The Treasure

by E. A. House

  The Treasure

  Treasure Hunters: Book #6

  Written by E. A. House

  Copyright © 2018 by Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.

  Published by EPIC Press™

  PO Box 398166

  Minneapolis, MN 55439

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  International copyrights reserved in all countries.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without

  written permission from the publisher. EPIC Press™ is trademark

  and logo of Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.

  Cover design by Laura Mitchell

  Images for cover art obtained from iStock and Shutterstock

  Edited by Ryan Hume

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: House, E.A., author.

  Title: The treasure/ by E.A. House

  Description: Minneapolis, MN : EPIC Press, 2018 | Series: Treasure hunters; #6

  Summary: The San Telmo: a Spanish merchant vessel lost in a hurricane off the coast of Archer’s Grove while carrying a magnificent dowry home to the Spanish princess. Chris, Carrie, and Maddison think they know where it is. But if they want to find the ship, they’re going to have to survive screaming caves, psychotic oceanography professors, dangerous cave floors, and ghosts.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017950431 | ISBN 9781680768817 (lib. bdg.)

  | ISBN 9781680768954 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Adventure stories—Fiction. | Code and cipher stories—Fiction.

  | Family secrets—Fiction. | Treasure troves—Fiction | Young adult fiction.

  Classification: DDC [FIC]—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017950431

  This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

  For archivists, college professors

  and park rangers

  Forgive me for taking liberties

  with your professions.

  WHEN THE WOMAN FROM REDD’S TELEVISION show turned up at the police station, clutching a black three-ring binder and looking deeply uncomfortable and slightly jumpy, Michelle Grey didn’t even bother to ask. She just took a moment to remember the woman’s name from the first time they’d met—Bethy Bradlaw, if she remembered correctly—and then waved her over to the desk where Robin Redd was sitting with his head buried in his hands, next to the Kingsolver cousins and the McRae girl and her father. Then Michelle went back to tracking down a boat using the impression of a key left in plaster.

  But she didn’t forget they were there. A very long career in law enforcement had given Michelle an excellent ability to pay attention to what was happening behind her, and the loss of one eye hadn’t hindered that skill. So, when Redd skimmed three papers and stopped dead on the fourth, Michelle didn’t even bother to put the phone down—she was on hold with the second-largest boat store in Archer’s Grove—before she said, “That had better not be one more clue to that ridiculous treasure.”

  Redd froze. Bethy bit her lip guiltily, and McRae, who had been trying to read what Redd was reading over his shoulder, stifled a hysterical laugh. Michelle sighed. Then the blasted Starside Marina finally answered their phone—how many calls did a boat shop regularly get on a weekday morning, anyway?—so she didn’t quite catch the furious conference that went on while an apologetic woman at the marina explained that they didn’t carry a line that would correspond to that key. She hung up just as Bethy Bradlaw said, “Well I’m not lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation!”

  “Lying about what?” Michelle asked.

  “Err,” Redd said.

  “It’s . . . ” Bethy Bradlaw started, and then trailed off. “To be honest I don’t know what any of this means, I just don’t think it’s any good.” She offered a single sheet of vellum paper to Michelle, who took it and frowned at a page of ornate but mostly legible handwriting. It was in Latin, which Michelle could vaguely recognize from a handful of church hymns but couldn’t actually read.

  “It’s a page from the journal of the missionary priest who built the Santa Maria Estrella del Mar,” Redd said.

  “And that means?”

  “He writes on this page about the sinking of the San Telmo,” Redd explained. “‘Against the high cliffs where the mussels grow so thickly.’ This is—this is enough proof of where the San Telmo ended up that you could get a dive crew together and they wouldn’t all think you were crazy.”

  “I see,” Michelle said. What she was actually seeing was a terrible vision of all the subjects of interest in her investigation disappearing on another treasure hunt, only to get attacked by the still-at-large Griffin somewhere with no witnesses. That man had the most irritating habit of finding the Kingsolvers when nobody expected him to and an equally bad habit of disappearing before the police could get there. It was, well, irritating. If Griffin would just once try his shenanigans when the police or the FBI were in the area—wait.

  There was an old saying about how if the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, then he’d just have to go to the mountain. Detective Hermann had been following up on some leads that had evaporated in light of the key Redd and McRae had found, which meant he was free right now. Catching his eye and hopefully conveying “Forgive me for volunteering you but I think they’ll accept you faster than me” with her gaze, Michelle turned to McRae and made a decision.

  “If you do decide to go off looking for that boat a second time, I’m going to insist that you bring Detective Hermann along with you,” she said, and McRae blinked once, slowly, then turned to Redd and shrugged.

  “It’s not going to bother me,” Dr. McRae said, “but I don’t have a boat.”

  “Oh, I can get a boat,” Redd said cheerfully. “And a scuba diver, since I have one in my address books.”

  “Is this a reliable person, or someone who bought a certificate off the internet?” McRae and Bradlaw asked in unison. Then they turned startled gazes on each other, while Redd folded his arms and declared that she may have been certified in Ohio but she had taken all the necessary tests and classes.

  “It might mean fewer people try to shoot me,” Chris Kingsolver suggested to his cousin Carrie and Maddison, Dr. McRae’s daughter. Chris was sitting in between the two girls; they punched him in the shoulder in unison.

  It was only after they had left, with McRae assuring Detective Hermann that they would call him before they did anything at all suspicious or even slightly dangerous, that Detective Hermann turned to Michelle with a sigh.

  “Really?” he asked.

  “I can go if you don’t want to,” Michelle said. “Or we can send Forrest, he has a romantic streak and he might enjoy looking for a lost treasure ship.”

  Hermann glanced pointedly at Forrest, who was happily charming a description of a boat that might possibly match the key out of one of the same receptionists who had hung up on Michelle for wasting his time. “Though . . . it looks like he’s doing good work here,” Michelle said, then added, in a disgruntled undertone and mostly to herself, “I come across as a little harsh on the phone.”

  Later, she would learn that at that point Detective Hermann was manfully restraining himself from mentioning that Father Michaels had described her as “a woman with a voice admirably suited to yelling through a bullhorn, who incidentally has a missing eye that makes her steely glare all the more impressive” before he’d even met her. Instead, the detective simply gave Michelle a slight smile and reassured her that he really had no objection to shadowing the treasure hunting and keeping an eye out for Willis Griffin.

  They reconvened at Carrie’s house, for the simple reasons that her living room was bigger than Chris’s and Maddison’s and both her parents were at work. Although Carrie did cal
l and tell them she was having some friends over and even put Dr. McRae on the phone to reassure her mom.

  And anyway, it was nearly noon, since they’d been stuck at the police station for some time while Agent Grey looked as though she was getting a migraine, and they were hungry. Carrie’s dad had just been complaining the other day about needing to get rid of leftovers, so in Chris’s mind it was perfect—they could do Carrie’s dad a favor. True, Chris didn’t think he really meant that he wanted a television star to finish off the ham, but he also hadn’t said that he didn’t, so . . .

  At that point, Carrie cut him off by whacking him over the head with the rye bread. This effectively ended Chris’s guilt-trip, plus it squashed half a loaf of rye, which wasn’t even supposed to be out of the refrigerator. Carrie and Dr. McRae were making everyone a ham sandwich apiece, and nobody in their right mind put ham on rye.

  “I like ham on rye,” Redd offered, leaning against the kitchen counter and nibbling on a carrot. Chris was not at all sure where he’d found the carrot, and very sure he didn’t want to know.

  Dr. McRae thought Redd had terrible taste, and when Redd pressed the issue, McRae started making threatening gestures with the plastic deli bag containing the sliced ham. Chris decided that retreat was in order and took himself out of the kitchen to go spread Carrie’s notes on the location of the San Telmo across the living room coffee table.

  Professor Griffin had, to Chris and Carrie’s absolute bewilderment, returned all of Carrie’s books to the public library sometime after he threw her overboard—all the books—plus all of Carrie’s notebooks, still in the book bag she’d originally packed them in. Chris did not see why the professor couldn’t have done the same for his backpack—he’d been quite fond of that shirt with the purple turtles, for one thing—but finding Carrie’s books and notebooks had been an unexpected piece of luck nonetheless. All of Carrie’s research had been in that book bag, and if the professor had thought to look through Carrie’s notes he might not have been so confused about where the San Telmo lay hidden, a location that the fragment of journal they’d just found only seemed to back up. “Against the high cliffs where the mussels grow so thickly” didn’t have that many interpretations if you were talking about Archer’s Grove. But why had this piece of the puzzle been missing for so long, and what had it been doing in the Edgewater Archives?

  Chris didn’t realize he’d been talking out loud until Bethy, who had also fled whatever terrifying things were going on in the kitchen, said, “I don’t know. I was trying to find a picture of Richard E. Emanate.” She sat down on the couch with a sigh, and added, “And I just realized I never even got the picture I was looking for.”

  “It might be available in one of the online collections,” Dr. McRae offered as he carried over a large plate of ham sandwiches. “The local photos collection in particular is almost a complete inventory of archival holdings, especially if they’ve been . . . um. . . ” He trailed off. He was standing in the archway that separated the kitchen from the living room, frozen with the sandwiches balanced precariously. “What?” he asked, looking from a startled Chris to Bethy, who was trying to look up the archive’s online collection on her phone. “It’s my job to know this sort of stuff!”

  “I sort of assumed you were learning all this from scratch,” Chris admitted, rather than saying something to the effect of “I didn’t expect you to be competent in this area, too,” or “the Richard E. Emanate Collection was Aunt Elsie’s pet project because she loved all the manatee-shaped notepaper he used.”

  “I used to work in an archive before I finished my degree,” Dr. McRae explained, finally setting the sandwiches down very carefully next to the page from the journal. “This looks like it could come from the Archive’s own Mission Church Collection,” he added, picking the piece of vellum paper up by one corner. “And it’s been well preserved for some time, there’s no recent discoloration, even if this edge has been folded.”

  Which put a hole in Chris’s first theory, which had been that someone had been reading through the diary and had ripped out a page when interrupted and then hidden it in a panic.

  “I just want to know what it was doing in that folder in the first place,” Bethy said absently, squinting at her phone. Dr. McRae put the piece of vellum paper down on the coffee table and sighed.

  “I would guess . . . ”

  “You would guess what?” Redd asked. He had a potato chip on his head, even though the bag of chips Carrie was holding had not been opened yet; Chris was not going to ask about that either.

  “I would guess that Elsie was being careful,” Dr. McRae said, reaching for a sandwich. Maddison joined Chris on the couch, and then they were all assembled in the living room, although Bethy was still frowning at her phone and possibly trying to look up Richard E. Emanate. “Elsie could put together the faintest of connections and make the most amazing conclusions but she absolutely hated going off heresy and half-proof,” Dr. McRae continued. “If there were three different ways to corroborate where the San Telmo went down she’d use all three just to get the most accurate idea of—Robin, did you put jam in these?”

  “Only some of them?”

  “I look away for one second.” Dr. McRae put his ham sandwich down and gave it a dubious look. “Anyway,” he said, “odds are, Elsie just happened to be going through the Emanate papers and the Mission Church Collection at the same time. I know she was worried about something—about someone,” he amended, “so when she realized that she’d found something more about the treasure, she might have decided that hiding a page that mentioned the San Telmo in the wrong box was more important than original order.”

  “Original order?” Carrie asked, looking up from her attempt to scrape peach jam off a slice of bread.

  “The original order the papers were in when they came to the Archive,” Dr. McRae explained, peeking inside a second sandwich. “Most archivists think it’s a good idea to preserve that arrangement if at all possible because it might tell you something about the person who made the papers, or what that person thought about the papers they were storing.” He put the second sandwich down—he’d taken only a bite out of his first one—and turned to Redd. “Only some of them?” he asked, clearly irritated.

  “What do you have against peach jam?” Redd asked.

  “It doesn’t belong on ham sandwiches!”

  Carrie met Chris’s eye and shrugged. “We were out of mustard?” she offered, which didn’t go very far in explaining why Redd had decided to put peach jam on the sandwiches. Unless jam and mustard were related condiments, as far as Redd was concerned, which was really the most reasonable explanation and still meant that Chris was not going to enjoy his own sandwich very much.

  “It’s not that bad,” Maddison offered, as her dad dissected his own and Redd’s sandwich in a quest for two slices of bread without peach jam on them. Carrie was frantically rescuing her notes from the resulting stickiness and Bethy had started on a second sandwich when the doorbell rang.

  “I’ll get it,” Chris offered when nobody else seemed to notice.

  Carrie’s family had a very open-plan house, at least in the front; the front door led into the living room, which opened up into the dining room, which led into the kitchen, which simply meant that when you opened the front door you could see who was on the front porch all the way from the kitchen. Chris knew that, in the same way he knew that the antique diving suit his uncle had once bought at a thrift store and steadfastly refused to get rid of was always going to live in the spot between the television and the bookcase. And in the same way that he knew that that diving suit—which was one of those bubble-headed ones with lots of rivets and brass trimming—was always going to terrify the unwary. He’d never thought of the problems with the way the house was laid out, at least not how it might be dangerous for someone to open the door and be immediately visible to the entire rest of the house. Especially if, say, they happened to be somebody who really shouldn’t be at Carrie’s
front door.

  In Professor Griffin’s defense, Chris realized afterwards, he must have thought Carrie’s parents were home but Carrie wasn’t yet. As it was, Professor Griffin had launched into an “I just managed to get the ship into port and I’ve been so terribly worried about the kids” speech while blinking back tears before he stopped and realized who he was actually talking to and said, “Chris?” sounding both horrified and shocked.

  “You,” Chris said, at a loss for words. Did Professor Griffin truly believe Carrie’s parents would fall for that? They’d been the ones Harvey had called, for heaven’s sake!

  “Me?” Professor Griffin asked, and if he was aiming for offended he missed it by a mile from sheer nervousness. Chris and Professor Griffin might have stood frozen in the doorway stammering at each other for the rest of the day—which would have been okay, as the professor might otherwise have actually used the gun Chris only belatedly realized was tucked into the professor’s waistband—except that the front of the house was open and everyone who had been sitting around the coffee table could see exactly who was at the front door. And apparently, Dr. McRae had a bit of a temper when you pushed him too far.

  “You!” Dr. McRae snarled, and then to the shock of Chris (and Maddison if the way she yelped in alarm was any indication), Dr. McRae lunged at Professor Griffin. In doing so he sent the entire couch, and Bethy, who’d been on the couch, flying.

  “Whoa, hey, Kevin, there’s no need to do anything rash,” Professor Griffin said quickly, trying to back out the door without turning his back on anyone, just as Redd grabbed Dr. McRae by the back of the shirt and they both fell over a side table and knocked the diving suit over with a huge crash. Chris, at a loss for anything else to do and still the person closest to Professor Griffin, slammed the door in the man’s face. He was just petty enough to hope that he’d catch a couple of the professor’s fingers in it, but he had no such luck. Then there was a moment of shocked silence, broken only by Carrie quietly talking to the 911 operator, and Redd patting Dr. McRae awkwardly on the head and pulling him to his feet.