“Why wouldn’t he just tell me he had an office then?” Mathias asked. “Why hide it? None of this makes sense.”
He was right. Nothing made sense. Not the secrecy, the coordinates, or Milas’s untimely death. I was starting to wonder if Milas’s death was as accidental as the police thought it was. Then again, if someone had killed him, how did they get off the boat before it sank in the middle of a Lake Superior storm? They never would have made it off that yacht alive either. I suppose his killer could have fallen into the water during the storm and disappeared, never to be seen again.
“Honey,” Mattie said, touching my cheek tenderly. “Honey, blink. Come on, come back to me, honeybee.”
I could hear him, but I couldn’t blink. I couldn’t speak either, but the pain in my hand was intense. When the seizure finally ended, I cried out in pain, pulling my hand to my belly.
“What’s wrong?” Mattie asked frantically.
“My hand,” I cried, real tears of pain on my face. “My hand hurts.”
He knelt next to my chair and his eyes widened at the way my fingers splayed out in a twitching mess. “Honeybee, you were having a seizure, but nothing was touching your hand.”
I blinked a couple of times and glanced between his face and my fingers. “It felt like they were bent the wrong way. It really hurt.”
He shook his head adamantly. “I didn’t touch your hand. I know not to massage your fingers until the seizure passes. You were just holding the key on your hand.”
I stared at my palm until the pain subsided and the fingers relaxed. He took it then and massaged them gently. “Does this hurt?” he asked, being extremely careful of how hard he was pushing.
“On the palm,” I said, taking a deep breath to quell the nausea. “It hurts a lot. I’m not lying, Mattie,” I said desperately.
He kissed my forehead as he kept massaging. “I believe you, baby. We’ll figure it out. Let’s go inside. I’m going to get you a drink and a headache pill. You’ve been in the sun too long.”
Just what I needed. A new symptom to add to the ones I already had. Now my hand was going to feel like someone was ripping it apart when I had a seizure. Fabulous.
“We have to take all of this inside with us. I don’t want to leave it out here,” I said, starting to gather the papers together.
He stopped me from leaving the chair. “Just wait for me to get your medication and then I’ll help.”
He disappeared back inside the house and I tried to stack up the papers in order. My hand wasn’t working the best after the seizure and I dropped the sheaf of papers accidentally.
“Damn it,” I sighed, but left them on the ground when he returned with water and one of my pills. After I swallowed the medication, I bent to pick up the papers, but paused with my hand outstretched. “Look, when these fell this way, the names in the margins lined up. Mateo Diaz.” I shuffled the papers in order, lining up the names on the documents, coming up with five names in total.
“I have names and addresses now,” I said excitedly. “It’s only a matter of time before I figure out what he was doing with the boat. Something tells me what we’ll find is going to be something you don’t like.”
He put one hand on my back and helped me up from the table. “Something tells me I didn’t know anything about Milas Møgensen, and that alone is something I don’t like.”
♥
I had the map laid out, the coordinates pinned, and my computer open, typing in names and comparing them to the GPS coordinates. Mattie had gone back inside to put away supper, and I was glad to have a few moments alone. He was on edge, and I wanted to get this done, regardless of the pounding at my temples. I rubbed my forehead and hit the go-to-website icon on Google maps. What I saw ripped a gasp from my lips, and I dropped my hand from my head. “Crap,” I said, quickly doing the same thing with the second name, but I didn’t get a hit that time. “Hmmm,” I said aloud, using the same name and the third address, and that time I got a hit. “Damn it, Milas.”
After that, it was easy to line up the names and addresses from the paperwork. I dropped my head into my hands and rubbed at my temples. The headache was already killing me, but this didn’t help matters.
A hand came down on my shoulder, and I glanced up at Mattie. “You figured it out, didn’t you?” He sat next to me and shifted his hand to my thigh. “I can tell by your posture. It’s not good.”
“I don’t know, but the five names and five addresses we have are cigar companies or rum companies. The names match up with owners or managers in each place.”
“It’s not illegal to buy Cuban cigars and bring them back to the US now. He could have been buying them legally.”
I nodded my agreement. “He could have been. I checked, and the US allows you to bring them in for personal use. He could bring in one hundred bucks in cigars and one liter of rum.”
He snorted at the ridiculousness. “That’s like two cigars.”
“Exactly. This doesn’t make sense for two cigars, Mathias. He must have been smuggling the cigars or rum, or both, back into the harbor on the boat somehow.”
“There’s one hole in your theory, Miss Blois,” he said, one brow raised. “We didn’t find any cigars or rum.”
“They floated away? It was underwater for a long time.” I tipped my head back and forth while I thought about it. “Or they weren’t on the boat when it sank. Rum-running has always been dangerous. Maybe Milas decided to double-cross someone and paid for it with his life.”
