Findings (12 page)

“That’s great! Can you get DNA from those?”

“Maybe. But we’ve got to have some subjects to match it with.”

Faye cut her eyes toward Nita and Wayland who were being hustled along by a couple of deputies.

“Yes, we’ll look at their DNA first thing. It’ll take time and I don’t think it’ll match. If it doesn’t, then we’ll be back to Square One.”

Faye blew an exasperated breath through pursed lips. “It may be even worse than that. The DNA may turn out to mean nothing. You know the whole countryside came through that house after the funeral.”

“Exactly. Half the people in Micco County could’ve left those hairs. Heck, one of the funeral-goers could’ve taken the catalog as a souvenir, meaning that even following up on that is a waste of precious time. Here’s the bottom line. As far as we can tell, there’s nothing missing but paper—your notes and the catalog you prepared.”

“I don’t like the way all this stuff keeps coming back to Faye,” Joe said.

“Neither do I,” said the sheriff. “And neither does my wife.”

Faye couldn’t argue with any of them.

Chapter Thirteen

The antibiotic ointment did nothing to ease the throb in Faye’s wounded hip. She twisted around to get a look at the cut—thank goodness, it hadn’t needed stitches—but she couldn’t do much more than spin around, chin over her shoulder, like a cat chasing its tail. A mirror helped her get a bandage on it, which was good, because she had no intention of asking Joe to help her with that little chore.

She’d called Ross, intending only a short, happy, reassuring call to tell him how perfectly safe she was. Instead, she got a dozen variations of, “What was in that catalog that the thieves wanted so badly? What was in your notes? Think, Faye!”

Exhausted by a day spent dealing with an unprovoked attack and hours of subsequent law enforcement activity—not to mention the need to keep all her protectors calm—she pulled some pajama bottoms over the fresh bandage and crawled into bed.

Was she safe here in her home? The sheriff had seemed unsure. Nita and Wayland were in jail, and they’d be staying there overnight, at least. Were they working alone? Or would someone else come to take their place? She was glad Joe was downstairs. And she was glad that Liz had lent him a gun, just in case.

Was it possible that Douglass’ killers really came looking for nothing more than paper? What did they think was hidden in those notes or in the catalog that was worth the risk of breaking into Douglass’ house? When they’d found him standing between themselves and their goal, they’d killed him. What piece of paper, short of a piece of paper money with a heckuva lot of zeros on the front, was worth that? And, just maybe, those same people killed Wally rather than let him tell anybody about the letters from Jedediah Bachelder to his wife. That book didn’t hold anything but letters. More paper.

Everything kept pointing to the emerald. Any crook worth his salt would do whatever it took to steal a treasure like that. But only if they knew where it was, and that was so very unlikely. Douglass hadn’t been stupid enough to tell a soul what he had stored in his safe, much less tell someone he was holding a queen’s ransom in the form of a precious stone. Besides, there had simply been no time for someone to take a call from Douglass, decide to steal the emerald, then boat over to his house to kill him and steal…a lot of nothing.

Presuming for the moment that the thieves had managed to circumvent the time problem, and presuming that they did know about the emerald, Faye asked herself whether that was the only thing they’d come to Douglass’ house to find. Perhaps they would have thought that the location of the rest of the necklace, and its many still-missing emeralds, was hidden in all the paperwork that they’d stolen.

What made them presume Douglass had that information? If they’d read Bachelder’s letters, they would know that he’d once owned an emerald necklace. If they’d read the newspaper, they’d know that Douglass owned one of Bachelder’s many possessions, the silver hip flask. Could this have led them to Douglass’ door?

All this speculation was fruitless, because she knew deep down that nobody but Faye and Douglass were aware that the emerald was in the laboratory that night. Was there any other link, however tenuous, between the necklace and Douglass that someone else
could
have known about? What was that link?

The word “link” bounced around in her brain. If the emerald had once been part of the necklace, it had hung from a chain, presumably a gold one, based on the fragments of its setting that were still attached. She didn’t have a single link of that chain. The stone’s setting would have been attached to its chain with a piece of gold hardware called jeweler’s finding…and, long ago, she had unearthed a gold finding.

When she found that finding, all those years ago, had she been digging in the area where she’d found the emerald? She thought it was possible. Yes, she was pretty sure that the two objects were found with a few feet of each other.

The finding had been nothing more than a tiny gleam, easy to spot in the sandy soil of Joyeuse Island. She’d found no chain, no pendant, no jewel, just a bit of gold and twisted golden wire. It had been engraved with an
M
, barely visible after so many years in the abrasive soil. At the time, she’d thought perhaps it had once belonged to her great-great-great-great grandmother Mariah Whitehall LaFourche. With a sense of vertigo, she now realized that it might have adorned the doomed neck of Marie Antoinette.

It was a tiny thing, but an interested person who saw the article about Jedediah Bachelder and his flask would surely visit the museum to see whether anything more interesting had surfaced. Anyone who’d read Bachelder’s letters—which had been in a library accessible to the public for many years—would know that the owner of the little silver flask had once owned something far more valuable. Might someone have visited the museum to see what else Douglass had that could be linked to Bachelder?

It wouldn’t have taken long to scan the little museum for gold or emeralds, for few things in the building fits that description. It was, after all, a museum dedicated to the lives of slaves, who were not known for owning jewels. Douglass’ entire collection of precious metals with some link to slavery—the broken finding, a worn pocket watch, a couple of wedding rings, the silver hip flask—were all displayed together in a small case. They would be quickly found by anyone looking for precious stones or metals.

Would there have been time for someone to read the morning paper, search the museum and find evidence of the necklace in the form of a gold finding, then plan a late-night raid on the laboratory to steal information on where that finding had been found? Yes. But wasn’t it risky doing such things so fast?

Among the sheriff’s suspects was a double truckload of re-enactors and treasure hunters. They would know plenty of arcane history of the time. Perhaps it was common knowledge among Civil War buffs that Jedediah Bachelder had once owned a treasure. Once Bachelder’s flask had been printed in the paper for everybody in Tallahassee to see, the burglars would have been in a hurry to make sure nobody else got there first. If they were sufficiently motivated by greed, they wouldn’t have worried about one old man who got in their way.

If all this were true, then there was enough information publicly available to lead treasure hunters to Joyeuse Island. Perhaps Nita and Wayland were only the first scavengers to come looking for Bachelder’s jewels. And perhaps they wouldn’t be the last.

She reached for her computer. She wished she had enough time to drive to Tallahassee and read every last one of them at a single sitting, even if reading the prolific Bachelder’s correspondence took days. The site work related to Bachelder’s necklace—the visit to his house and the abortive effort to excavate the site where the emerald had lain—had taken so much of her time and mental energy that she hadn’t even finished listening to the ones Joe had recorded for her. Another of Bachelder’s letters would make a good bedtime story.

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