The Pandora Box Read online

“You should be worried, breaking into people’s houses!” She stepped onto the porch in her bare feet and yelled to his retreating back. “Which I will tell somebody about if you lay so much as a finger on that story!”

  4

  Drawn Away

  “It is only after one is in trouble that one realizes how little sympathy and kindness there are in the world.” ~ Nellie Bly

  Dee stayed on the porch until Scott was out of sight. The nerve of him going through her private files! The duplicate key had to have been made last summer. Months before he even told her about Peterson’s diamonds.

  And what about this uncharacteristic fear at toppling the Wyngate Hospital corruption? Why, he was always digging up dirt on some public official down at the courthouse or delving into cold cases. A story like this should have been right up his alley. The kind they handed out Pulitzers for. They were constantly bantering about chasing that elusive prize. It had become a well-known competition between them down at the office. So even if it was Peterson’s diamonds he was really interested in, why should he care that she had taken on the Wyngate Hospital scandal instead?

  Stories where corruption was exposed to the public in a local region could spark changes nationwide. Isn’t that what Nellie Bly had done on her historic infiltration of Blackwell Island? Why, infiltration and exposure was her regular mode of operation. It’s what got the most accurate (not to mention dramatic) results. The very thing that had first drawn Dee to investigative reporting in the first place. And while times and technology had changed since Nellie’s time, human interest had not. Done well, a fantastic infiltration and discovery story could still garner interest and effect changes today.

  The very reason why she had jumped at the opportunity when Nelson Peterson reached out to her for help after personally experiencing the horrific illegal things that were going on at that mental hospital. Dee knew what she had to do the very moment he told her about it. This went far beyond investigative reporting. It had become a matter of her own personal integrity… Her editor, Ronald Devlin, had made the same choice for the same reasons and had even gone one step further by initiating the police investigation they were both cooperating with.

  But what about Scott Evans?

  He couldn’t have known any of that information before reading her files today. Not without bumping into it the same way she had. By befriending Peterson, himself. Or at least someone like him. And in order to do that, he would have to be…friendly. Scott Evans might be Devlin’s star reporter, but he was not much of a friendly person. No, that wasn’t exactly true. He did have a way of making people laugh by poking fun at his own oddities. Like insisting he was allergic to paint fumes, and, on his salary, it would practically break him to have to stay in a hotel for two weeks.

  Now, Dee wondered if he really did have his house painted, last summer. He had organized a charity booth for wounded war veterans at the Fourth of July picnic once, too. It was entirely manned by beautiful young girls handing out chocolate kisses, but it had brought in some substantial donations. People skills of a sort, but not really the friendly kind.

  What did she actually know about Scott Evans?

  Except that he had been in the newspaper business a long time, looked twenty-something instead of forty, and had contacts in every dark hole of the city. He told her he heard about Peterson’s diamonds after dating one of the nurses who worked over at Wyngate. Probably somebody like that Jennifer, who had given her Peterson’s note today. His last note.

  Hadn’t Scott admitted he already tried talking to the old man but never got anywhere?

  She wasn’t surprised. Peterson was way too sharp for that. A master manipulator he could have anyone who struck up a conversation with him either bristling or cooing within minutes. An expert in human nature. Proven by the way he had so ingeniously set up the list system. He did not have a weakness for expensive whiskey and cigars. Those items were strategically placed on the lists to hide the things he was really bringing into the institution: all the items needed for his coming “great escape.”

  And while most members of the staff would never help him with that, there were more than a few who had no scruples about covering up, or even smuggling in, a few forbidden pleasures. No one knew what he was really up to.

  No one but Dee.

  Suddenly, she wondered just how much of her research notes Scott had actually read. Why…they were her personal notes, tucked away safely in her own home, and she had written down everything! Dee stepped back inside and leaned against the closed door in a moment of utter dread.

  “Lord, what am I missing here?” she whispered. “How am I supposed to tell if this opportunity is a gift from you or some kind of trap from the devil?” Then, a terrible thought occurred to her. “Oh, my— How far into the files did he get? Enough to find out where the key to the deposit box is?”

  It was at the very moment she spoke those words out loud that she was struck by such a sudden sense of urgency, she could hardly stand it. Next thing she knew, she was rushing around as if a fire alarm had gone off. No way could she wait till tomorrow to make that drive! Why, if he knew about that box, he might even…

  She had to go, right now.

  She called Marion to tell her to be ready by the time she got there, but there was no answer. Obviously she had gone somewhere for the afternoon and forgotten her phone. She was always forgetting her phone. It was still early, and even though Dee knew her friend would probably be home by dinnertime, she didn’t dare wait that long. No telling what could happen by then, so she changed into jeans and a black sweater (the closest outfit she could come up with for someone wandering around fishing boats), tucked her hair up into a black French cap with a narrow bill on the front, and literally threw a few things into her duffel bag.

  By the time she left, it had been less than an hour since she first walked in.

  While she filled up at the nearest gas station, the smell of spicy, deep-fried something made her realize she was half starved. She bought a large coffee, a piece of chicken, and an egg roll from inside the quick mart. But even with all her rushing around, the first stars of evening were already twinkling through dusky skies by the time she finally picked up Interstate Five to head south.

  Five long hours later, she found the little fishing town Peterson had talked about. She pulled to the side of the road, just before a bridge that spanned a river near the end of town, then rolled down her window, as if removing the transparent barrier would help her see better.

  Instead, an intoxicating breath of salt air wafted in. Along with the long, soulful dole of a buoy whistle somewhere on the water. A road wound its way down to the shore, and she could see twinkling lights illuminating a small marina at the end. Right in the spot where he said it would be. Dee remembered Peterson had marked it in the atlas last week. That was the starting place, he had told her.

  Everything began from here.

  She had taken that part of the story with a grain of salt at first because, at that point, she was still having a hard time believing she could even get him out of the building safely. But the plan he had devised was so clever (almost as if he had done things like this before), he finally convinced her it might work.

  All she had to do was steal him a set of scrubs from the hospital laundry (which she had no intention of doing and had purchased a set from a local thrift store, instead) and he would simply walk out through the housekeeping entrance during visiting hours. Ten minutes before they were over, so that most of the staff would be busy cleaning up after visitors and getting ready for the weekend.

  Then she was supposed to drive him here to this little town, where he had money and a passport waiting for him in a safety deposit box at one of the local banks.

  For this help he offered to donate a thousand dollars to any charity of her choice (he knew she wouldn’t take a bribe).

  However, if she agreed to act as a sort of temporary manager and help him with the business end of hiring a team to recover his d
iamonds, she could earn even more.

  Keep that money or give it away that would be up to her own discretion. Her part of the entire project would only take a couple of weeks, here, in this little town. And she was scheduled for a two week vacation during that same time anyway. Oh, he had thought of everything!

  She had looked into that project from every angle and could find nothing illegal about it.

  Even though Peterson had told her himself what he had done during the war and why he had felt it necessary to hide the jewelry in the first place. Europe was in chaos after it was over. People were desperate. And desperate means called for desperate measures, he said.

  Nazis were stealing heirloom jewelry everywhere they went, and that particular jewelry had been in the Strassgaard family for over two-hundred years. They were well documented and could easily be traced through the inlaid coat of arms. Which she could look up for herself, if she wanted to take the time.

  Well she had, and they were. They were listed as stolen (like so many others) during the Nazi occupation of Holland. And, just as Scott Evans had said, the jewelry was worth a fortune now with not one family member left to make a claim.

  Nels had told her exactly what happened to them. During a very brief cruise off the coast of Holland in the middle of the war, the famous Hermann Goering had hired a boat on which Peterson occasionally served as a deck hand. It was there that he had first seen the Strassgaard jewels. Goering was well-known for traveling with his own personal hoard of stolen jewels. How Peterson had actually come into possession of them he had never elaborated on, but it certainly wasn’t hard to guess.

  It was a crime, lost among thousands suppressed for so long; the Strassgaard jewels were fair game to any treasure hunter that could find them now. Nelson Peterson just happened to be the wayward, desperate youth who had committed it and bore the brunt of guilt all these years. It was the reason he had asked Dee to pray for him in the first place. He wanted some measure of forgiveness before he died, even if he had to spend a good portion of his fortune to buy it.

  So what was so different between Peterson and any other troubled young man of today? Sin was sin, and God never said he only forgave the small stuff. And if somebody—anybody—asked for it, they got it.

  Only that familiar sense of peace that usually settled on new Christians never seemed to come over Nelson Peterson. Instead, he became obsessed with the thought that there was some kind of curse riding on those diamonds that would take more than a five-minute prayer to get free from. That’s when he declared he would make a pilgrimage back to the place he had hidden them and turn most of the proceeds over to charity.

  He would even cooperate with the Wyngate investigation, if Dee could give him a guarantee that she could get him out of the place before the story was published.

  Some place safe.

  Dee agreed.

  Not because of the diamonds (she wasn’t sure they even existed) but because he had been an innocent victim of the corruption going on there even more than most of the patients because he had been committed there illegally. By some drug-running nephew, he told her, who was trying to blackmail him into disclosing the whereabouts of the jewels.

  Everyone in authority stood by the falsified records that had landed Peterson in the asylum. His wild accusations were simply too bizarre to get past all the proper channels it took to get anyone un-committed, and for five years Peterson tried to bribe anyone who might help him get out of the place. But his extravagant promises to share the wealth only seemed to prove his insanity even more.

  Until one lone doctor finally responded.

  That was four months before Dee came along to interview him for a human interest piece about recovering treasures that had been hidden during World War II. She and Peterson hit it off right away. It seemed he had been quite the adventurer in his day and had more stories about globe-trotting in the post-war era than anyone she had ever met. So she decided to stretch the piece into a series. Except that somewhere between interviews, something terrible happened.

  Peterson lost a perfectly good eye.

  It was punishment, he said. And that’s how she got her big story. The one that began an investigation that would shortly topple this sordid little black-market ring for donor organs that had been going on there for years.

  She should have felt good about it all, considering it was the biggest, most important and far-reaching story she had ever worked on. One that could affect some important changes in the entire system of state-run psychiatric hospitals. Except she didn’t.

  Something was off somewhere. Something just didn’t add up. Now, she only had one week to sort everything out, before the first installment would be published. It was only the last one that Devlin hadn’t read, yet. The one she had turned in this afternoon. When he finally did read it, he was going to be in for one big surprise.

  So she hadn’t exactly lied to Scott Evans…

  She just hadn’t told him all the truth.

  And she certainly wasn’t going to admit her plans for getting Peterson out of the place to anyone now. The poor man had been offered protective custody, but he wouldn’t take it, because their idea of protection was to place him in a similar institution under an assumed name. It seemed the District Attorney believed what was written on the commitment papers, too.

  Nelson Peterson was eighty-two years old and had been of sound mind and body when he first went into Wyngate. And four weeks ago, he lost a perfectly good eye to their donor program.

  Which was why Dee Parker had taken it upon herself to get him out of there and deliver him to a “safe house” until his unique case could be brought before the proper authorities.

  Just because a person committed a theft (many years ago), didn’t mean they no longer deserved to be treated humanely. Especially if they were trying to make amends for it.

  So she took it upon herself to get him out and to take him to the safest house she knew of. It was her youngest brother’s church in a small rural community, high up in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state.

  As for the “treasure hunting” part of the proposition, she had promised they would all talk more about that after they got there. After all, there was no law against treasure hunting.

  At any rate, the old man had been so overwhelmed at the generosity and commitment of her family to help him during his most desperate hours that he promised a sizable donation to whatever charity they chose. Something that would prove to be a miracle for the struggling orphanage her oldest brother Dan and his wife, Myra, ran in Somalia. One they had all been praying a long time for, simply because there were not enough buildings for the amount of kids who kept pouring in. Happy ending for everybody if Peterson came through with even a little of his promise.

  And now… his entire fortune belonged to her.

  Why, she could accomplish more good with that kind of money in a year, than a lifetime of investigative reporting! Her career had not turned out to be all she expected anyway. There weren’t many reporters like Nellie Bly anymore. Champions of the poor and underprivileged who actually managed to change the world with their words. The world itself had changed.

  Today’s newspapers were big business. Now, they were governed by ratings and influenced by advertisers in much the same way the entertainment industry was. Besides that, the common people didn’t feel as responsible for society as they used to. Didn’t seem like it anyway. The truth was, other than her “scandal piece” for the editor’s yearly human interest award, the rest of her year was filled mostly with covering social events and community projects.

  One more reason why Peterson’s legacy felt like such a temptation right now.

  But she must not forget that old man had been tantalizing people with this crazy story for years. Still, the last missing piece of information… the item that would prove everything… rested in her hands, alone. “Lord, what should I do with it?” she murmured half-aloud as she continued to stare down into the dark, sleeping harbor.

/>   What should she do if Pandora’s box was exactly where he said it would be and actually had a key in it? The key to safety deposit box 127. According to Peterson, he had paid the rent in advance with plans of returning for it himself when he got out of Wyngate.

  What he hadn’t planned was that no one ever returned anywhere after Wyngate.

  5

  Enticed

  “But not once did I think of shirking my mission. Calmly, outwardly at least, I went out to my crazy business.” ~ Nellie Bly

  Well, there certainly wasn’t much she could do this late at night. So she backtracked through the center of town and stopped for a few hours’ sleep at one of the beach-side hotels. But early the next morning, when her car finally wound its way down that little road toward the waterfront… the very moment she caught her first clear view of all the fishing boats gently bobbing at the docks they were so neatly tied to…

  She actually felt like she had been there before.

  Nels had described the picturesque place that well. Steep green hills rose up on either side of a long lazy river that widened where it emptied out into the sea. The marina was tucked away on the south bank, behind a man-made jetty that formed a straight placid channel which led out into the river.

  The first thing Dee noticed when she got out (besides the tang of salt in an early morning fog that was just lifting), was a large flock of seagulls circling overhead, calling and squawking to one another as if it were feeding time at the zoo. The object of their interest seemed to be a fishing boat pulled alongside a dock at a building farther down where a sign read, “Pacific Seafoods.” The nearest building to the parking lot was a restaurant.

  She decided to have breakfast there, but not before she took a walk down on the docks to see if her “inheritance” was actually there. If there really was an inheritance. “The wealth of the wicked is laid up for the just…” that phase was running through her mind again. Like a song she didn’t know all the words for, it had been running through her mind all night long.