be all, Freddy. Thanks.” Jared said.
Freddy nodded and left without saying a word.
I wasn’t going to reveal my anxiety by asking questions about the stupid bag, so I took my whiskey and emptied it with one gulp. It was nice and smooth. The Irish knew how to make the good stuff.
“Well,” Jared finally broke the silence, “there’s something I want to give you back.”
“Give me back? I can’t remember giving you anything, to be honest.”
Jared pushed the bag closer to me.
“Open it. It belongs to your family.”
I slowly took the bag and looked inside. There was a little size white shirt, neatly folded and wrapped with a long blue string inside. I looked at Jared.
“Take it out,” he said.
So I did. Before seeing it, somehow, I already knew what I was going to see on that shirt. Slowly, I untied the string and revealed the embroidered anagram CJM on it.
“Charles John Montague,” Jared said. “I noticed you have a similar one on your cuff. You still customize all your shirts, don’t you?”
I did have a similar style anagram on my cuff, except it was my name, AJM II for Alexander James Montague II, and I’d been wearing dress shirts, polo shirts, and even underwear with my name on them all my life.
I was trying to gather my thoughts. “How … Why do you have this?”
“Well, Charlie gave me this shirt the day before I left the estate. I didn’t own anything that nice, as you might imagine. He gave it to me as a goodbye present.”
I shook my head, trying to digest the information. I didn’t remember Charlie giving away any of his stuff.
“He gave it to you the day before you left? When was it again?”
“It was on the day when he disappeared.”
Chapter 5
“Could you please step on it?” I asked the taxi driver. “I need to get on the last train.”
The man didn’t dignify me with an answer, but he did make the cab go faster. Shamefacedly, I took another dosage of Ching at the next traffic light in order not to spill the stuff.
This is insane. I’ll make a big fool out of myself.
My phone rang. It was our former butler turned de facto estate manager.
“Mr. Montague, this is Harry Schulenburg,” he said.
“Yes, Harry. I need you to open the house first thing tomorrow morning,” I said wiping my nose.
“It can be arranged, Mr. Montague. May I ask if you’ll be traveling alone?”
“Yes.”
“Will you be requiring any assistance?”
Good old Schulenburg. He’d started to work for my father when they were both young men in their twenties. He’d come from South Africa to see the land of his predecessors and decided to stay. He’d married a local lady, but she’d gotten sick and passed away after only ten years. He never remarried. He volunteered to stay behind and look after the house. He said that he was “tied to this land until the day he was no longer needed,” and we couldn’t imagine the house without him. Nothing could rattle his professional calm, which had helped him run the house without its owners and deal with the tenants for the past twenty-three years.
“I think I’ll be fine. I may need a flashlight and the keys to the basement, though.”
“I’ll have them and a guest room ready for you tomorrow morning.”
“Could you do it tonight, just in case, if it’s possible?”
“Certainly, sir,” he said without a hint of surprise.
“Thank you, Harry,” I said and rang off.
I placed my head on the back of the seat, not worrying too much about the cleanliness of it, and closed my eyes. I needed a few moments to understand what had just happened back in the pub and the possible ramifications of whatever was going to happen tomorrow.
What was Jared saying back there again?
“My mom told me what happened when we were on the way to the States,” he said, nurturing the glass in his hand. “Later, she told me that you guys had left the house. I know it might sound strange to ask this now, but was it properly searched?”
It did sound a bit odd, but I kept my poker face. “Well, we and the police searched everywhere the next day. A hundred people were looking for him in the park and nearby villages night and day for a month.”
“I see. I don’t know why, but I just thought of something Charlie told me about.”
I noticed Jared’s phone–that he had put down on the table–was blinking with incoming messages, but he did not check it. I was sure that he was going to tell me whatever it was, so I just looked at him, waiting for another flashback to surface.
“He told me about this scary chest that your family kept in the attic,” he said. “If I remember correctly, it was a pirate’s chest filled with cursed treasure, and if you took anything from it, the pirates’ ghosts would hunt you forever.”
“Yes, there were actually two. One was in the attic and “‘his identical brother’” was in my dad’s study. The one in the attic was ‘cursed,’ and I was the one who told him that story. It’s kind of a thing that gets passed from one generation to the next to scare the bejesus out of the younger kids in the house so that the older kids can hide their stuff in it. A family tradition, as it were.”
I didn’t need to tell Jared that this was the place where I kept my product. I had to reinvent a few scary stories to make sure Charlie never got closer to that chest. There was some powerful weed, and it smelled so strong that I had to double bag it and keep it inside so that no one knew.
“Were they really pirate chests?” Jared sounded intrigued.
“Well, the legend has it that the first Montague, Ezekiel, wasn’t a savory character. He travelled a lot and was involved in some shady trading business somewhere close to the end or right after “the golden age of piracy”.
“When was that?”
“I imagine it was in the early or mid-1800s. In any case, for some reason, he got to keep what he ‘traded,’ I think he was pardoned, and invested it in railways. Later, he was smart enough to pull his money plus interest out before the railway mania and the revolution in France …the last one, I think. Anyway, he bought the land and built the house in 1862. The chests were among his possessions when he moved in. It was said that he got them from some Chinese sailors in Asia. My grandfather used to say that the chests were filled with gold coins that helped the family through some challenging times, but I haven’t seen any of that alleged pirate loot.”
“Interesting.”
“Yeah,” I said, twisting the glass in my hand and looking at my drink.
As a little boy, I had been fascinated by the story myself and kept asking my father to tell it to me again and again. Unfortunately, it had been a rare treat because my father had usually been too busy for this sort of things.
“All the kids in the family, including Charlie and I, were trying to find those coins. Alas, the chests were filled with everything but.” I shrugged.
Jared smiled. “I remember wanting to look at that thing and being scared at the same time. I also remember Charlie thought that it was an ideal place to hide from everyone.”
“He was a bit afraid of the attic and the chest. Plus, the lid was too heavy for him to open anyway,” I said, massaging my belly which had started to feel strange. It wasn’t a “nature call” type of strange, but a feeling as if my mind was trying to tell me something and it chose my gut to send me the message.
I remembered what happened during that day in