Prize and Prejudice: A Cozy Mystery Novel (Angie Prouty Nantucket Mysteries Book 2)

by Miranda Sweet

  “That sounds about right,” Jasper agreed.

  Angie caught herself wondering about those two mysterious lovers in the past, Victor Nouges and…who? Who had he given the painting to?

  Even if their romance had been illicit, she was sure that their emotions had been real. You didn’t give a Monet painting to someone who didn’t have your deepest admiration and respect. Not even back then, when they weren’t worth millions of dollars.

  Jasper took all three books, admitting that he’d never read a romance or a Jack Reacher novel before. His tastes ran towards literary fiction and historical non-fiction. He was a James Joyce fan specifically. She made a mental note and said, “You look too tired for James Joyce.”

  “My thoughts feel like one of the longer Molly Bloom passages,” he admitted. “One long sentence running around nowhere most of the time.”

  She laughed, wished him some peace and quiet, and told him to call her if he wanted more books.

  On the way out of the hospital, she got a text from Aunt Margery asking her to pick up some cream and a few other things for the afternoon rush. “No hurry to come back,” the message added. Angie rolled her eyes. All right, she got the hint—find something to do for a couple of hours.

  Janet knew how to ring people up and record purchases on the computer so they adjusted inventory, but Angie had really only shown her what she had to know in order to survive working the café counter. “Give Janet more training on the computer if things get slow,” she texted back to Aunt Margery. “I’m going to pick up lunch somewhere. Want anything?”

  “Will do, have fun, I’m good,” Aunt Margery texted back.

  So…now what?

  It was a little scary that Angie didn’t know what to do with herself now that she wasn’t trapped at the store. She walked back to her car slowly, almost suspiciously. It felt like she was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  She climbed into the car and noticed more books on the back seat, ones that she’d picked up without thinking about it on her way to Sheldon’s the other night.

  The books that Reed had ordered. She hadn’t shipped them yet, thinking that he’d find them more useful while he was on the island looking for treasure rather than back in Boston where he couldn’t get them.

  A lump rose in her throat.

  All right. This was the plan: she was going to get something to eat from one of the small cafés near the harbor, bundle up, and go out to read for a while by the water.

  She picked up a hot baked turkey sandwich with cranberry relish and blue cheese, bought a cup of hot cocoa, and walked out along the wharf until she found a seat on a sunny, sheltered bench. One of the books from Reed’s order had sounded familiar, so she’d grabbed it. A Light in the Dark: Putting a Value on the Brant Point Lighthouse, 1746-1901, by James A. Higley, Jr. After a few moments, she worked out where she’d heard the title recently—from the list that had been dropped on the floor. She’d tucked the list somewhere for safekeeping in case the customer returned for it. There had been five or six titles, all of them scratched out but the one. She couldn’t even begin to remember the others. Maybe she should look.

  She ate, staring out at the water and listening for the sounds of boats. But not many people had ventured out on the water in this chilly weather, and since most of the businesses along the wharf were closed up for the season, it seemed she had, ironically, found a place of peace and quiet.

  With her legs curled up under her big wool coat, she drank her cocoa and read her book. She let her shadow fall over the page, because otherwise, it was almost too bright out to read.

  The history of the Brant Point Lighthouse was what she had expected, more or less. She’d grown up hearing stories about the lighthouse burning down multiple times. Each time she’d heard those stories, she had received the impression that the fires had happened just before she was born, even though they had really happened centuries earlier.

  The settlers on the island had been infamously cheap, hence the lighthouse’s poor design. And centuries later, Nantucket’s natives were still a thrifty lot. Even the wealthiest islanders took pride in managing to scrape along using twenty dollars and a stack of coupons they found on the Internet. They had million-dollar homes and enormous yachts, but they could often be spotted crawling through antique stores looking for a deal. They were born hagglers, and they’d wear a sweater until it unraveled on them before knitting the yarn back up into hats. It was just a part of the local culture, but the fire-prone lighthouse had been an example of thriftiness carried too far.

  Had Reed thought the painting was in that little wooden lighthouse at the very end of the point? The most recent incarnation of the structure had been built in 1901, which should make it a possible location for the painting. But the door of the lighthouse was locked to keep the tourists out. Then again, was Reed even looking for the painting?

  She looked toward the lighthouse, a squat black and white structure set against a backdrop of sea and sky. A lonely pair of pedestrians was walking along the sand, strolling slowly and enjoying the calm, sunny day.

  If she wanted to check the lighthouse for the painting, she’d have to talk to someone at the Chamber of Commerce to get permission and a set of keys. Doing so would probably be a waste of her time. She found it hard to believe that no one had gone over the lighthouse from top to bottom already. If the painting had been somewhere that didn’t require dismantling the whole lighthouse, it should have been found long ago. The lighthouse was publicly owned, too, which meant that the mysterious lover wouldn’t have been able to access the lighthouse easily over the years. And it would stick out if she had visited it December 17th every year, wouldn’t it?

  But still, it caught the eye. Maybe Reed had been researching it out of curiosity. It would make sense if he had wanted to learn about historic sites on the island so that he could visit them while he was there.

  When her lunch was eaten, her book read, and she’d had enough of a break to satisfy Aunt Margery (hopefully), Angie decided it was time to return to the store. She uncurled herself from the bench, noting that the chill she felt did nothing to curb her restlessness. She followed the wharf back to shore, then started walking along the beach.

  She decided not to walk toward Brant Point; the couple out there looked like they were enjoying their solitude. So she turned the other way, losing herself in the bright day, the complete lack of tourists, the feel of sand underfoot, and the whispering of the breeze.

  She walked for a while…then paused.

  The beach was remarkable for its even texture, with barely a pebble to ruin its purity. But something stood out in the perfect sand. Angie noticed what looked like a small gold piece of metal poking up from the sand.

  Her curiosity piqued, she walked over to it shimmering metal. She bent down and saw that the gold was attached to a leather band. Did someone lose their watch?

  But it wasn’t a watch. It was a briefcase strap with a gold clasp. Angie’s throat went tight, she recognized the strap immediately. It was Reed’s briefcase. She had seen it many times before, and he was practically never without it. The briefcase was stuck under an impressive amount of sand, nearly completely hidden.

  As she pulled the briefcase from under the sand, the cold waves rushed over her ankles and filled her shoes with cold seawater and drenching her socks. She shivered.

  She grabbed the strap of the briefcase, threw it over her shoulder—it was light enough that she was pretty sure there was no computer equipment inside—then shook the water from her shoes.

  Why was his briefcase down here? It almost looked like someone had hidden it. As she prepared to leave with the briefcase she noticed a reddish brown spot on the sand above the tide line. Was that a blood stain? Angie couldn’t be sure, and it was too cold to investigate. She snapped a picture with her phone so she could look at it later.

  She climbed back up onto the shore. She was shivering violently now, so it was time to go somewhere warm.

 
; She half-expected someone to rush toward her and demand to know what she was doing, or, worse yet, ask whether she’d found any clues to the location of the painting. But no one stopped her as she walked to Washington Street and made her way back toward the bookstore as swiftly as she could. She’d walked so far along the beach that it would be faster to go straight back on foot than it would be to pick up her car.

  The cream would have to wait.

  Chapter 9

  The Documents in the Case

  Aunt Margery looked up as Angie walked through the front door. She stared at the hemlines of Angie’s pants, which were waterstained, stiff with salt, and covered in sand. Then she looked at her face. “Are you all right?”

  Angie looked around the bookstore. Nobody was at the café counter, and Janet hadn’t come in yet.

  “Come to the back with me.”

  Aunt Margery’s eyes took in the soft-sided briefcase slung across Angie’s shoulder. “Where did you find that? Whose is it?”

  “Just come.”

  Angie led the way to the back of the store, keeping an eye out for treasure hunters along the way. She didn’t need an extra nose sniffing around at the moment.

  She brought the bag to the inventory table, then hesitated. The bag was covered in sand. She covered the table with one of her gentlemen’s used newspapers and set the bag down. She kept her gloves on as she unzipped it.

  Inside was a small, cloth-bound book and plastic folder containing a sheaf of papers. The title of the book was An Old-Fashioned Romance: A Collection of Love Letters from the Eighteenth, Nineteenth, and Early Twentieth Centuries, edited by Teresa Tukesberry. It was dry and free from water spots or other damage.

  She set that aside for the moment, opened the folder, and pulled out the papers.

  There were newspaper clippings neatly tucked into a 3 ring binder. Each clipping was in a clear plastic sleeve like Angie used to have in High School. The plastic sleeves had mostly protected the clippings from the water, but a few were water logged.

  The clippings were all about forged paintings. Specifically, a forger who was active in Boston many years ago. Each clipping revealed details about the case to catch this forger. The last clipping was from the late 90s and led the reader to believe the case had been dropped.

  Opposite the last newspaper clipping was a print out of an email exchange. The email exchange was between Reed and a fine art appraiser.

  Professor Edgerton,

  Thank you for your inquiry about the recently-discovered copy of Monet’s Haystacks at Sunset, 1887. I hope this letter will give you the answers you desire.

  The painting, which was purchased by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts two years ago, is an impressive forgery. It required deep analysis to confirm its lack of authenticity. As you suggest in your letters, the style is very similar to the rash of forgeries that appeared in Boston in 1997.

  Your suggestion that the artist is in fact the same forger, resurfacing 20 years later, is certainly plausible. But it is, in my opinion, unlikely, for reasons that I will outline below.

  Additionally, you claim that the forger likely originated in a New England island town, like Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard, due to the salt water content found on both the recent and past forgeries you mentioned. The chemical compounds found in the paint are consistent with salt water, so your theory is, again, plausible. However, I am not aware of any further evidence connecting the forgeries to a specific location.

  In your letter, you suggested that the forger may potentially still be on Nantucket or Martha’s Vineyard. You attribute this to a ‘hunch.’ In my experience as an expert witness in various forgery cases, forgers rarely live in the same place that they work, and even more rarely stay in one place for any period of time. Forgers are typically very intelligent people with great talent, but they are criminals and tend to act like criminals. For more information on this subject, I must direct you to the Boston Police Department, which is investigating the Haystacks case.

  I hope this response is of some assistance in your personal investigation.

  Cordially,

  Silvia Rutherford, ISA CAPP

  Forensic Art Appraiser

  Angie’s head swirled with the influx of information. Did Reed think the Monet that everyone was hunting for was a fake? Is that what he meant by impostor?

  “Angie,” said Aunt Margery, “What is all this?”

  “This is Reed’s briefcase,” Angie replied. “I found it on the beach under some rocks. It looked, well, it looked like someone tried to hide it there.”

  “Well that would mean he didn’t fall, and…”

  “And that Reed was murdered, and the murderer hid the briefcase. We need to call Detective Bailey. Now.”

  Angie took a few moments to sort herself out, then called Detective Bailey, who still hadn’t returned her last call. He said, “You moved the briefcase.”

  “Yes, I did. The tide was coming in and it was going to be washed away.

  Detective Bailey sighted. “Okay, don’t do anything else. Stay put. I’m on my way.”

  “Thank you.”

  Even though the bookstore was perfectly warm and Angie had changed out of her wet socks, she was shivering as if she was standing outside in a blizzard. Aunt Margery handed her a cup of hot cocoa and said, “Drink.” She didn’t. Instead, she sat in front of the table with her hands curled around the cup and stared blankly at the briefcase.

  “How could this have happened?” she asked it. Aunt Margery patted her on the shoulder, then went back to the front of the bookstore.

  When Alexander Snuock had been killed, his death had come as a shock and a surprise, but it hadn’t felt like an impossibility. Angie’s mind had wanted to accept Alexander Snuock’s death all too quickly. He had wronged so many people that it wasn’t so much a question of “why” as “who.”

  Reed was different. Angie’s mind rebelled against the reality of the situation. Reed couldn’t be dead, not really, because he hadn’t done anything to deserve it. It wasn’t logical, she knew it, but she couldn’t help feeling that way.

  After gazing at the briefcase for several minutes, she stood up, grabbed one of the spent, wrinkled newspapers that had been cleared from the café area, and dropped it over the briefcase so that it was completely concealed from view. Strangely, not being able to see the briefcase every second seemed to help break her out of the fugue she had slipped into.

  The cocoa had gone cool. It had helped heat her hands, but she had stared into space for so long… She checked the clock. Twenty minutes. She had been staring at the briefcase, stuck in a mental loop for the last twenty minutes.

  And where was Detective Bailey? The police station was only a few minutes’ drive from the bookstore, at most.

  She walked to the back door of the bookstore and looked out just as someone was approaching it: Tabitha Crispin from the Chamber of Commerce. She opened the door and let Tabitha inside the back of the store.

  “Tabitha. Is everything all right?”

  “I just wanted to pay you for the coffee,” she said.

  “Oh!” Angie laughed. She had completely forgotten. “Thank you. I’ve been keeping track somewhere…” She walked over to the inventory computer and sorted through the dozen or so slips of paper that she’d written notes on to herself, all of them pinned under a glass paperweight. She found the one she needed and led Tabitha into the bookstore.

  As they made their way to the front of the store, they chatted about how the treasure hunt was going. Each of them had noticed that the number of tourists on the island seemed to have dropped in the last few days, and they were both curious about the implications. Then, just as Angie was about to sit down at the front desk, Tabitha mentioned a familiar name.

  Angie momentarily forgot what she was supposed to be doing at the computer. “I’m sorry, what?” she said. “Could you repeat that?”

  “I said, and then of course that terrible Karner woman came in with more of her endle
ss demands.”

  “I’ve had to deal with her myself,” Angie said. “She tried to pull one of the bookshelves off the wall, can you believe it? She thought there was a secret passage behind it or something.”

  “Was there?”

  “Of course not—only another bookshelf.”

  They both chuckled over absurdity of it.

  Then Tabitha described what Alayna Karner had been up to at the Chamber of Commerce today. Apparently, she wanted permission to tear up the floor at the Brant Point Light House and dig below it for a lockbox. When Tabitha had pointed out that burying the painting under the floor of the lighthouse would have made yearly viewing of it rather awkward, Miss Karner had threatened to call in “some very influential people on this island” to force the Chamber of Commerce to cooperate. When Tabitha had then, reasonably in Angie’s opinion, asked to see what kind of proof that Miss Karner had to substantiate her suspicion that the painting was under the floor of the lighthouse, Miss Karner had refused to provide any. “The second I tell you, you’ll tell everyone on the island and word will get out. And then you’ll give someone else permission to dig where I want to dig. Because that’s how places like this work. You’re all completely inbred!”

  And then she’d flounced out of the building and marched out of sight down the street.

  Angie burst out laughing, loud enough to draw the stares of several people in the bookstore. Tabitha joined her.

  Finally, Tabitha let out a breath. “Thank you. I needed a laugh. I have to keep reminding myself that it only seems like everything is going badly.”

  “Oh, me too,” Angie said. “We’ve been so busy that I sometimes find myself bracing for some nebulous disaster that probably won’t ever happen. I have a bad habit of micromanaging everything in this store, as if I’m the only person who can be trusted with responsibility. But I’m working on that. And to be honest, it’s nice being busy. I just need to adapt and make some adjustments to my management style.”