The Girl with the Phony Name

by Charles Mathes

  “What made you think you could find the treasure even if you had the brooch?” said Lucy.

  “Arrogance.” Julius shrugged. “Stupidity. I was rich already, of course, but the treasure became my obsession. Even though the Fingons of Lis had possessed the brooch for centuries without finding anything, I was convinced that I could take one glance at it and decipher its secret. The Fingon brooch made a total fool of me. That’s it, isn’t it? At your neck?”

  “Yes,” Lucy said.

  “It’s odd,” Julius said sadly, not moving. “Even ten years ago, I would have torn the thing from your throat. Now I look at it and feel nothing at all. I’m eighty-five years old, Lucy. My heart is failing. My arteries are crumbling. No brooch, no treasure, not all the money in the world will save me from the grave.”

  “You really don’t want it?” asked Lucy, unbelievingly.

  The old man shook his head.

  “The treasure was just a dream. My life was just a dream. All dreams come to an end.”

  “There was a Fingon treasure,” said Lucy quietly after a moment. The old man didn’t seem to hear her, apparently lost in his memories. Then he looked up.

  “What?” he said absently.

  “I said there was Fingon treasure. It was buried where the brooch said it would be, but when we looked, someone had already dug it up.”

  “What are you talking about?” said the old man, squinting, his face a thousand wrinkles.

  “See for yourself,” said Lucy, unfastening the silver ring from her scarf, holding it out to Julius. Maybe justice would be served if he at least knew that all his scheming had been for nothing.

  The old giant pushed himself up to a standing position on his cane, stepped over, and took the brooch from her hand.

  “Look at the inscription on the back,” said Lucy, sitting wearily on the sofa. “Dumlagchtat mac Alpin Bethoc. There was a grave marked BETHOC in a little cemetery at Dumlagchtat Castle. In it was supposed to be a treasure given to the Fingons by Kenneth mac Alpin. The grave was empty.”

  Julius Fingon turned the brooch over in his bony fingers and stared at the inscription.

  “What’s this written on the pin?” rasped Julius, squinting through his spectacles. “I can’t make it out.”

  “Oh, that’s nothing,” said Lucy wistfully. “It says Lucy MacAlpin Trelaine. That’s who I used to think I was. Now I know the truth. You don’t know any Trelaines by any chance, do you?”

  Julius turned to face her. His mouth was open, but he seemed lost in thought, his great blue eyes stared blankly ahead. A strange gurgling noise seemed to come from his throat.

  “Mr. Fingon? Are you all right, Mr. Fingon?” said Lucy, rising from the sofa. She didn’t even hear herself scream when Julius Fingon crashed facedown into the polished hardwood floor, as rigid as a felled tree.

  THIRTY-ONE

  “Where are you going, Miss Fingon?” said the lanky officer in the customs booth at the Halifax airport.

  “Little Skye,” said Lucy.

  “How long do you plan to stay?”

  “A few days, I think. I’m making arrangements to settle a cousin’s estate.”

  “Are you a U.S. citizen?”

  “I have a dual U.S./U.K. nationality.” Lucy pulled out her passport with pride and handed it to the man. He barely glanced at it.

  “Are you bringing anything with you that you plan to leave behind? Any gifts?”

  Lucy dug into the left-hand pocket of her jacket.

  “Just this paperweight,” she replied, holding up a gray cylinder with the name Julius Fingon engraved upon it in gold letters.

  “Welcome to Canada,” said the man.

  “Thank you very much,” Lucy said, popped Julius back into her pocket, and walked down the aisle toward the exit. Transporting the compact deceased could become a huge new profit center for Neat ‘n’ Tidy, Lucy thought with a smile. She was beginning to think like Wing. She didn’t know whether to celebrate or shoot herself.

  “Mademoiselle Fingon?” said a thin man tentatively as Lucy passed the gate. He looked to be in his thirties, but his thick hair was gray. He was dressed in a taupe-colored summer suit.

  “Yes. Mr. Dessault?”

  “Oui. Welcome to Nova Scotia.”

  “Thank you.”

  “The baggage claim is this way and my car is just outside … .”

  In a few minutes they were in Dessault’s Mercedes, heading south along the coast.

  “ … leaving funds available immédiatement,” the lawyer was saying in a musical French accent. “The estate is a very large one and probate procedures, they are complicated. It will be years before everything passes into your name. As executrix, however, you control the estate and can invest in a responsible manner, n’est-ce pas?”

  “And the others?” said Lucy, still shaken by what had happened. She had spoken to Dessault several times in the two weeks since Julius Fingon’s death, but the reality of the situation still had not entirely sunken in.

  “There was a special account to take care of the nurse, Mademoiselle MacGilvry the housekeeper, and the gardener, Monsieur Warrick. I say to Warrick he can continue to work for the time being, I hope you do not mind.”

  “No, not at all.”

  “He is a nice old fellow. He comes three days a week. He is off now for the weekend. You can meet him next Monday. How long, then, will you plan to stay?”

  Lucy shrugged. “You tell me.”

  “There is quite a bit of paperwork we must encounter. You are sure you wish to sell the house?”

  “I think so,” said Lucy.

  “Well, you are the executrix. But you will change your mind about the house when you see it, perhaps. Julius loved this house. The property has been in your family for generations.”

  Lucy didn’t say anything. What would she do with a house in the middle of nowhere?

  They drove for nearly two hours. The passing countryside ranged from thick forests to grassy, rolling hills reminiscent of the stark landscapes of Lis. At one point Lucy heard the sound of bagpipes and looked out to find a field full of men in kilts.

  “Are there many Scots here?”

  Dessault grinned. “Nova Scotia, it means New Scotland.”

  “Of course,” said Lucy, feeling foolish.

  “After the Jacobite forces have lost at Culloden,” Deussault explained, “the Scottish diaspora began. Your ancestor, Alan Fingon, came to Little Skye in seventeen eighty-four. During the clearances of the nineteenth century, fifty thousand Highlanders have settled in Nova Scotia.”

  “Fifty thousand!”

  “Oui.”

  “You certainly know a lot about Scottish history.”

  “Canadians, they try to be good neighbors.”

  Lucy nodded, not knowing what that really meant. She had never had neighbors.

  As they neared Little Skye, Lucy was struck with déjà vu, the rocky coast was so like the one near Dumlagchtat. Perhaps this was why Alan had chosen this place to make a new life.

  Dessault turned the car off the meandering highway, onto a road that cut across the belly of a small peak. As they turned the final corner, Lucy’s heart leaped in her chest. Ahead of them sprawled a meadow exploding with wildflowers, framed with mountains and the sea. The most astonishing feature of the picture, however, were the trees. A row of them soared a hundred feet into the sky on either side of the road, which ended at a sprawling stone house.

  Dessault stopped the car in front of the house and they both got out.

  “Here are the keys to the house and garage,” said Dessault, placing them in her hand. “There are three vehicles; the keys for them are also upon this ring. I understand from the housekeeper that there is plenty of food in the refrigerator for you. If you need anything, however, Little Skye is only a few minutes away.”

  Lucy nodded, speechless with the quiet wonder of the place. The sun shone down golden on the flowers and the gray slate roof of the house. She could hear the sea lap
faintly at the rocks below. The Fingons could not have been all bad to have created such a place.

  “W-would you like to come in for a drink or something?” she finally stuttered.

  “Perhaps I come back on Monday. I think maybe you wish to be alone now, yes?”

  Lucy nodded, her eyes following the gentle curve of the huge trees back over the ridge, wondering how she could bring herself to sell this miracle.

  “I never dreamed it would be so beautiful.”

  Dessault merely nodded.

  “Is it always this beautiful?”

  “In the winter its beauty is considerably more colder,” said the lawyer gravely. “But yes, it is always this beautiful.”

  “Those trees are incredible,” said Lucy, awed by the feeling of the place, as warm and good as the castle at Dumlagchtat had been cold and severe.

  “They are the Fingon oaks. Julius told me that his ancestor, Alan Fingon, planted them when he built the house.”

  “I believe it,” said Lucy.

  “They are certainly the tallest in this area. The original forests here were cut for lumber long ago, much of it exported back to Scotland, in point of fact. But these oaks, they remain forever. They give the house its name.”

  “What?” said Lucy, barely listening.

  “The lane of trees. Of course the spelling is obscure, but it is for the trees that people call the house. Trelaine. Tree-lane. Mademoiselle Fingon? Are you all right?”

  Lucy found the graveyard on a promontory behind the house, looking out over the sea. It was small—barely twenty stones—surrounded by a short, white, picket fence and shaded by a huge, beautiful oak.

  After Dessault drove away, Lucy had dropped her bags in the house, barely noticing the low-beamed ceilings hung with dried flowers, the warm wooden paneling, the rich upholstery and leather. She had changed into jeans and gone outside to the garage.

  When she didn’t find what she was looking for, Lucy tried the shed behind the house. The door wasn’t locked. It was full of gardening implements. Lucy took a shovel.

  Now she stood in front of a flat, rectangular stone in the little graveyard beneath the beautiful tree, afraid to move. The other stones all bore the names of Fingons, the dates of their births and deaths. Alan. Rorie. Duncan. This stone, however, had only a single name chiseled deep into the well-worn granite: LUCY.

  Lucy stood on the grass, piecing together the story in her mind.

  Some ancient treasure had been consigned to the Fingons for protection centuries ago. It had been buried at the Castle at Dumlagchtat, its secret location engraved on a brooch. There it had lain until the Fingon line split at the end of the eighteenth century.

  Alan Fingon had exhumed the treasure, brought it here to Trelaine, and buried it in this grave. Then Alan had deeded the house to one son, but conveying the brooch with the location of the treasure to the other son, still in Lis. The secret was then forgotten over the years.

  If Barbara Fingon had reached her destination, Julius would have understood the message on the back of the brooch. He had understood instantly when Lucy had told him what was written there. The insight had exploded into his ancient brain with such a strong flash of greed—or justice—that it had killed him.

  Now Lucy stood here, shovel in hand, above a grave in which wealth beyond dreams was buried. Dared she dig? She knew she had to. She knew that here lay the secret of her life. Here, at last, was Lucy MacAlpin Trelaine.

  Lucy pressed her foot on the metal rim and the spade cut into the grass. The ground was thick clay, studded with rocks. After only a few minutes, Lucy grew discouraged. She returned to the gardener’s shed and brought out a pickax, which she raised over her head and crashed into the grave. Half an hour later, her hands blistered and already aching, Lucy went back to the shed again, returning with gloves.

  She began digging again, alternating the ax and the shovel. She returned twice to the house, once for water, once to get something to tie around her forehead to stop the sweat from drizzling into her eyes. She settled for a knee sock from the drawer in Julius’s incongruously charming bedroom—all lace curtains and chintz.

  After three hours, Lucy’s arms felt like lead, her legs like rubber. Still she dug, grimy, sweating, her blisters beginning to bleed. Images of Michael Fraser, slick with sweat and anger, kept invading her mind. She wished he were here now. Had the ground at Dumlagchtat been this hard, cold, unyielding?

  Lucy dug and she sweated, and the world seemed to become one vast, deep hole from which she would never escape until suddenly she swung her ax from the shoulder—she could no longer lift it over her head—and it struck the ground with a cracking sound. She had found something!

  Lucy grabbed the shovel and dug furiously until she found what she thought was the source of the sound. There in the grave were tiny bones and a skull, surrounded by red earth that must once have been a coffin.

  Lucy sank to her knees, assembling the brittle shards of what centuries ago had undoubtedly been a baby.

  “Poor, dear Lucy,” she said quietly and began to sob, not sure which Lucy she wept for. Could this be all there was? Was this the famous Fingon treasure that generations of her ancestors had kept hidden? That her father had died for? The bones of a child who had never lived?

  “No!” shrieked Lucy. Furiously she threw the bones down, whatever natural squeamishness she’d had long gone from working with Wing. She grabbed her pickax and swung it with all her strength into the grave.

  To her astonishment it met the earth with a clang.

  It took twenty more minutes for Lucy to excavate the box and drag it out of the hole, bracing her back against the mud to support it on the way up. The baby’s remains had been only a final red herring, she realized with disgust, the kind of red herring only a Fingon could think up.

  Nearly five hours had passed since she had begun, and Lucy lay on the grass between headstones for a moment, aching to her bones, her sweat drying in the setting sun, before examining what she had found.

  It was an iron box, a foot square. The metal was barely visible through corrosion and mud. This, she knew, was what she had been searching for. This was the Fingon treasure.

  Lucy pushed herself up on the handle of her ax and swung it against the lock. It held. She struck again, this time above the hinge, and the whole front of the box broke off. Lucy pried open the lid and dumped the contents out onto the grass beside her. Then she stared at the Fingon treasure with a mixture of awe and disgust.

  It was about the size of a loaf of bread and was covered with dirt and rust. It was a rock.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Lucy felt a little better.

  She had dragged herself and the rock back into the house, peeled off her sweat-drenched clothes, and taken a long, hot shower. Then she had sat down in the tub and soaked for another half an hour.

  Tomorrow she would lay Julius Fingon to rest in the hole she had dug, there with the bones of her namesake, there beside the rest of her family, there beneath the beautiful tree. Now Lucy lay on the white spread of the huge, four-poster bed in the old man’s room, propped up by pillows.

  Julius’s cat, a white Persian with one green eye and one blue, was curled up in her lap, apparently bearing no resentment over being left out of the will.

  Lucy could see herself in a mirror across the room, looking like an Oriental potentate in Julius’s oversized terrycloth robe, a towel wrapped around her hair.

  The rock lay next to her.

  Now that she had scrubbed the centuries of dirt from it with Julius’s bath brush, the rock looked better. It was white, smooth, oval-shaped—slightly flattened on top. Lucy thought it might be marble. Carved into its face was an inscription, which Lucy recognized from her Catholic childhood as being in Latin:

  Nifallit Fatum, Scoti, quocunque locatum

  Invenient lapidem, regnare tenetur ibidem.

  Lucy fingered the letters, mystified. Did Scoti have something to do with Scotland? Lucy certainly didn’t have
the knowledge to translate the words. Was it an explanation of where a real treasure was hidden? It was lucky that Lucy happened to know someone who understood Latin. At least she hoped he did.

  Lucy reached over, pulled the phone onto the bed with her. The cat looked over with an expression between boredom and annoyance.

  “Sorry,” Lucy murmured and dialed a now familiar number.

  “Hello?” answered the voice after a few rings.

  “Hi, it’s me.”

  “Lucy!” A warm voice filled her ear. “I was waiting for your call. You get in all right? How was the flight?”

  “Fine,” she said, happy just to hear his voice again.

  Lucy had been seeing Mike Fraser since the day after she returned from Lis. Wing knew something was up, even though Lucy hadn’t mentioned how serious the relationship was getting. She couldn’t keep her happiness a secret much longer. Nor was there any reason to anymore, now that she was sure of how she felt about Mike.

  “I miss you already,” he said.

  “Listen, Michael. I’ve come across this Latin inscription that I need you to translate for me.”

  “No ‘I miss you, too’?”

  “I miss you, too, silly man. You do understand Latin, don’t you?”

  “Just want me for my mind, huh? You know what they say: Mens sana in corpore sano.”

  “What is this? A little Ph.D. humor?”

  “That’s Latin. A sound mind in a sound body.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “All right. So what’s your quotation?”

  Lucy read the inscription on the rock as best as she could. Halfway through, Mike stopped her with a chuckle.

  “Where did you come across that?”

  “An old book,” Lucy said. She didn’t want to say anything about the rock, even to Mike, until she knew what it was she had found. “Do you know what it means?”

  “Sure. It’s the inscription that was supposed to be on the Stone of Destiny.”

  “The what?”