“LOOK OUT!” MOLLY DARTED forward, but she was already too late.
The heavy hexagonal door revolved, flipping top over bottom, propelling its massive weight toward Michael. Unbelievably quick, he dived under the massive door and into the space beyond.
“Michael!” Molly raced to the door and pushed, thinking that the locks would have reset and she’d have to initiate the sequence again. Instead, the door swung inward once more and stopped. “Michael!”
“I’m fine.” Michael stood in a small room and shone his flashlight around. “That door was an unpleasant surprise.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t get brained.” Molly climbed around the door and Lydia followed.
“I was thinking the same thing.” Michael turned his attention back to the door and smiled. “Weighted door. Nifty. I’ll have to remember that one. I haven’t used a weighted door before. Should be easy to emulate in a game.” He stepped to the wall and flicked door latches into place. “This will reset the combination locks. I don’t think Draghici and his men will make it this far, but in case they do, we’ll let them figure out the way in by themselves.”
“Probably be a lot easier now that the hexagon will show up so well after spinning.”
“True, but if they’re standing too close, they might find themselves knocked out cold.”
“Too bad I spoiled the other trap.”
“I’ll forgive you this time.” Michael motioned with the flashlight. “Let’s go. Shouldn’t be much farther now. And if I’m right about our location, Lydia, you should practically be home. But we’ll need to be careful. Obviously Charles Crowe’s little surprises turn more nasty the closer we get to his roost.”
AFTER THE FINAL CLIMB UP a flight of narrow stairs carved from the natural rock, Michael made out a heavy stone door ahead of him. A flying crow cut into the stone peered down at them over its cruel beak.
Molly added her torchlight to his. “Do you think there are any more traps?”
“Only one way to know, love.” Michael strode forward and searched the door. He found four catches and released them, then hooked his fingers in a recessed area and pulled.
He stared in amazement into the small room that had gold bars stacked on the remnants of wooden timbers. Gold urns held gems and jewelry. He recognized a few statues from Nanny Myrie’s pictures. He had no idea of the monetary value of what they were looking at, but it was definitely a fortune.
“The stories were all true,” Lydia whispered. “The gypsy gold. All of it.” Slowly, in stunned fascination, she walked toward the gold bars and gems.
“Have a care now.” Michael gently took her wrist. “You don’t know what surprises may still be lurking in this room.” But he found himself moving with her, the little boy inside him awakening at their discovery. He felt like Uncle Scrooge playing in his vault.
Then he realized where this money had come from—stealing from the gypsies, selling other people into suffering and hardship and poverty till the day they died. He wanted nothing to do with any of it.
He turned the torch away just as Lydia scooped her hand through an urn filled with gems. She squealed a little.
Molly stood at the entrance and made no move toward the wealth. Michael would have bet everything he’d ever made that she was thinking the same thing he was.
He shone his torch around the room. “Let’s see if we can find a way out of here. If we are around Crowe’s Nest, it should be a simple matter to give Paddington a call and start setting things to rights.”
“Michael.”
Molly picked up a thick, dusty book from a pedestal in the corner of the room. “What’s that?”
She opened the cover and leafed through the pages. “It’s a log. Charles Crowe’s.” She turned more pages. “It’s a recording of every slave ship that sailed under his orders. And it lists names.” She looked at him. “Some of these people, Michael? They’re big names. Houses of Lords big. If I can recognize them as an American, everyone in England will know them.”
“Well, if that book falls into the wrong hands, it’s going to cause quite a stink.” A memory twigged in Michael’s brain of someone saying something very similar. “You know, love, our lives in Blackpool got more complicated when a certain solicitor showed up.”
“You mean Lockwood Nightingale?”
“Exactly.”
“He’d be just the man the people named in that log would send to ensure none of their ancestors’ dirt touched their coattails.” Molly closed the book. “I think we should have a talk with Inspector Paddington.”
Michael took off the rucksack and unzipped it. “Why don’t we take that along with us?”
“You can’t do that.” Lydia had been watching them all along. Now she stepped forward. “That book belongs to my family.”
Molly turned on her, fire in her voice. “This fortune, and a considerable number of fortunes outside the room, were financed on human misery, Lydia. Do you really want to cover it up?”
Lydia hesitated.
“Maybe it’s too late to do anything about those people that are dead and gone,” Molly continued, “but Crowe’s descendants—your brother included—might be shamed into doing something honorable with their fortunes. Reparations can be made. There are nations in West Africa that could use financial help. Draghici and his lot don’t deserve the money, but other gypsy clans might be entitled to it.”
Chastened, Lydia stood quietly.
“At the very least, it’s something to think about.” Molly handed the log to Michael, who placed it in the rucksack.
“Aleister won’t like it.”
“Probably not, but he’ll only be the first among many.” Molly directed her torch toward the shelves that occupied one wall behind stacks of gold. “Look at this.”
Michael joined her. His torchlight fell over a collection of tribal jewelry and artifacts—skulls and gems, carved ivory and beaten copper. All of it held the stories of past cultures, some of which had disappeared in the passage of years.
He took a deep breath and let it out. “This is what Rohan was searching for. This is why he came to Blackpool.” He paused. “I wish he were here now.”
“He’ll see it soon enough.” Molly raised her voice so Lydia could hear her clearly. “This definitely can’t be kept secret, Lydia. All of it belongs to the people it was taken from. This is their history, their past.”
“I get it, okay? Can we please go? I’m tired of being down here. It feels like I’m standing in a grave.”
MICHAEL SEARCHED THE ROOM until he found a lever. When he pulled it, and the now familiar sound of machinery clanked to life. As he watched, a section of the ceiling shifted and came loose, descending on rusty iron rods. This platform was rectangular and shaped just like a—
“That’s a coffin!” Molly shone her torch on the metal-and-wood box that rested on the platform.
Lydia drew back with a cry of alarm. “Oh, my God. I know where we are. We’re in the family mausoleum on the estate.”
Totally amazed, Michael stared at the coffin. The woods were rich, perhaps mahogany, and carried a red luster beneath the thick coats of lacquer. Gold trim edged the box.
“You are standing in a grave, Lydia.” Michael played his torch over the top of the casket. A gold plate was screwed into place, and the name was inscribed with skill and verve.
CHARLES CROWE
1769–1841
MAY HE ETERNALLY REST
Michael had to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Molly looked at him with concern.
“C’mon, love. Don’t you see the irony in this? Chuck here screwed everybody over by dying peacefully. But he arranged it so that he took his fortune with him. You don’t see many people who get the chance to do that.”
“But he didn’t die peacefully.” Lydia spoke quietly and her gaze never left the coffin. “He was murdered.”
“Murdered?” The announcement sobered Michael immediately. “Everything I’ve read said Charles Crowe’s death was the result of natural causes.”
“All lies. That’s what Charles Crowe’s son decided to tell everyone.” Lydia nodded toward the coffin. “If you open that box and have a peek inside, you’ll find that someone shot Charles Crowe in the back of the head. It was done at close range.”
“Someone he trusted?”
“Charles Crowe didn’t seem like the trusting sort,” Lydia said.
Michael silently agreed.
“There was talk of a woman assassin.” Lydia shrugged. “Aleister told my brother and me all the old stories when we were children. Aleister believed them, but none of the rest of us cared. We didn’t know the man, and everything we heard of him suggested that he was someone we would count our blessings never to meet.”
“He definitely had a knack for making enemies of all the wrong people.”
Lydia swallowed with effort. “Charles Crowe was the Bogeyman our parents would sometimes threaten us with. They’d tell us that he wasn’t really in his coffin, that he was out walking the grounds and protecting his fortune. If we behaved badly, they said they’d leave us here—in the family mausoleum—for him to find us.”
“Lovely childhood.” Molly shook her head.
“It wasn’t all bad. I don’t mean to give you that impression.”
“Too late.”
“The Crowe family, including my parents, have all been a little strange. My great-aunt is one of the worst.”
Michael wouldn’t argue about that. He drew in a breath. There, mixed in with the moldering scent of the mausoleum, was the rich aroma of fresh-mown grass. Natural light filtered into the darkness above. He waved the torch’s beam toward the opening. “Why don’t we get out of here? There’ll be plenty of time to discuss this later.”
“All right.” Lydia walked toward the coffin, then hesitated.
Michael was certain that the younger woman was afraid that Charles Crowe was going to throw back the cover of his coffin and grab her. “It’s all right, Lydia. He’s gone. Been gone a long time.”
“I know.” She stiffened her resolve.
An iron ladder they hadn’t noticed before in the blackness of the room was bolted to the wall and led up out of the hidden vault. Lydia went up and Molly followed. After a last look around, Michael climbed after them.
MOLLY SHONE HER FLASHLIGHT around the crypt. The small room had been dedicated to Charles Crowe. Heavy stone benches filled the space, and a pulpit stood in one corner. Latticework windows occupied three of the four walls, leaving the fourth one solid. On that wall, a black-and-white portrait of the man in his later years hung over the open rectangle where the coffin had been. Beneath the picture stood a tall stone angel with wings spread.
In the painting, Charles Crowe was an old man with tufts of white hair, sunken cheeks and a cold demeanor. He wasn’t smiling. Instead, he looked as if he’d just bitten into a lemon. His suit hung on him, indicating that he’d lost weight and hadn’t cared enough about his appearance to have it tailored even for the portrait sitting. He held a black cane across his knees and twin mastiffs sat on either side of him.
“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, love?” Michael clambered up out of the hidden room. “Who would kill an old man like that?”
“Who knows?” Molly agreed.
“The answer is obvious.” Lydia stared at the portrait of her ancestor. “Someone who hated him very much.”
“Or feared him.” Molly kept her voice gentle.
“Fear is just a weaker form of hate. Helpless until it has a moment to strike, and only when everything else is spent and there’s nothing left to lose.”
“Is that a quote?” Michael looked impressed.
“I doubt it, but I’m studying literature in university.” Lydia smiled ruefully. “Some of it is bound to rub off.”
Michael led the way out of the crypt and into the mausoleum proper. The building was dark but thankfully uncluttered. Once she’d learned they were in the vault, Molly had had visions of coffins scattered everywhere, and all manner of dead Crowes ready to rise up like some kind of ravening zombie horde. You’ve been paying attention to far too many of Michael’s games, she chided herself.
But before they reached the door, a shadowy figure strode through. Michael pinned the figure with his flashlight. Pistol leveled before him, Aleister Crowe stood there in a wide-legged stance, his long coat billowing softly around him. He carried the walking stick with the silver crow handle in his free hand.
“What are you doing here, Michael?” If Crowe was surprised to see his kidnapped sister, he didn’t show it. The man was entirely too cold-blooded for Michael’s taste.
“Returning your sister to you. Finding the treasure your family lost when Charles Crowe was murdered.”
Crowe glowered at his sister. “You’ve been talking too much, Lydia.”
“Talking too much?” Unafraid, Lydia walked toward her brother. “Aleister, I was kidnapped. Those men were going to kill me. They were going to kill Molly.”
“The ransom’s been paid. You would have been set free.” Crowe’s pistol never wavered from Michael’s chest. “And then I would have shot Stefan Draghici.”
“They weren’t going to release me, Aleister. They let me see their faces. They were going to kill me and Molly.”
Something flickered in Crowe’s dark eyes. “I didn’t know they’d taken you, too, Mrs. Graham.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know.” Michael slowly pointed back at the open rectangular pit. “Your family fortune. All you have to do is crawl in the grave with Charles Crowe. Given who you are, I wouldn’t guess that would be too off-putting.”
Molly kept her voice soft and low so that only Michael could hear. “Michael. Not helping.”
Crowe’s face hardened and Molly grew frustrated. “Why are you still pointing that gun at Michael? We’ve got a common enemy. Draghici.”
“That’s what you say. I came out here because someone has broken into the estate. They’re headed this way. Brought here by you, I presume.”
Michael shook his head. “They didn’t follow us. We’ve been in the tunnels for hours. Draghici and his men are still lost somewhere in that underground labyrinth, so it can’t be them….”
“It’s true, Aleister.” Lydia’s voice sounded pleading.
“Then who are they and what are they doing here?”
The shrill ring of a mobile bounced off the crypt walls. Stunned, Michael reached into his pocket and took out the device he’d gotten from the man who’d been smashed by the crow door. The mobile rang again while he was holding it.
“Aren’t you going to answer that?” Crowe stepped closer.
“Not my mobile. I pulled it off a dead man.” Michael pressed the call button and held it to his ear. “Hello?”
Standing next to him, Molly heard the coarse voice at the other end. “Mr. Graham, I’ve been looking for you. You’re a hard man to catch. Now, it appears, I’ve found you.”
“Who is this?”
The click severing the connection echoed in the room. Only a moment later, Lockwood Nightingale entered the mausoleum from the end opposite the one Crowe had walked through. Two large men with guns trailed him. Michael recognized one of them as Leland Darrow from the pictures he’d seen of the man.
“Ah, Aleister, I’d truly hoped you wouldn’t be here when I arrived.” Nightingale looked irritated. “This really is a bit of a sticky wicket we’ve gotten ourselves involved in.”