Mystery by Moonlight Read online

  Hands jammed into the pocket of her sweatshirt, Nancy hurried up the sloping lawn toward Emily’s house. A neat rectangle of light from the kitchen window splashed the lawn. The rest of the house was dark.

  Nancy went around to the back entrance, walked right into the mudroom, and almost tripped on something. She looked down and saw some sort of diving gear. A pair of wet flippers stuck out from underneath a bench. On top of the bench was a milk crate filled with old junk covered in green slime: an egg beater, a rusty hammer, a saw, and some broken pottery. It was the kind of stuff that someone would find in Timothy’s Trash and Treasures. The stuff had obviously been dredged up from the lake—tonight, from the looks of it.

  What was this stuff doing in Emily’s mudroom? Nancy realized just then that voices were coming from the kitchen. Was Ravi back?

  After a moment’s hesitation, she walked into the room.

  Emily wasn’t with Ravi; she was with Dale. He wore a sweatshirt and jeans, and had work boots on. His hair was wet. A towel hung over the back of the chair.

  “What are you doing here?” Emily gasped, her hand flying to her chest in surprise. “I thought you went home.”

  “I started to,” Nancy said, then she explained about her encounter with Jim.

  “Man—he came at you with a knife? That guy’s gone too far!” Dale grumbled. “Want me to go after him?” he asked Emily.

  “I wouldn’t bother,” Nancy told the workman. “He’s probably long gone. The guy can move through the woods like a cat.”

  Dale nodded. “Tell me about it. We’re always running into him, rooting around for something. I keep chasing him off Emily’s land, but he waits until we’ve left, and then he comes back.”

  “Anyway, I wanted to warn you about him. I didn’t like the idea of you being here alone tonight,” Nancy said.

  Emily looked sheepish. “Actually, that’s why I called Dale. After seeing that boat hanging around my dock, I decided that maybe I shouldn’t be out here all by myself.”

  Dale nodded. “I told Emily weeks ago that if she ever had trouble here, I’d come over and kind of guard the place. I’m going to check the grounds now.”

  Nancy regarded Dale skeptically. Between his wet hair and the stash of dredged-up junk lying in plain view in the mudroom, she wasn’t sure he was telling the truth—or at least, not the whole truth.

  Still, whatever they were up to was their business. From what George had told her, Nancy knew Emily was close to broke and probably had trouble making ends meet. Maybe they were dredging up junk illegally and selling it to junk and antique dealers.

  At least Emily wouldn’t be alone in the house.

  “I think that’s a great idea, Dale,” Nancy said. “I don’t know what Jim is up to. Maybe he was the prowler we saw before, or maybe whoever stole those plans is back looking for something else. But it’s best for someone to be here, at least until Ravi gets back.”

  “Right,” Emily said. “Ravi. He’s due back late tomorrow.”

  • • •

  “This was a great idea, George,” Nancy said the next morning. While Bess and Ned slept in late, the two girls had set off on a hike through the woods. George suggested exploring the forest between the cottage and the Lawrence-Joneses’ property. It was early, and the woods were filled with birdsong. The air was cool and fresh. Soon after they set out, Nancy filled George in on the events of the night before.

  “Nan, you’re right-on about Jim,” George said when Nancy finished her story. “Let me show you something. When I was hiking around here last week before you guys came, I began finding some really weird things.”

  “Like what?” Nancy asked, as she scrambled up a low, rocky hill after George.

  “Like this,” George said, pointing to a cairn of smooth gray rocks. They lay at the base of a delicate paper birch tree. The rocks had been carefully chosen, and Nancy noted they were almost symmetrical and arranged in a kind of low pyramid. She crouched down and looked closely at the cairn. She touched the rocks and shrugged.

  “Jim was building something like this over on Emily’s property,” Nancy said. “It doesn’t seem very threatening.”

  George giggled. “No, of course not. And at first I thought it was sort of cool. I didn’t tell Bess, of course, particularly when all the spooky stuff began happening. But this is really weird,” George said, leading Nancy deeper into the forest. “Look in there,” George said, pointing into a shallow cave at the base of a cliff.

  Nancy stooped down. The cave was shadowed by trees, so Nancy pulled her penlight out of her pocket. She turned it on and grimaced at the sight before her. A small animal skull was in the center of the little cave. Some charred wood and a bundle of tiny bones tied together with a cord were carefully arranged a few inches from the skull. “It’s some kind of fetish or spirit object,” Nancy guessed.

  George nodded. “Probably, but Jim’s trespassing and being so mysterious about it all is making me wonder if he’s doing this on purpose to spook people out.”

  “But why?” Nancy couldn’t quite make sense of Jim’s motives. While his hostility to everyone on this end of the lake was more than obvious, it wasn’t enough to prove that he was responsible for the weird things that were happening. He was fighting a battle in court to try to redesignate part of the north shore as sacred land, because of ancestral burial sites. His fetishes and cairns were on other people’s property—but that didn’t make them particularly threatening. “Something about Jim just doesn’t add up,” she told George, thinking about the night before. Jim had practically assaulted her, but then he told her he was trying to protect her. From what? From the people in the boat?

  And what about the people in the boat? Last night as she went to sleep, she had thought maybe it was Dale, but he couldn’t have gotten back to Emily’s house so quickly from the boat. Jim seemed to think that whoever was paddling around in the dark was dangerous. Had he just been trying to put her off? Was he teamed up with the prowler who Nancy and Emily had spied from the island earlier?

  Nancy sighed as they backed out of the shallow cave and continued walking through the woods. Heading back down the hill, they meandered along a deer trail that descended toward the lake.

  “Now this tree has to be really old!” George commented, patting the huge trunk of a towering oak. “Nothing’s this big around here, except on a couple of the lawns!”

  Nancy stopped to admire the stately tree. It towered high into the forest canopy. Its trunk was thick, and Nancy trailed her hand against the bark as she walked around it. Suddenly her fingers encountered the edge of a wooden slat. “Would you look at this!” she said. The slat was one of several hammered into the side of the massive tree. These formed a kind of ladder leading up to a gray weathered platform which was half concealed with newly cut branches from the tree.

  “Some kind of observation point?” George suggested. “The Lawrence-Joneses’ property is near here.”

  “Makes sense,” Nancy said, carefully starting up the ladder. Moments later, Nancy reached the platform and gasped. Lying in full view was Jim’s hunting knife, half out of its leather sheath.

  14

  A Ghostly Fleet

  Nancy stuffed the knife in her knapsack, and she and George headed back to the house. Nancy hadn’t made up her mind what to do about the knife, but she was tempted to call the police.

  Just as they reached the house, Ravi’s red Volkswagen roared into their driveway. He jumped out, leaving the engine running, and hurried over to Nancy.

  “Where’s Emily?” he asked, breathless.

  “At the house, right?” Nancy said.

  Ravi shook his head. Just then, Ned came out onto the lawn. His hair was wet, and his cheeks were pink from the shower. “Hi, guys, what’s up?”

  “Have you seen Emily?” Nancy asked Ned.

  “Sure. She and Bess went into town. Emily suddenly had some urgent errand, and Bess wanted to check out something at the junk shop.”

  Ravi
groaned. “I found out the most incredible thing and—wait until Emily hears!” He went over to the car and turned off the engine.

  “Is it private?” Nancy asked, curious as to why Ravi was so charged.

  “I’ll tell you all about it if you give me coffee,” Ravi said with a weary grin. “I’m working with a severe sleep deficit here.”

  “We’ll even give you breakfast,” George promised.

  A few minutes later, they were all on the deck. Nancy and George sipped juice while Ned and Ravi dug into a plateful of bagels. Ravi sipped some of his coffee, then started his tale.

  “You know how Dale told me there was this woman around here who was close to a hundred years old and remembered the place before it was flooded?”

  “Sure, that’s why you took off last night,” Nancy commented, propping her feet on the railing.

  “Turns out she lived much farther away than Dale said. She was in a town about seventy miles from here, quite far from the lake. Anyway, I ended up visiting her this morning. Her name’s Betty Sue MacGregor. Turns out she had more information than I know what to do with.”

  “About the flooding of the valley?” Ned asked.

  Ravi nodded. “Her recollections are interesting. She has scrapbooks about the whole process. I was looking through them when I came across some really wild information. It’s about Mike Malone.”

  Nancy lowered her feet and leaned forward in her chair. “Our Mike Malone—the same gangster who owned Emily’s house and this cottage?”

  “The very person,” Ravi said. “The clippings in the scrapbook didn’t spell any of this out—only that the FBI suspected Malone had something stashed away at the house. But Ms. MacGregor remembers the gossip of the time. The old grapevine was buzzing about Malone. Talk was that one of Malone’s cronies told the FBI that stolen jewels and all sorts of loot was hidden somewhere on the grounds. When questioned by a newspaper reporter back then, the Feds denied it. But ‘everyone’ according to Ms. MacGregor, knew differently.”

  “Just like I figured.” George grinned proudly. “There really was buried treasure.”

  “More like there still is,” Ravi corrected. “It turns out that the Feds found a cache of arms, ammunition, and bootlegging paraphernalia, but they never located those jewels.”

  Nancy exchanged a quick glance with Ned. “So, they might still be on the property somewhere?”

  “Probably. Unless, of course, they were lost when the lake was flooded,” Ravi said. “The Feds suspected that Malone’s wife knew all about the jewels, but they couldn’t prove it, and she never led the agents to them, even inadvertently.”

  Nancy felt her pulse quicken. All the pieces of the puzzle were starting to fit together.

  Ned gave a low whistle. “Malone’s wife,” he said. “So he did get married.”

  “Isn’t that amazing? I didn’t think guys like Malone stayed with one woman very long,” Ravi said. “He must have been different from most of them. Emily is going to flip when she hears about all of this. Old Ms. MacGregor said she’d love for Emily to come and look at her scrapbooks. She really takes pride in being part of the oral history tradition of the lake.”

  Ravi checked his watch. “The problem is, I won’t be around to tell her. I actually have to drive back to New York today, but I’ll be back early next week. Pass it all on if you see her. I’ll phone her tonight and give her more details, and then figure out if we can set up a date to drive back down to see Ms. MacGregor. Emily just has to see those scrapbooks. And an interview with Ms. MacGregor would really be great for her documentary. The shock’s going to blow Emily away!”

  As soon as Ravi left, Nancy turned toward her friends. “He’s wrong. Emily’s known about this all along.”

  “No way!” George declared. “How could she?”

  “I’m not sure—but it makes perfect sense. She’s researching Prohibition era gangsters, then spends a ton of money to buy Malone’s place. She must have stumbled on to something. I think she’s been our prowler all along. I think she’s been checking everything out, looking for anything that would lead her to Malone’s wife and any kind of secret exchange of information between them.”

  “The letters in the attic . . . ,” Ned commented.

  “Right, and the plans. Though, how the FBI ever missed those, I have no idea.” Nancy tried to recall the plans, then remembered the penciled arrows that had been carefully retraced with ballpoint pen.

  “But the plans were stolen, Nan,” George pointed out. “If she already had them why would she steal them. Someone else had to know about that loot.”

  Nancy frowned. “You’ve got a point. Maybe I’m moving too fast here. Maybe she knew something, but not everything.”

  “Then what about Jim?” George asked. “He’s been acting really suspicious. Maybe all those fetishes are some kind of cover-up for his own personal treasure hunt. Or maybe he’s trying to scare people away from places where he suspects the loot might be buried.”

  “Why would he even have a clue about where Malone would have hidden things?” Ned asked.

  “Oral history,” Nancy mused aloud. “It’s pretty strong in the Native American community too. Ms. MacGregor might be one of the few survivors from that era, but stories get passed down. And Jim was definitely trying to locate something; remember those pins I saw on his diorama? He was pretty defensive when I asked him what they were about.”

  “So what’s next, Nancy?” Ned asked. “I mean, even if someone finds this stuff, who’s got the right to claim it? Emily, if it’s on her property?”

  Nancy shrugged. “I have no idea, but if we’re talking about stolen goods, then I’m sure the police would be more than interested. Right now, what I want to find out is how much Emily knows.” Nancy got up. “But look guys, let’s keep this to ourselves for now. I don’t want to let Emily know that we suspect something just yet.”

  “What about Bess?” George asked.

  Nancy shook her head. “Let’s leave her out of this for the moment. The temptation to talk about missing jewels and Malone’s wife might be too much for her to handle!”

  • • •

  That night, Nancy couldn’t sleep. She kept trying to figure out the exact connection between Mike Malone’s love letters, the missing plans, Jim, and Emily. She couldn’t shake the feeling that she was missing something very obvious.

  Wait—the secret passage! That was it. Nancy instantly got out of bed, threw on her clothes, and tiptoed downstairs. Of course. If Malone had gone so far as to build a secret passageway in the cottage, there was probably another one in the main house where Emily lived. And maybe there was a secret tunnel or crawl space at the boathouse, too. Before she had been knocked out, she had noticed arrows pointing to an outside corner of the boathouse that had been recently excavated and propped up with beams. A map to another secret space?

  Nancy couldn’t wait until morning to check out her hunch. She slipped on her shoes, grabbed her hooded sweatshirt and a flashlight, and headed out into the cool night.

  The moon was so full and bright, that she was able to make her way to the boathouse without even turning on her flashlight. As she rounded the corner of the building, a movement out on the lake caught her eye. Nancy ducked back around the side of the building and looked out onto the lake. Sure enough, a boat was silently making its way out of the bay. Then, as soon as it was a good tenth of a mile out, the motor kicked in, and the boat raced for the waters beyond Camp Moonlight.

  Nancy hurried up to Emily’s dock. A canoe she’d never seen before was moored to the pilings, and a damp paddle was resting in the bottom of the boat. Nancy jumped in, loosened the rope that tied the canoe to the pier, and paddled after the other boat as quickly as she could. She had no hope of catching up to it, but she could at least follow it and find out where it was headed.

  Nancy paddled furiously, keeping her eye on the speeding boat. It skimmed past Camp Moonlight, then vanished around the rocky promontory.

  Nan
cy was so intent on following the boat that she almost didn’t see an empty rowboat drifting right toward her. Where’d that come from? she wondered, paddling clear of it. As she looked back over her shoulder, an eerie sight greeted her eyes. The shallow harbor of Camp Moonlight was a ghostly flotilla of drifting boats: canoes, rowboats, flat-bottomed dinghies, and kayaks.

  Nancy froze with her paddle in the air. How did all those boats get loose from their moorings? They had been tied up on the beach the day before, when she and Ned had run into Steve Delmonico. Someone must have cut all those boats loose. But why?

  Just then, a dinghy drifted next to her. It banged into the side of her canoe, practically tipping it over. Nancy struggled to keep the boat upright.

  Suddenly a male figure rose up out of the dinghy and let out a loud cry. He lunged toward Nancy, tipping her canoe. Nancy struggled to stay upright, but didn’t have a chance against the man’s strength.

  Nancy was thrust into the cold, dark water. She tried to grab on to the edge of her boat, but a booted foot kicked her hand, sending a jolt of pain up her arm. She let go of the boat, and sank into the depths of the lake.

  15

  The Past Revealed

  Nancy’s head stung from where she hit the side of the boat, but she was conscious. With a few strong kicks, she surfaced right under the canoe, coughing and sputtering. She took advantage of the air pocket between the canoe and the water, and gulped down a couple of deep breaths of air. She had to right the canoe. Nancy pushed with both hands, but it wouldn’t budge. It felt like someone was holding it down over her head.

  Someone was trying to drown her! Nancy panicked for a second. She then gulped down another breath of air and dove deeper underwater, swimming away from the boat. With a thrust of her legs, she propelled herself up out of the water, clear of the canoe.