A Touch of Gold mpm-2 Read online

  A Touch of Gold

  ( Missing Pieces Mystery - 2 )

  Joyce Lavene

  Long before he became curator of the Duck Historical Museum, Max Caudle discovered its greatest treasure-a wooden chest full of gold. But a thief with his eye on the gold fires a cannonball into the museum, destroying the building-and killing Max.

  Injured in the explosion, Dae finds her abilities have been amplified, overwhelming her with intense visions every time she touches an object. Now if ex-FBI agent-and burgeoning beau-Kevin Brickman can help Dae decipher her visions, she just might be able to stop the modern-day buccaneer from killing again.

  PRAISE FOR A Timely Vision

  “Grabbed my attention on page one. A psychic mayor who finds lost things—and dead bodies? A secret room locked for decades? Puzzles are unraveled and secrets spilled in a fast-paced paranormal mystery full of quirky characters you’ll want as friends.”

  —Elizabeth Spann Craig, author of Pretty Is as Pretty Dies

  “A delightful yarn! Few amateur sleuths are as charming as this psychic mayor sleuth in a small coastal town where murder stalks the dunes and ghosts roam the Outer Banks. Kept me turning pages until it was done.”

  —Patricia Sprinkle, author of Hold Up the Sky

  “Filled with likable (if eccentric) characters and boasts a vividly realized small-town setting.”

  —Booklist

  “A quaint setting and leisurely pace make this a fun read. The characters’ interactions reflect the intricacies of small-town living. The mystery unfolds cleverly with a well-rounded group of suspects.”

  —Romantic Times

  “This opening act of a new amateur sleuth is a wonderful mystery due to memorable eccentric characters including Duck. The whodunit is complicated enough to keep readers entertained and stymied . . . The heroine is sassy and spunky . . . Joyce and Jim Lavene have . . . another hit series.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “A leisurely mystery that had me guessing almost ’til the very end . . . It was fun and the characters were likable . . . I could almost smell and feel the salty sea air of Duck as I was reading. The authors definitely did a bang-up job with the setting, and I look forward to more of Dae’s adventures and the hint of romance with Kevin.”

  —A Cup of Tea and a Cozy for Me

  “The Lavenes have launched a wonderful series, with a great deal of opportunity for future books . . . All of the characters in this book . . . are delightful. This is a mystery with strong characters, a vivid sense of place, and touches of humor and the paranormal. A Timely Vision is one of the best traditional mysteries I’ve read this year.”

  —Lesa’s Book Critiques

  PRAISE FOR

  Wicked Weaves

  “Offers a vibrant background for the mysterious goings-on and the colorful cast of characters.”

  —Kaye Morgan, author of Ghost Sudoku

  “Fast-paced, clever, [and] delightful.”

  —John Lamb, author of The Treacherous Teddy

  “Jolly . . . Serves up medieval murder and mayhem.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[A] new exciting . . . series . . . Part of the fun of this solid whodunit is the vivid description of the Renaissance Village; anyone who has not been to one will want to go . . . Cleverly developed.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Joyce and Jim Lavene have teamed up for yet another terrific mystery series . . . A feast for the reader. . . . Character development in this new series is energetic and eloquent; Jessie is charming and intelligent, with . . . saucy strength.”

  —MyShelf.com

  “I cannot imagine a cozier setting than Renaissance Faire Village, a closed community of rather eccentric—and very interesting—characters, [with] lots of potential . . . A great start to a new series by a veteran duo of mystery authors.”

  —Cozy Library

  PRAISE FOR THE PEGGY LEE GARDEN MYSTERIES

  Poisoned Petals

  “A delightful botany mystery.”

  —The Best Reviews

  “A top-notch, over-the-fence mystery read with beloved characters, a fast-paced story line, and a wallop of an ending.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Enjoy this pleasurable read!”

  —Mystery Morgue

  Fruit of the Poisoned Tree

  “I cannot recommend this work highly enough. It has everything: mystery, wonderful characters, sinister plot, humor, and even romance.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Well-crafted with a satisfying end that will leave readers wanting more!”

  —Fresh Fiction

  Pretty Poison

  “With a touch of romance added to this delightful mystery, one can only hope many more Peggy Lee Mysteries will be hitting shelves soon!”

  —Roundtable Reviews

  “A fantastic amateur-sleuth mystery.”—The Best Reviews

  “For anyone with even a modicum of interest in gardening, this book is a lot of fun.”

  —The Romance Readers Connection

  “The perfect book if you’re looking for a great suspense.”

  —Romance Junkies

  “Joyce and Jim Lavene have crafted an outstanding whodunit in Pretty Poison, with plenty of twists and turns that will keep the reader entranced to the final page.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “Complete with gardening tips, this is a smartly penned, charming cozy, the first book in a new series. The mystery is intricate and well-plotted. Green thumbs and nongardeners alike will enjoy this book.”

  —Romantic Times

  Perfect Poison

  “A fabulous whodunit that will keep readers guessing and happily turning pages to the unexpected end. Peggy Lee is a most entertaining sleuth and her Southern gentility is like a breath of fresh air . . . [A] keeper!”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “A fascinating whodunit with unusual but plausible twists and plenty of red herrings.”

  —Genre Go Round Reviews

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Joyce and Jim Lavene

  Peggy Lee Garden Mysteries

  PRETTY POISON

  FRUIT OF THE POISONED TREE

  POISONED PETALS

  PERFECT POISON

  A CORPSE FOR YEW

  Renaissance Faire Mysteries

  WICKED WEAVES

  GHASTLY GLASS

  DEADLY DAGGERS

  Missing Pieces Mysteries

  A TIMELY VISION

  A TOUCH OF GOLD

  Copyright © 2011 by Joyce Lavene and Jim Lavene.

  All rights reserved.

  We’d like to thank our editor, Faith Black, for her help and understanding. We’d also like to thank the rest of the team of editors and artists who made this book better. You guys are great!

  Chapter 1

  “On a dark night in 1812, the schooner Patriot vanished with all hands onboard, never to be seen again.”

  The story always started the same way when Max Caudle told it. Any story that had to do with dark and stormy nights and the sea had particular appeal for this group of first-graders. They lived on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, an island with the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the Currituck Sound on the other. They knew how bad and scary storms could get.

  “Theodosia Burr Alston was on that ship, trying to reach her father, the infamous Aaron Burr, in New York. She’d sailed from her home in South Carolina during the war with the British. The soldiers let her ship pass because she had a special letter from her husband, the governor of South Carolina. But it might have been better for her if the British soldiers had captured her. Because right after that, a terrible gale hit and the Patriot was assumed lost at sea.”

&nb
sp; “Was Theodosia Burr killed in the terrible gale?” The little girl’s eyes were wide in her pretty, tanned face. “Or was she killed by pirates?”

  Despite the fact that all of these children had heard the tragic tale of Theo Burr the way most kids on the mainland listened to “The Three Little Pigs,” there were always questions.

  “Dae, maybe you could take this question.” Max smiled at me.

  It was unusual for him to step out of his tale. Max was a master storyteller and loved the tales of the Outer Banks’ dark past—pirates, marauders and gold—better than anyone else I knew.

  “Miss Dae is the mayor of Duck, North Carolina, our hometown,” Max continued, probably trying to prompt a response from me.

  I was fairly sure the kids knew who I was since this was Walk to Story Time with the Mayor Wednesday, but I played along.

  Twenty pairs of eyes all turned and stared at me as though they’d never seen me before. I smiled back (my big, friendly mayor smile) and jumped right into it. “Well, kids, we all know the terrible things that can happen at sea.”

  “Pirates!” one little boy blurted out, grinning despite his teacher’s reprimand for speaking out of turn.

  “Hurricanes!” another little girl (I recognized her as the granddaughter of Vergie Smith, the Duck postmaster) yelled out, causing a loud rash of talking.

  Both teachers that had accompanied me to the Duck Historical Museum stepped in at that point to calm the group. When the kids were quiet again, they nodded at me to continue.

  “In this case, Theo Burr wasn’t killed by the pirates who attacked her ship or by the terrible gale that came up that January.” I glanced at Max to see if he wanted me to go any further.

  All the kids had already turned back, owl-eyed, to face Max again. The two teachers with me were probably as anxious to hear the tale continue as the children. Even as adults, we never tired of the story.

  Those of us who grew up in Duck know about how our Banker (our term for the people who lived here) ancestors survived by picking up cargo from ships that went down close to the Outer Banks. Be it pirates or storms, they didn’t call this area of the world the Graveyard of the Atlantic for nothing.

  Max began his tale again. His curly brown hair and cheerful red face that matched his red suspenders seemed unlikely for a man who could impart such gloom and doom. He’d been the curator of the museum for as long as there had been a museum. He knew every ship’s relic, barnacle and cannonball better than most people knew what was in their closet at home.

  “It’s true. Theo Burr wasn’t killed by the pirates who captured her ship. But she was forced to walk the plank, and the pirates thought she was dead just like the rest of the Patriot’s crew.”

  The voice and inflection were perfect. The children were wrapped up in the story just as I had been at their age—and was now. I could remember sitting on this floor listening as Max told his tales of woe and privateering with style and sufficient substance to cause fear to creep into my heart.

  For other children of this age, this might seem too frightening, but Duck children knew the terrible truth of the past. They respected it and learned to live with it.

  “But you said Theo Burr wasn’t dead,” the first little girl said accusingly.

  “Aye, and she wasn’t,” Max confirmed with a squinted left eye. “Old Frank Burdick, the pirate, confessed on his deathbed that he had held the plank for Theo Burr. He said the crew and passengers of the Patriot were all murdered. The pirates plundered the ship, then abandoned her under full sail.”

  “But what about Theo Burr?” the little girl demanded. “Was she dead or not?”

  “People tell different tales. But an old Banker story says that Theo made it to shore around Nags Head. She was picked up by a family who made their living salvaging from wrecked ships. They say she couldn’t tell them who she was but that she carried a small portrait that was later identified as one Theo Burr had painted for her father.”

  “But did she die?” a little boy asked in a shaky voice. “My dad says her ghost walks the beaches looking for her dead baby. She has to be dead to be a ghost, right?”

  Max laughed and pulled at his suspenders like he always did. “That’s right, young man. But that was a long time ago. No matter what, Theo Burr would be dead by now. But there are plenty of people who believe she lived the rest of her life on the Outer Banks. They say she couldn’t remember who she was and started a new family with a man from Duck.”

  “So she is a ghost and walks around looking for her dead baby,” Vergie’s granddaughter said in awe. “What about the pirate gold?”

  “She didn’t have any pirate gold,” Max replied with infinite patience. “But the real treasure is finding out if Theo Burr really lived here the rest of her life. If she did, one of you might be related to her. Now that would be something, wouldn’t it?”

  The kids looked around at each other. One little boy stuck his fingers in his ears and shook his head. “Tell us about the curse of the pirate captain,” he pleaded. “Talk about his ghost coming back to look for his hidden pirate treasure.”

  They all agreed with that idea, and Max told the story about Rafe Masterson’s curse, which had been a legend in Duck for more than two hundred years.

  I left the group to go over and help Agnes, Max’s wife, who owned the Beach Bakery. She always brought treats on story time days. She was unwrapping brownies and cupcakes while I took out all the tiny boxes of juice.

  “He loves when the kids come,” she said with a smile at her husband. “He worries they’ll forget, you know? They don’t teach our history in school anymore.”

  “I don’t think he has to worry about that. I’m sure everyone over the age of twelve can recite the tale of Theo Burr word for word. I know I can.”

  “But things are different now with all the gaming and such.” Agnes sighed as the last of the cupcakes was laid out. “There might be a time when all of the legends are lost. I hate to think of it, but sometimes I can feel it sliding away.”

  I agreed. With corporations fighting to see who could buy out more of the older homes in Duck for condominiums, I didn’t know if there was hope for the future or the past.

  But not today. The Duck Historical Museum might be small, but you couldn’t stand here without feeling like you were in the heart of Duck, past and present.

  I glanced down at the floor and saw a gold coin. Probably from the display in the glass case across the room, I thought. Agnes had already gone to tell the kids it was snack time. Max was still answering questions about ghosts and pirates.

  I bent over, picked up the coin and flipped it over in my hand. It was a dull gold, burnished by sea and sand. Unlike the recovered treasure often shown in movies, none of the old gold that washed up here was ever shiny.

  I knew the tale of how the Duck Museum came to have that pirate treasure as well as I knew the tale of Theo Burr. This one was closer to home. Max had found the gold early one morning. It was in an old wood chest that had washed up on the Atlantic side of the island. This was years before, when Max was a young man. He’d received a finder’s fee from the government and had donated the gold to the museum.

  I looked closely at the coin in the palm of my hand. Max would certainly miss it if it was gone when the museum closed. He might even come to me since I’d been Duck’s unofficial finder of lost things since I was a child.

  At one time, when I was a teenager, I had big dreams of saving the world using my special abilities. When I was alone, I even dared to call them my powers. There were things I could do that other people couldn’t do. I was very impressed with myself.

  But time had given me better perspective and honed the abilities I was born with. I might not ever save the world by finding everyone’s many sets of lost keys and misplaced TV remotes, but I helped the people I cared about—the same reason I had become mayor of Duck.

  I slipped the gold coin into the pocket of my jeans. I didn’t want to interrupt Max’s enjoyment of t
alking to the children. I wasn’t surprised to see the coin out of place. How many times had I visited the museum to find cannonballs where they didn’t belong or an old ship’s compass taken apart on a table? Max was a good curator, but he was far from neat.

  Around the cupcakes and apple juice, the talk was still of Theo Burr and other ghosts that inhabited the Outer Banks. Max was juggling questions between bites of Agnes’s delicious cupcakes and glances at his watch.

  “Hot date?” I asked when I could get close to him.

  “What?” He pushed his glasses back against his face and smiled as he understood the humor in my words. “You might say so. You won’t believe what’s happened, Dae. I think I finally have a real lead on someone in Duck who’s related to Theo Burr.”

  “That’s wonderful!” I gave him my full attention, which wasn’t easy since the cupcake in my hand was really good. “I know you’ve been looking for proof that Theo lived here rather than died as soon as she washed up on shore.”

  “All of my life,” he agreed with a seriousness only dedicated historians can muster. “If I’m right, it will rock the historical world. Not to mention my intense joy at flaunting it in Sam Meacham’s face!”

  I knew how much that meant to him. Sam Meacham was the curator of the Corolla Historical Museum. He believed Theo Burr had died when she reached shore, in the arms of one of the Bankers who’d stolen her personal possessions once she was dead. His proof was a portrait that was widely recognized by historians as Theo. It was found at a Banker woman’s home in Nags Head in 1869. While the painting was never definitively identified as being a portrait of Theo Burr, most historians agreed with Sam.