Douglas Preston - Crimson Shore

“Please take the chair; I’ll sit on the bed,” said Pendergast, going over to the fireplace and lighting the kindling. It flared up, casting a flickering yellow light about the room.

Constance produced from her bag the sachet of tea bags that Carole had given her earlier in the day. “Perhaps this would be more appropriate,” she said. “You know I’m not much of a drinker. We could ask for a pot of hot water.”

Pendergast took the sachet and glanced at it. “Chai?” he said, his lip curling in distaste. He tipped it into the wastebasket. “Sorry, my dear Constance — that is unfit for consumption. No: Calvados it shall be. Besides, I have little doubt that we’ll be back to our cups of King’s 403 oolong in the Riverside Drive mansion before much more time has passed.”

A moment later, a knock came at the door and Flavia, the young waitress, brought in a tray with two snifters and the bottle of Calvados. Pendergast pressed a bill into her hand, murmured his thanks, and shut and locked the door. He poured a finger into each snifter and handed one to Constance, taking a seat on the bed.

“My apologies for the size of the room,” he said. “It makes up for it in charm. I’m afraid what we must now discuss could not be mentioned in the dining room.”

She took a sip of the Calvados. It went down like a tongue of warmth.

“I hope it’s to your satisfaction.”

She nodded. She was already feeling the pleasant effects of the wine, which she normally did not indulge in; she would have to be careful.

“Constance, I first want to tell you how pleased I am with your work. You have been both steady and reliable.”

She felt herself flush at this unexpected compliment, although his emphasis on the word steady seemed a trifle backhanded. “Thank you.”

“You have also been careful to heed my warnings not to freelance, or to wander away from the Inn after dark. I appreciate that.” He paused. “This has been a peculiar investigation. We’re caught in a tangle of evidence, and we’ve reached the point where we must stop and tease out the threads. To that end, I’d like to go over what we know so far: a recap, so to speak. And to give you the benefit of my most recent discoveries.”

“Please.”

“There are two balls of twine here: the skeleton in the cellar, which I feel sure is related to the disappearance of the SS Pembroke Castle ; and the lost witches’ colony. Let’s start with the skeleton. A healthy, forty-year-old African European man was tortured and walled up in the lighthouse keeper’s basement. Why? There can be only one reason: he had information. What information?”

He paused.

Constance spoke. “Lady Hurwell received a ninety-five-hundred-pound insurance settlement for loss of cargo. Maybe it was something to do with that.”

Pendergast raised a slender finger. “Precisely! In 1884, such a sum was enormous, equivalent to millions of dollars today. The records of Lloyd’s are kept as secure as Fort Knox, but one might guess the cargo was money, bullion, or valuables of some sort. That, my dear Constance, is likely why this individual was tortured: to extract the location of the valuables kept aboard the ship.”

“That seems a bit of a leap.”

“Not when you know who the man was: a gentleman by the name of Warriner A. Libby.”

“You’ve learned the man’s name ?”

“I certainly have.” Pendergast seemed uncharacteristically pleased with himself. “Warriner A. Libby was the captain of the Pembroke Castle . He was forty, born in Barbados and raised in both London and New York, of an African father and a — to use the unfortunate parlance of the time — mulatto mother. In his day, he was a respected and prosperous sea captain.”

Constance stared. “That’s quite remarkable.”

“The man most likely to know the location of anything valuable aboard ship would be the captain. He was easily identified. I knew the age and racial characteristics of our skeleton. They matched. Quite simple.” He took a sip of his Calvados. “In any case, if Libby was tortured to give up the location of the valuables carried on the ship, that tells us something crucial: the ship wasn’t lost at sea. Otherwise, the valuables would have gone down with it.”

“So the ship took refuge in Exmouth Harbor?”

“No. The harbor is far too shallow. This was a three-hundred-foot steamship with an eighteen-foot draft.”

“So what happened to it?”

“I believe it was wrecked along the Exmouth shore, where there are many treacherous sandbars and rocks.”

“Just a moment. Wrecked... deliberately ?”

Pendergast nodded. “Yes. Deliberately.”

“By whom?”

“By certain townspeople.”

“But how could the townspeople contrive to wreck a ship at sea?”

“In concert with the lighthouse keeper. It’s a well-known trick. Extinguish the lighthouse and build a fire on the beach, in a location calculated to guide the ship onto the rocks. Once there, the townspeople loot the ship and retrieve any cargo that washes ashore. If the ship ran aground, before it broke up the looters would likely have time not only to retrieve much cargo but also to get their hands on the money — if they knew where it was hidden. In those days, ships that carried bullion or coin always had secret spaces precisely for such safekeeping.”

“So what happened to the survivors?”

“A grim question indeed.”

There was a pause before Constance spoke again. “And you believe the wreck to have been deliberate, I imagine, because 1884 was the year of the Exmouth famine, when the crops failed and people were desperate. A passing ship, most likely carrying valuables, might be too great a temptation to resist for a starving town. The looters tortured the captain to get the location of the treasure on board the ship by walling him up.”

“Brava, Constance.”

“But why come back a hundred and thirty years later to retrieve the captain’s skeleton? Was a certain party trying to cover up the old crime by removing it?”

“Unlikely. That skeleton was in no danger of being discovered.”

“So why run the risk of retrieving it?”

“Why indeed?”

A brief silence settled over the room before Pendergast continued.

“McCool visited Exmouth twice. He visits, the skeleton is stolen; he returns, he is murdered. McCool must have spoken of something on his first visit — something that certain townsfolk, aware of the Pembroke Castle atrocity, learned of in turn. That triggered the theft of the skeleton. When McCool returned, he might have been killed to seal his lips from revealing what he’d discovered. When we deduce what McCool learned — we will know precisely why the skeleton was stolen.”

Pendergast fell silent. The fire crackled. Constance could not suppress a sense of satisfaction at having helped Pendergast further his deductive work. She took another sip of the Calvados.

He continued. “Let us move on to the second tangled ball in this case: the Tybane Inscriptions. That list you gave me of those who accessed the papers at the Historical Society was most interesting.”

“How so?”

“There were twenty-four names. Twenty-three of them I’ve verified as belonging to real people, virtually all Wiccans. Then there was a name that did not appear on the various Wiccan membership lists. It sounded fake.”

“Indeed?”

“A Mr. William Johnson. Too common to be genuine, don’t you think?”

“Not exactly proof, though, is it?”

“Except that when I contacted your friend Mrs. Jobe, and enlarged on your amusing story of the Amish mother looking for her daughter, I was able to discover that our William Johnson had been captured on camera. With a little gentle persuasion she emailed me the man’s image.”