Chapter Ten
Jack was tired and grubby as he arrived back at the Roost, but replete with satisfaction because he’d just had the world’s best chicken pot pie.
Alice was getting to him. He’d stormed over to her house like a stampeding bull, but within two minutes she had completely tamed him.
She was impossible to rattle. He came at her sweaty, mad, and mean, but she stood up to him with cool, unruffled class.
Something about that soft, buttery accent was like a tonic, and he even liked her townhouse despite all the flowery stuff and lace doilies.
He parked his truck and looked through the windshield at the Roost, trying to see it through her eyes.
Instead of seeing only a derelict money pit, he searched for the history and meaning contained in these massive old logs and the stone chimney anchored to the side of the house.
What clues could shed light on the people who lived here long ago?
First of all, the site for the house had been carefully selected.
It was close to a source for water and sat on a natural ledge.
That would have been good for defensive purposes in a world where relations with the Native Americans were probably dicey.
The windows on the ground floor were expensive.
Diamond-paned glass would have been imported from England at great expense, but the windows upstairs were plain glass.
Whoever built this house was used to the finer things in life .
. . but if so, why leave England and venture into the wilds of an unsettled land?
What sort of person set off into the unknown in search of something better?
Whoever he was, Jack respected the guy’s ambition.
He left the truck and headed to the front door.
His footsteps thudded on the steps that were machine-milled, probably added in the early twentieth century, but the front door seemed original.
The opening was low, and he instinctively ducked whenever he entered.
People were shorter back then. Even the ceiling in the front room was low.
Doc was already stretched out on a plastic lounge chair in the front room, reading a paperback he'd picked up at a thrift store. He used the front room as a bedroom because he liked the view from the front window. He set the book aside and looked up, curious.
Did the professor own up to busting the irrigation pipes?” he asked.
“Nah, I don’t think she did it.”
“Told you so,” Doc said, then went back to reading while Jack continued to scan the room, looking for clues.
The fireplace was huge, tall and wide enough for cooking.
He’d taken a tour at Colonial Williamsburg shortly after he arrived in town, where the guide said fireplaces like this were made to cook a number of things simultaneously.
The small notch-alcove cut into the back was probably for baking bread.
Holes in the brick probably once held rungs on which water could be heated and stews simmered on cold winter days.
It would have been hard to turn out a perfectly baked chicken pot pie like Alice just made. He hadn’t even told her how good it was. He just shoveled it down like a barbarian and then asked for seconds.
“I’m heading up for bed,” he said. Doc gave him a little salute but didn’t tear his eyes off his book.
It was too early for bed, but his laptop had plenty of power and he could write a request to Kyle to see if the security cameras mounted at the club house spotted something suspicious.
Maybe some drunk college students broke the irrigation lines, or angry environmentalists, or even one of his ex-girlfriends.
He’d dated plenty of women, but backed away the moment anything got serious, so he doubted any of them would care enough to look him up and haunt him at this point in his life.
The bedroom window caught his attention.
That seventeenth-century window filled with old graffiti scratched into it was suddenly a lot more interesting than security cameras.
He smiled a little at the spot where Elizabeth and William Tucker scratched their names in 1771.
Someone had carved a snake and some palm fronds.
They didn’t look like the kind of palm fronds from here in Virginia.
Were they native to England? Or some kind of biblical or ancient Egyptian thing? They looked very stylized.
Although some of the scratchings had been done in spindly, somewhat sloppy lettering, the mark at the top of the window was different. In the upper left corner the letters were carved with purpose and clarity: SVOTZ∞
Could it be a date in Roman numerals? He checked his phone, but aside from the V, none of the letters were used in the Roman number system.
What about a town? Or somebody’s last name? And what about that sideways figure 8? In calculus, it was the symbol for infinity, but maybe there were other meanings for it.
He’d never had much interest in history, but he liked solving puzzles. He scrolled through his phone, searching the internet for various meanings for the letters.
According to Google, there were no towns or villages named SVOTZ. The translator app didn’t reveal any meaningful translations of the word. Could it be an acronym? If so, it opened up a whole world of possibilities that were too numerous to count.
Frustration drove him downstairs. “Hey, Doc, can you come up here for a minute?”
Doc tossed his book aside and the chair creaked as he got out of it. The old vet followed Jack back up the stairs and listened as Jack pointed to the strange markings.
“It could be a code for something,” Doc said, rubbing the stubble on his leathery face as he peered at the letters carved on the glass.
“In The Da Vinci Code, the guy in the book uses the Atbash cipher to decode old references. All you have to do is substitute each letter with its corresponding letter on the other side of the alphabet. The letter S is eight from the end of the alphabet, so you’d start from the beginning and count to the eighth letter, which is—”
“H,” Jack said.
He jotted it down on the back of a Pop-Tart wrapper. The V corresponded with E. A smile tilted his mouth as he continued decoding the letters:
HELGA
He stood, his heart pounding. Doc stared at the word, equally entranced.
“Someone went to a lot of trouble to hide her name,” Doc said. “What do you suppose that sideways 8 means?”
Jack stared at the markings but could come up with no ideas. Maybe Alice would know, and he looked forward to telling her about how the name HELGA was hidden in plain sight.
Jack was embarrassed by the way he accused Alice of vandalizing his golf course. After acting like an impulsive brute, Alice not only accepted his apology, but was pure class as she invited him to the best dinner he’d had in years.
He still needed to get to the bottom of who broke the irrigation pipes, and the following morning he headed to the police department to file a report. A clerk named Pricilla with brassy red hair and a syrupy drawl cut him off before he could even finish telling her what happened.
“Yeah, we’re already on that one,” she said, her fingernails thick with chipped polish tapping against the keyboard as she called up a record.
“Last night a couple of local college kids were drunk and bragging about tearing up a golf course,” Pricilla said.
“A bartender overheard and pressed them for details. They called him a stupid townie who probably couldn’t understand the importance of saving the environment, then bragged about how they dug up some pipes and then used their fraternity paddle to bust the irrigation lines.
The bartender called the cops, and Lieutenant Sparks hauled them in last night. ”
“Is Lieutenant Sparks still on duty?”
He was, and ten minutes later Jack sat across from the night shift officer hearing the rest of the story.
The two vandals were fraternity brothers who were staying in town throughout the summer for a special tutoring program, and this was their first brush with the law.
Their story ratcheted Jack’s resentment even higher.
He struggled with his grades in college as well, but his summers were spent working a full-time job instead of getting into a special tutoring program.
“What kind of charges are they looking at?” he asked Lieutenant Sparks.
“Trespassing and destruction of property. Both are misdemeanors, unless the property is worth more than a thousand dollars, in which case the D.A. will bump it up to a felony.”
The broken irrigation lines were going to cost a lot more than a thousand dollars to fix.
Those college kids probably never held down a real job or knew anything about the backbreaking labor of laying irrigation lines.
He wanted to teach them a lesson, not ruin their future by saddling them with a felony.
“Are there any diversion programs?”
The lieutenant nodded. “If you’re willing, you could have them work it off on your golf course. That could be a win-win.”
“Forget it,” Jack said. “I can’t trust anyone on an environmental crusade near my course.”
After a few minutes discussing other types of diversion programs in the area, Jack liked the sound of making them help bring in the strawberry harvest. It was grueling work.
Jack had picked strawberries every June when he was in college.
He spent each day stooped low, knees locked, and his back screaming.
It was dirty, itchy work, and it was the reason he disliked strawberries to this day.
Jack signed a form indicating his willingness to let the brats go into a diversion program, but as he prepared to leave, Lieutenant Sparks had a word of advice.
“There may be more trouble once the rest of the students return in the fall. Let me show you the various online groups to keep an eye on where the students post their protests.”
It was all good insight, and Jack noted the names of the various activist groups that had been protesting the golf course for years. Some were on the college website, while others were Facebook groups. As soon as he got back to the Roost, he fired up his laptop to bookmark the sites.
He did a cursory scan of the social media sites associated with Williamsburg and was surprised to see Alice Chadwick’s name pop up. There was a picture, too. He straightened his spine and leaned forward to look at the startling photograph.
Alice looked tragic and embarrassed as she was walked between two security officers, her wrists locked together in a pair of handcuffs. His jaw dropped as he read the headline:
Local College Professor Implicated in Celebrity Stalking Scandal
The photo was from earlier in the year in England. He skimmed the first few lines of the story, noting the name Sebastian Bell, one of those British heartthrobs who starred in a bunch of historical dramas Jack never wasted his time or money on.
Never in a million years would he have suspected Alice of something like this. She seemed too refined, too controlled, but the story was breaking out all over social media, and where there was smoke there was usually fire.
He was tempted to rush over to her place and warn her about what had been posted, but she probably already knew about it, and this wasn’t his problem. He had his hands full with golf course business, and his life motto was to look out for Number One. He shouldn’t worry about Alice.
It was still hard to imagine someone as classy as Alice Chadwick getting involved in a seedy celebrity scandal . . . and he already worried that something terribly unfair had happened to her.