“I hate that drive,” Robin said. “I’d rather go twenty miles out of my way than go over the mountain.”
“I’ll never do it again,” Elizabeth said. “Trudy was driving as well as could be expected, but still, it was scary. And then all of a sudden, in the middle of another turn, she slammed on the brakes and whipped into this driveway. The tires were screeching! I was clutching the dashboard for dear life. We were in the most remote area of the forest and, I swear, it looked like something out of a horror film. And then this tiny one-lane road opened, and suddenly we’d arrived at a beautiful little winery surrounded by acres of vineyards, where they served the most wonderful champagne.”
“I’ve been to that place,” Austin said, nodding. “It’s really good, but you’ve gotta want to go there. Sometimes I think the owner makes it tough on purpose so he won’t have to share his champagne.”
“I don’t blame him,” she said, “but I’m glad we found it. Seriously, though, that road is awful. Is that how you get rid of tourists? You send them up the mountain?”
“Every chance we get,” Austin said with a blasé wave of his hand, and everyone laughed.
Everyone but my brother Jackson, I thought with annoyance. He’d canceled on me at the last minute, and I was still miffed. Did he really believe I was trying to set him up with Elizabeth? Well, given her reaction to seeing him—or whomever she claimed to have seen—at the town hall yesterday, I didn’t think he’d have to worry about her trying to finagle a date with him. Elizabeth had looked absolutely horrified at the sight of him. She’d insisted she was looking at someone else she’d seen walking outside, but I had a feeling she was fibbing. After all, as soon as she made that face, Jackson completely disappeared from sight. Maybe he saw her first and took off running.
Why?
I might’ve been imagining the whole thing. Either way, I accepted that it was none of my business. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to find some answers. And it irritated me terribly that I’d completely forgotten to mention any of it to Derek. As soon as I got the chance to have a long talk with him, I was going to get his take on the situation.
I was curious. This was my brother and my new friend. My instincts told me that there was something going on there. Did they have some history between them? Maybe it had ended badly. Was there some way I could intervene—or was I playing with fire? I wasn’t ready to do anything about it just yet, but I would if the right moment presented itself.
*
Since Derek had spent another afternoon dealing with the insufferable Noland Garrity, he was bushed by the time we got home from dinner. In spite of that, he went for an evening walk with me and Maggie before calling it a day and going off to bed. I spent a few minutes playing with Charlie and Maggie and checking my e-mail for any messages from my online group. There was nothing yet, but Claude had said to give him a few days, so I would have to be patient.
Since I was online anyway, I stopped by a few of my favorite rare-book sites to find values for comparable versions of Journey to the Center of the Earth. I wanted to be able to tell Robson what the book might be worth so he could make an informed decision on its fate.
The first American version of the book published in 1872 had just sold for forty thousand dollars. The description referred to it as “beyond rare,” not only because of its age and its clean and bright condition, but mainly because no other copies of that edition had ever surfaced.
I made notes and moved on, searching for a French version published in the same year as my edition. I found one going for thirty-five thousand dollars and had to sit back and take a breath. High prices like this no longer astonished me, but neither did the fact that a book this rare and expensive was sometimes worth killing for.
Rather than dwell on that unhappy thought, I considered the story that the book told. I admit I’d never read Journey to the Center of the Earth, but I’d seen the old movie version. It had been one of my all-time favorites when I was young. I wondered again if young Anton Benoit and Jean Pierre Renaud had dreamed of traveling all those thousands of miles to find the cave that would lead them to the magical center of the earth. I believed they had had that dream, because what child hadn’t? And I was especially convinced after I’d read the blood oath they’d written inside the book.