by Liz Johnson
“Are you sure?”
“I did it myself tonight.”
With a slow sigh, she let herself breathe again. She’d somehow forgotten to do just that for the last minute, and the air, warm and thick with humidity, was still somehow refreshing. “And the night guards?”
“Night guards?”
“You know, the ones who patrol the grounds at night?”
When he shook his head, she leaned away from him. Coolness washed down her back in his absence, and she subdued the shiver so eager to betray her. Glancing over her shoulder, she tried to read his face, but his smile was easy, indecipherable. “No night guards?”
“I think that you’re giving far too much credit to the Chateau’s security system, which generally consists of trying to keep riffraff off the lawns.” He nodded toward the open window and the paved driveway beyond. “In its day, that gate was state-of-the-art. But that day was thirty years ago. Now . . . well, not so much.”
She looked in the direction he’d indicated and could see only darkness.
“The historical preservation society doesn’t have money to waste on overnight security—cameras or otherwise—when the estate is supposed to be closed. They figure once it’s locked up for the night, it’s safe.”
“And let me guess, you’re the locker-upper.”
“You know that’s right.” He hooked his thumbs behind imaginary suspenders. “And here you thought I wouldn’t come in handy.”
“I never said . . .” Okay, she’d had her doubts, but that was neither here nor there.
They were alone inside the Chateau, alone on five acres of prime shoreline and surrounded by a ten-foot stone wall. She couldn’t make out the stones or the gate she entered through in the barest hint of their neighbor’s lights, which stretched through the Spanish moss hanging in the old sycamores. Draped in their finest, the trees masked the wall that surrounded the property from the shore to the entrance. Its imposing façade had been Howard Dawkins’s idea—if the tour guides could be believed at least in that area.
Dawkins had been vigilant about protecting his guests and their privacy. And if he’d spent thousands of dollars—in the twenties, no less—to keep interlopers off his property, how much more vigilant was he about the ones he let in? Wouldn’t he have interviewed Jenny the maid? There would have been letters of reference from her previous employers, right?
He wouldn’t have been careless. He never would have hired Jenny if he didn’t trust her. But he hadn’t hesitated to fire her.
“We have to get to Jenny’s room.” She grabbed at his wrist and tugged.
He tripped on the sudden step but followed closely behind her. “Who’s Jenny?”
“Ruth’s maid. Well, not really Ruth’s. She was a housemaid here, and she helped Ruth get dressed. She probably turned down their beds.”
At a T in the hall, he pointed her to the left through an open archway that led to an exterior hall. She ran her fingers along the stucco wall, its open windows inviting in the night winds off the water. “She was sacked.”
When they reached the top of a set of stone steps, Ben stopped. The humor in his features had disappeared, replaced by a mix of concern and curiosity. “For stealing?”
Millie paused too, able only to offer a slow nod. Then because it was clear he was waiting for even more clarification, she added, “From the guests.”
“That’s great.”
Mouth dropping open, she paused, but he didn’t expound on his thought. Stepping around her, he took the first three stairs in quick succession before turning around and offering his hand. There was no handrail inside the tightly spiraled stairwell, so she slipped her fingers into his grasp. And instantly regretted it.
It wasn’t like that boy in junior high school who’d had sweaty palms. She’d pulled away from his damp grip immediately. And it wasn’t like her high school boyfriend, who had used their linked hands to steer her wherever he pleased.
Ben’s large fingers surrounded hers. Cool. Firm. Secure. Competent. He held on to her like he knew what he was doing. Like he was as concerned for her well-being as he was his own. Like the heroes in her books.
Nope. Not that again. You are not going down that path.
Her life wasn’t a romance novel. But his touch did make her wonder what she’d been missing out on all these years, confining love between the covers of her favorite paperbacks.
She pulled her hand from his, and he looked back at her, a question flitting across his face. At least that’s what she assumed. It was hard to tell for sure. The moon’s light couldn’t reach within the narrow confines of the stone walls, and a faint glow from the bottom kept him mostly in shadow.
Suddenly the silence felt heavier than the dark, and she stretched for anything to fill it. “I guess how great it is depends on who you are. Jenny probably didn’t think it was very great.”
He grunted something that sounded like agreement. “Did they search her room back then?”
“I’m not sure. Ruth didn’t say anything about it, but I assume they would have checked. Wouldn’t they?”
Pausing on the bottom step, he poked his head into the crossing hallway, looking each way. “Almost there,” he said, leading her into what she’d assumed was a hallway. But the vast room was filled with an antique icebox, a cast-iron stove, and the largest island she’d ever seen. It was laid with wax fruits and faux meat that sat in a pool of moonlight shining through a row of windows to her left. To the right an open door showed a clear path to the butler’s pantry. The opening was roped off with the telltale crimson velvet.
She stepped in that direction, but he tugged on her arm and ticked his head toward a barely-there panel hidden between the icebox and a sugar chest.
Millie tripped over her own feet and caught herself on the corner of the island. Her hand immediately burned, but not from the impact. Yanking it back, she clutched both hands to her chest, giving the exit a quick glance over her shoulder.
“There’s a whole other hallway back here,” Ben said.
“But . . . the house was built after the war. Didn’t live-in help go out of style in the twenties?” She was blabbering, her thoughts suddenly jumbled and unclear, but a cleansing breath did absolutely nothing to help. Her skin tingled where she’d slapped the oak countertop.
She wanted to get to Jenny’s old room. She wanted to know what was back there. The money, the jewelry, the evidence of who she really was. It could all be behind that thin door, painted green to blend into the surrounding wall.
Her heart gave a hard thump, then another, until she could feel it pounding at the base of her throat. “We aren’t supposed to be here.”
“What do you mean? This is where Jenny’s room would have been.”
Yes. She understood that. But there was something like a hook around her middle pulling her from the room. Something like fear that kept her from wanting to find what might actually be hidden nearby.
She wasn’t doing this just for the sake of breaking the rules. There was more at stake than protecting the past, like freeing the truth. After all, the Bible said that if she found the truth it would set her free.
But what if she didn’t like the truth she found?
“Are you all right?” He closed the distance between them, his grip on her elbow firm but understanding.
“I-I think so.”
“Millie, what’s your—” He let go of her and stabbed his fingers through his hair, his gaze trained on the floor.
His hesitation made her stomach do a couple flips, and she tried to step back from his warmth. The kitchen stayed relatively cool since the air-conditioning unit had been installed in the eighties, but within an arm’s length of Ben, she suddenly wondered if she was suffering from the hot flashes that Grandma Joy complained about.
Letting out a slow breath angled toward her forehead, she tried to keep her face from turning red or her upper lip from breaking out in a stiff sweat.
He couldn’t possibly know about De
vereaux. He just couldn’t. He hadn’t read more than a handful of words in Ruth’s diary, and Millie had been so careful. Of course, he knew that Devereaux had been a guest at the house that summer. They’d talked about that. But he didn’t know about Ruth and the millionaire. He didn’t know about walks along the beach or liberties taken beneath the afternoon sun or Ruth’s dreams of being a radio actress. He knew nothing.
So why did she feel like she was about to be sick?
Would it be so bad if he knew?
Fair question. Just not one she knew the answer to. He might not care. Or he might insist she cough up half of whatever a Devereaux family connection might afford her. After all, she’d promised to share the treasure. Only she had no idea how much that might be. If it wasn’t enough, she’d be right back where she started—without a fortune or a hope or any way of helping Grandma Joy.
She should tell him anyway.
“Ben . . . the thing is . . .”
When he finally looked up, his eyes were filled with determination. “Millie, what’s your claim on this treasure?”
seven
Finders keepers?”
Ben let out a full-bellied laugh, bending at his waist and leaning a hand on his knee just to stay mostly upright. She put her hands on her hips and stuck out her bottom lip like she couldn’t believe he was actually laughing at her.
He wasn’t sure what he’d been anticipating, but “finders keepers” wasn’t it, and the absurdity of it kept bubbling out of him on each guffaw.
“Hey now, mister.” She straightened, and the look of disbelief turned into one of mock indignation. “There’s no need to laugh. I mean, if someone just left it behind, we can keep it.”
That was enough to swipe away all humor. It was too close to his mother’s justification. “If someone is stupid enough to give me their money, then I’ll keep it.” And she’d done just that. She’d found more than a hundred marks willing to hand over their hard-earned savings. And while he only knew the names of the twenty-three on his list, the truth still applied. He wasn’t going to begin stealing because it was a family trait. He wouldn’t take money from the rightful owner of the Chateau’s treasure. Whoever that might be.
“I’m not taking someone else’s money.”
Millie wiped the teasing look from her face. “What do you mean?”
“Just what I said. You said you’d share it with me, but who says it’s yours to share?”
She looked at her empty hands as though expecting the journal to be there. “I mean, my great-grandmother knew about it. She had to tell my Grandma Joy. And she wrote about it.”
“We think.” He didn’t know why he interrupted her. He didn’t doubt that Ruth had been there and told Joy something that had sent her granddaughter on a chase. But if he and Millie never found a map, they’d never know for sure.
“She did.” Millie looked on the verge of stomping her foot, her hand flapping behind her in the general direction of the icebox. “She wrote about the pieces of jewelry that were stolen.”
“But none of them were hers, right?”
Her shoulders slumped like a deflated balloon. She took a deep breath, reinflating her stance. “Probably not.” She paused for a moment, and then the truth just spilled out. “It was a feat for Georgia farmers to send their daughters to the city at all. There’s no way Ruth’s father could have bought her diamond bracelets or”—she twirled her finger at her throat as though looping it around the necklace she’d worn earlier—“pearls.”
He scrubbed his hand down his face, something not far from disappointment swirling in his middle. “So what makes you so sure that what was taken belonged to her—belongs to you?”
Millie looked at the floor for far too long. “I’m not.”
Her quiet honesty disarmed him, sending him stumbling back a few steps. He’d expected bravado and anger and insistence that she could do and take whatever she wanted. Instead, she looked up through lashes too long to be her own, her lips pulled tight and hands folded before her.
“It belongs to the owners of the estate at this point. At least that’s the legal precedence here in Georgia. Dawkins’s great-nephew still owns the property. He just contracted with the local historical preservation society to run it as a museum.”
“You bothered to look that up, but you didn’t bother to tell me as much?”
She nodded slowly, her face collapsing.
He couldn’t hold back a scowl, hating the rising anger that churned in his stomach and took off along a fiery trail up his esophagus. “So you promised me half of something that isn’t yours. That’s very generous of you.”
She blinked quickly, remaining otherwise still for a long second. But then she hurried forward two steps. “Yes, I was going to turn over what I found to the authorities so they could return it to the rightful owners. But what about a finder’s fee? It’s not unheard of for people to show their appreciation.”
Good. They were on the same page at least. They weren’t keeping someone else’s money. But that didn’t leave much. “What is it you think Dawkins’s heirs are going to offer?”
“Maybe ten percent of whatever we find.” The last word ended on an uptick, a question more than a statement. Uncertain. Hopeful. And probably utterly ridiculous.
He grunted and crossed his arms over his chest, the urge to reassure her battling with the one to storm away. He wanted a treasure. Or half of one. It wouldn’t come close to covering what he needed it to, but he’d pay off at least a few of those debts.
Half of a finder’s fee wasn’t what he’d signed up for.
“And how much do you think we’ll find?”
She shrugged a shoulder, maybe a little too nonchalant about the whole situation. Sure, she’d had time to consider the rightful owners, and she’d known about this a lot longer than he had. But the difference between ten percent and a hundred barely seemed to register on her face.
“I don’t have any idea. But I know it’s worth something.”
“Worth risking your job?”
He already knew the answer to that because she’d put her job on the line every day since he’d met her, and at least a few times before that.
Her chin tipped up as her eyes narrowed. “It’s worth everything.”
A shiver raced down his spine at the urgency in her voice, and the drop of her jaw revealed that she’d said more than she’d planned on. There was something more than money on the line for her. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to be mixed up in it for a twenty-dollar payout.
You can’t leave her on her own.
He wanted to punch whatever whispered that into his ear. But he couldn’t argue the point. He’d promised to help her. Before he ever truly believed that there was even something to find, he’d promised.
“Aren’t you at all curious about what’s been hidden for so many years?” She closed one eye and raised the other eyebrow. “Imagine the history we could uncover. Imagine what it will tell us about the people who stayed here, the man who built it, the surrounding area.”
That was clearly bait. The good kind too. But he hoped his glare told her he was onto her schemes.
Millie stepped closer before tipping her head toward the invisible hall behind her. “Have you been inside? Haven’t you ever wondered what it looks like?”
He added a scowl to his glare, but her puppy-dog eyes never backed down. Innocent and compelling, she nudged him toward the nearly invisible door. “When you teach about the history of St. Simons Island, don’t you wish you could see what the people back then saw? Don’t you wish you could tell your students firsthand?”
He almost nodded, almost gave in. A flicker of a smile across her pert pink lips made him pause.
“When I teach about the history of the island, I spend about a minute on the Chateau.” That was an understatement. He spent at least a couple sessions of his local history class talking about the Roaring Twenties. Men like Rockefeller, Ford, and Dawkins had made a name for themselves. Some of th
ose men had reached the shores of St. Simons and changed it forever.
He’d give just about anything to see what the world had looked like through their eyes.
With that thought, he knew he was hooked. He was a bass and she a fisherman, and she had reeled him in with an expert hand. But he could put up one last fight.
“If you had a treasure at Christ Church of Frederica, we could talk.”
She crossed her arms and turned her head in the direction of the small white church building. It wasn’t visible from anywhere on the Chateau’s first floor, but she looked like she could almost see its charcoal-gray pitched roof and jutting steeple beneath a shower of thick moss and surrounded by sentinels twice as tall.
Shaking her head, she took a step backward, then another. Skirting the corner of the kitchen island, she made steady progress across the room. “I can’t help you there. But tonight I’m going into Jenny’s room, and I’m going to dig until I find what I’m looking for.”
Her determination made him grin, and he hurried in her direction. “What do you think you’re going to find in there? Don’t you think they searched it?”
He hadn’t been trying to deflate her, but it sure looked like he had. Her shoulders slumped, and her face puckered with concern. “Of course. Yes.” There was an unspoken “duh” in there somewhere, and she paused for a long second. “But maybe they missed something. If they had found the stolen jewelry—well, then there wouldn’t be a lost treasure, right? Maybe there’s a clue or something.” She picked up speed as she crossed the room to the door, and he followed right behind her.
The flash of her teeth in the darkened room was nearly blinding, but he couldn’t look away. The hidden door opened with a creak, letting loose an avalanche of dust, and Millie jumped back, straight into his arms.
He’d been aware of her before. Her hair smelled of citrus, and her laughter was contagious. He’d felt her presence somewhere deep inside him. Now he fully enjoyed it.
She was filled with life and verve that made his heart slam against his ribs. And she hadn’t lied to him. She hadn’t tried to convince him that the money belonged to her. She’d owned up to it. Even if something deep inside him whispered that she wasn’t telling the whole truth. For now it would be enough.
