Besides, now that I knew this had originally been a slave quarter, that changed everything and really put our own experience into perspective. Far worse things had happened on this land back then than what happened to the four of us when we were children.
“I can’t believe I’d forgotten about making the pine straw houses,” Maddee said, stepping away from the cabin and looking around, into the brush, for the other brick piers.
“There’s one,” Renee said, joining her and pointing far into the weeds. Sure enough, she was right. Partially obscured by a bush and some thick vines sat a bricked square about two feet wide and eight inches high.
“Oh yeah, and another,” Blake added. “Look there.”
Soon we were poking around in the weeds and vines, searching for the brick piers. We couldn’t get to all of them because of the brush, but we did find some, and though many had been reduced to rubble long ago, a lot of the ones we found were still intact. After a while, the ladies showed the guys how to build a pine straw house and soon they were all going to town on it together.
I stood back, not feeling quite so carefree. My mind filled with the image I’d seen at the museum of the man who’d been whipped, and I just couldn’t get over the fact that these had been slave quarters.
“What a horrible legacy for this place,” I said to Aunt Cissy, who was standing nearby.
“Michael didn’t think so. To his mind, the legacy was redeemed, and I have to say that I agree.” She went on to explain how the young couple worked to change the plantation in the years following the war. They picked a spot in the far field for a new house, just a simple structure at first, though subsequent generations would expand and enlarge it until it became the grand manse where Nana now lived. But back then, once they shifted over to their new home, they allowed this half of the property to grow wild, except for managing and harvesting the trees for the paper mill. During the construction of their house and later a barn, they dismantled much of the original mansion and other outbuildings, repurposing some of the materials and discarding the rest.
“But they left the slave quarters standing as they were,” she concluded, “as a reminder of the past, lest it become our future.”
I took in her words, thinking how wise our ancestors had been. I decided they were right. The sorrowful legacy of this place had been redeemed after all.
Standing in the heart of the woods, surrounded by loved ones and despite the presence of the cabin, I felt a growing sense of peace—until it was interrupted by a strange noise, like a bird being strangled or an animal with its leg in a trap. Turning, I realized the sound was coming from Aunt Cissy, who was standing with hands clasped and eyes closed, belting out her attempt at a soulful rendition of “Amazing Grace.”
Oh, my.
I looked to see the rest of the gang in various states of surprise and muffled laughter. Overcome with a surge of protectiveness, I took in a deep breath, stepped over to her side, and joined in on the last two lines, our voices merging into a terrible, toe-curling cacophony:
“I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.”
The seven of us ended up staying out in the woods longer than we’d planned. It was such a beautiful day, and we were all having fun creating the world’s biggest pine straw house as Aunt Cissy sat comfortably on a stump nearby and regaled us with tales of the Talbots. It had started after our song, when Danielle staved off a second verse by interrupting to ask Aunt Cissy how she knew so much about things that happened so long ago.
“We know Catherine’s story from the 1600s because she left a journal,” Danielle added. “And we know Celeste’s story from the 1700s because she wrote about it in letters. But all we have for Therese are photos and love notes, right?”
Aunt Cissy had grinned. “Nope. For Therese we have what’s known as an oral tradition. The stories I’ve been sharing with you girls were passed down to me verbally.” Looking from one to the other of us, she added, “I’ve been hoping one of you might want to carry on the torch. Learn from me and someday take my place with the next generation.” Wagging her eyebrows, she added, “The position does come with a prize.”
“A prize?”
“The porcelain box Michael gave to Therese. It’s in the museum exhibit right now, but ordinarily I keep it at home on the center of my mantel.”
We all shared glances, knowing that what she was suggesting would be both an honor and a responsibility, one that none of us was exactly jumping up to claim. It was something to think about maybe, for when we were older.
The moment passed when Blake said he’d love to hear her account of the story of the missing illuminated manuscript if she felt like sharing. So there we were, gathering pine straw into mounds for walls and listening to the tale at a new level of detail. When Aunt Cissy was done sharing, we found ourselves so invested in the story that we began brainstorming about what could’ve possibly happened to the illuminated manuscript. We started with the facts as we knew them:
Mr. Porter stole some important valuables from the Talbots’ safe, including the ruby ring and the illuminated manuscript.
For some reason, Porter then handed over the ring to the fence for him to sell, but not the manuscript.
The most logical reason Porter might have hung onto the manuscript was because he understood its full value and was planning to sell it on his own.
He had a secret place where he stashed his booty after stealing it, so considering that he’d not yet had a chance to sell it, the manuscript had probably still been in there when he died.
Considering there were no records of it ever having shown up, it was either hoarded away in someone’s private collection or still in his old hiding place to this day.
So where was the hiding place? That question led us to some more conclusions:
If it had been in any of the buildings that were taken down by Michael and Therese, they more than likely would have run across it.
Porter was found dead on the grass behind the slave cabins, which could mean he was back there intending to dig it up from the ground. According to Aunt Cissy, many people buried their valuables during the war.
Then again, when he was found dead, he’d had no shovel with him nor any other indication of what he’d been doing there, so digging didn’t seem likely.
“He could’ve been on his way to get a shovel,” Maddee said, “and just cutting through here when he ran into the copperhead.”
“No,” Renee replied. “The snakebite was to the man’s hand. If you’re just walking along and get bitten, it’s going to be on your leg or foot. More than likely, he was low to the ground when it happened.” Ever the scientist, Renee continued, explaining that copperhead bites weren’t usually fatal. “Which tells me he probably went into anaphylactic shock in reaction to the bite, and that’s what killed him.”
Blake stood and began pacing. “Okay, so he was found somewhere along here, behind the slave quarters, minus a shovel, low to the ground. Could his hiding place have been in a tree? Perhaps one with a hollow in it? I know it’s been a hundred and fifty years since then, but a lot of these trees are at least that old.”
Renee nodded, adding that the maximum lifespan for a white pine was something like 450 years.
Aunt Cissy had brought the photo of the old slave quarters with her, and suddenly everyone was crowding around looking at it, trying to figure out which of the trees that had been here back then were still here now. Before they got very far, however, Danielle seemed to have a different idea.
Stepping away from the group, she headed over to the cabin, walked around the back side, then called out for us.
“Hey, y’all. Come here!”
We rounded the corner to see her pointing at the cabin’s back left brick pier.
“Look,” she said. “This one is wider than the others—all the others, not just the ones with this building. Every intact pier out here is the same size, has the same number of bricks except for this one right here. See
? It’s wider, almost like someone added some extra length to create a little hiding space inside.”
Sure enough, once she explained it, I understood what she meant—though only someone as extremely visual as she would ever have noticed such a thing. Curious, I stepped forward and knelt in front of the pier to get a closer look.
“Be careful, Nicole,” Maddee scolded, sounding so much like her childhood self that we laughed.
From a safe enough distance, I poked at the pier until I found a chunk of two bricks, mortared together, that seemed to shift. Blake and Greg stepped in to help, and together the three of us managed to pull that chunk free from the wall. It fell to the ground, leaving behind an opening just large enough to use as a hidey-hole for all sorts of stolen treasures, including an illuminated manuscript.
Immediately, everyone whipped out their phones and turned on their flashlights to shine into the cavity that had been revealed.
“Watch out for snakes,” Aunt Cissy warned again.
“Not to mention brown recluse spiders,” Renee added.
None of us reached inside. All we could do was stare at what we were seeing, a bundle of some sort, just about the size and shape of a book.
“Well, what do you know?” I said softly.
Aunt Cissy gasped. “Is that—”
“We’ll find out soon enough.” My sister turned off the flashlight from her phone and dialed. “Detective Ortiz? It’s Maddee Talbot. And, boy, do I have an interesting development for you.”
Thanks to the excitement of our find, we were in top problem-solving form as we waited in the woods for police to arrive. If as a group we’d been able to use our collective reasoning to find a treasure that had been missing for one hundred fifty years, we decided, maybe we could figure out who killed Taavi as well. And so we began to brainstorm.
We all felt confident that Taavi had come here in search of Mr. Porter’s hidey-hole. Like the old game of “you’re getting colder, you’re getting hotter,” he’d probably been getting warmer and warmer, so to speak, in his search when he ran into someone who stabbed and killed him. That would have been a fairly straightforward crime save for the fact that they then somehow managed to get rid of his body and clean up a messy death in a short amount of time. That took the situation to a new level and made things infinitely more complicated. Heartsick, I couldn’t help but wonder what Granddad’s role in all of this might possibly have been.
“Okay,” Maddee said, interrupting my thoughts, “let’s walk through our day that day. Maybe something will come up that we haven’t thought of before.”
Such a blow-by-blow account ordinarily would’ve sent me into a spiral, but it wasn’t so bad now. Being only six years old at the time, I had just a few memories from that day, and they were related to the moment of discovery and its aftermath. But the others had been older and recalled far more. As they launched in, starting with when we got up that morning, some of what they described sounded vaguely familiar, as if they were taking an old, half-erased sketch and coloring it in.
That’s what I was thinking when something Danielle said caught Maddee’s attention. “Wait, say that again.”
“The double rainbow in the sky that morning, don’t you remember? We saw it just before we set off into the woods, and it was so beautiful we all just stood there looking at it until it disappeared. Then we kept going.”
Renee smiled. “Yeah, it’s funny, Danielle was going on about the colors and the perfect arced shape and everything, and I was standing there thinking about how we’d used prisms in science class to study light refraction.”
The others chuckled, but Maddee wasn’t smiling.
“What is it?” I asked.
“The double rainbow,” she said, her eyes wide. “The night Gabe came to Nana’s, earlier this summer, he said something about there having been a double rainbow here the day his father died. Remember? He was real specific about all of it, the rain and the coolness and the rainbow and the warmth and the sunshine, like he knew what had happened step-by-step.”
Now that she mentioned it, I did remember. “Yeah, but we all know the guy’s obsessive. I’m sure he’s studied every aspect of this case, including what the weather was like on the day his dad died.”
“The temperature and the humidity, sure. But a rainbow? It just seems highly unlikely to me that any secondhand report would have included the fact that the same morning Taavi was killed, a double rainbow appeared in the sky.”
We all gaped at her as she continued, articulating the obvious.
“Gabe must have been here that day and seen it for himself. He wasn’t in Cleveland wondering where his dad had gone, but in Virginia. Maybe even here in the Dark Woods. Maybe even here at the cabin, hiding behind a tree and holding the knife he would use to kill his own father.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Nicole
For the first time in memory, the annual Thursday night Talbot family reunion kickoff dinner was probably going to be delayed. As the afternoon wore on and people began to arrive, they were stopped from coming out back and sent to the main house instead. The pool house had become command central for Ortiz and her officers, though our little gang of seven had been allowed to stay. She had invited Nana to come out and join us as well, but the woman declined, saying she had guests to care for and we could fill her in later.
Officers had managed to extract the package from the pier, revealing a book-shaped bundle wrapped in canvas and coated with a shiny black substance. Blake and Renee had been reluctant for anyone to move the thing without Harold present, but they hadn’t been able to reach him, so finally they’d compromised and allowed it to be put in a cooler, the kind used to transport organs between hospitals. Once that was done, the officers confirmed that the hiding place was otherwise empty, no stolen jewels or other exciting treasures to be found within, and we headed back with Ortiz.
Blake carried the cooler, walking carefully, all the way to the pool house, where he put it on the kitchen counter. Renee finally reached Harold at that moment, and we were all so focused on her call that none of us noticed what Ortiz did next. She opened the cooler, removed the bundle, and set it on the table. She was about to unwrap the covering when Blake stopped her.
If this really was what we thought it was, he insisted, it had to be opened under the right conditions—light, humidity, and more. She couldn’t just unwrap it even if she were careful about it. Renee hung up then and announced that Harold was about an hour away but that he was coming, so Ortiz agreed to wait and let him take charge of the unveiling.
In the meantime, Maddee shared our new realizations about Gabe with Ortiz—but her reaction was not what we’d expected. As it turned out, she already knew Gabe had been here the day his father died because he’d told her that right up front.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Maddee asked.
She shrugged. “Wasn’t relevant, I guess. He’s not a suspect. We ruled him out a long time ago for a number of reasons.” She went on to tell us his story, how nineteen-year-old Gabe had come to Richmond on a hunch after his father disappeared, knowing this was probably where the man’s never-ending quest for his holy grail had led him. The Talbots were the biggest connection Taavi had to the manuscript’s disappearance, so Gabe camped out not far from the entrance to the estate with a pair of binoculars and watched everyone who came and went for a day and a half, hoping his dad would show up eventually.
He stuck it out until early afternoon on Saturday, when he was startled by the appearance of several police cars. Fearing he’d get in trouble for camping on private property, he waited until they were just out of sight up the driveway and then beat a hasty retreat. That was it. He headed back home to Cleveland, realizing the futility of his efforts. He never saw his father again and hadn’t a clue that the man had been murdered that very morning less than a mile from where he’d been camping. In fact, no one knew what had happened to Taavi—until twenty years later, when Detective Ortiz contacted the Koenigs an
d told them about her investigation.
“What about Lev?” I asked. “Did you question him regarding his involvement?”
Ortiz nodded, a mysterious smile spreading on her face. “Sure did, and I have some new info you’re going to want to hear. I was planning to fill you in later, but I might as well do it now while we’re waiting for Harold.”
Of course we all immediately gathered in front of her to listen, squeezing onto the couch and chairs, as Ortiz leaned against a kitchen stool and began to share what she’d discovered since Maddee and I called her about Lev Sobol the day before.
As it turned out, she said, Vida’s boyfriend was not a bad guy as we’d feared, but someone who had in fact done us all a huge favor. That’s because he managed to accomplish what Ortiz had not, thanks to threats from his high-powered lawyer and the efforts of several well-placed associates. The detective had questioned Lev not long after our phone call, she said, but in the face of her inquiry, rather than answer her questions, he had used his lawyer and insider contacts to convince the authorities to release information regarding Douglas Talbot’s involvement with Operation Paper Trail. That, in turn, would serve to exonerate Lev.
And so we listened now, spellbound, as Ortiz told us the full story that she’d finally been given access to, starting back in June 1995, when our grandfather was approached by the Secret Service to enlist his help with an investigation.
With gasps and wide eyes, we all looked at one another. I could feel relief pulsing through my veins at the realization that my worst fears about Granddad’s actions had not come true. He was an innocent man pulled into service by his government.
“The agents who contacted your grandfather told him they had it on good authority that ‘the head of Talbot Paper and Printing’ was soon going to hear from a representative of a bogus corporation, a ‘small specialty printer just starting out,’ that was going to try to convince him to serve as middleman in the purchase of a certain piece of printing equipment.” Ortiz went on to explain that the rep would tell Granddad they wanted to buy the machine through his company so that they could get a better price on it, and in turn they would pay him a commission equal to half the amount saved. A win-win. In truth, price had nothing to do with it.
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