by E. A. House
Didn’t she?
The truth was, Maddison wasn’t sure. Not of the big things—Maddison forced herself to think it through rationally and she could admit that she didn’t believe her father was capable of any kind of murder. He’d gone to much too great a length to keep Maddison and her two friends safe, and not once since this mess had started had he demonstrated any fear for himself. At least, not the kind that might drive him to lash out at another person to protect himself. It had always been fear of something happening to Maddison that had driven him, and driven him to some really odd actions.
So what, then, was so upsetting about the picture, and by extension, why was she so mad at her dad again? It’s logically upsetting, Maddison reminded herself. But she had the strange creeping feeling that something wasn’t quite right about the picture itself, as though there was something subtly off about Carrie. Why am I really upset?
Well, it was an invasion of privacy. Carrie’s privacy first of all, because to photograph her unawares was invasive and creepy, especially if you happened to be someone else’s dad. And then Maddison’s privacy had been invaded, too, since her dad was following her friends around without giving Maddison any say in the matter and the very following-around suggested he didn’t trust Maddison to make good decisions.
“I mean, really, what’s scary enough about Carrie that he can’t just ask me?” Maddison said out loud to herself. “She’s a teenage girl, she’s not the Spanish Inquisition or a demon clown, there’s no need to stalk her like she’s going to catch you following her and eat you—oh.”
Maybe there wasn’t something scary about Carrie, but there was something scaring her dad. He was scared. Her dad was scared, and acting oddly because of it. Overreacting to everything because of it. What, after all, was him dragging them all the way from Florida to Nebraska but him running away and taking the family along with him?
And suddenly, all of Maddison’s pent-up frustration over her father’s dancing around his past sparked up into a flaming rage. Something terrible had happened to him when he was only barely older than Maddison was now. Okay, she got that. But refusing to even mention what had happened when people were dying because of it? And trying to keep Maddison safely out of it by keeping her in the dark, far past the point where it got ridiculous? And leaving Chris and Carrie alone, not knowing any of the suspicions Maddison’s dad had about Professor Griffin, just so that he could get Maddison away from the guy? Really a bad idea. There was scared, and then there was running away, and seriously, if he thought the situation was so bad it needed to be fled from, why hadn’t he told Maddison how bad it actually was?
Maddison got to her feet, threw her phone at the pillow with unnecessary force so that it bounced, and stomped across the room to her open suitcase. If she was going to fight the urge to strangle people she might as well put it to good use and abuse her wardrobe. T-shirts could be thrown with more force than phones or random china cats on the mantelpiece, and they could also be thrown without particular guilt at fathers who dared to knock on Maddison’s door when she was simmering with anger.
“Go away,” Maddison snarled. One of her flip-flops bounced off her dad’s chest and fell over the stair railing. Maddison spared one second to admire her aim, and one to feel horrified that she’d thrown a shoe at her own dad, but honestly, right now? Right now he deserved it. “Unless you want to be honest,” she added for good measure, “for once in your life, stay out!”
Then she flipped her whole suitcase over and threw herself on the bed, fighting the urge to cry, and losing.
Back in Archer’s Grove, another plain, black car pulled into the parking lot of the Archer’s Grove police station. The two people who got out looked tired and harassed, probably because their flight had been delayed and the DNA results they needed weren’t in yet.
“I hate old murder cases,” the woman said to the man as she swung her jacket over her shoulders. There was a gun in the holster at her hip.
“I’ve only got a few minutes,” Father Michaels said with the greatest politeness and a certain amount of suspiciousness when the FBI turned up on his doorstep, “I’m in the middle of writing my sermon, and I have Mass at four thirty. And if you want to know about the priest here in the fifties I would really recommend getting in touch with my predecessor,” he added, which was when the suspicion turned into a certainty, because the blocky young man in a black suit who had waved a badge under Father Michael’s nose much too fast for him to actually read it looked confused, and then uncomfortable.
Father Michaels had been the priest at Saint Erasmus for six years, and he’d been chasing away thrill-seekers for every one of those years. He knew his local history, and the top ten most likely identities of the ghost in his cistern, and he knew the life and times of the Cuban revolutionary rumored to have made it to Archer’s Grove, bleeding and pursued, before dying and passing into legend. If the body of Cesar Francisco really had been found in the cistern of Saint Erasmus, then the government agency knocking on his door ought to be the CIA.
The FBI suggested that it was murder, or possibly a crime that had crossed state lines, or just that the local police department had decided there was something wrong with the crime scene. Or, as Father Michaels suspected, the FBI wasn’t involved in the case at all, and this was a ham-fisted attempt to pump him for information.
“Well then,” Father Michaels said kindly to the man on his doorstep, “what kind of questions do you have for me?”
He wasn’t very reassured. Agent Simmons was very sorry, but he needed to ask if anyone had borrowed the old church records recently. Asking what kind of old church records—Father Michaels was holding a distant hope that this was a creative way of verifying who’d been in the church basement in the sixties—had resulted in a lot of awkward mumbling, until finally Agent Simmons had resorted to pulling a notebook out of his pocket in order to get the title right and clarify that he’d meant to ask if anyone had come in and asked about the parish registers recently, and if so, could Father Michaels please describe them?
“Is it a matter of life or death?” Father Michaels asked.
“Yes,” Agent Simmons said earnestly. Father Michaels didn’t believe him for a minute, but as it was the FBI . . .
“I’ll need contact information,” Father Michaels said. “And I should probably have your badge number as well—I’m happy to cooperate, but if the situation’s been misrepresented to me, we’re both committing a mortal sin—” That got the agent’s attention, and he did hand over his badge, so Father Michaels could take down his name and badge number. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you all that much,” he said to Agent Simmons. “I’ve had four or five people ask to see the parish register, mostly college-age students. And we don’t keep track of that sort of thing unless they want to take a piece of church record out of the rectory. I think most people sign the guest registry, so if you want to look there you’re welcome to it.”
He showed the agent where the guest registry was, allowed him to take pictures of it, and agreed to call the man if he remembered anything, and then presided over his four-thirty Mass, thinking about his encounter with the agent all the while.
Then Father Michaels tracked down the phone number for the closest FBI field office, locked his door, let the cat in when the cat tried to claw through the door because he’d been sleeping under the statue of Saint Frances in the church, and prepared to spend a fair bit of time explaining himself. It was probably just a misunderstanding, but Father Michaels hadn’t forgotten the extremely strange conversation with the new local archivist about who else had asked to see the parish register. The man had seemed to think that his daughter would be in danger from anyone who came around asking about Father Gonzalez and the wreck of the San Telmo, and Father Michaels had to agree that the current circumstances were unsettling. He wasn’t suspicious by nature, but reportedly haunted churches attracted the odd and alarming and it was usually better to be safe than sorry.
When his
call went through, Father Michaels asked the cheerful-voiced switchboard operator if she could please check if someone with this specific badge number was supposed to be going door-to-door asking questions in Archer’s Grove.
“Certainly!” the operator said. “Let me see what I can do. Please understand that I may not be able to confirm or deny the actions of our agents if the investigation is ongoing—hmm.”
Long experience in dealing with people who didn’t want to tell him things, like why the Easter decorating committee was on strike, told Father Michaels he’d be best served by staying silent.
“Just a minute,” the switchboard operator said. “Would you please hold while I transfer you?”
He was on hold for a surprisingly short amount of time before someone with a voice perfect for yelling over a megaphone picked up the line.
“My apologies for the wait, Father,” she said. “You are correct, that badge number is faker than my left eye. Would you be able to describe this person?”
Bethy Bradlaw was, by temperament, more easily alarmed than Father Michaels. She was also under more stress than the priest, who was not trying to corral a film crew at a harbor while Robin Redd gave in to a childhood fascination with manatees and bounced around like he’d had too much sugar. And she hadn’t been forewarned about suspicious people looking for clues to the San Telmo. So it took her much longer to realize that the FBI agent who tracked her down at the harbor and approached her in the middle of hammering out last-minute script changes wasn’t quite legit.
Of course, another reason Bethy took longer to get suspicious was because Bethy had her own reason to fear law enforcement turning up at her door and asking questions about the week the Treasure Hunter crew had just spent in the Pine Lick State Park. Her brother had made a frightening attempt to sabotage his own television show and had nearly shot someone only a few days earlier, and Bethy had been half expecting a police officer at her door ever since. The FBI was worse, but Bethy wasn’t exactly surprised, and she spent about half an hour trying to run the guy off without obviously running him off or tipping him off to her brother’s whereabouts. Or shoving him off the dock before he could ask any awkward questions about her brother’s brief attempt to commit murder.
It was, in fact, only when he proved much more interested in the people her brother had tried to kill than in her brother that Bethy began to wonder where the interview was actually going.
“Look,” the federal agent said, pulling a manila envelope out of his briefcase and laying three misshapen pictures on Bethy’s rickety card table. It wobbled alarmingly at the addition of new weight, but Bethy had set it up in a tiny puddle of shade so she could guard the boat and, incidentally, get cornered by FBI agents. She was starting to regret sending the rest of the crew to pick up last-minute snacks and essentials. It wasn’t as if anyone was actually going to steal the boat. They were renting it for manatee filming and had gotten what they paid for, which was to say, floating death. The boat was listing sideways and was probably going to exceed its weight limit if Robin brought his beloved fiberglass manatee sculpture along, or Bethy relocated to the deck to get away from Agent Simmons.
“Ma’am,” Agent Simmons said, dragging Bethy’s attention back to the present, “I’m not interested in what your brother did or didn’t do on the night of the seventeenth, I’m just interested in whether or not you saw these kids in the woods that day.”
“Well, I may have,” Bethy said, finally looking at the pictures. The pictures of Chris and Carrie Kingsolver were matching school portraits. The picture of Maddison McRae had been carefully trimmed, but it looked suspiciously like it had been printed off a school website. There was a basketball court in the background and a random extra arm in the picture. It was also an older picture than the others. If all the kids’ parents had contributed these photos, Bethy would eat Robin’s ridiculous hat.
“It is absolutely essential that we identify their movements over the past three weeks,” Agent Simmons said earnestly, with a hint of a dark undertone. “Otherwise we might have to start looking more closely at those who may have seen them. Dragging other incidents into the light.”
“I see,” said Bethy, who had spent years dealing with bad, stuck-up, just plain overdramatic actors and had never seen a more pathetically heavy-handed threat in all her life. Or a worse portrayal of a federal agent—Bethy had been an extra in an episode of Bureau, and she had done a better job herself. She was increasingly less interested in cooperating. “Well, I’ll have to go back and go through the release forms from when we were shooting,” she said, because she did. “And then I’ll need you or somebody from your office to fill out a release form, and there will have to be a signed agreement on what information can be released and what can be withheld or the insurance company will drop us.”
“You can’t just tell me what I need to know today, and I’ll send someone to deal with the paperwork later?” Simmons asked. He was looking at the massive stack of forms Bethy was pulling out of numerous folders with a horrified expression, which Bethy had expected. Massive stacks of paperwork were how Bethy repelled people she couldn’t throw out when they were refusing to go away.
“Sorry,” Bethy said. “If I tell you anything, then the form has to be signed by you.”
That actually alarmed the agent, who suddenly found an excuse to leave without giving Bethy a card in case she needed to contact him. Even more suspicious. She was stuffing paperwork back into folders when Robin Redd turned up, thankfully minus Bill the Fiberglass Manatee, but lugging—oh horrors.
“Why do you have a giant inflatable manatee?” Bethy asked. “And why is it purple?”
“Who was the blond guy?” Redd asked her instead of answering.
“Oh,” Bethy sighed, wondering if she could get the folding table to collapse like it was supposed to or if she was going to have to wrestle it back into her car half-erect. “Some wannabe FBI agent who was asking me highly suspicious questions about those kids we met on the Annie Six-Fingers shoot.”
There was a splash, and the giant inflatable manatee was suddenly bobbing in the water. Redd looked almost more alarmed than the FBI agent had. He’d made a startled movement and apparently the purple inflatable manatee was slippery. “Did he ask you about the San Telmo?” Redd asked.
“No—well, he asked if the kids had said the name,” Bethy said. “Why, what does this have to do with a seventeenth-century sunken treasure ship—what are you doing in my folders?”
“They did leave contact numbers on those release forms you were waving around, right?” Redd asked, shaking out her file of catering contracts. Bethy watched him in alarm. My poor, poor filing system, she thought.
“Should I be more worried than I already am?” she asked finally, when Redd had finally found the correct forms and was searching his safari vest for his cell phone. “Or do you have a rational reason for throwing your inflatable manatee in the drink and frantically calling three kids we don’t know very well?”
Park ranger Helen Kinney was in the middle of coordinating search-and-rescue training in the sandbars, had three reports of marijuana being grown mere meters off a hiking trail to deal with, and needed to check on some potential vandalism to the giant rock that looked exactly like a hand. She looked up from her computer and made grabbing motions at Agent Simmons until he handed over his badge, and then she took one look and threw him out of her office because, she said, “If you want to waste my time pretending to be a federal agent, do it when Old Stoney the rock isn’t in danger of being picketed by the committee against public indecency and we haven’t lost a search-and-rescue team.”
Then she stared for a whole fifty seconds at the door he had flown out of like a man possessed before she sighed and picked up her phone.
“Kevin!” she said when someone picked up. “Glad I caught you—what on earth are you doing in Nebraska? Uh-huh. I don’t believe you at all, you know. Anyway, there was a fake federal agent in here asking about illegal hikin
g . . . ”
“Let me see your badges?” Father Michaels asked, for the second time in a day and a half. The two people on his stoop, both wearing sensible suits and even more sensible shoes, looked at one another and produced FBI badges that were a little less “second-hand-cobbled-together-thrift-store” in appearance. Father Michaels sighed.
“Okay,” he said, holding the door open. “Please tell me you aren’t here to ask me a lot of strange questions about the church being haunted and who might have looked at the parish registers in the past six years.”
The dark-haired woman blinked. Her partner, who had a worryingly orange tie and flyaway blond hair and was clearly newer to this, said, “Wait, what?”
“The conspiracy theories,” Father Michaels said. “I was warned about them when I first came to this parish, but to be fair, nobody expects to spend an entire month answering questions about past parish priests who may have buried treasure somewhere in the rectory. I have a sermon to write!”
“We’re actually here about the person passing himself off as an agent,” the woman said, “and about the body found in the church cistern last week. You said there’s an increased interest in buried treasure tied to this parish?”
She did not look as though she was taking this news lightly. Although it had to be admitted that she didn’t look like she took anything lightly: her suit was crisp, her hair was in a severe French braid, and her left eye wasn’t quite focused on Father Michaels because it was actually glass. And she didn’t look like the type of person to have lost that eye in a simple accident.
“Yes,” Father Michaels said. “Supposedly parts of the parish register kept by Father Gonzalez detail where the San Telmo went down, and since his mission church became this parish, people come in asking questions about him all the time. It’s flared up again recently—I think there must have been a television program about the ship.”
