour or so. Yes. One hour.” Grumbling in the nonsensical way he’d mastered since becoming a father – words that sounded profane but weren’t – he set the receiver back into its cradle with exaggerated care. “How are you so calm? All this crap should be driving you crazy.”

  “I was actually thinking that you’ve taken to the country life about as well as you expected Samantha would.” Richard straightened. “Don’t mistake me, though. Kigomo annoyed me. I don’t mean to allow him to get away with it.”

  “Now that’s what I wanted to hear. Lead the way to the breakfast room, because I couldn’t find it with a compass.”

  That explained why he’d found Tom this morning talking to himself outside the billiards room. Canniebrae had never been particularly disorienting to him, but then he’d grown up spending time there. He did recall thinking as a young boy that the place featured an endless number of doors and rooms to explore.

  Samantha, of course, had figured out the layout almost immediately. Whatever arguments there were for nature versus nurture, she, the way her mind worked, was a marvel. He didn’t think he would ever tire of trying to figure her out.

  “Honestly,” Tom said as they walked, “with the electricity and the phones and the wi-fi and the internet as they are here, I don’t know how either of you have been able to stand it. The—”

  “What?” Samantha said, as she emerged from the breakfast room, a can of diet Coke in one hand. “You can’t hack it here, Donner? Ready to flee to London?”

  “I’d just like to point out that you’re not trying to save a two-billion-dollar deal,” the attorney retorted.

  “Nope. I’m ghost busting.” She hefted the camera in her other hand. “I’ll be in the attic if you need me.” Stretching up, she gave Richard a soft peck on the lips. “Take your walkie-talkie with you when you go into the village. It should have just enough range.”

  “So she’s hiding out in the attic like Mr. Rochester’s looney wife?” Tom commented, eyeing the two of them.

  Samantha laughed, the sound floating back over her shoulder as she headed away. “That’s me, Bertha Mason Rochester. Points to you for knowing your Charlotte Bronte.”

  As she turned the corner and vanished, Tom led the way into the breakfast room. “Katie actually forced
me to sit through the Michael Fassbender movie,” he confessed.

  “It still counts,” Richard returned, trying to decide when, exactly, he’d gone from being troubled by the animosity between Tom and Samantha to being amused by it.

  “And why is Jellicoe hanging out in your attic?”

  “That’s where all the good stuff from the collapsed wing was stored, plus at least one Gainsborough and God knows what else that’s ended up there over the years. She’s cataloguing.” Which was fine, except that she’d more or less declared that she meant to go after the highwayman’s treasure. If she’d given up, it was the first time he could recall her doing so. If she hadn’t given up, though, what was she doing in the attic? He wanted to go take a look, but the damned clock was ticking on the Kigomo deal. Richard was generally fine with multitasking, but this was getting ridiculous.

  And then it got worse. Yule hurried into the room. “M’laird, there’s a man at the door. He claims to be here to see Miss Sam, but…”

  “Is he a large black man?” Richard asked. “Short hair graying at the temples, and a scar through his left eyebrow?”

  “Aye, m’laird.”

  “Walter?” Tom mouthed.

  Richard nodded crisply. “Show him up to Samantha in the attic. And he’ll need a room.”

  “Aye, m’laird.” Yule started out of the room, then paused again. “I’m nae certain what to make of him, m’laird. He’s dressed like an Eskimo.”

  If he didn’t explain Walter, rumors and speculation would flood the house. “He’s Walter Barstone. Samantha’s adopted father.” He sighed. “He’s family. Family who doesn’t like the cold.”

  “Of course, m’laird.”

  Oh, this was just perfect. He’d be out of the house for a good part of the day, giving Samantha plenty of time to tell Walter everything she knew about the highwayman treasure and enlist her cohort’s assistance in tracking it down. Which meant that now he was going to have to decide how far he was willing to let this go, and what he was willing to do to put a stop to it. And whether he needed to bring anyone else in on his side.

  As far as he knew Reg and Miss Nyland were digging through the ruined wing again, though he supposed eventually even his cousin would have to realize that either the map didn’t, in fact, exist any longer, or it wasn’t where he thought it was.

  “All in all,” Tom asked, “are you wishing you’d stayed in Palm Beach?”

  “Not so far, but that could change.” Soon, actually.

  Samantha leaned closer to the camera’s monitor, as if that would make the volume on the headphones go above ten. Norway might be smarter than she let on, but the woman had the investigatory skills of a moose, at least where asking questions to empty air was concerned.

  “Is Will Dawkin here?” came faintly to her ears, followed immediately by, “Let’s listen back and see if he answered,” followed by five repeats of her slightly garbled question from her recorder.

  “Patience, Sam,” Samantha breathed, resisting the urge to forward the camera’s recording. This bit was only twenty minutes. She just hoped it wouldn’t be twenty minutes of listening to the same two questions rewinding over and over.

  “Will Dawkin, if you’re here, please make a sound for us.” Pause. “Did you hear anything, Reginald?”

  “No. Play it back.”

  Samantha knocked her head against the chest of drawers.

  The request repeated. Twice. “I don’t hear anything,” Eerika commented quietly.

  “Should we ask Sam if we’re doing it correctly?”

  “Oh, yes, and while you’re at it, ask her if I’m wearing greedy colors tonight or not, why don’t you?”

  “Move past it, Ree. She’s American; they’re all rude.” He paused, the warm red and yellow blob of his form leaning toward his girlfriend. “Are you recording that?”

  “Oops. How do I erase something?”

  That went on for at least a minute, so Samantha popped the top of her soda and took a drink of diet Coke. They thought she was rude. Hah. She’d been going more for fresh-faced and forthright, but rude was close enough where these two were concerned. If they cared to become acquainted with her any more deeply than she did with them, she’d eat a cobweb. Usually watching and learning about people kind of fascinated her, but she knew these guys already, or at least their type. They were the sort she most enjoyed robbing.

  “Sam, this is—”

  She jumped, yelping, as the dark figure topped the stairs behind her. In the same swift heartbeat she recognized the form, paused the playback, and slipped out of the headphones before she rolled to her feet. “You came!”

  “Of course I came. I’m not happy about it, but… Is that a Bernini?” Stoney veered sideways, pulling out his phone and flipping on the flashlight as he leaned down to examine the white marble bust.

  “Yep. Louis the Fourteenth. I found a Gainsborough a couple of days ago.”

  “I’m telling you, kid, if you ever change your mind about this guy we could buy a country with the proceeds.”

  “Not changing my mind.” Once Stoney straightened she hugged him, then pointed him toward the chair she’d vacated. “I have a story to tell you, and then I need your help.”

  He eyed her as he took the seat. “What kind of help?”

  “A heist. Maybe.”

  “Honey, don’t get me all excited if you’re just going to crush my hopes again.”

  She perched on the edge of the chest of drawers and told him about the highwayman thing, from Reggie’s nastiness over a reportedly non-existent map to Rick’s line in the sand and the missing books from the library, to the maps she’d made and her ploy to sneak clues off of Reggie and Norway last night.

  “Show me what you’ve sketched out,” he said when she’d finished.

  Samantha dug out her map pages and handed them over. “You agree with me, then? There’s something out there?”

  “Addison tells you everything. If he knew for a fact nothing existed, he’d have a story about how he looked and found nothing. By my thinking he found something, and for some reason he doesn’t want his cousin – or his own wife-to-be – to know what or where it is. Ergo, it’s illegal and it’s valuable.”

  Samantha had walked down the same path, but she’d stopped short of that ending. “Rick might be sketchy but outright illegal’s pushing it, don’t you think?”

  “Look in the mirror, honey. Are you sketchy, or illegal? He’s kept who you really are secret from his own family.”

  “He’s more just fudged some of the details.”

  Because he was Stoney he’d kept his voice low for the entire conversation, but there were still enough greedy, prissy ears around here that she couldn’t help glancing over her shoulder. She might not have a bounty on her head, but some of the pieces she’d liberated had hefty return rewards. If someone did turn her in, it would probably end up being pretty lucrative for him or her or them.

  “How accurate is the topography?”

  “Pretty accurate. I went horseback riding for three hours yesterday so I could take a closer look. I cross-shaded the sections I haven’t been able to verify.”

  “You’ve got what, six possible locations for burying something?”

  “That’s as far as I could narrow it down from the one look – presuming he didn’t just shove the goods under a fallen tree somewhere and they’ve washed down into the loch.” That was possible, she supposed, but it didn’t fit with Rick’s current secrecy and annoyance. Aside from that, Will Dawkin seemed to have been a competent thief, so fallen-logging didn’t make sense. “I’m listening to a recording right now, but all I’ve gotten so far is the urge to barf.”

  Stoney lowered the pages to his lap. “Are you really going after it, then? And what if you find it?”

  Samantha grimaced. “I don’t have to have an answer for that yet, do I?”

  “You’re really asking me that?” he retorted. “You never go in without a plan to get out.”

  �
�This isn’t Fort Knox,” she retorted. “And I’m thirty percent sure the treasure isn’t even a real thing. So give me a frickin’ break.”

  “Uh huh. Then I flew overnight from Florida, took a tiny plane to some no name airport, and then hitched a ride into the middle of nowhere with a guy carrying sheep in the back of his truck, just so I could help you dig into something you might not want to dig into even if we track it down? Or am I your token underworld character because your boyfriend brought Donner in after he said he wouldn’t?”

  “Isn’t it enough that I’m a little…confused morally, so I called you for back-up?”

  He eyed her. “Excuse me, but in this new chapter of your life, the one where Rick Addison is your white knight, doesn’t that make me the Dark Side? The Darth Vader of your little tribe?”

  “Oh, please. You’ve always been my Yoda.”

  “I’m not here to talk you into doing evil, then?”

  That made her frown, mostly because in a way it was kind of true. “Nope,” she said anyway. “It’s just a tangle, and I need you to machete me into the open. Plus I have a lot of ghost hunting audio and video to go through, and you like that stuff.” She tagged him lightly on one muscled shoulder. “Plus I’m outnumbered by posh, and I missed you.”

  With a loud sigh he set her maps aside. “Fine. Do you have any idea where the billionaire stashed those books? Having them to look through would narrow down your potential treasure spots by a lot, I would imagine.”

  “He put ‘em somewhere he figured I would never think to look. But it’s a big house with a shit ton of obvious but not obvious places to put a couple of old books. Do you want to look for those or finish going through the highwayman séance tapes?”

  “Séance. I’ll do the rest of the recordings, too, and whatever else you brought up here, so it looks like you were actually doing an investigation, and not tricking people into talking about a treasure so you could record them.”