TWENTY-FIVE

My jaw dropped. “You mean he was a bigamist?”

Caitlyn nodded. “Elihu apparently traveled quite a bit, on business. But in fact he was splitting his time between the wives.”

“And only the first marriage was valid.” I was beginning to understand. “The second marriage, to my however-many-great-grandmother, was illegal. Which means her four children were illegitimate, even if she didn’t know it. So does that mean their descendants are not eligible to receive the proceeds of the trust?”

“The lawyers interpret the trust documents, at least as far as they’ve told Melanie, to include all his children. There doesn’t appear to be any language restricting the inheritance to legitimate heirs.”

I asked the obvious question. “Did Wife Number One have any children?” Because that would explain a lot.

Caitlyn frowned. “That’s what I’ve been working on for months now, and what we hired the genealogical investigator for. So far, we’ve come up empty.”

“Then how do we know there even was a Wife Number One? Surely there must be some kind of documentation—church records, birth certificates, mentions in the newspapers?” The same things Sheldon Todd had told me he was looking for.

“Rumors,” Caitlyn said, echoing Melanie’s words to me after she’d been shot. “Melanie’s mother told her about it when Melanie was a kid. And Doreen knew about it too. The story goes that Elihu’s granddaughter was so angry that she broke into her grandfather’s office one day while he was away and stole the marriage certificate from a locked desk drawer.”

“And did what with it?”

“Hid it. We think she didn’t want to embarrass her mother by making it public, but planned to blackmail Elihu privately. Maybe she did.”

She pulled a folder out of her oversized messenger bag, followed by a zip-top plastic bag filled with what appeared to be fluffy white cotton, and set both items on the kitchen table.

I glanced at the tab on the slightly yellowed manila folder. My heart stuttered. Monty’s missing file. And the plastic bag must contain the arrowhead. I stared at Caitlyn.

“Why do you have this?” I demanded. “How did you get it?”

She was nonplussed. “When I couldn’t get it that day at Gladys Montgomery’s house, I, uh, broke into Jack’s apartment and took it.”

Wow. This girl had some skills. “How did you know you needed it?”

“After they got the letters from MacNamara and MacNamara, Melanie got in touch with Doreen. Doreen scoured the house and grounds—and found the marriage certificate. She hid it again, and when we got here, we decided to leave it where it was for now since she assured us it was in a safe place. But before we could see it or figure out what to do, Doreen was dead.”

“And you still don’t know the hiding place.” She nodded. My mind raced. I pulled Doreen’s Bingo box out of my oversized shoulder bag, then opened the lid and looked at the Bingo card. N-G-O and the number 68. North, Go 68. “Come on, Caitlyn. Let’s go see if we can find that piece of paper that’s worth millions to somebody.”

I headed out the back door and for the mound crowned with junk, not bothering to count my steps or estimate the yards. If I needed the shovel, I’d go back for it.

Caitlyn and I searched through the rusty ghosts of farm tools past, looking for anything that Doreen’s tiny key might fit. If there had ever been a depression or any other sign that an arrowhead had been dug up here, it had long ago blended into the ground and been covered over with grass. There were no signs of recent digging either. We examined each of the farm implements, looking for places that a small box might be concealed. Skunked.

I brushed up against an old-fashioned milk can and looked down at the smear of oxidation that appeared on my jeans. Nuts. I stared down at the offending can, its top lying off to one side. The screw threads at the top were shiny, in contrast to the dull surface of the rest of the can, as though they’d been recently scraped. I turned the top over with my toe. Yup. Similar scrape marks. This can had been opened recently. “Caitlyn! Over here.”

We bent over the can together.

Still empty.

My heart dropped like an amusement park ride. If this had been where the document or documents had been stored, someone had beaten us to it.

Caitlyn looked up at me.

“This doesn’t mean anything, you know. Doreen could have found it and hidden it somewhere else.” She looked doubtful.

“I suppose. But have you seen that house? It’s full of clutter. What are we going to do? Lift every floorboard? Break up every plaster wall looking for something hidden inside? Not to mention the barn. Damn it!”

The truth was, why did we care? Even if there was another heir out there, it seemed there was plenty of money in that trust to go around. Hundreds of millions split two ways was still a boatload of bucks.

Except that the Mystery Man might not feel like sharing. And he might have paid Channing to murder Doreen and Spencer. Would I ever know what Spencer had wanted to tell me? It must have been about the Bloodworth Trust. Had he found one or more additional heirs? Or evidence that Channing had killed Doreen? Speculation was useless. If Spencer had notes or other documentation, the police would find it. He’d been a real pain in the behind at times, but he’d tried to warn me. For that I was grateful. And sorry that innocent people had lost their lives, all because of greed.

“Let’s go back to the house.” Defeat. “Hank will be here soon.”

Buzz. Buzz. My cell phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out and looked at the display. My spirits lifted. It was Jack.

“I’ll take this outside and watch for Hank,” I said to Caitlyn. She nodded.

“Hi,” I said into the phone. “Did you have a nice time with your sister?” I plunked myself onto one of the old metal chairs on the front porch.

“Hi, yourself,” he said. “And yes, it was great catching up with Trish. She sends her love.”

“She doesn’t even know me.”

“She will soon.” A warm fuzzy spread throughout my body. I filled him in on everything that had happed in Bonaparte Bay since he’d been away.

“Good God, Georgie. Are you all right? Melanie? Sophie? I knew I shouldn’t have left.”

“We’re all fine. Please don’t worry. When are you coming back?”

There was a silence on the other end of the line. “Georgie, something’s come up and they need me at the Oswego Station. I’m not sure how long it will take. A few days anyway. I don’t think I can get out of it.”

The warm fuzzy grew wings and flapped away in a cloud of disappointment. “Oh, okay.” Wow. That was pathetic. My eyes focused on the flowerbed near the front steps. The mums and asters still looked good, but there were some brown stems from some summer flowers that needed to be cut down. The gnome wearing the Giants football jersey stared back at me. Get it together, Georgie, he seemed to say. Maybe it will work out with Jack. Maybe it won’t. But you owe it to yourself to give it a try.

“I’ll call you as soon as I can.” It was clear from his voice that he was conflicted. “I’ll be back soon and then we can spend some time together. I’ve got Gladys’s big house to take care of, remember?”

I smiled. Gladys’s back parlor would be a nice place to spend a winter evening, curled up on the couch with a bowl of popcorn and a movie. And a hot Coast Guard officer, who I wasn’t about to ask to make a choice between me and his career. “I’m safe. And I’ll miss you. See you when you get back.”

“I miss you already.” He rang off.

My eyes roamed back over the yard and landed again on that silly gnome. Now it seemed to be mocking me from atop its pedestal. A number was painted in flaking white paint on his round belly. Number 68.

N-G-O 68.

Not Go North 68.

Rearrange the letters and you got G-N-O. Gnome.

I raced over to the garden. The gnome was ceramic, about a foot and a half high. One hand on his pointed hat and one hand on his butt, I tipped him up. As I suspected, he was hollow inside. I peered into the inner cavity and was rewarded with . . . nothing.

Damn! I could not catch a break. I went to set him back on his pedestal. A door with a small ring handle lay flush on the surface. My finger inserted itself into the ring, seemingly without any conscious effort from me. I pulled up, just as Caitlyn came out the front door. “What are you doing?” she called, walking over to me. I probably looked odd to her, bent over in a flower bed.

I restrained myself from peeking until she got there. Her face lit up. “Did you find it?”

“Let’s find out.” I plunged my hand into the opening, thinking too late that there could have been bugs—or worse, small furry rodents—inside. My fingers grasped a plastic bag and I pulled it out. Inside the sealed bag was another sealed container, dull orange 1970s-vintage Tupperware like we’d had when I was growing up.

“We should open it inside,” Caitlyn said, ever efficient and practical. “Whatever’s in there, we don’t want to drop it or have it blow away.”

Impatient as I was, of course she was right. I closed the door and replaced the gnome on his throne. We trooped inside and I set my find on the kitchen table.

“Ready?” My hands shook slightly as I unzipped the bag.

“As we’ll ever be,” she responded, leaning forward.

The lid of the Tupperware container proved difficult to remove. I wondered if some kind of glue had been used to stick it down. One broken fingernail and some inventive cursing later, the lid lay on the table.

I reached in and pulled out a small metal box, the inexpensive kind someone might use to keep cash in at a yard sale. The little key fit perfectly. I gave it a twist and we heard the metal-on-metal snick of the lock opening.

Inside lay a sheet of yellowed paper, folded into a neat square. Next to that lay another folded page, this one a lighter color.

“Which one shall we read first?”

Caitlyn blinked behind her big glasses. “It doesn’t matter. Pick one.”

Arbitrarily, I went for the one on the left.

Unfolded, the page was about half the size of a sheet of letterhead. The creases were deep and the paper had worn through in a few spots. It was covered in faded old-fashioned flowery handwriting. My voice trembled.

My Dear Helene.

That was my grandmother’s name. And this was as close as I’d ever get to her.

If you are reading this, it means I am gone. Enclosed with this letter you will find a certificate of marriage. The contents will no doubt shock you. Please do not feel shamed or embarrassed. We cannot choose the family into which we are born.

Wasn’t that the truth. I continued.

You may wonder why I never destroyed this document, which brought my mother such pain. It is because, after she retrieved it from her father’s study, she asked me not to. When the time came, many years into the future, she believed that God would make the situation right. If the fortune exists at the time the trust is disbursed, our heirs should be the ones to decide whether to reveal—or conceal—the secret.

I looked up. “So Doreen had read this letter and seen the first marriage certificate?”

“She was the one who told us about it, said, ‘an arrow marked the spot.’ Not ‘an arrow pointed to the spot.’ So I put two and two together and figured out that it must have been located on the site of the archaeological dig, which was reported in some of the newspapers at the time. But since I didn’t know the exact location of the dig, I needed Monty’s file.”

By all accounts, Doreen had had a prickly personality. She might have gotten a perverse pleasure out of making Melanie wait to find out about her potential long-lost cousin. Or cousins. Who was to say there weren’t a whole passel of descendants out there from Elihu Bloodworth’s first, legal marriage?

“It was only a couple of days before we arrived that she’d located it. She never did say where, but now I have to guess your grandmother hid it in the milk can on the site where the arrowhead was found.”

“And then Doreen re-hid the document inside the gnome. But why would she leave the Bingo card, a makeshift map? Was she afraid she’d forget?”

Caitlyn frowned and her tiny nose wrinkled up. She looked me square in the eye. “Georgie, there’s something else. Something Melanie wanted to tell you when we’d put all the pieces together.”

Caitlyn and Melanie had been hiding plenty from me all along. Why couldn’t I have a sweet, banana-bread-baking mother like Gladys? Gladys. Something Gladys had said in passing niggled at me.

Suddenly, the pieces shifted into a new pattern. Big Dom diTomasso, the restaurant owner whose murder I’d solved, sort of, a few months ago, was a distant relative of Gladys’s husband, Monty. What if Dom hadn’t been killed for the reasons we all thought? What if Dom had been killed because he was an heir to the Bloodworth fortune?

Doreen must have known her life was in danger, which was why she hid the documents and left a clue for Melanie in the form of the Bingo card. In case something happened to her. Which it had.

I reached for the second piece of paper, unfolded it, and uncreased it gently with my hand.

Certificate of Marriage.

The groom’s name, as expected, was Elihu Bloodworth. The bride?

Mary Elizabeth Grant.

Caitlyn’s thumbs moved furiously over the surface of her phone. After a moment, she stared at the screen, then up at me. “I just plugged that name and birthdate into the biggest online genealogy site.”

She didn’t have to tell me. Mary Elizabeth Grant. My friend Liza, at the Valentine Island Spa, was also named Elizabeth. Elizabeth Grant. Unless this was the biggest coincidence on earth, my friend was also my distant cousin.

“According to the notes attached to the family files, Mary Elizabeth and Elihu had a son. He apparently changed his name legally to his mother’s maiden name. We can only guess that he found out about the bigamous second marriage and wanted to distance himself from it.”

I sat back in my chair, gobsmacked. But thrilled at the same time. I’d longed for family all these years, and a cousin had been right under my nose, being my friend, the whole time. Tears welled up in my eyes.

Caitlyn snapped pictures of both documents with her phone. “Of course, Liza’s name isn’t on these charts. And we’ll have to have the attorneys verify the line of descent, but that should be easy now that we have a name to go on.”

The attorneys. “Let’s reschedule with Hank. We should get this stuff to the MacNamaras and let them get to work. And then we’ll go see Liza.”