Fiction
The Secret at Minnewater
Book under development
About the Book
Brugge, 1440s. Fine cloth and merchant fortunes fill a city certain of its future. When young accountant Gillis De Vos is found dead in the waters of Minnewater, a quarrel points suspicion toward Pieter De Smet, the son of a working dyer. Pieter has secrets, and his father Jan’s efforts to clear him only draw the family deeper into a powerful merchant’s questionable accounts. As small contradictions unsettle the story of an accidental drowning, Jan must uncover who profited from Gillis’s silence before his son bears the blame.
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Jan De Smet counted the bolts again because the young accountant had asked him to. Ten. There had been ten on the cart, ten beneath the merchant's roof, and ten when the last apprentice stopped complaining about the weight.
Gillis De Vos touched the page with a clean fingernail.
“Twelve,” he said.
“Then your book is carrying two I never made.”
Ordinarily, that would have earned a smile. Gillis looked toward the door instead.
From the yard came the sound of Pieter laughing with someone Jan could not see. His son had begun laughing differently in this house, easily and a little too loudly, as though the walls required proof that he belonged among them.
“Perhaps I copied the wrong entry,” Gillis said.
“Perhaps.”
But the young man did not cross out the number. He closed the ledger and rested both hands upon it.
Jan had spent his working life learning which stains would hold and which would wash away. He knew the smell of a spoiled vat before anyone lifted the cover. He recognized damage early because waiting cost money.
He ought to have recognized something now.
Instead, he called for Pieter and told him to bring the empty cart.
As they left, Gillis opened the ledger again. Jan saw him bend close to the page, shielding it with his shoulder from whoever had entered behind him.
Meet the Author
John K. Milius
John K. Milius brings four decades of sales, leadership, customer relationships, and hard-earned commercial judgment to the page. His fiction turns that same eye toward Brugge—a city of water, memory, history, and stories waiting beneath the stones.
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