I threw up my hands. As small a town as this was, I couldn’t believe no one had shared that little fact with me before tonight. “No wonder McCoy is spreading stories about me. He gets his attitude from his uncle.” And everyone knew there was no love lost between Ciders and me.
“Forget it, Pen,” Brainert said. “We believe you. That’s what counts.”
Fiona Finch rose. “Getting back on the subject at hand, Penelope, I think you should know I received a strange phone call this afternoon….”
As Fiona deliberately allowed her voice to trail off, Seymour folded his arms and tapped his foot. Fiona loved drawing out the suspense when she dispensed gossip. We were all used to it by now, but it continually drove Seymour up the wall.
“Out with it!” he cried. “Who from?”
“From Rene Montour’s uncle in Canada,” Fiona declared.
Sadie nodded. “That’s not unusual. Jacques Montour is the family patriarch and the true book collector in the family. Rene does—er, did bidding and buying for Jacques.”
“Well,” Fiona said, “Jacques Montour requested we hold Rene’s luggage and personal effects until a representative of the family arrives.”
“When is this representative expected?” I asked.
Fiona glanced at her watch. “He should be at the inn right now. I left my Barney at home to meet them. Whoever he is, he’s going to be disappointed.”
Sadie blinked. “Why?”
“Mr. Montour didn’t leave much in his room,” Fiona replied. “But I knew he was travelling with something of value because the first thing he did was ask me if the inn had a vault. I told Mr. Montour he was free to avail himself of the inn’s wall safe, but after checking it out, he told Barney that the safe would not be large enough for his purposes.”
“Montour obviously wanted to stash the books in a secure place,” Sadie said. “He knew they were too valuable to leave in the room, so he kept them with him at all times. That’s why the books were in the car when he went for a drive.”
“But the question is, why did he go for a drive?” I asked. “Mr. Montour had dinner at Fiona’s restaurant, he didn’t know anyone in the town except perhaps Sadie. Where was the man going at nine o’clock on a Sunday night in Quindicott?”
“Mr. Montour received a phone call at around eightthirty, if that’s any help,” Fiona offered. “About fifteen minutes later, he went out.”
“Another mysterious caller,” Seymour said in his woowoo spooky voice. “Could it be the same as-yet unknown person who called 911 while you were at Chesley’s mansion? Only the shadow knows…”
Anybody going to tell this rube he’s being about as helpful as a rock in your shoe?
“Two murders and an assault over a set of books,” Milner said. “What I’d like to know is why they’re so special.”
“Yeah, so they’re old. So what?” Linda shrugged. “You can get the Poe stuff anywhere. It’s not like it’s out of print.”
“Allow me.” Brainert moved to the podium, a file folder full of papers in his hand. I returned to my seat next to Sadie.
“Eugene Phelps knew there was not much market for his Poes when he published them,” Brainert explained in his professorial tone. “Phelps also knew there would be limited interest in his dubious scholarship, his rambling introductions. That’s why he buried a secret code inside these books—three of them, in fact.”
“Codes?” Fiona sounded almost breathless. “Like in The Da Vinci Code?”
Brainert appeared to have sucked on a lemon. “Kind of like that, Fiona. Only without the secret societies and that nonsense about Mary Magdalene.”
“No loose women!?” Seymour cracked. “Sheesh, that’s the best part.”
Bud slammed his hammer. “I want to hear about those codes.”
“I’m sure you do,” Brainert said. “According to solicitation letters Eugene Phelps sent out to subscribers in the 1920s, there are three codes buried inside these editions. The solution to all three riddles was to reveal the existence and location of a literary and artistic treasure, or so Eugene Arthur Phelps claimed.”
Bud Napp snorted. “Don’t you think that the premium for that particular prize might have expired after all these years?”
“Or maybe someone already claimed this marvelous treasure,” Mr. Koh said.
“Anyway it just sounds nuts,” grumbled the skeptical Bud.
Brainert nodded. “Maybe. But there is at least one code, which was solved by a scholar named Dr. Robert Conte. Penelope, you may recall that my colleague Nelson Spinner mentioned him? Well, I looked up his research, and I have the Conte paper right here.”
Seymour crossed his arms above his thick waist and stared at Brainert. “This had better be good.”
“Dr. Conte did a thorough textual analysis of the Phelps books as compared to the now-standard Poe text accepted as correct by the Ford Foundation and the Library of America—”
Bud brought the hammer down. “In English, if you please, Professor. And cut to the chase.”
Brainert sighed. “Dr. Conte determined that there are errant letters in the first story of each volume of the Phelps Poe books. They look like typographical errors, but if you put them all together and reverse their order, it spells out an actual sentence—” He glanced at the papers on the podium in front of him. “Mystic Library east wall sunset reveals all.”
I heard Jack Shepard groan in my head. This is starting to sound like decoder ring hooey.
“Is this riddle meant to reveal a hidden secret about the library in Mystic, Connecticut?” Sadie asked.
“That’s what Dr. Conte believed, but he was dead wrong. According to my own research”—Brainert grinned and straightened his bow tie—“when Eugene Arthur Phelps was editing his Poes, he lived in a large mansion at the cross streets of Plum and Armstrong in Newport. In the 1940s, the house was converted into apartments and renamed The Arms, but the mansion’s name when Phelps lived there was Mystic House.
“Ahhh!” said the Quibblers.
“Inside this Mystic House there was a large, well stocked library, much of it dedicated to the study of Edgar Allan Poe.”
Seymour arched his eyebrow. “Was?” he said.
Brainert nodded. “The place was destroyed by a fire in 1956.”
Bud threw up his hands. “Then I was right. The treasure is lost.”
“Frankly, I don’t think this treasure ever existed.” Linda Cooper-Logan waved her hand, her silver and jade bracelets janging. “Except as a figment of Eugene Phelps’s imagination. But I guess anyone who becomes obsessed with Edgar Poe is a little crazy, right?”
Brainert sighed. “Eugene Phelps was a tragic figure. An eccentric, and something of a romantic, too. But I doubt he was crazy, Linda. In fact, it was easy to find parallels between Edgar Allan Poe’s and Eugene Arthur Phelps’s life that may have fueled the latter’s obsession with the former.”
“Beside the fact that both men have the same initials, what else have you got,” Seymour asked. “And by the way, I have the same initials as Sharon Tate. Using your logic, I should be murdered by a crazy, Manson family–type cult.”
“We should be so lucky,” Fiona muttered.
“Watch it, bird lady! Mail can get lost, you know.”
Brainert ignored the bickering and pressed on. “As you know, Poe was the son of a beautiful stage actress who died when he was just a child. Phelps’s mother was a trained opera singer who died of tuberculosis when he was four. After his mother’s demise, Poe was adopted by a wealthy family named the Allans. Frances Allan loved Poe like a son; Mr. John Allan was cold and indifferent. Mrs. Allan died when Poe was nineteen and in military service. Her death left him once again bereft and motherless, with a stepfather who neither appreciated nor wanted him. Eugene Phelps had an indifferent father as well. After the death of his wife, Eugene’s father remarried, and the couple spent the next fifteen years traveling the world. Eugene remained in New England, raised by a string of nannies and servants—”