Chapter 28 #2
“You killed them, didn’t you?” Waverly choked as his arm tightened around her throat. He pulled her backward from the parlor door toward Leopold’s study.
“Don’t think less of me,” Theophilus chided. “I was protecting Louisa.”
Jennie
Newton Creek, Wisconsin
Present Day
Jennie struggled to comprehend. “B-but Rick—”
“Rick?” Todd, Allison’s brother, looked confused. “Oh! You thought Rick was the one who left the note?”
Jennie nodded, frantically trying to concoct a plan as to what to do next. There were no windows to jump out of, no way to escape Traeger Hall but through the front entrance.
Todd laughed, and even that one action changed his features to appear friendly and unassuming. “That was me.” He laughed again. “It was pretty obvious really, but people forget I sometimes work at the school when the nurse is off sick. I’m the substitute nurse, so to speak.”
Jennie reached for her flashlight, but Todd waved her away from it. She noticed then the glint of steel. He was armed.
Panic welled in her throat. This was not what she’d expected. She thought she had figured it out on the Harrises’ couch early that morning. There was no treasure in Traeger Hall. Instead, there was the secret of Louisa Theophilus. Fidelia Vallée was an unknown painter, and it all ended there . . .
But no.
The realization left Jennie cold. She’d been led astray by her own wish that an abusive, unfeeling father would suddenly view his daughter as a treasure. It had been a dangerously sentimental conclusion to a century-old tale of mystery and murder and betrayal.
The art records burned in her hands as if on fire. This was the treasure. Not the Vallées, but the records of the Degas and Monet.
“So you had found and were selling the paintings?” Jennie asked incredulously. “But how? This place has been sealed shut for over a century!”
Todd shrugged, his face ghoulish in the shadows made by his own flashlight that he’d set on the desk. “That a grand house like this one could be closed up for so long and have no one find a way in is a fairy tale. It’s not rational.”
“But . . .”
Todd shrugged. “Rick and Allison had been nosing around here for years. Rick was able to dig up a set of old blueprints that matched the place. I don’t know where he found them, but he did.
There’s more than one way to get into this place.
Do you really think a man as paranoid as Leopold Traeger, a man who believed someone wished him dead, would plan that his only escape routes would be through the predictable front and back doors? ”
Jennie was cold. Inside and out. She seriously doubted that Allison would have been involved in stealing priceless works of art from Traeger Hall, only to turn around and sell them on the black market.
She was a treasure hunter, yes, but Jennie couldn’t believe that Allison had been part of an art-theft scheme.
Todd waved his handgun as if it were a toy.
“My sister was going to tell Zane all about it. That night when they argued? She was planning to fill him in on what she and Rick had found—a way into Traeger Hall and about the art. Instead, they fought. Allison was so upset that she confided in me.” Todd gritted his teeth, and the anger he felt toward Zane was palpable.
Jennie eyed the darkened doorway behind him, the area around its frame lit only by the flashlights each of them held.
“I told her I’d help out,” Todd went on. “Rick wasn’t around at the time, and Allison was inconsolable. She told me she was going to the police to report everything. I tried to get her to chill out. Zane had her unraveling, and we needed to think!”
Jennie reached for the desk. The respirator mask on her face felt hot and was suffocating her. She tried taking a few deep breaths. “W-where did she find a way in?” There had to be a secret tunnel or entrance somewhere in the Hall that she didn’t know about.
Todd sneered at her. “The bell tower is more than meets the eye. Built into its side are a sequence of three bricks that, when moved a certain way, open a hinged door made to look as though it’s part of the tower. It’s actually a secret passageway into the house.”
Jennie sagged onto the chair behind her. “So you’ve been sneaking in and out of Traeger Hall and slowly selling off the art piece by piece?”
Todd nodded. “She wasn’t supposed to die, Jennie.
I loved my sister. But once she was gone .
. . she’d worked too hard to find the Traeger treasure for me to just give it up.
” He moved to the desk, leaning over it with both hands planted on the desktop, the gun pinned beneath his right palm.
“You have to understand—I didn’t mean for any of it to happen.
After Allison’s argument with Zane, and after she said she was going to the cops to tell them about this place, she took off.
Even though I’d promised to help her, she left me behind. ”
Todd jerked back into a standing position, still holding the gun but sending his flashlight flying off the desk and rolling across the floor.
He was becoming more agitated. “Allison was calling it quits. She said it wasn’t worth it—wasn’t worth losing Zane over.
” Todd turned, shuffling back toward Jennie.
He waved the gun in the air again. “They were Monets! You don’t just walk away from something like that! ”
Jennie shrank into the chair. She had to get out of there. She could easily outrun the overweight man, but it was the gun she was worried about. If he shot at her, maybe he’d miss in the dark. Then again, maybe he wouldn’t.
“I tried to convince Allison.” Todd whimpered a little.
He sniffed and ran his arm beneath his nose, the gun held lazily in his hand.
“Then she got mad at me! At me! I was just trying to help her, and she was walking too fast to her car. We were outside Grandma Gladys’s place, but Grandma was sleeping.
I can’t walk that fast, and it was raining at the time.
She turned around to yell at me, and she .
. . she slipped and hit her head on a concrete birdbath Grandma had set near the corner of the garage. ”
“She slipped?” Jennie repeated. “Did you—?”
“No!” Todd shook his head vehemently, stepping back into the beam of light and tapping his temple with the handgun. “I would never think of doing that. She just hit her head—it was a freak accident. I couldn’t get Allison to wake up, and she was bleeding . . . I-I panicked.”
“You tied your sister to a cement block and took her body to the creek by the mill wheel and dumped her in?” Jennie imagined Todd wrestling his sister’s body into the water. She felt as if she might throw up.
“I didn’t want to get blamed for her death!” he shouted, acting furious that Jennie didn’t seem to understand. “The whole thing was blowing up in my face. I needed time to think. To think!!” Once again he tapped the barrel of the gun against the side of his head.
“Todd . . .” Jennie straightened in the chair ever so slowly. She understood how to placate a narcissist like her dad, but Todd? He was emotional and irrational, and she wasn’t sure what might trigger him. She held up her hands to try to calm him down. “Let’s just—”
“No!” Todd dropped the gun from his head and aimed it at Jennie. The gun trembled in his hand. He wasn’t in complete control, which only made him more dangerous. Yet it also made him more likely to miss.
Jennie decided to do something. She dropped to the floor and into the darkness, scrambling on all fours for the doorway.
Todd’s shout split the air, which was followed by deafening gunshots.