Dead Past

stole the doll, perhaps this is connected. . . .” Diane pulled the paper from her pocket. “This is what was printed on a strip of yellowed newsprint.”
    Both of them looked at the letters.
    “Surely this is not about Leo Parrish,” said Mrs. Torkel with a snort, sitting back in her seat.

Chapter 43

    “Who is Leo Parrish?” asked Diane.
    “That name sounds familiar,” said Juliet.
    “It should, dear. It’s an old legend that’s hung around Glendale-Marsh for years.”
    The waitress came by and asked if they wanted coffee. Diane was at the point where a beer would have been nice, but the effects of caffeine would work just fine, too. The three of them ordered coffee.
    “Leo Parrish was this young man . . .” Ruby Torkel stopped. “I need to start before Leo. I need to start with the hurricane. In 1935 or thereabouts, a hurricane struck the Florida Keys and killed an awful lot of people. I was just a little baby then. They called it the Labor Day storm. They didn’t give hurricanes names back then. Anyway, a train was sent to rescue people stuck on the Florida Keys. Legend has it that a man in the path of the coming storm talked someone at the railroad into letting him stash his gold on the train. Now, this is what don’t make sense to me. The train was going to the Keys when the gold was loaded onto the train—going into the path of the storm, not away from it—that’s the story. Why would he put his fortune on a train going into the hurricane?”
    “Maybe he had to leave town or had to protect his fortune for some reason,” said Juliet. “He had only one chance to put the gold on the train, and he believed the train would weather the storm and eventually get to safety. He probably figured the railroad company knew what they were doing and would not send a train into a situation it couldn’t come out of. They had more to lose than he did.”
    “Maybe,” conceded her grandmother. “Now the details change depending who’s telling it. Some say the man’s gold came from a Spanish treasure ship. Some say it’s gold from the Civil War. I say it’s a load of malarkey.” She took a sip of coffee. “You think I could have another piece of that chocolate cake? It would go real good with this cup of coffee.”
    Diane called the waitress over and ordered Mrs. Torkel another piece of cake.
    “Anyway, the train never made it to the Keys. It got washed off the tracks, and the money, or gold, or whatever it was, supposedly got washed away in the ocean, or the river, or covered up by mud. Like I say, the story changes.”
    “I never heard this story,” said Juliet.
    “Oh, sure, you did. You must have. Everybody in Glendale-Marsh knows the story,” said Mrs. Torkel.
    “What about Leo Parrish?” asked Juliet.
    “I’m getting to that,” said her grandmother. “You never were a patient girl. Leo Parrish lived in Glendale-Marsh in the late 1930s. I don’t know much about him or where his folks were from, but he was—I guess—in his twenties about then. He was one of these boys always looking for the quick buck. The story is, he got interested in the tale of the missing fortune and, as he was a fellow with a head for numbers, he somehow figured out where the loot had to have ended up.”
    The cake came and the waitress brought one for each of them. Diane realized she had missed lunch. Well, what the hell, she thought, if cake was good enough for the peasants of France, it was good enough for her. She took a bite.
    “I usually don’t eat so much,” said Mrs. Torkel after a big bite of cake. “But, I’m on vacation.” She took a sip of coffee. “Now, where was I?”
    “Leo Parrish figured out where the treasure was,” said Juliet.
    “Oh, yes,” said her grandmother. “He found it—the legend says. And he brought it to Glendale-Marsh in secret and hid it. Not long after, he went off to war—that’s World War II. He was worried about the treasure, so he wrote down where it was in some kind of fancy code that nobody could decipher—and sent the code home in a book. I don’t know anything about what kind of code it was, but since the thirties, we’ve had tourists coming to Glendale-Marsh looking for the book with the code and for the treasure. It was a real popular thing to do back in the fifties and sixties. I reckon poor Leo Parrish’s family land has been dug up from one end t’other looking for that treasure.”
    “What happened to Leo Parrish?” asked Juliet.
    “He went