Shattered Haven. Carol J. Post

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      Except now she wasn’t facing the door straight on, more like she was guarding the sidelight. Had the angel always been slightly turned? Why hadn’t she noticed?

      She cupped its back, slipping her fingers between the bronze wings. The chill that had passed over her the night of the break-in crept along her skin again. Did her intruder try to remove the angel from the newel post? No. With all the valuables in the house, and her iPad and laptop in plain view, the intruder wasn’t likely after a bronze finial.

      She dismissed the thought and tried to straighten the angel, not really expecting it to move. It did. She twisted it back and forth, pulling upward. The angel didn’t come off, but the tugging was creating a small gap in the seam between the top of the post and its sides. Was it supposed to come apart?

      She strode to the kitchen and returned with a table knife, then worked her way along the seam on all four sides. The top wasn’t nailed to the post. In fact, there didn’t seem to be anything holding the two pieces together except countless coats of varnish and decades of swelling in Florida’s relentless humidity. She continued to pry, her pulse racing as the gap widened.

      Finally the top came loose from the post. She turned it over, checking the underside. A bolt ran through the wood and into the finial, holding the two pieces together. When her gaze moved to the newel post, anticipation coursed through her. It was hollow, its interior hidden in shadow.

      She hurried to the foyer closet to retrieve a flashlight, her heart pounding in earnest. Was something of value hidden inside the secret compartment? Was that what her intruder was after?

      When she returned to the staircase, she shined the light into the opening. About eight inches down was a thick roll of yellowed paper about two and a half feet long, judging from the height of the post. Blueprint size. She slid it out and began to uncoil it. Just what she suspected—house plans.

      Without fully unrolling them, she laid them aside, and they curled back into the shape they had maintained for the past hundred years.

      Surely the secret compartment held something more interesting than house plans. But when she shined the light into the opening again, the beam revealed smooth, hard wood, all the way to the bottom. The compartment was empty.

      She sank to the bottom step and rested her chin in her hands, elbows propped against her knees. Maybe her intruder wasn’t trying to get into the newel post.

      Then why had he tampered with the finial? It hadn’t been turned accidentally. All the times she had gone up and down those steps, the angel had never moved.

      No, he had broken into the house with plans to retrieve something from that secret compartment. He just hadn’t anticipated her being there and the police arriving before he could remove the top.

      Which meant he would be back.

      The uneasiness she had struggled to keep at bay for the past twenty hours intensified, and she cast a worried glance at the front door. It was locked. So were all the windows. She had checked.

      Of course, everything had been locked up last night, too. And that hadn’t stopped him.

      Well, if he did come back, he would be disappointed...unless he had a fascination with old house plans. She frowned at the thick roll of yellowed papers lying on the hardwood floor. They were an interesting find. She would have appreciated them under other circumstances. Now she just wanted to know why someone had broken into her house, and a set of ancient house plans wasn’t doing anything to help her figure that out.

      She knelt next to them and unrolled them fully to find the bound edge, planning to roll them more tightly. She may as well put them back where she found them. But as soon as she reached the inside edge, a smaller page sprang loose from the bound ones.

      It was a single sheet, eight and a half by eleven, unlined. Like copy paper. Except it was old. Or maybe it had just gotten wet. The page was crinkled and unevenly yellow. Three lines had been scrawled across the front—each beginning with a letter followed by a series of numbers. Whatever it meant, it probably had nothing to do with the house.

      The old Victorian had been in her family for most of the past seventy years. It had gone from her grandparents to her aunt to her cousin. Then to the investor who snapped it up from the courthouse steps five years ago, after her cousin stopped paying the property taxes. He had probably planned to hold on to it until the housing market turned around. But Allison’s cash offer persuaded him to change his mind.

      So who did the paper belong to? It wasn’t the investor. According to the neighbors, he had bought the house, then let it sit empty. Which meant her family had put it there. What did they have that they didn’t want anyone to know about? Money? Gold? Pirate treasure?

      Yeah, right. Cedar Key had never been a pirate hideout. Besides, if her grandparents had happened onto anything like that, there would be stories. Small towns were known for their gossip. Cedar Key was no different. Of all the tales about her grandparents that circulated around town, not one gave any hint of hidden treasure.

      Allison pushed herself to her feet and strode toward the kitchen. What if the numbers were clues to an unsolved crime, a way for her grandparents to get a bad deed off their consciences before they died? What if she solved the puzzle and found a body?

      No, her grandparents were a little odd—okay, from the stories her parents told, they were certifiably nuts—but they weren’t killers.

      Of course, she didn’t have firsthand knowledge. Ties had been pretty much severed between her parents and her dad’s side of the family long before she was born. Her dad had gone to law school instead of taking over the Winchester clamming business, and his parents never forgave him. Then marrying a New Englander sealed his fate.

      On two occasions, her parents had tried to mend the rift between the elder and younger Winchesters and made the trip to Cedar Key. The rift-mending excursions were a total failure. But on those two brief trips, Allison fell in love with the place. When her life in Providence unraveled, Cedar Key seemed the perfect location to start over.

      She flipped the switch on her way into the kitchen and flattened the paper against the butcher block island. Light poured from the four inverted globes of the Albany chandelier. But the random letters and numbers didn’t make any more sense there than they had in the dimness of the foyer.

      She squinted at the characters scrawled across the page. They were written with a heavy hand, and judging from the sloppiness, jotted down in a hurry:

       R45 87

       G45 165

       R2.55 282

      It looked to be some kind of code. But for what? The numbers weren’t coordinates. The forty-fifth parallel ran across the northern states, and neither latitude nor longitude went as high as 282.

      She stared at the page, trying to think outside the box. But the harder she focused, the more she drew a blank. Maybe after a good night’s sleep, the answer would come. If not, she would keep working on it.

      As odd as her grandparents had been, they were well liked on Cedar Key. And since Allison had taken back her maiden name and was once again a Winchester herself, it had given her an instant “in.” People still spoke fondly of her grandparents, even though they had been gone for years. But maybe they had harbored some secrets. Maybe there were skeletons in the Winchester closet.

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