Panic Button (27 page)

“You mean why did he need the actual button?” Nev had one hand on the front door of
the schoolhouse. “Maybe he didn’t need the button. Not really. Maybe—”

“It’s just lost. Like our fish button was. Yeah, I know.” I was sorry I brought it
up, but I couldn’t help myself. I felt like we were finally getting close to making
sense of all that had happened over the past weeks, and my brain wouldn’t stop whirling
over the details.

Grumbling, I stepped back so that Nev and Jimmy could pry the schoolhouse door open.

Good thing I did, or like poor Nev and Jimmy, I would have been swamped with the sea
of mud that poured out of the school.

“Oh, yuck!” Nev has quick reflexes. The mud flowed up and out, as high as his knees,
and he snatched his camera out of his pocket and tossed it to me to be sure it stayed
clean and safe.

Good thing I have quick reflexes, too. I caught the camera with one hand and darted
back and out of the way of the mudflow that would have easily come up over the tops
of my boots.

It wasn’t until after I was sure I was out of harm’s way that I bent forward and peered
into the building. Once upon a time, it had been a one-room schoolhouse, and now,
except for what had rolled out the door, that one room was pretty much filled top
to bottom with gunk.

“I think it’s pretty safe to say we’re not going to find any treasure in there,” I
commented.

Nev didn’t answer. But then, he was still pretty busy scraping spatters of mud off
his jacket.

That left the cemetery, and in the blasted landscape, it was difficult to tell exactly
how far away it was. I tried to stand on tiptoe to see a little better, slipped, and
would have gone down if Nev hadn’t looped one arm around my waist. Great plan. Or
at least it would have been if he wasn’t covered with mud.

Cringing, I refused to worry about how I’d ever get my jacket clean, and followed
my police escort, and after another couple slip-slidey minutes of walking, we caught
a glimpse of the first headstones sticking up through the mud like rotted teeth.

A shiver snaked over my shoulders. “Oh, that’s just positively creepy!”

“Not to worry.” Jimmy laughed. “The bodies aren’t here anymore. They were all removed.
You know, before the reservoir was filled. All the dead folks are up at Elm Lawn in
town now, and this place is just empty.

“Empty and creepy,” I said, hoping Nev would take pity on me and stay close, but it
seemed even the mud hadn’t soured his opinion of how interesting the drowned town
was. He motioned for his camera, I relinquished it, and he darted ahead.

I wiped a dot of mud off the photo of the button and studied the picture again before
I realized that what looked like a little building beyond the headstones in the photograph
was in reality an elaborate mausoleum.

“Nev.” I closed in on him where he was crouched in front of a gravestone that had
been completely coated with moss. “Nev, if you were a pirate and eager to hide your
treasure, would you take a chance of burying it?”

He got to his feet. “You mean here in the cemetery? I guess no one would notice that
the ground had been disturbed, but heck, the whole point of being a pirate is avoiding
hard work whenever possible. If I was a pirate, I wouldn’t want to put in the sweat
equity. Besides, you heard what Jimmy said. This whole place was dug up before the
town was flooded so they could retrieve the bodies and bury them in the new town.
If there was treasure in any one of these graves—”

“Somebody would have found it.”

We finished the thought together.

Rather than allow myself to get discouraged again, I glommed on to an earlier thought
and followed it to its logical conclusion. “But what if you were that same pirate
and there was a better place to hide something. Like, say in some little building?”
I asked Nev. “That would be easier.”

“Way easier.” He swung his gaze where I was looking, at that mausoleum. “If it’s not
filled with junk like the schoolhouse was…”

He didn’t finish the thought. He didn’t need to. Moving faster than either of us should
have been able to with the ground slipping out from under our feet, we hurried over
to the mausoleum.

This close, I could see that the tomb was constructed of gray and pink granite and
that it must have been gorgeous—and expensive—in its day. There were carved angels
standing guard on either side of the door, and I suspected that what was now a hole
in the side wall had once contained a stained glass window. These days, there was
greenery sprouting from the gutters and the skeleton of a fish lay on the doorstep.
None of that was especially surprising, of course.

The name carved over the doorway…

That was another thing altogether.

“Moran.” Out loud, Jimmy Carns read the name carved above the door from right behind
us, and yes, I squealed and flinched. But then, it was that kind of place. “Family’s
been around here for years and all of them were buried here. Not Ben, of course. Story
has it he died in Chicago and was buried there somewhere. But here,
this is where Thunderin’ Ben’s parents were supposed to spend eternity resting in
peace.”

I hadn’t expected that obvious a connection to Thunderin’ Ben, and my spirits soared.

Jimmy didn’t look nearly as pleased. In fact, he shook his head, downright disgusted.
“All these years, and you think this is where the treasure might be? Hell, when we
were kids, we’d listen to the stories about Ben and then we’d grab our shovels and
go running around the woods outside of town and dig up place after place. And if all
this time, it was really here…”

“If.”

Nev didn’t need to remind me. I was being practical. Honest. I was prepared to be
let down—again—by a clue that led nowhere. Of course, that didn’t mean I was prepared
to give up.

Again, I went over the theory Nev and I had just about talked to death over breakfast
that morning. “If the button showed the way to the treasure…”

“That would mean that button was worth stealing, and maybe our killer thought it was
worth killing for, too,” he said. “But I can’t help but think about what you said
earlier, Josie. Why did the killer need the button? The killer must have known that
the button showed old Ardent, the cabin and the school and the cemetery. But for some
reason, that wasn’t good enough. He needed the actual physical button. Why?”

“Maybe there was something you had to do with the button,” I proposed, sounding as
unsure of this theory as I felt and like I was coming up with a plot idea for a new
Indiana Jones movie. “Like the button is some kind of
key or something. And maybe Ben talked about how it worked in his diary. Maybe that’s
why the killer needed both the button and the diary.”

“Maybe.” Nev didn’t sound any more sure of this than I felt, and before I could convince
myself that we were wasting our time, I inched closer to the mausoleum.

I made sure to stay well out of the way of whatever might rush out when Nev pulled
open the mausoleum door. “Not a lot of mud,” I commented to him, and of course, he
was one step ahead of me. He simply nodded and gestured to Jimmy to have a look at
a mushy pile of mud just to the right of the front door. I knew where his thoughts
were running. “You think that little mud pile looks awfully neat. Like maybe someone
shoveled mud out of the mausoleum and threw it over there.”

He didn’t agree or disagree. “Let’s go inside,” Nev said, “and find out.”

If what was left of Ardent out under the wide, blue sky was creepy, the inside of
a mausoleum which had until just very recently been filled with water and left, silent
and abandoned, all these years, was off the scale in the scare-me-to-death department.

“Good thing I brought a flashlight.”

People had to stop standing right behind me and talking. This time Nev was the guilty
party and I was so immersed in the mood of the place that I clapped a hand to my hip-hopping
heart and watched as he flicked on the flashlight and arced its light around the inside
of the tomb. Apparently, the Moran family’s remains had once been laid to rest in
niches carved into the granite walls. Those spots were empty now, with decades of
accumulated
mud and debris on the shelves that had once contained their caskets.

“What do you think?” Nev picked up a stick lying nearby and poked it into the gunk
that coated the nearest shelf. “If the treasure was with one of the bodies, it’s gone.”

“I don’t know.” I whirled around, taking in the devastation and the grime that showed
everywhere Nev’s light hit. “For a minute there, my crazy theory about the button
being some kind of key or talisman actually made sense to me. But now…” His light
flashed across the far wall and I pulled in a breath. “Nev?” He was standing next
to me, and even though it was coated with mud, I grabbed his sleeve and tugged. “Did
you see that?”

“See what?” His light had already moved on, and Nev froze with it trained on the floor.
“What did I miss?”

“There. Over there.” I pointed straight ahead toward the far wall, but since it was
as gloomy in there as the inside of a thundercloud, I was sure Nev had no idea what
I was indicating. To help out, I clamped my hand over his—and his flashlight—and slid
the light over to the left.

“There,” I said, and since Nev is a smart guy, he saw exactly what I saw and stepped
forward.

“No mud.” Nev knelt down for a better look at an area of the wall that had obviously
been recently wiped clean. “There’s some kind of carving here.” He leaned nearer for
a better look, his light aimed at the wall right in front of him. “It’s like a little
miniature picture of the town, only it doesn’t look like that button of yours. It
looks like—”

“A perfect mirror image.” OK, so button dealers aren’t
all that fond of mud, but a little more dirt and grime (OK, a lot of dirt and grime)
at this point wasn’t going to make any difference, and it wasn’t going to keep me
from seeing what he was seeing. I knelt down next to Nev and held the photo of the
metal button up next to the carving in the mausoleum wall. “If we had the real button…”
I pretended I did, and held it by its imaginary shank. “It would fit into the wall
carving perfectly! So the button was the key!” I said, so pleased and stunned that
I’d already sat back on my heels before I realized that now, I could add the seat
of my pants to the list of my muddy-beyond-repair clothing. “The killer needed the
button in order to fit it into the carving. And once that was done—”

“This little door popped open.” Nev had been fiddling at the wall below the carving
and found the little door in the wall that had been kept hidden and secret all these
years. He bent even closer to the ground to shine his light inside and, just to make
sure, stuck his hand into the black hole, too.

“Empty,” he grumbled. He called Jimmy over to tell him to get some techs in there
to seal off the mausoleum and collect whatever evidence they were likely to find.
“The killer had to wait until the reservoir was empty,” he said once Jimmy was outside
and on the phone. “And once he had the diary and the button and the water was all
gone—”

“He came and got the treasure. If there really was a treasure.”

Nev held up his hand. It was cleaner than it should have been considering he’d just
poked it into that filthy
hole. “Oh, there was a treasure, all right,” he said. “That would explain the lack
of mud in there.”

“Because something else was in there, something like a treasure chest. That’s why
the mud couldn’t accumulate.” I nodded, following his theory.

And technically, all of this should have made us pretty pleased with ourselves. After
all, we’d followed a pirate’s clues all the way to X Marks the Spot. Trouble is, the
killer had gotten there before us.

I’m sure Nev was just as disappointed as I was, but it didn’t keep him from pulling
out his camera and snapping a few more pictures.

Pictures.

“Oh, for the love of buttons!” I would have slapped my forehead if I wasn’t afraid
of getting mud all over my face. “Nev, it’s been staring at us all along. From the
pictures.”

He didn’t question this curious statement. But then, like I said, he’s that kind of
guy.

J
UST FOR THE RECORD, THE LADIES’ ROOM AT THE
A
RDENT
Lake police station is not the most comfortable place to get cleaned up, but it served
its purpose. Before we headed over to Angela’s, I was presentable, if not spic-and-span.

Once there, we found two things. Or should I say we found one thing and found the
other missing.

Yes, the Sherlock Holmes book was gone.

And the other thing?

With Nev’s blessing, I took that with me, and when I changed for the cocktail party
that evening, I made sure I brought along a big enough purse to stash it in.

Call Mary Lou Baldwin a hopeless romantic; even though I’d reserved it for only one
night, she’d kept my room for me, and I was grateful. I took a very long, very
hot shower, put on black pants, sensible pumps, and a lightweight sweater the color
of the darkest grapes on that purloined punch bowl of Marci’s, and when I walked out
of my room at the B and B, Nev was waiting downstairs. He took one look at me and
smiled. “You should wear purple more often. It looks good on you.”