Page 22 of The Secret of Emerald Cottage

Chapter Thirteen

“Holy martyrs, what a blimey mess,” Brec muttered as he sagged against the frame of the door, the droop of his eyelids confirmation that early-morning tasks were not his thing.

“Yep, I’m afraid we’ve got our work cut out for us.” Huffing out a heavy sigh, Molly stood in front of Brec at the entrance of Uncle Hal’s trashed office and made up her mind that whatever it took, she would get to the bottom of who did this and why. From casual canvassing of the neighbors—not mentioning the Emerald Cottage break-in, of course, per Detective Kennedy’s request—to daily walks around Lake Loon to observe anything suspicious, this was one mystery she intended to solve.

Broom and dustpan under her arm, she carefully set two mugs of steaming coffee on the desk littered with strewn papers and bits of glass while Brec leaned against the doorjamb with her cleaning caddy of rags, polish, cleaners, and glue. “Sweet mother of mercy,” she said with another weighty sigh, “thank God Aunt Lilly took the sleeping pill her doctor ordered, giving her more time to rest and heal.” And us more time to clean up!

A shaft of sunlight cut a wide swath across the sea of splintered furniture, broken glass, and scattered papers, wearing Molly out just by the looks of it. “This will take a good hour or two, for sure, so hopefully she won’t wake up until then.”

“And hopefully I will,” Brec mumbled, six a.m. obviously too early for a pretty-boy athlete as he yawned, blue eyes bleary and black hair disheveled. “We could have started on this last night if Super Sleuth hadn’t stayed so late asking a million questions, putting away half my trifle in the process.” A scowl slashed above Brec’s clamped jaw, which was now peppered with overnight bristle, making him look like a ferocious pirate.

Molly’s lip twitched with a near smile, suddenly reminded of the stories she’d read as a girl about Blackbeard, the most notorious pirate who ever lived, supplying yet another appropriate nickname for the superstar from Ireland.

Slashing blunt fingers through his hair, Brec appeared to slump even more against the door, obviously in no hurry to enter the wreckage. “Janey Mac, I’ll need a pint of the black stuff for this brutal fix.”

Molly promptly held out a tall insulated mug. “I guess it’s a good thing I brought you coffee, then, isn’t it?”

Mosying into the room, he peered at her through a narrow gaze, which now held a hint of a twinkle. “I was talkin’ Guinness, lass, not coffee,” he said, snatching the mug from her hands before unloading the cleaning caddy on the desk with a clunk, “but this’ll do for now.”

“Gonna have to, Blackbeard, because we’re not eating breakfast till we’re through, got it?”

“Aye-aye, captain.” He took a drink of his coffee with a snappy salute. “Can’t keep Jimmy Dean waitin’, now can we?” Setting his coffee down, he snatched work gloves from his back jeans pocket and put them on. “Crikey, all of Uncle Hal’s photo frames smashed to smithereens,” he said quietly, squatting to gingerly pick up various broken frames from the floor, some with pictures intact, some not. “That’s a fret.”

“Indeed, it is.” Tugging Miss Lilly’s plastic gardening trashcan into the room, Molly went to work, first picking up all the loose papers, then sweeping up glass and splinters into a pile. “I am so grateful we found Uncle Hal’s collection untouched or I wouldn’t have been able to sleep a wink last night.”

Her gaze softened as she watched Brec gently dislodge broken glass from the picture frames, studying each with a faint smile before reverently laying them on the cleared credenza. “Uncle Hal seems like he was as much a character as Miss Lilly,” she said, “with all his secret compartments. I always assumed as a pastor, he would be more down-home and typical, but something tells me he was as lovingly eccentric as her, if not downright suspicious.”

“Yes, ma’am, a matched pair if ever there was.” Picking up a final picture frame—his aunt and uncle’s wedding picture—Brec paused to study it with a melancholy air while a quiet smile flickered across his lips. “She was only eighteen when she married him and a real pistol to boot according to Uncle Hal, I can tell you that.”

But nobody had to tell either Brec or Molly that because they’d both learned it firsthand from a woman who was still as small and sassy and scrappy today as she was in the faded wedding picture. “A beauty of a backwoods girl with a glint of the devil in her eyes,” Brec said his Uncle Hal had told him once, “outshone by the gleam of the Lord in her heart.” Molly watched as he positioned the frame next to the others, his voice barely audible while his Adam’s apple ducked in his throat. “I miss him.”

Sympathy gentled her tone. “Did he show you his collection often?”

Brec grunted as he hefted the overturned desk up, biceps bulging enough to cause Molly to look away when he righted it, an exquisite piece of furniture beautifully carved with the same swirly patterned corners as the credenza. “Not as much as he used to show my dad and his friends,” he said, “because back then, he kept his collection in the bottom drawer.”

“What do you mean?” Molly halted mid-sweep to stare in concern. “Did your dad and his friends mess with it or something?”

Smiling, Brec picked up the discarded desk drawers one by one, carefully easing them back into their slots. “You might say that. Apparently Dad used to sneak various doubloons out every now and then to play pirates with his friends—Savannah boys whose families summered at the lake.”

He frowned as he bent to pick up a piece broken off one of the drawers, painstakingly setting it aside. Ambling over to her cleaning caddy, he plucked a rag free along with furniture polish, commencing to clean and shine the desk and drawers. “Seems they lost a number of his doubloons they’d buried in the garden and what not. When they confessed to Uncle Hal, he evidently went nine shades of pale, storming up to his office to see if one of those lost was his prized doubloon.”

Molly’s heart lurched. “Oh, no—not the Brasher Doubloon?”

He chuckled as he retrieved Miss Lilly’s bill box and positioned it on the edge of the desk, promptly filling it with the stack of papers Molly had picked up. “No, thank God, but they were valuable enough that Uncle Hal hid his collection after that according to Aunt Lilly, leaving plain ol’ metal doubloons in the drawer instead for the kids to play with for a few summers, then finally the New Orleans doubloons.”

“What are New Orleans doubloons?” Molly asked, nose in a scrunch as she stooped to sweep up glass and dirt into the dustpan.

“Cheap imitation doubloons dating back to 1960 when New Orleans first minted them. Souvenirs to be thrown from Mardi Gras floats, Dad said. Not worth much, although the early ones are collectible.”

Setting the chair up, he cleaned it off as meticulously as possible, digging the rag into the leather crevices to make sure they were free of glass. He finally pushed it in toward the desk before returning items from the floor—a stapler, tape dispenser, pen holder, etc.—into the drawers. “Well, we’re definitely making headway here,” he said, tidying up the closet where a small file drawer had been turned over. “I’d say we’re bang on to a fierce job once I get these papers refiled and fix everything that’s banjaxed.”

Molly blinked. “Bang on? Fierce? Banjaxed? Speak English if you don’t mind, Striker Boy.”

He grinned as he reached for the glue. “‘Dead-on’ to a ‘good’ job,” he clarified as he waggled the broken piece of drawer in the air, “once I fix the ‘broken’ drawer and frames. But don’t worry, lass”—he shot her a wink as he uncapped the glue— “you’ll get the lay of the land soon enough.”