7 Never Haunt a Historian (27 page)

Where
was Allison?!

She ran back over to the side of the tool shed, her nerves frayed to the breaking point. She felt as if she had fallen through the looking glass; nothing that was happening made any sense. It seemed as if she had been wandering around in the rain for an hour; in reality it had been only a few minutes. The thought of her daughter’s being lost in the same nightmare brought sheer terror.
Stay calm,
Leigh begged her beleaguered brain.
Don’t be useless. Think!

Her phone buzzed in her pocket. She whipped it out so fast she dropped it. With a cry she squatted down and began rummaging through the muddy grass with shaky fingers. After what seemed an eternity, she retrieved it, quickly curling her body around it to protect the screen from the endless rain. It was another text from her mother.

Never mind. She was in the bathroom.

Leigh’s rear end collapsed onto the ground.

She remained sitting there, dazed, until she realized mud was seeping through her underwear.

Hang the fifth commandment,
she resolved steadily.
Frances Koslow is a dead woman.

“I think you’d better get up from there now,” a deep voice ordered menacingly.

Leigh’s head turned, with measured slowness, toward the source of the sound. Her predicament was so farcical, she could almost laugh. It did not surprise her, therefore—in fact, it seemed eminently fitting—that she would turn to find herself looking at the barrel of a shotgun.

“Hi, Joe,” she greeted with the unnatural calm reserved for the hysterical. “What’s up?”

Chapter 21

Joe O’Malley reached down a hand and pulled Leigh roughly to her feet. “What’s up is that you’re in the way,” he growled. “What the hell are you doing out here?”

Unruffled, Leigh blinked back at him. “You have no idea how complicated it would be to answer that question.”

He shook his head. “Forget it, I don’t care. But you’re not staying here. You’ll have to come inside.” He grabbed her by the arm and propelled her forward.

“Inside?” Leigh questioned, her tortured brain attempting to function again.

“In the house!” Joe spat out impatiently. Although Leigh was offering no resistance, the man seemed intent on half dragging her. “Before you screw up everything!”

Leigh’s brow furrowed. They were headed for the backdoor of the farmhouse. “What do you mean—”

Joe clamped a beefy hand over her mouth. “Shh! Will you just shut up and hurry?” He removed the hand and commenced dragging her again. As they moved to Archie’s back porch, Leigh caught sight of not one, but two other men doing a remarkably bad job of hiding behind trees. Realization dawned.

The reenactors.
Why were they here?

“Go ahead,” Joe ordered, pushing her up the back steps ahead of him. “He’ll be in the living room.”

He?

Another crack of thunder split the air, a flash of lightning hitting simultaneous with it.

Joe swore. “Gotta get this damn thing over with or we’re gonna get ourselves electrocuted!”

Leigh put her hand on the doorknob. She was trying to be smart. Really, she was. But making informed decisions was challenging when one was floating upside down in rainbow pudding on the wrong side of the looking glass. Was Joe threatening her or not? He was hardly asking her to tea. But he wasn’t pointing his gun at her, either.

She turned the knob and opened the door. If Joe was out to hurt her, trying to bolt now would only ensure that he did so—most likely immediately. And if he was not? Either way, she’d at least be out of the rain.

Leigh stepped into Archie’s kitchen. The house had an unpleasant, stale smell to it. The mess that Wiley had left in his wake during the first days after Archie’s disappearance had been cleaned up, presumably by Emma, and Wiley hadn’t been free to roam in and out of his dog door since. Still, Archie’s house seemed close and unkempt. All the ceiling lamps were off. The room was lit dimly by a small beam coming from the next room.

“Go on,” Joe prodded, poking the butt of his gun into her back. “He knows you’re coming.”

Leigh took a deep breath and stepped forward. She walked through the doorway and out into the living room.

“For heaven’s sake!” the familiar voice said with surprise, shining a small flashlight up and down her bedraggled form. “Mrs. Har— I mean, Leigh, what on earth are you doing out here?”

The question was a popular one. “I could ask you the same thing, Harvey,” she retorted, her tone measured. “Everyone at the Browns’ is worried sick about you.”

His face puckered. “I’m sorry about that,” he said sincerely. “But I had no choice. It was too dangerous for me to stay. I’m not ashamed to admit it—I was afraid.”

Leigh was sure her head would spin 360 degrees at any moment. “Afraid of whom?” she pleaded. “Who sent you the note? Why on earth would you come? And why are all these men from the reenacting company hiding around in the trees?”

Joe let loose with an oath. “You
saw
them?” He groaned. “Amateurs!”

“Don’t worry,” Harvey told her, even as his own voice shook with that emotion. “It’s all perfectly safe. Joe has everything figured out.”

Leigh did not feel any better. “He has
what
worked out?” she demanded. “Harvey, talk to me!”

Leigh heard the buzz of a phone. Mercifully, it was not hers. Joe dropped a hand in his pocket and took a step away from them.

“Harvey,” she said in a whisper, wondering suddenly if his presence was no more voluntary than her own. “If you were scared, why didn’t you just call the police? Has Joe threatened you?”

Harvey’s wiry eyebrows tented. “Has Joe… of course not! I’m the one who dragged him into this.”

“But why?”

“Because I didn’t know where else to go!” he said plaintively. “Once I figured out who the descendent was, I knew I couldn’t stay in the house. But I thought I would have more time! I snuck over to Joe’s to call the police, but he… Well, he talked me out of it. He said we didn’t have enough evidence, and he was right. He convinced me we should go for a confession… with witnesses.”

The pieces of the puzzle were at last assembling in Leigh’s mind. But the process was painfully slow. “You wanted to catch whomever was offering to sell you the treasure,” she reasoned, “so you asked Joe to help you? But why would anyone want to sell the treasure to you in the first place? Was the note even
for
you?”

Harvey cast her a sympathetic glance. “No, no, no. You don’t understand at all!”

Joe gave them both a not-so-gentle push to the side. “Affirmative sighting at ten o’clock,” he said excitedly. “It’s time, Boss. Everyone to their stations!”

“Come with me!” Harvey whispered hurriedly to Leigh, guiding her in the direction of Archie’s bedroom. “We’ll have to hide you.”

“From whom?” Leigh pleaded again. “Harvey, whatever you’ve got planned, there’s no need to go through with it. The police are already on their way. They’re coming out to look for
you!”

Harvey stopped a moment and stared at her, wide-eyed. “Oh, but no! That will ruin everything!” He hustled her the rest of the way into the bedroom and opened Archie’s closet door. “If they get here too soon, they’ll tip her off, and then we’ll never get a confession!” He spun Leigh around and attempted to push her gently backwards into the closet.

Tip
her
off?

“A confession from
whom?”
Leigh demanded, planting her feet.

“Places!” Joe whispered roughly.

Harvey groaned. “From the great-great-great granddaughter of Theodore Carr, that’s who!” And with a strength that was surprising for a man of his size, let alone his age, he shoved her backward and shut the closet door in her face. “And
please
try to be quiet!” he added.

In the next two seconds, Leigh became aware of three things. One, that the closet smelled of cigarettes, even though Archie didn’t smoke. Two, that some men’s breathing can sound remarkably like Darth Vader when heard in an enclosed space. And three, that she was not alone.

“Um…” the man whispered sheepishly in her ear. “Hi there.”

Leigh was proud of the fact that she didn’t scream. She had never been a screamer, but if she were so inclined, this would seem a valid opportunity.

“Hi,” she whispered back.

They heard the front door open. Leigh tried not to think about the fact that she was standing in a neighbor’s bedroom closet in soaking wet clothes pressed up against a strange man about whom she knew exactly nothing except that he enjoyed marching in parades and running around historic battlefields shooting off blanks.

She had been in worse predicaments.

While her ears strained to hear what was happening in the next room, her brain worked feverishly to decipher Harvey’s confounding comments. She had it all wrong, he had said. Had he meant that no one was trying to sell the treasure to him? That no one was selling the treasure at all? But the note said—

Of course.
How stupid of her. No one had sent anything to Harvey, had they? It was Harvey who was in the driver’s seat. Harvey who had reasoned out, without ever laying eyes on her map, that the best way to finger Archie’s competition would be to find out who had their own copy. He had suspected from the beginning that a direct descendant of Theodore’s would be the most likely candidate. He had spent all day at the library—and perhaps a courthouse or two?—finding out just who Theodore’s living heirs might be. And evidently, he had found one.

One a little too close to home.

A chill swept up Leigh’s bones, starting at the center of her soaking wet toes and traveling up to rattle her skull. Harvey hadn’t received that note. Harvey had
written
it. Both the one she found—either practice or a reject—and the one he had actually sent. That incredibly cunning, gutsy old historian who never left his room had run out on a stormy night and enlisted the aid of the entire 102nd Pennsylvania Volunteer Regiment to bring the great-great-great granddaughter of Theodore Carr to justice before she flipped out altogether and hurt someone else.

And he had taken his cat with him.

“It’s back here,” Harvey was saying, his voice quavering. Leigh could hear him moving into the bedroom doorway, mere feet from where she stood. A woman’s answering voice, low and indistinct, sounded from farther away.

“It’s here, I swear!” Harvey pleaded, switching on the bedroom lights. “I… I overhead Lester and Archie talking and I knew what they were looking for. I stole a look at the map and figured out where to find it. They were off by a mile, but the location was obvious to me, and now I’ve confirmed it. It won’t be hard to retrieve it—but that’s your problem. That’s stealing, and I don’t want any trouble. I just want some money. Not much, considering what it’s worth. All I want is enough to get out of the home and set myself up in my own place.”

The voice that responded sounded much like a hiss. Leigh craned her neck uselessly, trying to identify the voice. But she could barely hear it.

“You can come on back, but I’m not showing you exactly where it is until I see some cash,” Harvey insisted. Leigh could hear him backing up into the bedroom. He was trying to lure the woman deeper into the house, most likely so that as many hidden men as possible could hear her… and surround her.

“I want half before you leave here,” Harvey continued, his voice advancing farther into the room. “If anything happens to me, the police will find a note explaining the whole sordid story. If you don’t want that, I’d suggest you leave me to my business. When you’ve got it, you send me the other half. There’s no risk for you. You own the land. All you have to do is bide your time, then find it “accidentally” while digging a fish pond or something. That was your plan from the beginning, wasn’t it? If you couldn’t buy the farm, land close by was good enough? Convince everyone it was found on your property, and it would
be
your property?”

You own the land.

Leigh held her breath as the second figure rustled through the bedroom doorway. Her eyes could see nothing, but her mind supplied the image with frightening clarity. A woman on the sidelines, unconcerned. A woman who could know everything, but whom no one gave credit for knowing anything. A woman who donned the cloak of a nurturer to mask the soul of a selfish, heartless witch.

“It
is
mine, you idiot!” the she-devil bellowed, her voice mere inches from Leigh’s horrified ears. “It’s
always
been mine! It belongs to my family, and it belongs to me! Archie was the one trying to steal it!”

“But you didn’t have to hurt him!” Harvey chastised, raising his own voice to an impassioned wail. Leigh could hear the fear in his voice—understood it and felt it in her bones—but she also knew what he was doing. He needed a confession, and he needed it now.

“I didn’t!” she screeched. “I didn’t lay a finger on him!”

“But you hired somebody else to!” Harvey fired at her. “Hired them to ‘get rid of him!’ Didn’t you? Well,
didn’t you?!”

“No!” she shouted, her temper rising easily to Harvey’s well-dangled bait. “I only told them to scare him! To make him stop, to keep him away for a while! I can’t help it if they’re barbarians! But I can do the same to you all by myself if you don’t show me where it is and get out of my way!”

In the distance, outside the windows and through the rain, came the distinct, high wail of a police siren. “Show me now!” she screamed. “Or I swear to God, I’ll—”

“What?” Harvey pounced. “Bash my head in like you did Lester?”

“I’ll do worse than that, you old goat, maybe even in your sleep! If you know everything there is to know about me you should know not to stand between me and what I want! Now, WHERE IS IT?!”

No sooner did the woman’s voice move in the direction of Harvey’s than a shrill mouth whistle sounded from the living room. The man behind Leigh immediately pushed the closet door open, shoved her aside, and leapt out into the room—handgun drawn. At his shoulder appeared Joe O’Malley, now sporting a blocky, mean-looking pistol that looked like something from a bad action movie. A third man had sprung up from the corner behind Archie’s chest of drawers. A fourth leaned in the open window, his baseball cap dripping with rain.