The Lost Prince Read Online Free Page B

dark, stormy October night, Galen and Linnea were killed instantly when their car hit a tractor-trailer head on. They were driving south on Route 22. They had stopped at a local diner, where an employee named Mitch Sweeny gave a statement about talking to the couple just before the accident. The authorities could find no history for the man and woman, no point of origin for their journey, and they were officially listed as a pair of Does. There was no mention of a child in the report.
    “What’s that?” Cat asked, pointing to a photocopy of a coin.
    “That’s a Phoenix Standard,” Cal answered. He stared at the picture with a modicum of awe.
    “Cal?” Cat nudged.
    “It’s our money,” he said. “All the kingdoms use the Standard, but mint their own sigils. The sigil of Duke Athelstan’s house is the phoenix. It’s almost pure gold. This is it,” he said emotionally. He almost couldn’t believe it. Ever since Lelani’s spell deciphered his memories, Cal hadn’t felt quite himself; it was like halves of himself lived in different universes, neither one of which was right on its own. The entire mission was a bad dream. Cal expected to wake up in his bed in the Bronx at any moment and realize Aandor didn’t exist, there was no prince, and he was only in love with one woman who might be carrying their second child. Either that or he was a patient in a mental ward, wrapped up like a Russian newborn for his own good, and everything he knew about Aandor was an elaborate fantasy of a deluded mind.
    But this was it—proof. Aandor existed in the computer records of a town clerk in upstate New York. He turned to Cat and smiled. “We’ve found the trail.”
    “Do you have these coins?” Cat shouted back at Hank.
    Good question, Cal thought. He scrolled the rest of the file—nothing at all about an infant. Was it possible the prince wasn’t with them the night of the accident? Galen and Linnea were the agreed-upon caretakers. Proust’s spell had their identities written to be the child’s parents, so even if Seth’s miscasting of it overpowered them, they should still have come away thinking they were responsible for the baby.
    Hank returned holding a plate of Entenmann’s Danishes.
    “What happened to the items from the crash?” Cat asked the clerk. “Are they in storage?”
    “I don’t know. I wasn’t full-time back then. But I’ve never seen them around. Probably stolen.”
    “We should interview anyone that’s still in the area,” Cal said. “Does this Sweeny still live around here?”
    “Yeah. He’s up there in age, but still works at the diner. It’s about a mile down the road.”
    The clerk who filed the report was listed on the corner of the original page: G. Manning . Whoever had pilfered the gold coins would not be forthcoming. That might not matter, though. Cal decided to run a hunch—he loaded Google and searched for local coin collectors.
    “What are you thinking?” Cat asked.
    “I’m thinking you can’t buy groceries with twenty-four-karat-gold coins,” Cal said. “Not exactly something you can throw into the Coinstar machine at Pathmark. And unless you absolutely have a love for obscure, yet impractical, seemingly ancient coinage, you might want to cash in on such a thing, right?”
    “Right,” Cat agreed.
    “So whose hands would something like that eventually fall into?”
    The search hit on a Web site called the Numismatist run by a collector named Nathan Dumont. A link on the site led to a blog he wrote called Exonumianiacs.
    “You think he’s involved?” asked Cat, not really following the thread. “There might be bigger collectors in the city, or even Hartford.”
    “I don’t know,” Cal said. “But these types, they like to share knowledge of their scores—brag and taunt. Otherwise, there’s no glory in possessing something rare if no one knows you have it. Whoever took those coins thirteen years ago, it probably ended up in the hands of a guy like this.