Chapter One Aunt Elsie had loved leaving clues When Aunt Elsie had loved leaving clues When Chris and his cousin Carrie had been small chil Chris and his cousin Carrie had been small children children in need of babysitting Elsie had done puzzles with them tried to teach them Morse code and taught them how to make up secret codes so they could send each other messages that their parents and teachers couldn’t read Chris had loved this Carrie had claimed it was an indication of his degenerate nature and then snatched her diary away from him before he could read it Their aunt had almost always hidden an extra twenty-dollar bill in every Christmas and birthday gift and on the rare occasions her niece and nephew 5
complained about the way she was always hiding gift cards inside tricky puzzle boxes she’d argue that figuring figuring it out yourself was much more fun than just getting the present Then she’d give them a bunch of clues because Aunt Elsie wasn’t actually sadistic and she did know that not everybody liked puzzles She died in May of 2016 in a hit-and-run that tossed her car into a ditch where it ruptured a fuel line and caught on fire She was less than a mile from her house The impact the coroner said kindly at the inquest that ruled the crash accidental broke her neck before the explosion so she wouldn’t have felt a thing Not like that made anyone feel better It wasn’t much of a stretch to say that the loss of Elsie Kingsolver devastated the community of Archer’s Grove a small and mostly touristy island Elsie Kingsolver had been the archivist at the Edgewater Maritime Archive since her return to the island fifteen years ago right after the birth of her niece and nephew She’d been from the area too The Kingsolvers went back several generations generations and had multiple sailors in their family tree 6
Elsie had been the odd one out Well-behaved shipping shipping and merchant activity was in the family blood enlivened by youngest sons who ran off to sea to become pirates although the last documented case had been in the late 1920s And Great-Uncle Robert had technically disappeared while smuggling moonshine in Kentucky But the wandering gene usually struck the youngest child of the family which should have been Robby Carrie’s father and Chris’s uncle Instead he had earned a business degree married an accountant accountant named Helen and gone into banking His older brother Brian was a pharmacist It had been Elsie the eldest child and only girl who went slightly off-kilter devoting her life to history and old paper And it was in this that she had excelled A born teacher and a natural parent despite having no children of her own she gave presentations on the archival collection of shipping charters that actually drew crowds volunteered at the local historical society and did programs with the local schools where she dressed up as a pirate and led a treasure hunt Her funeral was packed with mourners 7
