X Marks the Scot

by Kaitlyn Dunnett

  Where the mansion had been, there was now an empty lot. The new owner had been true to his word. He’d already torn down the entire structure preparatory to building senior citizen housing. There was nothing left except the cellar hole.

  Liss hopped down from the passenger seat and picked her way closer. She was mindful of potential debris, but Brad Jardine’s crew had done a good job of cleaning up. The basement had been filled in too.

  “I wonder if they even noticed the entrance to the old tunnel,” Dan said. It had led from the cellar of the house to the bank of Ten Mile Stream.

  “Given the condition it was in the last time we saw it, the entire thing probably collapsed the moment the bulldozers went into action. What I don’t understand is how he managed all this without anyone noticing.”

  “He must have brought the equipment in from the other end of Raglan Road.” Dan frowned. “Looks to me like he meant to hide what he was doing. He didn’t use local labor or I’d have heard about it.”

  “Maybe he was afraid the historic preservation people would object to his razing the house.” She’d heard talk about finding a way to save it, back before Jardine bought the place, but it hadn’t come to anything.

  “Watch your step,” Dan warned as he made his way around the perimeter, heading for the stream. The cleanup hadn’t removed rocks or roots, either of which could trip up the unwary.

  Reminded of why they’d come, Liss followed him. They hadn’t gone very far when she heard the sound of another vehicle approaching. Reluctantly, they turned back.

  A shiny blue pickup truck pulled in next to Dan’s battered white GMC Sonoma, his truck-of-all-work. Still reliable, it was more than a dozen years old and looked decidedly shabby next to the gleaming monster parked beside it.

  The driver was also upscale, dressed in a suit that shrieked custom-made. His long strides ate up the distance until he was face-to-face with Dan and Liss. His body language suggested that he was spoiling for a fight.

  “This is private property.” The man snarled the words rather than speaking them. “You’re trespassing.”

  Dan shifted position until he stood between Liss and the newcomer. He kept his voice level. “No harm in neighbors taking a look around, is there? After all, we might have an aged parent or two who’d be interested in moving in when the new building goes up.”

  Liss kept silent. Assisted living was not a topic she wanted to discuss.

  The man’s eyes narrowed and his gaze fixed on the thick roll of paper Dan held. For a moment his reaction hung in the balance. Then the prospect of future profits won out. He offered Dan his hand. “I’m Brad Jardine. I own this land.”

  “Dan Ruskin. Ruskin Construction. Perhaps you’ve heard of us?”

  “Can’t say that I have. I brought in my own men from Portland for the demolition.”

  That figures, Liss thought. Some folks just can’t grasp the idea that the “other Maine” has as many skilled carpenters, plumbers, and electricians as more affluent places to the south. Jardine would have done better to support the local economy. He’d have saved himself some money that way too.

  Oblivious to Liss’s disapproval, the current owner of the Chadwick property began to extol the virtues of the senior living community he had planned. “There will be both assisted living apartments and separate cottages. A clubhouse will offer a place to meet for games and other recreation. Then outdoors,” he added, “we’ll put in a shuffleboard court and a swimming pool.”

  “You do know this is Maine, right?” Dan asked.

  Despite having mixed feelings about her parents’ future plans, Liss barely stopped herself from snickering. She’d seen places like the one Jardine was describing on her visits to Arizona. She’d heard they were popular in Florida, too. In southern states, the design worked with the climate. Here? Not so much.

  Jardine ignored Dan’s sarcasm, or else it went right over his head. “You said you had an elderly parent?”

  “Yes. My father.”

  Liss glanced at him in surprise before it occurred to her that Joe Ruskin was the same age as Margaret. So was Ernie Willett, Sherri’s father, although neither he nor Joe showed any signs of slowing down.

  “He’s still quite mobile,” Dan continued, lying through his teeth. “I expect, if he moved here, he’d want to walk around the property for exercise rather than take a yoga class or swim. Mind if we take a look around? Get the lay of the land, so to speak?”

  Jardine didn’t look thrilled by the request, but he agreed. Liss could only suppose that he hesitated to offend the relatives of a prospective tenant. If he was sensible, he could also see that they couldn’t possibly do any harm. What he thought of the rolled-up plans they’d brought with them was anyone’s guess.

  “No need for you to stick around,” Dan said. “We’ll just wander a bit. It will be too dark soon to see much of anything anyway.”

  Without waiting for agreement, Dan took Liss’s arm and guided her around the old foundation, once again heading east from there toward Ten Mile Stream.

  “Be careful where you step,” Jardine said. “The terrain is still somewhat rough.”

  Still? What was he planning to do—flatten everything out? Liss glanced over her shoulder in time to see the real estate developer look at his watch, scowl, and head for his truck. She asked the question aloud as the sound of the engine faded away.

  “Could be.” The grimness in Dan’s voice came as no surprise. Ruskin Construction always tried to leave natural features, especially healthy trees, in place.

  Picking their way through high grass, underbrush, and pines growing close together, Liss and Dan made their way toward the sound of running water. They came out into the open at the top of a steep embankment overlooking a rock-strewn riverbank. Ten Mile Stream, which formed one of the property’s boundary lines, was some twenty feet wide at this point. In the days when the tunnel had been in use, it had been sufficiently deep to allow small boats to navigate it.

  Liss took extreme care picking her way down to the water. Once there, Dan went first to look for the old door to the tunnel. It was still there, but beyond it were only fallen support beams and mountains of dirt.

  “I bet Jardine didn’t even know this was here,” Liss said.

  “I should probably tell him, so he can fill it in properly. It’s impassable the way it is, but kids might still try to crawl through. I’d hate for someone to be injured or be trapped in there.”

  “Never mind that now. What about the drawings?”

  Since what looked like a river or a stream appeared on the map, they had decided that it was logical to start from the same point on the architect’s drawings. Liss’s hope was that if they stood on the bank and looked toward the house, they’d spot some other landmark from the map.

  She removed a copy from the back pocket of her jeans and turned it so that the water feature in the drawing faced her. Looking up, she swept her gaze over rocks and trees, but nothing jumped out at her. Although the sun was low on the horizon, its bright beams still shone through the branches above her head. Shadow and light played on the forest floor, where many a year’s accumulation of leaves and pine needles gave the barest hint of a path. The smell of wild roses tickled her nose.

  Dan unrolled the architect’s plans and looked from the rendering to the reality and back again. Then he moved a little farther along the course of the stream and repeated the exercise. “Huh,” he said.

  “Got something?”

  “Maybe. Let me see your map.”

  Liss hurried to his side and handed it over, trying to see what it was that he’d spotted. Dan studied the map and the plans for a moment longer, then pointed, first to the map and then into a thickly overgrown area to the north-west of their position. Wild raspberries grew side by side with brambles and sumac and assorted underbrush that Liss could not identify.

  “What am I looking at?”

  “Sight past the raspberry bushes and squint. See it?”

 
After a concentrated effort, she did. She looked at the map again to make certain, but assuming that Dan was standing in the right place by the water, and that the map she’d found showed the Chadwick property in Moosetookalook, then the spot marked with X aligned with something roughly oblong in shape and located in the middle of that tangle of bushes.

  “An old building?” she guessed.

  “Part of one. We’re only about a hundred yards from the house right now. That’s a spot beyond where they planned to put outbuildings when the house was built, assuming the architect included everything in the plans, but I can definitely see something there that’s made of red brick.”

  “We need to take a closer look.”

  “Not tonight.” He rolled up the plans and offered her his hand to help her up the embankment. “By the time we fight our way to that spot it will be too dark to see anything. Besides, we can’t do more than look without Jardine’s permission.”

  “He isn’t going to give it.” She was all for investigating now and worrying about ownership later.

  “We won’t know till we ask.” Dan slung an arm around her shoulder, steering her firmly toward his truck. “Maybe he’ll be so intrigued by the notion of finding treasure on his land that he’ll offer to give us a hand with the search. Besides, unless there’s another way to reach that section of the property, we’re going to have to uproot a whole heck of a lot of shrubbery just to get at it.”

  * * *

  The next day they returned to Ten Mile Stream, but this time Brad Jardine was standing between them as they studied the anomaly they’d identified the previous evening. Jardine held a printout of Liss’s map.

  In the distance, church bells rang out, signaling the start of Sunday services. Closer at hand, small critters scurried through the underbrush, disturbed by the presence of the three humans.

  “You say you found this behind a portrait you bought at the auction?” Jardine asked.

  “That’s right,” Liss said. “Intriguing, isn’t it?”

  He made a dismissive sound, but since he’d agreed to come out to the property with them this morning, she was pretty sure he’d already decided to allow them to dig on the site. It was hard to resist the lure of a treasure map. In some ways little boys, and little girls, too, never entirely grew up.

  “I can’t tell from here if that’s a wall or the remains of a building,” Jardine complained.

  “There are several small structures shown on the original plans.” Dan indicated their locations on the unrolled architect’s rendering. “I don’t know if they actually built all the outbuildings that are shown here, but this is what they intended. There was to be an ice house, since the Chadwicks built their mansion around 1859, well before they had refrigerators. They also planned to put in a smokehouse, so they could smoke their own meat.” He tapped the drawing. “This is a chicken coop. Here’s the carriage house.”

  “There’s no sign of any of those now,” Jardine said, “and that brick wall we’re looking at couldn’t be any of those. It’s in the wrong place.”

  “It may have been built later.”

  “Or else they wanted to keep its location secret,” Liss suggested. “Maybe it was a still.” She’d had all night to imagine about what they might find this morning.

  “Unlikely,” Dan said. “The Chadwicks were importing, not manufacturing. But it may have been the building where they stored their bootleg hooch.” He turned to Jardine. “I imagine you heard all the stories before you bought the place.”

  “I didn’t put much stock in them.”

  “Maybe you should have.” And Dan proceeded to tell Jardine about the tunnel.

  Liss couldn’t help but grin at the developer’s shocked expression and the haste with which he agreed that it should be filled in immediately, before anyone could be injured and sue him.

  “Getting back to our brick wall,” Liss said. “Is it necessary to cut through all that underbrush to reach it?”

  Jardine frowned. “There should be a way in from the other side. I don’t recall seeing the remains of a building there, but I haven’t been over every inch of the property.” He set off at a brisk pace that left Liss and Dan scurrying to keep up with him.

  After a few minutes of hard walking through a heavily wooded section of the property, Liss once again caught sight of faded red brick. Reaching what turned out to be a tumbledown wall was easy after that. Too easy. It looked as if someone had taken a machete and whacked a path through the raspberry bushes to their goal.

  Dan fingered a broken branch. “This was done recently.”

  “During the night, do you think?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  Jardine’s scowl could have soured milk. “What the hell is going on here? First you people come up with this cockamamie story about a treasure map and then someone else trespasses on my property and—” He stopped short, breaking off in mid rant, to stare at the ground beside the remains of the wall.

  Someone had dug a series of holes. They extended the length of it, each one about a foot deep.

  “I guess we aren’t the only ones hunting for treasure.” A chill raced along Liss’s spine at the possibility that someone had followed them the previous night and watched where they went. Had that person crept close enough to listen to their conversation . . . and was that someone the same person who killed Orson Bailey? Sherri would say she’d just made a huge leap in logic, but Liss was not about to discount any possibility.

  One section of brick wall was all that was left of what had once been a small building. Whatever it had originally been used for, it appeared to have been a ruin for a long time. Weeds, underbrush, and even a small tree grew close to it.

  “Do you suppose they found anything?” Dan asked, indicating the holes.

  “If they did, they’re guilty of out-and-out theft.” Jardine’s face darkened in anger. “Anything buried on this land belongs to me.”

  Liss couldn’t look away. Jardine’s nostrils flared like those of an enraged bull. Then and there she decided that any clever quips or smart-ass comments would be best kept to herself.

  Having knelt to examine the holes more closely, Dan shook his head as he rose. “I don’t think whoever dug these had any luck. Look at the pattern. Down about a foot, then on to the next one.” He peered over the wall. “There are holes on the other side, too. If he’d found something, he’d have stopped digging, but these go right up one side and down the other.”

  “Maybe he didn’t dig deep enough,” Liss suggested.

  Jardine snorted. “You talk like you think this person believed a shallow hole would be sufficient to find what was buried at X.”

  “Maybe he knows what it is. We sure don’t.”

  Liss joined Dan beside the wall. She was surprised at its thickness. Why would anyone want walls like that in an outbuilding? Tentatively she ran her fingertips over the uneven surface on the side nearest her. This was the location shown on the map. There was no question in her mind about that.

  She stared at her hand, resting lightly on a broken brick. What if no digging was required? What if the X indicated a hiding place inside the wall?

  Her spirits sagged at the possibility that the “treasure” had been destroyed along with most of the old building. The other three sides and most of this one had crumbled decades ago. The odds against finding anything in the section that remained were enormous. Despite that, she began to search brick by brick. Using slow and careful sweeps, she ran her fingers over the rough surface. She could hardly believe it when she felt one of the bricks shift at her touch.

  She warned herself not to get her hopes up. Of course some of the bricks were loose. They were old. The mortar had fallen out. The entire wall was in danger of collapsing from sheer age. But when she explored further, she realized that the thickness of the wall was significant.

  “Can you say cliché?” she murmured. Finding a hiding place behind loose bricks was a hackneyed plot twist, but that didn’t mea
n it wasn’t possible.

  Liss pushed and pulled and tugged on the loose brick. At first nothing happened. Then, as if her efforts finally struck just the right spot, four bricks still mortared together abruptly popped out from the rest of the wall.

  With only a two-inch projection to grab hold of, Liss needed Dan’s help to pull the section free and set it on the ground. A gaping hole was left behind. She’d found a hiding place right where X marked the spot.

  Eagerly, heedless of spiders and other creepy crawlies that might be inside, Liss thrust out a hand. Dan caught it before she could plunge it inside.

  “Wait.” He unhooked a flashlight from his tool belt and turned it on.

  Liss bent closer as the beam illuminated the interior. When she drew back, disappointment put a catch in her voice. “It’s empty.”

  Dan took a turn to look, but he was shaking his head when he stepped away from the wall.

  “I can’t believe we went through all this for nothing!” Liss grabbed the flashlight. Holding it in one hand, she extended the other into the hole. The sides were smooth beneath her fingers, making it all too obvious that she’d been right the first time. There was nothing inside. She felt every inch of the hiding place before she gave up, but in the end she had to admit defeat. If there had ever been anything hidden where X marked the spot, it wasn’t there now.

  Chapter Nine

  It took Liss a full twenty-four hours to snap back from her disappointment. On Monday, the one day of the week that the Emporium was closed, she tried to cheer herself up after her morning workout with next-door neighbor Zara at Dance Central by having a late breakfast of blueberry muffins and coffee at Patsy’s Coffee House.

  It always felt good to exercise the muscles in her long dancer’s legs. She didn’t need that strength for much these days, but she was determined to stay in shape. Besides, she had to counteract the calories she packed on at Patsy’s somehow. When the last crumb was gone, she headed for Sherri’s office to report on the dismal end of the quest for X. She rapped on the door and let herself in just as Sherri was finishing a phone call.