15 Minutes of Flame

by Christin Brecher

  “Oh, my lord,” said Clemmie. “She killed the man?”

  “Turn here,” I said. “No! Wait. It’s two more streets.”

  “You’re going to get us killed,” she said. “Drink that coffee. Then call your policeman and tell him to arrest Brenda.”

  “Why does everyone keep calling him my policeman?” I said. “And Brenda didn’t kill him. Fontbutter said he saw her hit him but not strangle him. She hit him and took the map. Then Fontbutter blackmailed her to give him information.”

  “We still don’t know who killed Solder?”

  “First things first. Turn here!”

  Clemmie stepped on the brakes and turned left.

  “Over there,” I said, remembering the front door from our first Girl Scouts meeting to discuss Halloween Haunts. I joined the meeting to give the girls the exciting news that John Pierre Morton had loaned us his house.

  Clemmie turned off her lights but kept the car running.

  “I’ll be right back,” I said.

  “Hurry up,” she said. “This is creepy.”

  I ran across Shelly’s front lawn and up to her door. The lights were out, but I knocked.

  I knocked again and saw the curtain of the front window part. A moment later, she opened her front door.

  “What do you want?” said Shelly. “I won’t tell Peter, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “I have one question,” I said, sticking my foot across her threshold so she couldn’t close the door on me, “How did the chain in front of The Shack get unlocked to begin with? After all those years. Did you know Patience was there?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

  “Why were you so interested in the Morton house for Halloween Haunts?” I said.

  “Because it’s a great house,” she said, calmly.

  “Shelly, a man was killed,” I said.

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “What does it have to do with you?”

  From behind Shelly, a soft voice cried out.

  “Mommy?”

  Shelly looked behind her and up the stairs.

  “I’ve got to go,” she said.

  I kept my foot where it was.

  “Why did you want to use the Morton house?” I said. “If you don’t answer me, I’ll make sure you answer the police.”

  Shelly looked back up the stairs.

  “Coming, honey,” she said.

  She turned back to me impatiently.

  “Fine,” she said. “The other day, I was cleaning, going through old boxes that have been passed around my family forever. I came across one diary written by someone named Mary Backus. I was going to donate it to the Historical Association, but something caught my eye. The diary mentioned a man with some old-fashioned name who was looking for a treasure map in his house. There was an address, and when I heard you talking about John Pierre Morton’s house I realized it was the same place.”

  “And you decided you could poke around for treasure while you led the Girl Scouts?” I said. “I feel like that goes against troop rules.”

  Shelly rolled her eyes.

  “It didn’t matter anyway,” she said. “The treasure was down Old Holly’s well, right? I tried to ask that producer about it tonight, but I give up. I’m not meant to be rich. I’m just stuck with a good-for-nothing ex-husband.”

  “Give me the diary,” I said.

  Shelly grumbled and shut the door, barely missing my foot.

  A moment later, she peeked through the curtain to make sure I was gone.

  I waved.

  The door opened again. Shelly shoved a book into my hand and slammed the door.

  I walked back to Clemmie’s car, feeling good.

  “Do you have a Ziploc baggie?” I said when I got back into her car.

  “You think I drive around with Ziploc baggies?” said Clemmie. “What is that?”

  “Hopefully more clues,” I said, “but we need to keep moving.”

  “Where to now?”

  I opened my phone and looked up “Nantucket Lore & Legends.” I dialed Brenda.

  No answer.

  I sent her a text.

  I need to see the map.

  She did not respond.

  “The Morton house,” I said to Clemmie.

  “I’m not going to look at that skeleton,” she said. “I hate skeletons.”

  “I’ll only be a minute,” I said.

  “You told me you needed help,” she said, driving to the house. “So far, all I am is a chauffeur for a drunk lady. I want some action.”

  “If all goes well, you’ll have more action than you can imagine,” I said.

  “Good,” she said, heading across Main Street. “But no skeletons.”

  “Got it,” I said.

  I started to read the diary while Clemmie drove. The cover was similar to the one Agnes had photocopied for me, but it did not have initials on it. I surmised from the dates and stories that I was reading another diary of Mary Backus, written at the same time as the one Agnes had given me.

  A few minutes later, we reached the Morton house. The lights were out. I took it the Candleers had left. Then I saw movement through a window on the second floor, from the room I’d used as my workshop. It wasn’t Tinker.

  “Gotcha,” I said.

  “Who?” said Clemmie.

  “Be right back,” I said.

  I jumped out of the car and shot up the stairs. At the landing, I turned on the hall lights.

  As I suspected, Brenda peeked around the doorway.

  “Don’t be scared,” she said.

  “I need to see the map,” I said. “The only place it can be is with you. That’s the safest place, isn’t it? Don’t worry. I won’t take it from you. I just need to see it.”

  Brenda looked me squarely in the eyes. She reached into her blouse and pulled out the map. I took a few pictures of it with my phone. As I did, I noticed that the stitching seemed hesitant in certain places. As if the X had been sewn in several times, in different areas, before landing in its final place.

  “Are you sure there isn’t anything else you want to tell me?” I said, handing the map to her.

  “Like what?” she said, retreating into the room.

  “Like the tree?” I said. “Old Holly found the axe under his porch.”

  “How did you know?” she said, sitting on the rocker.

  “You said you scurried around Old Holly’s property after you left Peter in The Shack,” I said. “I sat up on Old Holly’s roof the other day. It would have been a maze to get to that well any other way except the path my cousins and Kyle had made. The only way you could have snuck back there without any of us noticing was if you’d been there before. You knew the lay of the land.”

  Brenda looked at her hands.

  “I was protecting the dead,” she said. “I went to chop the tree down before your excavation, after the men cleared the path. I was hoping when you arrived the next morning and could not get through, you’d all come to your senses and leave poor Nancy alone. But I couldn’t get the tree down, so I hid the axe under the porch and left. When I overheard you talking about the map, I knew I’d been summoned by the spirits. As I passed the tree, I gave it one more push. This time it toppled down. I had no idea that the woman would get hit. I didn’t know she was there. I wasn’t trying to kill anyone.”

  Brenda burst into tears.

  “Lock the front door behind me,” I said. “I’ll be back in a few.”

  Leaving the Morton house through the kitchen door, I hopped across the backyard to The Shack. Once inside, I turned on my phone’s flashlight. This time, I was not interested in history. I needed a tool. I searched the ground until I found the spade I’d used to take down the Cooper’s Candles sign—the spade that had been my tool when I started the entire chain of events.

  Armed, I jumped back into Clemmie’s car. My senses were strong again, my inebriation no lo
nger an issue.

  “What’s next?” said Clemmie.

  I opened the photo of the map and showed it to her.

  “We find the X,” I said.

  Easier said than done. I had no idea what I was looking at.

  “I hope it’s a lot of money,” Clemmie said. “If we find it, can we keep it?”

  She started the car.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  “To Hummock Pond,” she said. “The X is out by Ram’s Pasture.”

  “How do you know?” I said.

  “Kyle and I go there for picnics,” she said. “There’s a clearing back there that we love. Just where that X is. It’s a spot that’s not for tourists. We love it.”

  I was happy I’d called Clemmie, the wife of a man who knew the island’s flora and fauna, its nooks and crannies. I had a feeling we were about to find ourselves a treasure, one that, in turn, would hopefully help us capture a murderer.

  Twenty minutes later, we were bouncing down a dirt road that my Beetle would have flat-out died on. As we were nearing the beach on a dirt road, Clemmie suddenly pulled left and headed over a field.

  “We don’t do this during the day,” she said. “We walk. Even Kyle has no interest in getting hassled for being the only pickup in the middle of an empty field. But I’ve always wanted to do this. He’s going to be so jealous.”

  “Are we almost there?” I said, balancing myself against the dashboard.

  “Hang in there,” she said. “You dragged me all around. Now it’s my turn.”

  With one more turn, we found ourselves in an enclosed field.

  “What a rare find,” I said, jumping out of the truck.

  “You can bring Peter,” she said. “We won’t mind. Kyle found it once when he was doing a job.”

  Clemmie turned on her phone’s flashlight.

  “Where to?” she said.

  I looked at the map again.

  The X was in a circle of trees like the one we were in. It was truly a miracle that the land had not been touched. I held the map in the same direction we were in, hoping that Patience had taken geography into account. The X was in the upper-right corner of the field.

  “Come on,” I said.

  Clutching my spade, we ran across the field. In the area the map had indicated, we began to look around for something, anything.

  “How long ago was that map made?” she said after a few futile minutes.

  “Over a hundred years ago,” I said.

  “Let me call Kyle,” she said. “He’ll know.”

  I kicked around the ground while Clemmie told Kyle about the map and about where we were. When she hung up, she marched into the brush.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  “The plants grow,” she said. “The circle was probably bigger back then. Kyle said to walk in about five feet. That’s where the original X probably pointed to.”

  “Genius,” I said, taking a similar path a few feet away.

  I never needed the spade.

  A few feet into my search, my foot hit something. I looked down to see a pile of wood. I flashed my phone onto the unusual configuration and realized that each piece of wood was about three inches wide and two feet long; they were fastened together into a frame with a flat, rotting bottom. I thought it might be an old box when I noticed two other, curved pieces of wood below it.

  I was looking at the remains of what could only be described as a cradle. One of the rockers had fallen off. The bottom was cracked and rotting, but it was an old cradle, without a doubt.

  I sat by the relic and opened Mary Backus’s diary. A few minutes later, I had the answers to the story of Patience Cooper and Nancy Holland.

  “Why are you sitting here? I’m looking everywhere. I can’t find a thing,” said Clemmie, sitting down beside me. “Look at this! It looks like a cradle.”

  “Shelly didn’t understand Mary’s diary,” I said. “She didn’t understand the treasure. Emily and I had the right idea the other day. Patience had a baby boy. She gave him to her friend Nancy to protect him from Jedediah. They moved the child from place to place so that his father couldn’t find him. Each took turns caring for him. And they passed the map back and forth, each time with a different location about where the baby was. That explains why there were pinpricks on the cloth.”

  “How did Mary know about a baby if it was such a secret?”

  “Because Mary was Jedediah’s lover,” I said. “This was her real diary, with all the good stuff. The diary I found at the library had the same dates as the entries here, but a completely different story—one that would cover her tracks in case anyone ever became suspicious about her and Jedediah.”

  “What a witch,” said Clemmie.

  “Mary was the one who left Nantucket with Jedediah. In the first diary I read, she wrote about her excitement about an upcoming visit to her cousin in Louisiana. In the diary I read tonight, she wrote that she was sad for her parents that she would never make it there. They’d never know that she was heading to sea with her one true love.”

  “Oh, boy,” said Clemmie. “Bad choice.”

  “She was no saint,” I said. “She and Jedediah killed Patience and buried her in The Shack, where we found her. Then he went to get the baby, his treasure, from Nancy. She must have killed herself, with the map, to save the child from discovery. Jedediah got the money, but at least he left without the child.”

  “She was a good friend,” said Clemmie.

  “The best,” I said, missing Emily. I was so happy Victoria had come into my friend’s life, but now I decided to do a better job helping her and Neal.

  “I hope someone found the baby,” said Clemmie.

  I looked back into the cradle, happy that, for a change, there was no skeleton with my discovery.

  Clemmie and I both looked across the field. There was movement ahead, but I couldn’t see what it was. Clemmie saw it too and grabbed my spade.

  “Stella?” I heard Andy say.

  “Andy?” I said as his form emerged from the darkness. “What are you doing here?”

  “Kyle Nolan called me,” he said, finding us. “Clemmie, your husband is worried about you. Right now, I have my officers looking for Brenda Wentworth. Please don’t tell me you’re wasting my time.”

  “We figured out the mystery of Patience Cooper and Nancy Holland. And we found the treasure. It was a baby.” I showed him the photo of the map and the cradle. “The husband married and killed women for money; he jumped from ship to ship between marriages, which is how he got away with his life of crime. Then he had a baby with Patience. She realized she married a monster, so she hid the child. She and her friend shared in the baby’s care and passed secret information about his whereabouts in domestic linens Jedediah would never look at. Finally, he took the money from the Petticoat Row ladies, killed his wife to cover his tracks, and took off with his lover.”

  “How did you get this photo?” he said.

  “That’s all you care about from that story?” said Clemmie.

  “I got it from Brenda.”

  “I knew it,” he said. “Were you hiding her?”

  “No!” I said, “But I’ve got to go. I promised Clemmie I’d show her a good time tonight. I am having a little party in about an hour. I highly recommend that you come on by. In fact, I’ll deliver Brenda. Ready, Clemmie?”

  “Kyle is really missing out,” she said. “Can he come?”

  “See you in an hour?” I said to Andy.

  “What are you up to?” he said.

  “You worry too much,” I said. “I promise you will have a great night if you come.”

  “It’s my job to worry,” Andy called out as Clemmie and I took off across the field.

  Chapter 24

  “We’re catching a thief, right?” said Clemmie as we climbed into her truck. “We’re not really having a party. I’m not dressed for a party.”

  “Why can’t we have a party and catch a thief?” I said.


  “I don’t know what to wear to that kind of event,” she said, driving us across the field and back onto the dirt road.

  I called Peter. Thankfully, he answered.

  “Drop everything,” I said. “I don’t care what it is. I have an emergency need for as many hermit crabs as you can gather and get to the Morton house in the next twenty minutes.”

  “I’m your man,” he said and hung up.

  Love that guy.

  “By the way, I still think it was Brenda,” Clemmie said. “I’m with Andy. Are we going to tie her up and then have a party? Throw hermit crabs on her? That’s sick, Stella. I expected more from you.”

  “Brenda’s not guilty,” I said. “Fontbutter gave her an alibi. He confessed that he saw Brenda run off with the map after hitting Solder. I remember that the police arrested Brenda once for trying to stop someone from tearing down an old house. If you look at her actions, they all point to one thing: protecting the past. First, she tried to sabotage the path my cousins and Kyle had made. It was cold, dark, and windy that night, and she could not quite pull it off, so she gave up and hid the axe under Old Holly’s porch. She wasn’t worried about anyone finding it, because she hadn’t succeeded. The next day, however, she finds out from Peter that there’s going to be a Netflix special, and she loses it. She heads back to Old Holly’s, where things only get worse. She sees Agnes has stolen Patience’s bone and rescues it, so to speak. Then she hears us talking about the map. By the time she succeeds in knocking over the tree, her mission knows no bounds. She hits Solder with the femur, takes the map, and hightails it out of there, escaping by the canoe.”

  “So Brenda is going to be a guest at your party?” said Clemmie.

  “I’m not worried about Brenda,” I said. “But, sure, she’s invited.”

  “Who else?” said Clemmie.

  “Our suspects,” I said.

  “Kyle’s got to come to this,” she said. “He’s going to divorce me if he misses this party.”

  “OK,” I said. “Our suspects, and Kyle. And Peter.”

  “And Andy,” she said.