by Eva Gates
“I was hoping for treasure,” one of the construction workers said. “Like pirates’ gold or somethin’.”
Charles yawned and I put him on the floor. He returned to the chair near the magazine rack to resume his nap.
“Back to work, men,” George said. “Excitement’s over.”
“Don’t think that qualifies as excitement,” one of them said as, grumbling, they left.
“Okay, kids,” Ronald said. “Outside. Louise Jane?”
“What?”
“Time go to outside. The children have to be supervised.”
“You go,” she said. “I want to see what it says.”
He knew better than to waste his time arguing, and herded the children ahead of him.
“Maybe there’s something else down there,” Charlotte said. “Something that got missed. I can check if you want.”
“No, I’ll check!” Emily said.
Ronald told them to hurry up and the twins ran for the door.
The patrons returned to what they were doing, and eventually only Mrs. Eastland, Bertie, Charlene, Louise Jane, and I were left standing in a circle around the box. Bertie hadn’t taken the notebook out. We simply stared at it for a long time.
“Don’t touch anything,” Charlene said, “until I get back.”
She ran upstairs and returned almost immediately with a pair of tweezers and two pairs of white cotton gloves. She handed the gloves to Bertie. “Put these on.”
Bertie did so.
“Regardless of what this is,” Charlene said, “it wasn’t put there last week, meaning it’s a historical document. It might be of some significance. It might not. I, for one, am more excited than if the box had been stuffed full of pirates’ gold.”
Slowly, carefully, Bertie lifted the notebook out of the box.
“Time for me to be off,” one of the patrons called. “Lucy, I’m not going to my granddaughter’s this week after all, so I can come to book club. I hope I can still get a copy of the book. What is it again?”
“Journey to the Center of the Earth, by Jules Verne,” I said.
Charlene’s eyebrows rose. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
“Nope. That’s what we decided on at the last meeting.”
Chapter Two
Charlene grabbed two hardcover books off the nearest shelf and put them on the table, four inches apart. “Here. Prop the notebook against these, one on each side. Don’t bend the spine back, or it might crack. Use these tweezers to open the pages, and do it very, very slowly. If they seem to be stuck together, don’t try to separate them, or they’ll tear.”
Bertie rested the notebook into the supports. As it moved, a piece of paper shifted so a fraction of an inch stuck out of the book.
Mrs. Eastland groaned. “Oh no, a page is ripping. Be careful the whole spine doesn’t crack.”
Bertie gritted her teeth against the onslaught of advice but said nothing. She might not be a rare books expert, like Charlene, but she knew how to handle fragile documents. “That hasn’t torn. It’s a separate sheet tucked in here. See? The color’s slightly darker than the rest of the book.”
“Careful,” Charlene warned. “Paper is fragile.”
Bertie opened the book ever so slightly and fastened her tweezers onto the edge peeking out. She pulled at it slowly, carefully, and it came easily without the dreaded sound of ripping.
I leaned closer for a better look, and I realized I was holding my breath. Bertie laid the page on the table. It was a single sheet of paper, fractionally smaller than the pages of the notebook, but the edges weren’t torn, meaning this page had been slipped in after the book had been bound.
“It looks like a hand-drawn map,” Bertie said. “I think it might be of the Outer Banks. Something seems to be off about it, though.”
“That’s as it was back in the nineteenth century,” Charlene said.
“The sands are constantly shifting, and the currants move things around all the time,” Louise Jane said. “Roanoke Inlet closed in 1811, and Bodie Island became part of the peninsula. This map was drawn later than that—you can see the island’s gone. I’d guess it’s about mid-to-late nineteenth century.”
“Around the time the lighthouse was built,” I said. “After the Civil War.”
“Right.”
“Strange map, though,” I said. “It doesn’t have the names of any towns or bodies of water or other landmarks marked on it. Just those numbers.”
The map, if that’s what it was, was rough and hand drawn, the ink dark with age but still clear. Lines outlined the shape of the land, and a handful of squiggles were probably meant to indicate the ocean and the straits. In no pattern that I could see, numbers from one to eight were scatted across the landscape. Number two was in the approximate location of the lighthouse where we now stood.
“Do the numbers indicate where towns used to be?” I asked.
“No,” Louise Jane said. “Nags Head’s always been where Nags Head is now, and it’s not marked. The five seems to be at Jockey’s Ridge. Nothing but sand dunes even then, as far as I know. I could check with my grandmother.”
“What does the book have to say?” Charlene asked. “Open it.”
Bertie carefully pulled back the cover. The center of the first page was marked by a small, neat signature: Mrs. Jeremiah Crawbingham. And a date: 1858.
“Never heard of her. Or of him,” Louise Jane said. “Or anyone by that surname. It’s an unusual one.” If anyone would know, Louise Jane would. Her family went almost as far back as the first European settlers on these shores. She was a keen amateur historian and a well-regarded storyteller of Outer Banks history and legends. Unfortunately, Louise Jane didn’t always worry about the legends part leaking into the history part. And, I sometimes suspected, if she didn’t know something, she simply made it up.
Bertie turned to the next page. We sighed in collective disappointment. The date, July 2, was written at the top of the page, and underneath:
Fair and sunny. No wind.
Then the next day, July 3: A soft breeze bringing the threat of rain. High tide at 11:55.
And on it went. Every entry was the same. Dates and weather and tide reports.
“Her husband might have been a fisherman,” Louise Jane pointed out. “Nothing was more important in their lives than the weather.”
“True,” Charlene said.
Bertie flipped to the last page. It was empty.
“I wonder how it ended up underneath the lighthouse,” Charlene said. “Paper was expensive in those days, and you didn’t just throw away all those blank pages. Our Mrs. Crawbingham seems to have been somewhat wasteful, the way she barely fills the page before starting another. The book itself wouldn’t have been cheap, not with that good-quality leather binding. She must have had more money than I’d expect for an Outer Banks fisherman’s family.”
“As for how it got underneath our lighthouse,” I said, “maybe someone dropped the box and couldn’t find it in the dark, and then they built the lighthouse on top of it.”
“I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.” Bertie turned another page.
While all this had been going on, I’d been aware of what was happening in the library. Some patrons had left, and new ones had arrived. The shouts of playing children came from outside, as did the sound of men’s voices and the rat-tat-tat of a jackhammer or the roar of the engine of a heavy truck.
Our library was never a peaceful place—modern public libraries aren’t. But the constant noise of the construction was threatening to drive us all mad.
Still, a bit of noise was better than the lighthouse tower collapsing on top of us.
And considering that I lived on the fourth floor, in a small apartment I call my Lighthouse Aerie, the noise was much, much better than the building collapsing. Fortunately, work outside stopped at a reasonable time, and the nights remained peaceful.
“What’s this I hear about pirate bones buried under the lighthouse?” Janelle Washington
, the twins’ mother, joined us.
“That story’s growing quickly,” I said.
“It’s all the kids outside are talking about,” she said with a smile. “I know to take it with a grain of salt.” Janelle was an attractive black woman in her early thirties. She brought her girls to the children’s programs at the library regularly and always ensured they left with book bags stuffed full. She was such a lover of literature, she’d named her children after the best known of the Bronte sisters.
“More like a bucket of salt,” Charlene said. “Rather than a pirate, we found this old book.”
“More interesting, I’m sure, than a pile of moldy bones,” Janelle said.
“I’ve checked the girls’ books out already,” I said. “Their book bags are behind the desk. Let me get them for you.”
“Thanks.”
I half-turned to go back to work, leaving the others to read Mrs. Crawbingham’s weather reports, when Bertie said, “Oh. How strange.”
She’d turned a page to find a second loose piece of paper. This one was not covered in Mrs. Crawbingham’s neat script giving daily reports on the weather.
The page was full of lines of rough printing forming rows and rows of closely packed letters in a mad jumble that made no sense to me.
“What on earth?” Bertie said.
“Is it in another language, do you think?” Louise Jane asked.
“That can’t be it,” Charlene said. “There aren’t enough vowels.”
“Many of the words, if they are words,” Bertie said, “are very long.”
The letters were organized into groups. The shorter ones had only two or three letters, some without vowels, but many contained ten or more characters. They were mostly letters—from A to Z—but a few numerals were sprinkled among them.
“Is there more?” Louise Jane asked.
“Nothing I can see,” Bertie said.
“Is it some sort of code?” Janelle asked.
“Might be,” Charlene said.
“The weather diary entries were written just before and during the war,” Louise Jane said. “Somehow this book got into someone else’s hands after that.”
“A man, judging by the handwriting,” Charlene said. “But that’s only a guess.”
“Someone either stole this notebook or was given it,” Louise Jane said. “And then the war started, and they used it as a code book. This must be a record of troop movements or names of spies or the like. Wow! It’s quite a find after all.”
“Your imagination is running ahead of you, Louise Jane,” Bertie said. “We can conclude nothing of the sort.”
“This is the same hand as put the numbers on the map,” I said. “Look at the two.” I pointed to the drawing and then to the notebook. “It has an identical little curl at the end as the one here.”
“So it does,” Bertie said.
“Numbers are mixed in among the letters. Numbers one through eight, nothing higher than an eight. Look at the map. No nine and no double digits.”
“The code page—if it is in code—might be referencing the map,” Charlene said.
“I think it must be,” I said.
“If it is a map,” Bertie said.
“This is no spy’s report,” Louise Jane said. “It’s a treasure map.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Louise Jane,” Bertie said. “Treasure map, indeed. It’s been a long time since I read Journey to the Center of the Earth, but as I recall it begins with the discovery of coded directions to a passage in an Icelandic volcano that leads to the center of the earth.”
“Thus the book’s title,” Charlene said. “I agree with Bertie. You’re letting that book lead your imagination, L.J.”
I bit my tongue. I’d also been reading the Jules Verne classic in preparation for book club, and I’d been about to say the same thing Louise Jane had.
“Rather than lead my imagination, as you put it,” Louise Jane said, “my recent reading has helped me to arrive at the logical conclusion quicker than I might otherwise.”
“A treasure map,” Janelle said. “That’s cool.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve left you waiting.”
“Not a problem. This is much more interesting, and the girls are perfectly happy outside for a while longer.”
“Treasure!” Mrs. Eastland said. “There have been rumors, you know. The pirates who sailed in the Caribbean often came up this coast.”
“The days of the Caribbean pirates were long over by the nineteenth century,” Charlene said. “And even if they weren’t, seamen didn’t stuff chests full of gold coins and jewels and bury them in the sand and forget to come back.”
“Who says?” Mrs. Eastland asked.
“Reputable historians,” Charlene replied.
“Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen,” Louise Jane said. “There have also been rumors through the ages about valuables families hid during the War Between the States. Valuables they were never able, for one reason or another, to come back and reclaim.”
“Those stories have as much validity as Captain Jack Sparrow and his merry crew,” Charlene said. “The Outer Banks was a poor place in the nineteenth century, occupied by hardworking people struggling to make a living out of the sea and poor soil.”
“Still is,” Janelle said. “Families like mine.”
“And mine,” Charlene said. “Fishing families didn’t have diamonds and jewels to hide from potential invaders.”
“Don’t be so sure,” Louise Jane said. “Valuable doesn’t always mean—”
“Goodness me, but it sounds tense in here.” Theodore Kowalski joined our little group. I hadn’t even heard the door open. So engrossed were we in studying the map and the code page (I couldn’t now think of it as anything else), I’d lost track of my surroundings. “What do you have there? Oh my, is that written in some sort of code?”
“We think it must be,” Louise Jane said.
“We think nothing of the sort,” Bertie said.
“I agree with Louise Jane,” Janelle said.
“I do too,” Mrs. Eastland said.
Charles jumped onto the table and sniffed at the book. I snatched him up before he could give it a lick.
“Ronald told me a historic book had been found underground,” Theodore said. “I was hoping he meant a book as in a novel. But this looks better.” Theodore was a rare book collector and dealer. He adjusted the spectacles on his nose and bent over to peer at the lines of print. He didn’t need help seeing, and the lenses were made of clear glass. He was not an Englishman and not in his fifties, and he didn’t smoke a pipe. But he thought all those things gave him more gravitas in the world of book collecting than the nonsmoking thirty-something Nags Head native with a soft North Carolina accent and perfect eyesight that he was.
“Hmm,” he said. “This makes no sense.”
“Yeah, Teddy,” Louise Jane said, “we kinda noticed that.”
“Have you tried reading it backward, like in Journey to the Center of the Earth?”
I didn’t admit that I’d tried that already. But backward made nothing any clearer.
“No,” he said after a moment. “That doesn’t help. Perhaps it’s not in English.”
Bertie closed the book, tucked the map and code page inside, and put it back in the box. “That’s enough of that for now. We have work to do everyone. Mabel, so sorry to keep you. Come into my office. Lucy, can you join us? We’ll be discussing plans for Settlers’ Day.”
“Sure,” I said.
“Leave it with me.” Louise Jane reached out a hand for the box. “I’ll protect it.”
Bertie placed her right hand firmly on top of it. “This doesn’t leave the library until I know what we’re dealing with. It might not lead to buried treasure; it might be the ravings of a lunatic or a couple of schoolboys playing pirates. But it is a historical document, and we’ll treat it as such.”
“What are we going to do with it?” Charlene asked.
“My fellow members of
the Bodie Island Historical Society would love to see it,” Mrs. Eastland said. “One of them might have heard of this Mrs. Crawbingham and be able to tell us about her.”
“No one by that name ever lived on the Outer Banks,” Louise Jane said.
Mrs. Eastland sniffed. “I doubt even you, Louise Jane, know the identity of every person who ever passed this way.”
“I know the old families …”
“At the least,” Mrs. Eastland went on, “the society can check the weather records and see if this book is at all accurate. Mrs. Crawbingham might not have been living in these parts. Perhaps she gave the book to someone who brought it here and put the map in later.”
“That’s possible,” Louise Jane said.
“I can try and find the weather records for the dates mentioned,” Charlene said, “but I’ve got a lot on my plate these days, so some help would be good, as would researching the Crawbingham family.”
“Not that there’s anything to find on that accord,” Louise Jane said.
“Can I tell the society about it, Bertie?” Mrs. Eastland asked.
“I see no reason not to,” Bertie said. “Besides, everyone in town will know about it soon enough.”
“No better way to spread a secret than to give it to a six-year-old,” Janelle said. “And that goes double for my twins.”
“Nothing the society loves more than a historical mystery,” Mrs. Eastland said. “Please invite the group in to have a look. Jeremy Hughes in particular will be thrilled.”
“Jeremy Hughes?” Charlene said. “What’s he got to do with anything?” Her tone turned sharp, and I gave her a curious look. A touch of red had come into her cheeks, and she avoided my eyes.
“Jeremy’s the new head of the historical society,” Mrs. Eastland said.
“And the primary force behind the forthcoming Settlers’ Day Fair,” Bertie said.
“I didn’t know that,” Charlene muttered.
“We’ve been working out the details while you’ve been on vacation,” Bertie said. “I haven’t thought it necessary to involve you, Charlene, because the library’s not doing much more than providing the space.”
“The historical society has everything well in hand,” Mrs. Eastland said. “I myself am on the committee. It’s all coming together perfectly.”
