Treasure in the Woods

by E. A. House

  “You know, I think you’re right,” Chris said, and then jumped when Carrie flicked a twig at his shin. “What?”

  “You suspect everyone, but we meet a terrible television host and you decide he’s actually not that bad?”

  “I—well, he isn’t,” Chris said, thinking partly of film cameras and mostly of how willing Redd had been to throw himself into the middle of a standoff to help.

  “I’m going to agree with Chris,” Maddison added. “Redd was nice. Kind of flakey but really nice. And he’s practically the first person who’s acted like our suspiciousness is normal, and I’m definitely going to start watching his show regularly. What I want to know is what he saw in Carrie. Do you look frighteningly like a secret enchanted portrait?”

  “No,” Carrie said. “Although I’ve been told I look a lot like Aunt Elsie when she was young.”

  “Huh,” Maddison said. And she looked like she was about to ask another question but a fat raindrop suddenly plopped on her head and she jumped and looked up. The morning had started bright, with fat, puffy clouds in a blue sky, but it must have been steadily clouding over because the sky was now a dull, hazy gray.

  “Oh, that’s not good,” Carrie said, as another scattering of raindrops fell. “It wasn’t supposed to do this!”

  They had been winding around fewer and fewer trees and the groundcover had transitioned to beach grass while they had been arguing about ice-cream cones and Robin Redd. While squinting at the oncoming rain, Chris thought he saw in the distance . . .

  “Is that the old Mission?” he asked, pointing.

  It was.

  “So, if we just head over casually,” Carrie started to say, but then there was a threatening crack of thunder and caution was abandoned in favor of getting to the ruins before it started pouring.

  They made it to the ruins in record time, despite the path being so windy, and were quickly standing in the dampening dust at the side of the equestrian path, reading the plaque identifying the mission.

  “Ruins dating to the seventeenth century, believed to have been erected by some of the first Spanish settlers to the region,” Maddison read aloud. “I notice they didn’t identify it as a church.”

  “They probably didn’t know,” Carrie said. “I mean, does it look like a church?”

  It didn’t. It looked like a pile of very old stones and some weathered wood, clinging to the vague shape of a building by sheer stubbornness. It had once been large but a good quarter of the structure had collapsed, so that nothing but an outline of the foundation in crumbling foundation stones could be seen. There were hardly any windows left, and the doorway had flowers growing over it. Honestly, it was amazing that the church even still had a bit of its original wood-shingled roof, sagging towards the ground in the middle and dotted with holes.

  “Sooo,” Chris said, tapping his fingers on the plaque. “How do we get in there and find the parish register?”

  “Walk in through the front door?” Carrie suggested, and then they all jumped at a tremendous crack of thunder as the heavens finally opened and it started to pour. “Quick, get inside!” Carrie gasped, and they were lucky the park service didn’t fence off their delicate archeological sites, because if there had been a fence around the building Chris would have gone right through it.

  As it was, he bypassed the flower-covered doorway and instead charged through the gaping hole in the side of the building and found himself in a cool, dark, cavernous space, dripping wet and trespassing on government property. Creepy government property—the inside of the old mission church was one big, dim, dusty cavern. The fact that it was completely open on one side didn’t make it much lighter inside and the rain was dripping in through some of the holes in the roof. They’d darted into the most covered part of the old church and were clustered in what Chris, if he had to guess, would say was where the altar had once been. The floor here was wooden, more intact than anywhere else, and slightly raised. It was also covered in an ancient layer of splintered wood and stone dust from when the roof had tried to fall in and gotten only halfway down. But at least it was dry?

  “Wow,” Maddison said, following Chris and Carrie in and dumping her backpack in a mostly dry corner. “Listen to it out there. I hope it lets up before we need to head back.”

  “I hope we find the parish register,” Carrie said, poking at a lump of lumber that was either a rotted wooden chair or a collapsed lectern. “Anybody have any ideas?”

  “Find the cellar?” Maddison suggested.

  That was easier said than done. The old mission church was half derelict and had been abandoned to the elements for years, and they spent a good twenty minutes—according to Chris’s watch—poking around in the debris looking for a parish register or even just a bookshelf but coming up empty. There were some very old wooden benches sinking into the dirt floor and some optimistic weeds trying to grow wherever there was a big enough hole in the roof to let in sunlight, but not a piece of paper or book anywhere.

  The walls, made of rough stone and with no crevices or hidden rooms, were barely standing; the rafters were exposed but held nothing but cobwebs and one very annoyed pigeon. The only chest in the room proved to have nothing in it but an old wasp nest. Chris was unpleasantly reminded of the last time they’d tried looking for the parish register, and tried to squash the sudden prickling at the back of his neck. He hadn’t noticed any signs that they were being followed, but that could just mean someone was being careful.

  Or it could mean that whoever was following them hadn’t been fooled by their sneaking off at all, and instead had taken one look at the old mission church, decided that there couldn’t be anything remotely worth looking for in it, and gone home where it was warm and dry. But no matter how hard Chris tried to tell himself that, the feeling that they were being followed—which Chris simply couldn’t shake no matter how illogical it was or how much he pushed it to the back of his mind—suggested otherwise.

  “Maybe there’s an old well somewhere on the property,” Maddison suggested, interrupting Chris’s woolgathering and turning over one of the many fallen shingles with her shoe.

  “Oh,” Carrie sighed, wandering across the altar area towards the far wall and a window-like hole. “I hope we don’t have to fall in another”—she froze.

  “Carrie?” Chris asked.

  “Something just creaked,” Carrie hissed. She’d frozen in mid-step and looked horrified. Chris, closest to her and reasonably sure that he was on solid ground, reached out and grabbed her arms, then pulled her over to him. They overbalanced and landed in a heap on a particularly lumpy piece of floor but nobody plummeted down a sudden hole to their deaths, so Chris decided to count it as a win.

  “Was it a hollow creak?” Chris asked his cousin as she got to her feet and he rubbed his tailbone, which had only just started to lose the bruises from when he’d fallen into the cistern. Carrie nodded and Chris looked around for—oh, that’ll do nicely, he thought. He grabbed a loose piece of wood and rapped the floor where Carrie had been standing, listening for an echo that was hollow. Which would mean that the floor itself was hollow. And if it was hollow, Chris thought, then that meant there was a hidden space underneath it, or at least a natural nook or cranny into which somebody might decide to stuff something secret. “Hmm,” said Chris, and dropped to the floor to look for unusual seams.

  “Chris is communing with the floor again,” Maddison sighed, but she joined him and a second later Carrie followed them, knocking on the floorboards and listening for a difference in the thunking sounds. They almost gave up; the altar area was less decrepit than the rest of the mission church and the boards used to construct it were sturdy. Then one of the boards made a slightly hollower sound when hit, and they all started frantically sweeping years of dust and dirt away, and it was Carrie who actually found it, blowing years worth of dust out of an extra-large crack between the floorboards and inching her fingers into the crack until the resulting trapdoor came up with a painful groan.
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  “Whoa,” Carrie said when she’d dragged the heavy door up and over, fishing a flashlight out of her pocket. The flashlight’s beam illuminated a tiny room, barely big enough for the desk and the two rough shelves piled with papers that had been stuffed into it. It was dug directly into the earth itself, was just big enough for a person Chris’s size to spin in a circle with their arms outstretched, and had dirt walls buttressed with wooden planks. “Jackpot!” Carrie hissed triumphantly. “Here, let me down?”

  Of the three of them she was the smallest, so it made sense. It made even more sense, Maddison pointed out before Chris could figure out a way to lower Carrie down, to check if the hidden office space had a ladder.

  “Hidden office space?” Carrie asked, circling the rim of the hole all the way around with her flashlight. Chris got up to grab his backpack from the pile they’d left in the corner—glancing nervously through the gap in the wall at the tree line he could barely see through a sheet of rain, wishing he didn’t feel so much like someone was watching him—and tried to find his own flashlight, which was no longer in the spot he usually stored it. Next time, he thought to himself, stuffing spare socks back into the side pocket before they escaped, volunteer to pack the bags so you don’t have to ask Carrie where everything is.

  “Secret cave? Hidden archive? Private library?” Maddison offered. She was leaning over the edge as far as possible and blowing ineffectively at the cobwebs lacing the shelves. “I don’t know if there’s a word for ‘hidden compartment with a desk and bookshelves in it’ in the dictionary—oh hey, you found it!”

  “Yeah,” Carrie agreed, flashlight wavering on a series of wooden boards nailed to the wall of the cavern. “But I almost think it would be better just to jump.”

  “Wait, do you have belt loops?” Chris asked, socks forgotten. “Or something to clip a carabiner to?” Maybe it was a good thing Carrie and Maddison had been the ones to pack up the contents of his pack so that it had gotten jumbled: Chris had completely forgotten that he had a carabiner and a length of climbing rope in his backpack. He held them up triumphantly. Maddison looked delighted. Carrie gave the belt loops on her jeans a cautious tug but she didn’t say the plan was terrible.

  “I’m just not sure we should clip anything to these pants,” she explained. “They’re kind of old and some of the belt loops have already started to fray.” Carrie gave one a very firm tug and it made a ripping noise.

  Maddison suggested just tying the rope around Carrie’s waist; Carrie protested the waste if they couldn’t get the knot out—which was nice of her, the rope and the carabiner had been expensive—and they finally settled on clipping the rope to Carrie’s mostly emptied backpack and then buckling the backpack’s front straps to make an improvised harness. With added storage space for the parish register, Maddison pointed out before Chris could convince himself that telling Carrie she looked like she was wearing a backpack leash was a good idea.

  It turned out to be way more precaution than they needed, because Carrie made it all the way down the crude ladder without falling or slipping or having the ancient wood crumble under her touch, and there weren’t even any booby traps.

  “I don’t think that is ever going to be an issue here,” Maddison said, patting Chris on the back. He’d only realized they might run into booby traps after Carrie had started carefully pulling sheaves of paper off the shelves to look for parish registers.

  “I can’t believe that slipped my mind,” Chris told Maddison. “What if there had been?”

  “But there weren’t, and I think we’re dealing with a part of this mystery that nobody’s tried to protect before.” Maddison paused when Chris frowned at her, because if the parish register was down there then people had killed for the information it contained and that was basically the definition of something you booby-trapped. “I mean, I think we’re the first people to find this, and I don’t think the person who left this stuff here—an overworked parish priest moving stuff via ox cart or something, remember—thought it was important.”

  “So, we don’t need to worry about booby traps on this end,” Chris said. He was still watching Carrie nervously, although so far all she’d suffered was a sneezing fit.

  “Not on this end, no,” Maddison agreed. “Our stalker has been quiet, though, so we should maybe check for booby traps on our way out.”

  “We should definitely check for booby traps on our way out,” Carrie said, and Chris and Maddison stopped staring at each other and turned to Carrie, who had a heavy, leather-bound book clutched in her hands and a brilliant grin on her face.

  “Did you find it?” Chris asked, almost falling into the hole trying to get a closer look.

  “Santa Maria, Estrella del Mar, registro de la parroquia,” Carrie said. “I think this is it. The handwriting is tough to read and parts of it look like they’re in Latin. But the date on the first couple of entries”—she opened the front cover and held it out—“matches what we need, so I’m thinking it’s possible . . . ” She shrugged. “Plus it’s the only book down here, everything else looks like letters and maybe some maps.”

  “So, we grab this and we hide it,” Chris said, opening his Guide to Invasive Florida Wildlife and peeling the Ziploc bag of acid-free paper from between the pages for the entry on anacondas. “What?” he added, because Maddison was grinning at him and Carrie was giving him an exasperated look. “I wanted to be prepared!”

  “So you brought acid-free paper to wrap the book in?” Carrie asked, passing the book up to Chris and climbing out of the hole after it. “Where did you even find the paper?”

  “I had some lying around in case of emergencies, where did you think I got it? And I feel bad enough running around in the rain with a fragile book that should be off in a box in an archive somewhere,” Chris said, devoting himself to wrapping. The parish register was bigger than he’d thought and it took four sheets of paper just to get it securely wrapped. And it was still pouring outside, so he added his rain poncho on top of the paper, making a huge but hopefully protected bundle. “I didn’t even think there’d be so many other papers down there.”

  “The sealed underground conditions probably helped preserve them,” Carrie agreed, settling cross-legged at the edge of the hole. “Which, yeah, we just disturbed that environment, so we need to tell someone about this before the rest of the papers are ruined,” she said. “Hey, do you think the archive takes anonymous tips?”

  “Well, the police do,” Maddison said dubiously. “And it might be a good idea to call them too. Or first. Or from a cell phone while we’re walking back, except I was getting one bar off and on when it wasn’t completely clouded over,” she added, glancing out one of the half-fallen windows at the pouring rain still coming down in sheets and obscuring anyone who might be hiding.

  “Okay, but first can somebody untie my backpack?” Carrie asked, and Maddison had to save them all from Chris’s knots.

  Then they took a moment to check phones, and Maddison was right: she didn’t have any bars, Carrie had one, and Chris for some reason had two so he was elected to keep his phone on-hand in case of emergencies. Then a fat drop of rain made it through the roof and plopped cheerfully on the desk in the secret library and Chris decided to close the trap door before they got rain on decades-old papers.

  “Quietly,” Carrie hissed, as Maddison helped Chris tug the trapdoor back over. “What if they hear the trap door closing?”

  “Then we just have to make it look like nobody’s touched it,” Maddison said. When it was closed, the trapdoor was practically invisible. The hinges disappeared and the whole thing sat exactly level with the rest of the wooden floor, matching right down to the wood grain. Maddison stood back to study it and then said, “Dust.”

  “Dust?”

  “Or dirt,” Maddison amended. “We should rub some dirt into the edges of the trapdoor,” she explained, using a chip of wood to brush out the one spot where her hands had left trails in the floor’s decades-old dust layer. “A
nd then maybe walk across the edges randomly so nobody can tell where we disturbed it.”

  “Dust it is,” Chris said, and wandered over to one of the busted windows, where the shutters had fallen in and collected a pile of dry dust. He grabbed two handfuls from behind a large piece of shutter, figuring it would even hide the evidence that they were rearranging the dust in the old church, and brought them over to where Maddison was sprinkling pinches of dust over her handprints.

  “Thanks,” Maddison said, and sneezed.

  “Guys,” Carrie said, and her voice was so alarmed that Chris dropped his dust. “I just found footprints.”

  She’d wandered in the opposite direction Chris had, towards the end of the church that was without a roof at all, and was staring at a spot on the ground right where they’d entered. When Chris and Maddison joined her, Maddison discreetly blowing her nose, she pointed.

  There were two sets of footprints, one about Chris’s size and one slightly bigger, and both pointing into the church, clearly made by two people walking off the path and directly into the church after a somewhat heavy rain. But much more importantly, they were clearly pressed into dirt that was no longer muddy, and Chris ordered his pounding heart to calm down because it wasn’t as bad as it looked.

  “These are old,” Chris said, poking the bigger one with his finger to be sure. Part of a ridge crumbled when he did. “Must have been made after a really heavy storm when the wind was blowing at an odd angle; this part of the building is pretty well shielded from rain.” Which was true, their current downpour had slowed to a steadily decreasing patter and the wind had died down but it had been raging before and the spot where they were standing was still dry.

  “But not that old,” Carrie said. “These are obviously tennis shoes. In fact, I think they might be the same brand Chris likes to wear.”

  “Really?” Chris asked, and stood on one leg to look at his foot. Except he’d forgotten he was wearing his hiking boots so it turned into a pointless balance exercise because his boot prints didn’t match either of the ones they’d found, and both Carrie and Maddison’s feet were much too small. He hopped in a circle, put his foot down, and noticed that Carrie’s mystery deepened: the footprints picked up again in the dust just inside the door, now illuminated by one brave little ray of sunshine. Then they went up to the remains of the altar, walked along the very outside edge of it, and came back down the other side of the church in what Chris had to admit was a nicely thought-out search pattern that also kept as close as possible to load-bearing walls. “Whoever this was,” Chris said to Carrie when he’d finished following the footprints around and had determined that they didn’t lead to someone hiding in the ruins, “they were smart.”