The Key in the Attic(38)

Melanie fumed in silence for a moment.

“Do whatever you want,” she said at last and hung up.

Mary Beth clicked off the telephone, and as much as she would have liked to hurl it across the room, she instead set it with a forced gentleness into the charger. The moment she did, it rang again.

I don’t need more of this right now, Mel.

She let it ring twice more and then picked up.

“Hello?”

“Is this Mary Beth Brock?”

The voice on the other end of the line was female, very businesslike, and unknown to Mary Beth.

“Yes?”

“This is Officer Wiesner with the Brunswick Police Department. I’m calling regarding the charges you filed against Frank Sanders in the matter of your antique clock.”

“Oh yes! Have you found out anything else? You haven’t gotten the clock back, have you?”

“I’m sorry, no, and I don’t want to get your hopes up at this point. I’m sure the officer who took your information told you it’s fairly rare for us to recover this type of thing.”

Mary Beth sighed. “Yes, he did.”

“But there is one thing we’d like to ask you about. Can you come into the station sometime?”

“What is it?”

“We’re hoping you can tell us that. It’s just a piece of notepaper with some writing on it. We’re not sure it has anything to do with the case at all, but we’d like to see if there’s anything about it that you recognize.”

“What kind of writing?”

“It’s just a little poem, not very good, and some directions. Mr. Sanders claims it was something he made up himself. But, if you could come by and look it over, it might—”

“I’ll be there first thing tomorrow.”

****

“Come in! Come in!” Annie practically pulled Mary Beth into the living room of Grey Gables and over to the sofa. “Sit down. Let me see it.”

Mary Beth took a folded piece of paper out of her purse and spread it out on the coffee table. “It’s just a copy they made for me at the police station. They said it’s definitely in Sanders’s handwriting. It was on his desk when they searched his place. The detective thought he was being a little funny about it, though Sanders claimed it wasn’t anything. That’s why they made a copy, for what it’s worth.”

Annie studied it for a moment:

I hide my face behind my hands,

But still my voice you hear,

And to the treasure of my heart

This path will lead you near

Stand between the trees,

face to the north, move west to east,

from the west move south to north

from the east move north to south

from the north move east again

from the south move downward

and then the key

“This first part’s got to mean a clock,” she said. “What else hides its face behind its hands and has a ‘voice’?”

Mary Beth nodded. “That’s what the police think, too, and that’s why they were interested in it. But I don’t know what the rest of it means, and they said they can’t prove it wasn’t Frank Sanders’s bad attempt at blank verse.”

Annie bit her lower lip, thinking. “Why would he write poetry about a clock anyway? I know he really liked yours, but that would be a little bit much, wouldn’t it?”

She read the page over again, slowly this time, saying the words half under her breath. Then she froze.

“‘And then the key.’ Mary Beth, ‘and then the key’! What if this is another clue from Geoffrey Whyte for Angeline?”

“But how—”

“Did you say the clock was something passed down from your great-great-grandmother along with the desk and the table?”

“Yes. And the vase that got broken too.”

“Exactly. There was a clue in the table—the original clue. There was also one in the vase—the key with the lion on it.”

Mary Beth nodded.

Annie picked up the paper from the coffee table. “Suppose the desk had this clue in it. That would explain why he was so interested in the clock.”

“But there was nothing in the desk. And nothing in the clock. He almost took it apart when he was looking at it before.”

“We think there was nothing in the desk. Remember that hidden cubby hole, ‘the deeper secret place’ in the desk? What if he found this clue in there? You said you didn’t know about it, that your family didn’t know about it. What if this was part of a clue Geoffrey Whyte put there in the 1860s and nobody ever knew it was there?”

Mary Beth exhaled heavily. “I don’t know. By itself, this really doesn’t mean much—just a silly rhyme and some directions. It does sound a little like a treasure hunt. Who knows what’s at the end of it? Maybe Geoffrey left Angeline a love letter or an engagement ring. Maybe it was Confederate war bonds, and you know what they’d be worth by now.”