by E. A. House
Not that she expected them to call her. Maddison’s luck was generally horrible and she expected to spend the rest of the week glued to the phone wishing someone would call her, and getting nothing. She’d even tried calling Chris and Carrie with her cell phone from the attic, but although she got a full five bars if she stood on top of the old dresser, she still couldn’t get through to Chris or Carrie. The phone wasn’t even ringing before going to voicemail. Maddison was stuck feeling horribly guilty for having her phone out at the dinner table, feeling terrible for spending all her time on the Lyndons’ home phone in between playing cards with Mrs. Lyndon.
When Mrs. Lyndon won War and then three games of Go Fish, Maddison realized she wasn’t paying enough attention to what she was doing, and surrendered the deck of cards so Mrs. Lyndon could play Solitaire. Then her cell phone finally, actually rang.
It was an unknown number, but Maddison answered with shaking hands anyway.
“Hello?” Please, please, please don’t be a telemarketer.
“Hi! Maddison, right?” The voice was familiar, but it wasn’t the familiar voice Maddison had been hoping for.
“Father Michaels?” Maddison asked in surprise.
“Yes,” the priest agreed. “We met when you came by to ask me some questions about the old parish register.” They had actually met when Maddison, Chris, and Carrie had fallen into the cistern in the church basement while sneaking around where they weren’t supposed to and had unearthed a dead body, but Father Michaels had ended the day by giving them tea and telling them about the parish register and was surprisingly forgiving. Maddison had no idea why he might be calling her.
“Is there . . . something wrong with the parish register?” Maddison asked weakly.
“You’re the first person who picked up the phone,” Father Michaels explained, which didn’t really explain anything. “Maddison, this may seem completely out of line, but I’d prefer you be angry at me than in some sort of trouble. I had a man come to my door yesterday pretending to be a federal agent and asking questions about you and the parish registers.”
“What?” Maddison said. “Me?” Had they decided to go after her father already?
“Actually, you and both your friends,” Father Michaels explained. “He asked me a lot of strange questions about who had asked to see the parish registers in the past month. I called the FBI and they’re looking for this phony agent but I wanted to make sure that you knew what was going on and to be careful. I really didn’t like the looks of him.”
For a moment, Maddison couldn’t find her voice, and then when she did, the first thing she asked was, “Did you tell my dad?”
“His phone line is busy, that’s why I called you.”
“Of course it is,” Maddison said, and thanked the priest on autopilot so she could hang up and figure out where her dad was.
He was in the study, on the phone, and Maddison heard him before she saw him, and then decided to listen in because he was arguing with someone about stalking. Specifically, that he had not noticed anyone stalking him and so this was a new development.
“Yes, well, I can hardly do anything if I don’t know what the man looks like,” he was saying. Maddison cautiously pushed the door open. Her dad was pacing back and forth across the small room waving one hand and scowling. “What—no! Why would I have robbed a bank?”
Maddison started edging her way into the room, careful not to startle him. If her dad didn’t know she was there he might say more than he usually did around her.
“Helen, I know you have a lot to do, I’m just saying this is turning into a matter of life and death and if I don’t know what he looks like I can’t—” He looked up and right at Maddison. Maddison froze. A look of supreme horror danced across her dad’s face.
“Helen, I need to call you back,” he said, lowering the phone from his ear and ending the call even as the person on the other end started yelling furiously.
“A matter of life and death?” Maddison asked, coming into the room and shutting the door. She wasn’t seeing red, but she was having trouble focusing she was suddenly so angry. “When were you planning to tell me about this?”
“Maddison,” her dad started to say.
“Don’t ‘Maddison’ me!” On some faraway level Maddison knew that starting a fight right now was a bad idea. On the much more immediate level of right now she did not care. She had passed her tolerance level for this frustrating evasion about three weeks ago, and if her dad tried the “I’ll explain everything, just not right now” route she might explode.
“I’m telling you . . . ” Her dad was trying to stuff his phone in his pocket and failing. “This is not something you want to get involved in—”
“Yes, I can tell, you sulked around in corners spying on my friends rather than facing it!” Maddison snapped. “You ran away to Nebraska rather than facing it!”
“Because it almost destroyed me last time!” her dad yelled. “I can’t watch the same thing happen to you! I won’t let you get involved in this!”
“But, you can’t seem to comprehend the fact that I am already involved!” Maddison yelled right back, startling both her father and herself. The windows may have rattled a little bit. They were both shaking. The chicken that had been perched in the window box directly outside the study window was upset and clucking furiously.
And then the door positively slammed open, and Mr. Lyndon was framed in the doorway, expression somewhere between murderous and exasperated. Apparently he had heard them yelling, and apparently Mr. Lyndon had had enough.
“All right,” he declared, glaring at Maddison, her father, and the chicken that was now pecking inquisitively at the glass of the window. “Both of you, sit down, now.” He opened the window and said kindly to the chicken, “You shoo.” Then he gave it a gentle shove out of the flower box. The chicken tried to peck at his fingers and then fluttered away in a huff. “I mean it,” he said to Maddison and her dad, who looked at each other, and then at Mr. Lyndon, and then sat down on either end of the desk. Mr. Lyndon glared at the both of them and sighed.
“You know,” he said, “I’m retired.” He crossed his arms and looked up at the ceiling, as if just rolling his eyes heavenward was no longer enough. “Do you know what that means? It means I’m supposed to be done with taking witness statements forever. I’m supposed to be done with interviewing witnesses who are confused and upset, and I’m not supposed to be comparing multiple accounts of the night in question to see if there’s anything they can agree on. But then, that’s always been a particular problem with this case, hasn’t it?”
“Greg,” Maddison’s dad started to say.
“Go on. You were going to explain to me why the San Telmo is suddenly a major factor in this case, since not once in the whole investigation did anyone other than Wyzowski mention a sunken treasure ship.”
“It—it wasn’t—as far as I knew, it had nothing to do with Ryan disappearing,” Maddison’s dad stammered, and Mr. Lyndon put his head in his hands.
“No, I mean it,” Maddison’s dad said, hopping off the desk so he could gesture wildly. “Greg—look, we were all friends! Wyzowski and Ryan and Griffin and I were in the same dorm off and on, we had something like six classes together—and we spent part of our free time looking for clues to the San Telmo together. But the night Ryan disappeared he told me he was going to a concert. And there’d been—tension between the five of us for a couple of weeks, so he’d been tiptoeing around me. I didn’t see how Ryan’s disappearance could have anything to do with the San Telmo, so, no, I didn’t mention it.”
“Wyzowski did,” Mr. Lyndon said. “Wyzowski, in between telling me that there might have been alien involvement and insisting that he had never once in his entire life tried any kind of mood-altering substance, told me that Ryan Moore had been really excited because he had just found a new clue to the mystery of the lost treasure of the San Telmo. He said Ryan was going to meet you to go looking for it the night he disappeared.”
“What?”
“Wait,” Maddison said. “Who was the fifth person?” Her dad and Mr. Lyndon turned to stare at her, her dad opening his mouth uncertainly. Mr. Lyndon looked proud that she’d noticed. “You said you and Ryan and Wyzowski and Griffin, but that’s only four. Who else was there?”
“I . . . ” her dad said.
“Kevin,” Mr. Lyndon said. He sounded irritated. “You’re going to have to tell her eventually. I’m honestly shocked that you’ve managed this far without needing to explain.”
“Explain what?” Maddison wailed.
Her dad sighed. “It wasn’t just me and Ryan and Griffin and Wyzowski,” he explained. “There was another person, one who never deserved any of this.”
“And?” Maddison asked impatiently.
“She didn’t share a dorm room with us, obviously,” her dad said. “They wouldn’t do co-ed dorms for another three years.”
“Who?” Maddison demanded. Her dad sat down heavily in Mr. Lyndon’s desk chair and grabbed a random pen so he didn’t have to look at anyone.
“Elsie Kingsolver,” he said.
“We were all in the same geography class our freshman year,” Maddison’s dad explained. Maddison was staring at him and there was a weird rushing noise in her ears. Hopefully it wasn’t shock, if she passed out now it would be embarrassing. That, and her dad would probably try to explain how he knew Chris and Carrie’s Aunt Elsie while Maddison was out cold so he never actually had to tell her anything.
“I was assigned to room with Ryan, and we’d met Griffin at orientation, and he had a math class with Elsie, and then Ryan made friends with Wyzowski and just turned up with him one day, and nobody ever knew where they met,” Maddison’s dad explained, waving a hand as if to indicate that that part wasn’t important.
“The tables in the geography lecture hall seated five comfortably—they were supposed to be able to seat six—and the rest is history,” he went on. “We were inseparable for the next three-and-a-half years. We were planning to go into fields that were . . . I guess you might say . . . complementary? History, geology, archives, and oceanography all play into each other, especially if you spend your free time treasure hunting. And Elsie was—kind of terrifying,” her dad said. “She had the most incredible mind. She loved puzzles and she’d practiced all kinds until she could look at a collection of separate objects and tell you three different ways you could fit them together. She was the one who started the whole search for the San Telmo,” he explained. “It was this little sidebar in our geography textbooks and I’d been interested in the history behind it. We were sitting over lunch talking about it one day and suddenly Elsie said, ‘Well, why hasn’t anyone ever looked into the lee side of Archer’s Grove?’ and all of a sudden the theory became practice.” He had a faraway look in his eyes. Maddison was afraid to breathe too loudly for fear she’d break the spell.
Chris and Carrie hadn’t talked about their aunt that much. They had both known her all their lives, so Maddison supposed that there was little for them to discuss, and the loss was still too fresh for either of Maddison’s friends to feel like sharing. Maddison had known that Elsie Kingsolver was a much-loved woman, but she’d always been a plot point rather than a character in her own right. And now she turned out to have been a major player in Maddison’s family history, too.
“Sometimes, I think Elsie saw how the five of us fit together better than anyone else,” Maddison’s dad added. He picked up a snow globe from Mr. Lyndon’s desk and turned it over. “And then, Ryan went missing and suddenly none of my other friends would talk to me,” he said, watching the white flakes swirl around. “And the police were asking me all these leading questions and only the police chief overseeing the case seemed to think I was telling the truth when I said I hadn’t done anything.”
“Except act like an idiot teenager,” Mr. Lyndon said.
“Well, what was I supposed to do, develop psychic abilities and report Ryan missing before he left?”
“Mention the San Telmo before today?”
“There was nothing to connect the San Telmo with Ryan disappearing!” Maddison’s dad protested. “And there had been arguments between all of us the week before, it was right before finals and we were . . . hormonal.”
“What does that mean?” Maddison asked, and then got a very good idea when her dad covered his face with his hands and blushed. Mr. Lyndon raised an amused eyebrow.
“Elsie had started dating a guy and I didn’t like him,” her dad admitted.
“Did you like her?” Maddison asked. “What?” she added when her dad looked horrified. “It’s an important question, lovers’ spats are practically the first thing they check for when someone goes missing!”
“Valid point,” Mr. Lyndon said. Maddison preened.
“I actually didn’t,” Maddison’s dad said. “We were really good friends for a really long time, and we both thought about it, but in the end—I saw fireworks when I met your mother. I was never in love with Elsie Kingsolver in the same way.”
“But you still dragged us to her funeral,” Maddison said. “Without explaining anything to me or—actually, did you ever tell Mom this?”
“I had to tell your mom, she wanted to know why I was so interested in taking her name when we got married,” her dad explained. “I very nearly didn’t get into any graduate program at all because of Ryan’s disappearance. My grades suffered and I had to explain to every school where I interviewed why I was the subject of an ongoing police investigation—and yes,” he said to Mr. Lyndon, “I know that you did everything you could to stop that and that it wasn’t legal for the schools to be getting letters about me, but that didn’t matter to the vultures. I was getting anonymous phone calls too. A bunch of people thought I did something to Ryan.”
“I never understood that,” Mr. Lyndon added. “There was no more evidence that you did it than there was that the Wyzowski kid did it, but for some reason everyone assumed we were going to arrest you. I even had to have words with a couple of the local cops on the subject of blabbing to reporters.”
“Anyway,” Maddison’s dad said hurriedly, “I had a heck of a time moving on from the whole mess, and when I met your mother in our first year of graduate school I told her before our first date. She’s always known.”
Maddison sighed.
“I was trying to put the whole thing in the past,” her dad said. “The last thing I wanted was for someone to make your life a nightmare because they remembered my part in a disappearance years ago. So, I didn’t tell you, and I didn’t see anyone from school for eighteen years, and as far as we were all concerned it was over. Nobody even contacted me, except for one letter from Elsie right after you were born, wishing me luck. And then . . . ” He paused. “Then Elsie sent me a letter. A postcard, really. It had a picture of a Spanish galleon on the front and ‘It’s starting again’ written on the back in an old keyword cypher we used to use.” Maddison gasped. “And two days later I found out,” her dad said, “that she was dead.”
“Was her name the key?” Maddison asked.
“That was her favorite,” her dad agreed. “And then . . . well you know the rest . . . ”
Maddison did, sort of. Her dad’s story explained so much—the paranoia, the insistence on going to the funeral, the moving across the state and taking a new job at the drop of a hat, the weird avoidance of Professor Griffin, even the stalking of Chris and Carrie. It just also all seemed so pointless.
“You know, we wasted a heck of a lot of time in the beginning, wondering if you were out to kill everybody,” Maddison said, and her dad choked. “No, really,” Maddison said, warming to her subject. “You kept following Chris and Carrie around and being creepily nosey! I had a screaming fight with Chris because he was absolutely convinced you were going to murder him in his sleep and I still don’t think he trusts you at all. And what was the deal with following Carrie around and taking pictures of her?”
“Wait, what?” Her
dad looked now more confused than guilty, which Maddison felt was an annoying response to a legitimate complaint.
“Taking pictures of your teenage daughter’s friends without asking either girl for permission is a very suspicious thing to do, Kevin,” Mr. Lyndon added.
“I agree,” Maddison’s dad said, looking puzzled. “But I haven’t actually done anything like that.”
Oh, this was ridiculous. “I saw the picture,” Maddison said. “It fell out of one of your folders in the study when I was trying to find your glasses.” Her dad continued to look bewildered. “Here, look,” Maddison said, and pulled the picture of the picture up on her phone. “See?”
“Oh,” her dad said. “That’s not—Maddison, that isn’t a picture of Carrie.”
Maddison looked from her dad to the picture and back again, letting her incredulity show on her face.
“Has anybody ever mentioned to Carrie how very much she looks like her aunt did at that age?” Maddison’s dad asked in a slightly strained voice.
“This is Elsie?” Maddison asked.
“Carrie really looks like her aunt,” her dad said.
“The Kingsolver case?” Detective Hermann said. “Yeah, what about it?” He’d been about to head home. It was six o’clock and the police station was switching over to night shift, and Detective Hermann had been hard at work since seven in the morning with exactly one break, during which someone had accidentally walked off with his chips. He’d tracked them down to Detective Barrie, who hadn’t even realized they were in her bag and returned them in perfect condition, but that was the biggest success Detective Hermann had had all day.
The convenience store robber had struck again, there had been another flare-up of the graffiti artist who kept bothering the park service, and no progress had been made at all in the Kingsolver case. The murder of Elsie Kingsolver—if, as Detective Hermann still had to convince some people, it truly was a murder—had been stuck ever since the suspiciously convenient suspect had committed a completely out-of-character suicide. So when the two federal agents came in asking for him, he was only too happy to help.
