Damien nodded and pointed upwards. “The attic will work. I was up in it earlier. There’s only one way in and one way out. We can barricade the door.”

“How do you get to it?”

Damien looked sideways. “It’s right here. This short flight of stairs leads to an outward opening door.”

“Excellent. Call Iris and Colette on your two-way radio and have them help you barricade the door.” Arcadias looked at the Rafters. “Let’s go. The attic awaits you.” Arcadias followed the couple to the door Damien referred to. His brother opened the door, allowing entrance. A musty smell filtered out onto the landing.

Arcadias gently nudged Jon Rafter’s back with the Glock. “In you go. Trust me; it’s only for a little while. You’ll be fine. Take a nap while you’re waiting. Before you know it, this will all be over with.”

Chapter 6

The attic door slammed shut, plunging them into cave-like darkness. Annie latched onto Rafter’s hand. “Did that really just happen? Are we prisoners in our own home?”

“Unless this is a dream and we’re both dreaming the same thing, I would say yes,” Rafter answered. He listened intently to the sounds on the other side of the attic door. He heard grunts and curses as someone placed something heavy in front of the door. And then he heard a drill securing something to the door frame.

No way out. And the attic would become a sauna before long.

Still holding Annie’s hand, Rafter moved deeper into the attic.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see. Hold your other hand out in front of you. There’s plenty of stuff in here we can run into,” Rafter said quietly.

They shuffled forward bit by bit like penguins on an icepack. When they approached what Rafter considered the middle of the attic, he held his right hand straight up. A few more halting steps and he felt the chain.

Rafter pulled the chain. A sixty watt light bulb turned on and brought the dark attic to life. The flickering light bulb revealed an antique lover’s dream. Forgotten furniture, trinkets, and clothes from a bygone era crammed every nook and cranny. Dusty sheets covered the more ornate furniture pieces and protected them from cobwebs. “Let there be light,” Rafter said.

“Gosh, we could open an antique store with all this stuff,” Annie said, looking all around. “I can’t believe I never made it up here. I wouldn’t have dragged you all over shopping for furniture if I knew all this antique furniture was up here.” Annie pointed at a phonograph sitting on an accent table. “Is that a Victrola I see?”

Rafter walked over to the phonograph. It sat uncovered. He ran a finger along its mahogany wood horn, wiping away perhaps a hundred years or more of dust. “No, a Victrola had their horn inside a cabinet. This is a Victor Talking Machine phonograph.” A disc sat on the turntable. Rafter picked it up and blew off the dust. It was a recording by Harry Macdonough—To Have, To Hold, To Love. On a whim, Rafter put the record back down on the turntable and wound the winding arm several turns.

He looked at Annie and held out his hand, tried his best to smile. He would do just about anything to lighten the dark mood and reassure his wife everything would be okay. “May I have this dance?”

Annie nodded. Rafter took her into his arms, prayed a silent prayer that the old phonograph would work one more time. Amazingly enough it worked beautifully. Harry’s voice came out loud and strong. They had just enough room amongst the antiques to slow dance.

Annie rested her head against his. Rafter drank in her smell. Annie had a knack for smelling good all the time, no matter how stressful the situation. They swayed in time to the old love song, bodies pressed against one another, forgetting for the moment their awful circumstances.

They continued to dance long after Harry crooned his last note. The old music still played silently through their limbs. “Jon, why did we ever stop dancing? We used to dance almost every night on the upper gallery. You would bring out your entire Sinatra and Glen Miller collections. We would dance for hours, the moonlight shining through the trees and onto our skin. Those nights were so romantic. They were magical.”

“I don’t know. I really don’t. We’ll start dancing again real soon, I promise.”

“We have to get our house back from the Charbonneau brothers before we do anything.”

“I’m thinking we should find a way out of this attic and let the police handle our guests.”

“But I resent how they’re tearing up our house.”

“I know, Annie, but our lives are more important than this house. The house can be repaired. And we have plenty of experience at renovations. But if something were to happen to you…I would be lost.”

Annie pulled back and released his tender embrace. She looked around. “So do you have any ideas how we can escape?”

He had no ideas, not even a clue. The only way out seemed to be through the roof. But he doubted he would find an axe or a chainsaw or anything else in the attic he could use to breach the roof.

They were stuck, but he wouldn’t tell Annie that. “Out the roof somehow. Let’s sort through all this stuff and see if we can find some tools.”

Annie nodded. “Our attic is big. I’ll take this end if you take the other end.”

“That sounds like a plan. We’ll meet in the middle. With any luck we’ll be out of here before sunrise.”

Chapter 7

“I’m not proud of my past, Arcadias. I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life, but I’ve never committed a felony until now,” Iris said. She sat tensely in an easy chair in the parlor, her back rigid and straight. Colette and Damien sat nearby on an antique sofa. Arcadias paced back and forth in front of the marble hearth. His boots squeaked with each anxious step.

“We’ve hardly started our search. It’s too early to say whether things are going well or not. There’s a lot of house left to explore,” Arcadias replied. “We’ll find it, Iris.”

“But then what do we do? Where will we go? We’ll be on the run the rest of our days.”

“You can go wherever you want. You’ll have the means to do it.”

“I’ve never had any money to speak of. But the way you talk, it sounds as if you’re not coming with me,” Iris said.

“They’ll be looking for couples, Iris. When we find the treasure we should settle up and go our separate ways to increase our chances at evasion.”

“But how do we convert the gold into money?”

“There are all kinds of rare coin and gold buyers out there. It’s also easy to melt the coins down into bars. You’ll need to get you a graphite crucible, an acetylene torch, and an ingot mold. Put the gold into the crucible, sprinkle a little boric acid onto the gold and melt it with the torch. Then, using the tongs, you pour the molten gold into the ingot mold. That’s what I’m going to do. The melted gold will attract less attention.”

“I don’t mean to be a wet blanket, Arcadias,” Damien interjected, “but have you considered that Lafitte may have come back and dug up his treasure? You showed me the note. It looked to me like Lafitte wrote down the coordinates so he could find it later.”

Arcadias stopped pacing and faced his younger brother. Looking at Damien was almost like looking in a mirror. Same hair, same height, and nearly identical weight, the only noticeable physical difference between them was the color of their eyes. Damien sported blue eyes instead of gray ones like Arcadias. Two years younger, and a longtime construction worker, Damien possessed as many sun-induced wrinkles as Arcadias.

“Your point is valid, Damien. But I don’t think Lafitte would have had time. The treasure came from a Spanish galleon he plundered late in 1816. Not long thereafter Lafitte agreed to be a spy for Spain and left his Barataria Bay smuggling port in April of 1817 and settled on Galveston Island in Texas.”