Paranormal Mystery Boxset Books 1-3: Legends of Treasure

by Lois D. Brown

  “Your husband’s name is not on any of these investments. Is there a reason for that?”

  For the first time, Emily’s face showed emotion—disgust. “Because my husband was an idiot. He gambled, embezzled, and bribed. Trust me, I didn’t vote for him.”

  Shocked, Maria took a second to form her next sentence carefully. “You knew all of this about him, but never said anything to the authorities?”

  Slightly ruffled, Emily answered, “I wasn’t one hundred percent sure. But I had my suspicions. I took care of everything financially because I didn’t trust him. I paid for the house, the bills, the cars, everything. I let my husband do what he wanted with his money, or the lack of it. The arrangement worked.”

  One word that Emily had said had stuck with Maria. “And just who do you think your husband was bribing?”

  The ball of yarn stopped turning. Emily set her needles down. “I think before I say anything else, I’d better get a lawyer, for whom I will also be paying by myself. Can I show you out?”

  Maria obliged Emily for a moment and stood up, but she didn’t move toward the door. “Emily, who do you think had a reason to kill your husband? I need names. I want to find his killer and clear your family of any wrongdoing. You must know something. Tell me at least the name of a business involved. Is it someone local?”

  Emily grimaced and kept quiet.

  Frustrated, Maria was about to make her case some more, but she stopped. She didn’t need to. She already had the answer to her own question. The name she had seen in his journal. The note in the cell phone case. “It’s Cal Emerson, isn’t it? Your husband was bribing the Utah senator. But why? What did Emerson do?”

  Emily pursed her lips tightly. “Call my lawyer, Chief Branson. I’m done with this conversation.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Crystal had uncovered an old tunnel, the entrance of which had been sealed with crude bricks and mortar.

  RANGE MAGAZINE. “MONTEZUMA’S REVENGE” BY RICHARD MENZIES, FALL ISSUE 1998.

  Driving home from the office that night, Maria was in a bad mood for two reasons. The first was because Emily Hayward had been stubborn and unwilling to give out any more information. Investigating a case was so much easier when people would actually tell the truth. Sadly, that didn’t happen very often. Even the ones who weren’t guilty clammed up half the time.

  The second reason Maria was grumpy was because there had been complications getting Mayor Hayward’s cell phone records. It was ridiculous. She needed the records to corroborate her theory about Mayor Hayward bribing Cal Emerson. If the financial records and the cell phone records concurred, the motive for Mayor Hayward’s murder just became stronger than ever. But for the next few days, she wouldn’t know because of some red tape mess up. Waiting was the worst part of any investigation.

  So instead, Maria would do as much as she could on her own. Tomorrow she’d spend the day at the office, looking over all aspects of the case and re-listening to interviews. She had conducted another six that afternoon, but none had been as interesting as the one with Emily.

  One piece of good news was that Ryker Jephson, the forensic archaeologist she’d emailed, had gotten back to her. He was on sabbatical for the semester and had time to spare. He was also of the opinion that in view of the murder and consequent discovery of hidden drawings, the cave needed to be excavated to see if there was something else that may have been a motive in the killing. Even better news was that he was going to do all of the nasty paperwork—apply for a BLM permit with the state, create the research design, and even submit the package as a rushed salvage project, which meant, if approved, the excavation could start as early as next week.

  As Maria went over in her mind all of the things she needed to get done in the next few days, she groaned. With everything that had been going on, she’d completely forgotten her weekly Skype appointment she had every Friday night with her psychologist from the CIA, Dr. Roberts. Spending her evening trying to prove to an intelligent man that she really wasn’t crazy and that she really could handle this job the government had so kindly provided her was not high on Maria’s list to of fun things to do. But that was part of the deal she’d made with the CIA, and there was no way out of it if she wanted to keep her job, which she did.

  While the last week hadn’t given her the exact adrenaline rush that working in the CIA had, it had been fulfilling in many other ways. She’d send Dr. Roberts a message and beg for forgiveness. Her excuse would be that she forgot. And that meant her mind was thinking of things other than Tehran.

  Kanab was growing on her, more than she’d thought it would.

  When Maria texted Dr. Roberts to tell him she was sorry she’d missed the appointment, he’d responded it wasn’t a problem and they could just do it later that night instead. It wasn’t the answer Maria had hoped to hear, but then again the man was nice enough, and he usually did have good tips for her.

  As Maria waited for the time to pass before the appointment with Dr. Roberts, she pulled out the dusty box of her grandfather’s from her kitchen cupboard. There were still multiple newspaper and magazine articles to read. As she tried to choose which one to start with, she wondered what had made her grandfather become a “closet treasure hunter” in the first place. It wasn’t that he was lazy and wanted a free ride in life. He’d always worked hard at his job and seemed to love it.

  A thought occurred to Maria. Maybe her grandfather had been one of those who joined the treasure hunt with Freddie Crystal. If she remembered right, that had been in Kanab in the 1920s. Her grandfather would have been a small boy. But maybe he remembered. Maybe he’d walked up and down the mountain with other men, women, and children in the hopes of finding the treasure the man Freddie Crystal had claimed was there.

  Things done as a child stick with a person. It was all about making neural pathways. Maria knew all about those. They could be a blessing or a curse—mostly a curse for Maria; however, she was sure her fond memories of Kanab were the reason she was falling more and more in love with the town each day.

  Maria sifted through 60-year-old articles from magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and Argosy. They were written differently than most magazine articles these days. These clippings read more like a story. Who said today’s media was all about entertainment? Apparently it was the same way six decades ago.

  The piece she decided to read first was from a men’s magazine called Argosy, printed in 1966. It was a storybook telling of Freddie Crystal’s search for Montezuma’s treasure. Freddie, it turned out, had come to Kanab twice. The first time was in 1914 when he brought with him a picture of a petroglyph he’d seen published in a Utah newspaper. The petroglyph was the same one he had seen in a panoramic vision up in Idaho.

  He’d searched for the petroglyph for two years, until he finally learned it had been blasted off the canyon wall to make a place to store hay. He’d left discouraged. However, he returned five years later, this time with a yellowed, ancient map he’d retrieved from a Mexican monastery. Using the map, Freddie and some of his cowboy friends located the spot where the map indicated the treasure would be.

  Maria’s grandfather had underlined this portion of the article:

  They craned their necks and followed the line of the step—holes the size of human feet, cut into the sandstone, which climbed one hundred feet up the bluff to a lookout.

  With great effort, Freddie calmed himself. Then he sat down and forced himself to check once again every clue on the map. The topography was correct, the petroglyphs were exactly where the map showed them to be, and the steps on the bluff matched perfectly with those on the map.

  Breathing heavily, Freddie rose. “Boys,” he said, “we’ll have ol’ Montezuma’s treasure by Christmas.”

  His eyes wandered over the pale cliffs, searching, probing. Then he grunted, scrambled up the steps, with the cowboys following, went directly to a jutting rock formation and plunged the blade of his knife into a crevice. It soon broke through th
e hard crust of sand which, to a careless eye, seemed to be a part of the rock. They saw that the crevice was actually the mouth of a tunnel.

  They dug for several days, and had scraped out a good sixty feet of sand, when they hit a plugged-up hole, sixteen feet long by fourteen feet wide. The obstruction was a wall of roughly cut blocks of blue limestone, cemented together with marsh-mortar. Whoever had placed the blocks in the tunnel had gone to a lot of trouble, for the nearest deposit of blue limestone was thirty miles away.

  Maria’s computer beeped. Dr. Roberts was calling. She had to stop reading. However, she understood more why her grandfather was the way he was. She was just like him. It was why she had gone into law enforcement in the first place. She loved a good mystery.

  Maria clicked the touchpad on her laptop to accept the Skype call.

  “Hi, Dr. Roberts. Good to see you.” Maria adjusted the angle of her camera so the psychologist wouldn’t be staring up her nose during the whole session. Heaven knew she’d seen the inside of his plenty.

  “Good to see you, too,” he answered, fiddling with his glasses.

  His glasses were the only thing that said “doctor” about him. Dr. Roberts had a full head of hair, the thick luscious wavy kind. His face was pretty basic, but not nerdy by any means.

  “I probably need to keep it short tonight.” Maria let out an enormous yawn for good measure. “I’m working on a case right now, a murder investigation as a matter of fact, and I’ve been putting in some long hours.”

  “A murder investigation?” Dr. Roberts perked up. “How’s that been with your discomfort with death?”

  Discomfort? The man made everything into a euphemism.

  “Tricky the first day, but now that the dead body is at the coroner’s, and I’m just conducting interviews and gathering evidence, it’s good. I like working. A lot.” Maria always made sure Dr. Roberts knew how much having a job—a purpose—meant to her.

  “And how have you been sleeping?”

  Maria wiggled in her chair. “Hmm, that all depends how you define sleeping.”

  The psychologist rolled his eyes. “Maria?”

  “Okay, I’ve probably slept two nights this week. But I’ve been doing great with all that relaxation stuff. Promise.”

  “And the depersonalization,” he said. “How often?”

  “Twice since we last talked.” Maria would tell him how many times, but there was no way she’d tell him how bad it was in the cave.

  Dr. Roberts hemmed. “Well, not much better, but not getting worse, either. I think that’s progress of sorts. Have you been having any nightmares?”

  “You know, it’s not so much the nightmares that bother me. I probably don’t sleep enough to have them, but it’s the daytime . . . hallucinations that bother me the most.” Maria bit her lip. She hated to divulge too much, but she really would love a way to stop seeing ghosts.

  “You mean the ghosts?”

  She nodded.

  “You still see them?”

  She nodded again. “I mean, it’s not like it was in Tehran after the . . . well, you know. But the ghosts still do come and go.”

  “Have you ever tried speaking to one of them? I know they scare you, but maybe it’s time you tried facing them. It might show your subconscious that it no longer needs to make these hallucinations up because you no longer fear them. I mean, if you ended up chatting with a ghost at the grocery store and normalized the experience, it might convince your subconscious to stop punishing yourself.”

  Maria liked when Dr. Roberts explained her condition. He always made the strangest things sound so every day: Oh, so you see ghosts. No big deal. Just talk to them and tell them to go away. It sounded way too easy.

  Propping her elbow on the desk, Maria rested her chin in her hand. “I don’t know if that would work. Besides, I can’t imagine engaging one of the ghosts in a conversation. I don’t know. If I talk to them that would make them real.”

  “Maria, does this conversation make you feel anxious?” Dr. Roberts straightened his glasses again.

  “No, not really.”

  “What are you doing with your fingers?”

  Maria noticed the fingers on her hand were tapping out the first five notes to Brahms Concerto on her cheek, over and over again. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I just want you to notice your compulsions so you can learn to stop them. They only aggravate the problem of you not facing your fear.”

  The defeat she constantly tried to hide bubbled upward. “Maybe I don’t deserve to feel better. If I ever feel better it might mean I thought what I did to . . . them . . . was acceptable.”

  Dr. Roberts cleared his throat. “When you say ‘them,’ are you referring to your team in Tehran?”

  “Yes.” It was barely a whisper. Maria’s hands and arms had begun to shake.

  “Maria, you didn’t do anything to them. Stop telling yourself it was your fault. We’ve talked about this before. Listen, don’t try to talk to all of the ghosts. Pick one and try speaking to it. Tell it your fears, your feelings, your hopes. See what its reaction is. You might learn quite a bit about your subconscious this way. Will you do it?”

  Maria squirmed in her chair. “Maybe. We’ll see. I’ll check in with you next week?”

  “Friday night this time?” he asked.

  “Yes, and sorry again for forgetting.” Maria closed the Skype call and stared at the computer-generated nature scene on her desktop. If she had to talk to one of her ghosts it would definitely be the Aztec one from the cave. It was he that puzzled her the most.

  Talking about Tehran always aggravated Maria’s phasmophobia. Tonight was no different. Even though her arms, legs, and eyelids felt so heavy they might fall off, her body still jerked awake at the exact moment her mind started to drift into relaxation and sleep. It happened again and again until Maria decided it was useless, and she got out of bed and filled up the bathtub. Maybe a warm bath would relax her.

  It was there, in the water, when her first ghost of the night came. She was thinking about her cell in Tehran and how many times she’d longed for a soak in the tub. At least two times every hour. Two times twenty-four hours made that . . . forty-eight times per day and that number times three hundred and eleven days, the entire time spent in solitary confinement, was—

  Before her brain could churn out the answer, a tall, lanky body appeared sitting on her bathroom vanity swinging one foot. The other foot was gone. From the knee down on the ghost’s right side was empty space. He had no leg. It was cleanly severed. No tendons or blood vessels hung down. Yet the open wound festered, with maggots feasting on the rot.

  Maria’s breathing sped up and she closed her eyes. She did not want to talk to him. Who cared what Dr. Roberts said? Perhaps playing a bit of Brahms in the water for a few minutes might get rid of him. She hummed the tune as she fingered the notes. In addition, she stretched the tense muscles in her neck by rotating it from side to side and took deep breaths.

  Her body relaxed . . . kind of. That should take care of him. As Maria’s eyelids popped open, a crowd of ghosts had now breached her bathroom. They were everywhere. Standing on the toilet, hovering over the bathtub, shoved into the shower. They all had parts missing. Fingers, ears, feet. And, as always, several had no heads.

  It was too much. Maria screamed. A curdling noise that made her own ears ring. There were so many at once and so close!

  Overcome with the desire to run away, she realized every single one of her muscles was paralyzed. Maybe her lead-like body would sink in the water, and she would drown? It wouldn’t be that bad of a way to go. Just a few quick intakes of liquid and she would pass out and move out of this world. Away from her madness.

  A pounding in her head. Go away, go away, go away!

  Dr. Roberts was an idiot. There was no way for her to speak to her ghosts. Every time they came she couldn’t move her mouth to form intelligible words.

  Only her thoughts still worked. And they were thoughts no one
would ever want to hear spoken. They were a constant barrage of berating insults. Condemnation of her weakness, her stupidity, her ineptness. Modes of suffering she should endure for what she had done in Tehran. Death wishes for herself.

  Just when Maria was at her breaking point, just when sliding into the bath water and dying was no longer a possibility but inevitability, the Aztec ghost appeared. He stayed his distance, standing in her walk-in closet next to the bathroom. Maria had to look closely to tell, but it appeared he was shielding his eyes as if the lights were too bright or as if . . . he was embarrassed to see her undressed in the bathtub? That couldn’t be. It certainly didn’t bother the others.

  Was she still sane? Had she completely lost it?

  The only sliver of logic that remained inside her mind shouted at her. Talk to one of them!

  It was truly her last option. She had no other idea what to do. She would try to talk to the Aztec ghost that had joined the ranks of the other souls that haunted her.

  With concerted effort, willing every bit of strength she had left, she forced her mouth to open up and her vocal cords to rub against each other.

  “Gaahh.”

  What kind of a word was that? What had she even meant to say? Focus on one word, she told herself. Dr. Roberts had said she should tell the ghost how she was feeling.

  “Sc-sc-sc-ared.”

  Success! Who cared if she sounded like she had a stuttering problem that could rival that of King George the Sixth of England? She had said something! She had told him how she felt.

  Within seconds, a few of the ghosts faded. Those particularly close to her moved further back, and some sat down on the floor and turned their heads.

  “I’m scared.”

  Now she was on a roll. A few more of the ghosts disappeared. The strangely dressed Aztec remained, his hands still shading his eyes.