There was a pretty, young African-American woman there who was, one by one, pressing every carved leaf that went across the mantel. It was an intricate carving of English ivy that twisted and turned and trailed down the sides. The carving had always fascinated Holly and she’d been told that it was the work of a slave who’d once been the overseer of all Belle Chere. “Before the war,” Lorrie had told her.
Suddenly, Holly thought, For a slave to have been made overseer, he must have been a trusted servant. Very trusted. And smack in the middle of the mantel was carved the date, 1839.
“Oh!” the woman said, at last seeing that she was being watched. She jumped back guiltily. “I was, uh, I was…” Looking embarrassed, she picked up her handbag off the floor and started for the door.
“I’m Holly Latham,” Holly said loudly, and the woman halted and turned back.
“I’m sorry about your sister,” she said, taking a step forward. “I’m Kera Ivy. I teach at the local elementary and I thought I’d look around before someone buys the place and does whatever to it. I’ve always wanted to see the place and I thought that this would be my one and only chance.”
The woman was talking too fast and too nervously. Holly figured her nervousness could be from several things, but she guessed that Miss Ivy had been doing something she wasn’t supposed to be doing. It couldn’t have been thievery. How could she have thought to walk through a crowd carrying a fireplace mantel? “What were you doing?” Holly asked.
“I, uh—” She looked at the tip of her shoe.
Nick stepped forward. “I’m Nicholas Taggert,” he said, extending his hand.
“Oh!” she said as she shook his hand. “Are you one of these Montgomery-Taggerts? I read in the newspaper that they were going to be here.”
“Yes, I am,” Nick said, smiling. “My cousin wants to buy Belle Chere. Or maybe I will.” He kept his eyes focused on Kera’s, ignoring Holly’s glare.
“Wow,” Kera said. “Hollander Tools and the Montgomery-Taggert megacorporation bidding against each other. That will be exciting. I won’t want to miss that. I think I’d better go home now and rest up for that. See you tomorrow.”
As she headed for the doorway, Nick caught her right arm and Holly her left.
“So what were you looking for, Miss Ivy?” Nick asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “I just thought it was a beautiful fireplace, that’s all. And what with its being covered in ivy and my name being Ivy, it interested me.”
Nick smiled at her. “Now, why don’t I think you’re telling the truth?”
“Because one liar can recognize another one,” Holly said, giving him a false smile. “Because a low-down, slimy, sneaking rat can tell when someone else is up to no good.”
Kera looked from one to the other and said, “I think I’d better go now.”
Neither Nick nor Holly released her arms, but they quit looking at each other and looked at Kera.
“You were looking for something, weren’t you?” Nick said.
Kera sighed. “Okay, so I was. If you’ll release me, I’ll tell you.”
“I have a Thermos of hot chocolate in my car,” Nick said. “I don’t know about anyone else, but my feet are freezing.”
“Sounds good,” Kera said and Nick released her to let her pass.
“Mine’s the black car by the entrance.”
Kera walked ahead, Nick and Holly side by side behind her. “Did you bring the Bentley or the Rolls?” Holly said through clenched teeth.
“The Jag,” he said cheerfully. “Instead of bidding against each other, how about if one bids and we split the cost?”
“Own something with you?” Holly asked. “Not in this lifetime.”
“But I thought—”
“What?” she said, halting and glaring at him. “That when I found out you had money, I’d throw my arms around your neck and agree to marry you?”
“Actually, yes.”
“Think again,” she said, walking and nodding toward two men from a university in Arkansas.
“Holly,” Nick said, pleading. “I wanted a woman who loved me for myself, not for my money. You can understand that, can’t you?”
“I understand that you put me through hell.” She was walking faster, moving ahead of Kera; Nick stayed right beside her. “I understand that while I was pouring out my deepest secrets to you—secrets I’d never told anyone else—you were lying to me about the very essence of who you are. While I was being torn apart, you were enjoying your little game immensely.”
“I never enjoyed myself for one minute,” Nick said.
She turned on him. “Never enjoyed yourself?”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I meant I didn’t enjoy what I was doing to you.”
“Which was?”
“Making you fall in love with the gardener?” he asked, eyebrows raised.
“Gardener! You don’t deserve the title. You—”
“Is this the car?” Kera asked, stopping at a long black limousine.
“No, that one.” Nick pointed toward an inexpensive black Jeep.
“Slumming?” Holly asked.
“Saving to buy you a multiacre wedding present,” he said as he opened the car door.
Angrily, Holly got into the backseat while Kera and Nick took the two front seats. Minutes later, Holly had removed her cloak, and was sipping the hot chocolate Nick handed her and doing her best to listen to Kera’s story and block from her mind what Nick had done to her.
Kera had grown up in an old house that was locally known as “Ivy House” because all four of its fireplaces were decorated with carved ivy vines.
“I was told that before the Civil War, they were carved by my ancestor, who was a slave at Belle Chere. The two mantels upstairs are rather crudely carved, but by the time he got to the living room and the fourth mantel, the carving’s good.”
“So why were you pressing the leaves on the fireplace?” Nick asked.
“All four mantels at home have a secret compartment. You press a leaf and a panel clicks down and reveals a little hiding place.”
“How big?” Holly asked.
“The one in my bedroom can hold one Barbie doll snugly,” Kera said.
“Unfair analogy,” Nick said.
“You can talk of fairness?” Holly hissed at him. “You don’t understand the concept.” She looked back at Kera. “You think the same man carved the mantel in the overseer’s house?”
“It looks the same to me. My great-granny said that our four were practice work for the real one, which she always told me was at Belle Chere. But since nobody local was ever invited to visit this place—unless we worked here, that is,” she said bitterly, “I’d never seen the inside. When I heard of the open house, I thought I’d look for an ivy mantel. I stupidly assumed it would be in the big house.”
Holly leaned back against the seat and thought. The dates were right. The mantel had been carved a few years before Jason Beaumont was said to have cleaned out Belle Chere, and the legend was that a “trusted servant” had helped Jason.
“Do you know anything about the man who did the carving? How he died and when?”
“Nothing. I’ve often wondered about him, though. If he was a slave, how did he come to own a house that’s ten miles away from Belle Chere?”
“Maybe he carved the mantels and sold them and whoever built the house bought them,” Holly said. “How did your family come to own the house?”
Kera finished her chocolate and smiled. “Promise you won’t laugh?”
“I believe I can promise you that for sure,” Nick said.
“My great-granny used to tell me some tall tales that I loved to hear. She had to whisper them because my mother got angry. Anyway, Granny told me that my great-great-whatever-grandmother had purchased the house after the war with an emerald bracelet that had been hidden in one of the mantels.”
She looked from Nick to Holly, who weren’t smiling. “Silly, huh? Unless she stole the bracelet,
of course, but, then she wouldn’t have got away with it. Someone would have missed it.”
“Not if the bracelet had been stolen and hidden some twenty years before,” Holly said.
“Arthur, who would have prosecuted her, was dead by then,” Nick said.
“And it was twenty years later, so Julia was probably dead, too.”
“Who are Arthur and Julia?” Kera asked, then looked at her watch. “I have to go. I have a husband and kids who will starve if I’m not there to feed them.”
“Maybe in a day or two we could visit your house, see the mantels, and tell you a story?” Nick said.
“Love to hear it,” Kera said as she opened the car door and stepped out. “Ask anybody where the Ivy House is and they’ll tell you.”
They all said good-bye, then Nick and Holly sat in silence for a moment.
“Holly, baby—” Nick began.
She looked out the side window. “He—the faithful servant—helped Jason take away the wealth, including family jewelry, and they hid it together. Then Jason voluntarily went back to jail where he knew he’d be unjustly hanged.”
“And the faithful servant was given an emerald bracelet as thanks,” Nick said.
“He hid the bracelet in one of the mantels he carved,” Holly said. “Probably inside the crudest one, the one no one would want so there was no danger they’d be used in the white man’s fine house.”
“The mantels and the bracelet were kept hidden for over twenty years, until the war was over and whoever owned the mantels was given freedom.”
“But not him,” Holly said. “It wasn’t the man who stole the goods because I think he was supposed to tell Julia where the treasure was after Arthur was dead. I think he killed Arthur.”
Nick looked at her. “Julia could have hidden a murder of Arthur. She had enough influence to get a doctor to say his death was an accident. And besides, the locals probably guessed what Arthur had been to his brother.”
“And the faithful servant? Did he die with the secret of the whereabouts to the treasure?”
“That would be my guess,” Nick said, then looked at Holly. “One Barbie doll isn’t very big. What if he put the bracelet in one mantel and a map in another one?”
Holly’s eyes widened. “If he was the overseer, he’d want the map where he could keep a close watch on it, say, maybe over his own fireplace.”
“And if he’d made four practice mantels, by the fifth one he’d have come up with a pretty ingenious way to hide the opening, one that a little girl couldn’t find.”
For a moment Nick and Holly stared at each other, then she turned away. “When I own this place, I’ll start searching,” she said.
“Right. If you started searching now it would be illegal. Now it’s still owned by Beaumont.”
“Yes,” Holly said. “I’ll be here for the auction tomorrow, buy the place, wire the money here, wait for the attorneys to do the paperwork, then I’ll see if there’s a secret compartment, if there’s anything in it, then wait until after the snow melts so we can see where to dig, maybe even wait until after winter, and if it’s there I’ll find it. It will be a fitting end to my dissertation.”
“Perfect,” Nick said. He was leaning back in the driver’s seat and staring out the window. “All legal and sensible.”
“Yes,” Holly said from the back of the seat. “Legal and sensible.”
“Besides, they’ve stationed armed guards to patrol this place since…well, since the tragedy. Lots of curiosity seekers around here. We’ll just wait and do it all when it’s safe and legal.”
“Right,” Holly said. “Safe and legal.”
They were silent for several long moments, then Holly said, “Greenville.”
“Right,” Nick said as he started the car and Holly climbed through to the front seat. As Nick pulled out into the driveway, he said, “Lowe’s, right?”
“Or Home Depot.” She opened the glove box. “So where’s something I can make a list on?”
He opened the compartment in the console and she took out a pen and a notebook and began to write. “Flashlights, shovels, rope.”
“Saw,” Nick said. “By the way, do you get a discount if we buy Hollander tools?”
“You pay double,” she said sweetly.
Chapter Twenty
“I’M HUNGRY,” HOLLY SAID, HOLDING HER CLOAK close to her. “I wish we’d stopped to get some sandwiches.”
“We’ll take whatever we find to the nearest restaurant where there are lots of lights.”
“And to a twenty-four-hour copy place.”
When he took her arm as she stepped over a rough place in the plowed field that bordered Belle Chere’s land, Holly jerked out of his grasp and nearly fell. “I haven’t forgiven you,” she said.
“Oh, right, I forgot. How long do you think it will take?”
“Longer than you have years left.”
Nick chuckled as he shifted the big bag on his shoulder. It was full of black-out fabric that they planned to use to cover the windows in the overseer’s house while they searched, and several tools, all of them stamped with the Hollander name.
“Remember,” Holly said, “that no matter what we find, we don’t search for anything until after the auction, until after I own Belle Chere.”
“About the auction…” Nick said. “Maybe I should buy the place and put it in my name.”
Instantly, Holly halted, then turned on her heels as though she was planning to go back.
“Okay,” Nick said. “You win. You buy it.”
In the next second, they turned off their flashlights and fell to their stomachs in the dirt as a guard carrying a huge flashlight went by. Once he was out of sight, Nick stood and signaled for Holly to follow him. Under cover of darkness, they ran to the overseer’s house.
It was locked. Nick pulled bolt cutters out of the bag, but they would only cut the latch—the old handmade, wrought-iron latch. Holly shook her head vigorously, then motioned for Nick to follow her.
Smiling in triumph, she pointed to a window that, earlier, she’d opened a couple of inches. The problem was that the overseer’s house, like all the buildings at Belle Chere, was set on brick pillars, which made the window high above their heads.
Silently, Nick cupped his hands for Holly to put her foot in them, but as soon as she was halfway up, he opened his hands so that she fell, her body sliding against his all the way down.
“Stop it!” she hissed in his ear when he began to kiss her neck.
Think of Taylor, she thought, and pushed away from him. For a moment she wondered what some wild-goose chase for some probably nonexistent treasure had to do with her sister’s murder, but she erased that from her mind. She again stepped into Nick’s hands and pushed herself up.
As she knew it would, the window opened easily (when she was thirteen she’d painted herself into a corner and had had to escape out that window). Tossing her cloak onto the floor, she went in after it, head first.
After Nick tossed her the big bag, for a few seconds she was tempted to not help him get into the building. But she thought he might have some ideas of where to look, so when he jumped up and caught the ledge, she helped pull him in. Silently, they thumbtacked the black cloth over the two windows in the room, and around the door. They wanted no one to see their light. When they’d finished, they turned on the big flashlights they’d bought and aimed them at the carved mantel.
An hour later, they’d pushed and wiggled every carved leaf, but with no results.
They sat down, wrapped Holly’s cloak around them, leaned against the far wall, and shared a bottle of water.
“Where would I have put a secret compartment?” Nick whispered.
“You would know, since secrets are your life.”
“You didn’t tell me you were heir to Hollander Tools,” he said, “so you had a few secrets of your own.”
“I had one; you had a thousand. What was all that you told me about your life, about how you didn’t
have a TV until you were nine?”
“It’s true. We had every video my mother approved of, but she hated what was being shown on TV.”
“That’s quite different from the way you presented your childhood to me. I guess the house so many of you lived in together and that ‘constantly needs repair’ is that marble mansion in Colorado.”
“The very one.” During this exchange Nick didn’t look at her, but just kept staring at the mantel. “Where would I put a compartment?”
“If it were me, I wouldn’t make a little flip-down door. It’s too easy for things to get stuck inside and too hard to get them out. I’d make an old-fashioned drawer, one that no one’s likely to accidently open by leaning against it.”
They looked at each other with wide eyes, and in the next minute they were back at the mantel, this time pulling instead of pushing.
Holly found the drawer. It was so tightly wedged in place that it took them three tries to get it out. When they did, they saw a roll of cloth inside. Their breaths held, they removed the cloth and untied it. Inside was a piece of parchment, old and brittle.
Slowly, they unrolled the paper on the floor in front of the light.
It was a simple and crudely drawn map, made by a person with little education. A dotted line ran from the main house of Belle Chere, past the slave quarters, past the stables, followed the river, then ran into the swampland. At the end was a drawing of a tree shaped like a Y.
“What’s this?” Nick asked, pointing at a symbol in the corner.
“It’s a sword,” Holly said softly. “It’s an old sword that a tree has grown around.” She looked at him. “All this time I’ve known where the treasure was.”
“You ready to go?” Nick asked.
“Now? It’s pitch black out there,” Holly said.
“Does that mean you can’t find the place?”
“Blindfolded.”
Nick gave her a look to say, So?
Holly grimaced. “You never let me sleep.”
Nick offered her his hand to pull her up. He started to kiss her, but she turned her head away.
“Just remember that the auction is at nine A.M. tomorrow and I plan to be there,” she said.