Читать книгу Meg Harris Mysteries 6-Book Bundle - R.J. Harlick - Страница 46

I opened my eyes to the grey light of yet another rainy morning. Although I was firmly tucked under the duvet, I was still fully clothed. My feet, thank goodness, were boot free. A second later, I realized the doorbell was ringing. I waited for Eric to answer. It rang again. Why doesn’t Eric get it? Again the bell sounded, this time more persistently. I got up to see what was going on.

Eric wasn’t in the house. The bell rang again. Afraid to make my presence known, I furtively peeked out a window overlooking the front stoop. John-Joe stood impatiently at the door. In his hand he held the canvas sack I’d taken from the sugar shack.

Horrified at forgetting Louis’s money in my boat, I flung open the door and grabbed it. I hastily thanked John-Joe, closed the door and retreated to the kitchen at the back of the house. I hoped no watching eyes had seen my brief appearance. I tried to reach Eric at the Council Hall and the Fishing Camp but connected only to answering machines. Something important must have come up, I thought. Though it was unlike Eric to forget to leave me a note.

I called Chief Decontie to see if they’d found Sergei, and if they’d caught the gunman but received the unhelpful answer that Chief Decontie would call me when he returned.

Wondering what to do, I threw the sack onto the kitchen table. The top burst open and out spilled packets of twenty dollar bills and Aunt Aggie’s stolen wedding picture. I quickly counted twenty-five bills in one bundle and forty bundles in all. Twenty thousand dollars seemed a paltry sum to pay for the discovery of a multi-million dollar gold discovery. Trust Gareth to be cheap. But it was probably more than enough to keep Louis happy.

I looked at the picture of a marriage that had destroyed a life and wondered what use Gareth could’ve made of it. Even if Charlie did know the identity of Aunt Aggie’s bridegroom, the picture contained nothing to link the man to the owner of Whispers Island.

As I gazed at the picture, I realized it was lying on top of another object. Moving it aside, I found myself staring at Marie’s sacred amulet, the one given to her by her mother, Whispering Pine, the one missing since her terrible death. It confirmed with icy certainty what I already knew, that the gunman who’d fired at me and kidnapped my dog was indeed Marie’s killer.

Curious to know why he would steal it, I loosened the fragile thong enclosing the small deerskin pouch and shook the contents onto the table. Out spilled broken bits of shell, and some small rocks, one, a smooth opaque green, another, a jagged greasy white with a thin gleaming thread running along one edge.

At the sight of this last stone, my pulse quickened. Did this confirm another suspicion? I hastily retrieved the stone discovered last night in my jacket pocket and laid it beside the one from Marie’s amulet. Two almost identical pieces of quartz, both with a jagged thread of gold. Since the one from my pocket came from Whispers Island, so must the other. Proof Marie had known there was gold on the island.

However, I was certain that because of the stone’s sacred nature, she would never have willingly revealed its existence to anyone, not even to her son or her man, Louis. It probably explained her agitation the night she disappeared. She had learned that Louis had somehow found out about the gold on the island. He had betrayed her ancestors.

The amulet still bulged. I shook it. A cylinder of birch bark fell out and rolled along the table towards me. When I picked it up, a thin gold chain slid onto table. With its fine workmanship in such sharp contrast to the amulet’s naturally found objects, I couldn’t help but wonder about its significance to Marie or her mother.

I carefully unrolled the paper-thin bark. Written in bold black lettering on the inside speckled surface was the following: “On this day, the 8th of June, 1922, on the occasion of the birth of our child, I, Two Face Sky, bequeath to my one true wife, Summer Wind, Minitg Kà-ishpàkweyàg, my beautiful island.”

I leaned back in my chair, stunned. This will was the motive for Marie’s murder, probably Louis’s and the shooting of Tommy. Louis’s money had nothing to do with it. The motive was Minitg Kà-ishpàkweyàg, now called Whispers Island. Because of this will, the killer believed Marie, the granddaughter of Summer Wind, had become its owner.

Except it was a disastrous mistake. Two Face Sky may have lived on the island, but he had no ownership rights to the gold discovery. Only William Watson and his heirs did.

Marie died because of this terrible mistake. What would the killer do when he finally discovered the truth? I started praying Aunt Aggie had divorced her absconding husband.

Infuriated but scared, I paced around Eric’s large country kitchen, wishing there were some way I could get in touch with him. Another call to his office and the Fishing Camp didn’t locate him. I tried Chief Decontie again and was told that he would be notified of my call.

I checked to ensure all the doors were firmly locked and returned to the strange collection on Eric’s table. I could understand the killer stealing Louis’s money and Marie’s will, but I still couldn’t come up with a reason for his taking Aunt Aggie’s picture. I even tried to penetrate the cryptic stares of Aunt Aggie and her bastard of a husband for an answer.

And then I realized the sack wasn’t yet completely empty. I shook it and another framed picture fell out. I flipped it over, and knew I had the answer.

I placed the faded newspaper photograph next to Aunt Aggie’s wedding photo. Although the two men bore little immediate resemblance to each other—one, an aristocratic German dressed in elegant finery, the other, a defiant Indian garbed in deerskin and feathers—there was no denying the obvious.

I didn’t have to read the headline under the photograph to know they were one and the same man. The jagged scar on the left check of both men told me that Aunt Aggie’s husband, Baron Johann von Wichtenstein, also known as William Watson, was the man in the faded sepia photograph, the one the newspaper called Two Face Sky.

And in front of the standing Two Face Sky sat a woman in much the same pose as in Aunt Aggie’s wedding picture, except she wasn’t Aunt Aggie. She was a beautiful young Indian woman dressed in the palest of doeskin. Around her neck was the thin gold chain, which lay on the table in front of me. On her lap nestled a small baby wrapped in furs. She could only be Summer Wind with her daughter Whispering Pine, Marie’s mother.

Underneath the photo, the headline confirmed that “German Baron Dies in Tragic Fire.”

The killer had made no mistake. Two Face Sky had called Summer Wind his wife, which meant Aunt Aggie had divorced him. Marie was the true heir to William Watson, not I. She would have owned Whispers Island, and she would have stopped the gold mine.

My heart ached for Aunt Aggie. Her cherished Johann had deserted her for Summer Wind, the same sweet girl after whom Aunt Aggie had named her baby girl, the baby girl who had tragically died. I could almost feel the agony she must’ve suffered, especially when he set up house with his new wife within sight of her once happy home. Every glance across the water would have reminded her of his betrayal. Little wonder she suffered from bouts of mental illness. Still, she could have moved from Three Deer Point. Instead, she spent the rest of her eighty-odd years harnessed to the constant reminder.

I removed the newspaper clipping from the frame and discovered the rest of the article folded underneath. It seemed Baron Johann von Wichtenstein had become enthralled with the northern wilds and had taken on the guise of an Indian chief, calling himself Two Face Sky. He gave up the trappings of the modern world and lived off the land as a native. The only mention of Aunt Aggie was a brief reference that he’d once been married to a lady from one of Toronto’s finest families. So even in his death the marriage had been kept secret.

But Charlie had known. He’d probably learned this family secret while growing up with Marie and her mother. So he had come to my place that night looking for proof and found it in Aunt Aggie’s wedding picture. After that it was simple. He only had to compare it, like I was doing now, to the picture he’d already stolen from Tommy’s place.

Still, could Charlie also be Marie’s killer? The presence of her amulet with the two pictures and Louis’s money pointed in that direction. And what about Louis’s mysterious partner whom Gareth had mentioned? Did he really exist, or was this simply Gareth’s way of diverting attention from himself?

The phone rang. Assuming it was Eric, I picked it up and heard a low, raspy voice that wasn’t his.

“Meg Harris, you better bring that money, if you want to see your dog alive. If you’re not at the sugar shack within fifteen minutes, the dog dies. And he dies if you bring the police.”

I was certain the voice belonged to Charlie Cardinal.