A Touch of Gold

“No. Not another question until I ask one of mine—what is Kevin Brickman like? I know a little about him. I would, of course, since I sold him the Blue Whale. But that was through my agent. Does he seem like the type to run an inn? I can’t imagine an ex-FBI agent cooking and cleaning.”

I told him about Kevin and all the work he’d done on the Blue Whale. “He’s even taking in all the historical items for the new museum. I think he makes a good innkeeper. You should try his lasagna sometime.”

“That’s right. The little museum blew up. Remind me before you leave to give you a handful of coins for the collection. I never got rid of the rest of the gold I found when I was young. There’s not much market for pirate gold, you know.”

“So the FBI asked you to leave Duck,” I said, reminding him where we were.

“Yes. They offered me a new name and a place to live for information I gave them about a gang of smugglers working in the area. I was small potatoes compared to them. I took them up on it for a while, but I could never live under the radar that way. I traveled to Europe and around the world a few times. I finally came back here. I want to die close to home, you see. I knew I couldn’t actually live in Duck again—no one would leave me in peace. Being here is very much like being at home.”

“And you gave Max more recent gold for his wife’s surgery a few years back.”

“It’s my turn.” He smiled at me like a kid waiting for ice cream. “How’s Millie doing? I hated when I heard Lizzie was killed. Is Millie still the ‘it’ girl she always was? That woman knew how to get under my skin.”

“I’m not sure about the ‘it’ part, but she’s doing fine. I thought you were in love with Miss Elizabeth, not Miss Mildred.”

He laughed and I could see something of the ladies’ man he had been all his life. “I loved them both. Never could choose between them.”

“And the gold for Agnes’s surgery?”

“You have it all wrong, Mayor. I gave Max gold for my daughter’s open-heart surgery. Max was a good man. He took good care of Agnes—better than I did. I wouldn’t have harmed a hair on his head.”

Now that was a story I’d never heard before. “Agnes Caudle is your daughter?”

Pablo served the cheese quiche and fragrant, homemade bread with little flower-shaped pats of butter. Bunk thanked him, then smiled as he buttered some bread and handed it to me. “Wait until you try this. You won’t believe how good it is.”

I waited impatiently for his answer to my question. The quiche set before me smelled almost as good as the bread.

“Agnes is my biological daughter. She doesn’t know it. When I heard she and Max were having trouble finding the money for her surgery, I brought him out here and gave him the gold. I wasn’t there for her when she was growing up. Not entirely my fault, but I wanted to do this thing for her.”

“How can she not know you’re her father?” I knew Floyd Reynolds, Agnes’s father. Did he know Agnes wasn’t his daughter?

“Agnes’s mother was Adelaide. Beautiful Adelaide. She was my soul mate. She and I were very much in love, but she was married. Back then divorce was a big deal, and Adelaide cared for Floyd and wouldn’t hurt him by leaving. She was a wonderfully kind woman. Could never even stand to kill a spider. She never told her husband that Agnes was my daughter. I trusted Max with that secret. He was the only one besides Adelaide and me who knew.”

“If Adelaide was married to Floyd, how did she know you were Agnes’s father?”

“There was a genetic marker. Nothing big. We could’ve done a paternity test, but it didn’t matter. We knew Agnes was my little girl. But Adelaide didn’t trust me to be the kind of father she knew Floyd would be.”

“And then Adelaide killed herself because of you.”

He sat up straighter in his wheelchair, shock and disbelief in his lined face. “What are you saying? Adelaide drowned. It was an accident. She didn’t kill herself.”

“I’m sorry.” I played with my linen napkin. I hadn’t realized it was a secret. “I guess you didn’t know. She took her own life.”

“How do you know?” His voice was gruff and demanding, the southern gentleman falling away and revealing the darker side of him. “I’ve seen the sheriff’s report. Adelaide had a little too much wine. There was no mention of suicide.”

I realized I’d said too much. I wasn’t willing to talk to him about my abilities. All this terrific reminiscing about the past and the lives of people I’d only heard about had caused me to let down my guard. Talking about what had happened was one thing—admitting how I knew about Adelaide was another. How did I know what he’d do with that knowledge?

“Wait!” He laughed. “Of course! You’re Eleanore’s granddaughter. You inherited her gift, didn’t you? You can see things the rest of us can’t. But what brought you to this discovery? If I recall correctly, Eleanore had to be in direct physical contact with a person to learn things about them.”

That was the first time I’d ever heard it put that way. Had my grandmother been able to do more with her gift than simply help people locate their lost items? I realized this wasn’t the best time or person to ask.

There really were no secrets in Duck, or apparently outside of Duck, if you’d ever lived there. I gave him a brief idea of how it happened that I tried on one of Adelaide’s old dresses. “She wasn’t out for a swim, drunk or not. She walked out into the ocean, not planning on coming out again. You know that’s what the medical examiner is going to rule about Sam’s death. Everyone thinks that he killed Max and then took his own life out of guilt. We have to let his family know that it isn’t true.”

“Yes. That’s terribly wrong. Nothing could be further from the truth. I believe Sam was trying to save his life.”

“You have to tell Chief Michaels or the sheriff what happened.”

He seemed suddenly out of it, still trapped in the past thinking about Adelaide. “Things never work out exactly the way you plan, Mayor. I wish I could take so much back and change so many things that happened. I can’t, you know.”

“Maybe not—but you can make this thing right, Bunk. What about Max? You said you keep an eye on things. You knew Agnes needed surgery. Why was Max killed and the museum blown up? Who set the fire that almost killed your daughter?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you have some theories since you thought Sam was next. What made you think that?”

He stared off through the big windows that made a panoramic portrait of his little kingdom. “I do have an idea about why this happened.”

“And?”

His gaze came suddenly back to mine with great clarity. “Sam came out here to talk to me once. He came with Max. It was a mistake. There were some things going on at the time. Suffice it to say, it was a matter of being in the wrong place at a very bad time.”

“Are you saying someone wanted to murder Sam and Max to get back at you?”

“Not exactly. His target was never Sam or Max. They were collateral damage.”

“I don’t understand. Can you make that plainer?” My mind was buzzing with all kinds of possibilities.

Bunk moved back from the table with a touch of the controls on his wheelchair. “I’m saying I think that it’s time you should go back home. It was very pleasant talking with you, Mayor—may I call you Dae? But for the grace of Horace getting there first, this could be a very different conversation. I held your grandmother in very high regard.”

That threw me off balance. I realized that it was meant to. I was being dismissed as rapidly as I’d been brought here. I hadn’t even finished my quiche. “Now what?” I tried to stay focused despite the eww factor in thinking of Bunk being my grandfather. Although I would have had a very nice bathroom.

“Now I think I need to speak with Chief Michaels. Do you think you could get him to come back out here with you?”

I nodded, completely amazed in his turnaround. “Definitely.” I wondered, though, if it would be the sheriff who would need to handle all of this. No matter what, Chief Michaels would be a good start.

Then that was it. Game over. I was whisked out of the mansion with Nash and Roger faster than an eel can