“It was Hughes,” said Nova as soon as she had pulled the gag from her mouth. “That no-good skunk of a man stole my grimoire. And my pilots. Who he will use to hijack my plane.”
“Why?” I said as I cut through the ropes around her ankles. “Why would Hughes want to fly your secret route?”
“Hughes doesn’t want to fly my route,” said Nova, shaking the ropes off her ankles. “Hughes never cared about bootlegging, except that I could afford his fees when my drivers and pilots needed his treatments. Hughes wants to be an explorer!”
She spat the last sentence out like a curse.
“What?” I sputtered with surprise. I’d considered several labels for the doctor, but that one didn’t fit. “He’s a doctor, not Byrd or Amundsen.”
“He’s going to end up dead if he uses the grimoire,” said Nova, climbing to her feet. “That idiot of a doctor believes he can wander along Gulliver’s route, harvesting various vegetation and bringing it back here for new medicines and treatments. He’s convinced he’s found the cure for every phobia. A new and more powerful drug to eliminate fear itself.”
“The glowing seaweed?” I said, pointing at the barrels we’d found.
“Every time we sailed Gulliver’s route,” said Nova, “the seaweed would appear. Not just along the beach but everywhere in Innsmouth.”
“And Arkham,” I said, remembering Humbert’s battles with the weeds on French Hill.
“Probably,” said Nova. “I found it around the caves and draped over everything that came back from Gulliver’s route, including my pilots. But the more we used Gulliver’s route, the more storms happened and the more of the purple seaweed appeared. Ezra started collecting it, telling people he’d pay for any viable pieces if they’d bring it here. It’s not easy to preserve. Sunlight or even a dry day will destroy it. It needs to be pickled in brine almost immediately or it will start to rot.”
“And what does it do?” I said.
“Apparently, in a tea, it eliminates nightmares,” said Nova. “The Innsmouth women who work here let me know. Hughes did find a cure that worked for his patients. It just makes the patients who drink it very calm, very sleepy, and, well, a little bit like Minerva.”
“Like Minerva?” I said. The seaweed inspired knitting? I was now completely confused, and my energy flagged. I had been so certain we had found Tom.
“Spirit writing. Receiving messages from beyond,” Nova said to me. “The nurses and the orderlies knew. They’d collect up the messages from the rooms and give them to Hughes. He locked everything up in his desk and continued dosing people with his tea. He has plans to manufacture a cure-all and market it over the radio.”
“Ambitious,” I said with a shudder. The thought of that glowing purple seaweed going down willing people’s throats made me queasy. But patent cures were popular. People paid for all sorts of strange concoctions, and this one might very well make Hughes rich. I could understand his motives.
“Don’t doubt me,” Nova said as she shrugged off the last of the ropes and climbed to her feet. “I would love to find an industry to help Innsmouth prosper. We are going to rot and blow away if we keep waiting for the whaling to return. It’s done, and I cannot regret that because it was a hard business. Too many drowned men and too many widows. But there’s other fishing, other shipping, other work to be had if people are willing to clear the harbor, repair the seawall, and invest in new technology.”
“Like seaplanes,” said Wini.
Nova nodded. “This could become a pleasant place for holidays, especially if you could fly up from New York or Boston harbor.”
Considering the condition of the town I had visited, I doubted Nova could make Innsmouth into a summer destination.
“Why not manufacture Hughes’s medicine if it works?” I said. “Medicines are legal. Booze is not. And you endangered men, too, taking Gulliver’s route.”
Nova stared at me for a long time in the dim light of that basement with the rotten smell of the purple seaweed rising around us.
“Partner with Hughes and manufacture his cure-all,” I urged her. “It’s less dangerous than bootlegging.”
“Father poured a broth made from the purple seaweed down me when I was a child,” said Nova. “It made a sickly babe into a large, strong, healthy girl. But it put the sea in my blood, and I’ll never be able to wander far from these shores.” She shoved up the sleeve of her dress and angled her arm toward the light. A patch of purple scales ran from elbow to wrist on the back of her forearm. When she shifted her arm in the light, the scales sparkled.
On Nova’s arm, the scales had a weird beauty, but such a side effect wasn’t desirable. It seemed Hughes’s cure-all could prove to be deadly indeed.
Nova rolled down her sleeve. “I stopped drinking Papa’s broth when I was a toddler. In those days, the seaweed only appeared in the winter, maybe for a day or two. Many Innsmouth families would harvest it for medicinal tea, but nobody drank it all the time,” she said. “I never drank it as an adult. From what I hear, the adults, mostly men, who take it as Hughes’s patients don’t develop scales, but if they drink too much or too often, they become complacent, sleepy, and unable to think for themselves. They’ll do what they’re told and little more.”
“They become lotus-eaters,” I said and quoted, “‘Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil…’”
When Wini raised an eyebrow at me, I shrugged. “I had to memorize Tennyson’s poem for school,” I said. “That line stuck with me.”
“Far too many in Innsmouth have become lotus-eaters in various ways,” said Nova. “Waiting for something else or somebody else to change things for them but not being willing to do anything more than chant and moan and hope the sea will spit out a solution.”
I thought about the niche further down the passageway and the figure made out of beach glass. Had the Hughes family looked for other, darker solutions to their money problems?
“So where is Hughes?” I said. “And Tom? And Max? And the grimoire?”
“Ezra Hughes stole my grimoire,” Nova said. “And if you want to see your Tom and Max again, you need to help me get it back.”
“What happened?” asked Lonnie, nailing down the lid of the open barrel of glowing seaweed. We all felt a little better with that pulsing purple light and smell once more stifled.
“Ezra had a new patient, a man named Max, when I came to visit my pilots yesterday. Ezra was going on and on about how he saw this man through that shard of glass he carries in his pocket,” Nova said.
I remembered the strange world I glimpsed through the same shard and shuddered. If that was where Max had been for the past three years, he must have suffered horribly.
“The man’s completely addicted to Ezra’s tea,” Nova continued. “Yesterday Ezra kept having him demonstrate how he could do simple tasks, like signing his name in the register, while actually in a state like sleepwalking. Ezra seemed to think I wanted men like that working for me. He claimed they’d make the perfect smugglers, never able to remember where they had been or what they had done if questioned by the cops.”
Sydney and Max once tried to sell the studio on a script that was supposed to make people who watched the movie susceptible to their suggestions. I’d read the proposal and it had made me shudder. It was also why I helped Jeany hide all the evidence of that last movie at the Fitzmaurice house.
“As if I would poison the men who had lived in Innsmouth all their lives. The husbands, brothers, and sons of women who are my friends!” Nova said. “Ezra tried again today, and I turned him down flat. Then the doctor ordered Max to restrain me. I fought, but he hit me over the head, tied me up, and carried me down here. He stashed me behind those barrels.”
“Where did they go?” I asked.
“The seaplane,” said Nova. “It’s taking off from Falcon Point to complete the rendezvous with my ship. Or at least that’s what was supposed to happen. I think Ezra intends it to be a test flight to fetch back more of the seaweed. Or to prove he can control the route to his investors, similar to what his ancestors tried to prove when they set the Bolide out on Gulliver’s route. If he’s poured enough tea down my pilots’ throats, they can make the flight safely. They’ll also do exactly what Ezra tells them to do.”
“But what about Tom?” I asked. Max’s fate was horrible, but I could understand why Hughes wanted someone who wouldn’t remember any crimes he was told to commit. Did he intend to control Tom the same way? The thought of his funny bright mind ruined by purple seaweed was appalling.
“Your Tom,” said Nova, “has memorized the grimoire. He can say the spells without needing the book on the flight. From Ezra’s point of view, that’s much better than risking the loss of the grimoire.”
I remembered Nova’s fascination last night upon learning Tom had read the grimoire. Then she had locked him up. “That was your idea!” I accused. “You told Hughes that Tom could help the pilots navigate and you wouldn’t have to risk the book. I bet you were even willing to pour that horrible tea down Tom’s throat!”
Nova shrugged. “He’s not an Innsmouth man. Nor could I risk losing the Deadly Grimoire again. The last time it disappeared on a voyage, with my ancestor, it took nearly thirty years to reappear at the Sweets’ bookstore. The spells are vital. Gulliver’s charts and maps, which are on the plane, can only take them so far. The spells keep them together, as it were, so everyone can return safely with the cargo.”
“We’ll have to go back through the passage and around the cliff for your car, Betsy,” said Wini. “We might be able to make it to Falcon Point before they take off. Or meet them when they return? Are they coming back to the same spot?”
“They are,” said Nova, checking her gold watch. “They won’t have left yet. The timing has to be exact on these flights to navigate Gulliver’s route. They’ll take off right before sunset.”
“Then we better start back,” I said. “The tide should still be low enough to make it to the car.” We needed to get Tom away from the doctor before he swallowed any of that purple seaweed. I eyed Nova, willing to tie her up again for all the trouble she had caused. Nova must have guessed my thoughts because she offered me a bargain I couldn’t refuse.
“I know the fastest way there,” said Nova, heading toward the steps leading out of the cellar and into the house. “My Rolls is parked in the driveway. Let me make one call upstairs and we’ll have a dozen Innsmouth friends at Falcon Point to help us.”
“I like how you think,” Wini said, “and I’ll drive.”
“Winifred Habbamock, you are not driving a Rolls,” said Lonnie as we surged up the stairs. “If anyone drives the Phantom, it is going to be me.”