Southern Gothic (16 page)

“I’m so glad you showed up. I was afraid I’d miss you when my shift ended.”

Max loved the giddy enthusiasm of his friend. “I take it you found something about Sebastian.”

“No. But that O. Henry story you found — I looked into Cal Baxter some more. In particular, I learned that his famous house has had an interesting history.”

Leon launched into a tale that took Max by surprise. In addition to Baxter House’s odd creation and eccentric owner, the place had a dark reputation. Over the decades since Cal Baxter’s death and the Hull family’s purchase of the house, four people had attempted to break into the building.

Leon found no record of what they sought. “Guess they figured anything worth building up in secret has got to be hiding something. Besides which, the whole thing was an unanswered mystery, and some people cannot let that kind of thing go.”

With an excited shake, Leon showed Max several grainy copies of old newspaper articles. There was Samantha Shoemaker, a devout Christian woman, who wanted to free Cal Baxter from haunting the house. Another was Alex Crane, a young man who often got teased for wearing a leather bomber jacket though he had never served. In the 1980s, a young man from Japan traveled to check out the house. Ushiro Takashi looked amusing with his neck garnished in a mass of gold chains and his body proudly wearing a Mr. T sweatshirt. The last page showed Alan Peck — an older man wearing a heavy, dark coat and a hunter’s cap.

“The weirdest part about all of this is the fates of these four people. All of them disappeared. They never came out of the house again. Police were summoned, but when they searched the house, they didn’t find anything. Not even a hint that those people had gone in.”

Max looked over the pictures again. “Thanks. I don’t know how this fits in, but I’m glad for the extra info.”

“I thought you might like it. Good luck with the rest of your search. I got to get home.”

As Leon shuffled off, Max thought about the secret room. He never saw signs that people had been killed in there — assuming these unfortunate mystery-hunters were killed — but then Sebastian’s murder had enough strangeness about it to suggest that these disappearances could have equally strange answers behind them. Perhaps Cal had built another secret room in the house.

He set the pictures aside and dived into more research on finding Lilla. An hour later, with little to show, he packed up and headed home. He didn’t feel that much better, but Leon’s contribution gave him a sense of progress.

That night, Sandra and Max met Cecily Hull at the Tokyo Steakhouse. Cecily offered to pay for dinner, so the Porter’s thought it best to go for something moderately expensive. Plus, they both enjoyed Japanese cuisine and had not been able to afford it for a long time.

Tokyo Steakhouse was the kind of place where the chefs put on a show, cooking the food in front of the diners with plenty of fast-paced and flashy knife-work. Cecily purchased a private room, leaving clear instructions that the chef should simply cook the food and avoid the show. Though this disappointed Max, he considered that the food came free, so he would keep all whining to himself.

“What? No show?” Drummond, naturally, had no problem complaining. “Bad enough I can’t eat any of this food, but I can’t even get the show. What a cheat.”

After the chef prepared their meals and left, Max and Sandra dug in. Cecily’s look of disgust did nothing to prevent their ravenous attack on the shrimp, chicken, and rice. Five minutes later, Max patted his belly.

Cecily forced a smile. “Glad you enjoyed this. Now, I’m assuming we’re meeting tonight so that we can discuss your working for me?”

“No,” Max said, enjoying the shocked look on her face. “We’re meeting so that I can tell you to back off — unfreeze our assets and leave us alone. If you don’t, we’ll find that gold before you or Tucker or any of the others looking for it. We’ll find it first — you know that. That’s why you want us to work for you. So, leave us be or we’ll get the gold and you won’t have anything to fund your fight against Tucker with.”

Cecily stared at Max a moment before breaking into laughter. “Bless your heart, aren’t you adorable, thinking you have something to threaten me with. But, you see, I don’t want the gold.”

Drummond drifted toward the door. “Hope you have a backup plan. If it helps, nobody’s out here watching or anything. She’s all alone.”

Sandra pushed her empty plate aside. “Perhaps you can tell us what it is you do want. And don’t give us your crap about us having to work for you. We know this gold is involved. We’ll get the rest of the story eventually.”

Cecily clicked her tongue. “For such a noteworthy researcher, I’m surprised you haven’t learned everything you need to know already.”

“I see,” Max said. “You don’t think we’re that close. Well, let me share with you what you should already know. And if you don’t know any of this, then consider it a warning as to how good I actually am. The gold goes missing in 1865. This is a pretty well-documented case — newspaper reports, rail yard reports, even a reference in some Union army reports. What isn’t reported at all, because nobody could figure it out, was who the gold was meant to go to.”

Drummond’s head whipped toward them. “You don’t mean — Hull?”

“There’s only one family in all of North Carolina that I can think of who could pull off a carload of gold without any paperwork,” Max said.

Cecily raised an eyebrow. “The Reynolds family could do it, too.”

“Maybe. But they wouldn’t. Your family, however — this is right up their alley. So, somebody with a lot of guts rips off your family’s gold. I’m not sure what happened to this guy, but my guess is that the family employed a witch to curse the thief in an imaginative and tragic way. Unfortunately, for you, whatever spell you used did not result in a confession. So, the Hulls were out their gold.”

“You can’t prove any of this.”

“This isn’t a court of law. I’m merely pulling in the knowledge I have with the threads of information available to me — it’s what I’m good at. I may not be exactly right, but I’m close. I can see it on your face.”

“Don’t think you’re so smart. There’s far more than you know.” Cecily tried to look amused but Max could tell he had unnerved her.

“I have no doubt. In fact, I’m not sure what happened for the next twenty or thirty years — except that the Hulls couldn’t find the gold. But I think I can guess what happened after that. See, in the 1890s, William Porter, better known as the writer O. Henry, was living down in Texas. He spent a lot of his time hanging out in hotel lobbies eavesdropping on all the rich people passing through. It was a great way to get news stories or ideas for fiction. I think one day he was doing his usual thing when he happened to overhear something about the Hulls missing gold.”

“And how would that have happened if the man who stole the gold was silenced by a witch?”

“Nobody steals a trainload of gold by himself. He had an accomplice, maybe more than one. When O. Henry hears them talking, he knows exactly what it’s about. After all, he’s from Greensboro. He would have been told stories about the gold while growing up. Whatever he heard that day, it clued him in to where to search for the gold. But he had his own problems to deal with, problems that required him to leave on the run for Honduras. By the time he returned and served his jail sentence, he had become a famous author and no longer required the gold.”

“This is a very entertaining tale,” Cecily said, but her tone fooled nobody.

“It gets better. See, even though O. Henry didn’t need or want the gold, he wasn’t going to let it go to waste. In 1909, as his life neared its end, he wrote a story and dedicated it to an old friend, Cal Baxter. I believe that story contains a hidden message for Cal that told him what O. Henry knew about the gold.”

“Really, now, Mr. Porter. A secret message in a famous author’s short story? I suppose you’ve cracked the code, too.”

“Not at all. There’s no point. We already know Cal figured it out and found the gold. Which is good news for all of us because the code wasn’t easy. It took Cal three years and he knew O. Henry. How else to explain that massive yet mysterious inheritance he came into in 1912?”

“Perhaps a relative who died and left a fortune to Mr. Baxter.”

With a derisive frown, Sandra said, “That would be the normal explanation. But the problem is that your family bought Baxter House the second it became available. Overpaid for it, too. In our line of work, we call that a coincidence. We don’t like coincidence.”

Drummond snorted in one gleeful burst. “Watch out, Max. I think your wife is getting a stronger taste for this.”

Cecily ignored Sandra as she leaned closer to Max. “If I understand you correctly, you are saying the hidden gold is no longer hidden. That Cal Baxter found it, spent it on his mansion and his life, and it’s all been absorbed into the banking system, investments, and such. Is that right?”

“Not in the least,” Max said. “If all the gold had been transferred into the system, there’d be nothing to search for. The gold would be gone and you would have no way to claim it. But the fact is that you and Tucker and Sebastian Freeman and probably others are still searching for it. Ergo, the gold is still around. Since nobody has found it, it’s still hidden — just not hidden where it had been before.”

Cecily’s body tensed like a lioness ready to pounce. “Should I assume you know where the gold is then?”

“Why, Ms. Hull, didn’t you ever learn not to assume?”

“Then you know nothing more than some history.”

“I know that I’ve found out the full history in a short few days. And where the rest of you have had the same information for years and have been unable to find the gold, I’ve narrowed it down to a few key sites. That’s why I know I’ll get to it first. You know it, too — otherwise, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. You want us to work for you so that you can get that gold.”

Cecily sat back, a calm confidence taking over that worried Max. He had her on the edge and suddenly the whole thing shifted. What had he said wrong?

“Careful, Max,” Drummond said. Max wanted to snap
I know, I know,
but he had to stay quiet.

Cecily tilted her head, forcing her hair to hang over one eye like a professional model. “You are so arrogant, so sure of what you know, that you don’t listen very well. I do not want the gold. I’m a Hull. I have more money than I could possibly spend in a lifetime — money that neither Tucker nor Terrance nor any other Hull can touch. What I need is the chest that holds the gold. Give me that and you can keep the gold.”

Max, Sandra, and Drummond stared at Cecily. Nobody spoke. Elsewhere in the restaurant, the clanking of chef’s knives and the sizzling of meat formed a distant noise.

At length, Max said, “Did ... did you say we could keep the gold?”

“Oh, are you suddenly interested in what I have to say?”

“
Confused
might be a better word.”

“Allow me to make it simple enough for you to understand. I agree with your assessment of the history and the current situation. I agree that Cal Baxter did not convert all the gold into other assets. That gold was contained in special chests. I require those chests but not their contents. Therefore, my offer is this — come work for me, for this one case, and the pay will be any gold you find. I will take the chest. That’s it.”

Max looked to Sandra. Her expression read nothing but suspicion. To Cecily, he said, “There’s something wrong here.”

“There’s a lot wrong here,” Drummond said.

“If this was the deal you wanted to offer us, why not tell us that from the start? Why the bullying tactics, freezing our assets? Why not simply offer us the gold?”

Cecily placed her hands on the table. An insignificant gesture most of the time, but with her, it felt calculated and controlled — a way for her to maintain control over the pacing of the next part of the conversation. Max thought of the way a boxer could control the ring by stepping a certain direction, forcing the opponent to either follow or pay the consequences. He hoped his choices would not be so limited.

“First and foremost, I had nothing to do with the freezing of your assets. That was Tucker’s doing. He doesn’t want you around North Carolina and he is not pleased about your refusal to leave.”

Sandra said, “That’s all he’s going to do? Make life uncomfortable for us?”

Max appreciated her bravado, but considering how greedily they had eaten their meal, he doubted Cecily bought into the idea that they were happily poor.

Cecily went on, “Tucker has had much to deal with to keep the peace in our family. This issue of Cal Baxter is but one problem among many. So, forgive him for not crushing you right away.”

“He wouldn’t do that anyway,” Max said. “He likes to make people suffer. Isn’t that right? Hulls are a vindictive bunch. They’d rather curse a man than kill him.”

“Regardless, Tucker is the one that froze your assets. I tried to warn you and to leverage the event in my favor. As to the rest, I didn’t offer the gold at first because I had hoped to avoid the offer. I’d much rather keep the gold, but when I saw your situation and when I realized the depth of your hatred toward my family, it seemed the only lure strong enough to entice you.”

Drummond said, “I’m not buying this. Don’t take this deal. You can’t know how much gold is left, if anything. Some thief could have robbed the gold long ago and nobody knows it yet. You don’t want to end up like Geraldo Rivera opening Capone’s safe.”