Chapter 11 Buster Unearths the Decoy Truth #2
It wasn't a pirate's chest. It was an old, heavy-gauge steel tackle box, originally painted forest green but now weathered to a dull olive drab.
The metal was pitted with surface rust around the hinges, but the seam where the lid met the base had been meticulously, almost fanatically protected: three thick layers of heavy black electrical tape had been wound around the perimeter, sealed with what looked like melted paraffin wax.
"Eleanor," I whispered, kneeling beside the box on the damp stone.
"You think she buried it?" Birdie asked, crouching down beside me, her fuchsia vest rustling.
"Look at the top," I said, pointing a trembling finger.
Scratched crudely into the rusted green enamel of the lid with what looked like an iron nail was a single word:
*MINE.*
"That's Eleanor Vance's handwriting, alright," Birdie said, letting out a low whistle. "She used to write that exact same word on the bottom of the lemon meringue pies she brought to the church bake sales so nobody would steal her Pyrex dishes."
Luke pulled a folding utility knife from his pocket, flicked the thumb-stud to extend the stainless-steel blade, and looked at me. "Want me to do the honors, Mags?"
"Do it before Gregory Vance wakes up and claims it's part of his inheritance portfolio," I said.
Luke wedged the tip of the blade beneath the cracked, yellowed wax, slicing cleanly through the brittle layers of aged electrical tape.
The tape peeled away with a stiff, tearing sound that smelled of old rubber and petroleum.
Luke slid the brass latch upward. The spring popped with a sharp, metallic *clack*.
Slowly, carefully, Luke lifted the lid.
Inside, the upper plastic cantilever tray of the tackle box—the kind normally meant to hold lead sinkers and plastic worm lures—was empty. But the deep lower compartment was filled to the brim, wrapped securely in layers of thick, heavy butcher's wax paper tied off with coarse jute twine.
My hands were shaking slightly as I pulled off my canvas gloves and reached into the box. The wax paper was stiff and cold from its years beneath the mountain earth, but completely dry.
I untied the twine. The paper crackled as I folded back the flaps.
Nestled inside was a stack of three small, cloth-bound journals with marbled covers—the kind of inexpensive ledgers sold in country five-and-dimes during the 1960s and 70s—and a thick bundle of ivory correspondence envelopes held together by a faded red rubber band that snapped into brittle dust the moment I touched it.
"Her diaries," Birdie breathed, leaning in so close her perfume—lavender and expensive French vanilla—mingled with the smell of cellar dust and garden dirt. "Maggie, those are Eleanor's private journals."
I opened the topmost journal. The inner flyleaf bore Eleanor’s sharp, spidery script in faded black fountain pen ink:
*Property of Eleanor Vance. If you are reading this without my permission, you are either a thief, a trespasser, or one of my miserable relations. May your teeth fall out while you eat your Sunday dinner.*
Birdie snorted into her sleeve. "Oh, I miss that woman. She was a terror, but she had style."
I turned the yellowed pages. Most of the early entries recorded mundane garden notes, weather tallies, and bitter grievances against the county tax assessor. But toward the middle of the volume, dated October 1994, the handwriting became tighter, darker, and more deliberate.
My eyes skimmed the lines, my heart accelerating with every sentence:
>*"October 14, 1994.* >*The vultures are circling earlier than usual this year. Young Gregory came up from Raleigh today with that sickening, oily smile he inherited from his father. Sat in my parlor, drank three glasses of my good bourbon, and had the gall to ask if I had updated my will to account for his ‘investment ventures.’ As if I don’t know he lost sixty thousand dollars on bad tobacco futures last spring.
He thinks because I am an old woman living alone on a mountain, my skull is filled with cobwebs.
I told him the only thing he would inherit from Blackwood Manor was the privilege of paying for my pine box.
* > >*He spent twenty minutes snooping around the secretary desk when he thought I was in the pantry boiling water.
Fool. He thinks he is clever. He doesn't know that Martha Gable tells me every word he whispers to her in the kitchen. "*
"Martha Gable," Luke said, leaning over my shoulder. "The old housekeeper? Sly Gable’s mother?"
"Look at the letters," Birdie urged, pointing to the bundle of envelopes.
I picked up the top letter. It was written on lined notepad paper, dated August 1998, signed in a shaky, uneducated hand: *Martha.*
>*"Miss Eleanor,* >*My boy Sterling came by my cottage last night full of whiskey and bad talk. He’s been talking to a man from Atlanta about that old Moravian desk in your sitting room.
Sterling says the secret compartment has got papers in it worth more than the timber on the whole north ridge.
I told him he was a fool and that you’d take a shotgun to him if he set foot on the porch, but he wouldn't listen. Keep your doors locked, Miss Eleanor. He’s got no respect for the dead, let alone the living. "*
I turned back to Eleanor’s journal, flipping rapidly through the pages until I reached an entry from September 3, 1998.
Underlined three times in heavy, jagged ink was a passage that made the breath freeze in my throat:
>*"September 3, 1998.* >*Sterling Gable and Gregory think they are playing chess, but they are playing with an old woman who built the board.* > >*They want the 1845 ledger. They think the secret drawer in great-grandfather’s Moravian desk is the cleverest hiding place in North Carolina.
Let them look. Let them scheme.* > >*This morning, I took the original 1845 church covenant and land grant ledger out of the desk.
I placed an old, useless timber tally book from 1862 into the false bottom—bound in identical calfskin, marked with the same family crest, but containing nothing more valuable than the price of fence posts and mule fodder.
* > >*If a thief comes in the night, let him steal the chaff and think he has the wheat.
* > >*The REAL 1845 ledger—the one that proves the land beneath this manor was never deeded to the Vance bloodline, the one that places this entire mountain into the permanent hands of the Black Walnut Conservation Trust—is resting exactly where no thief would ever think to look: right in plain sight. "*
Silence fell over the terrace.
The wind rustled through the dry hydrangeas, sending a shower of purple-grey petals drifting down over our boots. Down in the driveway, a crow cawed sharply from the telephone wire, but none of us moved.
"Sweet Lord above," Birdie whispered, her cat-eye glasses slipping down her nose. "The ledger Julian Croft stole... the one that went missing from the secret compartment when he was killed..."
"It was a decoy," I said, my voice barely louder than the breeze.
The pieces in my head snapped together with the cold, terrible precision of an antique clockwork gear.
"Julian Croft didn't die because he found the treasure," Luke said, his voice dropping into that deep, dangerous register he used when he was truly angry. "He died because he stole a fake."
"Think about it," I said, standing up, my mind racing through every moment of Tuesday afternoon.
"Julian spent the whole morning bragging about how he was going to verify the desk.
He slipped away to the carriage house during lunch to inspect the pieces he had hauled out.
He found the secret drawer in the secretary, he pried it open, and he took the calfskin ledger. "
"And then the killer confronted him," Birdie added, her eyes wide with horrified realization. "The killer followed him to the carriage house to demand the ledger—or maybe to buy it off him, or take it by force."
"And when they opened it..." I looked down at Eleanor’s spidery handwriting. "They realized it was useless. Just fifty pages of hundred-year-old mule feed accounts. Julian realized he’d been played, the killer realized Julian had nothing of value, an argument broke out..."
"And whoever it was grabbed the nearest heavy object," Luke said grimly, looking toward the cordoned-off carriage house. "The brass beam scale on the workbench."
"And the killer still doesn't have the real book," Birdie gasped, clutching my arm with fingers like steel talons. "Maggie... the real 1845 ledger is still inside the house. Right now. Three hours before we unlock the front doors to three hundred people!"
I looked down at Buster. The golden retriever was sitting proudly beside his excavated tackle box, completely oblivious to murder, fraud, or the historical fate of Black Walnut Cove.
He looked up at me through a mask of black potting soil, sneezed once, and gave my kneecap a warm, forgiving nudge with his wet nose.
"Good boy, Buster," I murmured, my hand sinking into his scruff. "You just blew this entire case wide open."
I snapped Eleanor’s journal shut, tucked the precious volume into the deep pocket of my utility apron, and looked at Luke and Birdie.
"Luke, take the tackle box and lock it in the cab of your truck. Don't let it out of your sight."
"Done," Luke said, hauling the steel box up under his arm.
"Birdie, finish the bunting on the porch. Act natural. If Gregory or Vanessa come out asking questions, tell them Buster was chasing a mole."
"Where are you going?" Birdie asked, her voice trembling with excitement.
I looked up at the towering, four-story stone facade of Blackwood Manor, where the morning sun was just beginning to strike the diamond-paned attic windows, setting them ablaze with cold, golden fire.
"I’m going inside," I said, checking my watch. "Eleanor said the real ledger was hidden in plain sight. We have two hours and forty minutes to find it before the doors open—or before the killer realizes where it is, too."