Dead Past

by Beverly Connor

  “No. We are fine here. Thank you for your help.”

  “Yes, ma’am. An officer is at your location now.”

  They looked up to see a Rosewood police officer entering through the doors of the museum Security office. Diane thanked the operator again and hung up the phone.

  “Thanks, Chanell,” said Diane. “Will you handle this with the police, please? I have to go see someone right away. Tell them the package he stole contained a doll, approximately twelve inches high, dark hair, dressed in a green satin dress with white fur trim. The perp may have it with him if he is caught. Call me if you need me.”

  Diane left the Security office and walked briskly to the restaurant, hoping that Juliet and her grandmother were still there.

  “Do you want to be seated, Dr. Fallon?” the hostess asked.

  “I’m looking for someone, thank you.” As Diane’s eyes grew accustomed to the darkened interior, she spotted Juliet and her grandmother getting up from the booth. She walked over to them.

  “Juliet, why don’t you and your grandmother sit down a moment.”

  Diane drew up a chair from another table and sat down at the end of their booth. Where do I start? she asked herself.

  “Someone just stole the doll,” said Diane.

  “What?” said Juliet. “Stole the doll? Why?”

  “I told you to hang on to it,” said Mrs. Torkel. “Someone tried to get it from me when we were helping Juliet, and I had to elbow them out of the way.”

  “You mean someone besides the security guard?” asked Diane.

  “Yes. When we were helping Juliet into the back room,” said Mrs. Torkel. “Did they snatch it from you? You should have given them a good elbow.”

  “No, I was taking it to Laura Hillard and a man pulled a gun on me,” said Diane.

  Both of them looked at Diane with open mouths.

  “A gun?” said Juliet. “Here in the museum?”

  “In the parking lot,” said Diane.

  “What’s the world coming to?” exclaimed her grandmother.

  “Don’t worry about the doll,” said Juliet.

  “It’s not the doll that I’m worried about,” said Diane.

  She took a deep breath. This wasn’t going to be easy.

  “Juliet, I want you and your grandmother to stay in a hotel. The museum will pay for it.”

  “Why?” Juliet looked alarmed.

  “Because of the doll?” said Mrs. Torkel. “It was just a doll.”

  “Juliet, I’m trying very hard not to alarm you.”

  “I don’t think you’re doing a very good job of it,” said Mrs. Torkel.

  “Gramma!” said Juliet.

  “It’s OK,” said Diane. “She’s right. Juliet, you know someone was murdered in your apartment building.”

  “Oh, goodness gracious,” said Mrs. Torkel.

  “Yes. They had an address similar to mine and it frightened me.”

  “I know. Did you know the murdered woman?” asked Diane.

  “No,” said Juliet, “I never met her.”

  “Joana Cipriano, the murdered girl, didn’t look like you, but her general physical description was the same—blond hair, blue eyes—living in your apartment building. Someone who hadn’t seen you for a long time or perhaps had an old picture might mistake one of you for the other,” said Diane. “We have reason to believe that her murderer drove a blue Chevrolet Impala. The man who stole the doll also drove a blue Chevrolet Impala.”

  “Oh,” said Juliet. She drew a deep breath. “I’m not crazy, am I?”

  “No,” said Diane. “You are definitely not crazy.”

  “I’ve always been afraid that someone was after me, even though I couldn’t remember the kidnapping. But still, why would he come back after all these years?”

  “Juliet, when you played with your dolls, did you ever hide messages inside them?”

  Juliet looked at Diane with a blank stare. So did her grandmother.

  “Why in the world would she do that?” said Mrs. Torkel.

  “Just for fun,” said Diane, hoping not to have to explain her own childhood play.

  “No,” said Juliet. “You mean like cut them open? I’d have to tear up the doll to do that.”

  “Not really. They can be put back together fairly easily—most of the time.” Diane paused a moment.

  Juliet and her grandmother looked at her as if they were beginning to doubt her sanity.

  “Your grandmother said you told her that the doll had a secret,” she continued.

  Juliet shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

  “That’s what you told me, dear,” said her grandmother.

  “To me that meant one thing,” said Diane. “There might be a message inside the doll.”

  “Well, how the heck did you get here from there?” said her grandmother.

  “It was the way I played with my dolls. I won’t get into that now, but I found that your doll had been restitched at the arm . . . so I took it apart.”

  “Took it apart?” said Ruby Torkel.

  “I put it back together,” said Diane. “It’s as good as new.”

  “Did you find anything?” asked Juliet.

  She was wide-eyed at this point. Diane didn’t know if it was from Diane’s effrontery, the odd way she played with dolls as a child, or the fact that there might have been a message hidden in the stolen doll.

  “Yes, I did,” said Diane. “There was a roll of paper inside with some kind of code written on it. I asked if you hid messages in your dolls because I wanted to know if it might have been something that you left, and not be of any importance to recent events. But since someone stole the doll, perhaps this is connected. . . .” Diane pulled the paper from her pocket. “This is what was printed on a strip of yellowed newsprint.”

  Both of them looked at the letters.

  “Surely this is not about Leo Parrish,” said Mrs. Torkel with a snort, sitting back in her seat.

  Chapter 43

  “Who is Leo Parrish?” asked Diane.

  “That name sounds familiar,” said Juliet.

  “It should, dear. It’s an old legend that’s hung around Glendale-Marsh for years.”

  The waitress came by and asked if they wanted coffee. Diane was at the point where a beer would have been nice, but the effects of caffeine would work just fine, too. The three of them ordered coffee.

  “Leo Parrish was this young man . . .” Ruby Torkel stopped. “I need to start before Leo. I need to start with the hurricane. In 1935 or thereabouts, a hurricane struck the Florida Keys and killed an awful lot of people. I was just a little baby then. They called it the Labor Day storm. They didn’t give hurricanes names back then. Anyway, a train was sent to rescue people stuck on the Florida Keys. Legend has it that a man in the path of the coming storm talked someone at the railroad into letting him stash his gold on the train. Now, this is what don’t make sense to me. The train was going to the Keys when the gold was loaded onto the train—going into the path of the storm, not away from it—that’s the story. Why would he put his fortune on a train going into the hurricane?”

  “Maybe he had to leave town or had to protect his fortune for some reason,” said Juliet. “He had only one chance to put the gold on the train, and he believed the train would weather the storm and eventually get to safety. He probably figured the railroad company knew what they were doing and would not send a train into a situation it couldn’t come out of. They had more to lose than he did.”

  “Maybe,” conceded her grandmother. “Now the details change depending who’s telling it. Some say the man’s gold came from a Spanish treasure ship. Some say it’s gold from the Civil War. I say it’s a load of malarkey.” She took a sip of coffee. “You think I could have another piece of that chocolate cake? It would go real good with this cup of coffee.”

  Diane called the waitress over and ordered Mrs. Torkel another piece of cake.

  “Anyway, the train never made it to the Keys. It got washed off th
e tracks, and the money, or gold, or whatever it was, supposedly got washed away in the ocean, or the river, or covered up by mud. Like I say, the story changes.”

  “I never heard this story,” said Juliet.

  “Oh, sure, you did. You must have. Everybody in Glendale-Marsh knows the story,” said Mrs. Torkel.

  “What about Leo Parrish?” asked Juliet.

  “I’m getting to that,” said her grandmother. “You never were a patient girl. Leo Parrish lived in Glendale-Marsh in the late 1930s. I don’t know much about him or where his folks were from, but he was—I guess—in his twenties about then. He was one of these boys always looking for the quick buck. The story is, he got interested in the tale of the missing fortune and, as he was a fellow with a head for numbers, he somehow figured out where the loot had to have ended up.”

  The cake came and the waitress brought one for each of them. Diane realized she had missed lunch. Well, what the hell, she thought, if cake was good enough for the peasants of France, it was good enough for her. She took a bite.

  “I usually don’t eat so much,” said Mrs. Torkel after a big bite of cake. “But, I’m on vacation.” She took a sip of coffee. “Now, where was I?”

  “Leo Parrish figured out where the treasure was,” said Juliet.

  “Oh, yes,” said her grandmother. “He found it—the legend says. And he brought it to Glendale-Marsh in secret and hid it. Not long after, he went off to war—that’s World War II. He was worried about the treasure, so he wrote down where it was in some kind of fancy code that nobody could decipher—and sent the code home in a book. I don’t know anything about what kind of code it was, but since the thirties, we’ve had tourists coming to Glendale-Marsh looking for the book with the code and for the treasure. It was a real popular thing to do back in the fifties and sixties. I reckon poor Leo Parrish’s family land has been dug up from one end t’other looking for that treasure.”

  “What happened to Leo Parrish?” asked Juliet.

  “He went missing in action. Nobody ever heard from him again. If there ever was a treasure, it got lost with him,” said her grandmother. She stopped talking and ate several bites of her cake.

  “The treasure hunters have slacked off for several years. Occasionally, we get a few now and again, but not like we did in the fifties.”

  “That’s an interesting story,” said Diane. “You think this might be the code?” She tapped the paper in front of them.

  “Who knows?” said Mrs. Torkel. “I don’t know of any other code, but I can’t say how it got in that doll. The doll’s not that old.”

  “Maybe some treasure hunter found the code and hid it in the doll,” said Juliet.

  “Do the Parrishes still live in Glendale-Marsh?” asked Diane.

  “No, they been gone from there for about thirty or forty years. Died out, mainly.”

  “Wow,” said Juliet. “Treasure right there and I didn’t know about it?”

  “We found lots of treasure in our shells,” said her grandmother. “They seem to have served you well. I imagine you’ve made more money from your interest in shells than you ever would from looking for treasure.”

  Diane finished the last bite of her cake. “Juliet . . . ,” began Diane.

  “I really don’t want to stay in a hotel,” said Juliet. “I will if I have to, but . . .”

  “I’ll have museum Security watch your apartment,” said Diane.

  “You think the guy who held you up for the doll is my kidnapper, don’t you?” said Juliet.

  “Yes,” said Diane, “I do. I don’t know how it all fits together, but I’m working on it. I really don’t want to alarm you, but I think he may be afraid you remember him.”

  “Why?” asked Juliet.

  Why? A good question, thought Diane. It was something else that had been nagging at the corner of her mind. Then, like the slow movement of molasses, it simply flowed into her brain.

  “I think it has something to do with what you said before you were kidnapped. In the newspaper articles, neighbors were quoted as having heard you say, ‘I don’t know you’ to someone near your backyard. Just before Joana Cipriano was murdered, she was heard to say to a man at her door, ‘Do I know you?’ The phrases are so close, I think her murderer was convinced he was recognized. Joana turned out to be the wrong person, but the conviction that you would be able to identify him carried over.”

  “You think it is about the treasure?” asked Juliet.

  “He wanted the doll. A code was in the doll. That’s the only story we’ve heard so far that contains a code. So, yes. It may be just a treasure story, but he may believe it to be true.”

  “So he was trying to get the doll when he kidnapped me twenty years ago?” said Juliet.

  “Maybe. We won’t know that until we find him. But the police are on it. We are taking precautions, so don’t you or your grandmother worry.”

  “Maybe we should stay in a hotel,” said her grandmother. “A nice one.”

  “Why don’t you do that?” said Diane. “I’ll have someone from museum Security stay next door.”

  “That sounds just fine,” said Mrs. Torkel. “They can follow us over to your apartment to get some things, Juliet. I’ll get a chance to see where you live, then we’ll stay in a nice hotel.”

  Juliet smiled at her grandmother. Diane got the idea that Mrs. Torkel had mellowed considerably since Juliet was a little girl.

  When they finished eating their cake, Diane took them to the Security office and arranged for an escort and guard. From there she went to her office and removed the evidence bag with the original code from her safe, put it in her pocket, and walked up to the top floor of the east wing to the museum library and archives.

  Beth, the museum’s librarian, was a slender middle-aged woman with snow white hair whom Diane had hired when she was eased out of the university library in favor of younger employees. Age discrimination was against university regulations, but being passed over for promotions, and other passive-aggressive measures, were hard to prove and to defend against. She was clearly Bartram’s loss and the museum’s gain.

  The door issued a gentle jingle as Diane opened it. Beth, holding a book, was standing on a tall library ladder. She looked down to see who had entered, placed the book on the shelf, and climbed down.

  She looked warm in her navy pantsuit. Diane shivered. Beth kept the library slightly cooler than Diane liked, but she apparently found it very comfortable.

  “Dr. Fallon,” she said, “what can I do for you?”

  Among Beth’s abilities as a librarian and archivist, she was an outstanding genealogist and taught several community classes at the museum. Genealogy wasn’t in the domain of natural history, but it was history and it was in the domain of classes people would pay to take, and that made it good for the museum.

  “Beth, I have a task for you,” said Diane.

  She smiled. “I hope it’s not as difficult as the task you gave Kendel.”

  Diane smiled, too. “I don’t think so. I have someone I want you to trace for me. I would like to know his ancestry at least one or two generations back, but mainly his descendants—and not just his direct descendants.”

  Beth went to get a pen and paper. She held the pen poised over the pad. “What’s his name?”

  “Leo Parrish. I don’t know the exact spelling. He was in his twenties in the late 1930s and lived in Glendale-Marsh, Florida, at that time. He enlisted in the Second World War, but I don’t know which branch of service. He was listed as missing in action. He wrote to relatives while he was in the service, but I don’t know who they are. I know that’s not much to go on.”

  “Actually, that’s quite a bit. When do you want the information?”

  “Yesterday, if you can manage it,” said Diane.

  “Time travel’s my speciality. I’ll see what I can do.”

  Beth smiled, and Diane thanked her and walked downstairs to the conservation lab and into the head conservator’s office.

>   “Korey,” said Diane, “do you have a minute?”

  “Dr. F.,” said Korey, “I’d be a bad employee indeed, if I didn’t have time for my boss. I’ve got that analysis Kendel asked for. It’s not newsprint, but paper used in books circa thirties and forties.”

  “Book paper. Interesting.” Diane took the evidence bag from her pocket and removed the original paper containing the code.

  “What you got here, Dr. F.? Looks like some kind of cryptogram.”

  “This is the paper the sample came from. What I want you to do is duplicate it—it doesn’t have to be exact, just look old. And I want the printing changed to simple random letters, but basically the same format and near the same handwriting as you can get it.”

  Korey put a hand on the back of his dreadlocks, raised his eyebrows, and grinned. His brown eyes sparkled.

  “When you get finished with whatever it is you’re doing,” he said, “I’ll buy you a steak if you’ll tell me what this is about.”

  “You’ve got a deal. Can you do it?”

  “Sure. When do you need it?” he asked.

  “As soon as you can get to it,” said Diane.

  “You got it,” said Korey.

  “Put the original in your vault for me,” said Diane. “And don’t talk about it to anyone.”

  “Sounds like a serious scrap of paper,” he said as he held it up to the light.

  “Deadly serious,” she said.

  As she left his office, her cell phone vibrated. The display said it was Garnett.

  “Diane,” he said, “just called to tell you we have a line on the Impala.”

  Chapter 44

  “You’ve found the Impala? That’s a relief,” said Diane. She climbed the steps to the third floor.

  “We don’t have it yet. It’s been sighted and we have a lead on it. I just thought I’d let you know, so when we find it, your people can process it,” said Garnett.

  “I’ll give them a heads-up,” said Diane. “I’m really eager to find this guy. He told me that if I didn’t give him the package, he would open fire on the busload of children visiting the museum.”