Site Unseen

by Dana Cameron

  “Well, I’d have to check. Can you hang on for a few minutes?” The librarian was reluctant, making it sound like it might take a long time.

  “Oh yes, I’m happy to wait.” I wondered if I could hold my breath until I got the answer.

  “I have to get it from our records. You can’t be too careful with the manuscripts, we must keep track of everything.”

  Often the tracking systems were files of handwritten lists of which patron had looked at which documents. I knew I’d suffocate long before she got back, but at least that was an attractive option to life with this increasing burden of anxiety and suspicion.

  Much to my amazement, about thirty seconds later she had my answer. “I have it all right here.” Pride and efficiency were mingled in her voice.

  “That was quick,” I said without much hope. She couldn’t possibly have found anything useful in so short a time.

  “Well, we just got our tracking system updated, and I am starting to learn the right queries.” I heard tapping of keys over the line, and little echoing voices in the background as our conversation bounced off satellites and across the ocean.

  “Here we are. Now what do you think you might be looking for? He looked at quite a lot of documents during his stay.”

  That had me stumped. “Well, it would be on the New World,” I started. “A map.”

  “Of course, most of his research has been on Jesuit accounts of Mayan ruins.”

  Of course. “He promised he would look for anything that had to do with New England. It might even be called Virginia, or Northern Virginia. Perhaps an early account of the British settlement on the northern Atlantic coast. It was a long shot, but he said he would keep his eyes open.”

  Long shot indeed, most of the Spanish activity would have taken place in the Caribbean, Florida, Georgia, possibly as far north as the Carolinas.

  “No, nothing catalogued under New England. I’m sorry,” the librarian apologized a moment later.

  “How about Maine? Maybe Massachusetts?” I was wracking my brains to come up with anything that might work: Maine was officially controlled by Massachusetts until 1820.

  “Wait a moment. I have an entry under “Province of Maine.”

  Bingo! “Yes, that’s right! That’s it.”

  “Well, I don’t know. You said early British settlement. This document is French, and dates to the second half of the eighteenth century.”

  Lady, don’t try and be helpful now! “I believe it might have some descriptions of the ruins of the site in which I’m now interested,” I replied, thinking quickly.

  “Now that I’m looking at it, I’m almost certain that this is what you are after.”

  How the hell—?

  “It’s a letter and map, a description written by French priests of military movements along the southern frontier. I know this is what you want because your friend was so excited when we found it. It wasn’t in our catalogue, but was tucked into a stack of manuscripts. The librarian who brought the volumes found it and was very excited. Dr. Markham also showed a good deal of interest when he saw it. As precise as we try to be, we are always discovering these treasures, sometimes lost for hundreds of years,” she said.

  “Is it a very long document?” I asked, my heart sinking at the thought of trying to sift the information out of a long, handwritten report. I doubted I could get them to send it to the Caldwell library.

  “Oh no,” the archivist reassured me. “It’s just a two-page letter, probably a summary sent back with other official documents. Who knows how it ended up here? We have a transcription that an intern made when we found it. Dr. Markham must have had his copy made for you.”

  “Is there any way that you could mail me a copy? It would be a tremendous help!”

  “Well, it would be difficult. It is very late here, and the Spanish postal system is somewhat antiquated, I’m afraid. It would never get to you in time.” The librarian sounded almost as disappointed as I.

  “I don’t suppose you could send it Federal Express or something? I’d be happy to pay for it,” I offered, my heart sinking over the possibility of losing even this thinnest of potential clues. Why was Tony excited by a document that had absolutely nothing to do with his work? He certainly didn’t run home and tell me about it.

  “Well, that’s part of the problem. We are preparing to close for the weekend, and then Monday is what you might call a bank holiday and nothing is open.”

  I was at a loss, when she spoke up again, “I thought all Americans had fax machines. Don’t you—?”

  “Of course!” Hope leaped up like a rekindled flame as I cursed my thickheadedness.

  “Well, nothing simpler then. I can send it off as soon as I find the transcription. I will have to send you a bill for the photocopy and my time, I’m afraid.”

  I’d sell my soul, señora. “No problem at all!” I gave the other woman the information and thanked her profusely.

  “I’m happy I could help. Send us a copy of the paper when it’s done. I’ll put the proper citation on the fax for you to use.”

  For a moment I couldn’t remember to what paper the woman could be referring. “Oh, yes. Of course, thanks again, er, gracias obrigado!”

  The librarian laughed. “You’re welcome! No offense, but I hope your French is better than your Spanish—obrigado is Portuguese! And please give our regards to Dr. Markham, when you see him. We are all quite fond of him here—he’s so very gallant. Good-bye.”

  I tried not to watch the clock, waiting for the fax to come; if it was meaningless, then this was all just delaying the inevitable process, accepting facts and getting on with my life in spite of it. I let my eyes unfocus, staring at my bag packed for California and listening to the wind whip the rain against the building. I wondered if I would get the fax before I had to leave to catch my plane. The wind suddenly knocked a spatter of raindrops against the window, reflecting the urgency I felt. The thought of a long, romantic weekend now struck me as torture, if I couldn’t see what was on that fax until Monday. Of course, if the fax meant nothing, then I wasn’t certain how much fun I was going to be in San Francisco.

  Miraculously, I heard the fax machine through the thin walls of the office, and hurried in to see if it was mine. It was, and the first page after the cover letter took forever to come through, the cramped handwriting and the darkness of the photocopy making the fax creep out from the machine at an exasperatingly slow rate. I snatched the first page and began to read it even as the second page was laboriously churning out. The storm outside was picking up and for a heart-stopping moment, the lights flickered as the wind picked up. I didn’t hear thunder, but couldn’t be certain that the wind hadn’t taken a transformer out someplace either. Less than a second later the fax resumed after its hiccough and I breathed a sigh of relief, even as I continued trying to translate the document I already held.

  I realized as I scanned the second page that I was holding a ticking bomb. My French is excellent, and after struggling to sort through some of the archaic eighteenth-century idiom, I understood the reason for all the excitement about my site. The hunches I’d had about the river being the focus of all the sudden attention were correct. The original letter was written by a French spy, a priest, recording British ship movements along the river in the early 1750s. Apparently he got wind that a ship’s boat was going to be dispatched to the British fort, Fort Archer, carrying gold to pay the troops in the French and Indian Wars. It never made it to its destination, and had sunk downriver of Fort Archer, near my fort, Fort Providence, during a storm. If the spy’s observations had been accurate, then it was entirely possible that a fortune in gold still rested at the bottom of the Saugatuck River just off Penitence Point. For once, the rumors about gold on an archaeological site had been true and provided more than an ample motive for murder. And now that I knew for certain, I had to act fast.

  Chapter 25

  I DIALED BRIAN’S HOTEL NUMBER IN SAN FRANCISCO.

  “C’mon, pic
k it up, baby, pick it up,” I begged as the phone rang away on the West Coast. Outside, I noticed, the light had changed from gray to yellow-white, giving an eerie cast to the sky.

  “Brian Chang,” came the curt answer.

  “Brian, it’s me. Listen, something’s happened, I can’t come—”

  “Emma, are you all right? What’s wrong? I can barely hear you.”

  “I haven’t much time, the storm, I’ve got to get to the site right now—”

  “The site?” Brian shouted in disbelief. “The site? You absolutely do not need to go out to the goddamned site! I swear to God, Emma, if you—”

  “Look, I know, I know, let me—”

  “Emma? I can barely hear you! Don’t—”

  “I think I know—” I shouted, but it was already too late. After a final earsplitting crack, the line went dead, save for a loud whine, some sort of emergency tone. The lights went out as well. I looked out the window and saw that the whole campus was dark.

  I tapped the receiver a couple of times, but nothing. Brian would understand, I reasoned, when he calmed down and I could tell him what I’d discovered. He has to understand.

  Hurriedly I grabbed my slicker and a couple of other things, then rushed down the hall. In my haste, I ran headlong into Neal and gave him a few brief instructions.

  “Get hold of Sheriff Stannard. Tell him to meet me at the Point. And then you stay put—”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’ll tell you later; I’ve got to get out there now.”

  Then, not bothering to curse the stranded elevator, I stumbled hurriedly down the stairs and out into the storm.

  Two hours later I left the Civic on the road leading to Pauline’s driveway in order to draw less attention to myself on the site. The wind had steadily picked up during my drive; when I’d left campus, it had been blowing in sporadic gusts, now it pushed the rain relentlessly. At first I was pleased that I was adequately dressed to face the weather; soon, however, I found myself completely soaked from the thighs down the moment after I slammed the car door shut.

  I had wisely decided to leave the fax in the car; there was no way that it would stand up to one minute of the downpour. I didn’t need it any longer anyway, I had practically memorized the contents of the text, and one hasty comparison of the sketch—the same as the one in the map file and in Tichnor’s kitchen—with a topographic map had only confirmed what the crabbed cursive of the eighteenth-century writer told me.

  It was difficult to squelch the same sense of discovery that I’d felt on the site the day I’d found the silver sixpence or started to understand the stratigraphic sequences. I suddenly realized that I’d been getting the same rush hunting for the clues that had led me here as I had with my regular research. I decided there was no shame in being proud of the skills that would lead to the discovery of Pauline’s killer. What mattered now was keeping a head cool enough to get the job done.

  I hurried down the driveway and onto the lawn facing the river, the still-open trenches partly filled with water where the tarps had collapsed in and the surrounding area had become a sea of mud and treachery. I moved along the easternmost line of trees, trying to remain concealed while I searched along the river for some indication that I was not on a self-deluded wild-goose chase. I clutched a camera tightly under my slicker and moved as close to the eroding northern bank as I dared. Under the relative shelter of the pines, I scanned the far bank to the east and the west for as far as the low clouds and rain would allow.

  I awkwardly twisted the telephoto lens through the plastic bag I had swathed around the camera, trying vainly to see through the mist. A few small sailboats, tied close to shore, rocked violently in the wind, loose halyards and clips clanging against their masts. There was nothing to see, nothing suspicious, nothing out of the ordinary. The wind died down, briefly, mocking my overreaction to an unlikely hunch and diminishing the dramatic impulse that had driven me out onto the stormy coast when I could be heading toward Brian, San Francisco, and the local red wine. I stood there, dripping and freezing, cursing my own foolishness, when I saw what I had been looking for.

  The motorboat was much closer to my side of the river than I had calculated from the eighteenth-century map. Surely I had attributed too much accuracy to the description, or else the water had shifted what I had come to find. The boat’s dark color and the size of the chop helped obscure the activity that was going on when sane and legitimate business was being conducted indoors. A diver in a black dry suit, barely visible to the casual observer, hoisted himself onto the side of the boat and dumped in a small, bulging bag.

  I was ecstatic. I stepped out of the line of trees to get a better view and made the most of the temporarily slack winds by snapping a succession of shots of the diver moving around on the boat. I had an impression of something yellow. The figure then fiddled with his regulator; it was clear the diver was fed up.

  “Please, oh please, look over here, let me get a face shot,” I murmured as a prayer. “This is why Pauline died, no one wants a sharp-eyed old lady around when there’s gold in her backyard. There’s too much for this to be a coincidence. Come on, come on, smile pretty for the camera, Tony, give me one clean head shot, and we’ll end this right now.” I squinted through the lens, every drop of mental energy focused, channeled, willing Tony to give himself away, when, frustrated with the hookup, the diver removed his mask to get a better look.

  It wasn’t Tony Markham at all.

  Chapter 26

  THE FIGURE FINALLY SUCCEEDED IN GETTING HIS DRY suit hood pried off of his head, and was, with the impatience of a young man, exchanging his empty tank for a full one. Billy Griggs looked up at the sky and the horizon, as if gauging the storm’s progress, then redonned his hood and mask and clumsily reentered the water.

  I snapped two or three shots before I realized that it truly wasn’t Tony. I stepped back, stunned, my mind racing to try and explain how I could be so wrong. Of course, Billy had been the friend whose name Mrs. Maggers at the antiques shop so imperfectly remembered. Not Tony? Billy was just the sort to keep company with Tichnor and just stupid enough to be deluded by the dead man’s promises of riches and buried treasure. He and Tichnor had lived around here forever, and somehow the two of them must have stumbled onto the wreck…It was entirely possible that after Pauline observed them, Tichnor killed her. And if Griggs was another one of those survivalist types, it made perfect sense for him to know about natural poisons, like lily of the valley. He was the one.

  And what kind of mistake had I almost made? Had the French text and map just been a coincidence? Jesus, I came this close to, what? Libelous accusation of a powerful colleague? I toted up the charges with which I had been prepared to accuse Tony. Trespassing, site robbery, arson, and murder, just for a start. Brian was right, and I was so wrong. Way to go, Em, just because the man was in a bad mood, a little cryptic, you had him limned for a murderer and turned his every word into an allegation and a suspicion. Tony’s an archaeologist; he would never have gotten into something as unethical as treasure hunting, never mind the rest.

  I guess that all the adrenaline I’d been pumping drained away with the realization of my colossal stupidity. Trying so desperately to absolve myself of guilt I felt over Pauline’s death, I had completely misread the situation. I could understand now why I had tried to force Tony into the mold of a murderer: I had been so wrapped up in my own little world of thought that I had ignored the facts.

  I felt the cold intensely now, whereas I had not even been conscious of it while I was taking the pictures. In spite of my foolishness, it occurred to me that I did have evidence against Billy and Tichnor, and if I were going to get anything out of this exercise in thickheadedness, I’d better do something while I had the chance. Stop overanalyzing, Emma, for once in your life, and do something useful.

  I made a rough mental note of the location of the boat. Though it might be too late to catch Griggs in the act, if I were very lucky, there m
ight be some traces of his activities left after the storm to implicate him, along with my photos. I barely had enough energy or, to tell the truth, interest to do so. My legs were chapped from the salty wind and rain that soaked into my jeans; my nose was numb and I could feel it running inelegantly. Even though I had my hood on, the rain driven into my face was rapidly soaking my hair into a sodden mass under my raincoat.

  My thoughts were interrupted by the wind picking up again, roaring along the river. The heavy pine boughs swayed, and in the distance dead branches cracked, and the rain regained its former intensity. I decided that it was time to find Sheriff Stannard and see if he could help me make some sense of all this. I turned to leave.

  Brian will be so pleased with my good sense, I thought wryly, as another limb splintered nearby. If I hustled, it was even remotely possible I could catch a later flight, but at any rate I had to get out of here before I froze to death. The rain came down harder now, colder because of our proximity to the frigid river. Even during the summer no one wanted to swim in such cold water, and now that fall was well under way…

  Against the background noise of the storm, a noise caught my attention. Suddenly it occurred to me that the last sound that I had heard wasn’t cracking branches and wasn’t snapping lines. It was the sound of someone removing the safety and drawing back the trigger on the pistol that was now pointed at my head.

  “I’ll thank you to hand over the film please. Just pull it out of the camera so that it is quite exposed, thank you.”

  I knew that voice.