Threads of Deceit (Vineyard Quilt Mysteries Book 1) (7 page)

“I hope you have better luck today than you did last night.” She fidgeted with the rubbing in her pocket, starting to feel a tiny bit guilty for withholding such an important clue. But not guilty enough to come clean.

“Thanks,” he said, but he continued to stand at the front desk. Staring at her.

She began to fear that he
knew
. Folding her arms across her chest, she lifted her chin defiantly and waited for him to speak.

The awkward silence stretched almost to the breaking point before he finally spoke. “See you later.” His words tumbled out in a rush.

Julie watched in bewilderment as he practically ran out of the inn. She could understand if
he
were the one with the coded message crammed in his pocket, but what could possibly be making him act so oddly? Whatever it was, Daniel Franklin had the worst poker face she’d ever seen.

Finally, she shrugged and returned her attention to the front desk. A cheerful couple came down the stairs and showered Julie with praise while they checked out.

“You’re not staying for breakfast?” Julie asked.

“We have to get back on the road,” the man said.

“We’re on our honeymoon,” his wife whispered, and her pale cheeks pinked as she spoke.

Julie looked at their nearly matching gray heads and smiled. “Congratulations.”

“We’ve been married for thirty years,” the man said.

“But we never had a honeymoon,” his wife added. “So this year we decided to do it. Today we’re driving on to Branson.”

“That should be exciting,” Julie said.

“We haven’t been there since the kids were little,” the lady said, lowering her voice as if she were revealing a secret. “And now we’re going by ourselves.”

Julie wished them well, feeling a nice glow from their happiness. The rest of the morning passed in its usual blend of joy and crisis. Another guest checked out after breakfast and also complimented everything about the inn. Then a different guest caught up with Julie after breakfast to say she was certain her room was haunted by a ghost scratching at the walls. When Julie examined the room, she saw mouse droppings in the closet. Julie put down live-catch traps and
offered the woman a different room. The guest was clearly disappointed that she hadn’t heard a ghost, but she accepted the change happily enough.

By late morning, most of the guests had either left the inn for the day to pursue their own activities or had settled into one of the comfortable public rooms for some quilting. Julie peeked in on the tearoom, where Shirley was having a little workshop on embroidery stitches. Julie was glad to see that most of the tearoom tables were filled.

With everything so quiet, she hopped up onto the stool behind the front desk and pulled out the rubbing from the mantel. She spread it out and studied the symbols. Each was a little box with dots and tiny marks along the edges. There was something vaguely familiar about the look of the row of boxes. The squares reminded her a little of the squares on a quilt, but beyond that she couldn’t tell much.

She pulled out a second sheet of paper to copy the designs, thinking the process of drawing them might shake loose an idea. As she did, Mrs. Eddings, one of their most frequent repeat guests, stopped and looked at what Julie was doing.

“That’s an interesting design,” she said. “Are you planning quilt blocks?”

Julie looked up to smile at the thin woman’s friendly curiosity. “Actually, I think it’s a code, but I can’t figure it out.”

Mrs. Eddings lifted her reading glasses from where they dangled around her neck on a chain. She perched them on her nose and peered more closely at the papers. “It looks a little like the Masonic cipher, but not quite. There are no triangles, and none of the squares have open sides.”

Julie looked at her in surprise. “You’re right. That’s why it looked vaguely familiar to me. But how did you recognize it so easily?”

The old woman chuckled. “I’m a retired schoolteacher. I taught American history, and the Masonic cipher was one of my kids’ favorite things. Every year, all the notes slipped around in my class would be in code for a solid month after that lesson.” Then she tapped the paper. “Still, that’s not really the Masonic cipher, but it looks a lot like it.” Then she shrugged. “Of course, they also look a little like the squares of a quilt.”

Julie’s eyes lit up. They did look like both squares on a quilt and the Masonic cipher. What if they were? The old ship’s captain was sending the message to his wife and a woman of that period would certainly know quilts. Then she remembered the letter that the captain sent to his wife had mentioned her love of quilts. Was that a clue to how the cipher was laid out?

The original Masonic cipher was based on two tic-tac-toe boards and two crossed-line figures. One set of each had a dot in the middle of every square or triangle. So what if the captain did the same kind of pattern, but with three Nine-Patch quilt figures instead of the traditional form?

Julie quickly sketched out each Nine-Patch quilt. The cipher had been drawn with an
X
at the corners of the center square of each quilt, and they crossed into the corner of the adjacent squares. In addition, one of the Nine-Patch quilts had heart designs at the center of each block, while another had a dot in the center of each block. The third had nothing at the center of each block.

Once Julie had drawn out the quilt squares, all she had to do was figure out the order in which the quilts were laid out. Did the
A
square have a dot at the center, or a heart—or nothing? Once she knew that, she could tie the rest of the letters in the alphabet to a square and crack the code.

Mrs. Eddings looked over the drawings excitedly. “I think you have it! What a quick mind you have. Every square in each Nine-Patch quilt must be a letter—except one. That probably serves as a blank space to separate words. Figuring out which of these corner squares is probably the blank space should be a big help.”

Julie laughed. Mrs. Eddings must have been a very encouraging teacher. “Can you help me work out the order of the three quilts?”

The old woman took Julie’s place on the stool, and the two worked by trial and error to figure out the order, though Mrs. Eddings’s thoughts about the blank space certainly shortened the job.

When they finally hit on the right order, Mrs. Eddings clapped her hands. “That was such fun! I still have no idea what the message is trying to tell you, but at least it’s readable now.”

“It is,” Julie agreed as she stared at the papers. “Although I was hoping for something a little less obscure.”

The old woman shrugged. “It’s a nice little poem. Well, I really need to buy some thread. I got so caught up in this, I completely forgot what I’d come downstairs for.”

Julie thanked her, then turned back to the message and sighed. Maybe it would make more sense to Daniel. She folded up the papers and slipped them back into her pocket. Then she turned to the far less entertaining job of working on the inn’s finances.

When Daniel returned later in the day, Julie was dealing with another crisis. She could only nod as he waved in passing. The sisters had heard about the mouse at the other end of the hall from their room and were terrified that it was in the process of looking for them.

“Animals can sense when people are afraid,” Mrs. Cantrell insisted. “They sense it, and they attack.”

“You’re concerned about being attacked by a mouse?” Julie asked.

Mrs. Cantrell narrowed her eyes. “They spread disease.”

“Plus,” her sister added, “I’m allergic.”

“To mice?” Julie asked.

“To anything with fur.”

“I’m not certain what you want me to do,” Julie said helplessly. “I put out traps in the room where the mouse was. I could call around and find you a room at another inn.”

Both women looked instantly affronted. “We don’t want to move,” Miss Lawson said.

“That’s entirely too disruptive,” her sister insisted. “We’ve already been moved once because of problems here. We simply want you to catch the mouse before we retire for the evening.”

“Oh.” Julie wasn’t sure what to say to that. Catching a mouse wasn’t exactly like tracking a bear. You had to wait for it to come out and end up in the trap. “Well, I’ve set the traps.”

“What did you use for bait?” Mrs. Cantrell asked. “Peanut butter works best.”

“No,” Miss Lawson said. “Bacon works best. I’ve told you that a hundred times, Clarice. Bacon is far more effective than peanut butter. You’re simply too cheap to bait the traps correctly.”

Julie looked back and forth between the two women. “I used cheese.”

“Cheese!” Miss Lawson was clearly horrified. “You can’t catch a mouse with cheese. What kind of innkeeper puts cheese in a mouse trap? Anyone would think you’d learned about mice from cartoons.”

The truth was, Julie
had
learned about mice from cartoons,
but she chose not to mention that. She hadn’t had to deal with mice getting into her apartment in New York.

After a few more minutes of the sisters’ theatrics, Julie reluctantly agreed to rebait the traps. She even let the sisters follow her, clucking with disapproval, to the kitchen to look over the bacon and peanut butter options.

Hours later, Julie had finally managed to head off every impending disaster and retire to the peace of the third floor. She tapped on Daniel’s door before heading to her own. He opened the door so quickly, she wondered if he’d been waiting for her. His smile was certainly warm and welcoming.

“I have something to show you,” she said. “I found the beam.”

His already cheerful expression bloomed into delight. “You did? I can’t believe it! Where was it?”

“In our cook’s room,” Julie said as she pulled the papers out of her pocket. “I took a rubbing.” She unfolded the thin paper and handed it over.

Daniel moved away from the door and stepped closer to the room’s lamp to study the markings. “It looks almost like the Masonic cipher, but it’s not.”

“No, it’s based on Nine-Patch quilt blocks,” Julie said.

He looked up, and she was pleased to see she’d impressed him. “I don’t suppose you figured out what is says?”

“With a little help from a guest,” Julie admitted as she pulled the rest of the papers from her pocket and took a step inside the room. “But the message isn’t exactly enlightening.” She started to hand them over, then hesitated. “Don’t forget, you promised to let me be involved in this treasure hunt.”

“I won’t forget,” he said. “And I’m not likely to turn down anyone who wants to help. Let me see what you figured out here before I burst, and then I’ll tell you all about my day.”

Julie handed him the papers, and Daniel read the deciphered message aloud: “‘Mey apples fill the finest crock and hew a space in Southern stock.’”

“Does that mean anything to you?” she asked.

“The words ‘hew’ and ‘stock’ could be a reference to a hiding spot for some of the treasure,” he said. “It could be hidden in a compartment hewn into something. Maybe the stock of a gun?”

“Then the treasure would have to be very small.”

“Could be jewels,” he said. “There was a war coming, and some families sent their more portable valuables to family in the territories. This could be a case of that.”

“But what about ‘Mey apples’?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Once we find the ship, this might make more sense.”

“So, tell me about your day.”

Daniel gestured toward the room’s cozy rocking chair. “Please, make yourself comfortable.” He sat nearby on an ottoman. “I walked the Winkler property today, working out where the ship’s most likely location could be. Tomorrow an old friend of mine will be meeting me at the farm. George is a geologist, and he’s bringing a magnetometer to search for the wreckage through the ground.”

“Is that like a metal detector?” she asked.

“A magnetometer identifies magnetic fields,” Daniel said. “Any large deposits of iron will give off a strong reading.”

Julie nodded. “Like the cast iron in a steamship boiler. Sounds interesting.”

Daniel laughed. “It’s not. I’ll be following George around with this backpack magnetometer and listening to him sing badly, but you’re welcome to come out. He’ll like having a new audience.”

“I don’t mind a nice, peaceful morning out on a farm,” she said. “I could use a little bit of boring after the last couple of days here.”

“Well, it might not be totally quiet. I did call the local newspapers and television stations.” Julie’s expression must have reflected her dismay, because his tone turned apologetic. “I really need the publicity. If I can drum up interest, I won’t need to finance everything myself. Right now, I can cover it as long as nothing goes wrong. But I’ve yet to see an excavation where nothing goes wrong.”

“So you’re looking for investors?”

“I will be,” he said. “And it will be easier if I can get the word out.”

She couldn’t fault Daniel’s reasoning, but that didn’t mean she liked the idea of the media being at the search. Julie had been very careful to avoid getting her picture taken since moving to Straussberg. She didn’t know how much energy a criminal art theft ring would put into tracking her down, but she was certain she wouldn’t enjoy the result if they managed to do so.

Still, she didn’t want to pass up a chance to be involved in the search for treasure. It felt like old times to have an adventure ahead of her. She’d just have to be sure she stayed clear of any photo ops. How difficult could that be?