Barefoot in the Dark

by Suzanne Enoch

  “Thanks, Yoda.” She kissed him on the cheek, moved her diet Coke closer by his elbow, and gave him her walkie-talkie. She would have to snag Donner’s, but he and Rick were practically joined at the hip, anyway.

  Rick and Donner were still in the breakfast room when she found them. For a second, she thought about just picking the attorney’s pocket and going on her way. He already thought she was a one-woman crime syndicate, though, and she hated giving his theories more fuel. “You guys still going into Orrisey?”

  “We are,” Rick returned, reaching for her hand as she stopped beside him. “Walter found you?”

  “Yep. He’s helping go through the ghost tapes. I need the monitor for the cameras, though. May I borrow your walkie-talkie, Donner? Pretty please?” He’d probably make her say that last part anyway, so she headed him off.

  He pulled it out of his coat pocket and handed it over. “You scare me when you’re polite like that.”

  She flashed Rick a grin as she turned back for the stairs. “You’re just saying that to try to get me to be nice to you. It won’t work.” As she ascended she switched the radio two frequencies up to avoid including Reggie and Norway, and Rick, in her conversation with Stoney. “I’m on air,” she said, lifting it. “The others are two below this, if we want to go public.”

  “Roger,” Stoney’s voice came back to her. “Good hunting.”

  “You, too. Lemme know if you catch anything interesting.”

  “Bring me some scones or something next time you head up here. Last meal I had was airplane pretzels and some gum from the sheep guy.”

  “Ten-four.”

  Lady Mercia – Samantha still wasn’t ready to call her “aunt” yet, even if it had been offered – hadn’t made it into the library yet this morning, so Sam made another circuit of the bookshelves in case Rick had just moved the highwayman books he considered pertinent to her search. This didn’t seem like a place she wouldn’t check, though, and she wasn’t surprised not to find them.

  She would have been out shopping with Norway when he moved them, so they could literally be anywhere. At least if she’d been in the attic she would have had one place she could eliminate. But no, she could have been sitting on them up there, for all she knew --- except that he knew she was digging through all that stuff. Rick liked taking chances, but they had to have a logic to them. Given all the more likely hiding places, she didn’t think he would have risked dumping them up there.

  Where the hell, then, would he think she was unlikely to look for a pile of books she really wanted to find? It wasn’t like there was a room filled with glass-eyed antique dolls in the house…she hoped. Shuddering, Samantha went one door past the library, peeked in at extra chair storage, and backed out again. Too easy.

  What, did Rick think she just wouldn’t notice? Or was she overthinking how sneaky he would be about it? Maybe they were just under a couple of unused chair cushions.

  She could do without the additional info the books would provide, but that would mean additional time spent on outdoor treasure hunting. Rick would know what she was up to – and Reggie might figure it out, too. The more she could narrow it down on paper first, the better.

  Okay. Rick logic. Tricky, but with sound reasoning behind it. According to him, the last place she would look would be Donner’s room, but the lawyer hadn’t yet arrived when the books vanished. Reggie and Norway’s room? Nah, he wouldn’t put more information in his cousin’s reach even if Reggie thought all he needed was the map. His aunt and uncle’s room? Rick was a proper Brit. Proper Brits didn’t sneak stuff into the rooms of their elders.

  Their room? That would be kind of…clever, really. Huh. The odds were against it, but it would be totally easy to search – especially now, with Rick headed down to the village.

  Feeling kind of stupid, Samantha headed up the hallway, climbed the stairs, and slipped inside the room she shared with him. She closed and locked the door, because no way did she want to get caught tossing her own room.

  “Okay, Sam,” she muttered, rubbing her hands together and blowing out her breath. “Let’s make this quick, and never speak of it again.”

  Sinking onto her hands and knees and then lowering to her stomach, she flipped up the bed skirt to look beneath the nosebleed-high piece of furniture. Without her phone light she wouldn’t have been able to see all the way back, but other than a sack and some dust bunnies that probably dated back to the Highland Clearances, it was just a lot of space.

  They’d both unpacked into the old wardrobe and chests of drawers, with the suitcases relegated to what used to be the formal dressing room with its old hat boxes and dressing table and chair and more old shoe boxes. She went through her drawer, then Rick’s, then went into the dusty dressing room and opened their suitcases. Nada.

  The one bookcase in the bedchamber had more knickknacks than books on it, but she checked there, too, just in case. “Dammit.” Grumbling, she stomped back into the dressing room to shove the suitcases back into their corner, then sat in the single dressing chair.

  This was getting embarrassing. If she couldn’t outfigure Rick in the “hiding goods” department, maybe it was a good thing she was mostly retired. Or had being mostly retired for the past year dulled all her instincts? Either way, this sucked.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid.” Next, she’d be on her hands and knees digging through the boxes of mildewed ostrich feather hats and shit and yowling at the moon.

  Wait a minute. Narrowing one eye, she looked at the uneven stacks of round hatboxes. She liked antiques, but moldy old hats didn’t much interest her at all. Unless they’d been carefully stored and preserved, hats in cold damp just turned into lumps of blech. Pursing her lips, she toed the top box in a stack of three.

  It wobbled, then tipped over. A damp-looking straw hat with fake flowers that had probably once been silk daisies plopped onto the floor. Great. Now she was going to have to clean that up. Even so, she’d committed now. Using her foot again, she pushed the next one down. At the least knocking over stacked things helped her push back against her frustration. If Rick got the idea that he could outmaneuver her, well, that would be setting a very bad precedent.

  The bottom box wouldn’t tip, so she shoved off the lid with her toe. Then she stared at the contents for a good, long minute. Bingo. Pushing a fist straight up into the air, she slid down the front of the chair to sit her bottom on the floor. Five books. Legends of the Scottish Highwayman, A Dangerous Occupation, In the Shadow of Balmoral, The History of Highway Robbery, and Stand and Deliver: A Guide to History’s Lawbreakers.

  Swiftly she set them aside, then closed the empty box so she could stack the other boxes back on top of it. Even the yucky straw thing only made her wipe her fingers off on her jeans. The books she bundled into her spare jacket before she retreated with them back to the attic.

  “Found ‘em,” she said, setting her bundle down on a side table.

  “That’s good, because most of the audio on your thermal recording is pretty spooky messed up,” Stoney returned, straightening to flex his arms. “I think you found a ghost. Where’s my scone?”

  Her heart beating a little faster, Samantha picked her way through the mess of antiques to where Stoney sat. “I’ll get you a sandwich in a minute. Ghost first.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not ready to swear in court what it is,” he said, “not that you’d ever find either of us in a court, but it’s… Well, take a listen for yourself.”

  He backed the thermal recording up to seven or eight minutes after she’d stopped her own review, then handed her the headphones. Once she’d adjusted the small playback screen so she could see it, he reached over and hit play.

  On one side of the screen Reggie and Norway sat side by side, her right hand up as she held out the digital recorder. “Is it true, Will Dawkin, that no one has ever found your treasure?” Norway asked, then paused. “Yes or no, is it hidden in a cave?” Another pause. “In a tree stump? Under a r—”

  Th
e low rumble at the edge of Samantha’s hearing unsettled her. “Jesus.”

  “I nearly fell out of my chair,” Stoney said. “Did you make out any words?”

  “I definitely heard something.” Rewinding it, she turned up the volume, putting both hands over the earphones.

  “Leave me alone,” she heard, low and soft. “Not for you.” Then the audio went out completely for a couple of seconds before it popped back in.

  “Wow,” she murmured.

  “What did you hear?”

  She looked over at Stoney. “I got ‘leave me alone’ and ‘not for you’.”

  “Huh,” he returned. “I heard ‘leave me my gold’ and ‘Nosferatu’.”

  Samantha squinted one eye. “Well, they’re similar, but I don’t see why an old spirit would say the name of a 1922 horror film.”

  “Maybe he’s a fan,” Stoney said dryly. “Or it’s audio matrixing, and we really just heard nothing but your stomach growling.”

  “Yeah, so loud I blew out the audio.” She snorted. “Norway’s going to flip out when she hears this.” And somehow that had become the best part of all this – the idea of scaring Eerika so badly she would go fleeing down the front drive in her expensive shoes. Samantha had set up this whole ghost tracking thing so she could spy on Reggie and Norway. The fact that she’d actually found evidence of something was pretty damn awesome.

  “Norway?”

  “Rick’s cousin’s girlfriend. Eerika Nyland. You’ll get it when you see her as something other than heat blobs. Very Scandinavian.” She tapped the camera. “Did you find anything else?”

  “Not yet. I had to listen to that one thing about forty times. You check the books, and I’ll keep going with this. I’m past your spy cam work, and I have a couple of notes for you, but I want to know if anything else stopped by to chat.”

  “Deal. I’ll get another pair of headphones so I can at least listen to Rick’s digital recorder while I read. Plus, I owe you a sandwich.”

  “If we find a highwayman’s loot, you’re going to owe me more than that. And if that spook comes after me, I’m going to make it my business to haunt you for getting me killed in the world’s coldest place.”

  She could totally argue that Scotland in September was not the coldest place on Earth, but Stoney was cranky enough already. “Got it. Sandwich, hold the spooks.”

  Wow. Now she had a maybe warning that was probably aimed at Reggie and the Viking and that could easily be interpreted to be about the treasure, and she had enough information on hand that she would hopefully be able to at least halve her search area. Time to do some reading.

  15

  Sunday, 12:12 p.m.

  “I’m getting all dirty, Reginald,” Eerika said, dropping the crow bar she held and putting her left hand around her broken right pinkie nail as if that would mend it again. “And I didn’t see a nail salon in Orrisey. This is stupid.”

  “It’s not stupid. Your nails are rather ridiculous anyway, don’t you think? How do you even use your phone?”

  “That’s what the stylus is for.” She sniffed. “And don’t be angry at me because you can’t find anything. We’ve torn up every floor board in this entire room. The map’s not here.”

  “Oh, it’s here.” Reginald tossed his hammer aside. “It’s just not here. He moved it.”

  Using the back of one filthy hand to swipe blond hair out of her eyes, she frowned at his backside. “Then why are we still ripping up floorboards, for heaven’s sake?”

  “To make certain it’s not here.”

  “Now you’re being ridiculous, Reginald. You told me—”

  “I told you there was money and fame here that Ricky could only claim if he got to it first. He hasn’t done so. Which means I will.”

  “How do you know he hasn’t?”

  Reginald straightened, his slightly bland features forming into a pleasant smile that made him look more like his cousin. “Two reasons. First, Ricky can’t keep his purchases and discoveries to himself, especially if they’re rare and valuable. He’ll do an interview with some magazine or newspaper or something to explain what perfect taste he has, and why he’s saved some old stick figure from historical obscurity. But there’s never been a whisper about Will Dawkin’s treasure. Second, he’s extremely worried that we’re looking about in here. He nearly threw a tantrum when he found me in here the other day, and then he actually offered me money to stop searching. The—”

  “He offered you money?” Eerika interrupted, trying to keep the annoyance from her voice. “How much money?”

  His smile sagged a little. “He didn’t name a figure. What do y—"

  “Reginald,” she cut in again, bending down to pick up her crowbar and gratified to see his attention on her chest as she straightened once more. “I could do an entire series around an unexpected windfall. Money doesn’t have the same ring as highwayman’s gold, but it might work. We’d have to change the name of the show, of course, but I’m not married to Booty Queen, anyway.”

  He took the crowbar out of her fingers, then straightened to give her a soft kiss. “I like Booty Queen. But Rick’s charity money wouldn’t be enough. I negotiate price against product for a living. Trust me. Finding the treasure wouldn’t be charity. It would be mine. Ours. As would all the publicity we get from digging up Will Dawkin’s treasure.”

  Stifling her sigh at the fragile egos of men, she furrowed her brow in the pout she’d been told was her second most attractive expression. “Darling, Booty Queen only happens if we find the map.” She sniffed. “I am getting impatient, Reginald. I don’t know how many more times I’ll be able to tolerate going shopping with that woman.”

  “Eerika, I will find it for you. The map and the treasure.” He kissed her again, this time on the forehead. “I promised you a treasure, and I promised you that this would be the thing that moved me so far beyond being just ‘the other Addison, you know, not Richard’, that he’ll have to make an appointment to see me. And that producer friend of yours will have to make an appointment to see you, because you’ll be busy being a star.”

  Well, he sounded very certain of that. At the best she could be married to the famous Reginald Addison and he could be married to the even more famous Eerika Nyland. At the least it would be nice not to have to go to the bother of pretending he was Richard Addison when he climbed on top of her. Folding her frown into a smile and stepping closer to rub her chest against his, she took his free hand. “You make me wet when you talk like that. It’s just that you’ve been promising me that highwayman’s treasure for weeks. I want it. I want it now. I want to see you tell your cousin you found it. I want that tiny rude woman to know she settled for the wrong Addison cousin. And I want all the fame that comes with it.”

  “You make me hard when you talk like that,” he said thickly. “What say we go take a shower and wash all this dirt off each other, and then figure out why Ricky’s American has been spending so much time in the attic? Especially when Ricky claims she finds lost things that are worth large piles of money?”

  Thank Christ. She’d been nudging him toward the idea of using the American’s claimed expertise for the past two days. It had become clear to her almost immediately that all Reginald had was a theory and a vague idea. She’d sharpened it as best she could, but they had a limited amount of time here, and with the months she’d invested in Reginald she required a payoff. A very lucrative one. That was what she’d been promised, after all. If Sam Jellicoe was capable of providing it, then she must be convinced to do so. There didn’t appear to be any other option.

  Her mother had always said that a man with possibilities and no ideas needed a woman with intelligence and ambition. Reginald was that man, because the little American already had her claws into the good Addison. And by God, Eerika Eunice Nyland was that woman.

  Lightning slashed across the windows along the front wall of The Bonny Lass. The sky had been lowering all morning, and according to Jamie MaCafferty, the pub’s owner, they
were in for a bit of a blow. By Highlands standards that could well mean something apocalyptic.

  The lights flickered overhead. It could also mean the end of their internet and wi-fi. Tom glanced over the screen of his laptop, then went back to typing. Generally the two of them would be pacing, contract revisions in hand, while someone else typed up changes for immediate review by the other party involved. These were not normal circumstances, and as thunder rumbled again Richard had the distinct impression they were running out of time.

  “Do you have it?” he asked. “I’ll still step in to purchase Himori Gaming, but if that bastard Kigomo stays on, my offer shrinks to four hundred million because of the impediment his presence will cost my business and my reputation. Let’s see how their board likes that.”

  “You’re sure they won’t just back out of the whole deal? A hundred seventy million is a lot to lose in exchange for keeping one bastard on the payroll.”

  “They can’t afford to back out. That’s the problem when a company puts all its resources behind a billion-dollar enterprise that gets a unanimous ‘worst game of the year’ vote.”

  “Yeah, Rick Addison swoops in and suddenly your company will be working on a Godzilla VR game for his girlfriend.”

  Richard grinned. “I am not making anyone work on anything. I am going to run the next big game idea by your children before I sign off on it, though. There will be no Slip and Slime 2.”

  “And thank God for that. I’ve never heard so much whining about how many hockey goals my kids had to make before they earned enough points for ladder steps to climb a slide or some such crap.”

  “Less complaining. More typing.”

  “Don’t worry. Mrs. Prendergast didn’t give me an A for being the slowest typist in typing class.”

  Richard pushed to his feet. “There’ll be a mug of mulled cider and cinnamon whisky waiting for you to hit Send.”