Harvey Bennett Thrillers Box Set 2

by Nick Thacker

  “It was,” Derrick said, a look of reverence on his face. “It was unbelievably impressive. The man would write 2,000-word-long essays after traveling 20 miles a day, hunting and fishing for — and cooking — their food. He was insanely productive, and his body of work remains a reliable guide to the high country to this day.”

  “Wow,” Reggie said.

  “Wow is right.” He paused, taking care to flip the next page as carefully as possible. “This man was, among other things, an American hero. There were songs written about him, and the entire nation knew his name and his story.”

  The page fell, a slight crackle as it landed on the open cover, and Ben could see the first page of text — the same scrawled, nearly illegible handwriting filled the page. The paper was yellowed, but still sturdy enough to provide a decent backdrop to the writing itself.

  Derrick continued his explanation. “He starts in December 1805, toward the end of their expedition and after they’d reached the Pacific and started home.”

  “So whatever the journal was meant for wasn’t something he thought about until they were headed home?”

  “Well,” Derrick explained. “Perhaps. Or it’s simply that his ‘secret’ mission wasn’t supposed to begin until he’d accomplished his other goals: finding the Pacific, establishing some sort of trading agreement between America and the Plains Indians, and not dying.”

  “So he accomplished those things, then he starts the journal?” Ben asked.

  “Correct,” Derrick said, nodding. “He waits to start it until they’re well on their way back home. But this first page is right in the middle of things, at Fort Clatsop, in present-day Oregon, where they wintered during the last month of 1805 and the early months of 1806.”

  “Outside of Astoria?” Joshua asked. “I’ve been there. I mean, I never saw the fort, but I remember seeing a sign for it once.”

  “One and the same,” Derrick said. “They built the fort in December of 1805, hoping to get it in place before winter hit. It was rainy and miserable, but they finished it and moved in mid-December. It’s been renovated and rebuilt by the National Parks Service since then.”

  “And Lewis started his secret journal then.”

  “Correct. He began writing Christmas night, 1805, after exchanging gifts.”

  “Why start then?”

  Derrick shrugged. “That’s part of the mystery, since he never addresses it. There’s one single journal entry on Christmas Eve, then the journal skips ahead to March, the day they leave Fort Clatsop. But after the inscription, the journal simply begins, as if it’s something he’s been doing all along. It was quite a feat, too, as he still maintained his writing schedule in the other journals — the public journals.”

  “Where he’d write thousands of words a day?”

  “Yes, or at least something. He had essays on plants, animals, and Indians they encountered along the way, and he collected, catalogued, and documented innumerable species of wildlife as well.”

  “Busy guy.”

  “Well, he didn’t have a cell phone to distract him,” Reggie said. “But yeah, that’s impressive.”

  “It’s damn impressive. Almost unbelievable. And Clark did this as well, to ensure they would always have multiple points of view, or overlap with other men’s journals that would provide the most accurate analysis.”

  “It’s amazing they even made it back,” Joshua said. “I read in the brief that it was insane they hadn’t been killed or scalped by a tribe.”

  “It is miraculous,” Derrick said. “Yet they pulled it off. A remarkable journey, which is part of the reason why they are still celebrated today.”

  Derrick stopped and looked down at the journal in front of him, and Ben felt the weight of it, the moment of reverence. He respected that, and waited until Derrick was ready.

  Finally Derrick turned the next page and began reading.

  “Christmas Eve, 1805. We are weary, yet spirits are high. Men are unsure what tomorrow might bring, yet optimism rings true. They cannot fear what they do not know, and yet what I know I do not either fear.”

  Ben crossed his arms. “That’s a cryptic way to start a journal.”

  “To say the least,” Reggie said. “Man, that’s weird. Are his other journals written like that?”

  Derrick shook his head. “No, not at all. He’s mostly straightforward, pretty to-the-point. After all, the journals were meant to be fact-based, just observations on what he saw, with little pontificating and speculation.”

  “Clearly he’s not writing field notes anymore,” Joshua said.

  “So it would seem,” Derrick said. “That’s why I believe Daris was so into this journal.”

  “She’s read it then?”

  “She’s probably got copies of each individual page, both hand-copied and scanned. I assume she’s pored over them personally, and has probably even reached out to members of the academic community to enlist their help. Subtly, of course, and without mentioning what the scans were from.”

  “Yeah,” Reggie said. “That’s what I would do.”

  “Well, that is what we’re going to do,” Derrick replied. Everyone looked at him. “We’re heading to Oregon, but we’re not going to Fort Clatsop. We’re going to meet up with the world’s leading expert on Lewis and Clark. She’s spent her life studying their trip, and she turned her home into a Lewis and Clark museum that she built herself after her husband left her.”

  “She’s the world’s leading expert?” Reggie asked.

  Derrick cleared his throat. “Well… according to her.”

  Reggie chuckled. “Great. I’ll bet she’s really easy to talk to, as well. Husband left her, lives alone in a museum, weird obsession for Lewis and Clark. No social awkwardness or anything, right?”

  Derrick frowned, then addressed Reggie directly. “Well, she’s not without her quirks. Says she’s a descendant of Sacagawea, actually.”

  “Even better. What’s her name? Maybe we can do a little research before we land.”

  Derrick shook his head. “Well, she doesn’t do Internet stuff, which is part of the reason no one knows about her little museum. But I know everything you need to know about her.”

  Ben noticed Joshua beginning to grin, and he felt he knew where this was going.

  “Why’s that?” Reggie asked.

  “Because she’s my grandmother. Cornelia Derrick.”

  Reggie groaned, and Joshua’s grin turned into a full-on smile.

  Chapter FIFTY

  IN THE LAST DAY, BEN had travelled cross-country twice. He’d been beaten and shot at, and Julie had been taken from him. He was pissed, cranky, and tired. The flight, as comfortable as it was, offered little reprieve. They had decided to try to get some rest, and then start in again on the journal when they woke up.

  During the flight he’d tossed and turned in the airplane seat, and as the pilot’s ‘announcer voice,’ declaring their descent, broke into his fitful sleep and woke them up, he realized that he was now sore, on top of everything else.

  He groaned and put his seat back up.

  “You too, brother?” Reggie asked, rubbing his eyes and blinking heavily.

  “Slept like a rock,” Ben said. “Falling off a cliff.”

  “And landing on a bed of nails,” Joshua added. “Are we here already?”

  “I guess so,” Ben said. “Unfortunately. But every hour we spend sleeping, Julie spends…”

  “Don’t think like that, buddy,” Reggie said. “We’re getting her back. I promised you that.”

  Ben nodded. It doesn’t matter what you promise, he thought. I’m getting her back either way.

  Roger Derrick seemed to be the only man on board, save for the pilot himself, who wasn’t upset. “We ready to roll?” he asked. “Clock’s ticking.”

  “Can’t go anywhere until this bird lands, big guy,” Reggie said.

  “No, but we can plan our next move. I’d guess we’ve got about a half-hour before we’re on the ground and ta
xied in. That’s a half-hour of planning.”

  “I thought the plan was, ‘talk to your weird grandmother,’” Reggie said.

  Derrick scowled at him.

  “Sorry. I meant, ‘talk to your completely normal and well-balanced grandmother.”

  “It is,” Derrick said. “But… she might not be able to give us much more than we’ve already got.”

  “I thought you said she was the ‘world’s leading expert,’” Ben said.

  “I did… but also that she was the self-declared leading expert, remember? It’s been a few years since we’ve talked about this stuff, and she’s been having… health issues.”

  “Sorry to hear that, pal,” Reggie said.

  Derrick shook it off. “Thank you. It’s fine, really. Amnesia, probably an early form of Alzheimer’s, but she’s closing in on ninety, so I can’t really complain. Sort of comes with the territory.”

  For a brief moment Ben remembered his mother, Diana Torres. She had taken back her maiden name a few years after his father had passed, and Ben had always assumed it was mostly because she couldn’t forgive her son for her husband’s death. She hadn’t struggled with Alzheimer’s, but she did have memory lapses frequently, even though she had been employed and maintained a healthy, active lifestyle up until the end.

  The end that I caused, Ben thought. He had met Juliette due to a virus scare at Yellowstone, where he was working, and he had sent his mother, a chemical analyst, a sample of the strain.

  Within a week, she was gone.

  The hole in his heart was typically more than filled by Julie’s presence, but since Julie was now gone as well…

  “Anyway,” Derrick said. “I’m just worried she’ll spout the same stuff she’s always talked about. That there’s ‘something out there, but it’s been hidden to protect us.’ It’s always some form of that rumor. But when I press her on it, she clams up, like it’s her duty to keep the secret.”

  Reggie nodded. “Does she know about the journal?”

  Derrick looked at him. “No, I guess that might change things.”

  “If she really believes this stuff, and she’s been almost talking about it with you, I’d bet she opens right up when you plop that old dusty book in front of her face.”

  “Yeah,” Derrick said. “You’re probably right. Still, I think it’s best if we work through our next move, see if we can’t figure out where this journal’s trying to point us to.”

  He opened the journal once again and flipped to the page after the initial inscription, then started reading.

  “Mar 23. Toward the Cottonwoods, where the unique three lay.”

  He looked up.

  “That’s it?” Reggie asked. “On page one? Just a sentence?”

  Derrick smiled. “Why do you think we haven’t been able to figure out whatever it is that’s been hidden?”

  “Because it’s all gibberish,” Reggie said. “It means nothing, like you suspected. It’s just a madman’s scribbling.”

  Derrick shook his head. “No, I can’t believe that. Logically it makes sense that there’s no ‘great conspiracy,’ that Daris is on a fanatical treasure hunt for nothing, but like I told you before, I think there’s something at the other end. I think Lewis did hide something, even if it’s just a few plants — albeit a few plants with the power to render someone inert for a few days.”

  “So it’s all code?” Ben asked. “He was writing a coded message to Jefferson?”

  “Well that much is clear,” Derrick said. “He needed to get a message to Jefferson, so he wrote it down. But what he was trying to tell him is very unclear. It’s not a code, per se, as it’s written in plain English. There are numerous spelling mistakes, but that was normal for all of the men who kept a journal during the expedition.”

  “So where are these Cottonwoods?” Ben asked.

  “We have no idea,” Derrick said. “There are Cottonwood trees everywhere in this side of the world.”

  “Well then, where were they on March 23, 1806? Fort Clatsop, right?”

  He shook his head. “No — I mean, yes, they were at the fort in Oregon, getting ready to leave. But I’ve scoured that area, numerous times. It’s a tourist trap now, and even the surrounding area is well-traveled. If anything was there, it would have been found by now.”

  Joshua rubbed his chin, thinking.

  Ben frowned. “Unique Cottonwoods. Three of them. Yeah, he’s right. Those are everywhere, and we’re supposed to find just three of them.”

  “Wait —” Reggie said. “You’re only on the first clue?”

  Derrick sighed, then looked up from the journal and adjusted his cheater glasses. “Well, yes — we have yet to determine what the first clue means — but the other clues aren’t nearly as cryptic. I don’t think.”

  Joshua stood up and started pacing. “Okay, then. How many clues are there?”

  “Three.”

  Joshua stopped. “Three? There are only three? What kind of treasure hunt is this?”

  Derrick nodded. “Just three. And like I said, I’m not sure it is a treasure hunt, as much as Daris wants to believe it is. And the second one seems pretty self-explanatory, as if Lewis couldn’t come up with something clever to write. He may have been a great naturalist and surveyor, and certainly a capable leader of men, but a treasure map creator he was not.” He smiled, then flipped the page with the pair of tweezers and let it fall gently onto the first two. “Inside the Cave of Shadows.”

  “Inside the Cave of Shadows,” Reggie said. “Got it. So you’ve looked for this ‘Cave of Shadows’ place already?”

  “As much as we could, yes,” Derrick said. “It’s a long trail, and there were plenty of places they could have found a cave.”

  “So there’s nothing called ‘Cave of Shadows’ today?”

  Derrick shook his head.

  “What about the third clue?”

  “Within the silver lies the gold.”

  “Within the — seriously?” Reggie asked. “That’s Lewis’ final clue?”

  “I told you it was cryptic. He wasn’t much for flowery prose, and I’d bet he wasn’t super creative about his code. He needed something utilitarian, pragmatic — something he could write down that would effectively hide the treasure from anyone casually looking for it. Only someone with enough knowledge of the expedition, like Jefferson himself, could decipher it. And it’s a linear progression, as well. There’s no sense looking for answers to the second and third clue until the first one is solved.

  “That’s why we’re going to visit my grandmother. She can help us.”

  “Great,” Reggie said, rubbing his eyes again. He yawned. “Not only did I not get enough sleep, but now we’ve got no better ideas than to visit your grandmother.”

  “She knows her stuff,” Derrick said. “You’ll see.”

  “I can’t wait to meet her,” Reggie said.

  Chapter FIFTY-ONE

  REGGIE FELT TORN. ON ONE hand, he had never in his life met someone so eccentric, so downright odd. The woman in front of him seemed to be a mix between French-Cajun and Jamaican, with hair that she wore high on her head, a la Marge Simpson. Bits and pieces of odds and ends she had obviously found on trips during her long life were stuffed into it, and Reggie couldn’t help but stare.

  It had been three hours since they’d landed in Astoria, collected weapons from the FBI safe house Derrick had brought them to, and then driven to Derrick’s grandmother’s small house-museum. He wondered if he was just delirious, suffering from a lack of sleep, and the woman in front of him now was nothing more than a normal, well-balanced, Oregonian.

  Three combs, two chopsticks, about a hundred beads, and — what is that? Is that a fake bird? He kept looking at Joshua and Ben to see if they had noticed the woman’s larger-than-life hair and personality, and if they were affected by it, but both men seemed to be better than he at holding their emotions inside.

  But on the other hand, Roger Derrick’s mother, Cornelia Derrick, was on
e of the best cooks he’d ever had the pleasure of meeting. Her food would have put a Cajun restaurant’s jambalaya to shame, and he wasn’t kidding. He’d tried hundreds of Cajun dishes, straight off the bayou and in other places around the world, and hers was the best.

  “Living close to the water, my dear,” she’d told him with her thick, chopped accent. “You get the best seafood in the world up here, but no one knows that.” The words lilted from one to the next, rising and falling but stopped short just as one syllable ended and the next began.

  “Well,” Reggie said, trying to talk without losing the mouthful of food. “This is absolutely phenomenal. I — I can’t even tell you —”

  “I hear that from my boy,” she said, nudging Derrick. “But I always say he’s just humoring me.”

  Derrick shook his head. “I’ve tried to tell my grandmother to open a restaurant, but she won’t listen. Says she’s too busy.”

  “I have to water the plants,” she explained. “They can’t water themselves, now, can they?”

  As Reggie finished his first bowl of jambalaya, even before he could drink the spicy broth, Cornelia had plopped another scoopful in front of him.

  “Eat,” she said. “My boy tells me you have an adventure.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Derrick said. “I told you we’re looking for something.”

  “And if you came here, it means you are looking for something related to the Expedition.”

  Reggie smiled. “Now, why would you think that, ma’am?”

  She frowned. “Don’t you be calling me ‘ma’am,’ boy. Cornelia is the name my Mama gave me, and it should be good enough for you.”

  Reggie nodded, his smile growing. The woman reminded him in some ways of his own grandmother, now long passed. Growing up, visiting ‘Meemaw’ was a special treat — they could eat whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted it, and there was no one there to tell them to stop. As long as he and his siblings behaved and minded their manners, Meemaw was their best friend.

  But if they didn’t behave…