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27

Briar

1942

T he morning after Cadence and I had our Agatha Christie moment at Island Treasures, I woke in Gram’s bed and reached for Sandra’s black receipts book in the bedside table drawer. Earlier I’d heard Cadence go off with England’s finest, Major Crab, for a tour of the island, and I wished she’d been there to talk possible spy suspects. She’d proven herself an able fellow detective, and I could have used her help sorting it out.

I ran one finger across the word Receipts, embossed into the pebbled faux-leather cover in faded gold. It made me sad for Sandra, her life summed up in that grubby little book. I avoided something encrusted on the lower corner and yanked off the rubber band, causing all the papers and receipts inside to kind of explode out. Sandra had done some big business through the years.

I flipped the grease-stained pages, trying to keep all the pieces together, turning to the more recent entries. She’d included all sorts of notes and scribblings in there, like dates for estate sales and grocery lists, heavy on the Dinty Moore beef stew.

I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for. The names of some of her customers, maybe. Possible leads to who may have wanted her dead. And info about past sales. I found a receipt for a World War I sword sold to a fancy Boston Back Bay antiques shop for two hundred dollars. And it turned out she’d sold the German life preserver I brought her, to a dealer in Quincy, for fifty bucks. She’d paid me two. A receipt for a World War I knife was made out to Shelby Parker. WWI German trench dagger. I looked closer at the barely legible signature. What was Shelby doing with that?

I flipped to the last pages and read a line written in Sandra’s handwriting toward the bottom of one. T. Schmidt. Do not leave at his grandfather’s house. I sat up in bed and read it again. So Sandra did know Tyson. She’d lied to me. And he’d skillfully avoided telling me he knew her. What did he buy from her? I rifled through the book for a receipt made out to him but didn’t find one. Why would he deny knowing her? Clearly Shelby did, too.

I snapped the rubber band back around it all, stowed it in the bedside table drawer, and got out of bed. With Tyson in the hospital, his house would be easy to search.

—

For all my years of friendship with Mr. Schmidt, I’d never been to his home in Vineyard Haven. It was one of the prettiest houses on William Street, close to town, a white Victorian with a sloping lawn. Mr. Schmidt had lived there full time for decades but in his later years moved to what he called his “camp” on the shore, next door to us.

I shifted my canvas shoulder bag, heavy with reconnaissance supplies—scissors, binoculars, and a pad of paper and pencil—and approached from the back of the house, not gutsy enough to just barge in the front door. Though that’s what most people who weren’t snooping would have done. No one locked their doors on the island. I stepped through the rear entrance into the kitchen, that big room so bright and sunny, with dust dancing in a light beam shining through the soaring window. It was warm in there—the house had been closed up since Tyson went to the hospital.

I got teary thinking of Mr. Schmidt with his wife, making his peppermint tea, sitting together at the little yellow-painted table. It had been his wife’s family home. I never knew Maria Von Weber, but she’d been the love of Conrad’s life, pure German, second-generation American. Tyson’s grandma. I stepped to the sink and checked out the cereal bowl there, a few cornflakes petrified to the side of it, the milk dried up. Probably Tyson’s pre-accident breakfast.

I tiptoed into the main part of the house, not because I had to be quiet but because I was nervous, I suppose. It was a big place, and I ducked into a room that looked like an office. Tyson had taken over the wide mahogany desk as his school study area and filled it with open textbooks and notes. I hadn’t taken him for the type who would actually study in the summer.

I opened one of the desk drawers, looking for anything suspicious. Correspondence. German artifacts that could have come from Island Treasures. Papers that shed more light on Mr. Schmidt’s ties to Germany.

The only interesting thing I found was a stash of coins in the pencil drawer, which I helped myself to. Tyson wouldn’t miss them.

After checking all the drawers, I stepped to the built-in bookcase next to the fireplace, which was crammed with World War I military books and mementos. I was happy to find the little tugboat that I’d given Mr. Schmidt for his birthday just two years ago, after we’d made it together from a kit. I pulled it from the lower shelf. Light dust covered the deck of the LUCKY XI, a harbor tug with a rust-and-black hull and little pilot’s house. The tiny captain figure and the two seamen we’d painted to look like Mr. Schmidt and me were still glued to the deck. We’d finished it in three days. No doubt Mr. Schmidt had displayed it in a place of honor when he was alive, and now Tyson had relegated it to a bottom shelf.

I replaced the model and continued my search. Before I headed out, I checked the gray file cabinet that stood along the wall across from the desk. I slid out the top drawer and felt papers along the bottom, and then my hand met cold metal. I pulled out a gun, what looked like an old Luger. German? I was no firearms expert, but it was definitely a candidate for Tyson’s purchase from Island Treasures. Do not leave at his grandfather’s house.

I set the gun back in the file cabinet, and as I ran through my options of what to do next, I heard something in the house. I crept out of the office, barely breathing, and inched down the hallway toward the sound.