Page 22 of Buck Baxter and the Mysteries of Love

“You mean… my mother’s some sort of whistleblower?”

“Whistleblower, informant, spy… whatever you wanna call her, Crystal Hart is trying to turn your father in without him knowing it.”

“Oh God, she reallyis in trouble.”

“You betcha. As Stella would say, ‘Snitches get stitches.’ Or worse.” I pulled more items out of the drawer. “She’s potentially shown all of this to the Feds. Look here, a telegram mentioning the completion of work by some guy named Bockenheimer. And here’s the diagram of some kind of clock, or something, I don’t know. And here… here’s a letter from Herr Garbutt confirming a wire transfer of funds from the German Nazi Party to your father to the amount of… holy shit!”

But Harry had stopped listening to me. Instead, he was holding up something he’d found in another drawer. I recognized it instantly…

A red, white, and black lapel pin with a swastika on it.

At that moment, we both turned our heads to the window, hearing a low droning sound outside.

“What the hell’s that?” I asked.

We stepped over to the window, and there in the sky, materializing through the clouds, was Howard Hart’s private airship.

At the same time, we heard the rumble of several trucks and turned to see a small convoy making its way up the drive.

The trucks pulled up in front of the house and dozens of men in gray coveralls exited the front and back of each vehicle, offloading large crates and striding toward the house while the airship descended toward the landing pad beyond the maze.

“What the fuck is going on?” Harry asked, a sense of panic in his voice.

Before I could answer we heard the banging of doors and the stomping of boots through the house.

Harry and I hurried toward the door to the den and peered warily down the hall to see several men pulling artwork off the walls before sealing them in crates. Several other men took priceless vases and exotic artifacts off shelves, before hastily wrapping them and securing them in boxes.

“What is this, some kind of raid?” Harry whispered urgently. “They’re taking everything!”

“No, not everything.” I noticed there were several items they ignored. “They’re only taking the things that are worth something.”

“Who are they? Thieves?”

“No, not thieves. They’re removalists.”

Suddenly two men came hurrying toward the den.

Harry and I ducked back inside the room. I quickly shoved everything back inside the drawers of the desk before Harry scrambled the cipher and closed the hidden compartment in the desktop.

The sound of footsteps in the hall outside grew louder.

“We need to hide,” I said. “Where can we hide?”

Harry headed straight for a tall bookcase standing against the wall. “Stay close,” he told me.

I pressed myself against him, wrapped my arms around his waist, unsure what was about to happen next.

Harry ran his fingers along the spines of the books on a particular shelf, stopped at William Shakespeare’sJulius Ceasar, then pulled it out an inch.

With a lurch, the bookcase—along with a circular section of the floor beneath our feet—began to revolve.

“Jesus, a secret tunnel?”

“How else do you think I got outta here with all those cigars?”

As we rotated into a dim, gas-lantern-lit tunnel, I caught sight of the men entering the den.

A moment later the bookcase sealed us safely inside the tunnel.

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