Prize and Prejudice_A Cozy Mystery Novel

by Miranda Sweet

  “I don’t want to annoy him…” She sighed and pulled out her phone. Once again, no messages. She dialed his number; it rang several times and went to voice mail. She left a message.

  “Where is he staying?” Jeanette asked. “We can check with them to see what time he came in.”

  “I don’t know,” Angie said. “He’s so private…I got a message from him about four o’clock agreeing to meet me here at six-thirty, but saying that he hadn’t made it onto the island yet.”

  Sheldon and Jeanette looked at each other.

  “He would have to be on the four-ten Hy-Line or the five o’clock Steamship,” Jeanette said. “Otherwise, how could a punctilious man be sure of arriving on time in order not to disappoint a young lady? He would have said something otherwise, I am sure.” She turned to Angie. “Did he bring a car? Or did he plan to take the shuttle? Or rent a car?”

  “I don’t know,” Angie said. “He didn’t say.”

  “I’ll call Lexie at the Hy-Line desk,” Sheldon said. “She should be able to tell me about the Steamship ferry, too. Angie gave me a good description. He sounds like a real character.”

  “You are a real character,” Jeanette said. The tall woman leaned over and kissed her husband on the top of his balding head. “And thank you for coming to the rescue.”

  Sheldon walked back into the kitchen with a smile on his face.

  “He’s going to walk through the door any second now,” Angie said. “And all this worry will have been for nothing.”

  “That is true,” Jeanette said. “But then again, it is better not to let worry fester too long. While you are waiting, won’t you come with me to the office? I wanted to show you something. It would make a good distraction, and someone will tell us if your friend arrives while we cannot see him.”

  Angie took a breath. “Of course. What’s it about?”

  “Why, the treasure hunt,” Jeanette said. “What else?”

  As they threaded their way through the close-packed but seemingly random tables scattered through the restaurant, surrounded by the comfortable chatter of people eating good food in good company and the muted sounds of an accordion and a woman singing in French, Jeanette said, “I have been going through the boxes of old documents that have been in the house since forever. You know that Sheldon, he hates to throw anything away. Ever. But he cannot organize anything. He pushes it all into the same boxes until they get full, then carries them up to the attic without any kind of label whatsoever. I have found love-letters from a girl that he loved decades ago next to telephone bills and receipts for shoes. So romantic! They were not even tied up in a ribbon.”

  She shook her head. Angie could imagine Jeanette sorting out long-lost love letters, tying them up, then teasing her husband about it later. “You are never allowed to have an affair, because you would need your wife to organize it well enough to keep it secret from your wife!” Something like that.

  “But what is important is that he also threw all the other paperwork he found into boxes, and those are in the attic too,” Jeanette was saying. “So that one moment, I am reading a receipt from 1985, and the next, a page from a ledger a hundred years older than that.”

  “Is the Shuckery that old?” Angie asked.

  “Oh, yes, it is older in parts and not so old in parts. The part that extends over the water, it is not that old; it must be replaced from time to time. But the main part of the house that is now the rear of the restaurant, that is very old. It is like walking through the small rooms of a house, no? Which makes it very comfortable to have privacy.”

  Angie nodded. The whole building felt old, or at least not new, but the back part of the building had a narrow hallway and doors so low that some people had to duck to go through them. The doorways were capped with beautiful leaded glass transoms.

  “We are sure that part goes back to at least 1849, because we have a bill of sale from that year. But it is most likely older than that, because it was a bill of sale, yes? Not records of construction.”

  The office was in one of the rear-most rooms and was stuffed at Angie’s head-height with what looked like an endless row of ledgers. In other words, historical documents.

  Jeanette had to duck a little to reach the back of the desk. She unlocked one of the drawers and pulled out a file folder.

  “I had it ready for you to look at,” she said.

  “Jeanette, why do you want me to see it? You know that I can’t win the treasure, either.”

  Jeanette winked at her. “I said to Sheldon, ‘Angie, she would know what to think about this.’ I suggested it. And he said yes.”

  Angie sat in the small chair in front of the desk. Jeanette sat before the computer and started tapping away at the keys.

  Angie flipped open the file. The first piece of paper was a fragile newspaper clipping about the founding of the Nantucket railroad in 1881. Angie hardly dared to touch it. The railroad had been a narrow-gauge railroad, which meant that, for the most part, it had never been meant to ship commercial goods or anything heavy, like rock or coal. The train cars would be too small and unstable for that. No, it was a tourist line.

  The train engine’s name was “Dionis,” she read, in honor of the wife of one of the original settlers on Nantucket, Tristram Coffin. Having grown up on Nantucket, Angie could vaguely remember the name. She wanted to say it was around the 1650s or so when he and his wife had arrived on the island. That’s right! He was one of the original group who had bought Nantucket for something like a hundred dollars and a beaver hat. Only that was before dollars, so it was probably some comparable sum of British pounds.

  The train was built to entice tourists to travel to, and around, the entire island. Carefully, she flipped to the next sheet of paper, then held her hands out of the way. She felt almost sacrilegious touching paper this old. The most valuable paper she normally dealt with was signed first editions from the twentieth century!

  The next piece of paper was another newspaper clipping, this time announcing an attack on the railroad by locals only months after the train had opened to the public. Reading between the lines, Angie guessed that local cabbies had been to blame. No one had been arrested, at least at the point the article was written. She’d have to do more research if she wanted to find out whether the mystery had ever been officially solved. If she had to guess, she’d say that it hadn’t been, but she suspected that the culprits had received a private talking-to and may have had their feet held to the fire to donate money to the island.

  Another clipping bragged about the one-year anniversary of the train, and how it had carried over 30,000 passengers.

  “Wow, Jeanette. This is some amazing stuff that Sheldon has been saving.”

  “Keep reading.”

  Another clipping had sadder news. In 1895, the railroad closed down after a series of expensive repairs necessitated by repeated flood damage. The Nantucket Railroad reopened soon afterward under a new company name, the Nantucket Central Railroad Company.

  Aha, Angie thought. She knew enough about financial analysis to smell a business reorg in favor of private investors when she saw it.

  “Jeanette,” she said.

  “Eh?”

  “Do you know who the investors in the Nantucket Central Railroad Company were?”

  “No, there was nothing in the papers about that. At least, nothing that I have found yet.”

  “Did Sheldon’s family own this building all the way back then?”

  “I do not think so. What are you thinking?”

  “That I might look up who owned the building at the time, and who the investors in the Nantucket Central Railroad Company were.”

  Jeanette gave a little shrug. She wasn’t obsessed by mysteries, but rather by a sense of order. And that was why Angie was now involved. She would bet twenty bucks that Jeanette had found the papers and taken them to Sheldon, Sheldon had hinted that Jeanette should talk to Angie, and Jeanette had decided that it was her own idea to do so. Sheldon could be sub
tle when he felt like it. Not that many people would have guessed, given that he usually wasn’t.

  Angie wondered if the locals were beginning to consider her their local sleuth. She had played a pivotal role in unraveling the mystery of Alexander Snouck’s death, and she did love to solve problems. Angie dismissed the idea and focused back on the next piece of paper Jeanette was showing her.

  The railroad changed over from coal to gasoline engines. The first engine was tested in 1907, and a second engine in 1910. Which made sense, sort of. Internal combustion engines were in development during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the Ford Model T would have appeared on the market sometime around…1910, maybe? She’d have to look it all up. She was solid on things like the publication date of The Phantom of the Opera and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, but the history of automobiles, not as much.

  But the changeover to the gasoline engine went along with the decline of the railroad, and no wonder. As the number of automobiles on the island—including trucks and buses—grew, fewer and fewer people chose to ride the rails, which were limited by the railroad tracks in a way that busses or private cars weren’t.

  In 1917, the railroad closed for good. The end of an era.

  The next clipping was about Victor Nouges and his father, Albert. Albert Nouges, and the Nouges family in general, owned a large shipping company in France which was working with the Allied forces. The clipping bragged about the family’s connection to the famous painter Claude Monet through Victor Nouges, who had also trained as an artist.

  “We hope that Mr. Nouges will help bring French culture to the island of Nantucket,” the article concluded.

  There was no mention of any paintings accompanying him, by Monet or anyone else.

  Angie turned to the next piece of paper. It was in much better condition than the previous ones, a full sheet of actual paper rather than the ragged newspaper pulp of the clippings. The paper was thick and smooth with linen fiber in the paper, and had been folded over on itself in fourths.

  Angie unfolded it carefully.

  It was a large ship’s manifest, dated 1917, listing passengers on the ship SS Puy de Sancy as well as the cargo.

  Jeanette stopped typing and said, “Do you see it?”

  Angie skimmed over the page. “No…wait.” She put her finger on one of the lines with a big swooping “M” on it. Monet. “The line showing that the painting was shipped here?”

  “Oui.”

  Angie skimmed through the rest of the manifest but didn’t notice anything else that stuck out. “I can’t make out all the writing on here,” she said.

  “Moi non plus.”

  “Do you mind if I take a picture of it and try to keep working on it?”

  “Why? There is nothing else to be found on that paper.”

  “It’s too tempting,” Angie said. “All that history, right in front of my face, and I can’t read it.”

  Jeanette laughed. “Then take a picture! I would not be the one to stop you from your obsessions.”

  Angie took out her phone and photographed the manifest several times.

  The next page was an insurance document for the painting. It stated that the Monet was valued at five thousand francs and owned by Victor Nouges.

  Even though the document had been typed, Angie took a pic of that one, too.

  “You know,” Angie said, “The Jeritt twins, mostly Mickey, that is, seem to think that the painting might be in the attic of the bakery.”

  “Yes, the bakery is very old,” Jeanette said. “Did they look?”

  “No, Jo wants to make sure the tourists stick around long enough to pay their bills first.”

  Jeanette laughed heartily. “Sometimes, I think she would have fit into my French family very well. We have always been known for our heartless bread-bakers.”

  “Heartless?” Angie asked.

  “Oh, the worst,” Jeanette agreed. “During the Revolution, my family was held up to the wall with bayonets while the people took all the bread. The family story is that my ancestor threatened to start baking moldy flour into the bread on purpose if they made him bake for the Republic without pay.” She drew a line across her throat. “Shhhick!”

  “No!” Angie said.

  “Mais oui. But when Napoleon came to power, we came back into respect, because everyone likes good bread. But I, I am the black sheep of the family, and I am only a cook. The twins, their bread isn’t as good as my family’s bread, but what can you do? The flour here is terrible. I am sure that if they had the same flour we have in France, they would soon make bread almost as good as my family’s.”

  Angie wasn’t sure if Jeanette was pulling her leg, but it was probably better to pretend that she believed every word.

  “That’s amazing,” she said.

  “And so you must tell me what you have learned.”

  “Nothing, yet,” Angie said. “We knew the painting had come over here, because of the clippings that Walter found. The painting arrived and was displayed to the public in 1917, for reasons that had nothing to do with the mysterious lover. It sounds like the people of Nantucket hadn’t been expecting the painting at all. It just came out of the blue. Why Victor Nouges brought it with him in the first place was a mystery. And then, just before he left, the painting disappeared. That’s all we really know for certain.”

  “And?”

  “And…” Angie closed her eyes and imagined the painting sitting on an easel, being shown off to everyone in the town. “And why did Alexander Snuock, or someone in the Snuock family at any rate, save all those clippings that Walter found? I think everyone on the island has the same feeling—that the Snuocks had to be involved.”

  “The family was powerful then, too,” Jeanette said. “So they had to be involved somehow, yes?”

  “But how?”

  “That is what we want to know from you.”

  Angie said, “I don’t have enough information yet.”

  “But this helped?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you are supposed to be the great detective!” Jeanette exclaimed, laughing. She leaned forward and kissed Angie on the forehead. “Don’t let it trouble you. You will keep looking around and asking questions, and everyone will tell you their secrets. The painting, it will be found eventually, and if it is not found until after the Jerritt twins have made enough money to keep the bakery open, est bien, that is how it will be.”

  “I’m not hiding anything,” Angie said.

  “I did not say you were, ma chère.”

  Angie checked her phone. Still no message from Reed.

  Sheldon said, “It’s seven fifteen, and you look like you’re starving. Any word?”

  She shook her head. She had called Aunt Margery while she was still in the office. Her great-aunt had said that everything was fine at the bookstore, but that she hadn’t heard anything from Reed either. Angie checked her email. Nothing.

  “No, and I’m really getting worried.”

  Forty-five minutes late, and Angie was starting to think that maybe Reed had not made his ferry.

  “The ferry didn’t crash or anything, did it?” she asked.

  “Heh. No,” Sheldon said. “I called the office like I said I would, but they said they hadn’t seen anyone that looked like him. Although Lexie did say that it had been really busy and someone might have missed him, especially if he came over on the Hy-Line. It’s always easier to remember someone with a car or a bike.”

  Angie nodded.

  He patted it and said, “Why don’t you sit down and have something to eat?”

  “I should really wait for him. Forty-five minutes is late, but perhaps something came up.”

  “A cup of coffee then?”

  That, she couldn’t turn down. And then at eight-thirty, she couldn’t turn down a bowl of chowder and a small loaf of heated French bread with butter.

  At nine o’clock, she paid her bill, gave Sheldon and Jeanette a hug, and drove back to th
e bookstore. A car she didn’t recognize sat in the back lot, and for a moment, her spirits soared. She ran to the back door and burst inside, looking around eagerly.

  But Reed wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

  Her hopes deflated.

  Aunt Margery said, “Nothing?”

  “No, nothing.”

  It was nine-fifteen and the bookstore was still busy enough to keep it open, but nowhere as bad as it had been the night before. The pastry case was almost empty, with only a few of the blueberry and bourbon cupcakes left.

  “They must not have made fruitcake tonight,” Angie said to Janet.

  “No, they did,” Janet said. “After the way they sold out last night, good thing, too. At first everyone was like, ‘Oh, fruitcake, yuck,’ but then I cut one up into samples and passed it out and whoosh, gone like that. So I called them and said they should bring twice as many tonight. Those are gone already too, even though there weren’t as many customers tonight.”

  Angie shook her head. “That’s amazing.”

  “Fruitcake is really good,” Janet said. “You should give it a try.”

  “I did, like twenty years ago,” Angie said.

  Janet laughed. “Well, I think they would have gotten better at fruitcake by now.”

  Angie glanced at Aunt Margery, who was struggling to keep a straight face too.

  “I think it’s the difference between store-bought and homemade,” Angie said finally. “We always ended up with the kind that was as heavy as a brick, that people had been passed around for years, and that was so sweet with corn syrup that it was just yucky to eat after bite or two.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Janet said. “That makes sense. Well then, this is totally one of those things that’s better homemade.”

  Angie started going through the inventory and putting together an order, moving on autopilot. She stopped to pick up a piece of paper from the floor. It had a list of books on it with most of the titles scratched out, and one of them circled so hard that the paper had wrinkled around the pen marks. The books were all local titles. The circled one was about the Brant Point Light. Light in the Dark was written on the paper—a book that Angie suspected was A Light in the Dark: Putting a Value on the Brant Point Lighthouse, 1746-1901, by James A. Higley, Jr.