The Treasure

by E. A. House

  “I hate him,” Dr. McRae said to the house in general. He started to kick the fallen diving suit but gave up halfway through the swing and ended up just poking it with his foot.

  “I know, but you really mustn’t go around attacking all the people you don’t like,” Redd said. “It always ends badly. Especially if the other person has a gun. And it makes the police irritated and producers angry and Bethy sigh.”

  “Oh no, I’m fine,” Bethy offered, popping up from behind the upended couch and shoving it upright with great effort. “I just had the wind knocked out of me. And I found a couple of quarters and a whole bunch of hair bands back here.”

  “So, that’s where they went,” Carrie said, and then blushed furiously when everyone turned to look at her, at which point Chris finally realized that he had been in terrible danger yet again and sat down in order to wail, “Why me?” more effectively. Counting the time someone broke into the house, the time Bethy’s brother had a nervous breakdown, and now this little incident, Chris had been menaced with a gun three times to Maddison and Carrie’s two. And nobody seemed terribly surprised!

  “Because you have an admirable amount of curiosity?” Maddison finally offered.

  “If I get voted ‘most likely to get shot’ when they put together the yearbook next year I’m blaming you guys,” Chris said.

  Of course, by the time the police that Carrie had so sensibly called got to the house, Professor Griffin was long gone. Detective Hermann said a few dire things along the lines of “Of all the times to cut the police surveillance off . . . ” But then he turned to Chris and said “Slamming the door in his face was still the smartest thing you could have done” very sternly but approvingly, so it could have been worse.

  “It’s not like I go around trying to get myself in trouble,” Chris said. Detective Hermann just raised one eyebrow and looked at him, which, since Chris was trying to prop the diving suit back into its customary corner, was not at all helpful. Chris was only now discovering that the thing was twice as heavy as it looked and that the helmet made it very top heavy. It was also worryingly possible that the detective had finally coaxed the full story about what had happened in the state park out of someone—possibly a worried Carrie—and was now laboring under the delusion that Chris was prone to getting shot at and held hostage.

  DETECTIVE HERMANN REFUSED TO GO AWAY after fingerprinting the front door and checking the street for suspicious tire tracks, citing Professor Griffin’s consistent stalking of the Kingsolvers, and the fact that nobody could tell which direction he’d disappeared to or if he had come on foot or not, as proof that an officer needed to be on the scene. “And since Agent Grey so sensibly”—he rolled his eyes slightly—“suggested I accompany you on your treasure hunt, this seems a good enough place to start as any,” he said. It was impossible for Maddison to tell if he was being sarcastic or not—Maddison could guess that Agent Grey had thrown Detective Hermann under the bus by volunteering him, and Agent Grey herself had been radiating guilt when they’d left the station earlier that morning—but Detective Hermann seemed to be taking everything in stride, even the ham-and-peach-jam sandwiches and the fact that according to Helen Kinney, the probable location of the San Telmo was legendarily haunted.

  “Yeah, that’s where the Screaming Caves are,” Ranger Kinney said matter-of-factly via Skype on Carrie’s laptop, which was nestled on the kitchen table amongst Carrie’s research notes on the San Telmo and every single one of the books Carrie had used. She seemed blithely able to ignore the groans of disbelief and horror that followed her pronouncement. Once the introductions were out of the way—Helen Kinney had never actually met either Chris or Carrie, although she had, on seeing Carrie for the first time, squinted and then mentioned that she’d done an elementary school presentation with their aunt once—Carrie had obligingly held her marked-up map to the computer screen and Helen had immediately known the area.

  “The Screaming Caves,” Maddison’s dad said flatly. He’d made himself a ham sandwich without any peach jam over Redd’s offended protests that he made perfectly good sandwiches, but he wasn’t getting very far in eating the sandwich because he kept having to stop and look alarmed. First at Redd for eating a ham-and-peach-jam sandwich, but then at the sheer number of books Carrie piled on the table, and now at the admittedly alarming news about the caves.

  “It’s just an old superstition,” Helen said, waving a hand impatiently through the air. “Someone or something expired in those caves once upon a time, and their restless spirits have haunted the area ever since. Hence the screaming. Heaven forbid we remember that that area of the island gets a nice volume of wind year-round and that wind blowing through caves makes a nice, eerie howling noise.”

  “But does it make a screaming noise?” Bethy asked, scribbling frantically in a notebook.

  Helen glared.

  “What?” Bethy protested. “This is great! This is local color! And I know it’s picking at semantic details, but that’s the sort of thing that makes a good sound bite.”

  Helen sighed. “The Screaming Caves—the Six Screaming Caves, if you want to be specific, although most people only count five—are on the absolute most remote tip of Archer’s Grove. Building there has always been difficult because the limestone is crumbly and the amount of natural erosion is tremendous; and for roughly the same reason the soil is too sandy to make for good farming so it’s never been heavily populated.”

  And suddenly Chris realized something. “Father Gonzales is supposed to have spent the rest of his life—after he witnessed the San Telmo disaster, I mean—trying to help the souls of the drowned. Because he had been so badly shaken by hearing them crying out in torment,” Chris said excitedly.

  “So . . . ?” Helen asked, but Carrie’s eyes had lit up.

  “So, that could be a reference to the Screaming Caves!” she said. “I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before; it did seem weird that he could have heard people screaming over the storm that must have been raging at the time.”

  “The caves were doing it for them,” Maddison offered darkly. “No wonder nobody wants to go near them.”

  “So, if a treasure ship was going to lie forgotten and overlooked for untold generations, then that’s a good place for it,” Maddison’s dad said.

  “Oooh,” Bethy said, writing furiously. “That’s a good point too.”

  “Well, I guess,” Helen said, “but there was a USGS survey team out there in the fifties doing pretty in-depth terrain mapping and they didn’t notice anything at all, and someone walks the one road through that part of the park before we open the area every year, it’s not completely remote.”

  “And you’re sure that the USGS survey team was actually a USGS survey team, and not a team from the CIA looking for Cesar Francisco?” Bethy asked.

  “No, but if they were a CIA team they also did a bang-up job on the geological survey and were immensely passionate about the silt in the mussel beds,” Helen said, voice as dry as the Sahara Desert. “My point, if you would all stop interrupting to be sensational, is that you’re heading off to go poke around the most unstable and remote part of the island, so you need to be careful. And for the love of all little green growing things,” she added as she signed off, “don’t mess with the plants or wildlife!”

  “Why did we call her again?” Redd asked Maddison’s dad.

  “So we don’t go charging into a national park blind and get ourselves killed by angry mussels?”

  Maddison did not point out to her dad that, angry as mussels might get, they were highly unlikely to attack people. The offhand comment had made Chris start in surprise and frown as though he were thinking, and if the danger of attack mussels was enough to keep Chris Kingsolver from getting into some kind of trouble, Maddison would just as soon let him believe it.

  The qualified scuba diver met them at the marina. Her name was Maria Sanchez, and she possessed a motorcycle, and this was a huge relief to Maddison’s increasingly frazzled da
d, who nearly went insane trying to work out the logistics of stuffing seven people into one car. It was the first hurdle to searching for the San Telmo, or at least the first hurdle of the day—after a round of phone calls to Chris’s parents, Carrie’s parents, Maddison’s mom, Agent Grey, and the mysterious qualified scuba diver, they were more or less ready to go and more or less not going to disappear and scare anybody. Funnily enough, the only ones worried were Carrie’s mom and dad, who were shopping at the grocery store and understandably puzzled by the news that they needed to buy a new jar of peach jam. Chris’s mom did sound suspicious but she didn’t ask any questions, especially since Chris managed to imply that he was going to see about a job interview while he was out. Maddison’s mom sighed so deeply everyone could hear it even though the phone wasn’t on speaker, and Agent Grey just grumbled that they had better not fall overboard this time. “She must not be having much luck with the boat key,” Detective Hermann said.

  And apparently, Maria Sanchez would just park her motorcycle at the marina and meet them with her gear in front of the Meandering Manatee.

  Maria proved to be small and cheerful, with her pretty dark brown hair in a very tight French braid and a compass rose tattooed on one ankle. How, precisely, she knew and liked Robin Redd was a complete mystery; she didn’t seem nearly crazy enough.

  “Now that is a very long and very complicated story,” Maria said, when Bethy asked the much politer but roughly equivalent question of how Maria knew Redd. “He was taking a filmmaking seminar at a college in Ohio, I was working at a scuba-diving shop in Columbus. We met in a rock quarry . . . ”

  “Quarries are about the only place you can go scuba diving in Ohio,” Redd explained, which made a surprising amount of sense. Then he introduced everyone to his boat, a sneaky move that very effectively prevented any more prying into the “long and complicated” part of how he had met Maria by giving them all something to be very horrified about.

  “Okay,” Maddison’s dad said. “I had some reservations about you coming across as the crew of a haunted ship but now I buy it. Redd, that is hideous.”

  “I’ll have you know I spent a lot of money on that manatee,” Redd said, gesturing to the large inflatable purple manatee dangling from the hook most people would have used to hang a wind sock. Bethy looked down at the video camera she was packing along, looked up at the manatee, and sighed heavily. “It was money well spent,” Redd protested.

  “Stop while you’re only in a little bit of trouble,” Maria told him, clapping him on the back. “Now come on, let’s all go get seasick from something other than this ship’s color scheme!”

  “Oh no,” Chris said, horrified, just as Carrie produced a bottle of Dramamine from her backpack and tossed it at him.

  The journey to the most deserted tip of the island was relatively quiet. Detective Hermann pulled Maddison’s dad and Redd aside to ask them some questions, and Bethy spent the time filming the shoreline and talking quietly with Maria. Chris managed to fall asleep, proving that the red-and-purple-painted ship might actually have mysterious powers, and Carrie got quieter and quieter as they got farther from the marina.

  “Something the matter?” Maddison finally asked her. Carrie jumped; she’d been leaning against the railing, gazing out at the horizon.

  “No, not really,” Carrie said. “I was just thinking . . . we were almost here last time we, well, you know.” Maddison nodded. “All Professor Griffin needed to do was turn the coordinates around and he would have found the caves we’re looking for,” Carrie said. “He came this close to finding them.”

  “And that’s scary?”

  “Actually I think it just makes me really mad,” Carrie said. “Why did he wait this long to go looking, and then why does he keep giving up so easily?”

  “So, you’d rather he was a more persistent thorn in our side?” Maddison asked.

  Carrie sighed even more heavily and dropped both arms over the side of the railing. “Noooo,” she said. “I just wish he’d commit to something and quit stalking around in the shadows. I hate guessing what he’s up to.” She flicked a piece of peeling paint into the water, and then added in a much quieter voice, “And I really wish I knew why Aunt Elsie knew all this and didn’t go after the treasure herself.”

  “Maybe she was trying to keep it out of Professor Griffin’s hands?” Maddison offered. “She obviously knew that he was up to something, or at least she suspected he was up to something. She did leave you and Chris that note and send my dad a warning.”

  “Hmm,” Carrie said.

  “Or maybe she already found it?” Maddison suggested, chipping away at a peeling piece of paint as well.

  “What?”

  “Maybe she already found it,” Maddison said, warming to the idea. “If your aunt was as good at puzzles as everyone is always saying she was, then maybe she put all the puzzle pieces together and actually found the San Telmo.”

  “But then why wouldn’t she tell somebody?” Carrie asked. “Why keep the archeological discovery of the year a secret, especially if she suspected Professor Griffin of being up to something? The only way we’re going to be able to stop Professor Griffin is to get to the San Telmo first and then prove that we’ve found it first.”

  Which was why they’d all so quickly agreed that they needed to bring Bethy and Redd and a video camera along, and why it looked as though Chris was going to get the shaky handheld-camera-footage feature film (or at least documentary) he was always pining over.

  “Well . . . ” Maddison bit her lip. It was just a theory; she hadn’t exactly hammered all the holes out yet.

  “I can actually answer that,” Redd said behind them, and Carrie and Maddison both jumped almost a foot in the air.

  “You can explain why Aunt Elsie might have found the San Telmo but never told anyone about it?” Carrie asked dubiously when she came back down to Earth.

  Redd opened his mouth confidently and then paused, a pained expression crossing his face. “Well, when you put it like that I should amend the statement,” he admitted. Carrie crossed her arms and glared at him, tapping her foot. “I have a possible explanation,” Redd said.

  “Which is?”

  “We swore a blood oath in college,” Redd explained. Maddison’s dad sighed so heavily it was clearly audible even though he was inside the ship’s cabin putting on more sunscreen. “And now that I say that out loud it doesn’t make as much perfect sense as it did when I was thinking it over inside my head.”

  “Robin,” Maddison’s dad said, poking his head around the open door with a sunscreen-white nose, “we were eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, it wasn’t . . . ” He sighed. “Just because we swore that we would all stand in front of the wreck together before we ever revealed its existence to the world doesn’t mean that Elsie remembered that promise all these years,” he said gently. He laughed, without any humor, and added, “Willis sure didn’t.”

  “Well, I’m not Willis Griffin,” Redd said. “And you aren’t, either. So tell me, Kevin, would you have announced that you found the San Telmo without calling any of us? Because I sure wouldn’t.”

  “I . . . no,” Maddison’s dad admitted. He rubbed distractedly at his nose, sneezed at the sunscreen, and sighed. “No, I would have tracked you all down if I found the San Telmo. Jeez, I’d have tracked you all down if I found a good clue to the San Telmo.”

  “So, Maddison’s theory is more than a theory?” Carrie asked. “It’s what both of you would do?”

  “Yes,” Redd agreed. “But of course I was never quite as astute as Elsie was so I probably wouldn’t have realized there was someone dogging my tracks, which throws any theories based off me out the window. I’m hardly a good indication of what Elsie would do in a given situation.”

  “Well, if we take the exact opposite of what you would do in any given situation, that might give us an idea of what Elsie would do,” Maddison’s dad suggested.

  But his eyes were dancing. “The same could be said a
bout you, Kevin,” Redd retorted.

  Maddison figured that whatever well-worn college memories they might have dredged up, they weren’t too bad. Then Chris startled awake and demanded to know why Maddison’s dad and Redd were sort of arm wrestling on the deck, and they had to explain the whole thing all over again.

  Come to think of it, what exactly did Redd mean by “blood oath”? Had there been pricking of fingers and signing of names in blood?

  Brad was miserable, tired, frustrated, and uncomfortable, in that order. Or any order. The point was that he was having a terrible time. The hotel room he was currently holed up in—a two-bed sort of deal in the most unappealing part of town and at the very cheapest rate—was the most horrifying example of its kind Brad had ever seen, and Brad was not a man accustomed to the finer things in life.

  The floor was peeling yellow linoleum, the overhead light had been flickering erratically ever since Brad had turned it on, there was a mysterious stain creeping out from under the bed, and the air conditioner was a window unit that made a lot of noise while doing nearly nothing to the temperature in the room. The air in the little room was stifling with humidity and smelled of mold and damp, and the bedspreads had a peculiar damp and gritty feel from being saturated with that humidity. But the true source of all Brad’s misery, discomfort, tiredness, and frustration was seated on the horrifying bedspread of the adjacent bed, turning a piece of yellow paper over and over in his hands with a faraway look in his eyes. Brad was more than a little thankful for that faraway look. Professor Griffin was much more terrifying when his attention was focused on the present with Brad, instead of on the sticky note he had taken from the Kingsolver girl and still seemed to think was a useful clue.

  He was terrifying just sitting there thinking, anyway. Brad had been looking for a way to ditch the professor since the evening before, when the man had dragged Brad into his office on the college campus and smashed his own statue of Melville after an exhausting day of avoiding what looked like a state-wide manhunt. But the smashed statue had simply been the professor’s way of retrieving a key to the boat he hid in an out-of-the-way marina on the far side of the island, and Brad had been on that blasted boat before he could make a break for it. Then Professor Griffin had driven the boat around the island all night with some sort of maniacal skill, staying just one step ahead of Coast Guard patrols and the eventual police and then even an FBI presence. They’d docked the boat at yet another out-of-the-way marina, this one clearly involved in some very shady dealings, before hiking cross-country and into the very outskirts of town, where the professor had rejected three different hotels before settling on this one as the least conspicuous.