The Map in the Attic Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  The Map in the Attic

  Copyright © 2010 DRG.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews. For information address DRG, 306 East Parr Road, Berne, Indiana 46711-1138.

  The characters and events in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.

  _______________________________________

  Library of Congress-in-Publication Data

  The Map in the Attic / by Joyln Sharp

  p. cm.

  I. Title

  2010905264

  ________________________________________

  800-282-6643

  Annie’s Attic Mysteries

  Series Creator: Stenhouse & Associates, Ridgefield, Connecticut

  Series Editors: Ken and Janice Tate

  1

  David Coyne sat up groggily and groped for the receiver, only to hear the dead whine of a disconnected call before it even reached his ear. It was then that his foggy brain processed the distant sound of the smoke alarm, and the acrid taste of the air. He snapped abruptly awake. Without thinking, he rolled off the bed, pulling Laura with him; she didn’t wake up until her shoulder slammed to the floor. He stopped her from jumping to her feet and then pushed her in the direction of the door. The two scuttled like crabs below the smoke to the hallway. He saw her turn toward Martin’s room, so he pushed along the passage to Megan’s.

  He felt the door for heat before pushing it open, thankful to find the smoke less dense. Megan was already awake and standing beside her bed, but when she saw her father crouched, she also dropped close to the floor. She swiftly crawled to him, and they emerged to find Martin and Laura at the top of the stairs. The parents urged their children down, following close behind.

  The smoke was coming from the back of the house, under David and Laura’s bedroom. The front door, which stood at the bottom of the stairs, was obscured. In that split second, David had to reason out the best course of action. He hurried them through the front door and out into the cold of an early spring night. He hoped he was the only one who turned to look back down the first-floor hall as they rushed out. Flames roiled over the living room couch and slithered up the wall of family photographs, lapping at the ceiling just beneath the spot where they had minutes ago been sleeping.

  The chill, moist air only exacerbated the burning in his lungs. As they stepped into the yard, David could feel his legs weakening. But he pressed his family forward across the street before sinking to his knees and gasping uncontrollably. Through tearing eyes, he examined each member of his family; though clearly shocked and frightened, none seemed obviously injured. Laura was coughing as hard as he was, but the children clinging on either side of her helped keep her up.

  With a rush, sound seemed to return to the world. The deafening roar of wood giving way under the assault of fire was cut by sirens and the shouts of neighbors, and underneath all that, the tiny sobs of Megan and Martin, just twelve and nine years old.

  ****

  “A phone call?” Bruce Besham, the fire chief of Stony Point, Maine, knew that anyone faced with a house fire was experiencing one of the most stressful events they would ever know, and he was loath to do or say anything that might make things worse. Nevertheless, he found it difficult to keep the skepticism from his voice.

  David Coyne, wrapped in a blanket and now telling his story for the third time, merely nodded.

  “At two in the morning?” Besham continued. Coyne merely shrugged. “And there was no one on the other end of the line?”

  “They hung up,” said Coyne. “Maybe it was a wrong number.” Every few seconds, his eyes would scan the crowd of neighbors and firefighters, not stopping until he found his family again and assured himself they were all right. Besham didn’t think he was even conscious of doing it.

  Besham suppressed a sigh; this wasn’t the time or the place. “Thank you, Mr. Coyne,” he said. “Why don’t you go have a seat in the ambulance?”

  The Coynes sat in the back of the ambulance, watching the firefighters dowse the remains of their home. It was an old house, and it had burned quickly. The battle with the flames lasted several hours, and it was now almost dawn. The house was a total loss, but the houses on either side, not that close to begin with, were unharmed except for some water damage. The house had sat on a street that ran along the ocean, and the freshening breeze now mixed an incongruous whiff of salt water in with the smoke.

  After the initial shock, the children had recovered quickly and were now subdued, half dozing against their mother’s side. David and Laura had been treated with oxygen for their smoke inhalation and were now breathing with more comfort. The paramedics had encouraged them to go to the hospital, but the parents didn’t know what they would do with the children if they’d gone, so they didn’t.

  David lifted his eyes beyond the remains of his house to watch the light spreading over the Atlantic out at the horizon. He knew he ought to be making a plan, figuring out where they could go to stay, how they could get clothes and other things that they would need immediately. He’d need to call the garage where he worked and tell them he wouldn’t be in.

  But for the moment, it was all he could do to look past the house and watch the sunrise.

  After a moment he sighed and turned back to the organized chaos of hoses, firefighters, trucks, and milling neighbors. His eye was caught by the sight of an older woman in a creamy chenille housecoat and rubber boots striding purposefully toward them. In his overstimulated mind, David first thought he was seeing an angel, but then he recognized the Brock woman from down the street. David had never talked much with her, but as she approached, Laura and Megan greeted her warmly. She said some comforting words and handed David a thermos of coffee, saying she’d be right back.

  He watched as she went to confer with the police chief, Reed Edwards. By the time he’d poured out some of the coffee and handed it to his wife, Miss Brock was headed back toward them. “Come on,” she said briskly, “you’re all coming back to my place to get some food and rest. After that, you can decide what you want to do next.”

  David and his wife exchanged glances and nods, but both children were already eagerly following her.

  Mary Beth Brock had settled the kids in the guest room while giving David and Laura the sleeper sofa in the family room. She explained she thought it important to provide the children with something as familiar as possible. David thought that kids were pretty adaptable, but he certainly wasn’t going to argue with his neighbor’s kind intentions. Although the sleeper sofa was not a sterling example of the species, David assumed he would fall asleep immediately. Instead, he lay on his back listening to Laura’s soft, wheezy snore and replaying the events of the evening over in his mind. How was it that the smoke alarm didn’t awaken them? Who had called
? Had it been a wrong number, as he’d suggested to Besham? If so, it was funny timing. No, funny wasn’t the word for it.

  Sleep, when it did come, was brief and uneasy.

  Sitting at the kitchen table later that morning, a cup of coffee, and a plate of eggs and toast in front of him, David felt as if he could melt to the floor and sleep for a week. He was startled wide awake by the phone ringing again.

  Mary Beth dried her hands and picked up the receiver. “Claims adjuster? We haven’t called one yet, and we won’t be calling you!” Mary Beth was doing a good job of fielding their calls, which had been coming at them since eight in the morning. She seemed to have a sixth sense for who was legitimate and who wasn’t.

  Sounds of early-morning children’s TV drifted in from another room. Laura was in the bedroom with a borrowed cell phone, talking to her sister in Oregon. David smiled to himself and counted his blessings. His kids were safe, his wife was safe, he was sound, and they’d been found by a guardian angel who made great coffee.

  After she hung up, Mary Beth joined him with a cup. “The fire chief wants to talk to you,” she said. Her voice was measured and calm. “He wants to come over as soon as he can, but I insisted that he wait until you’ve had a little something to eat, and a shower. He’s at your house now. Chief Edwards is with him.”

  David nodded as if he understood, but his mind was resisting the implications of what he was hearing.

  2

  Annie Dawson gave a violent sneeze.

  Through watering eyes, she watched the dust motes float in the dim light of the attic, and she shivered as she pulled her cardigan close around her. The attic felt chillier in the weak springtime warmth than it did in the dead of winter. She sighed and gazed about. Sometimes the ongoing project of cleaning out the cluttered attic was an exciting treasure hunt, and sometimes it was a tedious chore; today it was the latter.

  She squared her shoulders to the shelves before her; they were loaded down with innumerable boxes stuffed with who-knew-what. She ought to pick one corner of the shelves and methodically work her way through them, but she hadn’t the heart. “First I’ll just try to get an overall sense of what’s here,” she told herself, and reached out to grab a shoe box at random. It proved to be stuffed with pamphlets, old tourist maps, and other papers. And so was the next, and the next. Annie decided the shoe boxes could all wait for examination another day.

  She wanted to call it quits but felt that she needed to accomplish just one more task, however trivial, before doing so. She spotted a larger box on the bottom shelf labeled “For yard sale.” That would do nicely. She’d carry it downstairs, have a quick look inside, and more likely than not consign it to the fate that her grandmother had clearly once intended for it. Hefting the box, she decided it couldn’t be stuffed with papers.

  Annie had been steadily clearing out the attic of the old Victorian house she’d inherited from her grandmother. Betsy Holden, it turned out, had been a bit of a pack rat, but much of what she had saved had some significance. To honor her grandmother’s memory, Annie felt she must treat what she found in the attic with as much care as her grandmother had. So it had been slow going.

  Annie set the box down on the dining room table, enjoying the greater light and warmth of the downstairs room. The brown cardboard box was not sealed but had been closed by folding the top flaps one under another. Opening it, Annie found it was packed tightly with objects wrapped in newspaper—probably dishes. She carefully withdrew and unwrapped them, finding cups and saucers—elegant strays from someone’s china set apparently; a group of five long-stemmed, tarnished silver teaspoons tied together with string; a cut-glass candy dish; a small serving platter adorned with a picture of a turkey but sized for a Cornish game hen; and other miscellaneous dishes.

  Everything was lovely or interesting, but they did not constitute any sort of set. It was just a jumble of odd dishes; no wonder it had been destined for the yard sale. As Annie unpacked dish after dish, her attention started to flag. Outside, the spring sky quickly turned from light to dark to light again as clouds scudded along on brisk winds. The unsettled atmosphere brought a Gothic ambience to the rocky Maine coast, and Annie found herself beckoned by the promise of an easy chair by the fire, a cup of hot tea, and a good book.

  Looking out the dining room window at the Atlantic, Annie felt a twinge of loneliness as she thought of her daughter and the twins, her five-year-old grandchildren, back home in Texas. LeeAnn and her husband Herb were still creating their home in Dallas. In Stony Point, Maine, Annie wasn’t sure yet if she was disassembling her grandmother’s home or creating a new home for herself. She continued unwrapping the dishes, but flashes of her own Texas life and her late husband Wayne sparked in her mind. Here in Maine, the winter’s snow lingered in shadier spots, while her garden in Texas would by now be abloom.

  Annie smiled distractedly as one large bundle of newspaper revealed a colorful ceramic clown. She thought it must be a cookie jar; yes, its hat was the lid, now held in place by ancient cellophane tape. But the large and oddly shaped jar was awkward to hold, and the newspaper was slippery against its smooth surface. Annie felt it slide in her hands; as she shifted her grip, she knocked aside the clown’s hat. The ancient tape let go, first one piece, leaving the hat dangling for just a moment, and then the other. Without thinking, Annie took one hand from the jar to snatch in the air at the lid—and by some miracle, she caught it.

  For a moment, she stood absolutely still, not even breathing as she clutched the jar in one hand and the lid in the other. Slowly she set them both on the table and then chuckled at her own foolishness: the lid probably would have been fine if it dropped, but if she’d dropped the cookie jar itself, it would have shattered. But she’d dropped neither, she told herself, and all’s well that ends well.

  The surprise, and the rush of adrenaline, had shocked her mind back to the present, and she paused to catch her breath, taking a closer look at the cookie jar as she did so. He really was a colorful, cheerful little fellow, and except for a small chip in the back of the hat, he was in perfect shape. She thought of her needlecraft group, the Hook and Needle Club. “I may know of a good home for you,” she said to the clown, “but you’ll need a bath first.”

  She picked up the jar and peered inside, surprised to find that someone had apparently stuffed newspaper down in there as well. As she started to pull it out, however, she realized it was not newspaper at all. Rather, it appeared to be a wadded-up rag or a piece of muslin fabric. In fact, as Annie pulled it out, she found it was quite a bit of fabric, with an intricately embroidered abstract design.

  She pulled the entire wad from the jar and carefully spread it on the dining room table. The embroidered muslin was about the width of a place mat but longer, though not as long as a table runner. The edge was neatly hemmed by hand. She picked up one end and peered at the back, where someone had written a series of numbers, perhaps with a grease pencil, and had crossed out all but the last: “516, 620, 400, 537 …”

  But it was the front of the piece that took Annie’s breath away. Running an irregular course from one end to the other was a gorgeous wave of color. Two crooked parallel green and blue lines made with small, precise chain stitches bisected the fabric, with irregular green circles dotting the blue side and brown teardrops pulling away from the green side. In each corner were more recognizable objects: the sun in the upper right corner and a half-moon in the upper left, while a cormorant dried its wings on a large rock in the bottom left corner, and a seal splashed in water on the right. In the curve of the seal’s splash were the tiny letters YSP. Finally, in a cruder, broader stitch, someone had placed ten red Xs at points between the green and blue lines.

  Annie stepped back and took in the whole piece at once. She couldn’t imagine what, if anything, it represented, but the piece was so absorbing and intricate, with feather-like stitching and tiny French knots giving it texture and a three-dimensional appearance, that Annie felt she was looking at someth
ing. But what was it? And what did the numbers on the back mean? And what was it doing in an old cookie jar, for Pete’s sake? She couldn’t imagine that her grandmother had intended this for the yard sale.

  Annie stood for a long time, lost in thought as she examined her odd treasure. She was finally drawn from her reverie by a warm pressure on her ankles, accompanied by soft purring. She was surprised to realize it was getting dark. “OK, Boots,” she said, smiling down into the shadows at her feet, “let me put this stuff away, and then we’ll see about your dinner. Sound good?” She bent down and stroked the cat.

  Annie tried to rewrap the dishes carefully, but even without the cookie jar, they didn’t go back into the box as readily as they’d come out. Though she was growing impatient, Annie forced herself to handle the delicate dishes with care. Finally they were back in the box, and Annie reclosed it and set it down in a corner. She carefully picked up the cookie jar and carried it off to the kitchen, Boots following expectantly at her heels.

  ****

  There was always something soothing and familiar about the smell of A Stitch in Time, the yarn shop where the Hook and Needle Club met on Tuesday mornings. It was a smell of wool and lanolin and lavender and sometimes the lingering scent of someone’s perfume. Upon entering the shop, accompanied by the tinkling bell over the door, Annie often felt overwhelmed by the riot of colors and the promise of so many crocheting projects. Sometimes she would stop for a moment just inside the door to close her eyes and allow the scent to calm her mind and counteract the overstimulation of her other senses.

  Fortunately, on this day there was no other customer right behind her, trying to get past her into the shop.

  As she moved toward the tables at the front of the store, Annie could hear Mary Beth and Kate preparing for the arrival of the club’s members, but her view of the two women was blocked by a new display of Two Ewe yarn. Two Ewe, Annie read on a handprinted poster next to the display, had started out as a sheep farm about fifty miles inland from Stony Point; it had subsequently morphed into a spinnery, first using their own wool and eventually experimenting with and incorporating other fibers as well. Annie reached out to feel the silk mohair on display, and an “ahhh” escaped her.