Don't Take Any Wooden Nickels (22 page)

Kirby and I carried the charts cradled in our arms back to the kitchen as I explained what they were and how I had gotten them. We dumped them onto the counter, and then I opened a tube, took out the map, and spread it open on the kitchen table.

“Yeah, see, here you go,” I said. “It’s got the latitude and longitude indicated along the edges.”

I studied the list of coordinates we had taken from the website. The longitudes ranged from 70° to 164°, the latitudes from 20° to 42°.

“Hey, Kirby, this doesn’t make sense. The coordinates on the list aren’t anywhere around here.”

“You got a globe?”

I pointed toward the living room, where I kept Bryan’s beautiful old globe on a stand near the couch. It was a classic, ordered for him by his parents from
National Geographic
when he was 12. Bryan had always been more into geology than geography, and he told me once that he loved this globe more than the ones they had at school because it was a “relief” globe, with raised mountains and dented valleys and creased rivers. He said that as a teenager he used to run his fingers over the globe and wonder if that’s what the earth felt like to God when He held it in His hands.

“Sweet,” Kirby said now, bringing the globe into the kitchen. He had it up on one finger, spinning, like a basketball. “I haven’t seen a globe like this since probably fifth grade.”

I took the spinning globe from his finger and held it against my chest.

“Yeah, well, it’s pretty fragile. You’d better not do that.”

“Sorry.”

I held the globe carefully, and we tracked the lines of latitude and longitude for the first coordinates on the list. It soon became
apparent these were points in different parts of the United States, from Hawaii to Maine and lots of places in between.

“I guess I misunderstood,” I said to Kirby. “I thought this was a local club.”

“It is. The men are local, anyway. But the capsules are all over the country.”

“How does that work?”

He was quiet for a moment, and then he smiled almost sheepishly.

“They’re all rich, Callie. Rich, bored men who want an adventure. It’s an excuse to travel.”

I thought about these men who spent their time and money on such an expensive hobby. Truly, couldn’t they have found better things to do with their cash? I had about a hundred worthy charities I could easily recommend!

“I know what you’re thinking,” Kirby said, “but don’t judge my dad until you meet him. He’s really a nice guy.”

“Why the change of heart?” I asked. “Yesterday it sounded like you were feeling kind of bitter and angry.”

Kirby shrugged.

“I am, sometimes. I still get mad at him when I think about the way he treated Mom when she was dying. But then I look out at Bertha—”

“The mermaid.”

“The mermaid, and I remember that he really did love her. He just couldn’t bear the sight of losing her.”

“I’m sorry for your loss, too,” I said. “Like I said yesterday, I know what it is to lose someone you love.”

He looked at me, his deep green eyes holding mine for a long moment.

“I guess you do,” he said finally.

Taking a deep breath, I broke our gaze and looked back down at the globe.

Bryan’s globe.

“Let’s look for points in the seventies and thirties,” I said, feeling flustered. “Something closer to where we are.”

We scanned the list together and discovered the one location at the same time: longitude 76°, latitude 38°.

According to my navigational chart, that put it somewhere in our general vicinity.

Twenty-Four

Soon we were in Kirby’s Jaguar, flying much too quickly up the road in the general direction of the nearest hidden capsule.

“So what are we using to find our way? Is this thing portable?” I asked, gesturing toward the GPS unit that was mounted on the dashboard.

“Yeah, but it won’t accept coordinates, just addresses.”

“How about your phone? Do you have an app for geocaching?”

“Probably,” he replied, “but I’d rather stop by my house and grab one of my dad’s handheld GPS units, if you don’t mind. That’ll be far more accurate than anything I could get on here.”

“Sure.”

“On the way, maybe you can tell me more about why we’re doing this.”

“Of course,” I replied, surprised that he hadn’t asked sooner. After asking that he keep things confidential, I started by describing Shayna, saying how she was a young, recovering drug addict who had been working hard to make changes in her life since getting out of rehab. But then she made the mistake of letting an old boyfriend named Eddie Ray back into her home and her life. For some reason, when that wooden nickel popped up and Eddie Ray looked into it, he decided that it was going to make him rich.

“Then a few days ago,” I continued, “Eddie Ray was killed by a bash to the head with a tire iron and dumped into the trunk of Shayna’s car. Because her fingerprints were all over the tire iron, she’s been charged with the murder. I’m investigating the case and working with her attorney by attempting to prove she didn’t do it. It’s probably a stretch, but right now I’m just trying to see if this wooden nickel is somehow connected. It seems improbable, unless you go back to what Eddie Ray said, that the nickel was somehow worth ‘millions.’”

When I finished my explanation, Kirby let out a long breath, shaking his head.

“I hope it isn’t connected,” he said earnestly. “I’d hate to see my dad’s club somehow linked to a
murder.”

I told him that we would find out soon if the two things were related or not.

“I read about that guy’s death in the paper,” he continued. “Sure sounded to me like the girlfriend did it.”

“Shayna has made some stupid mistakes,” I said, shaking my head. “But trust me, this kid is
not
a killer.”

We got to Kirby’s mansion and parked out front in the curve of the U-shaped driveway. I waited in the car, using my cell phone, while he went inside to find one of his father’s old GPS units. It took him some time, which was fine, because it also took me a while to work my way through the proper channels of the legal system to get through to Shayna on the phone.

She was allowed to speak to me for just a few minutes, so I kept it brief. I assured her that I was hot on the case, and that I hoped we’d be able to clear her name soon. She sounded as though she was about to start crying, so I didn’t inquire about how she was doing but instead went right to my questions. I needed more specific information about the chain of events following the discovery of the wooden nickel, I told her. I had brought my laptop, and I had it open now to my database for the case. According to my notes from the conversation I’d already had with Shayna at the jail, Eddie Ray first saw the nickel on Tuesday, two weeks ago. Two days after that, he declared to her that from that
nickel they would make “millions.” What I needed to know now was everything she could tell me about what transpired between the time he found the nickel to the time he made that statement.

Shayna thought hard, trying to piece together two seemingly ordinary days from her recent past—something that’s usually not very easy to do. But the more she talked, the more she remembered, and by the end of the conversation, I had gleaned several more important facts. As we spoke, I quickly entered what I was learning into the database.

Apparently, Eddie Ray’s first stop after discovering the nickel was a trip to the library in Osprey Cove, to go on the Internet and look up the website that was printed on the nickel. Shayna knew this because she went with him to check out want ads in area newspapers. They had stayed at the library for about an hour, during which time she found several leads on jobs while he sat huddled in the corner in front of a computer. She hadn’t thought much about it at the time, assuming he had gotten bored with his original quest and was just playing around with games or something.

When they left the library, they drove to Easton, where they had dinner at a McDonald’s and then drove out to see an old friend of Eddie Ray’s, a retired fisherman originally from Kawshek who now worked at a marina in St. Michael’s. Shayna hadn’t been interested in visiting with this man she hardly knew, so while he and Eddie Ray chewed the fat at the docks, she strolled the quaint streets of the picturesque town, window-shopping. When she got back to the marina, Eddie Ray was ready to go, and he had in his possession a small electronic device. She said it looked like a cell phone, but with more buttons. When she asked Eddie Ray about it, he brushed her off and said it was just something his buddy was loaning him for a while.

From there, they went home. Shayna was tired and wanted to watch TV; Eddie Ray, however, was antsy and couldn’t sit still. Finally, she told him to go on over to the bar and join his friends, because he obviously wasn’t happy being there with her. Instead,
he said, he wondered if by any chance he could please use the car. He said he had an errand he needed to run.

“At nine o’clock at night?” I asked.

“Actually, by then it was more like eleven o’clock,” she said. “I let him go. He asked me so nicely and all.”

Shayna continued her story, telling me how Eddie Ray didn’t come home until five the next morning. She had been angry, but Eddie Ray had placated her, promising that what he had been out doing was as much for her benefit as it was for his.

“Did he bring anything home with him?” I asked. “Any trinkets? Any odd little items?”

“Just that electronic unit, a pair of binoculars, and a flashlight,” she said. “But I remember thinking how weird it was that he didn’t smell like smoke and alcohol this time—he smelled more like sweat and dirt. I guess that’s why I didn’t stay mad at him. He obviously hadn’t been off fooling around in a bar or something.”

“So what happened next?”

It took a few moments for her to recall much from the next day. She had gone on a job interview that morning, she remembered, and Eddie Ray slept until she got back. Then he borrowed the car for the afternoon and, exhausted from waiting up for him the night before, Shayna had taken a long nap. Eddie Ray had made it home that evening in time for dinner.

“He was like the best of his old self,” Shayna said. “Happy and funny and charming. That night he didn’t even go out. He just stayed home with me and watched TV. After Letterman, he went to sleep on the couch, and I went to bed. The next morning at breakfast is when he said the thing about that nickel being worth millions.”

“And between that morning and the night he was killed, did he ever go out of town? Did he take any trips that you know of?”

“Gosh, no, Callie. Mostly, he seemed like he was just passing time, waiting for something. We drove back to St. Michael’s one day, to return that electronic thingy. But other than that, he mostly just hung around the house or the bar.”

“Were there any other nights where he went out late and came back smelling like sweat and dirt?”

“No, not at all. Though on Saturday…” Her voice trailed off.

“What?”

“Nothing. I was just thinking. He was out really late last Saturday night. That’s not unusual, except that I know he wasn’t at the bar, because I went over there looking for him. They said he hadn’t been in all evening, and he wasn’t sleeping at Stinky’s.”

“Where was he?”

“I don’t know. I figured he was off getting drunk with one of his buddies. My car was still at home, so wherever he went, it was with somebody else.”

“Did you ask him about it?”

“Yelled at him about it is more like it. He finally came home Sunday afternoon and we fought all evening. He said he had been doing business, trying to get us all this money. We were both pretty mad. In the end I went on to bed, and he stormed off to the bar. That’s the fight we had that everyone overheard. I think that’s one reason everybody thinks I killed him—because we had such a huge argument the night he died.”

“So he was gone all night Saturday night, came home Sunday, went back out Sunday night, and ended up killed?”

“Basically, yeah.”

“Time’s up,” a voice said sharply in the background, and then Shayna spoke again.

“I have to go now,” she said.

“You hang in there,” I told her, and then the line went dead.

I turned off my phone and sat there for a while, thinking about all that Shayna had said. I was able to draw a few conclusions, which I entered into the database now.

Obviously the handheld electronic device that Eddie Ray picked up in St. Michael’s was a GPS unit. It made sense that a fisherman or a marina might have one for navigational purposes out on the water.

The next morning Eddie Ray came home smelling of dirt and sweat because he had gone out and found the club’s local capsule.
I didn’t know what was inside or why it was worth so much money. And I couldn’t imagine what he had been waiting for since then, or where he had gone all night Saturday night, the night before he died. But judging by Eddie Ray’s suspicious and secretive behavior, I thought there was indeed something fishy about the whole wooden nickel angle. I felt strongly that Kirby and I weren’t wasting our time looking for the capsule, though anything valuable that Eddie Ray had found inside of it had almost certainly been removed by him and wouldn’t still be there.