Maggie knew better than to ask about “next time” lest she be treated to another long, loopy lecture on karma and reincarnation. Caroline sounded tired but still as cheerful and optimistic as ever. She told Maggie about the people she’d met and the plans they had to build a Buddhist retreat center nearby. Maggie listened patiently and tried valiantly to keep from rolling her eyes every two minutes. She loved Caroline, but the groovy new age version of Mother Theresa act wore thin quickly. Maggie preferred to send money to support the effort rather than have to hear her friend lecture about it for an hour. Maggie knew it was shallow and selfish, but it was how she felt.
She told Caroline Scott was investigating the crime, and asked if Theo had any enemies she knew of.
Caroline laughed, and said, “I don’t think he had many friends, do you?”
“Is there anything else you can think of that might help? Anything you know Theo was doing he shouldn’t have been?”
“Theo never confided in me, so I haven’t a clue what he was doing. There is something Scott should check out, though,” Caroline said. “Out at the lodge there’s a room above the study. You can get to it through the closet ceiling but we were not allowed to go up there. Dad said his father used to keep booze up there during prohibition, and who knows what Theo used it for. There should still be a key to the house behind the lantern on the front porch; Theo always left one there for me.”
Maggie told Caroline about Theo’s dogs, which probably weren’t really the purebred dogs Theo said they were.
“They weren’t mistreated, were they?” Caroline asked.
“Not at all,” Maggie reassured her. “Hannah just needs to know if you want to keep them or should she find homes for them?”
“I really don’t know what I’m going to do. They won’t read the will until after the funeral, so I won’t know what property’s mine and what’s Gwyneth’s until then. I travel so much with this organization that I certainly won’t be able to take care of them, and you know how much Gwyneth hates animals and children. Tell Hannah to find good, loving homes for them with my blessing.”
Before she got off the phone, Caroline said she would let Maggie know when she was coming home. Caroline said, “Namaste,” to which Maggie said awkwardly, “Right backatcha,” before they both hung up.
Maggie lay awake for a long time thinking about the secret room, trying to decide whether to tell Scott and let him deal with it (probably should) or enlist Hannah to go with her to check it out instead (probably would).
Maggi
e woke up Wednesday morning right before the alarm rang at 6:00, and thought about what had happened the night before. She pictured Scott and Sarah lying entwined in tangled sheets and an actual pain shot through her chest, propelling her out of bed. Convinced Scott was seeing Sarah romantically, she decided she would not immediately tell him about the secret room in Theo’s lodge home. She would wait until she saw Hannah this morning, tell her about the room, and then they would decide what to do about it.
It
turned out she didn’t have long to wait. Hannah called her right after the bookstore opened to see if she was free to go out for breakfast.
“A big one,” Hannah said. “I want everything fried and covered in gravy.”
“We won’t have time,” Maggie said. “Come pick me up and I’ll bring you something. We’re going on a treasure hunt.”
Maggie made Hannah an
extra-large latte with caramel syrup and whipped cream, and filled a bag with day-old baked goods before going out back to wait for her. As soon as she climbed into the cab of the truck, she gave Hannah the cup and bag of food.
“Yummy,” Hannah said.
“Caroline called me last night,” Maggie said. “After you insulted me and I hung up on you.”
Hannah had already latched o
nto a cheese danish, so she could only say, “Mmm, hmmm?”
“Our Miss Caroline is on a missionary trip in Paraguay–she told me the name of the city but I can't remember it now–and just found out about her bastard brother getting himself murdered,” Maggie said. “She’s flying back in a few weeks, as soon as she wraps up what she's doing down there and can get flights booked.”
Hannah asked, “Where's whatsit-guay?” with a mouth full of pastry.
“South America,” Maggie told her. “Anyway, she said the lodge has a secret room you can get to through the closet in the study. She said her great granddad used to hide booze in it during prohibition.”
Hannah put the truck in reverse and backed into the alley so fast they slid.
“How do we get in?” she asked, and Maggie grinned.
After an interminable crawl up Pine Mountain Road behind a slow moving eighteen-wheeler, they went on a four-wheel drive adventure up the lodge driveway. The state road crew was plowing it a couple times per day for Hannah, as a favor, so she could get to Theo’s dogs, but they hadn’t done it yet this morning. Hannah’s truck slid to rest almost against the porch of the large house and they waded through three-foot high drifts to get to the front door. Up here on the ridgetop there was a clear blue sky, while down in Rose Hill it had been overcast and gray; they had climbed above the bad weather.
Maggie fumbled behind one of the big lanterns that flanked the door and found a key on a long, frozen leather shoelace, right where Caroline said it would be. She carefully lifted the yellow police tape that was draped across the doorframe from lantern to lantern and Hannah held it up for her. When the key turned the lock in the massive door, they more or less tumbled into the foyer of the big house, bringing a lot of snow in with them.
Hannah whistled low and said, “Wow, I forgot how big it is.”
They shed their coats, hats, g
loves, and boots on the rug right inside the door, and Maggie handed Hannah some big yellow rubber gloves and one of the flashlights she brought from the bookstore. Hannah laughed, making a queenly wave with one of her gloved hands.
“Some cat burglars we make with our big yellow hands,” she said.
“It was all I had,” Maggie told her.
They went through the library to the billiard room, where they stopped long enough for Maggie to pull the sheet off the development model on the pool table and take a good look at Eldridge Point. They studied it from several angles, pointing out different features.
“This must be Theo's house,” Maggie said, pointing to an elaborate mansion at the end of a cul de sac, the largest home featured, with a view of the mountains, lake, and golf course behind it.
“Isn’t all of this property protected land?” Hannah asked, noting the miniature wind farm on several of the mountain ridges.
Maggie was glowering at the development, looking like she might destroy it with one swipe of her huge yellow hand. Hannah reminded her cousin what their intentions were, saying, “Let's go see what the bastard has hidden in the ceiling.”
In the study there was a closet, right where Caroline said it would be, back in the corner. The closet was three feet deep and wide, and full of boxes of Eldridge Point logo merchandise. They laughed at the stupid looking logo before moving all the boxes into the study. Maggie used a flashlight to look at the ceiling of the closet. The cedar-paneled enclosure had a cedar plank ceiling, and loo
king carefully, they could just make out how it was not flush against the molding where it met the walls. They borrowed the rolling ladder from the library and pushed it into the closet as far as it would go.
Maggie went up first, and found the ceiling panel was hinged on one side, which allowed it to swing upward into a dark space above the closet. With the upper half of her body through the opening, Maggie shone the flashlight on all four walls of the space, roughly the same size in circumference as the closet.
“If I see one spider this mission is aborted,” Maggie told Hannah.
“You’re such a big sissy,” Hannah said. “Spiders wouldn’t stop Miss Marple. Spiders wouldn’t stop Harriet Vane. Spiders wouldn’t stop Kinsey Milhone. Spiders wouldn’t stop Cordelia Gray…”
“Alright, shut up,” Maggie said.
Maggie was momentarily disappointed to think this was the secret room itself. Then the beam from the flashlight revealed a series of iron rungs attached to one wall. Maggie pointed them out to Hannah, who was steadying the ladder beneath her. After testing the strength of the rungs first, she climbed up into the dark, empty shaft above the closet. It was hard to climb and shine the flashlight up at the same time, so she went slowly, pausing every so often to shine the light above and around her. The walls were cedar lined, just like the closet beneath it, and the rungs were made of thick iron pipes bolted to the wall. It was dusty and cobwebby in the corners, but to Maggie’s relief they seemed to be dust webs and not the spidery kind.
After she climbed what seemed like ten or twelve feet, she discerned a door on the wall behind her. She calculated she must be at the second floor level looking toward the back of one of the bedrooms, but she felt a little disoriented. Up another eight feet the shaft ended in a cedar plank ceiling that seemed to be firmly fastened to the walls all the way around.
Maggie turned and shone the light on the door in the wall behind her, a yard away. She reached out and turned the old iron doorknob, which had no locking mechanism, and pushed the door inward. She pointed the light into the room and frightened herself by shining it into a mirror on a far wall, and seeing herself looking back. She told Hannah, close behind her, what she was doing, then turned and leaped into the room.
She stumbled over something, and had just righted herself as Hannah got high enough on the iron rungs to point her flashlight and look in.
“That was graceful,” Hannah said.
Maggie stood up in the middle of the room and flinched as something swung against her cheek. She batted frantically at what she thought was probably a giant spider, much to Hannah’s amusement. It turned out to be the pull chain to a light bulb in the ceiling. She pulled it, and the light came on, throwing everything in the room into dim relief by its low wattage light. Hannah leaped into the room, avoiding the ottoman Maggie had stumbled over.
Maggie estimated the room was ten feet square at most. There was an old velvet armchair next to the ottoman with a fringed floor lamp behind it. The mechanism on the lamp showed its age, but when Maggie pulled the short chain it worked, helping to light the small room even more. On the other side of the chair and ottoman was an old iron safe, about two feet cubed, with an old fashioned dial and handle, and on top of it was a half empty bottle of whiskey and a glass with some whiskey residue in it. The bottle was new and not dusty. Theo, or someone, had been up there recently.
Hannah meanwhile, was studying the wall across from the chair and ottoman, most of which was covered in photographs.
She turned a grim face to Maggie and said, “Come look at this.”
They were all photographs of Maggie’s sister-in-law Ava. There were black and white shots of her as a toddler, yellowed color photos of her in grade school, and blown up color photos of her posing as Prom Queen, Winter Festival Queen, and Miss Firecracker. There was even a blurry wedding photo with Brian cut out of it. There were photos representing all the intervening years from her childhood to the present, even some that seemed recent. The almost surgical precision of the cuts revealed Theo had removed anyone who appeared in a photo with Ava, even her children. The recent photos seemed surreptitiously taken, and Maggie wondered who had taken them.
All together the collection told the story of an obsession which seemed to span most of Theo's adolescent and adult life, and formed a shrine to the beauty of Maggie’s sister-in-law. Hannah pointed at one photo pinned near where she stood, and Maggie leaned over to look. It had been taken through Ava’s second floor bedroom window, could only have been taken from the vantage point of a tree outside, through the space where the lace curtains were parted. Ava was sleeping, one arm thrown over her head and one leg under a sheet. There was a man in the bed with her, but Maggie couldn’t tell who it was. Theo had cut him out of the picture, so only his arm showed.
“I'm taking them down,” Maggie said firmly, and Hannah said, “I’ll help you.”
“You don’t think Ava was ever involved with Theo, do you?” Hannah asked tentatively as they worked.
“I don’t know,” Maggie said. “They dated briefly the summer Brian broke up with her, right after he graduated, but it was probably only a week or two at the most.”
“Didn’t Brian and Ava get married shortly after that?” Hannah asked.
“Yes,” Maggie said. “It was the big scandal of the year. She had just turned sixteen. He had to turn down a baseball scholarship at Wake Forrest to stay here and work for Curtis at the station.”
The air in the room was stuffy, dusty, and stale. Maggie didn’t want to think ab
out what all Theo got up to in here, with this shrine to her sister-in-law on the wall. Once all the pictures were in a pile on the floor Maggie checked the safe.
“It’s locked, of course.”
“What number was it left on?” Hannah asked. “Maybe he forgot to spin it.”
Maggie told her the number.
“That’s the year I was born,” Hannah said.
That gave Maggie an idea.
“Wasn’t Brad your age?”
Hannah nodded.
“Too bad we don’t know Brad’s birth date; that might be it.”
“Or Ava’s,” Hannah said, and gestured at the wall they had just cleared.
Maggie knew her sister-in-law’s birth date, and sure enough, those numbers opened it.
“That was too easy,” Maggie said to Hannah.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Hannah said. “If I kept a safe in my secret stalker Ava Fitzpatrick shrine, I might make her birth date the combination.”
“Thanks, wise ass,” said Maggie, and opened the door.
The safe had several manila envelopes and folders in it, plus a handgun, two boxes of ammunition, three thick, bundled stacks of money, a display type coin or jewelry box, a big plastic bag of pot, some small plastic vials of what looked like rocks of brown sugar, and a rectangular shaped object wrapped in brown paper and twine.
“Geez oh wiz, would you look at that! Colombian drug lord Theo Eldridge,” Hannah said.
“I’m not touching those things,” Maggie said, pointing at the gun and drugs.
Maggie left everything in the safe except the manila folders and envelopes. Those she piled on the ottoman before she seated herself in the velvet armchair. Hannah sat down on the floor and watched her open each one, awkwardly, with her big-yellow-gloved hands.
As Maggie and Hannah opened and examined the contents of each envelope, they realized the collection represented enough blackmail dynamite to blow the quiet lives of several prominent Rose Hill citizens to kingdom come.
There were compromising photos of men and women who didn't seem to realize, in their enthusiasm, that they were being photographed. The two recurring players in these photographs were Phyllis Davis, in various color wigs, looking triumphant and smug, and a man who always had his face covered, or turned away, but who had a distinctive snake tattoo down the underside of both his forearms.
The names on the envelopes included several Maggie did not know, but some she did, including Doc Machalvie, former fire chief Eric Estep, Ed's father, and Maggie’s brother Brian.
Hannah was beside herself at first, but eventually could only say, “Ew,” at every photo.
After the first six envelopes Maggie said, “I’m getting sick of looking at naked people, how about you?”
Hannah nodded emphatically, saying, “That Phyllis is like a gymnast at the sex Olympics, isn’t she?”
“We’ll only look in the envelopes of the people we know,” Maggie said.