The coins slipped and slithered through my fingers. I had no way of calculating what all of this was worth. It had to be a small fortune. No wonder Celia and Vicky had pushed their mother into getting it back.
Kevin and Agnes found a few flowerpots. After dumping the plants out, we used the pots as small pails to transport the gold. In the gleam from the overhead light, the back of Kevin’s truck began to fill with the fortune.
It was past two A.M. before the last of the coins and some small gold bars were in the truck. Kevin pulled a tarp over the gold.
“I’m a little worried about that falling out of there,” Agnes confessed.
“With all the weight of those bricks, you don’t have to worry about it,” Kevin assured her. “It’s not going anywhere.”
Agnes may have developed a sense of insecurity despite her words to the girls because she insisted on us going first and them following. Maybe she planned to pick up any gold that might fall out. Kevin and I got into the pickup and started back down Duck Road toward the Blue Whale.
“Now’s the time if you’ve ever wanted to live on an island outside the U.S. jurisdiction,” I joked.
“That might not even be necessary since at this point, ownership of the gold could be questionable. Were you thinking Caribbean or Pacific?” He smiled at me as the gold slid around in the back of the truck.
I was thinking about where they would keep all this gold once they got it to the Blue Whale when I heard a loud crash behind us.
Kevin looked in the rearview mirror and frowned as he stopped the truck. “Looks like we’re not the only ones out this late after all. Someone just back-ended Agnes.”
Chapter 22
The dark vehicle—an SUV of some kind—didn’t come to a stop as I had expected the driver to do. Instead, it used its momentum to spin around in the empty road and race back toward Agnes’s car.
“Stay on the other side of the truck,” Kevin yelled at me as he ran toward Agnes’s car. “Call 911.”
Agnes screamed as she struggled to get out of the car. I couldn’t tell what was wrong. But I knew if she didn’t move quickly, the driver in the SUV would hit her again.
It didn’t look like she was going to make it. I could see her frightened, smudged face in the glare of the headlights. Celia and Vicky were yelling at her, but they didn’t move from the side of the road where they’d run after escaping from the crumpled hybrid.
Kevin grabbed Agnes and yanked her bodily from the car. The two of them tumbled down into the cold, wet ditch. The SUV hit the hybrid again, pushing it on its side, before speeding away down Duck Road toward Corolla.
The 911 operator answered as I watched the SUV go by. It was too dark for me to make out any of the license plate—if there was one. The Dare County dispatcher said she would send help, but the incident seemed to be over.
I ran back to make sure everyone was all right. It was only a few seconds before Tim Mabry and Scott Randall showed up in a Duck police car. Agnes and the girls were crying too hard to give them any information about what happened. Kevin and I filled in the blanks with a basic description of the vehicle and how viciously it had attacked Agnes’s car.
“It wasn’t an ordinary hit-and-run,” I told them. “This person hit Agnes, then turned around and hit her again.”
“We’ll take care of it, Dae,” Tim said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I wasn’t involved,” I reminded him. “And you’re losing time you could use looking for that crazy driver.”
He and Scott left at that point, just as the paramedics were arriving. No one was hurt, and all three women declined a ride to the hospital. Ben Moore came out with his tow truck, remarking on the amount of damage done to Agnes’s car. “These mainland drivers get scarier every day,” he said as he winched the car upright to pull it back to his body shop. “You all are lucky to be alive.”
I agreed with him. But this was more than some drunk or impatient driver, possibly Roger’s handiwork. Kevin agreed as he urged all of us to get in the pickup and off the road. It took a few minutes to convince Agnes to leave her car, but eventually she complied.
The pickup had only one passenger seat. I couldn’t see Agnes riding in the back (she was hysterical and soaking wet), so I gave up my place in front to ride with Celia, Vicky and the gold in back.
The gold coins were better to look at than sit on. They were hard and cold and slithered around every time the truck moved. It was a chilly trip, too, going down the road with no protection from the wind.
“Why would anyone do something like that?” Vicky demanded, still crying.
Celia was silent, playing with her cell phone, calling someone over and over and, from what I could tell, getting no response.
Vicky finally grabbed the phone from her and threw it over the side of the truck into the darkness, probably never to be found again. “Stop messing with that thing! We were almost killed out here and all you can do is call that stupid loser boyfriend of yours.”
“Shut up! You don’t know anything!” Celia shouted back at her. “You’ll see and then you’ll be sorry.”
I didn’t know what she meant, but I was sitting between them, already uncomfortable and wishing the short ride back to the Blue Whale was over. We were probably all in shock, definitely cold and filthy. It almost seemed funny that we were sitting on a fortune in gold that couldn’t help us.
Kevin was one step ahead of me when we finally got back to the Blue Whale. I’d been ignoring the arguing, weeping sisters by thinking about what we could do to hide all this gold. I didn’t think he had a safe like Agnes did, but I figured one of the empty rooms on the third floor would be a secure place to store it. The only problem was getting it up there. After moving it once, I knew it was too heavy and unmanageable to take upstairs or in the old iron-cage elevator.
I thought Agnes and the girls would want to be right on hand for whatever happened to the gold, but I was wrong. They had worked themselves into such a state that all they could do was go up to their rooms. The incident on the road and our response to it must have eased Vicky and Celia’s suspicions about our intentions toward the gold.
“So I have an idea about storing the gold,” Kevin said after the three women had retired to their bedrooms on the second floor.
“Me too! I had to have something to think about to keep from killing Celia. Anyway, could we wait to do whatever it is until after I have a shower and change clothes?”
“I don’t see why not. I’m going to pull the truck around back to the delivery area. The gold should be safe there until we can move it.”
“Do you have some clothes I could put on that aren’t full of emotional turmoil?”
“I think we can work that out too. Follow me.”
He loaned me some of his clothes—an old pair of jeans that must’ve shrunk in the wash and a long-sleeved shirt that had seen better days. They felt safe, like Kevin, when I touched them.
I took a quick shower that I hoped was enough to get most of the black soot out of my hair. It ran off of me in heavy rivulets, which left a ring in the tub that I felt compelled to clean up when I was done. The tile shower had been so nice and clean before I’d stepped into it.
Kevin was showered and changed as well, waiting for me with three of the large, old whiskey barrels from the storm cellar. “I think these will hold all of it. I have the pickup lined up in the delivery area. That way I can fill up the barrels and move them with the hand truck into the big freezer in back.”
As ideas went, it sounded like a good one. We rolled the barrels to the side of the inn where trucks unloaded supplies. I ignored the feelings I got from the barrels—nothing too distressing beyond workers who were unhappy with their jobs anyway. At least no one had ever been buried in one of them as had happened in a few Duck legends.