CHAPTER 20
Hairs rose on Megan’s arms. She and the other two Williams sisters all took a step forward, as if the revealed paperwork had an irresistible pull, but she stopped to let the others go first. Jessie kept the book flat, not daring to do anything else, while Raquel—evidently the appointed diary-handler—cautiously pulled the papers free. Even Megan, a few steps behind the rest of them, could see that the handwriting on the outer sheet wasn’t Gigi Elsie’s, and it didn’t take any of them more than one breath to guess it belonged to Patrick Edgeworth.
Sondra pulled a few papers from one of the emptier boxes and turned it over, making a table to rest the papers on. Raquel unfolded them reverently, and Megan crept closer to stand on her toes and look over the sisters’ shoulders as they peered with their torches at century-old correspondence.
The inner sheets, except for along their creases, were remarkably creamy pale, with bold, browned handwriting scrawled across them. And they were correspondence: letters to home, addressed to Patrick’s cousin, to his uncle, even to a sweetheart called Nancy. None of the letters had ever been sent, nor, it seemed, had even been intended to; the last of them said If only I could send these on its final line, and everyone skimming through them, even Megan, gave a soft, sad gasp, as if a fairy tale had come to an unexpected ending.
Raquel, without speaking, turned the diary to its back interior cover, touching the top seam. Like the front, it was glued down and bulky in the way that older, hand-bound books could often be. The front cover, though, had—now obviously—been modified to hold the letters. The sisters all looked at each other before Sondra said, testily, “Well, go on.” Raquel slid a fingernail along the glue, breaking it, and after a few seconds, eased another small stack of folded pages free from the diary’s back. Jessie whispered, “Shit!” as Raquel unfolded the pages, and Megan, biting her lower lip, was inclined to agree.
These were the maps Elsie had written about. Megan recognized the general lay of the Lough Rynn lands from having seen them online, with the grand house a centrepiece even in Patrick’s sketches. Elsie’s drawing of the druid altar inside the diary had clearly been inspired by seeing Patrick’s, although his were rendered with the skill of a craftsman, and hers were amateur doodles by comparison. There were a dozen of the sketches, highlighting different parts of the grounds, including a huge, elegant garden that must, Megan thought, have long-since gone to ruin. It lay off to the left of the house, as they were facing it, and neither she nor the sisters had gone anywhere near it. But Patrick had written X-marks-the-spot-style X’s at one corner of that garden and in various other locations, including the druid’s altar, all around the grounds.
“They can’t really be treasure,” Sondra said in a kind of disbelief that asked to be corrected.
“No, they . . .” Raquel trailed off, obviously unsure of herself, and turned the maps, examining them. Then she spread them out, trying to make a whole picture of all the drawings. None of them were much larger than postcards, and their folds made the edges wing upward, so laying them flat seemed harder than it should be. Her sisters and Megan all cautiously put fingertips on their corners, flattening them to study the sketches. “There’s too many for treasure.”
“And there are these . . .” Jessie brushed her fingertips over squat circles drawn in the borders of several of the maps. “What are they? A key? There’s something drawn on them.” She moved her phone closer, squinting at the one nearest to her, then laughed. “There are faces and something that looks like runes. Didn’t the old Irish use a runic written language? Ogham or something?” She said the word correctly, OH-am. “Maybe he found some. What?” she said irritably, at her sisters’ glances of surprise. “I’ve got a degree in anthropology, you know. I learned some stuff in college.”
“I don’t think they made ogham coins, though,” Megan said slowly. “The Vikings used runic coins. But I don’t . . . that looks like a Roman numeral to me.”
“Yeah, but that’s different from the runes, see?” Jessie thrust a fingertip at the drawing she meant. “I don’t know what any of them mean, but I’m pretty sure that’s ogham writing. The numbers—oh. Oh!” She suddenly gathered the papers up, changing their order swiftly while her sisters made small, agonized sounds of protest at her apparent lack of care. Then she laid them out again, pointing triumphantly at the Roman numerals. “There! Look! Now they’re in numerical order! That’s got to mean something!”
“It means the whole landscape is a jumble.” Sondra was clearly trying not to sound exasperated. “Before we had it laid out more like the grounds are actually shaped.”
“Yeah, but who would make a treasure map easy to read?”
“Who would put a treasure map in the back of their daughter-in-law’s diary?!”
“Gigi Elsie put them in here,” Raquel said, clearly exasperated with her sisters. “I think that’s pretty clear. She must have found them after Geepaw Patrick died and decided they were too precious to be thrown away, but also known he didn’t want them shown around. She talks about hidden trea—” She laughed a little and shook her head. “About hidden treasures. That’s what she meant. She was talking about these old papers of his, not treasures. I’d bet you anything.”
“Well, what’s all this for, then?” Jessie demanded. She gestured at the papers, but moved away with her sisters while they argued. Megan bent over them more closely, holding her phone up to the various sketches and trying to make sense of it all. The puppies, bored, tugged on their leashes, and she mumbled a promise that they’d go soon, but kept studying the papers until her eyes crossed from concentration. The drawings on the coins, particularly, looked familiar somehow, but she couldn’t figure out where she’d seen them. She straightened away from the drawings, rubbing her eyes as Sondra said, “I’m certainly not staying in Ireland long enough to go dig up every one of those X’s. I have a board meeting on Tuesday, Raq. I can’t miss it.”
“On Tuesday? Are we even going to have Mama buried by then?”
“We’re going to have to,” Sondra replied sharply. “My company is riding on this, Raquel.”
“Oh, who cares about your stupid comp—”
“I do!” Sondra’s bellow silenced her sisters and made Dip fall over again, although at least this time he didn’t pee. “I realize,” Sondra continued, frostily, once she’d gained everyone’s attention, “that my life seems pathetic and rigid and uninteresting to you, Jessica. I’d love to tell you all the ways it isn’t, but I don’t think you’d even believe me. What I can tell you is that I will lose my job and everything else that I’ve managed to hold on to in the past two years if I am not back there on Tuesday to present at the board meeting. That may not matter to you, but it matters very much to me. It’s all I’ve got left.”
“You have us,” Raquel whispered.
Sondra gave her a bitter, almost scathing look. “Do I? It’s a nice sentiment, Raq, but when was the last time you weren’t angry with me? When was the last time you listened to me, instead of just taking Mama’s side?”
Guilt flushed Raquel’s face. “You were just so hard on her, Sonny.”
Sondra said, “Someone had to be,” but without conviction, as if she knew it was an argument she’d lost long ago.
“Look,” Jessie muttered, “if we’ve got to get Mama buried by Monday we’d better stop hanging around here trying to—whatever. Find treasure. We already found Mama’s diary, for heaven’s sake.” The colour drained from her face as if she’d finally realized what that meant. “Wait. Jesus, Sonny. Megan found Mama’s diary. Does that mean the person who killed her is living here in this house? We have to—to get out of here, or to—to—to catch them! We have to—”
Megan yelped, “Coins!” The Williamses turned to stare at her and she said, “Coins,” again. “I thought of it when I was looking at them but I didn’t even hear myself think it. The circles. The circles on the maps. They’re drawings of coins. Old coins. Anne Edgeworth has a stack of old coins on her kitchen windowsill! I bet they’re the key to the maps!”
All three sisters spasmed toward the door, then stopped as abruptly, their voices rising in a discordant argument—or maybe just questions—about what they should do. Go back to Anne’s house, call the police, just get out of the house where a killer was apparently living, go upstairs and see if they could learn anything—
“No, we can’t,” Megan said to that one, loudly. “We can’t disturb it any more than I already did. I shouldn’t have even taken the diary, but I did. It seemed like a good idea at the time,” she added defensively, although it wasn’t the Williamses to whom she had to defend herself. Detective Bourke, on the other hand, would want to know what she’d been thinking. Her only justification went back to grade school, when she’d one day taken a pair of scissors and cut a large hole in her favourite shirt. Her outraged mother had demanded, repeatedly, to know why Megan had done that, and all she could say was it had seemed like a good idea at the time. Sometimes there just wasn’t a better reason. In fact, Megan suspected that it seemed like a good idea at the time was the underlying reason for a lot of what people did, and that they generally learned to layer in more elaborate, if not more honest, explanations later.
“Should we put it back?” Raquel asked uncertainly. “We have all these papers out of it now but we could say we found them in the mess?”
“Oh, good,” Sondra muttered. “Let’s plan our story for lying to the police.”
“I’ll put it back,” Megan said. “I took pictures of where I found it, so if I put it back, it’s—”
“It’s like we disturbed a crime scene, or whatever it is, and then put things back where we found them,” Jessie said dryly. “But even if our fingerprints would show up on the diary, they’d all be there anyway—well, except Megan’s—so if we just say we found the papers, maybe nobody will ask where and the diary can be where you found it as evidence or whatever.”
“Here.” Raquel offered Megan the damaged diary. “Go put it away and then we’ll . . .”
“Call the police,” Sondra finished.
“I already texted—” Megan’s phone buzzed as she spoke and she took it out to check the incoming message from Paul, which said DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING!!!
Two second later the phone rang with his number coming up, and he opened with, “Did you touch anything? Don’t touch anything. Are you still there? Get out,” as Megan pressed the speaker button so everyone could hear. She widened her eyes at her clients, grimaced guiltily at the phone, and said, “We, um, okay, we’ll—okay.”
Bourke, suspiciously, said, “Okay what,” while Megan took the phone off speaker, traded Raquel the dogs’ leashes for the diary, and sort of half-ran, half-snuck back to the upstairs servants’ bedrooms so she could put the book back where she’d found it. Why she snuck, she didn’t know; it wasn’t like either Bourke or the guy staying in the bedroom could see her, but sneaking felt important.
“Okay, we won’t touch anything and we’ll get out of the house. We found—we did find—some papers that—we don’t know yet, but they might have some answers.”
“Found them where? In that bedroom?”
Megan, face screwed up like a child trying very hard not to get caught in a lie, said, honestly if not exactly truthfully, “No, in the storage room.” She slipped into the bedroom and put the closed diary back where she’d found it, tucking it down just enough that its square was visible, like it had been when she’d come in. Then she scurried back downstairs, suddenly very aware she was leaving a lot of footprints in the dust.
Bourke sounded ever so slightly mollified. “All right so. Don’t touch anything else and don’t go hunting down whatever you think those papers mean. I’ve called the local guards already and they’ll be there soon. Go outside to meet them and don’t go finding any more trouble.”
“I do not find trouble,” Megan said with as much dignity as she could muster as she got back to the sisters. She spun her finger at them and pointed down the hall, indicating they should leave. A little to her surprise, they did as she told them, and she fell in at their heels. “It keeps finding me.”
“For the love of God, Megan . . .”
“Look, we’re going outside and I’ll call you again as soon as we know anything.” Megan hung up, extremely aware she hadn’t promised any of the things he’d asked for, and hurried down the stairs and outside after her clients.