He watched her carefully for a moment, as if weighing the truth of her words. Apparently her motives must have met his approval for he said, “You are right, Miss Creed. Captain Parker did indeed come here. The abbot at the time, Brother Markum, was actually a distant cousin on his mother’s side, you see.”

Annja felt a surge of excitement.

“According to Brother Markum’s account, Captain Parker was agitated, perhaps even fearful for his life, and he gave my predecessor specific instructions to watch over a piece of his property until someone came to retrieve it in his name.”

Annja was leaning forward in her chair, full of questions, but Deschanel raised a hand and held her off, at least for a moment.

“There is no indication in Brother Markum’s account as to the specific nature of Parker’s mission or the source of his fear. Just that he was clearly afraid and that he felt it likely that he might not be back to retrieve the object himself. But I don’t know any more than that and, unfortunately, Brother Markum is no longer around for us to ask him ourselves.”

After a century and a half I certainly hope not, Annja thought.

“Do you have any idea what the object was that Captain Parker placed into the abbot’s safekeeping?”

Annja was thinking it might be another letter, or maybe a journal. A journal would be ideal, as it might describe in more detail what was going on.

But Abbot Deschanel’s answer surprised her.

“It was a wooden box. About the size of a microwave.”

A box?

“Do you, by chance, still have the box?”

Then, at last, Deschanel showed some of her own excitement.

“I do,” he said, his grin spreading from ear to ear. “And because you have come asking for Captain Parker’s legacy in his name, you’ve allowed us to fulfill our vow to him. This is a blessed day indeed!”

He rose, saying, “I’ll just be a moment,” and slipped out the door, leaving Annja waiting anxiously for his return.

It took less than ten minutes. When Deschanel came back through the door, he was carrying a small chest. It was about the size of an old-fashioned bread box and was covered with a thick patina of dirt and dust, as if it had been stored in the back of a closet for some time.

It’s probably been sitting in the same place for the past hundred years, Annja thought.

He set it down on top of his desk and gestured for her to open it.

This is it. This is what you came here for.

She could feel her pulse racing, could hear her heart pounding in her ears as she realized that the box in front of her might hold the answers to several questions. What had Parker been doing in Paris? Why the letter of introduction from President Davis? What, exactly, had happened to the missing Confederate treasure?

With hands that only slightly trembled, Annja opened the chest.

Inside was a small lacquered box the size of a jewelry case.

She recognized it immediately.

It was a Japanese puzzle box.

“May I?” she asked.

The abbot nodded. “Be my guest,” he said.

Reaching inside, she drew out the puzzle box and set it down next to the crate. As she did so the slip of paper that had been stuck to the bottom of the box came loose and drifted to the floor.

Picking it up, Annja saw that it was a short note in an unfamiliar hand.

Sykes,

Time is of the essence so I must be brief. The FotS want more than Davis is willing to grant and the negotiations have turned ugly. I fear for my life. This box contains everything you need to locate the specie stolen from the wagon train. I trust you will see that it reaches the right hands if I do not return.

Faithfully,

Will

She’d been right! Thanks to her research earlier that morning, she knew that Parker’s second in command had been a man named Jonathan Sykes, so there seemed little doubt now that the remains did, indeed, belong to the Confederate captain as she’d suspected.

It was the contents of the rest of the note that really caught her attention, however.

Specie,she knew, was a term used to describe money in the form of coins, usually gold or silver, that provided the backing for paper money issued by the government. Parker had to be referring to the money from the treasury. The wagon train he’d driven out of Danville had been ambushed by brigands; his official report had listed the gold as stolen.

If the note was to be believed, then Parker clearly knew exactly where the treasure was, which made the official report a bold-faced lie.

She didn’t have to think about it very long to come up with a handful of reasons for his doing so, either. Perhaps he’d been ordered to fake the treasury’s disappearance. Perhaps he’d taken it upon himself to protect it during the hectic days at the end of the war. Or maybe he’d simply taken advantage of the opportunity to secure a future for himself and his family for when the war was over.

Any way it happened, the answer to a historic mystery was about to be solved.

All she had to do was open the puzzle box.

She thought about what she knew about puzzle boxes. Originating in the Hakone region of Japan in the late eighteenth century, puzzle boxes, or disentanglement boxes as they were sometimes known, were exquisitely crafted works of art that could only be opened by following a certain sequence of movements. Some were made up of multiple sliding pieces that, when moved, unlocked other pieces, which in turn released a side panel of the box, and so on, until the top was finally released, allowing the box to be fully opened. Others required putting pressure on certain locations in a specific sequence, which then released various panels that eventually unlocked the box. An individual box might require as few as two or as many as sixty-six moves to open it.

The trick, she knew, was finding the right starting point.

She picked up the box and examined it carefully. It was made of a highly polished hardwood—linden or perhaps cherry—and was lacquered to a fine finish. A mosaic of different colored squares covered the top, but the sides were free of decoration of any kind. Nor did it show even the slightest hint of any seams.

For all practical purposes, it looked like a solid block of wood.

Annja knew better, though.

She examined the mosaic, looking for a pattern that might provide a hint as to where to begin. When that failed, she began to press the colored squares in a variety of common patterns. Four corners. A cross in the center. Crisscrossing the middle.

Nothing.

She glanced up at the abbot, who was watching her curiously.

“It’s a puzzle box,” she said, answering his unspoken question. “In order to open it, you have to follow a certain sequence of motions.”

He nodded sagely. “And how to do you know that you are on the right path?” he asked.

“You don’t.”

“Ah, so the box mirrors life, no?”

She supposed that it did, though that didn’t help her get it open.

Parker hadn’t left any instructions telling Sykes how to open the box, so she knew that the key had to be something they both would have understood. Maybe a prearranged symbol or word? Maybe something that Sykes would associate with Parker, something that he would think of right away?

She ran through the obvious list of ideas—names of their wives or children, birth dates, their current ranks in the Navy. None of them worked.

She looked at the layout of the colored tiles on the lid again. The checkerboard was fourteen squares wide by eight squares high. The fifth and tenth vertical row were slightly darker than the others, subtly dividing the mosaic into three even sections four squares across by eight squares deep.

Three even sections.