Findings (21 page)

In Faye’s mind, Chip was genial and pleasant, but not a take-charge kind of guy. Even his doting mother had said he tended to follow the crowd. So who else could be involved? Surely all the history buffs in Micco County couldn’t be enmeshed in this web—Nita, Wayland, Herbie, and their treasure-hunting friends.

But Chip had another friend. Liz had told Faye all about her, even though she’d never actually seen her. Even better, he’d been seen with that friend on the campus of the university where Bachelder’s letters were stored…and where someone had tried to scare Faye away. Or kill her.

The woman was a little skinny and plain, compared to how good-looking Chip is. But she walked like somebody who knew where she was going.

Who was that woman? Nita was skinny, for certain, but Faye wouldn’t have called her plain. And her demeanor was languid but furtive. Nita didn’t move like somebody who knew where she was going.

Faye pushed the elevator button and willed the car to rise faster, because she’d just figured out where Chip was. Could it be any coincidence that he and his shorts and underwear had disappeared just as soon as the sheriff talked her and Joe into leaving Joyeuse? The treasure was on Joyeuse Island, and she and Joe had abandoned it. Of course, Chip would take the opportunity to do some serious exploring…looking for gold that probably wasn’t even there.

Nobody but Faye had read Cally’s story of Bachelder’s return to Joyeuse after the war. Faye would bet money that he’d taken the gold and paper money away with him then, not to mention a certain emerald necklace. The odds were excellent that her emerald was the only one left, lost when the necklace broke apart during its retrieval.

There was a posse of treasure hunters out there, some of whom might be killers, looking for a long-gone cache. If Faye was right about Chip’s whereabouts, Douglass’ murderer might be planning to sleep in her bed that very night. Faye slapped at the elevator button again.

Joe tapped on her elbow. She realized that this was at least the second time he’d done that, but her mind had been far away.

“I took the book for you.”

“You did what? Which book? Not Bachelder’s letters?”

Joe nodded proudly. “I watched the library lady put the book back on the shelf, then I swiped it when she wasn’t looking. Stuck it under my shirt in the back. I figure it’ll be a while before someone wants it. It’s not like we’re talking about George Washington’s diary or anything. We take it home. You read it. Take it to the copy shop, if you want to. Then I’ll bring it back in a day or two. That librarian will never know.”

Faye didn’t know which was worse for an antique book—being exposed to the intense light of a photocopier or to the skin oils of Joe’s intensely muscled back.

“Joe—what possessed you to do that? We’ve got to take it back before we’re both expelled.”

Trying not to think about things like signatures on sign-in sheets or security cameras, she grabbed Joe by the arm and hurried him—and the irreplaceable manuscript stuck into the waistband of his pants—down the corridor. When they reached the glass entry door, she tugged hard on the handle. Nothing. It must have locked automatically behind them, or Ms. Slater had been lurking close by so that she could lock it as soon as they left.

Now she was in possession of the book that had pointed Chip in the direction of treasure, then in the direction of murder. How many times had he visited this collection while he read and absorbed everything Jedediah Bachelder had to tell him? Ms. Slater must have gotten good and tired of pulling that book off the shelf for him, then worrying over whether he was handling it properly.

Faye turned away from the rare book room entrance and took an uncertain step toward the elevator bay, as the facts about the person controlling Chip fell into place. There was at least one other person who was as passionate about history as Herbie and Chip and all their friends. She had free access to Bachelder’s letters and to shelves full of documentation on the Confederate treasury. She was thin and plain, and she always looked like someone who knew where she was going. She knew that Faye had spent the entire afternoon researching the Confederate Gold…and she had let her stay in the rare book room so far after closing time that there was no chance that any witnesses were still hanging around within earshot.

Faye let go of Joe’s arm and slapped both hands flat on his back, pushing him toward the fire escape. “We’ve got to get out of here. We can’t wait for the elevator. There’s no time.”

At that moment, the elevator doors opened to reveal an empty car, and the fire escape door opened, too.

A hand thrust a gun through the door, and Ms. Slater, looking cool and in charge, stepped through. “Ms. Longchamp. Would you like to take me on a little boat ride? I’m very anxious to see your island and all the lovely things that Jedediah Bachelder left behind.”

Chapter Twenty-four

Joe had driven the fifty miles from Tallahassee to this spot with great aplomb, considering that Ms. Slater had been holding a gun muzzle plastered to Faye’s head. They stood on a secluded, muddy beach, watching Chip pilot a boat toward them, coming from the general direction of Joyeuse Island. As a final insult, he had brought Joe’s own john boat to fetch them—the same boat he stole so that he’d have a way to get out to Joyeuse and dig for treasure. The flat bottom of the battered boat let him pull in so close that the shallow water hardly lapped against Faye’s knees as she stepped over the gunwale.

She was momentarily seduced by the idea of using her weight to overturn the boat, gaining the upper hand against their captors. Johnboats were, on the whole, pretty stable, but Faye had been puttering around in boats all her life. She could probably have pulled it off, if Ms. Slater hadn’t shifted the gun barrel to Joe’s temple while Faye boarded the boat.

The poker-faced librarian had hardly spoken since she forced them into her car and handed Joe the keys. A boat ride over water as clear as diamonds did nothing to loosen her tongue, and the noise of the motor would have made conversation hard, anyway. Faye used the time to puzzle out what, precisely, Ms. Slater and Chip had done.

Even more importantly, she spent the time trying to figure out just what her captors did and didn’t know. She had no doubt that the two of them were capable of teasing all of Bachelder’s secrets out of the letters he left behind, but nobody had read Cally’s reminiscences but Faye. There had to be some way of exploiting that one slight advantage.

Knowledge often translated into power. Not always—sometimes brute force translated into even more power—but knowledge and brains shifted life’s balance often enough for a scholarly woman like Faye to put a lot of stock in the notion. Too bad her adversary was also a scholarly woman.

If that scholarly woman had only had access to Cally’s oral history, she would have known that, though the Confederate Gold had indeed once been on Joyeuse Island, it was long-gone. If she’d known the truth, there would have been no reason to ask Chip to sabotage Faye’s brakes when her research came too near the treasure’s hiding place. There would have been no need for Wally and Douglass to die. And there would have been no sense in kidnapping Faye and Joe today, hoping to coerce them into showing her the place where X marked the spot.

There could be no reason to keep them alive now, treasure or no. Kidnapping charges would only be the beginning of Ms. Slater’s woes, if Joe or Faye survived long enough to tell Sheriff Mike what they knew. There would be attempted murder charges for the sabotage of Faye’s car. And all that paled beside the specter of murder charges for the deaths of Wally and Douglass.

There was no treasure, but that didn’t mean Faye and Joe wouldn’t die today. They were going to die for nothing, and she’d never even told Joe that she loved him.

***

Ms. Slater twitched the gun barrel in such a way that no one could mistake her intent. She wanted them out of the boat and onto the dock—Faye’s very own dock on her very own island. If she survived this debacle, Faye planned to sanitize that dock. There had never been anything more noxious than fish entrails on it before. Chip was a murderer, so he was noxious for sure. Even if he’d killed on his own initiative, without prior instructions from Ms. Slater, the fact that the woman had continued to work with him afterward meant that she, too, was more disgusting than a harmless little pile of fish innards.

When Ms. Slater finally spoke, it was simply to nod in Joe’s direction and say, “I’m glad you showed up. I was afraid Ms. Longchamp was just too puny to do the digging I need done.”

“Until this afternoon, I wouldn’t have had a clue what you’re talking about,” Faye said, wondering just how much she could get the woman to tell her. “I mean, even
you
could dig up a little tiny necklace.”

Joe looked at her sideways, and she realized that she’d never had a chance to tell him that they were dealing with a treasure bigger than they’d ever dreamed. She also realized that he was, at that very moment, calculating how quickly he could get to Ms. Slater and snatch her gun, versus the amount of time it would take her to pull the trigger. Faye was not willing to risk Joe’s life on those odds, but she wagered that he was. She caught his eye and gave a barely perceptible shake of her head.

Don’t do it, Joe.

He looked away.

The best way she could help Joe, if he decided to take that suicidal chance, was to distract their captor. She fixed a confrontational gaze on Ms. Slater, in the hope that ancient instincts would cause the woman to focus on her threatening expression, instead of the powerful man preparing to launch himself in her direction. “You think Jedediah Bachelder hid the gold and cash from the Confederate treasury here on Joyeuse Island. You think it’s still here. You’re certain of it, certain enough to kill for all that money.”

“I’m just glad you stopped digging before you got to it.” Ms. Slater turned to Chip and said just one word. “Tape.”

Chip pulled a roll of duct tape from the bottom of the boat and grabbed one of Joe’s feet, knocking him onto his butt. Faye was reminded that Joe wasn’t the only big man on this island.

As Chip bound Joe’s ankles and wrists, Faye began to appreciate how coolly logical the librarian’s mind truly was. While she’d waited for Faye and Joe to walk out of her library, she’d called Chip and told him to meet her. Faye imagined that Chip had been the one to suggest the pickup point, since he’d probably run around this part of the gulf in little boats most of his life, the way other boys lived their preteen years on bikes. He would have known plenty of good places to land a boat where they wouldn’t be seen.

Ms. Slater’s cold-blooded and logical mind had also foreseen the need to confine Joe, so she’d made sure Chip had duct tape. She’d also thought through the ramifications thoroughly enough to know that Joe would need his legs unrestrained when he got in and out of the boat. The first opportunity to bind him would have been when they reached dry land, which would be…right now. The woman took no chances, a trait which did not improve the odds that Faye and Joe would survive this encounter.

Ms. Slater put the gun against Joe’s temple and supervised Chip’s work. She had him use the tape to fashion makeshift shackles that allowed enough movement for walking but would hobble any attempt to run. Faye damned her attention to detail.

As soon as Chip was finished, Faye immediately saw the need to continue distracting their adversaries. She could see slight movement as Joe clenched and unclenched the muscles in his forearms, and she imagined that his mighty leg muscles were doing the same. He was trying to loosen the tape. It seemed to be a futile effort—Chip had pulled it brutally tight, except for the lengths of slack tape that allowed Joe to move his hands and legs—but Joe deserved a chance to try.

“Why do you need us, anyway? You’re the librarian. You’re the one with all the answers. You’ve had access to Bachelder’s letters for a long time. You’ve had plenty of time to study my notes. You probably have a better idea of where the necklace is buried than I do.”

Ms. Slater didn’t speak—which wasn’t necessary, since the gun was speaking for her—but she also didn’t move. Was she reveling in the sheer power of her life-and-death hold over two human beings? Faye would have suspected as much from most people, but Elizabeth Slater wasn’t into power. If she had been, she’d have chosen some career other than library science.

Well, that wasn’t quite accurate. Like Faye, she knew that knowledge was a powerful thing, but it wasn’t the kind of power that required the use of deadly force.

What motivated a woman like Elizabeth Slater? What desires had driven her to this point?

Faye would wager that the woman’s first motive had been curiosity. Reference librarians did what they did because they
just had to know
. She had no doubt that the first step in Ms. Slater’s slide toward murder had been an insatiable curiosity about how people lived in the past. Bachelder’s letters would have sung a siren song to the librarian, just as they had sung to Faye. The two women weren’t so different. Faye was simply not willing to do the things that Ms. Slater had done to ferret out the past’s secrets.

The librarian’s second motive was simple and obvious—greed. Gold, cash, and emeralds had all triggered many murders in the past, and they might spur two more today.

Subtle body language told Faye that love might have played its own part in this drama. A softness in the woman’s eyes, a slight inclination of her head in Chip’s direction, a change in her tone when she spoke to him…all these things suggested that she might have been drawn into this treasure hunt by a simple desire to be near the handsome young man who’d called her attention to the book of romantic letters.

These thoughts flashed through Faye’s mind in seconds, causing her to pause only a few heartbeats to look inward. Still, those heartbeats had been too long. Ms. Slater had stood there, gun aimed, and waited for Faye to think. Why hadn’t she forced Faye to move toward the goal? A woman with an obsession for treasure did not wait patiently for people to think. Why was Ms. Slater hesitating?

It was because she didn’t have a clue where Bachelder had buried the Confederate Gold.

Elizabeth Slater was waiting for Faye to lead the way. But she should have known the exact spot. What information was the woman missing?

“You don’t know where it is.” Faye almost laughed when she said it. “Why don’t you know? You’ve had the field notebooks for more than a week, and they document the exact spot where I dug up the hip flask. That’s what led you to me…and to Douglass. Right? When you read in the newspaper about an artifact linked to Bachelder that was dug up on an island near here, you knew he probably buried it with the necklace and for the same reason. It was made of a precious metal that would be worth something when the Confederacy’s economy collapsed, even if his paper money wasn’t. Any reference librarian worth her salt would have known that. And she would surely have figured out where he buried it by now.”

Ms. Slater was still silent.

“You had Chip cut my brake lines. Why would you try to kill me if I’m the only one who can find the treasure for you? That doesn’t make a bit of sense.”

“I thought you were expendable. I was wrong.”

Reality dawned. Faye would have laughed if the situation hadn’t been so dire. “You don’t have all the notebooks. I pulled one notebook out of the box and took it with me when I left Douglass that night. I took the one I was using when I found…”

She stopped. Ms. Slater had no way to know that she’d found the emerald. She was simply hoping Faye would lead her to the necklace and the Confederate Gold, based on the discovery of Bachelder’s hip flask.

“I thought it didn’t matter. I thought you could find the gold, even without that notebook, but you’re missing the critical information. Yes, you have the notebook where I documented the hip flask, and it should have taken you to the treasure. But I found it before the hurricane took out the tree I used as a reference point and changed the shape of the whole island. You sent Nita and Wayland here to do your digging, but they couldn’t find the spot because the landmarks were gone.”

Ms. Slater twitched the gun toward the shovel in the bottom of her boat. Faye picked it up and kept talking, “You were going to kill me, so that you and your flunky would be the only people who knew the treasure was here. Aren’t you glad you didn’t manage it? Loser.”

Ms. Slater foot lashed out and kicked Faye in the butt, forcing her to take a step forward. “Walk, or I shoot your handsome friend.”

Faye stole a glance at Joe, who was still unobtrusively stretching his bonds. She took a single step, then started talking again. “Wally. Why is Wally dead?”

“It’s Wally’s fault you’re here right now. He was supposed to help Chip get all the information he could about where you found that hip flask. Then Mr. Everett surprised them by being home that night and Wally got all prissy about getting rid of him. Fortunately, Chip understood the importance of keeping the old man quiet.”

“It seems that even Wally had more morals than you. That puts you pretty low on the ethical totem pole.”

Ms. Slater didn’t bat an eye at Faye’s comment. She just went on defaming the dead. “Wally was gung-ho about this project when it was all about money. He’d been laying low since the hurricane, but Chip’s mother has a soft spot for Wally. She and Chip have always known where he was. And Chip knew that Wally had been pothunting these islands for years. If there’s a place to bury something around here, Wally knew about it. Chip asked Wally to help us find the necklace, and he was happy to do it, until you and Douglass got in the way.”

Faye’s eyes watered. So Wally had learned something since she saw him last. He’d been perfectly willing to double-cross her back then, maybe even send her to jail, for a chance at big bucks. If he’d clashed with Chip over Douglass’ killing, then he’d clearly grown a conscience in his old age. And it had cost him his life.

“Wally was going to tell you everything,” Ms. Slater continued. She was clearly angry with Wally, even now, and it was making her chatty. This was good. While she was chatting, she wasn’t shooting. “He was afraid you’d get hurt like Douglass did. He should have known that Chip would never let him warn you, but he tried anyway. Look where it got him.”

Faye’s tears burned. Wally had known he was risking his life by trying to warn her, but he did it anyway. He’d died before he could tell her anything, but he’d managed to pass enough information to lead her to Bachelder’s letters…and to his own killer. His sacrifice more than made up for his earlier betrayal. There weren’t many people in the world to weep for Wally, but he had earned Faye’s grief.

Ms. Slater didn’t share her sorrow. “Without that scum Wally, you’d be nothing to me but some initials on a field notebook. Without him, you wouldn’t have come snooping in my library.”

“You’d have gone looking for the archaeologist who wrote those field notes sooner or later. Because you don’t know where the treasure is. And I’m going to die today. Why should I tell you?”