After I took a quick nap to try to settle my nerves a bit, I contemplated wandering Inverness and taking in a bit more of the town. My introverted nature, however, decided it was better to just stay in the room, relax, and enjoy the quiet. Beattie headed out to a museum, and I spent the time lying on my bed and staring at the ceiling.
As I studied the smooth finish above me, I slipped into the kind of state I used to find when I was a kid looking up at the clouds. I was relaxed but not asleep, not thinking about anything in particular. I let my mind shift from thought to thought—Adaire, Eilean Donan, Uncle Fitz, Davis MacDonald.
Somewhere in that gliding meditation, a crisper thought came into focus, and I sat up. Beattie had left the letters from S on the nightstand between our beds, and I grabbed them and spread them out on the bed. None of the letters was dated, so I couldn’t arrange them in chronological order. But the content of the letters gave them a sort of timeline, from when the writer was a bachelor to when he became a husband and then, apparently, a father. Nothing got more serious in the letters—they were still casual and light—but the subjects moved from the latest night at the pub to the joys of changing diapers.
With this loose chronology in mind, I arranged the letters in what seemed like the order they were written, and then I read them each again in this order. Then, I read them again. I couldn’t consciously identify what I was noticing, but between the penultimate and the final letters, I felt like something had changed.
I pushed all the other letters back into a pile and then studied the final two. The first of the pair discussed the author’s young son’s first steps, how he had toddled down the front walk and almost into the street before his father had noticed he was out of the garden at all. The second letter described the little boy’s first taste of marmalade and the nasty face he made at the experience. Both were funny and tender, and the salutation and closing were the same. But the final letter contained the only postscript in the collection. It read:
Your niece is such a dear, as you say. Have you considered making her your heir?
The postscript was interesting, both in its existence and its content, but I couldn’t put things together. Some idea was charging around just behind my recognition, and I needed to figure out what it was. It seemed important.
I knew, though, that concentrating on what I was trying to understand wouldn’t work any better than it worked to try to remember a name or a song when it slipped past the tip of my tongue and back into the safety of my memory. I had to do something else for the strange barricade at the back of my mind to drop and let what I unconsciously knew come to the front.
I decided to go full-on spa afternoon in the hotel and began rummaging through Beattie’s extensive supply of creams, lotions, and makeup. I laid out my plan for hydration, beautification, and relaxation on the counter and then ran a long hot bath. I was chin deep in hot water and bubbles when the information that had been dancing against the edge of my awareness popped forward like a child from a closet. Tada!
“The handwriting is different,” I said to the steamy air of the bathroom. “Someone else wrote that last letter.”
At twenty-two, I would have leaped from that tub to study the two pieces of paper, streaming bubbles across the floor of the hotel room as I went, my naked body dripping onto the bedspread. Now, squarely in middle age, I knew the prudence of carefully stepping out of the bath, drying my feet so as not to slip on the tile floor, removing the bubbles from my body so I didn’t have to bend over and clean up the floor later, and then sliding into the hotel robe first.
Only then did I turn on the bright desk lamp, lay the two pieces of paper out on the desktop, and peer at them. The differences were subtle, which is why I probably hadn’t been able to discern them before. But now, with recognition as my guide, I could clearly see that the Rs were pointier in the first letter than in the second, and the second writer had a tendency to add long tails at the end of the words, a characteristic the scant tightness of the first author didn’t share.
I sat back in the chair and stared at the two blue pieces of paper before me. Now that I was certain the last letter had been written by an entirely new author—especially after I double-checked for the same markers in the other letters and confirmed for myself they’d all been written by the same person—I had a new and even more pressing question. Why had someone written to MacDonald as S?
I scoured the final letter again, this time paying close attention to the content. As best I could tell, nothing was different in tone or general topic, the author’s son. But as I stared at the letter, that niggling awareness popped up again, and I rifled through the other letters again. There it was—a mention of one of the baby’s first solid foods being marmalade, a taste he had apparently hated. The other note from S had said the opposite—that the baby loved marmalade. Both of those things couldn’t be true, and my suspicion solidified. S hadn’t written that final letter.
I felt the zing of possibility zoom under my skin, and I began pacing as I listed the facts as I knew them out loud. “S was writing over the course of at least a few years,” I said as I walked past the TV and to the room’s door. “S married and had a child.” I turned toward the window as I spoke. “Someone pretending to be S sent MacDonald a letter, and it’s the last letter in the collection if my chronology of events is correct.” Back toward the door.
I practically wore a path in the thick carpet of the room as I recited these facts over and over again, hoping they’d rearrange into a picture I could understand. But I had too many questions to get a clear image. Did MacDonald catch the slip about the marmalade? If so, what did he make of it? Did he then hide the letters? Or did he confront the writer and then get a response that warranted hiding the letters?
But my most pressing concern was about the author—was it Inspector Scott or someone else? We were presuming Scott’s authorship because we’d also found the photo of him hidden in the house, but what if those were unconnected facts?
As I wound through the questions in my head, I realized that with each fact, we had more queries to consider. But somehow, it also felt like we were getting closer to something, but even what that something was felt unclear. Were we about to discover some secret about Inspector Scott’s relationship with Davis MacDonald? Find out some great mystery about the book that started this whole adventure? Or was our research going to reveal something more sinister, like the identity of a murderer?
I felt like I’d come to the end of my progress in pondering, and Beattie wasn’t back yet. We were due at dinner in ninety minutes, so I decided to continue with my spa plan and spend some time on my feet and hands before doing a full face of makeup for the first time in weeks. Given, for me, a full face of makeup was a simple tinted moisturizer, blush, a bit of eyeshadow and mascara, and a lip gloss, not the elaborate contouring and eye enhancement I saw in YouTube videos. I did enjoy painting my toenails a vibrant teal, using one of the six colors Beattie had brought along, and while my fingernails were as short as usual, I did apply a light pink to give them just a little lift.
When I put on the one dress I’d brought with me and did a little curl-magic with my hair, I felt pretty good about how I looked. And somehow, surprisingly, that lift gave me a great deal of confidence that we were going to figure out this mystery—or mysteries as the case was now—and get resolutions to a lot of our questions. I didn’t know how, but I was confident.
So confident, in fact, that when Beattie came in with about thirty minutes to spare before our date, I offered to do her hair, nails, and makeup while I caught her up on what I’d discovered. The look of surprise on her face was priceless but fleeting, and while she sat in the desk chair and let me do my version of a smoky eye, which was not smoky at all, I told her about the handwriting and rattled off my questions.
After listening diligently, she said, “Fitz’s letter came in, so we can take that to Scott in the morning. His signature will hopefully answer the big question, and then maybe we can drill down into those other ones.”
“Drill down?” I said. “What are you, a business tycoon now? Soon you’ll be saying, ‘I’ll pencil you in.’”
“I’m going to pencil you in if you don’t fix this eyeliner. I look like a teenage girl in the eighties.”
“Want me to curl half your bangs up and half down to complete the effect?” I snickered.
“Give me that,” she said as she grabbed the brush from my hands. “You’re fired.”
I laughed and sat down on the bed. “I can’t wait to tell the guys about this.”
Beattie stopped expertly flipping her bobbed hair under. “About that . . .”—she turned to me—“I’m not sure we should tell them.”
I felt defensiveness for Adaire rise in the back of my throat, but a number of years of dating had taught me that my desire to defend someone I liked was much more about me and my history of poor choices in men than about the man himself. And it certainly wasn’t about Beattie because, as I’ve mentioned, she has always had my back. So I took a deep breath, looked my friend in the eye, and said, “Why is that?”
She studied my face for a minute and then turned back to the desk and the makeup mirror on it. “I just don’t know who to trust right now. Besides you, I mean,” she said as she met my eyes in the mirror. “I like Aaran and Adaire, and I think they’re on our side. But we don’t know them well, and Adaire does have a vested interest in this book situation. If it’s part of what happened to MacDonald—”
“Then we need to be cautious about what we say,” I interrupted. I sighed. She was right again. “Okay, so we won’t mention the handwriting to them.” The shimmer of rightness settled into me as I agreed with her point. I just hoped that shimmer wasn’t because either of the brothers was involved in this mess.
The place the brothers chose for dinner was perfect for the evening, mostly because it was quite loud and meant we couldn’t talk all that much, a situation that would likely prevent me from slipping and telling them about the handwriting difference. It was also helpful that Aaran decided we both needed to learn to play darts, so after we had our first pints and were waiting for our food—I had ordered shepherd’s pie—the men taught us not only how to throw darts but also how to score the game using the rules of cricket. I had a feeling this was going to be one of those things I would know how to do only for the next few hours and would then promptly forget after a night’s sleep.
Still, it was a fun night, and when we all parted ways with relatively chaste kisses, I was relaxed enough to fall straight to sleep when we got to the room. The next morning, however, I awoke with a start as my brain flicked to the fact that we were about to ask a police inspector to sign a document under, at best, morally ambiguous circumstances.
Fortunately, the inspector agreed to see Beattie and me briefly before he had a meeting at 9 a.m., so I didn’t have to stew in my anxiety for long. In fact, the meeting was very straightforward, and the inspector signed without any questions after reading the one-page document quickly.
“My regards to your uncle, Poe,” he said and headed toward his office. Beattie and I looked at each other and then down at the slip of paper in our hands. The Ss were exactly the same, so we had our answer. Inspector Scott had, indeed, written the letters—well, except for the last one.
“What do we do now?” I asked Beattie as we continued to stand awkwardly in the hallway down from the inspector’s office.
Beattie shook her head slowly. “I have no idea.” She started to walk back toward the front door. “But given that the inspector didn’t even hesitate, I think we can be sure he thought the book wasn’t in MacDonald’s house during the murder. Maybe that tells us something.”
I was just beginning to let my mind turn that idea around when it pulled up short as Ms. MacDonald, Davis’s grandniece, barreled through the door of the station, right past the receptionist, and past us directly into Inspector Scott’s office. She didn’t seem to notice us, and I was quite fine with that, especially as I registered that the receptionist hadn’t even batted an eye when she bypassed her.
Beattie must have been thinking the same thing because she said, “Must be a frequent visitor.”
“I guess so,” I said as I looked back into the station. “I guess so.”
Beattie and I were due to meet Stovall the next day and discuss terms of purchase for the book. It was not a meeting I was looking forward to, and I didn’t really want to spend our last day in Inverness stewing about Stovall and his potential schemes or involvement in MacDonald’s murder. So I said, on a whim, “Let’s do a pub crawl.”
Beattie looked at me, raised one eyebrow, and said, “Alrighty then. Where do we start?”
Given that I knew absolutely nothing about any pubs in Inverness beyond the ones we’d been to, I decided to let the universe guide us and pointed to a place with a fox sign hanging over the door. “There,” I said.
“You got it, sister,” Beattie said as she took my arm and led me to The Fox and the Hound, a pub that looked like it had been there long before Walt Disney’s people thought of their story. After two pints there, we headed over to The Fish’s Whistle just up the street. I’m fairly sure we found three or four other places to visit, but by that time, I’d lost all sense of time and place, and I definitely wasn’t going to remember any names.
In fact, we were so tipsy and, apparently, so “American,” as the hotel concierge told us the next morning as he winked at us, that the owner of the final pub we visited had escorted us back to the hotel just to be sure we got there okay. Talk about embarrassing.
The afternoon of imbibing, however, did have the desired effect of distracting us from our investigation, and even the next morning, when the hangover made it hard for me to even open my eyes outside, I still had only enough brain power to navigate the day without ruminating on anything more significant.
Fortunately, Beattie recovered quicker than I did, so she drove us back to Edinburgh. By the time we were checked into our bed and breakfast near Arthur’s Seat, my headache had subsided, my stomach had settled, and the questions about MacDonald’s murder resurfaced. I didn’t really have time to mull over that topic too long, though, because we were due to meet Stovall for dinner to negotiate a purchase.
Beattie had been handling the conversation with him via email, a fact I was grateful for because my distaste for the man had grown exponentially ever since the possibility that he had conned us about the book at our first meeting had come to light. I didn’t like arrogance much, and Stovall had that in spades. But I couldn’t abide deception, not at all.
Our plan was to meet Stovall and his guest Denise at a quiet French restaurant in Old Town. I wasn’t particularly enthused about eating French food on one of our last nights in Scotland, but I figured the Scots liked variety in their eating as much as I did. I’d just have to double down on my commitment to try all the city’s meat pies the next day.
The restaurant turned out to be quite delightful, and I had a wonderful mushroom risotto with a lovely side salad. Beattie, as usual, had some sort of fish, and she swore it was absolutely amazing. To be honest, I didn’t pay much attention to what Stovall and Denise ate because I was too preoccupied with trying to figure out if they were a couple. They acted couple-like—finishing each other’s sentences and removing unwanted food from each other’s plates—but I didn’t see them touch each other at all, not even knees pressed together under the table, a situation I evaluated when I pretended to drop a fork so I could peek.
But when our main courses were finished, and Stovall brought our conversation back around to the Sea Monster Chronicles, I had no trouble focusing at all, especially when Beattie led our offer by suggesting we’d now pay $25,000 pounds and no more. We had discussed this strategy, deciding to go in very low and cite the controversy over the book as well as our doubts about Stovall’s trustworthiness as cause enough.
After an initial flush that indicated his reaction to our offer, Stovall declined. “If that is the best you can do, lasses, then I’ll just deal directly with the Library.” The smugness of his tone made my blood boil.
Beattie, however, seemed unfazed as she tapped the screen of her phone, pulled up something, and then turned her phone so Stovall could read it. He scanned the screen, and the further down his eyes went, the paler he got. Finally, he looked up, and Beattie slipped her phone back into her purse. “You were saying?” she said.
I wasn’t sure exactly what Beattie had shown him, but given Adaire’s repeated assurances that the Library would buy only from representation for my Uncle Fitz, I figured it must have been something to that effect.
My suspicion was confirmed when she said, “As you can imagine, the Director isn’t inclined to change her mind. She and my employer have known each other for several decades.”
I held back a smile as I realized that Beattie and Uncle Fitz had pulled all their strings and gotten Dr. Heidi Lodge to confirm the Library’s requirement to buy from my uncle only.
Stovall, to his credit, maintained a professional demeanor and said, “Well, I see your position. I do have other potential buyers, however.”
The man was good, and I couldn’t tell if he was bluffing or not. Given, though, that we suspected he had, at least, a passing involvement in Davis MacDonald’s murder, I knew we still had the upper hand in our negotiations. “Mr. Stovall, we have no desire to defraud you or give you less than a fair price for the book.” I cleared my throat and tried to look demure and probably only looked a little embarrassed. “We are willing to pay $30,000 for the book, and we will also give you our assurances that we will not share your relationship with Davis MacDonald with the press that has contacted us.”
I wasn’t lying exactly. I had asked my friend Marie back in the States, who wrote for a little paper up in Octonia County, to write me and ask me some questions about a man named Davis MacDonald. She cared not one whit about a Scottish guy, but she’d been a good sport and emailed me a query on her business letterhead, a message I could happily share with Stovall if need be.
A bit more of the color drained from Stovall’s face, and I felt Beattie shift slightly in the seat next to me. We had him, and we all knew it. “$30,000 is acceptable,” Stovall said.
Denise’s face broke into a giant grin, and she grabbed Stovall’s hand. “Great decision, baby,” she squealed. “Now we can take that honeymoon in Bali.”
And there was my answer to the totally irrelevant question about their status. I silently thanked the woman for being present because, now that I understood the situation, I felt her presence was probably the thing we needed to tip the scales so easily in our favor.
“Oh, Bali is so lovely,” Beattie said with sincerity. She spent a couple of weeks there every summer, a place for her to meditate and relax on the water, she said. I hadn’t traveled there with her yet, but maybe my new commissions and flexible schedule would make that possible this year. I was almost as excited about the prospect as Denise was.
Stovall took the book out from a bag below the table. She was lovely. “May I?” I asked as I pulled a pair of white cotton gloves out of my bag.
Stovall nodded, and I gently picked up the book to study her. She was weighty, which wasn’t surprising given that her pages were made from vellum. The leather on the cover was thick and soft, worn but not damaged in any way. The leatherwork was deep and clear still, even after all these years, and the image of the serpent on the front was both mystical and a bit scary.
The illustrations inside were gorgeous, hand-drawn, and intricate. I knew absolutely nothing about visual art, but I could tell the person who had done these drawings was talented. The serpents looked life-like—well, as life-like as a mythical creature could look.
I ran my fingers carefully over the spine and looked extremely closely at as many pages as I could, being sure the binding was still solid and the illustrations still intact. Uncle Fitz had warned me that early in his career, he’d bought a couple of beautiful books that were renowned for their images, only to find the seller had cut them out before selling the book itself. “Check the illustrations, Poe,” he’d said. They were all there, so I gave Beattie the nod.
She pulled a leather-clad checkbook out of her bag and carefully filled out the check for $30,000. Then, she tore it out and handed it to Stovall, also sliding her card across the table. “If you need anything further or find yourself the owner of any rare titles, please do reach out.”
I followed her lead and passed him my business card, too. “Thank you, Mr. Stovall. It’s been a pleasure doing business with you.” I stood, and Beattie and I walked calmly out of the restaurant and up the street.
As soon as we were out of sight of Stovall and Denise, I jumped into the air and pumped my fist. “My first buy,” I said.
Beattie looked down into her bag and said, “You think she’s a little excited.”
When I looked down at our hamster, I was pretty sure he rolled his eyes.
With a late-night email sent to Uncle Fitz and the book stowed carefully in our room’s safe, Beattie and I decided to go out and enjoy a bit of the Edinburgh nightlife. Let me be clear, though—we were not going out clubbing. Instead, we decided to take in The Scottish Play at a local theater. The show started in a half-hour, and because we bought tickets at the last minute, we got great seats at a discounted price.
Macbeth wasn’t my favorite of Shakespeare’s plays— As You Like It and The Taming of the Shrew tied for that title—but it was hard to pass up seeing it in its original setting. That setting, however, took on an unexpected feel when we realized that this version of Macbeth was actually a Scottish version of Doctor Who, and the castle was the TARDIS. I was a huge fan of the show, so I didn’t mind. But Beattie spent the entire intermission whining about how Shakespeare was better without time travel.
“Come on, you have to admit that casting Banquo as the Doctor’s companion worked pretty well,” I said purely to get a rise out of her.
“You think that one of the greatest roles in all theater—” She interrupted herself when she saw me grinning. “You’re just riling me up on purpose, aren’t you?”
I nodded vigorously. “Of course. It was a little jarring for me, too, and I’m not as much a fan of the bard as you are.” I still thought it was pretty fun, though it would serve no purpose to say that to Beattie.
On the walk home from the theater, we discussed what we were going to do for the next three days. Beattie had to get to her other acquisitions here in Scotland, and I needed to finalize the sale of the Sea Monster Chronicles to Adaire for the Library. I had lots of hopes for that sale—only one of which was about the sale itself, and all the rest had to do with having a dashing Scotsman show me around his adopted city. But business had to come first, so we decided that we would head our separate ways tomorrow, Beattie back to the Highlands and me to the Library.
The next morning, I texted Adaire first thing, and he suggested we meet at his office at ten to do our business, and then, much to my delight, he suggested he give me a ‘resident’s’ tour of Edinburgh. I couldn’t wait for either, but I was definitely most excited about the tour.
After breakfast, Beattie headed off on her two-day trip with a promise she’d be back in plenty of time for us to enjoy some of the city together on our final day. I gathered my things for my meeting with Adaire and spent a little extra time on my appearance.
After putting on the lipstick I rarely wore, I opened up our safe to remove the book and then promptly dropped to the floor. The book wasn’t there.
I shoved my hand all the way to the back of the safe, which couldn’t have been more than eighteen inches deep, and then I tapped my fingers against every side just in case the book had been upended or something. But it wasn’t there. Nothing was there.
I could feel panic beginning to creep up my throat, so I did what I always did in crisis situations—I called Beattie. Unfortunately, she must have already reached the outskirts of the city’s cell service because her phone went right to voice mail. I was on my own.
I thought about calling Uncle Fitz, but while I knew he would be calm and helpful, I couldn’t really face the shame I felt about losing this precious book we had just paid tens of thousands of his dollars for. I also considered calling Adaire, but that seemed kind of unprofessional since I was supposed to be selling him the book in about thirty minutes.
Instead, I texted him that something had come up and asked if we could meet tomorrow instead. His response was almost instantaneous. “Absolutely, but I was going to ask you to dinner tonight. Just pleasure. You available?”
I almost bowed out by saying I wasn’t feeling well and probably needed to rest, but something inside me said I should say yes—if only because if the book was still missing in ten hours, I was going to need the librarian’s help to recover it. “Sure. Text me when and where.”
He sent back a smiley emoji and a heart, and I put the phone on silent and shoved it into my pocket. Then, I flopped on the bed, throwing my torso and arms back, and stared at the ceiling as if the plaster would inspire me.
I had to think. Who knew I had the book? And who could have possibly gotten in here to get it?
The list of answers to the first question wasn’t that long, as far as I knew, but as I thought of Ms. MacDonald, Inspector Scott, Adaire, Aaran, Uncle Fitz, Stovall, his girlfriend Denise, and Beattie, I realized that any of them could have, even casually, mentioned the book to anyone in the world. So really, anyone could have known I had the book.
The second question limited that list significantly. Obviously, Beattie had the combination, but given that she was my best friend and had the opposite of a motive to steal it, I struck her from the list immediately. Almost everyone else got excluded because they would have had to not only get into our room but also into the safe to get the book.
So I was really left with only one suspect: Inspector Scott. Ideas turned quickly into suspicions as they zinged around my brain, and I felt myself getting more and more sure that something suspicious was going on with the police officer.
Almost as soon as that thought fully formed, though, a giant knot gathered in the pit of my stomach. If a policeman had stolen my book, I couldn’t imagine what I could do about it. I briefly ran through all the TV scenarios I knew. One. Find a trusted friend on the force, confide in them, and see what they could dig up, but that wouldn’t work because I didn’t have any friends here. Two. See if I could find out anything myself by asking around at the station or entrapping the inspector himself. I immediately discarded that idea because I was sure I’d draw more attention to myself by doing either of those things than I would get information. Three. Ask the hotel staff to help.
That third one seemed the most likely. Surely, they had methods of opening the safe in the case of a forgotten combination or left-behind item. Maybe that meant they kept records of the times the safe was opened or something. I felt a little hesitant about that last possibility since this wasn’t exactly the hotel of the Mission: Impossible crew, at least that I knew of, but I wondered if they could help. At the very least, it would be good to file a report with them, lest the book turns up somewhere.
I slipped into my booties and headed down to the main floor with my best “disgruntled guest” face on, which is to say I probably looked a bit like a toddler who’d just dropped his lollipop in dog hair. When I got living room, the owner looked up at me from where she was knitting by the window, smiled, and then said, “Are you okay, Ms. Baxter?”
Concern over my well-being hadn’t been what I was expecting, and I immediately shifted from upset to comforting. “Oh yes, I’m fine. Well, mostly fine. You see, a very valuable book was stolen from the safe in my room.”
The woman nodded as I described the book in great detail, from the shade of “sea-like blue” to the long tail of the sea monster carved into the cover to the Garamond-style font used in the typography. The whole time, she listened with a placid face, and when I was finally done, she reached to a small basket beside her and said, “Is this your book?”
There, in her hands, was the exact book I had just spent two full minutes describing. I felt myself flush red, but she seemed totally unfazed by my over-explanation of the object that had, apparently, been inches from her fingers the whole time. I nodded vigorously and said, “Yes, that’s it.” I took it from her and flipped through the pages. Everything was just as it should be. “Thank you,” I said as I started to turn and leave.
Then I decided I needed to know a bit more and fought my tendency not to make waves, and turned back to the desk. “I’m sorry. Could you tell me how you came to have the book here?”
“Yes, ma’am. My housekeeper found it here on the sofa and brought it to me in case someone came to claim it.” She smiled. “Unfortunately, we can all be forgetful at times.” The tilt of her head was meant to be friendly, but, in actuality, it made my blood boil because it communicated what she was too well-trained to say—“Nice story about the book being stolen, but you just left it here, where you were reading, like it was a mass market Colleen Hoover mystery, not a valuable rare book.”
I took a deep breath and smiled. “Thank you,” I said, reminding myself to act out of my grace and not my anger because, in this situation, clarifying that the book was indeed stolen was going to do no good. “Do you mind telling me the name of the housekeeper? I’d like to thank her.”
She looked at me and said, “Of course, her name is Maisie. She’ll be in this afternoon.” She smiled at me in a way that I expected she thought was friendly but actually made me feel an inch tall.
I thanked her again and walked off before I had a chance to shake her by the shoulders while explaining her patronizing tone was not exactly as friendly as she thought it was. Causing a scene would do no good either, and while I was sure something quite fishy was going on here, I didn’t think violence would get me any more information.
Instead, I returned to my room, put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, and tried Beattie again. This time, she answered, and I gave her a quick rundown of what had transpired.
“Very odd,” she said. “I even checked to be sure the safe was shut tight before we went to sleep last night. I’ve not latched safes in the past, and I didn’t want to wake up and find we’d made that mistake.”
I felt a bit of relief at my friend’s thoroughness and said, “So someone came in here during the night and got the book out?”
Beattie cleared her throat on the other end of the line. “Well, it could have been earlier. I didn’t open the safe to see the book when I made sure it was closed.”
I sighed but said nothing. She’d at least had the forethought to check out the situation. I couldn’t say the same for myself. This did mean, however, that someone could have come in while we were out the night before and taken the book.
“It would have been hard to get past both of us in the night, don’t you think?” Beattie asked as if reading my thoughts.
“Yeah, they must have come in while we were at the play,” I said quietly. “So someone was watching us to know when we left.”
Beattie groaned. “I don’t like that you’re there alone. Maybe I should come back.” She paused. “I can be there in two hours.”
“No, I’m fine. I’ll be careful, and I made sure not to make a big deal out of things in public. As far as our thief knows, I bought the story about the book being found and turned in. I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.” I wasn’t as confident about this idea as I tried to sound, but I didn’t want my friend to worry.
“All right, but I don’t think you should use the safe again,” she said in the tone she always gets when she’s worried and managing her concern with bossiness. I didn’t love it, but I did know how to handle it.
“Right,” I said. “I’m going to contact Adaire and see if we can’t make the sale happen this afternoon. That way, I can be free of the book, have Uncle Fitz’s money in his account, and just relax for the next three days.” I laughed as casually as I could. “I need to get my tourist on.”
“You hate being a tourist,” Beattie said flatly. “But yes, I think meeting with Adaire is a good idea.”
She wasn’t wrong—I hated crowds of people taking pictures at the expense of any kind of traffic flow—but I was glad she thought the meeting with Adaire made sense. “I’ll be in touch this afternoon via text.”
“Sounds good. If I don’t hear from you by 6 p.m., I’m calling Inspector Scott,” she said and hung up.
I had been going to say that I didn’t know if calling Inspector Scott was the best idea, but she’d been too quick to get off the line. Oh well, all the more reason to be sure I called her before 6.