Repair to Her Grave (29 page)

“The old stories are wrong. Hayes didn’t die the day after Jane. He died the day before, the way Hecky Wilmot says. She was a pirate's child, remember. With pirate instincts.”

We peered over the cliffs. Most of the edge was precipitous, yet studded with trees growing precariously from the soil formed by the crumbling shale. Here the drop was straight down to where the water moved massively far below.

“This is where that other fellow went off,” Wade said, his tone grim, and the strangeness of that event struck me again, too. It was an odd place to try scrambling down for a snapshot, if that was what he’d been doing. But we had no time to ponder it.

“Over here.” Through the trees that clung to the cliffside I could see a steep, slanting sort of trail. The stones and twigs on it were freshly disturbed.

“Jane killed Hayes, or had him killed,
because
he’d given her the map. So she didn’t need him anymore.”

“And because he’d betrayed her father, the pirate Josephus?” Wade reached a hand up, steadied me as I made my way down.

“No. They did that together. She planned it all, Wade. She meant to be the last one standing, and have the money Hayes stole for herself. After she’d got rid of Hayes, though …
Oof.”

I grabbed a protruding tree root, caught my breath as loose shale slid out from under my shoe.

“After that,” I went on when I’d reached the bottom, “she had Hayes's body dumped at Pirate's Cove, where Josephus's ship had been burned to the waterline by the townspeople after he was hanged. It's how the skull ended up there.”

A wave crashed onto the wet rocks protruding from the water, boomed in an explosion of spray, and fell back for another onslaught.

“Probably,” I finished, “it was a kind of joke to her. The pirate wanna-be buried with a pirate ship. God, how she must have despised him with his fake respectability, his pretensions to education. Everything she didn’t have and wanted so badly.”

“What about his head?” Wade swung down expertly. “You think Jane's boyfriends actually cut it off?”

Here at the foot of the cliffs with the water pounding, the waves hurtling in, and the gulls crying, the world of streets and houses seemed like a distant country. “The ocean did that. Two hundred years and a lot of water … the rest of the bones probably just washed out to sea.”

I gazed around at the wild landscape. “But the skull rolled into a backwater, got covered up with peat and silt, and it just stayed there.”

No other human beings were in sight. The footing down here at the water's edge was treacherous, slippery rocks shifting as we tried stepping on them. We covered as much of the narrowing shoreline as we could, but it was useless. There were dozens of openings, no way to tell which ones led to caves or had anyone inside.

Wade shouted inaudibly, his voice swallowed by the pounding of the rising tide, then shook his head and pointed up. It wasn’t as difficult climbing back up the cliffs as it had been trying not to tumble going down, but the earth and rocks were unbelievably treacherous. I slid a few times and once nearly lost it entirely in a clatter of stones, before finding an outcropping I could put my whole weight on.

Finally, I hauled myself up to seize Wade's reaching hand, as he looked out toward the swirling blue channel and the islands beyond. He pulled the invisible-ink map out, scowled at it again as I peered at it with him.

“Look, it shows these cliffs,” I said. “And there's the rocks we were just standing on. The entrances to some of the caves. But…” A stiff breeze off the water made the old paper flutter and threaten to tear; I steadied it. “But if it's a map
to
something, where's …”

“I still don’t see anything specific. No X to mark the spot. Or if there is one, we’re just not recognizing it. Hayes could read it because he already knew what it indicated, and as far as he knew, he was the only one who would ever need to follow it,” Wade theorized.

So we were stonewalled. Meanwhile, Sam had been pulling on his drysuit, checking his tanks and regulators. But there was nowhere for him to dive. The idea of checking every possible cave remained ridiculous, as he had already concluded.

“If they’re in there, they’re trapped,” he said. “Tide's so high, it's filling the entrances to the caves. Even if there are pockets of air inside, they won’t last. Hear it?”

I hadn’t. But now I realized: the booming sound of the waves was coming not only from the foot of the cliffs, but from the earth beneath my feet, the water hammering inside the rock that was the foundation for this whole end of the island. Filling the caves, making a drum of the earth itself as it pounded with the force of billions of gallons of icy water.

The sound of an engine made me look up.

Ellie arriving, I thought.

But it wasn’t.

Instead, it was the important thing that we’d been missing.

9

It was Jonathan Raines, highballing toward us in Mapes's old pickup truck, with Winston Cartwright riding a massive shotgun and Ellie clinging in the truck bed, her red hair flying.

The truck skidded to a halt and Raines jumped out. I didn’t know whether to kiss him or kick him.

Kick him, I decided. “You faked it,” I said. “You faked your own murder and left us this mess to try to sort out. You lying, sneaking, dirty rotten little son of a—”

“Right. I apologize.” He gazed around urgently. “But I’ll do my penance later, if you don’t mind. Where are they?”

Ellie leapt from the truck bed. “Bob Arnold's gone out to Lillian's place, see if he can find out anything there,” she said as Cartwright lumbered down from the passenger seat.

The old man leaned hard on the carved cane, anxiety etched on his face. “Winston, what the hell is going on?” I demanded.

He waved at Raines. “He intended for Charmian to have a change of heart at the news of his death,” Cartwright said.
“And
to spur you two to further detective efforts. Mapes was hiding him, in hopes of learning more about that blasted map. But—”

“I think Charmian and Lillian Frey are down there. No sign of them now, though,” I told him. “I don’t know what more to do or where to look. And the caves …”

His sharp eyes took in the situation. “The tide,” he uttered gravely. “Oh, dear God in heaven.”

But Raines didn’t pause for praying any more than he had for penance. Instead, he pulled a much-folded sheet of paper from his pants pocket.

“Sam,” he said crisply, “look at this. Do you think you can find this opening?” He pointed at a spot on the paper.

“Where did you get…” I began, then stopped as it hit me. He’d made his
own
copy of the map he’d found in Jane's diary, of course. The one that had been so legible, it had sent Charmian out to try following it at once.

“Wait a minute,” I started again. “Sam's not going to …”

Sam just looked at me, and all at once I noticed how tall he was: as tall as Wade. Bigger through the shoulders, actually. And while I wasn’t looking, something had happened to his face.

That jutting jawline, the shadow along it because he hadn’t shaved. And the eyes, so calm and confident. Much more than mine had been when at that same age I had married his father.

“Oh,” I said, and the hint of a smile creased the corner of Sam's mouth; he bent back to the paper Raines was showing him.

“Right here,” he said seriously. “Yeah, I can do it.”

I turned to Cartwright. “But how did you know? That Raines was alive, I mean.”

He snorted disparagingly. “Mapes is a hunter. Guns, antlers, trophies. But the box of food and supplies in his truck consisted entirely of vegetables.”

Cartwright's voice was a low rumble as he watched Raines and Sam. “Thus I concluded the supplies were not meant for Mapes.”

“You remembered Raines is vegetarian,” I said. “Brilliant.”

He shook his head sadly, removed the disreputable slouch hat to gaze at it before resettling it. “Not quite brilliant enough, apparently.”

He caught his breath as Sam disappeared over the edge of the bluffs. Wade went down behind him, carrying the coil of line that Sam would use in case it was murky or he lost his bearings. The very idea made me want to hunker down on the grass and cover my eyes.

“I still don’t understand why Lillian Frey thinks she’ll find the Strad down there.” I waved at the water. “She's the one who first told me it couldn’t survive the elements, and surely Hayes would’ve realized that, too. I mean, I’d say a flooded cave is a pretty harsh—”

But here I stopped, as my tactless musing brought a look of anguish to the old man's face. After that, we waited for twenty long minutes until Sam reappeared over the edge of the bluffs. Even from this distance I could tell his search hadn’t been successful. The target cave, the one marked on Raines's copy of the map, was empty.

“I went all the way back,” he said as we gathered around him. “Nothing. But you know, once you get in there it's not what the map shows.”

He peered again at Raines's tracing of the sheet from Jane Whitelaw's diary. “See, you start here, but when you get here …”

His finger moved along a line Raines had marked. Watching, Winston Cartwright paled. Then he understood, too.

“Idiot!” he bellowed, clapping a massive hand to his forehead. “Oh, I am a foolish old— Give me that.”

He lumbered hastily to Raines and Sam, snatched the copy of the map from Sam's hand, scowled blackly at it. “Oh, of course, any
infant
could surely predict that…”

“What?” Raines demanded, as Cartwright took the map Wade had been carrying and held the two maps up side by side: the invisible-ink map from my dining room wall, and the tracing Raines had made of Jane Whitelaw's map, the one from her diary.

And finally, finally, I understood what must have happened: two books. Two maps. One for Hayes, one for Jane.

Different
maps. “Compare,” he demanded. “Here, and here. You see?” He looked triumphantly at us. “The maps don’t match. Hayes gave Jane Whitelaw a map, all right. But it was a fake.”

“Of course,” Ellie breathed. “He didn’t trust her.”

“He wanted to appease her, and he loved her. So …” I tried picturing it: the beautiful woman he adored, his growing sense of something amiss, perhaps. He just didn’t know how amiss.

“Oh, Lord.” Cartwright's voice was despairing as he examined the map we now believed to be the true one: the one Hayes kept for himself. “Haven’t any of you any classical learning at
all
?
”

We shook our heads. “Greek to me,” Sam said as a joke, but shut up as Cartwright glowered at him.

“What does this word say?” he demanded, shoving the frayed sheet of old paper under my nose.

“It's Latin,” I said. “It says ‘
ex,
’ which I think means out. But we don’t want to get out of somewhere, we want to get… Oh.”

“Oh,” Ellie echoed comprehendingly. “Ex. And not as in FedEx, either, but as in …”

I clapped a hand to my head. “Ex marks the spot. Do you mean to tell me that on top of everything else, this annoying little jerk had to be a bilingual joker on his own damned
treasure map?
Oh, that's just…”

I stopped. They were staring at me, Cartwright in despair.

“If I’m not mistaken,” he said heavily, waving at the water, “the spot this map marks is now entirely submerged.”

Sam's shoulders slumped. “Yeah. I’m afraid so. When I was down there I saw the opening. Saw it from above, I mean, it's way below the surface now, this entrance.”

He put a hand on the old man's massive shoulder. “I couldn’t have gotten in even if I’d known it was the right one. I’m sorry, Professor. But this cave here … Well. It's been flooded for quite a while, now. Without air tanks, they couldn’t…”

Cartwright looked up. His face was desolate. “Thank you, my boy. Thank you for trying to save my niece. You’ve been so kind.”

He turned away, and we watched him walk slowly back to the pickup truck, leaning on the walking stick. When he got there, he looked at the vehicle as if he couldn’t remember what it was for.

So there we were, helpless and miserable. It was over for Charmian and Lillian Frey. And there wasn’t a damned thing any of us could do about it.

“That lying bastard,” Ellie said vehemently, and I knew who she meant: Hayes.

“He was a fake, and a thief, and a liar. He betrayed the man who helped him. I don’t care if Josephus
was
a pirate, he was a friend to Hayes. And I hope he's rotting in—”

“Look!” Sam shouted, pointing.

A hand flopped up over the edge of the cliff, scrabbled for purchase in the crumbly soil, slipped, finally found its hold. As we stared, a black-clad arm followed, then a face. Blond hair stuck in sodden wisps from a closely fitting drysuit helmet.

“Jill!” Sam ran a few steps and stopped, just as a car sped down the road at us and swung over.

Lillian Frey jumped out, her face distraught. In her own car and driving alone. Which meant that the car we were going to find backed up into that birch stand belonged to …

“Have you seen Jill?” Lillian demanded worriedly.

“Over there,” I said.

“Thank God,” Lillian said, “I’ve been frantic. People downtown are saying something happened to Wilbur, and …”

Then she caught my tone, as Jill climbed over the cliff edge and got to her feet, tugging off her headgear before she saw us all standing there.

I showed Lillian the opal. “Charmian's ring,” I said.

And now here was Jill. “She's done something, hasn’t she?” Lillian said.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m afraid she has.”

Jill decided how to play it. “Oh,” she cried, “someone help! I saw Charmian fall, she's down there, somebody's got to—”

None of us moved. Jill came toward us, her face a mask of urgency. As she walked I could see her eyes flicking from one to another of us, deciding which one to manipulate.

Finally she decided. “Sam, come on, you have to—”

“Sam doesn’t have to do anything, Jill,” I said.

She stopped, a glimmer of uncertainty in her eyes. Then her chin jutted, her shoulders straightened, and she stalked past me; she was going to try to bull it through.