by E. A. House
“Wait, what?” Chris yelped.
“Aunt Elsie never explained where she got this necklace from,” Carrie told Dr. McRae. “Just that it was very special to her.”
“Ryan bought the locket for Elsie the summer before everything went wrong,” Dr. McRae said, looking sadly at the compass. “He had a friend who worked at a small, family-owned metalworking business and he did all of the detail work for next to nothing because Ryan made him a pie. Elsie had always wanted a locket-type necklace that wasn’t a heart or an oval. The compass—the compass was an afterthought and it never really worked, there was something wrong with the inner mechanisms and it stopped being able to point north three days after Elsie got it.”
“So, what is it doing here?” Chris demanded, even though he already knew.
“Elsie didn’t exactly lose the compass after it stopped working,” Dr. McRae said. He rubbed the last of the grit from the face of the compass and handed it to Carrie, who stuffed it hurriedly into a pocket. “She just used it as a paperweight.”
“But she never forgot it was a compass.” Redd sounded delighted. “And what good is a compass if you can’t use it to point the way?”
“So, then she used it as a trail marker,” Carrie said. “To let us know which way she went when she was here.” She was trying to peer around Chris and down the tunnel. The cave they were in had hardly hit claustrophobic levels of narrowness and low ceilings, but only two people could walk comfortably side by side, and turning around when you’d stopped suddenly was an upright version of Twister. And the caves were living up to the “screaming” part of their name by screaming off and on with no warning, in a horrible, high-pitched tone that made everyone jump. “But a trail marker to what?”
“I guess we take this branch and go find out,” Chris said. Then he almost ran into Maddison and nearly tripped Carrie. The cave was getting narrower. It continued to get narrower as they went along, the rock walls they were passing a slightly different color and a harder type of sandstone, and then finally it opened out again, into an echoing cavern flooded with water and very faintly lit with natural light from some access point far above.
“Hello,” Redd said as he popped out of the doorway. “Mysterious cavern ahoy!”
“Huh,” said Chris, who was picking his way on partially and only just submerged rocks to where the water in the cavern looked deeper, shining his flashlight into the water as he went. “I still don’t see the San Telmo.”
That was when Maria almost stepped on a sword. It had been buried in the wet sand at an angle, so when she stepped just slightly on the bent hilt it sprang out of the sand only halfway, and Maria yelped and sat down. Chris, startled, missed a step on a slippery rock and landed with a painful splash in waist-deep water.
“Mercy!” Maria gasped, digging gingerly around the banged-up metal sword until she’d dislodged the whole thing. “Is this what I think it is?”
“Ooh, a nicely preserved Spanish rapier!” Dr. McRae said, dropping to his knees next to Maria to examine it. “Err,” he added guiltily, “you aren’t hurt, are you?”
“It missed me,” Maria said cheerfully. “But this means we’re on the right track, doesn’t it?”
She was tugging her fins on as she spoke, and adjusting her mask, and Chris realized what she was planning to do—take a dive into the deepest part of the underground lake—just a second before she went and did it. It should not have been possible for anyone to take what was basically a running leap at the water while loaded down with an oxygen tank and wearing flippers, but Maria managed it. Chris needed to re-evaluate his assessment of Maria as “more ordinary than Redd.” She was weirder, or at least even more impulsive.
Dr. McRae appeared to share Chris’s sentiment. “Where, exactly, did you find her?” he asked Redd as the ripples disappeared and the water went still again.
“I told you, I was taking some filmmaking courses in Ohio,” Redd explained. Dr. McRae gave him a look, and he grinned sheepishly and added, “We were shooting a scene at the same rock quarry her scuba-diving class was using for dive practice, and she rescued me when I fell in. We started talking about how much we didn’t like cold weather and she told me to look her up the next time I was in Florida. If she’d managed to move to Florida by that point.”
Dr. McRae pinched the bridge of his nose. “And it didn’t occur to you that a professional scuba diver who did all her preliminary certifications in a landlocked Midwestern state might be a little . . . ” He visibly tried to find a polite way to phrase the next bit, but couldn’t. “ . . . off the deep end?”
Oh, hey, that one was a pun, Chris thought.
“Ohio’s not completely landlocked,” Bethy pointed out. “They have the Great Lakes along one border and a couple of rivers.”
“I think Kevin is more worried about the fact that she just took off into what, for all we know, is an unexplored cave system. Without any backup, with one light, and with a single spool of bright orange nylon thread to lay a track so she doesn’t get lost,” Detective Hermann said. “There could be all kinds of dangers down there that we don’t know about. Rock slides, strong currents, wreckage . . . ”
“Really cold water,” offered Chris, who was not wearing a wetsuit the way Maria was and was currently soaked up to his shoulders.
“Angry fish,” Maddison offered. Several people stared at her. “What?” she asked. “I mean I was gonna point out that mythical lost nuclear submarine that’s supposed to be around here somewhere but I figured I wouldn’t alarm anyone unnecessarily.”
Chris, who, now that he thought about it, did remember reading that there was supposed to have been a nuclear submarine that went missing somewhere near Archer’s Grove in the fifties, decided not to mention that Cesar Francisco was rumored to have made it to this end of the island before dying from his wounds.
“Angry fish are alarming,” said Carrie, who had never forgotten their family fishing trip when they were twelve.
“There are no angry fish or nuclear submarines in this cave system,” Redd said patiently, with a confidence that he couldn’t possibly feel, as he hadn’t explored the cave system himself, yet. Dr. McRae opened his mouth to say something more, probably on the subject of Ohio or unseen dangers, but then Maria broke the surface of the water with a splash.
“So, this cave system’s amazing,” she said as soon as her mouthpiece was out, sloshing across the cavern towards them with something bundled in her fist. “The water is almost crystal clear and it’s not that cold.” Chris would have disagreed with that statement but he was much too curious about what Maria was holding. “And there’s natural light coming in from somewhere.”
She came to a halt in front of Chris and dumped a huge fistful of coins on his lap.
“And there’s this massive wreck of a ship washed up in the cavern right next to this one,” she said.
“You found it?”
“Well . . . does the San Telmo have a prow with an octopus on it?”
Bethy made a little yelp of triumph and Carrie and Maddison both clapped hands over their mouths in shock. Dr. McRae went white as a sheet, and Redd folded into a sitting position on the floor so quickly he must have been feeling wobbly. Chris was already sitting down—he’d never bothered to get up after falling in the water the first time—but he felt like he needed to anyway. “Where?” he whispered, and Maria looked at him in amusement.
“You can’t see it from here,” she explained, “but there’s a trail of gold and silver coins underwater that lead from this cavern into the next. I think the water must naturally flow in through here, into the next cavern, and then back out with the tides, and I’ll bet the waves get bad when it storms. Anyway”—she had noticed the rise in fidgeting and so continued—“I’ll bet if you squeeze through that hole in the left wall of this cavern,” she said, smiling and pointing, “you’ll come out in the next one. You could probably even swim under without gear if you knew where you were going.”
“I’
ll see if I fit through the hole first,” Chris said. Getting lost underwater sounded terrifying, and he was beginning to doubt that Maria had any kind of a self-preservation instinct. Not that squeezing through a narrow crevice between one cave and the next was Chris’s idea of fun; claustrophobia wasn’t a problem for him but Chris could certainly see why some people had trouble with tight spaces. And being underground with the weight of most of the island pressing down on him made the mild feeling of being buried alive worse. This particular narrow crevice wasn’t that bad, though. If Chris turned sideways, and didn’t take deep breaths it would all be—he froze. Then backed out the three sideways steps he’d managed and turned to Dr. McRae.
“I,” Chris said, “um, sorry—did you want to go first? You and Redd?”
Dr. McRae looked at the crevice for a long moment before answering, and when he did his gaze was distant. “I won’t speak for Redd,” he said. “We drifted too far apart too long ago for me to do that. But I don’t. This was your idea, yours and Carrie’s and Maddison’s, so I want the three of you to see the San Telmo first. It’s not my ship anymore.” He paused. “But, um, maybe Detective Hermann could actually go first and take a good look around before Griffin pops out of a corner or something?”
“But Aunt Elsie,” Chris said. “She was—well, she was your . . . ”
“Yes,” Dr. McRae said, “but she was your aunt.”
Chris turned to Redd, who looked uncharacteristically somber himself. “I’ll follow you with Bethy,” he said quietly. Bethy had the video camera in her hands, and it was on—she’d been filming their meandering progress even though she’d told Redd she didn’t think there would be anything useful in the resulting tape—but she currently had it pointed politely at the floor. “There are certain things that you don’t exploit on television, and this is one of them,” she said.
Then Carrie decided to be extra weird about it, too. Which for Carrie meant that instead of leading the way like a sensible person when Detective Hermann called back through the crevice that a grown man could fit through it, and it was all clear, she stuffed Chris into the narrow crevice ahead of her and Maddison. Chris had a feeling they had somehow discussed this beforehand because Maddison didn’t seem surprised when Carrie took leave of her senses and shoved Chris in front of her, saying, “You believed in this the most, you go first.”
“Okay, okay,” Chris hissed, walking like a large and awkward crab. “I’ll go first. Everyone’s lost their marbles and I’m the only one who—whoa.”
He hadn’t let himself daydream about what it would look like when he found the San Telmo. There were too many variables, there was so much danger, and Chris had never been able to shake the sneaking feeling that they would find the San Telmo only to discover it had already been looted and stripped of everything valuable. So, he’d never let himself think about what it would look like if (or when) he found the ship deep underwater or in pieces on a beach somewhere. Aside from reading every description of the San Telmo he could get his hands on—it was a very ordinary example of the typical Spanish merchant vessel of the time, distinctive only in the octopus carved on the prow—Chris had refused to let his imagination run away from him.
But if he had ever allowed himself to let his imagination wander, to picture the shattered hull and the octopus prow and the chests of treasure meant for the dowry of a princess, it would have looked a little like what he was seeing. Only not nearly as cool.
It was the most amazing thing Chris had ever seen. Shipwrecks underwater were subject to the ravages of time and saltwater; this ship had escaped much of that by washing up on land. The San Telmo lay on the rocky floor of the cavern, her prow with the fabled octopus crushed against the far wall of the cave and her wrecked and splintered back listing into the water. Heavy wooden chests, the iron bands and hinges that had once held them together rusting away in the damp, were scattered around the cave. The ancient lids had cracked open here and there to spill a tempting array of dirt-encrusted treasure.
And what treasure! They had been finding coins all day at a volume much greater than you ever got with washed-up shipwrecks, even off the Florida coast, but as Chris splashed through shallow puddles to the hull of the San Telmo he walked over more coins than he had ever seen in his life. It was like Aladdin’s cave. There were tarnished silver plates and dimly glowing golden plates and strings and strings of beads of both gold and silver. There were strings of fat pearls. There were finely engraved silver forks and knives with pearls set in the handles, wine glasses only partly crushed, silver and gold and even ceramic candlesticks. There were plates of the finest china, their delicate patterns clear even after all these years. There were bracelets and rings, rubies and emeralds, even more pearls and the rotting remnants of bolt after bolt of fine fabric. There was, in short, a king’s ransom—or perhaps more accurately a future queen’s—hidden here by the Atlantic Ocean.
“This is amazing,” Chris said, splashing in a circle in the shallow standing water. “And to think it was here all this time! Why didn’t anyone follow the trail of coins back to this years ago?”
“People only see what they want to see,” Dr. McRae said faintly. He had followed Carrie and Maddison through and was standing just out of the crevice, staring at the ship. He didn’t look like he could believe they had found it either.
“Also, screaming caves,” Maddison pointed out. She was hovering over one of the chests. “Do you think we should touch any of this or should we stuff everything in climate-controlled boxes and take it to a museum?”
Carrie paused in the act of picking up an especially tempting golden statue of a bird. “We probably shouldn’t touch anything,” she admitted. “But—pictures would be a good idea, and we can still look.”
“Right,” said Redd, who had been standing in front of the ship just staring at it, his eyes wide and a hair crazier than normal. He grabbed Bethy by the arm and gently positioned her in front of the San Telmo. “Bethy, this is a job for the person with a camera.”
“I—I—I have no idea how to even start filming this!” Bethy said, clutching the camera to her chest. “This is an actual archeological find, there isn’t a single thing I need to cover up with clever camera angles!”
“Maybe we should just look at it a little bit first,” Redd said after an awkward pause. “Here, put the camera down on a nice dry bit of rock and see if you can find an emerald cut like an egg.”
“I’m not putting this camera down! The instant I do that it’s going to fall in the water,” Bethy said, and took several careful steps through shin-deep water so she could film the whole front of the wrecked ship. When she went around to the back of the ship, camera still steady, Redd followed her.
There was a lot to look at; even Detective Hermann, who had not spent the summer trying to find the San Telmo and was only along in case Griffin showed up, was walking around the wrecked ship with an awed expression; Maria was poking around in the water. She’d come through underwater so she could rewind her emergency line and had fished up even more coins and a thin gold necklace along the way.
“You know,” she said, rubbing silt off a coin, “I would not want to be the first person to go through these caves. You could get lost in here really easily and some of the underground currents are a little strong.”
Detective Hermann stopped his circuit of the cave next to her. “Luckily for us, the person who found this ship before we did was not you,” he said, looking up at the wrecked ship.
Maria looked up at him, startled; Chris looked at the detective in surprise, too, and actually came a step closer to the two of them, because Detective Hermann had never been anything other than polite and that was a little . . . harsh, what he had just said to Maria. But the detective and the scuba diver were half hidden behind the bulk of the ship, and if Chris got any closer they would realize he was there. And interrupting this conversation would be beyond awkward.
“I’m sorry, that came out wrong,” the detective said, and Chris
breathed a sigh of relief. “I knew someone who died, exploring caves,” Detective Hermann explained. “You scared me a little when you took off all by yourself with only a line and one lantern.”
Maria winced. “That was a bad idea,” she said. “I’m a little too used to diving with a partner and quite honestly I forgot he didn’t come along until I was already underwater, and then this cave system didn’t seem that dangerous to me, so I was maybe taking more risks than I should have.”
Detective Hermann cast a wary glance around the cave and said, “This cave system might very well be dangerous.” That would have come across as foreboding, if Detective Hermann hadn’t been sent along on this trip solely in case Professor Griffin turned up and did something dangerous.
So, of course, that was when Professor Griffin turned up and did something dangerous.
THAT THEY MANAGED FOUR AND A HALF HOURS without Professor Griffin turning up was something of a miracle, all things considered. As Carrie pointed out later, with no small amount of suppressed fury, he had the same coordinates they did. All he actually needed to do was play around with the numbers for a while, and if you didn’t pretend that they were some sort of clever cypher Carrie had put together—not an impossible theory, but one that assumed Carrie liked cyphers even more than Chris did—then you had only a limited number of ways to rearrange those numbers. Sooner or later the professor was bound to stumble across the right combination, if only by process of elimination, and so sooner or later he was going to find the San Telmo. The idea had really only been to get there before him.
It was an idea that had neglected one very important factor: that if they got to the San Telmo before Professor Griffin did, that did not mean they would leave the site of the San Telmo before Professor Griffin arrived. Which he did, wearing a crazy expression. And holding a gun.
“So!” he said, halfway through the crevice and already aiming a gun at Chris.
