The torture was so intense that I knew my mind would snap if it continued, and just when I thought I couldn’t take one more second of it, I heard a whoosh and BANG!
The end of the attack was so immediate that it took me quite a few seconds to realize it had stopped, and as I lay there panting and wheezing, I listened intently to the eerie silence that followed. I rolled to my knees, battered and sore and picked my head up, chancing a glance up and then all around, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. No trace of the phantom remained.
With some difficulty I got to my feet and walked over to the talisman lying peacefully in the grass. With a grunt I bent double, literally trembling with relief.
“M. J.!” Heath shouted again. I looked up and saw him leaving the doorway of the church, attempting to run to me.
I held up my hand, knowing he had to be in great pain from the wound in his back, and managed to say, “I’m fine! Stay there and I’ll come to you.”
Heath slowed and pulled out two spikes from his back pocket. He held them warily and looked around, as if he thought at any moment the phantom would attack.
But I knew better. Placing the coin I still clutched in my hand in the center, I carefully lifted the talisman, and carried it with me over to Heath. “You can put those away,” I told him, referring to the spikes.
“Where’d it go?” he asked, still eyeing the surrounding terrain suspiciously.
“In here,” I said, lifting the disk so that he could see.
“You found the talisman?”
I nodded.
“Can it get out of there?”
“Not as long as the gold’s in place,” I told him.
Heath let out a heavy sigh of relief. “Thank you, God.”
“Come on,” I told him. “Now that the genie’s back in its bottle, we’ve got to get Alex to a doctor, and then we’ve got a kidnapper and a thief to catch.”
Chapter 14
I figured we had about eight hours of darkness left to work with, and I just hoped it was enough time to do what we had to do to save Gopher.
Gilley and I managed to help Alex down the church’s spiral staircase and back through the underground tunnel. When we emerged from the manhole, I noticed with satisfaction that the night had turned cloudy, and it was nice and dark on the beach. I’d told everyone to turn off their flashlights right before moving through the manhole exit, and also ordered my friends to be quiet lest our talking reach suspicious ears.
As quickly as we dared, given Alex’s woozy condition, we got to the van, loaded her inside, and drove directly to the hospital. Once she was taken down the hall for a CT scan, Gil and I sneaked over to a nurses’ station, and while I created a distraction, Gilley did a search of the hospital’s records using one of their computers.
When I saw him nod triumphantly and hold up a paper he’d printed, he and I made a hasty exit, leaving Heath to look after Alex.
Once Gilley and I were back in the van, we drove to the inn, and for the next few hours Gil did his covert hacking into old records and files till we had what we needed. We then drove an hour and a half to an all-night hardware store, where we got our supplies, and just before dawn, when Heath called to say that Alex had only a minor concussion, Gilley and I hustled our butts back to the castle, once again using the underground tunnel, but making sure to park our van much farther down the beach and well out of sight of the causeway.
Convincing my partner that the phantom was securely locked inside the disk had been a challenge, and as I carried it through the tunnel and up the stairs to the church, he kept glancing fearfully at it.
“You’re sure it can’t get out?” he asked for the hundredth time.
I sighed. “If you ask me again, I’ll remove the gold stopper and let it out just to get you to keep quiet.”
“You’re not very nice when you’re sleep deprived,” he muttered.
I pointedly ignored him and kept climbing the stairs.
“M. J.?”
I gritted my teeth. “Yeah?”
“Got any food on you?”
“If you promise not to ask me any more questions, I’ll give you the Snickers bar in my bag when we get to the church.”
That worked like a charm. Gilley said not one word more. Of course, we had only about twelve more steps to the top, but I was taking my victories where I could.
Once we were there, and Gilley was happily munching on his snack, I moved to the tomb where Malachi was buried and got out my supplies, lining them up on the ground by the tomb.
Gilley came over to stare sadly down at me, his eyes roving to the interior of the sarcophagus with envy. “Do we really have to leave all the gold?” he whimpered.
I smiled up at him and sighed. “It’s not our treasure, Gilley. It’s Ranald’s, and now that I know him, I’m finding it kind of hard to take what isn’t rightfully mine. Plus, I think enough of it has already been stolen, and we need to prevent the rest of it from disappearing.”
“But, M. J.,” Gilley pressed, “wouldn’t Dunnyvale want you to have even a little bit of it after all you’ve done to rid the castle of the phantom?”
I wanted to say yes, but I kept thinking back to how Ranald had buried his firstborn son. He’d laid him down on a bed of gold, and I thought it incredibly symbolic—as if the loss of Malachi was too much for Ranald to bear, so he’d buried his treasure with his treasure. It was a final gesture of love to his son. And Ranald had kept only one gold coin from the cache of bullion, which he’d worn around his neck as a symbol of his devotion to his firstborn. To me, that made the gold more than just something to plunder. That made it sacred and untouchable.
“It’s not ours,” I said firmly. “It belongs with Malachi.”
Gilley whimpered a bit more until I gave him another Snickers bar, and then, fully hopped up on sugar, he helped me move the lid back into place. Once Malachi and the gold were firmly covered again, I began to seal the crevice between the lid and the coffin with liquid cement.
“That’ll need about an hour to dry,” I said, wiping my brow when I was done.
Gil had polished off the second Snickers bar by then and was rummaging through my messenger bag looking for more. Pulling up my last remaining candy bar, he shouted, “Aha! I knew you were holding out on me!”
I put my hands on my hips and marched over to him, snatching the candy bar out of his greedy little hands. “Dude!” I snapped. “Get a grip! You’re getting fat!”
Gilley gasped, reeling backward as if I’d slapped him. “Mean!” he accused, pointing his chocolate smeared finger at me. “I can’t believe you just used the f word to describe me!”
I stuffed the candy bar into my jacket pocket. “Had to be said, buddy. You’ve put on at least ten pounds since we got here.”
Gilley’s lower lip trembled. “You know I eat when I’m anxious!” he accused. “I can’t help it! It’s a nervous condition.”
“I’m telling you this for your own good, Gilley Gillespie. It’s time for you to get a grip and some exercise.”
Gilley sniffled but didn’t say anything in reply. Instead he stomped over to a corner and sat there, pouting while I got busy setting up the camera equipment and monitors.
After a while, I guess he forgave me, because he came over and pushed me out of the way when I struggled to secure our one and only remaining camera to a stone cornice. “Let me do that,” he said. “Or we’ll be here forever.”
After setting up the camera, Gil and I moved to the hallway just beyond the church’s interior door. There, we set up the computer monitor and made sure we were getting a good clear feed from the camera. After that, we sat back and waited.
The minutes ticked by and I kept glancing at my watch, waiting for the breakfast hour to come and word to spread. “You’re sure this’ll work?” Gilley asked after a bit.
“No,” I admitted. “But as long as Heath is able to get the word out at the inn that we’ve sent the phantom packing, and that we’ve gone to bring back some
special equipment for our investigation, I’m pretty sure it’ll trigger a reaction from the people who took Gopher. They’ll know that what we’ve really done is locate the gold and we’re going to try and move it out of the castle as soon as possible.”
“Who do you think the other kidnapper is?” Gilley asked me.
We were fairly certain we’d discovered the master-mind behind this whole thing; it was his accomplice that still had yet to be identified. “I’ve no idea,” I told him, glancing again at my watch. “But I’m pretty sure we’re about to find out.”
My intuition was right on the money. Not five minutes later we heard the familiar slide of the panel at the back of the church. Gilley and I immediately focused our attention on the monitor, and I sighed when I realized who’d just walked into the church, because, although I’d suspected the intruder as the accomplice, I’d really wanted it to be someone else.
“Crap,” I whispered. “This is going to be tricky.”
“What do we do?” Gilley asked softly.
I didn’t reply right away, but waited and watched until I was sure of the intruder’s intentions. “We’ll have to get him to confess on camera,” I told Gilley softly. “Otherwise, it’s our word against his.”
“I don’t like that plan,” Gilley muttered.
Ignoring his comment, I said, “Stay here and monitor the situation. If I get into trouble, create a distraction or something and we’ll run for it.”
Gilley opened his mouth to protest, but I was already moving away. I eased around the corner, keeping flat against the wall. A peek into the church showed me that our guest had already gotten to work, and was busy pounding a crowbar similar to the one I’d used into the crevice now sealed with liquid cement.
I smiled, then took a breath and stepped quietly into the room. “Need some help, Constable?” I asked casually.
The man driving in the wedge jumped and his hammer slipped and hit his hand. He let out a yelp of pain and whirled around to glare furiously at me. “What’re you doin’ here?” he demanded.
I leaned against the stone wall and folded my arms across my chest. “I’ve been waiting for you, Quinn.”
He eyed me suspiciously, and I noticed that he also moved the hammer and crowbar behind him. “How’d you know I’d come, then?”
I casually inspected the fingernails on my right hand. “It was a fairly easy deduction,” I told him. “I mean, through a pretty thorough records check we figured out that your buddy Bertie was actually the one that brought the talisman back from South America and gave it to Bouvet twenty years ago. His story, which implicated that it was Jeffrey Kincaid who was responsible for the phantom, didn’t really hold water after we’d finished looking at the evidence. Kincaid was a fairly convincing suspect for Bertie, though—I’ll give him that—what with Jeffrey’s mental collapse and living so far away in South Africa, and not here to defend himself. I’m pretty sure Jordan’s father had no idea the talisman even existed, until his son decided to go looking into the affair. And then, when both father and son died, well, that just made Mulholland’s story all that more believable.
“And then we managed a rather covert look into the hospital records and saw that Bertie Mulholland was admitted to the hospital the day after Bouvet fell from the cliffs. The same day you claimed to have ventured here to have a look at the phantom, and I’m guessing you not only had a good look at the phantom, Quinn, but you also found Bertie lying helpless with a broken back somewhere here at Dunlow.”
Constable O’Grady’s face registered the guilt I’m sure he felt for his part in the lie all those years ago. “You see,” I continued, feeling my way along the truth, “what I’m thinking is that Bertie really did find the gold twenty years ago, and to make sure he got Bouvet out of the way, he gave him a little present in the form of a small round disk with a gold stopper, which Gaston obviously uncorked, unleashing the phantom.
“Then while the phantom was off chasing Bouvet right off the edge of the cliffs, and sending Kincaid insane, Mulholland came here and discovered the gold. While everyone else was preoccupied with recovering Bouvet’s body and getting Kincaid to the hospital, Bertie managed to hide the talisman in Malachi’s tomb so that the phantom could guard his gold. He thought he could come back here later with some rope, pulleys, winches, et cetera, to slide the lid aside to get at all the gold and take it before anyone was the wiser.
“The problem was, he couldn’t get all of his equipment through the narrow tunnel under the causeway that led up here. He had to use the outside entrance, and the phantom proved to be far more dangerous than even he had estimated.
“I believe he made it as far as the castle before encountering the phantom. It probably chased him to the outside stairs, where he got tangled in his rope, tripped and fell, and ended up breaking his back. That’s where you found him, Quinn—am I right? You found him badly hurt right on those stairs.”
Quinn glared hard at me. “I only wanted to help the poor man,” he said.
“Oh, I’m sure you did. But Bertie must have been in a terrible state, terrified really and in quite a bit of pain. I’m assuming, to keep you quiet, he offered you some of the gold he’d already taken from in there.” For emphasis I pointed to Malachi’s tomb. “And that’s how you had the money to buy your pub—am I right, Quinn? We looked up the township records. You opened your pub the day you turned eighteen. Where would an eighteen-year-old son of a bricklayer get forty thousand pounds to put down on a pub?”
The constable took a shaky breath and sat down on the stone slab. “Aye,” he said grudgingly. “It’s true.”
“I’m also guessing that Bertie’s tried to convince you all these years to come back to this church and take the rest of the gold, but you were too afraid of the phantom.”
Quinn shuddered and then he eyed the secret passage leading out of the church. I knew he was thinking of running for it, so I said quickly, “The one question I have for you, though, is, who was it that actually kidnapped Gopher? Was that you? Or did Mulholland manage that from his wheelchair?”
The constable’s eyes darted back to me. “I had no part in that!”
“Ah,” I said. “Then Mulholland somehow managed that on his own. Still, I’m guessing you were the one that stole the original blueprint from the library, right? And I can see why. It had to have shown the inside stairwell to the church, and Mulholland couldn’t have anyone know about that. But why you didn’t use it when he hired you to do his dirty work still puzzles me.”
O’Grady’s jaw bunched. “I tried,” he said. “Right after that young man Kincaid fell to his death. I came here and tried to retrieve the talisman, but the phantom, it started to come inside the church. So I left it alone and told Mulholland I’d have none of it until the phantom was dealt with. He’s the one who sent word to your producer friend. He told Peter about the treasure and the haunted castle, and he even told him about the phantom.”
I now knew how Mulholland had lured Gopher to his home, which was where I was now convinced Gopher was being held captive. Still, I wanted to be sure. “Where is Peter, Quinn?”
O’Grady scowled and stared at the floor without answering me.
“How many children did you say you had?” I asked, reminding him of exactly how much he had to lose.
The constable’s eyes came back to meet mine. “Seven. I’ve seven hungry mouths to feed, Miss Holliday.”
“Then I think it’s time for you to help me get Gopher back—don’t you agree?”
Quinn stared at the tomb again. “I could take care of all of them with a bit of this gold.”
“Yes, you could,” I told him, smiling like I had a big secret. “Of course, once you pried that lid up—and trust me when I tell you that you’d need a forklift now that we’ve resealed it—you’d discover the tomb empty of all the gold.”
Quinn stood and glared at me. “You’ve already taken it? All of it?”
“Yep,” I said. “We had all night, after all. It w
as a lot of work, but we’ve managed to clear Dunlow of its infamous treasure.”
O’Grady threw the crowbar and hammer onto the floor. “You’ll never prove I had a hand in any of it,” he said. “It’s your word against mine.”
My smile grew even bigger. “Say, Quinn?”
“Aye?”
“Could you turn a little to your left? I don’t think our video camera is capturing your good side.” For emphasis I pointed to the cornice where we’d attached the camera. “The feed is traveling right across the Internet as we speak. I figure you’ll be a YouTube sensation in about three hours.”
O’Grady’s shoulders slumped and he sat back down on the tomb, covering his face with his hands. “What’s going to happen to me children?” he wailed.
In that moment I took pity on him, and truth be told, I knew I needed his help to get Gopher back. “I don’t know that anyone really has to know about your part in this,” I said. “I’d be willing to have the feed erased, especially if you decide to help us.”
The constable’s head lifted and he looked hopefully at me. “What do you want me to do?”
“Help me get Peter Gophner back.”
Quinn looked again at the camera with its little red recording light glowing in the dim church, and I knew he was considering all he had to lose. “All right,” he agreed wearily. “I’ll do what you ask. But I want to warn you, miss: Bertie Mulholland is a dangerous and deceptive man. He might be in a wheelchair, but it wouldn’t be wise to underestimate him.”
“Noted,” I said. “Now, let’s work on a plan. ...”
Gilley and I approached Mulholland’s large house warily. We’d already spent a little time scouting the perimeter and making sure that the camera I carried in my messenger bag was sending a good signal to Quinn and Heath in the van.
I was taking a big chance with the constable, but I hoped that the footage I already had of his confession at the castle was enough to get him to cooperate fully. I’d made sure to let him know that if I even sensed a double cross from him, I’d make sure it ended up on YouTube and in the e-mail of every member of the town council and he’d be taken from his wife and children.