Considering everything, it was a surprise that my dreams weren’t filled with visions of monsters and murderers.
Instead I dreamed about coffee—the aroma of it, the taste. In the dream I drank the best coffee I’d ever had. Normally I drink coffee without anything extra, but in the dream I added loads of cream and sugar and then other good things that don’t normally go into coffee—chocolate, cheese crackers, hot dogs—and everything tasted delicious. Somewhere deep down I thought, Oh, maybe I should try that. After I’d enjoyed the nocturnal journey for a while, the dream’s real message became clear. I opened my eyes, sat up in bed, and gasped.
“What?” Groggily, Tom sat up too.
“Oh, Tom, The Last Drop pub.”
“Aye, what about it?”
I looked at the time. All the pubs had probably just closed.
“I need to make a call.”
In the dark I looked up the number for The Tolbooth Tavern and hit Dial.
“‘S’late, what can I do for ye?” a voice answered.
“Benton?”
“Aye?”
“Hello, I know it’s late, but … I’m Delaney, and I was in earlier.”
“Aye. The treasure hunter.”
“That’s me. I have a question. The mugs we had today with our coffee—they had an old advertisement painted on them, something about ‘good to the last drop.’ They aren’t the mugs you normally use, right?”
“No, they arenae. Someone brought them in last week, offered me a thousand quid if I used only those mugs for a few weeks. I thought it was a clever advertising idea.”
“And you took the deal?”
“Aye, do I look daft tae ye? ’Twas easy money.”
“Can you tell me who brought them in?”
“A man called me on the phone and then had the mugs messengered over. My waitress told me that a lad dropped them by, didnae say much of anything.”
“Can you tell me more about the messenger?”
“I can ask my waitress tomorrow. Call me back in the afternoon. I’ve got tae go now, though. Time tae go home. Goodnight.”
He clicked off before I could say anything else.
“What?” Tom said after I didn’t explain.
“I don’t know how the person who left the clues did it, but this one, I’m almost one hundred percent sure, was meant to lead us next to The Last Drop tavern.”
“Another pub? Another one in Grassmarket?”
The Last Drop pub was in Grassmarket, in between Tom’s pub and The White Hart Inn.
“I think so. I think all the clues are inside Edinburgh pubs.”
“Might be a long hunt.”
“I hope I’m on the right track.…” I shook my head and told him about the mugs. As I explained what had happened, it seemed like a pretty weak story, but it was all I had.
“Someone paid him to use them?” Tom asked.
“Yes.”
“How in the world would they know you’d order coffee?”
“Maybe it was just a chance they took, but not only did we order coffee, we ordered a carafe of it, along with the four mugs. Maybe Shelagh thought we’d stop by during the day, and it’s cold.… I don’t know. If we hadn’t ordered warm drinks, we’d have nothing, which might actually be exactly what we have anyway. I’ll stop by The Last Drop pub tomorrow and see if there’s another clue there.”
“You’ll call Birk?”
“Of course. I’ll send him an email tonight and have him meet me there.”
“Good plan.”
I kissed my husband. “Go back to sleep. I’m wired. I’m going up to my wonderful library to email Birk and do some reading. If I’m not here in the morning, send a search party to the attic.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come too?”
“No, rest. But thanks for asking.”
“Very well. Goodnight, love.”
I kissed him again, and I was pretty sure he was back to sleep by the time his head hit the pillow. I was going to have to remember to leave the bedroom when I had middle-of-the-night epiphanies.
I wrapped myself in a thick robe and made my way to the pull-down door. It whooshed open and I climbed up.
I switched on a table lamp, lighting the space with a warm, bright glow. Though the light didn’t extend to illuminate all the books on the shelves, I knew exactly which shelf I wanted to go to and the approximate spot where a certain book was located.
The Complete Short Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson. It wasn’t a valuable book, but one with a few of Stevenson’s stories, including The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
I opened the book to the monster story. It was short, probably only about seventy or so of today’s pages, but it was still astounding that the author had written it in a mere three days. I started reading.
It wasn’t long before I became swept up in not only in the story but the writing too. Yes, the language was somewhat old-fashioned, as were the characters’ behavior and speech. But Stevenson’s words were crafted beautifully, his imagery vivid. I could see the monster. I could feel the fear, the devastation some of the characters felt when they began to understand that their friend Dr. Jekyll was in fact also Mr. Hyde.
The narrator of the story is an attorney, Utterson. An intelligent and levelheaded man, he’s compelled to find the answers to what is happening in his city and what he himself has witnessed. Who is this villain, a man who he eventually discovers is living in his friend Dr. Jekyll’s home? Dr. Jekyll is a good man, a good doctor, so the idea that he is also the monster doesn’t occur to Utterson until another friend of theirs, so shocked by what he has discovered about Dr. Jekyll, sinks into depression and death.
The ending is a statement by Dr. Jekyll himself—written before he disappears forever. Having wanted to explore the dark side of human nature, he concocted a potion that turned him into the violent Mr. Hyde. But that first potion had been made with something the good doctor couldn’t find again. As a result, as time went on, the dark side of the man kept winning, and Jekyll couldn’t get back to being himself so easily. Dr. Jekyll had to kill Mr. Hyde—but there was no other way to do this than kill himself, because there weren’t two different men, only one, made of both good and bad elements, like all humans.
I closed the book. There was no happy ending, but it touched something inside me. Fear? Sure, but it was more than that. It made me wonder about my own dark side, about that of the people I thought I knew.
Dark and light had been used more times than I could remember in books and movies to portray good and evil. There was nothing unique about those descriptions. So what was it about this book that had captured Shelagh’s heart? Was it simply the fact that she’d read it without knowing anything about the story beforehand and learned the twist in real time, or was it something more disturbing? Something about her own darkness?
But that’s not the way it works. Most people who enjoy reading books about serial killers aren’t serial killers themselves. Maybe Jekyll & Hyde was pure escapism for Shelagh, and maybe her behavior long ago really was something she’d done because she’d been a rich, curious, and bored young woman.
My sense of it was that there was more, but I was far from figuring it out.
I dug into more internet research on my phone, starting with the author himself. Not only had Stevenson written the story in three days and not only had there been a rumor that he’d based his character on Deacon Brodie, there were other interesting things too.
He had dreamed the book, his wife waking him in the middle of it as he was screaming at the monster. I smiled. I’d just been awakened by my own dream, though visions of coffee weren’t quite as exciting as Stevenson’s fantasies.
When I read the next part, though, I exclaimed aloud. Though Deacon Brodie was often thought of as the inspiration for the story, there was another source of inspiration mentioned too. Stevenson had been friends with an Edinburgh-based French teacher who was convicted and executed for the murder of his wife, Mary. The teacher had appeared to live a normal life in the city, meanwhile poisoning his wife as well as maybe other people throughout France and Britain. He’d serve them his favorite dish of toasted cheese, but with lethal doses of opium added to it.
Stevenson had been present throughout the teacher’s trial, shocked and terrified by what his friend had done, much as Dr. Jekyll’s friends had been.
The part that caught me off guard the most, though, was the teacher’s name. It was Eugene Chantrelle. Was it a complete coincidence that a man who worked for Shelagh had the same surname? Who was Louis Chantrell, and was he somehow related to the nineteenth-century killer whom Stevenson had known? How much difference did an e make?
Louis was my next search, but I found nothing online at all. As far as I could tell, Louis was in no way involved with social media. But that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Neither was Edwin, after all.
I could find a few things about Edwin on the internet, though. He was well known. Though Louis might not be, I was surprised that I couldn’t find even one thing about him anywhere. I pulled up a couple of Chantrells who lived in France, but no one I could guess was local to Edinburgh.
I thought back to those first few moments in Deacon Brodie’s pub, when Louis seemed to recognize the murder victim, Ritchie John. I wished I’d asked him what had seemed so familiar, but at the time I hadn’t thought it would be something important.
Where had he been yesterday afternoon when Shelagh had been taken from her home? What about Findlay Sweet? And did Ritchie’s tie to horses also tie him to Shelagh?
A chill shivered through my limbs. Where had she been taken? Was she still alive? If so, she was probably terrified. I sensed she was still living, but that might have only been wishful thinking on my part. I hoped she was. I considered that we all might too easily have been somehow blaming her for whatever had happened to her. That was a mistake. Because even if she held some responsibility for her own disappearance, it should not change the fact that priority one was finding her and assuring her safety.
My eyes were tired, yet adrenaline still coursed through me. I had so much I wanted to do, so much I wanted to think about and figure out, but it was far too late—or maybe early—to do anything.
I emailed Birk, telling him I’d meet him at The Last Drop tavern at 10:00 A.M., and then I shut my eyes. As I fell asleep, I was sure I heard the faraway howl of a wolf, but there weren’t wolves in Scotland. Maybe it had been a dog.
Or maybe it had been something else altogether.