by Caleb Wygal
Her possessions were missing, as was her physical presence. In the past, even if she wasn’t in the same room with Lucas, he could sense where she was in the house. It was small, just the right size for a childless couple. If she were in the bathroom tidying up, Lucas could tell from his chair. If she was in the kitchen baking, the smells drifted in from the kitchen, around the two-sided fireplace and into the sitting area he shared with his office.
He missed her, although deep down he knew she was never coming back. He hadn’t yet figured out how was going to move on.
Compounding that, he just got home from West Virginia where his grandfather, Leland, had been laid to rest. He died from Alzheimer’s disease, a malady that ran in the family. The slow degradation of his grandfather’s mind devastated Lucas and everyone else in the family.
Leland had a strong influence on Lucas’s life. He died a year after his wife, May, died of natural causes. Really, Lucas thought, he had died before she was gone. His mind started slipping long before her death.
His grandparent’s three children got together when they realized their parents couldn’t live on their own anymore. It took several months of argument and convincing before they agreed to be admitted to a nursing home. May’s health was deteriorating quickly and needed constant medical attention, and Leland couldn’t remember where he was many mornings when he awoke.
Lucas visited the two of them shortly after they settled into their new room at the nursing home. His grandfather was a coin collector. Any time Lucas came across a coin he thought was rare, he’d save it to give to his grandpa. Leland had a large safe deposit box at the bank containing rare coins valued at over thirty-thousand dollars. When the U.S. Mint released the state quarters, Leland had bought a display featuring each state’s design. He gave it to Lucas upon his visit.
“Lucas,” he had said, “I want to give you this. Don’t tell your aunts I did so.”
He handed Lucas a box containing the display. It was made of three folding, high-grade cardboard panels painted blue. There were slots for the fifty states. All of the quarters were there, except one: South Carolina.
“I came up one quarter short of completing the entire set,” his grandfather had said. “I know that you of all my grandchildren will appreciate this the most. I wanted to give you this in hopes that you’ll finish the project for me.”
Lucas assured him that he would and accepted the gift. The display now sat on a bookshelf above Lucas’s head in his office. The South Carolina quarter slot remained empty. Lucas had yet to complete his grandfather’s mission.
His grandmother was under the impression that if her health improved, she would get to go home. She promised Lucas she would make him his favorite meal upon her release: chicken and dumplings.
She never made it home.
Lucas remembered back to the last time he had seen his grandfather alive. Lucas had gone to visit his grandfather several months after his grandmother’s death in the nursing home. The rest of his family had warned Lucas that his grandfather was not the same. When Lucas got to his grandfather’s room at the nursing home, they hugged and Leland invited Lucas into his room. They sat down and Lucas tried to have a conversation with Leland. It started out well, and his grandfather was his normal gregarious self. Although he joked about the weather and the food in the cafeteria, Lucas could tell something was off.
Lucas realized as he stared into his grandfather’s eyes, that the man he’d known his entire life, who had taught him how to play baseball, who had taken him to Washington D.C. as a teenager to watch his first NBA basketball game, who had spent countless hours walking in the forest outside of his grandparent’s home, teaching Lucas valuable lessons on life and how to be a man, that from the blank look in his eyes, this man no longer knew who Lucas was.
That was one of the most difficult moments of Lucas’s life.
As he sat in his office, lost in thought, his phone buzzed on the wooden side table to his right. At this point since their breakup, Lucas had taken few phone calls. His phone rang so often, he had turned the ringer off and set it to vibrate. He just didn’t feel like talking to people. He glanced at the name showing on the screen, and went “hmm” aloud.
He hadn’t heard from this guy in quite a while. He hit the “Accept” button and said, “Hello, this is Lucas.”
The voice on the other end hesitated, breathed heavily into the mouthpiece for a few seconds before responding, “Hey Lucas. This is Darwin. How are you doing?”
“Well, not so great, Darwin, but it’s good to hear from you. How’s school?” Lucas hoped to get his mind off his current situation.
“I graduated back in the spring.”
“Congrats, Darwin! I’m proud of you,” Lucas said, allowing something positive to penetrate.
He’d known Darwin Trickett since he was a 16-year-old busboy at one of the Mahoney’s restaurants in Concord. Trickett won a scholarship available to employees in a contest from Trent Mahoney, the now deceased owner of restaurant chain. Lucas was the member of the home office who presented the award to Trickett, which he used to go to North Carolina State University in Raleigh.
Although he was more than a decade older than Trickett, he found they shared some of the same interests in history and archeology. While Lucas graduated from the Business & Economics School at West Virginia University, Darwin went to college to pursue a career in archeology.
In some ways, Lucas was jealous of Darwin and wished he’d thought about that before choosing a major.
“So what are you doing now?” Lucas asked.
“I took a job as an archivist at the N.C. Museum of Natural History here in Raleigh.”
“That’s cool. What do you do?”
Trickett took a moment to consider how to describe his job. “Basically what I’m doing now is going through the old storage rooms, trying to decide what to keep and what to throw away.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Not for the most part,” Trickett said bluntly. “You know the scene at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie where they have the Ark of the Covenant in a crate at a CIA warehouse?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, what I’m going through is in a place such as that, although on a much smaller scale. You wouldn’t believe how many artifacts are here that no one has looked at for decades. Nothing is logged into computer inventory database, which is what will happen next. I can imagine how much funding went into the financing of these digs or projects that just sits here now."
"Who knows? It sounds crazy."
"Yeah, so I came across something that might interest you."
Lucas could imagine plenty of things buried away in a museum that would interest him. "What is that?"
“The diary of Mary Ormond."
The name brought Lucas up short. He had to think about it for a second. It sounded familiar. He had to put what Darwin said into context. He was in a museum basement looking through old projects, so Mary Ormond couldn’t be anyone from recent years. Darwin knows Lucas’s interest in the historic and the ancient. Lucas knew that the museum Darwin was working in had a focus on the Carolinas.
Carolina history. Carolina history. Ormond. Then Lucas thought pirates and it clicked.
“Do you mean Blackbeard’s wife?”
“That’s the one,” Darwin chuckled. “It took me longer to figure it out than you, though. When Governor Charles Eden married the two, she became Mary Teach. She was, like, sixteen-years-old at the time.”
“Dang.” Lucas went through a period in his twenties where he studied a lot of pirate history. Not for any reason in particular. It was a subject he had found interesting since he was a child, and he saw a book in a small coastal bookstore while traveling in South Carolina that gave an overall history of pirates. Later, he had gone to the library and picked up books focusing on Captain Kidd and Blackbeard.
Despite being the most notorious pirate in history, not much is known about Blackbeard’s personal life. Mos
t believe his given name was Edward Teach and hailed from Bristol, England. His transgressions were well documented, sometimes embellished, although not too far from what was probably the truth. Finding something from the point-of-view of one of his wives was unheard of.
“Where did you come across it?”
“It was just in a box, sitting in a manila envelope. There were some other artifacts in there—bowls, spoons, etc.—but it was unceremoniously dumped in this box.”
Lucas shook his head. “I think that would be an important find.”
“Yeah, me too,” Darwin said.
“Who was behind the project?”
“Some guy named Travis Cole,” Darwin answered.
“Does he still work there?”
“Not that I can tell. I’ve never met him if he does. I looked at the staff registry in case he was one of those professors with tenure that comes and goes as they please, but he’s not listed.”
“Okay. Could you read any of it?”
“Yeah, it’s actually in good condition. The lettering is faded on some pages and the paper is yellowed, maybe some mold on the leather cover. Still a great find. I have no idea what it was in when it they found it.”
Lucas let out a long, low whistle. “So what did it say? What did she write?”
“What little bit I’ve read is mainly about her waiting for Blackbeard to come back from his voyages.”
“So this would have had to have been after he resumed pirating?”
“Allegedly.”
Blackbeard spent part of the last year of his life living around the Outer Banks of North Carolina in Bath. In 1717, he received an Act of Grace, which was, in effect, a pardon for his pirating actions from the Governor of North Carolina at the time, Charles Eden. The colony of North Carolina's seat at the time was based in Bath Town where the Pamlico River joined the sea. This was where the Darwin said the journal of Mary Ormond was found. In June of 1718, Blackbeard set up residence along the shore of the town, near Eden's home. Many believe that Eden granted Blackbeard the Act of Grace in return for a part of the pirate's booty. Land records show that Eden sold his home in April of 1718 when rumors surfaced of his arrangement with the infamous pirate, before Blackbeard moved into the area. They never found the tunnel.
“Lucas, the diary wasn’t the biggest find in the box,” Darwin said matter-of-factly.
Lucas had a difficult time imagining what would be bigger than the diary of Blackbeard’s wife, Mary Ormond. “What is it?”
On the other end of the line, Lucas could hear Darwin make a sound resembling a maniacal laugh.
“A treasure map,” he said.
Lucas’s jaw dropped.
3
"A treasure map?" Lucas repeated as a question.
"That's right," Trickett confirmed. “The problem is that it’s really just a sketch of an area.”
The revelation sent Lucas’s mind spinning. For centuries, legends existed of the “Lost Treasure” of Blackbeard. Treasure hunters from all over the globe had come and gone from the Outer Banks of North Carolina where they hoped Blackbeard hid his treasure. Salvors have tried to uncover his treasure from the minute Blackbeard had his head lopped off on a November day in 1718 near Ocracoke Island.
The night before he lost his head, someone asked him if Mrs. Teach, Mary Ormond in this case, knew where he had buried his money. He replied that nobody but himself and the devil knew where it was. No cache of gold or money has been found to date.
In 1996, the wreckage believed to be Blackbeard’s flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, was found near Beaufort Inlet near Moorhead City. Divers recovered cannons, cannonballs, pewter platters, pottery fragments, anchors, and other artifacts from the wreckage. However, no one found any large chests of gold, silver, and jewels.
“What area is it a map of?” Lucas asked.
“I have no idea.”
“Tell me more about the map,” Lucas said. “What does it look like? Did he write anything on it?”
Darwin explained that the sketch depicted what looked like an island shaped like a human kidney on the left side of the map. The island had a river with numerous tributaries that looked like veins. The artist divided the map into three sections. The island on the left sat farther in than where the mainland ended. On the right side of the map was the continent. The shore of the landmass began its curve inland near the right side of the island.
There was no indication of where true north was. Darwin said Blackbeard had drawn a picture of either the sun or moon cut in half by a line in the upper-left-hand corner of the map. He couldn’t figure out if depicted a sunrise, moonrise, sunset or moon set. If they could figure that out, they might know where true north was in relation to the map.
“So, did he really draw an X? Does X mark the spot?”
Darwin laughed. “Actually, he did. There’s an X and a big tree on the rounded part of the bottom-right of the island. He made a note on the back, ‘treasurre buried 23 paces in by the large oak under a falling sun near the cove where the dolphinss gather.’”
“So, any idea where this is?”
“I have no idea,” Darwin said. “It’s vague, and he may not have known the name of where he was when he buried it.”
“So, it could be almost anywhere then?”
“Pretty much.”
Lucas seemed to remember that Blackbeard's travels took him from South America, to the Caribbean and as far north as Delaware Bay. A very large area to try to pin down from a few crudely drawn lines on a 300-year-old parchment.
"How did that happen? How did the people who found the journal not see it?"
"Well, the map was tucked into the journal fairly well and it's thin. I mean, I almost dropped the journal and jerked to catch the map when the paper fell out. It could be they never knew it was there. I haven't had the chance to ask anyone here about it yet."
"Why not?"
"There's no one here to tell,” Darwin said. Being late on a Sunday night, Lucas could understand the staff wanting to spend time elsewhere. Darwin continued, “I found it a little bit ago. I'm taking a break, and I knew it had been a while since I spoke to you. I knew you'd be interested in this. I wanted to tell someone."
"Thanks Darwin. Makes me feel special that you thought of me,” Lucas laughed.
"You're partly responsible for getting me into college, and I wouldn't be here if it weren't for the Mahoney's. The company as it was doesn't exist anymore, and Quinn is dead. You're my one last connection."
Lucas fell silent for a moment. The mention of Quinn Mahoney brought back sad memories. The Mahoney’s hired Lucas right after graduating from West Virginia University. He threw his belongings in the back of his car and drove down to Concord where he went to work as an assistant for Mr. Mahoney’s son, Trent.
A year into his employment, Lucas arrived at the office building in Concord to find Trent shot dead in the parking lot outside the front entrance. A high-security perimeter surrounded the building requiring anyone arriving at the gate to enter an access code to get in. Lucas was the last person to leave the evening before and the gate logs showed no one getting in between the time Lucas left and arrived the next morning.
With all signs of the murder pointing at Lucas, he took it upon himself to clear his name. In less than a day, Lucas broke up a mugging, met Kristen, was threatened at gunpoint, and discovered the person responsible. Quinn Mahoney died of a heart attack a few months later. The family sold the corporation shortly thereafter. By that time, Lucas was in the planning stages of his bookstore.
“It was a sad mess of things that happened with them,” Lucas said.
“Yes, I can imagine,” Darwin agreed. “How is the bookstore doing?”
Lucas caught Darwin up with his growing business, ending with, “Right now, I’m just taking some time off. I have someone taking care of the one store and waiting to hear back on a property for another.”
“That’s great!”
“Thanks,” Lucas said with l
ittle conviction in his voice.
Darwin picked up on that, and asked, “What’s the matter? Thought you’d be happier about it than that.”
He didn’t really want to talk about it, but informed Darwin of his impending divorce from Kristen leaving out the scandalous details.
“Man, that’s tough,” Darwin said. “I’m really sorry to hear that.”
“Thanks,” Lucas said in about the same dry tone as before.
“Look,” Darwin said, “part of the reason I called was to see if you wanted to go on an adventure? I actually go on vacation starting on Monday and don’t really have any plans. It’s difficult for a guy such as me to make travel plans when all I own is a moped.”
Darwin didn’t drive a car from what Lucas remembered. Darwin never had the money for a car. Picturing Darwin cruising along the side of the interstates on a moped made Lucas smile, although he thought that might be illegal. “What sort of adventure?”
“How about a treasure hunt?”
“You’re not serious.”
“I am,” Darwin stated. “Look, no one knows about this journal or map from Blackbeard yet. I’ve already snapped a picture of the document with my phone. When I go to the museum director and tell him about the map, it’ll take weeks before they even think about following up on this. I’ve seen how they work. This bureaucracy can be glacially slow. There’s nothing in my contract with the museum that says I can’t use anything I’ve learned from this job outside of these walls. I might not be able to take the actual artifacts. With this, I don’t need them.”
