Who Killed Darius Drake?: A Mystery

  “Okay, but you should know I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s not that complicated,” Darius says. “We gather the facts of the case, weigh them as to relevance and probability, and then draw conclusions.”

  “If you say so.”

  “This may take some time,” he says. “And a considerable exertion of brainpower. Sustenance is definitely required.”

  He reaches into a pocket, produces two Snickers bars, and hands me one.

  So maybe this inductive reasoning thing isn’t so bad, not if it involves candy bars. My mouth is watering, and I’m about to chomp down on the first bite—mmm good, can’t wait—when a fist pounds on the front door.

  DEIRDRE IS ON the front steps, smiling impishly. She’s wearing a pink hoodie with the hood up and a baseball cap. “A treasure hunt? And you forgot to invite me? That’s seriously rude!”

  I pull her into the house and shut the door, heaving a sigh of relief. Then it dawns on me that if Darius and I might be in danger, then Deirdre might be, too. “This is a bad idea. What if Scar Man saw you?”

  She shrugs. “There’s nobody around. I checked.”

  “You didn’t notice a human bulldozer with a melted face?”

  She lowers the hood and shakes out her hair. “There was nobody around, honest. And I thought we might need these.” She shrugs a backpack off her shoulder, zips it open, and shows what’s inside.

  “Flashlights?”

  “Tactical flashlights. Bright enough to blind an enemy, or pick out diamonds in the dark. Plus a set of action video cameras, so we can record us discovering the treasure. I bet we’ll get a zillion hits on YouTube.”

  Deirdre is pumped and won’t listen to reason about how dangerous it might be, searching for something so valuable. “What, it’s okay for you guys to have a cool adventure, and maybe do dangerous stuff, but not for me? No way!”

  To be honest, I didn’t try very hard to dissuade her. So a lot of what happened later—the grisly turn of events that followed—was my fault. Deirdre wouldn’t have been in harm’s way if I hadn’t first gotten her involved.

  The trouble with the future, it’s never quite what you expect, even if you’re as smart as Darius Drake.

  As for Darius, he can’t say no to Deirdre. Fact is, he doesn’t say much to her at all, at least not directly, although it’s obvious he’s flattered that she wants to join us.

  “Okay then,” she says, eyes gleaming. “Where do we start? Attic? Basement? Inside the walls? Have you located any secret compartments or passageways?”

  As she awaits instructions, she clips a thumb-sized camera unit to her baseball cap and sets it firmly on her head.

  “We are still in the thinking-about-it stage,” Darius concedes. “I was about to list known facts and then proceed to the inductive reasoning.”

  “What?”

  “Have a seat, this could take a while,” I suggest. “You want half a candy bar?”

  She settles on the old sofa and shakes her head. “Go ahead, I’m all ears.”

  Not even slightly true. Her ears, like everything else about her, are pretty much perfect.

  Darius flips open a notebook. I haven’t mentioned it before, but he doesn’t have a permanent cell phone or a tablet or anything electronic, outside of the old desktop computer in his lab. Excuse me, his room. Probably because he’s a Stonehill kid, and doesn’t have anyone to buy him stuff like that. Not that it seems to have slowed him down any, in terms of brainpower.

  “This house isn’t equipped with a chalkboard,” he says, “so here goes.”

  Using a felt-tip marker, he inscribes the following onto the peeling wallpaper between the bookshelves.

  1.Dunbar purchased a famously expensive necklace for Lucy Dare.

  2.Lucy Dare died before he could give it to her.

  3.Dunbar, who had been a celebrity, became a recluse and died in obscurity.

  4.After Dunbar’s death, the necklace was nowhere to be found.

  5.The location of Lucy Dare’s grave is unknown, as is Dunbar’s.

  Deirdre raises her hand before he’s done. “Won’t you get in trouble for writing on the walls?”

  “The walls belong to me, or will eventually, so I gave myself permission. Okay? Let us proceed. These five facts are not in dispute,” he says, gesturing at the wall. “For decades treasure hunters have made the connection between facts four and five, and concluded that their final resting place was kept secret because that’s where the diamonds are located. Grave robbers have been stealing from the dead since at least the time of the pyramids—Donald Dunbar would have been aware of that and taken precautions.” Darius pushes up his glasses, glancing from me to Deirdre. “You follow?”

  “Go on,” Deirdre urges.

  “All of which brings us to a dead end, no pun intended. That’s everything we know about the case for certain. To go any further we must use facts and observations to induce possible directions and outcomes.”

  Deirdre raises her hand again. “You mean make educated guesses?”

  Darius looks disappointed. “If you must simplify, yes. I’ll go first. In regard to fact three: Dunbar became a recluse, ignoring his business until, ultimately, it failed. Contemporary accounts, mostly newspaper articles, indicate that Dunbar became quite morbid. He seems to have been obsessed with memorializing Lucy, and yet he left behind no visible monuments. From these facts, I induce that whatever memorial or monument he made for Lucy Dare is underground, out of sight. That’s what all the tomb raiders assumed, and I agree.”

  “But they never found anything.”

  He nods. “As I said before, looking in the wrong place. Lucy Dare can’t have been buried in a cemetery, because it would have been discovered by now. So ask yourself, if Donald Dunbar wanted to build a secret monument, a hidden tomb for his beloved, how would he do it? Who would he turn to?”

  “Of course,” I say, with a mental snap of my fingers. “James Rutgers.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Wait,” says Deirdre. “Who is James Rutgers?”

  “Donald Dunbar’s closest friend, and also the man who helped him build the mills and factories. By all accounts Rutgers was a brilliant mechanical engineer. He built something else, too. Something that may tell us where Lucy Dare is buried.”

  “Don’t be a tease,” Deirdre says. “What?”

  “This house. All we have to do is unlock its secrets.”

  IT’S AMAZING HOW much Darius reminds me of a teacher, the way he gestures with his felt-tip marker and rubs his chin while thinking out loud. If he doesn’t become a world-famous detective I can see him as a professor. But that’s in the future, and like I said, the future doesn’t care what we think. It just keeps happening, whether we like it or not.

  “We know from the land records and building permits that James Rutgers personally oversaw the construction of this house. That’s the reason it’s still standing after years of neglect. The foundation is factory-grade poured concrete. The framing is longleaf yellow pine, super-strong and highly resistant to rot. The electrical wiring and plumbing were also factory grade for their time. He spared no expense, cut no corners.”

  Deirdre’s hand pops up. “Is this really your house?”

  “Legally, yes. I can take possession when I turn eighteen.”

  She looks around with a calculating eye. “It needs a total makeover, but it could be cute.”

  “If you say so,” Darius says.

  “And the man who built it was best friends with Mr. Dunbar? And your grandfather searched it top to bottom for a clue to where the diamonds might be located?”

  “He did, yes. And when he found nothing, this is where he ‘discovered’ the forged document indicating that Lucy Dare’s tomb had been constructed on the grounds of Donald Dunbar’s estate. Which was razed in the 1970s and eventually developed into the Dunbar Acres subdivision.”

  “That’s where Arthur lives!”

  “He does. Alo
ng with about three hundred other households. According to my grandfather’s theory—based on a lot of wild speculation, in my opinion—one of the new houses had been built directly over Lucy Dare’s tomb. He used money he swindled from Jasper Jones, purchased the house, tore it down, and started to dig. They hired backhoes and Bobcats and big drills, and they dug until they reached bedrock. No tomb. No nothing.”

  “Wow. He wrecked a house for nothing.”

  “A house, his reputation, and his life. All because he was convinced that Dunbar built the tomb on his own property. But that wasn’t Donald Dunbar’s only property. He owned the factories.”

  “And his best friend built a house on factory grounds,” I point out.

  “Exactly!” Darius says, giving me a nod of approval. “And this, we induce, was no coincidence. If I’m correct, the house had a dual purpose. It was James Rutgers’s home, and it was also somehow connected to Lucy Dare’s tomb. A tunnel, a door, a secret passageway? I’m not sure. But something physical. Something real. And something very cleverly hidden by a master millwright. Clever enough to have fooled the world for almost a hundred years.”

  “This is so cool,” Deirdre says, standing up and adjusting her cap. She opens her backpack. “Flashlight, anyone?”

  And so the search begins. We start on the main floor, poking around the bookcases for hidden switches or levers. Which means we have to unload all the books and stack them on the floor. And then put them all back when we don’t find anything.

  “Had to be done,” Darius says, panting. “Just because a bookcase is an obvious place to hide a panel, that doesn’t mean we can exclude it.”

  Next we crawl around inside the kitchen cupboards, looking for trapdoors. To be honest, Darius and Deirdre do the crawling because I’m too big to squeeze into the cabinets.

  No luck.

  Darius points to the ceiling. “Upstairs,” is all he says.

  So we trundle up the narrow, squeaky stairway to a dim hallway on the second floor. There are three paneled wooden doors in the hallway, one for each small bedroom.

  The first is entirely empty. No furniture, no shelves of any kind. Just one narrow window overlooking the street below. Deirdre brings up a small hammer she found in a kitchen drawer and starts tapping the walls for hollow spaces. Darius and I check for loose floorboards, hidden levers, or switches.

  Nothing.

  Deirdre sighs. “I guess we better try door number two.”

  The second bedroom is far from empty. A single, iron-framed bed shoved up against the wall, the bedding neatly made. The oak desk in the corner is covered with a layer of dust. On a shelf above it, several books about Donald Dunbar and the mystery of the missing diamonds.

  One of the books, a slim volume, is about Lucy Dare. Deirdre carries it to the window, where the light is better, and leafs through the book. “Wow,” she says. “I had no idea how beautiful she was.”

  Inside the title page is a formal portrait of young Miss Dare, gazing with large, intelligent eyes directly into the camera. A hint of laughter in her smile, as if she’s amused to be looking so grown-up. But the picture that really brings her to life is a group photo taken with her fellow orphans at the Stonehill Home for Children, in 1916, when she was seventeen years old. The downstairs foyer of the home is still recognizable, although everything looked much newer then. The residents, as they were then called, are dressed in their Sunday best, faces gleaming, hair neatly brushed. In the center, arms linked to the other children, stands Lucy Dare, about to “graduate” from the home into adult life, according to the caption.

  You might think that would be scary, going out into the world on your own, but not to Lucy. She seems to glow with good humor and, well, just goodness. Even in the old photograph, her personality fills the room with warmth and kindness. Clearly the other, younger children love her as they would a sister or a mother.

  The biggest part of the slim book is Lucy’s prize-winning essay, written at the age of fifteen. “Why We Must Help One Another.”

  “If you just told me about her, I’d think she was too good to be true,” Deirdre says. “Until I saw this picture. You can tell there’s nothing fake about her. She really and truly believes we must help one another. At the same time, you know—I mean, look at her expression—you can tell she likes to hear a good joke. She loves to laugh! Oh, I wish I’d known her!”

  “May I?” Darius says, holding out his hand.

  “Sure.” Deirdre gives him the book.

  Darius flips back to the title page and squints through his thick glasses. “Just as I thought,” he says. “A privately printed edition, compiled by Donald Dunbar, in 1920. He was memorializing her.”

  Which makes a light go on in my brain. I clear my throat. “Maybe a clue? Where the tomb is located?”

  Darius thrusts his hand in the air. “Excellent idea, Bash Man! I shall devour each page, in search of clues.”

  For a moment I’m worried he might actually devour the book. Tear out the pages and eat them. Instead he pulls a chair over to the window and begins to turn the pages, his eyes locked into focus. Tuning out the world while he reads the contents, flipping the pages methodically.

  “Might as well keep searching,” I say to Deirdre. “He’s a fast reader, but not that fast.”

  We go back into the hall. Deirdre slips ahead of me with a gleeful look and turns the knob on the third door. It creaks open into darkness. The windows of the last bedroom have been boarded up, making it difficult to see. The shadowy shapes inside could be furniture draped with dust covers.

  “There must be a light,” Deirdre says. “The house is wired for electricity, right?”

  I fumble around the doorjamb and locate an old-fashioned switch, one you have to turn instead of flip.

  A bare lightbulb comes on, blinding us for a moment. Then, as the flash of brightness fades from our eyes, Deirdre screams. Actually we both do.

  There’s a body hanging from a rope, and it looks like Darius Drake.

  “IT’S CALLED AN effigy,” Darius says, examining the horrible thing that hangs from the bedroom light fixture. “Stuff some old clothing with newspaper, like a dummy, and draw a face on an old soccer ball for a head, and there you have it, an effigy. Variations of this sort of thing have been going on since at least Roman times. Sometimes the effigies are burned, usually by an angry mob, sometimes they are symbolically hung as part of a protest.”

  “Dude, it has a red wig.”

  Darius folds his arms across his skinny chest. “I don’t think it looks anything like me.”

  “They drew glasses on the face,” Deirdre points out. “Black, thick frames. Just like yours.”

  “I didn’t say it wasn’t supposed to be me. Just that the resemblance is minimal. For example, I don’t have a round face. I don’t have a nose like a pig snout.”

  I say, “Dude, how come you’re not freaked out? Somebody made a what-do-you-call-it, this dummy thing, and hung it from the ceiling with a sign around your neck.”

  “Effigy, from the Latin ‘to shape or fashion.’ And it’s not my neck.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Crudely printed in red Magic Marker, the cardboard placard reads:

  THOU SHALT NOT STEAL

  “A message, obviously. That is, don’t steal the Dunbar diamonds.”

  “I know this is terrible and scary,” Deirdre says, taking a picture with her cell phone. “But it’s also sort of cool.”

  “Are you cracked?” I shout. “It’s supposed to be Darius!”

  “I said it was terrible and scary,” she says, a little defensively. “But we were looking for clues, and this is a big fat clue.”

  “Not fat,” Darius points out.

  “You know what I mean. So, who did it? Who went to all the trouble to try and scare us out of the house?”

  Darius pushes his glasses back up his nose and thinks about it. “Two possibilities. Jasper Jones, according to my grandfather. Or Scar Man, who keeps warn
ing us not to search for the treasure. Supposedly because he believes we’re in danger, but possibly because he already knows where the diamonds are and doesn’t want us to find them. He was in the house when we arrived, and we know he has a key, so he had ample opportunity. He may have been the one who sent me the original message, written in blood. This time the message is in red Magic Marker, but it might as well be in blood.”

  “I hate to even bring it up, but what about your grandfather himself?” I ask. “He’s the one who keeps telling you to leave the diamonds alone.”

  “Since he can’t walk, I don’t think he could manage this. Unless he was faking with the crutches.”

  Deirdre makes a face. “You can cross Jasper off the list. No way he would do such a thing.”

  “People aren’t always what they seem,” Darius reminds her.

  Which gives me an idea. “What about Mr. Robertson? He’s an expert in the life of Donald Dunbar and knows a lot about the diamonds.”

  “Are you serious?” Darius asks.

  “You said people aren’t always what they seem, right?”

  “Fine,” says Darius, nodding in agreement. “Add him to the list.”

  Staring at the effigy, Deirdre says, “Whoever did it, it seems like we’ve got a big decision. Should we call the police?”

  “Absolutely not!” Darius responds instantly. “No way. At the very least they’ll send us home.”

  “But this is a crime, right? Making a threat?”

  Darius tries to shrug it off. “Maybe, maybe not. If this was part of a protest, it would be protected speech. And I’m pretty sure I’d have to be the one to bring charges. Which I won’t.”

  “Why not?” I ask, looking forlornly at the scary-looking effigy.

  Darius is defiant. “Because we’re going to find the Dunbar diamonds. The three of us together, or me alone, if need be.”

  OKAY, YOU’RE RIGHT, we should have called the cops. I get that now. But there’s no stopping Darius Drake when he’s on a case. It’s like trying to stop the sun from coming up. And Deirdre is totally geeked about the treasure hunt. I doubt she’s ever really been afraid of anything in her whole life. I mean, she thought the effigy was cool, right? Me, it’s all I could do not to toss my cookies when I first saw that thing. Not that I’d had any cookies, but you know what I mean. Right now I’ve got a nervous stomach. Eating usually calms it down, but not today.