“Lucie, I don’t know what you think you’re doing or what you’re looking for, but you should drop it. There’s no there there. Prescott could sell ice to Eskimos; he was such a charmer and he apparently has you believing a crazy-ass story about a fantastic discovery he was gonna make, some deep dark secret he was on the verge of uncovering—a lost treasure. Forget it, okay?” He twirled his finger next to his ear. “Prescott had been losing his grasp on reality for a while now, but you couldn’t talk to him about it without a huge blowup. Whatever he told you, I’m sure he believed it, but the truth is, it’s all a fantasy. Save yourself some grief. And me, too, okay?”

I said okay and he seemed relieved.

“What do you mean by ‘and me, too’?” I asked.

“I told you. I’ve already been talking to our lawyers,” he said. “I’m sorry Prescott’s gone, but at least he didn’t get to go through with his plan to sell everything out from under us, especially the Tribune. I’m sure we can make a case for him being not entirely of sound mind before he died. It’ll make it easier to make changes in promises and commitments that the family can no longer afford to keep.”

He was talking about the Caritas Commitment.

“I see,” I said.

I left him standing by the fire with his drink, just as I’d found him half an hour ago. Whatever Clay said just now, I didn’t doubt the veracity of what Prescott had told me on Saturday. I believed him for the simple reason that my father had been searching for the same thing Prescott was and Clay didn’t know that. Even though Leland was known for chasing rainbows and throwing his money away on lost causes, there was something different about this time.

Now all I needed to do was figure out what the two of them were searching for.

Because I thought it was real.

Fourteen

High beams momentarily blinded me as a car swung around a corner of the private road that led from Mosby’s Highway to Hawthorne Castle. The driver had been barreling down the middle of the gravel-and-dirt road like he or she owned it. I swerved hard and ended up on the rutted shoulder, slamming on my brakes to avoid plowing into a stand of hollies and white pines.

In my rearview mirror, I saw brake lights followed by taillights as the other car backed up until it was alongside the Jeep. A window powered down, so I lowered mine. Scotty Avery wore a stricken expression as he recognized me and apparently realized how near he had been to causing a head-on collision.