Carol J. Post - Shattered Haven

Without fully unrolling them, she laid them aside, and they curled back into the shape they had maintained for the past hundred years.

Surely the secret compartment held something more interesting than house plans. But when she shined the light into the opening again, the beam revealed smooth, hard wood, all the way to the bottom. The compartment was empty.

She sank to the bottom step and rested her chin in her hands, elbows propped against her knees. Maybe her intruder wasn’t trying to get into the newel post.

Then why had he tampered with the finial? It hadn’t been turned accidentally. All the times she had gone up and down those steps, the angel had never moved.

No, he had broken into the house with plans to retrieve something from that secret compartment. He just hadn’t anticipated her being there and the police arriving before he could remove the top.

Which meant he would be back.

The uneasiness she had struggled to keep at bay for the past twenty hours intensified, and she cast a worried glance at the front door. It was locked. So were all the windows. She had checked.

Of course, everything had been locked up last night, too. And that hadn’t stopped him.

Well, if he did come back, he would be disappointed...unless he had a fascination with old house plans. She frowned at the thick roll of yellowed papers lying on the hardwood floor. They were an interesting find. She would have appreciated them under other circumstances. Now she just wanted to know why someone had broken into her house, and a set of ancient house plans wasn’t doing anything to help her figure that out.

She knelt next to them and unrolled them fully to find the bound edge, planning to roll them more tightly. She may as well put them back where she found them. But as soon as she reached the inside edge, a smaller page sprang loose from the bound ones.

It was a single sheet, eight and a half by eleven, unlined. Like copy paper. Except it was old. Or maybe it had just gotten wet. The page was crinkled and unevenly yellow. Three lines had been scrawled across the front—each beginning with a letter followed by a series of numbers. Whatever it meant, it probably had nothing to do with the house.

The old Victorian had been in her family for most of the past seventy years. It had gone from her grandparents to her aunt to her cousin. Then to the investor who snapped it up from the courthouse steps five years ago, after her cousin stopped paying the property taxes. He had probably planned to hold on to it until the housing market turned around. But Allison’s cash offer persuaded him to change his mind.

So who did the paper belong to? It wasn’t the investor. According to the neighbors, he had bought the house, then let it sit empty. Which meant her family had put it there. What did they have that they didn’t want anyone to know about? Money? Gold? Pirate treasure?

Yeah, right . Cedar Key had never been a pirate hideout. Besides, if her grandparents had happened onto anything like that, there would be stories. Small towns were known for their gossip. Cedar Key was no different. Of all the tales about her grandparents that circulated around town, not one gave any hint of hidden treasure.

Allison pushed herself to her feet and strode toward the kitchen. What if the numbers were clues to an unsolved crime, a way for her grandparents to get a bad deed off their consciences before they died? What if she solved the puzzle and found a body?

No, her grandparents were a little odd—okay, from the stories her parents told, they were certifiably nuts—but they weren’t killers.

Of course, she didn’t have firsthand knowledge. Ties had been pretty much severed between her parents and her dad’s side of the family long before she was born. Her dad had gone to law school instead of taking over the Winchester clamming business, and his parents never forgave him. Then marrying a New Englander sealed his fate.

On two occasions, her parents had tried to mend the rift between the elder and younger Winchesters and made the trip to Cedar Key. The rift-mending excursions were a total failure. But on those two brief trips, Allison fell in love with the place. When her life in Providence unraveled, Cedar Key seemed the perfect location to start over.

She flipped the switch on her way into the kitchen and flattened the paper against the butcher block island. Light poured from the four inverted globes of the Albany chandelier. But the random letters and numbers didn’t make any more sense there than they had in the dimness of the foyer.

She squinted at the characters scrawled across the page. They were written with a heavy hand, and judging from the sloppiness, jotted down in a hurry:

R45 87

G45 165

R2.55 282

It looked to be some kind of code. But for what? The numbers weren’t coordinates. The forty-fifth parallel ran across the northern states, and neither latitude nor longitude went as high as 282.

She stared at the page, trying to think outside the box. But the harder she focused, the more she drew a blank. Maybe after a good night’s sleep, the answer would come. If not, she would keep working on it.

As odd as her grandparents had been, they were well liked on Cedar Key. And since Allison had taken back her maiden name and was once again a Winchester herself, it had given her an instant “in.” People still spoke fondly of her grandparents, even though they had been gone for years. But maybe they had harbored some secrets. Maybe there were skeletons in the Winchester closet.

Whatever it was, someone apparently knew. If there was something of value that belonged to her family, no outsider was going to take it away from her.

And then there was the other possibility, that the clues would lead to some kind of contraband...or worse. A knot of dread settled in her stomach. The news would travel fast, from one end of Cedar Key to the other. She knew how it worked. She had experienced it all—the sideways glances, the hushed conversations that came to an abrupt halt, the people suddenly too busy for her, people she had thought were her friends.

She folded the paper and slid it into her purse. She needed to find a better hiding place. Contraband or treasure, someone had apparently found out and come to claim it.

Well, he could look all he wanted. She had the clues. And she was determined to get to it first.

* * *

Blake sat on the deck of his Sea Ray, a glass of green tea in one hand and a Sharpie in the other, the latest issue of the Cedar Key Beacon open on his lap. Brinks lay stretched out in the sunshine, attached to a spare dock line. In another hour, it would be time to walk him again. Maybe by then Allison would be back, and he could combine the dog’s afternoon walk with her trip home. Brinks was great company, but conversation was a little lacking.

Early that morning, he had gone fishing and caught his dinner for the next few evenings. At least, the protein portion of it. Then he had walked Brinks and gone to the gym. After that was a call to his mom. He had already been the cause of enough sleepless nights. He didn’t want to compound her worries by not staying in touch.

He drew in a deep breath and leaned back in the seat. Eventually, boredom was going to set in. Even back home, with physical therapy and vocational rehab and the teaching certification classes the work comp carrier had put him through, there was still too much downtime, not enough activity to work off the energy coiled inside. Tough sessions at the gym helped. But they weren’t the same as rock climbing with his buddies. Or zig-zagging down Vail’s black-diamond slopes.

He looked up from his reading to scan the horizon. Two sailboats cut through the waves, but neither were Allison’s. When he turned back toward Cedar Cove Beach and Yacht Club, the kid he had met yesterday was making his way down the dock in flip-flops, an Old Navy shirt and a pair of plaid shorts fastened a good six inches below his waist.