Chapter 14
14
Sunday, 8:19 a.m.
“ N o. Read that last part to me again,” Tom said, his Texas twang intensifying as his frustration increased. He banged the phone’s receiver on the desk. “Mansour? Hello?... No, I didn’t catch it. I need the last paragraph again.”
Across from the desk, Richard sat in the deep window sill of his office and watched the sun edging into the southeastern sky. “Tell him to email it. After breakfast we’ll go down to the pub.”
“Man—Mansour? No. Just no. Email it. I’ll get back to you in an hour or so. Yes. One hour.” Grumbling in the nonsensical way he’d mastered since becoming a father – words that sounded profane but weren’t – he set the receiver back into its cradle with exaggerated care. “How are you so calm? All this crap should be driving you crazy.”
“I was actually thinking that you’ve taken to the country life about as well as you expected Samantha would.” Richard straightened. “Don’t mistake me, though. Kigomo annoyed me. I don’t mean to allow him to get away with it.”
“Now that’s what I wanted to hear. Lead the way to the breakfast room, because I couldn’t find it with a compass.”
That explained why he’d found Tom this morning talking to himself outside the billiards room. Canniebrae had never been particularly disorienting to him, but then he’d grown up spending time there. He did recall thinking as a young boy that the place featured an endless number of doors and rooms to explore.
Samantha, of course, had figured out the layout almost immediately. Whatever arguments there were for nature versus nurture, she, the way her mind worked, was a marvel. He didn’t think he would ever tire of trying to figure her out.
“Honestly,” Tom said as they walked, “with the electricity and the phones and the wi-fi and the internet as they are here, I don’t know how either of you have been able to stand it. The—”
“What?” Samantha said, as she emerged from the breakfast room, a can of diet Coke in one hand. “You can’t hack it here, Donner? Ready to flee to London?”
“I’d just like to point out that you’re not trying to save a two-billion-dollar deal,” the attorney retorted.
“Nope. I’m ghost busting.” She hefted the camera in her other hand. “I’ll be in the attic if you need me.” Stretching up, she gave Richard a soft peck on the lips. “Take your walkie-talkie with you when you go into the village. It should have just enough range.”
“So she’s hiding out in the attic like Mr. Rochester’s looney wife?” Tom commented, eyeing the two of them.
Samantha laughed, the sound floating back over her shoulder as she headed away. “That’s me, Bertha Mason Rochester. Points to you for knowing your Charlotte Bronte.”
As she turned the corner and vanished, Tom led the way into the breakfast room. “Katie actually forced me to sit through the Michael Fassbender movie,” he confessed.
“It still counts,” Richard returned, trying to decide when, exactly, he’d gone from being troubled by the animosity between Tom and Samantha to being amused by it.
“And why is Jellicoe hanging out in your attic?”
“That’s where all the good stuff from the collapsed wing was stored, plus at least one Gainsborough and God knows what else that’s ended up there over the years. She’s cataloguing.” Which was fine, except that she’d more or less declared that she meant to go after the highwayman’s treasure. If she’d given up, it was the first time he could recall her doing so. If she hadn’t given up, though, what was she doing in the attic? He wanted to go take a look, but the damned clock was ticking on the Kigomo deal. Richard was generally fine with multitasking, but this was getting ridiculous.
And then it got worse. Yule hurried into the room. “M’laird, there’s a man at the door. He claims to be here to see Miss Sam, but…”
“Is he a large black man?” Richard asked. “Short hair graying at the temples, and a scar through his left eyebrow?”
“Aye, m’laird.”
“Walter?” Tom mouthed.
Richard nodded crisply. “Show him up to Samantha in the attic. And he’ll need a room.”
“Aye, m’laird.” Yule started out of the room, then paused again. “I’m nae certain what to make of him, m’laird. He’s dressed like an Eskimo.”
If he didn’t explain Walter, rumors and speculation would flood the house. “He’s Walter Barstone. Samantha’s adopted father.” He sighed. “He’s family. Family who doesn’t like the cold.”
“Of course, m’laird.”
Oh, this was just perfect. He’d be out of the house for a good part of the day, giving Samantha plenty of time to tell Walter everything she knew about the highwayman treasure and enlist her cohort’s assistance in tracking it down. Which meant that now he was going to have to decide how far he was willing to let this go, and what he was willing to do to put a stop to it. And whether he needed to bring anyone else in on his side.
As far as he knew Reg and Miss Nyland were digging through the ruined wing again, though he supposed eventually even his cousin would have to realize that either the map didn’t, in fact, exist any longer, or it wasn’t where he thought it was.
“All in all,” Tom asked, “are you wishing you’d stayed in Palm Beach?”
“Not so far, but that could change.” Soon, actually.
Samantha leaned closer to the camera’s monitor, as if that would make the volume on the headphones go above ten. Norway might be smarter than she let on, but the woman had the investigatory skills of a moose, at least where asking questions to empty air was concerned.
“Is Will Dawkin here?” came faintly to her ears, followed immediately by, “Let’s listen back and see if he answered,” followed by five repeats of her slightly garbled question from her recorder.
“Patience, Sam,” Samantha breathed, resisting the urge to forward the camera’s recording. This bit was only twenty minutes. She just hoped it wouldn’t be twenty minutes of listening to the same two questions rewinding over and over.
“Will Dawkin, if you’re here, please make a sound for us.” Pause. “Did you hear anything, Reginald?”
“No. Play it back.”
Samantha knocked her head against the chest of drawers.
The request repeated. Twice. “I don’t hear anything,” Eerika commented quietly.
“Should we ask Sam if we’re doing it correctly?”
“Oh, yes, and while you’re at it, ask her if I’m wearing greedy colors tonight or not, why don’t you?”
“Move past it, Ree. She’s American; they’re all rude.” He paused, the warm red and yellow blob of his form leaning toward his girlfriend. “Are you recording that?”
“Oops. How do I erase something?”
That went on for at least a minute, so Samantha popped the top of her soda and took a drink of diet Coke. They thought she was rude. Hah. She’d been going more for fresh-faced and forthright, but rude was close enough where these two were concerned. If they cared to become acquainted with her any more deeply than she did with them, she’d eat a cobweb. Usually watching and learning about people kind of fascinated her, but she knew these guys already, or at least their type. They were the sort she most enjoyed robbing.
“Sam, this is—”
She jumped, yelping, as the dark figure topped the stairs behind her. In the same swift heartbeat she recognized the form, paused the playback, and slipped out of the headphones before she rolled to her feet. “You came!”
“Of course I came. I’m not happy about it, but… Is that a Bernini?” Stoney veered sideways, pulling out his phone and flipping on the flashlight as he leaned down to examine the white marble bust.
“Yep. Louis the Fourteenth. I found a Gainsborough a couple of days ago.”
“I’m telling you, kid, if you ever change your mind about this guy we could buy a country with the proceeds.”
“Not changing my mind.” Once Stoney straightened she hugged him, then pointed him toward the chair she’d vacated. “I have a story to tell you, and then I need your help.”
He eyed her as he took the seat. “What kind of help?”
“A heist. Maybe.”
“Honey, don’t get me all excited if you’re just going to crush my hopes again.”
She perched on the edge of the chest of drawers and told him about the highwayman thing, from Reggie’s nastiness over a reportedly non-existent map to Rick’s line in the sand and the missing books from the library, to the maps she’d made and her ploy to sneak clues off of Reggie and Norway last night.
“Show me what you’ve sketched out,” he said when she’d finished.
Samantha dug out her map pages and handed them over. “You agree with me, then? There’s something out there?”
“Addison tells you everything. If he knew for a fact nothing existed, he’d have a story about how he looked and found nothing. By my thinking he found something, and for some reason he doesn’t want his cousin – or his own wife-to-be – to know what or where it is. Ergo, it’s illegal and it’s valuable.”
Samantha had walked down the same path, but she’d stopped short of that ending. “Rick might be sketchy but outright illegal’s pushing it, don’t you think?”
“Look in the mirror, honey. Are you sketchy, or illegal? He’s kept who you really are secret from his own family.”
“He’s more just fudged some of the details.”
Because he was Stoney he’d kept his voice low for the entire conversation, but there were still enough greedy, prissy ears around here that she couldn’t help glancing over her shoulder. She might not have a bounty on her head, but some of the pieces she’d liberated had hefty return rewards. If someone did turn her in, it would probably end up being pretty lucrative for him or her or them.
“How accurate is the topography?”
“Pretty accurate. I went horseback riding for three hours yesterday so I could take a closer look. I cross-shaded the sections I haven’t been able to verify.”
“You’ve got what, six possible locations for burying something?”
“That’s as far as I could narrow it down from the one look – presuming he didn’t just shove the goods under a fallen tree somewhere and they’ve washed down into the loch.” That was possible, she supposed, but it didn’t fit with Rick’s current secrecy and annoyance. Aside from that, Will Dawkin seemed to have been a competent thief, so fallen-logging didn’t make sense. “I’m listening to a recording right now, but all I’ve gotten so far is the urge to barf.”
Stoney lowered the pages to his lap. “Are you really going after it, then? And what if you find it?”
Samantha grimaced. “I don’t have to have an answer for that yet, do I?”
“You’re really asking me that?” he retorted. “You never go in without a plan to get out.”
“This isn’t Fort Knox,” she retorted. “And I’m thirty percent sure the treasure isn’t even a real thing. So give me a frickin’ break.”
“Uh huh. Then I flew overnight from Florida, took a tiny plane to some no name airport, and then hitched a ride into the middle of nowhere with a guy carrying sheep in the back of his truck, just so I could help you dig into something you might not want to dig into even if we track it down? Or am I your token underworld character because your boyfriend brought Donner in after he said he wouldn’t?”
“Isn’t it enough that I’m a little…confused morally, so I called you for back-up?”
He eyed her. “Excuse me, but in this new chapter of your life, the one where Rick Addison is your white knight, doesn’t that make me the Dark Side? The Darth Vader of your little tribe?”
“Oh, please. You’ve always been my Yoda.”
“I’m not here to talk you into doing evil, then?”
That made her frown, mostly because in a way it was kind of true. “Nope,” she said anyway. “It’s just a tangle, and I need you to machete me into the open. Plus I have a lot of ghost hunting audio and video to go through, and you like that stuff.” She tagged him lightly on one muscled shoulder. “Plus I’m outnumbered by posh, and I missed you.”
With a loud sigh he set her maps aside. “Fine. Do you have any idea where the billionaire stashed those books? Having them to look through would narrow down your potential treasure spots by a lot, I would imagine.”
“He put ‘em somewhere he figured I would never think to look. But it’s a big house with a shit ton of obvious but not obvious places to put a couple of old books. Do you want to look for those or finish going through the highwayman séance tapes?”
“Séance. I’ll do the rest of the recordings, too, and whatever else you brought up here, so it looks like you were actually doing an investigation, and not tricking people into talking about a treasure so you could record them.”
“Thanks, Yoda.” She kissed him on the cheek, moved her diet Coke closer by his elbow, and gave him her walkie-talkie. She would have to snag Donner’s, but he and Rick were practically joined at the hip, anyway.
Rick and Donner were still in the breakfast room when she found them. For a second, she thought about just picking the attorney’s pocket and going on her way. He already thought she was a one-woman crime syndicate, though, and she hated giving his theories more fuel. “You guys still going into Orrisey?”
“We are,” Rick returned, reaching for her hand as she stopped beside him. “Walter found you?”
“Yep. He’s helping go through the ghost tapes. I need the monitor for the cameras, though. May I borrow your walkie-talkie, Donner? Pretty please?” He’d probably make her say that last part anyway, so she headed him off.
He pulled it out of his coat pocket and handed it over. “You scare me when you’re polite like that.”
She flashed Rick a grin as she turned back for the stairs. “You’re just saying that to try to get me to be nice to you. It won’t work.” As she ascended she switched the radio two frequencies up to avoid including Reggie and Norway, and Rick, in her conversation with Stoney. “I’m on air,” she said, lifting it. “The others are two below this, if we want to go public.”
“Roger,” Stoney’s voice came back to her. “Good hunting.”
“You, too. Lemme know if you catch anything interesting.”
“Bring me some scones or something next time you head up here. Last meal I had was airplane pretzels and some gum from the sheep guy.”
“Ten-four.”
Lady Mercia – Samantha still wasn’t ready to call her “aunt” yet, even if it had been offered – hadn’t made it into the library yet this morning, so Sam made another circuit of the bookshelves in case Rick had just moved the highwayman books he considered pertinent to her search. This didn’t seem like a place she wouldn’t check, though, and she wasn’t surprised not to find them.
She would have been out shopping with Norway when he moved them, so they could literally be anywhere. At least if she’d been in the attic she would have had one place she could eliminate. But no, she could have been sitting on them up there, for all she knew --- except that he knew she was digging through all that stuff. Rick liked taking chances, but they had to have a logic to them. Given all the more likely hiding places, she didn’t think he would have risked dumping them up there.
Where the hell, then, would he think she was unlikely to look for a pile of books she really wanted to find? It wasn’t like there was a room filled with glass-eyed antique dolls in the house…she hoped. Shuddering, Samantha went one door past the library, peeked in at extra chair storage, and backed out again. Too easy.
What, did Rick think she just wouldn’t notice? Or was she overthinking how sneaky he would be about it? Maybe they were just under a couple of unused chair cushions.
She could do without the additional info the books would provide, but that would mean additional time spent on outdoor treasure hunting. Rick would know what she was up to – and Reggie might figure it out, too. The more she could narrow it down on paper first, the better.
Okay. Rick logic. Tricky, but with sound reasoning behind it. According to him, the last place she would look would be Donner’s room, but the lawyer hadn’t yet arrived when the books vanished. Reggie and Norway’s room? Nah, he wouldn’t put more information in his cousin’s reach even if Reggie thought all he needed was the map. His aunt and uncle’s room? Rick was a proper Brit. Proper Brits didn’t sneak stuff into the rooms of their elders.
Their room? That would be kind of…clever, really. Huh. The odds were against it, but it would be totally easy to search – especially now, with Rick headed down to the village.
Feeling kind of stupid, Samantha headed up the hallway, climbed the stairs, and slipped inside the room she shared with him. She closed and locked the door, because no way did she want to get caught tossing her own room.
“Okay, Sam,” she muttered, rubbing her hands together and blowing out her breath. “Let’s make this quick, and never speak of it again.”
Sinking onto her hands and knees and then lowering to her stomach, she flipped up the bed skirt to look beneath the nosebleed-high piece of furniture. Without her phone light she wouldn’t have been able to see all the way back, but other than a sack and some dust bunnies that probably dated back to the Highland Clearances, it was just a lot of space.
They’d both unpacked into the old wardrobe and chests of drawers, with the suitcases relegated to what used to be the formal dressing room with its old hat boxes and dressing table and chair and more old shoe boxes. She went through her drawer, then Rick’s, then went into the dusty dressing room and opened their suitcases. Nada.
The one bookcase in the bedchamber had more knickknacks than books on it, but she checked there, too, just in case. “Dammit.” Grumbling, she stomped back into the dressing room to shove the suitcases back into their corner, then sat in the single dressing chair.
This was getting embarrassing. If she couldn’t outfigure Rick in the “hiding goods” department, maybe it was a good thing she was mostly retired. Or had being mostly retired for the past year dulled all her instincts? Either way, this sucked.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid.” Next, she’d be on her hands and knees digging through the boxes of mildewed ostrich feather hats and shit and yowling at the moon.
Wait a minute . Narrowing one eye, she looked at the uneven stacks of round hatboxes. She liked antiques, but moldy old hats didn’t much interest her at all. Unless they’d been carefully stored and preserved, hats in cold damp just turned into lumps of blech. Pursing her lips, she toed the top box in a stack of three.
It wobbled, then tipped over. A damp-looking straw hat with fake flowers that had probably once been silk daisies plopped onto the floor. Great. Now she was going to have to clean that up. Even so, she’d committed now. Using her foot again, she pushed the next one down. At the least knocking over stacked things helped her push back against her frustration. If Rick got the idea that he could outmaneuver her, well, that would be setting a very bad precedent.
The bottom box wouldn’t tip, so she shoved off the lid with her toe. Then she stared at the contents for a good, long minute. Bingo . Pushing a fist straight up into the air, she slid down the front of the chair to sit her bottom on the floor. Five books. Legends of the Scottish Highwayman , A Dangerous Occupation , In the Shadow of Balmoral , The History of Highway Robbery , and Stand and Deliver: A Guide to History’s Lawbreakers .
Swiftly she set them aside, then closed the empty box so she could stack the other boxes back on top of it. Even the yucky straw thing only made her wipe her fingers off on her jeans. The books she bundled into her spare jacket before she retreated with them back to the attic.
“Found ‘em,” she said, setting her bundle down on a side table.
“That’s good, because most of the audio on your thermal recording is pretty spooky messed up,” Stoney returned, straightening to flex his arms. “I think you found a ghost. Where’s my scone?”
Her heart beating a little faster, Samantha picked her way through the mess of antiques to where Stoney sat. “I’ll get you a sandwich in a minute. Ghost first.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not ready to swear in court what it is,” he said, “not that you’d ever find either of us in a court, but it’s… Well, take a listen for yourself.”
He backed the thermal recording up to seven or eight minutes after she’d stopped her own review, then handed her the headphones. Once she’d adjusted the small playback screen so she could see it, he reached over and hit play.
On one side of the screen Reggie and Norway sat side by side, her right hand up as she held out the digital recorder. “Is it true, Will Dawkin, that no one has ever found your treasure?” Norway asked, then paused. “Yes or no, is it hidden in a cave?” Another pause. “In a tree stump? Under a r—”
The low rumble at the edge of Samantha’s hearing unsettled her. “Jesus.”
“I nearly fell out of my chair,” Stoney said. “Did you make out any words?”
“I definitely heard something.” Rewinding it, she turned up the volume, putting both hands over the earphones.
“Leave me alone,” she heard, low and soft. “Not for you.” Then the audio went out completely for a couple of seconds before it popped back in.
“Wow,” she murmured.
“What did you hear?”
She looked over at Stoney. “I got ‘leave me alone’ and ‘not for you’.”
“Huh,” he returned. “I heard ‘leave me my gold’ and ‘Nosferatu’.”
Samantha squinted one eye. “Well, they’re similar, but I don’t see why an old spirit would say the name of a 1922 horror film.”
“Maybe he’s a fan,” Stoney said dryly. “Or it’s audio matrixing, and we really just heard nothing but your stomach growling.”
“Yeah, so loud I blew out the audio.” She snorted. “Norway’s going to flip out when she hears this.” And somehow that had become the best part of all this – the idea of scaring Eerika so badly she would go fleeing down the front drive in her expensive shoes. Samantha had set up this whole ghost tracking thing so she could spy on Reggie and Norway. The fact that she’d actually found evidence of something was pretty damn awesome.
“Norway?”
“Rick’s cousin’s girlfriend. Eerika Nyland. You’ll get it when you see her as something other than heat blobs. Very Scandinavian.” She tapped the camera. “Did you find anything else?”
“Not yet. I had to listen to that one thing about forty times. You check the books, and I’ll keep going with this. I’m past your spy cam work, and I have a couple of notes for you, but I want to know if anything else stopped by to chat.”
“Deal. I’ll get another pair of headphones so I can at least listen to Rick’s digital recorder while I read. Plus, I owe you a sandwich.”
“If we find a highwayman’s loot, you’re going to owe me more than that. And if that spook comes after me, I’m going to make it my business to haunt you for getting me killed in the world’s coldest place.”
She could totally argue that Scotland in September was not the coldest place on Earth, but Stoney was cranky enough already. “Got it. Sandwich, hold the spooks.”
Wow. Now she had a maybe warning that was probably aimed at Reggie and the Viking and that could easily be interpreted to be about the treasure, and she had enough information on hand that she would hopefully be able to at least halve her search area. Time to do some reading.