Althea wiped the lid with the hem of her skirt.
The letters had been worn away over time, but there was still enough left to be able to make out the words, Cedar’s Hill Consolidated Bank.
“Well, well, well,” Althea said, as she sat back on her heels and stared at the heavy box. “This wasn’t what I was expecting.”
It was more than I was expecting. Much more.
“This must be the—” I began to state the obvious.
Something in the woods rustled. It might have been a small animal. But with two people already dead because of this treasure chest, our position suddenly felt terribly open and vulnerable.
“It’s locked.” Althea looked around for something to use to break it open. “There has to be a stick we can use like a crowbar around here.”
The last thing we needed was to find a blunt object that any passing murderer could use to bludgeon us. I put my hand on her arm. “We need to get this out of here. We need to get out of here,” I said.
She glanced out at the thick growth of vegetation that could easily hide a person and then nodded in agreement.
Together, we lifted the extremely heavy bank box. With Stella leading the way, we began the long, slow trek through the thick maritime forest and (I hoped) to safety.
Chapter 25
I hadn’t stepped foot inside Althea’s cottage since before the hurricane. I was relieved to see the storm hadn’t damaged the charming home that had been in her family for two generations.
“It’s private here,” Althea explained as she slid out of the front seat of her bright yellow car.
Nestled within the lace of the Spanish moss draped branches of ancient oaks, the cottage was partially hidden from the road.
“We need to be careful,” she said.
With Big Dog and Delilah unaccounted for, Althea was right.
“No one would suspect you’d come here with this kind of evidence,” she said. “Not with the…um…troubles that have been brewing between us.”
Another fair point.
But then I glanced over at the road.
There was a man standing at the edge of Althea’s property.
He was staring right at us.
I jumped out of Althea’s car, slammed her trunk closed, and hurried toward the road.
It took me a moment to recognize the man. He was the ghost hunter from the shop, the one who’d warned me to watch my back around the treasure hunters. What was his name?
He took one look at me and Stella charging toward him and set off running in the opposite direction.
“Call Gibbons!” I shouted to Althea as I picked up my pace. “Tell him…” What? “Everything.”
Now, I might not be the fastest runner in the world. Those extra chocolates I’d been eating ever since the hurricane certainly hadn’t done anything to help boost my speed. But, even so, I couldn’t believe that by the time I’d reached the road, the man was nowhere in sight. Absolutely nowhere. I spent several minutes searching for him in neighboring yards and peeking in the windows of the few cars that were parked along the road.
Nothing.
He was gone.
“What in the devil is going on with you?” Althea asked somewhat testily when I returned with Stella panting by my side.
“There-there was a man watching us,” I panted. “That ghost hunter, Brett Handleson. He was right there. Didn’t you see him?”
Althea turned toward the road and shook her head. “There wasn’t anyone there. I checked. Our find is too important to make sure there are no prying eyes around before pulling it out of my trunk.”
“No, he was there,” I insisted as I thrust my finger toward the road. “Right there.”
“I didn’t see anybody.” The skin between her eyebrows wrinkled. “Did you see where he went?”
“No. It was like he”—I hated to say it—“vanished.”
~~
“Where in blazes is my love potion, Althea?” Trixie complained from her perch on Althea’s sofa. Barbie, seated next to her, snorted.
“Tell me again who invited those two,” Harley whispered in my ear.
“They overheard Bertie talking on the phone with me and insisted on coming. They said they had vital information,” I whispered back.
“My guess is they were getting vitally bored spending all their time in your living room and were desperate for a change of scenery,” he said with a chuckle.
“You’re a naughty girl, Althea, letting me go this long without that potion. A girl has needs.” Trixie waggled her hips provocatively, which was a feat since she did it while seated.
“That’s one sight I didn’t need to see,” Bubba said and whirled to look out the window.
Althea patted Trixie on the shoulder. “I understand completely. But, honey, you don’t need that potion. You’ve got the magic in you and more. All you need to do is get out there and wag those hips at the man you want, and he’ll come crawling after you.”
“You hear that?” Trixie shouted over at Barbie. “She said I’m a magic man magnet.”
Barbie snorted. “You’re a magnet for something, all right. Remember what happened with you and Oscar, that crusty old coot?”
“Poor man couldn’t peel himself away from me.” Trixie tsked. “Twasn’t his fault he got all wound up in my net. Did him a kindness and tossed him back into the sea. Couldn’t keep him. Not with his bad heart and all.”
“And bad manners,” Barbie added.
“Perhaps we can save the love talk for another time,” Gibbons said as he swept into the room after Bubba opened the door for him.
The detective was the last of the group to arrive. Althea, who had wanted to smash open the box immediately, let out a loud sigh of relief. With a look of excitement, she picked up the crowbar.
Gibbons deftly slipped the tool from her hands. “We need to do this by the book.”
“This is why I didn’t want you to call him,” she grumbled.
“You called him,” I reminded her.
“Only because you told me to.”
“I don’t understand something,” Bubba said as he approached the muddy box cautiously. “From everything we now know, presumably Joe brought this box of stolen money with him when he moved here from Virginia. So why in blazes would he spend all his time these past several years searching for it?”
“You were there when Bertie explained it to us,” I said. “Just the other day Trixie and Barbie agreed with Bertie’s assessment,” I added with a smile in their direction. The two sisters puffed up. “Joe was showing signs of memory loss. Was he suffering from dementia or something else? We may never know. But we do know that a few years after moving to Camellia Beach he started his obsession with searching for pirate’s treasure.”
Bertie tut-tutted. “The poor man forgot where he’d buried his own treasure.”
“Impossible,” Bubba growled. “How could a man forget something so important?”
“Oh,” Bertie said with a sage nod, “I can see that happening. Wasn’t it just this morning you lost the keys to your shop? You spent two hours searching for them.”
“That’s not the same thing,” he grumbled.
“No, perhaps not,” I agreed. “But you do have to agree that Joe’s obsession with treasure hunting did seem a bit outrageous. I mean, he had no way of really knowing if Blackbeard’s treasure was on the island. But he would know for certain that he’d buried a treasure of his own somewhere on the island…and then lost it.”
“That would explain why he’d only quote the Wikipedia page whenever he talked about Blackbeard,” Bubba grudgingly agreed.
“And he did seem genuinely surprised to see the gold coin Stella had dug out of that crab hole,” Althea added. “Didn’t he say something like, ‘I didn’t really think it existed’?”
He had.
“Now can we see what’s inside the treasure box?” Althea bounced on the balls of her feet like a little kid anxious to open a birthday present.
“You can tell everyone back at the station that we opened it before we called you, if you need to,” I told Gibbons, feeling nearly as eager as Althea looked.
“I suppose we could take a peek inside it to make sure that this is stolen goods and not just a box of pirate research,” Gibbons said after he’d snapped several pictures of the box’s exterior.
I suspected he was as excited about peeking inside the box as the rest of us. After all, he’d been chasing after Big Dog around the Lowcountry thanks to the contents of this box. When Gibbons handed our find over to his captain, the box would likely be given to that cranky Detective Prioleau. Prioleau, who’d openly expressed his distrust of me, would hide the contents like a dragon hiding its treasure.
With a look of determination Gibbons picked up the crowbar and with a quick movement broke the rusty lock.
Chapter 26
“Whoa, I wasn’t expecting that,” Althea breathed.
“What? Move out of the way, you big lugs. I’m too short to see.” Trixie used her cane to knock Harley and me out of her path.
“Good thing it wasn’t paper money,” Bubba said. “Looks like water got into the box.”
“Well, you have to give the man credit. When Joe told us he was searching for gold, he wasn’t lying,” I said unable to take my eyes off the gleaming bars in the metal box. No wonder both Althea and I had struggled to pull it out of the hole and carry it.
“This is the work of someone who really thought through the crime. Marked bills would be too hard to spend. Gold, you can sell anywhere,” Harley said, sounding impressed.
Either Joe or Sammy had stuffed crumpled paper in the gaps between the bars. Gibbons pulled out the soggy paper lumps while we all leaned closer to get a better look. The bars didn’t fit neatly into the box. It looked as if they had once been neatly stacked but had all shifted into an untidy pile.
Gibbons pulled bar after bar out of the box, lining them in an orderly row on Althea’s kitchen counter. “That’s the last of them,” he said at last. “Ten gold bars.”
Harley whistled. “That has to be at least five million dollars’ worth of gold.”
“Really?” I wrinkled my nose. “That’s not nearly enough to kill for.”
Everyone in the room turned to look at me with a strange expression.
“Someone has killed over this, dear,” Bertie gently pointed out.
“Twice,” Althea added.
“Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Gibbons warned. “We don’t know that Joe was murdered, and we don’t know why someone wanted Sammy Duncan dead. And now that we know what’s in this box, I think it’s time I turn it over to”—he sighed—“Detective Prioleau.”
As he returned the bars to the box, he speared Harley with a sharp look. “I trust you haven’t heard from Big Dog.”
“I gave you my word,” Harley snapped right back. “And, besides which, he didn’t steal this gold or hurt anyone.”
“That reminds me,” I said quickly, uncomfortable with the tension between two of the dearest men in my life. “Were you able to find out anything about that ghost hunter Brett Handleson? I spotted him outside this cottage when Althea and I returned with the box. He was just standing at the road watching us. He took off when he saw that I’d spotted him. I gave chase but lost him almost immediately.”
“Y-you gave chase?” Harley sputtered.
“Not very well,” I said. “I didn’t see where he ran off to.”
Gibbons frowned. “I did look into his background. Whoever you were talking with gave you a false name. Brett Handleson died in a boat accident three years ago right off this coastline.”
“Are you sure you weren’t talking to a ghost?” Althea asked me. “Has anyone else talked with him? Seen him?”
Ghosts indeed.
Of course that was where Althea’s mind would go. I rolled my eyes. “Yes, people have seen him. He was in the Chocolate Box on a crowded day for goodness sake. Besides, there must be more than one Brett Handleson in the world. Or perhaps the man I spoke to lied about his name. Perhaps he’s scared, or maybe he’s after Joe’s treasure. There has to be a reason why he was watching us.”
While I was making my case against conversing with a dead man—which I could hardly believe I’d ever do in my life—Althea ignored me. Instead, she tapped on her phone.
“Is this the man?” She turned her phone’s screen toward me.
“That’s him. Brett Handleson, right?” I asked.
The way her eyes glittered with excitement made me nervous. “I wonder why he’s interested in you,” she mused.
“It’s not me he’s interested in. It’s the treasure. Clearly, he lied about being a ghost hunter,” I said. “What?” I asked when I noticed how both Gibbons and Harley were frowning as they passed Althea’s phone between them.
“That can’t be the man you saw,” Gibbons said.
“No, it is the man. I’m sure of it. That’s the face I saw not much more than an hour ago. Will someone tell me what’s going on already?”
“Now don’t explode on us,” Althea warned. “But the picture I showed you is the picture the newspaper ran for Brett Handleson’s obituary three years ago.”
~~
I didn’t explode. Or implode. Or do anything embarrassingly emotional. Before reacting, I took a long, slow breath. I then smiled. I shrugged. And finally I did something I hated—I lied.
“Clearly, the man I talked with looked like this man. A brother? A cousin? Whatever.” But deep down in my heart, I knew—knew down to the marrow in my bones—that the man in the picture was the same Brett Handleson who’d warned me to be careful around the blood-thirsty treasure hunters. He was the same man standing at the road this morning watching.
I had no idea how Brett had managed to fake his death…or why. Obviously, he had his reasons, just as he had his reasons for coming “back from the grave” now.
One thing was obvious, though. What better way to get away with murder than to become a ghost? Perhaps this Brett Handleson—ghost hunter extraordinaire—had spent the past three years traveling around the Lowcountry committing all manner of crimes. Or perhaps he’d been biding his time, waiting for this moment.
Later that day, as I hunched over the counter in the Chocolate Box, I added Brett’s name to my suspect list. Like Joe Davies, he had gone to a great deal of trouble to disappear from his old life. How, I wondered, was Brett connected with Joe’s stolen gold?
All the names on my list had more questions beside their names than answers.
“You-you’re g-g-going at it from the w-w-wrong angle,” Fletcher stuttered. His voice like a rasping ghost right next to my ear, startled me nearly to death.
“I thought you agreed to take a few days off,” I said once my heart had settled in my chest. “And how did you sneak up on me like that?”
He adjusted his deerstalker hat while giving me a smug look. “I’m here as a paying customer. Delilah, who-who sh-sh-shouldn’t be on your l-l-list”—he tapped the paper—“has g-g-gone into hiding thanks to your b-b-bungling. I hope to clear some things up with Detective Prioleau so she’ll feel safe enough to return.”
“You invited that mean detective here? Now? You do know that if he arrests me—wrongly, mind you—you’re going to be out of job?”
Instead of answering, he tapped his finger against Brett’s name. “D-d-don’t know him. But he’s not our killer.”
“Then who is?” I asked.
“I had my m-m-money on Big Dog, but now I’m wondering if he’s s-s-still alive.”
“Who do you think is going around our town killing people?” I asked again.
“Now, if I told you that, you’ll just take credit for solving the mystery like you did last time,” he sang.
“I did solve it,” I reminded him. “And I saved your life.”
He grunted.
“Just tell me what you think is going on,” I said.
Fletcher shook his head. I probab
ly would have argued with him further, but the bell on the door chimed and in walked Detective Prioleau looking as if he’d swallowed a lemon.
“D-d-detective!” Fletcher smiled broadly as he crossed the room to greet him. “I-I think w-w-we have l-l-lots of information to sh-sh-share.”
“I’m not here to share information.” Prioleau cut his sharp gaze in my direction for a moment before turning back to Fletcher. “I’m here because you said you had important information for me.”
“Y-yes.” Fletcher adjusted his deerstalker hat and smacked his lips. The detective’s icy attitude clearly made the young man nervous. “I-I do. I-I’m also trying t-t-to help Delilah, um, M-Mrs. F-F-Fenton.”
Fletcher glanced over at me before directing the detective to sit at a small table as far away from the front counter as possible. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t hear what either man was saying.
Eventually, I stopped attempting to eavesdrop and instead spent my time wondering about Fletcher’s odd devotion to Delilah. Though Fletcher was young and prone to jumping to conclusions, he wasn’t a fool. I circled Delilah’s name on my suspect list. There had to be something about her story that had convinced him to become her champion. Perhaps it was simply a case of romantic attraction. He wouldn’t have been the first person in the world to make bad decisions because he’d followed his heart.
I closed my eyes, picturing Delilah. She always scowled at me. Why? What threat did I pose to her?
I opened my eyes and circled her name on the suspect list again.
It has to be her.
Delilah saw me as a threat. Before even meeting me, her body language had communicated her dislike. To be fair, on that first meeting I’d reacted stiffly to her. She reminded me of Florence, my perfectly turned out and perfectly unfriendly mother.
Still, it has to be her.
After meeting Mary and hearing how Delilah was the quintessential wicked stepmother, how could she not be my number one suspect?
If her description didn’t fit the profile of a greedy killer, I don’t know what did.
Dear sweet Mary. She’d lost her father twice and didn’t know why. I needed to call her and tell her about finding her father’s treasure.
Bonbon With the Wind Page 21
