Treasure in the Woods

by E. A. House

  Treasure in the Woods

  Treasure Hunters: Book #3

  Written by E. A. House

  Copyright © 2018 by Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.

  Published by EPIC Press™

  PO Box 398166

  Minneapolis, MN 55439

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  International copyrights reserved in all countries.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without

  written permission from the publisher. EPIC Press™ is trademark

  and logo of Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.

  Cover design by Laura Mitchell

  Images for cover art obtained from iStock and Shutterstock

  Edited by Ryan Hume

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: House, E.A., author.

  Title: Treasure in the woods/ by E.A. House

  Description: Minneapolis, MN : EPIC Press, 2018 | Series: Treasure hunters; #3

  Summary: On the trail of a document that could lead them to a lost treasure ship, Chris, Carrie, and Maddison head into the woods in search of an old Spanish mission church. Except they encounter a stalker, a film crew that doesn’t take kindly to unexpected hikers, and the vengeful ghost said to haunt the woods.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017949809 | ISBN 9781680768787 (lib. bdg.)

  | ISBN 9781680768923 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Adventure stories—Fiction. | Code and cipher stories—Fiction.

  | Family secrets—Fiction. | Treasure troves—Fiction | Young adult fiction.

  Classification: DDC [FIC]—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017949809

  This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

  For Victoria

  “Accidents?” Professor Griffin asked, looking up from his salami sandwich in alarm.

  Chris, feeling terribly guilty for disturbing the Professor over lunch, tried to explain. “When we didn’t find anything at the church Carrie and I realized that there must be a parish register that didn’t get moved to the new building, one that holds the key to the location of the San Telmo. And we’re going to the site of the old parish to look for it tomorrow. Which is why I wanted to tell you about the treasure today. In case of”—he made vague yet (hopefully) significant hand gestures—“accidents.” It was, as Chris had feared, really hard to explain his and Carrie’s search for the San Telmo and have it make sense.

  Also, Chris had hoped that bringing Professor Griffin an extra sandwich from the bakery that he really liked and surprising him with fresh muffins from the same place would make up for the fact that Chris and Carrie had cornered their oldest family friend in his office over his lunch hour and poured out a tale of secrecy, mystery, and terror, but the muffins didn’t seem to be making that much of a difference.

  “Yes,” Carrie spoke up. “Accidents. Like what happened to Aunt Elsie . . . ”

  Neither Chris nor Carrie really wanted to get into detail about what they meant by accidents or what happened to Aunt Elsie, but they were starting to realize that just saying “accidents” to someone who hadn’t had a near-miss with a car crash that wasn’t really a car crash wasn’t clear enough. Chris poked Carrie. Carrie swatted him back. Professor Griffin continued to look alarmed. “I think,” he said, folding a discarded muffin wrapper carefully into a triangle, “that this is a lot to take in, smaller Kingsolvers. And you’ve been carrying this all by yourselves this whole time?”

  “We weren’t sure who to trust,” Chris admitted. If Chris was being honest with himself, he still wasn’t. Professor Griffin, at least, was trustworthy, though they might be putting him in terrible danger by getting him involved. But they had to, because who, other than Chris and Carrie, would Aunt Elsie have left her clues to? Chris was still a little—okay, actually a lot, but he didn’t want to admit it—nervous about trusting Dr. McRae even as far as they’d had to already. It was only the fact that Chris and Carrie and Maddison were about to go into the woods looking for the ruins of an old Spanish mission church that had driven Chris to tell Professor Griffin why they might not come back alive.

  The day before they had been, for once, hanging out in Maddison’s house rather than Chris’s. Mainly because Maddison had better access to maps than Chris and Carrie did, since her dad had an impressive collection of Florida topographical maps and was on a first-name basis with multiple park rangers. They had been debating whether or not to include Professor Griffin in their plans.

  “Remember, he has a boat,” Carrie had added, looking up from the map she and Maddison were poring over.

  “Will you cut it out with the boat routine?” Chris had said.

  They had been scattered around the McRaes’ living room surrounded by maps of the Pine Lick State Park, and Chris had been sitting furiously on his curiosity for the past half hour because he’d never been in Maddison’s house before. It was a small two-story, with yellow siding and a decorative glass ball in the front yard, and someone in the family liked decorating in green and yellow and hanging china plates on the indoor walls. Chris hoped it wasn’t Dr. McRae, because the plates looked nice on the walls and he was trying not to find things they had in common.

  “I’m sure we can find someone with a boat we can borrow,” Maddison said. She was chewing absent-mindedly on the end of a highlighter. “Someone else . . . on this island . . . ”

  Chris shrugged. It did seem silly when you put it that way.

  “Why is Professor Griffin the only person with a boat you can borrow, anyway?” Maddison asked.

  “Because he’s almost the only adult I can think of who’s going to believe the whole story but not ground us for eternity when we tell him,” Chris remembered explaining. Although now he was starting to worry about that claim, because the Professor looked—

  “Don’t worry,” Professor Griffin said. “I’m not about to forbid you from searching for a lost treasure ship, that would be hypocritical of me after I did all that looking for the spy plane that sank off the coast in the fifties. And it would require me to believe that the tall tale you’re telling me is true.”

  Carrie bristled at this. Chris opened his mouth to argue but the Professor, with a twinkle in his eye, stopped him.

  “Just teasing, Chris,” he said. “I’ve known you two since you were wee tykes, by this point I do know what a lie sounds like in your mouth, and the infinitely more stammered sound of you telling the truth. Although you really do need to get better at organized public oration,” he went on. “It’s a valuable life skill that requires cultivation.”

  “I made note cards,” Chris pointed out. But before his speech he’d shuffled them out of his hands and all over the floor, and then realized that he hadn’t numbered them, and finally given up and told the whole story off the top of his head while Carrie sorted the cards. She’d interrupted a couple times to clarify, usually when she felt that Chris was not fully explaining things, but other than that she had let the story come from Chris. Though she had added a few note cards of her own, which couldn’t possibly end well.

  Chris had also glossed over Dr. McRae in his summary of their adventures. He still didn’t entirely trust Dr. McRae, and Professor Griffin would pick up on that, and Professor Griffin was terrible at hiding his feelings at faculty meetings. Aunt Elsie and three or four of the graduate students that she often had over for dinner—to save them from Professor Griffin’s belief that one could survive on pasta and ham for eternity—had emphasized that point, repeatedly. A meeting between Dr. McRae and a suspicious Professor Griffin would end, Chris was afraid, in Dr. McRae and Professor Griffin getting into some sort of fight, the exact nature of which he cou
ldn’t imagine. Professor Griffin was just absent minded enough to be secretly hiding a black belt in some obscure martial art he had learned in his study of ocean-floor geology—really, it could happen! And Dr. McRae was still far too much of an unknown. He could have any number of secret agendas, unexpected skills, or unsavory underworld contacts, and even his own daughter didn’t know what his deep dark secret was.

  That Dr. McRae was honest enough to admit to Maddison that he had a secret, dark past was, Chris felt, only a small point in his favor. He was not about to be swayed in his opinion of Dr. McRae just because he was trying to help his family. He definitely hadn’t decided that Dr. McRae’s contributions to the whole adventure were to be kept as secretive as possible in case someone was after the new archivist.

  Totally, absolutely, definitely hadn’t.

  “But I’m not so sure I like the idea of you two going hiking without an adult,” Professor Griffin said with a frown, and oh great, here came the stumbling block. Chris wriggled in his seat and put on his very best pleading face, which Carrie said made him look like a constipated kitten.

  “It’s just a weekend,” he said in his best reasonable voice. “And we could probably do the whole hike in one day but Carrie got a new sleeping bag for Christmas and she wants to try it out.”

  “It’s just the old Pine Bow trail,” Carrie added helpfully. “Then, when we get to the far end of the loop, we’re following the horse path all the way to the coast.”

  “Well,” Professor Griffin said, “I guess . . . ”

  “And there’s even a campground right in the middle, it’ll be perfectly safe,” Chris said. “The park ranger we talked to said nobody’s even gotten shot in that state park in sixty years!” he added when Professor Griffin didn’t look convinced, and then Carrie smacked him at about the same point Chris realized how bad an idea it was to mention park shootings. But it was true; after an afternoon of poring over maps and not coming up with a plan, Maddison had suggested they try calling a family friend who was also a park ranger.

  “Oh, the old mission church,” Helen Kinney had said, finally connected to them after twenty minutes of playing phone tag. “It’s visible from the equestrian trail off Pine Bow. Someone wrote an article for the local paper a couple of years ago that said it was somewhere in the middle of the park, though, and even though it’s not at all true that version of the story just will not die. We’ve tried to set the record straight but we still have people getting lost when they wander off the trails with video cameras.” Then she’d gone on to reassure Maddison that Pine Lick was remarkably free of smugglers, drug dealers, and other reasons that teenagers shouldn’t go hiking unsupervised, and that there weren’t even very many alligators.

  “But, Kingsolvers, you’re telling me this in case you don’t come back,” Professor Griffin said flatly, and to emphasize his point he took off his hat, plopped it on the bust of Melville, and ran both hands through his hair. The result was surprisingly similar to the time he’d accidently touched a live wire trying to repair Moby.

  “This is more of a . . . of a precautionary measure?” Chris said. “In case we don’t come back? So if we don’t, you know to start looking really hard into the things Aunt Elsie did right before she died?”

  Professor Griffin sighed. “At least let me come with you. I’ve got . . . only a week’s worth of exams to grade, let me get that out of the way and arrange for someone to keep the grad students on track and then I’ll come along.”

  Which was the other problem Chris had anticipated but not yet quite figured out how to prevent.

  “I think,” Carrie said cautiously, “that Aunt Elsie would be very annoyed if our backup plan went and spoiled the whole ‘backup’ part of the plan by coming with us, and she probably didn’t tell you any of this in the first place because it would put you in too much danger.”

  Professor Griffin stared at them for a moment, something strangely frustrated and nostalgic in his expression, and then he sighed, long and gustily.

  “Well, blast and botheration, I can’t argue with that,” he said, and that seemed to be the end of it.

  “Why do you think Aunt Elsie told us instead of Professor Griffin?” Carrie asked later than night, causing Chris to yelp and almost cut his forehead on one of his mattress springs, because he was under his bed looking for his left hiking boot and she’d come through the window again.

  “Carrie!”

  “Sorry,” Carrie said, and meant it, partly. “But really, Chris—why us and not him?”

  “Uhhhh.” Chris gave up on the search for his boot and maneuvered himself out from under the bed, to discover Carrie holding both his boots and looking faintly amused. “I figured it was because Professor Griffin is the logical choice for Aunt Elsie to have left a secret to. They were best-friends-slash-colleagues for years.”

  “Yeah, but then what makes Professor Griffin not a logical choice—”

  “Well,” Chris started, but Carrie cut him off.

  “That doesn’t make leaving the secret to us an act of—of child endangerment or something?” she said.

  “You’re worried about that body we found at the church,” Chris said.

  “Yeaaah, a little,” Carrie said. “I’d feel a lot better if we knew who he was and if he was connected to this treasure in some way. But I’m more worried about Dodson dying the way he did.”

  “So am I,” Chris admitted. “And so is Dr. McRae, and Maddison, and Detective Hermann, and somebody called Lyndon who tried to call Dr. McRae three times while they were moving the body, did you notice that?”

  “No, because I don’t watch Maddison’s dad as suspiciously as you do.”

  “Er,” Chris said guiltily, deciding that Carrie didn’t need to know about how he’d gone through the phonebook for Lyndons afterwards, and come up empty. Carrie tugged at the knot in one of the boot’s laces, and frowned.

  “What has me worried,” she said finally, “is if Professor Griffin is the logical choice to leave this secret to, and Aunt Elsie gave it to us instead, and she did that because she knew Professor Griffin was the logical choice so giving him this secret would put him in too much danger, then doesn’t that suggest that the person who killed her is, well, local?”

  “You mean you think it might be somebody she knew,” Chris said.

  “Yes?”

  “Which would mean it’s most likely someone we know?”

  “Yes,” Carrie said miserably.

  “But then who?”

  “I don’t know!” Carrie said. “It’s kind of hard to look at your aunt’s co-workers and figure out which one might have tried to kill you!”

  “Okay, that’s true,” Chris agreed. “But—”

  “Do not tell me you still think it’s Dr. McRae,” Carrie said sternly. “For one thing, we know he didn’t live here at the time of the accident.”

  “I was actually going to say that it might be really informative to see if Dr. McRae and Professor Griffin know anything about each other,” Chris said, since Carrie had forbidden him from saying what he’d been about to suggest. “Whatever reasons Dr. McRae has, he seems to know more about this whole mess than he’s willing to tell us, but maybe he’d tell Professor Griffin.”

  “Or maybe they’ll just end up arguing over the importance of the whale in Moby-Dick for six hours,” Carrie pointed out glumly, and Chris had to agree that that was unusually likely when you left Professor Griffin alone with someone for more than two minutes.

  The next morning dawned bright and breezy, with fate smiling on them for once in the form of a clear and unseasonably cool day. A light breeze was even ruffling the bushes and the palm trees at the trailhead for the Pine Bow hiking path when Chris and Carrie met Maddison and her groggy-looking father at nine o’clock sharp, backpacks, hiking boots, carefully highlighted map, and excuses at the ready.

  The excuses were a blind in case they were being stalked, and they weren’t excuses as much as they were a careful evasion of any facts an
y parents might find alarming. Both sets of Kingsolver parents were under the impression that this was a totally normal hiking trip; Carrie had used the excuse of wanting to test out her new sleeping bag, and Chris had actually forgotten to mention to his parents that they were hiking with Maddison. Since his mom was the one who dropped Chris and Carrie off at the trailhead, this earned him a significant look and a promise of talking when they got back.

  And neither Chris nor Carrie had told their parents that they were going to be taking the horse trail up to some supposed ruins, or that they were planning a little unauthorized archeology while they were there. Chris was still glum that they had had to tell Dr. McRae, but the man had basically known anyway, and as Maddison had pointed out, it was a very bad idea to go hiking and not leave an accurate itinerary with at least one person. “That leads to state-wide manhunts when you take a wrong turn and get lost in the cypress swamp,” Maddison had said. “I’ve been told accidentally becoming the subject of a statewide manhunt is very embarrassing.”

  Chris had pointed out that their route was through a thick Florida pine forest with scattered islands of deciduous trees. The only swamp was a small cypress one on the eastern edge of the park that shifted to high grasses and palm trees at the coast. Maddison had accused Chris of being overly literal, and then Carrie had flipped a page in Maddison’s carefully curated pile of notes and scared herself with a full-color portrait of the swamp ape, and they’d had to take a break to argue about the likelihood of seeing Bigfoot’s smellier cousin in the woods. Swamp apes were basically Bigfoot, but with the notorious habit of smelling hideous, like rotting meat and barf. They were more common in the Everglades, and had never actually been reported in Pine Lick, although the next island over had experienced a rash of sightings in the late eighties.

  “Besides, the woods are supposed to be haunted, not inhabited,” Maddison had said.

  Carrie frowned and sifted through her massive pile of opened-and-sticky-noted books.