Page 39 of Once a Hero

After they hung up, Jake plugged in the laptop to the wall to charge it up while he thought of Helen’s husband, Reuben, who had come a very long way from being a convicted art thief to a consultant for law enforcement.

Jake firmly believed that it was possible to reform criminals. And yet, he wondered if it was too late for Molyneux.

Could she really be Imogen, the second wife of Chisolm Wright, the woman he had met while they were both at Oxford University, studying history?

How could two history students have veered so far away from lessons of history? Instead of avoiding the foibles of past wars, they had embraced them. Imogen more so than Chisolm.

Was that why their marriage had fallen apart?

Jake read that their divorce had been bitter. In the middle of their brawl were two young children, a boy and girl, who stood to lose the most.

The divorce papers had stated that neither Chisolm nor Imogen was the biological parent of the two children, which they had raised as their own. However, with Imogen gone a lot, they hired a live-in nanny, Philomena Caddock, to watch the kids.

Somehow Chisolm had fancied the nanny more than his own wife.

The fallout of the Wright divorce was bad. Chisolm threatened to testify that his estranged wife was Molyneux in real life. That didn’t happen. Multiple threats to his life made Chisolm take his two children and flee to his native country of the United States, where he entered the federal Witness Security Program.

For all practical purposes, they had been gone for twenty-five years.

That was, until the nanny surfaced, insisting that Chisolm had continued living until two years prior when he disappeared for good, leaving her with no means of supporting herself. As an illegal immigrant to the United States, she could not get a proper job nor could she draw on social security or get a welfare check.

Falling through the economic cracks, Philomena drained their bank account and then began going through the valuables that Chisolm had left behind.

Etsy or eBay wasn’t good enough for her. Nope. She attempted to reach Chisolm’s old buddies in Europe, perhaps hoping that she could get a higher black-market price for her finds.

When buyers and brokers began to ask about a particular set of brooches, it went downhill from there for Philomena. The unwise move was probably how she ended up in the morgue.

Jake felt sorry for her.

And for himself. Philomena had wanted to meet Jake in Cannes to tell him where Chisolm’s son and daughter were. The cost of that information was twenty thousand dollars, a price that Helen Hu had been willing to pay after the FBI refused the offer.

Unfortunately, Philomena had been a no-show the same day Jake ended up in the ocean.

“And here we are.” Jake scooted off his bed and put the laptop on the only table in the room.

He yawned and nearly climbed back into bed.

“No,” he told himself aloud. “Get some coffee and get thee out to the cabin!”

He called a local rental car place. They offered to deliver the car to the motel, but Jake said no. Instead, he took an Uber over to pick up the car.

He decided to check on Earl later. More to tell him if Jake had made it to the cabin today.

Jake had a feeling he was already late getting to the cabin. By now the whole place would have been picked over by that treasure hunter, a woman of mystery.

Who just might be the key to this whole affair.

Or not.

Chapter Eighteen

Beatrice could not believe that Dad had a cabin in the woods some three thousand miles away from where she lived in the same country. It didn’t show up in the will after he supposedly passed away because he had been still living in the cabin until recently.

By the mercy of God, Dad’s friends in had Charleston adopted Beatrice and Benjamin, eventually bequeathing to them several hundred million dollars on top of what Dad had left them. Sometimes Beatrice wondered where all that money had come from, but she had been taught not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

“The cabin is problematic,” Kenichi announced when Beatrice parked the van by the side of the road, somewhere behind Jake’s rental car. Both vehicles were exposed to any passerby.

“Why did Jake stop here by the side of the road?” Beatrice asked. “It’s too obvious.”

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