Free The Testament of James (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens) by Vin Suprynowicz

needed a lawyer who could convince the judge it was just a case of youthful hi-jinks, which it was.”
    “Stole a car?”
    “A truck. The week before Thanksgiving, actually. Driver went into a diner, left the diesel running, so Joey drove off with a semi trailer load of frozen turkeys.”
    “Where do you put a trailer load of frozen turkeys?”
    “This question occurred to Joey, as well, but not quite soon enough to keep him from getting into a bind. So he had to break into Pegnataro’s Market during the night to hide the turkeys in the walk-in freezer.”
    “He must have worked all night. He’d cleared this with the owner?”
    “Of course not. Old man Pegnataro shows up for work the next morning, and he’s informed his walk-in freezer is so full of frozen turkeys no one can even get in there. So he picks up the phone.”
    “Not to call the police?”
    “This is Providence, honey.”
    “So he calls the boys.”
    “He calls the boys, to ask if they know what’s going on, or if he should call the police.”
    “They gave the turkeys back?”
    “Not much choice, at that point.”
    “They couldn’t get the driver to drop the charges?”
    “He would have been happy to, he tried, but he’d called it in to his company, which had called it in to the police. So a lawyer was needed who knew the judge.”
    “Joey is not the sharpest knife in the drawer?”
    “He shows great loyalty. He looks after his mother. And at least he tried to show some initiative. It was just youthful hijinks, long before he found his proper role in life.”
    “Which is?”
    “Joey is now a banker.”
    “You mean, like a loan shark.”
    “For Aldrich Bank, downtown. Mostly mortgages, though, so I won’t quibble with your description.”
    “Oh.”
    * * *
    “For a book that supposedly doesn’t exist, this thing sure turns up often enough.” Marian was finally taking a break from her online searches, handing Matthew the nice sheaf of stuff she’d printed out for him to peruse in his off time, if there was such a thing.
    “The last report I can find was a guy from the British Museum traveling in the Sinai back in the 1930s. He stopped over at some monastery deep in the desert. The monks gave him the run of the place, he sat on a stone bench in a little library that had old books in a jumble. I mean old — vellum and parchment, leather bindings, hand-copied stuff. He says some of them were multiple old books that had been re-bound together, so he’s paging through some old book on alchemy and suddenly there it is, The Testament of James the Just . Of course the monks wouldn’t let him take anything away.”
    “Let me guess,” Chantal chimed in. “He had other commitments. . . .”
    “He had other commitments, of course, planned to go back the next year to copy the thing if he couldn’t actually buy it, but then the war started, followed by more years of political unrest; he doesn’t get back for 14 years. And when he does . . .”
    “The old abbot had died, and no one had any idea what book he was talking about.”
    “How did you guess?”
    Matthew shook his head. “They might as well start these accounts with ‘Once upon a time . . .’”
    “He swears he saw it, says he couldn’t very well have forgotten the first page, which he quotes as a variant of what we’ve heard before.”
    “This is starting to sound like a tape loop or something, like Groundhog Day .”
    “Exactly.” Marian was getting unusually animated. “All the accounts of the sightings of the Testament share these extremely coincidental details. There’s never time or opportunity to translate or even copy more than a line or two. The monks are wary, the traveler doesn’t want to give offense. He assumes he can return in a fairly short time with a proper letter of introduction to get down to work properly. But something always comes up. He falls ill, war breaks out, the Turks or the Germans are always up to something, travel in the region is