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 the 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 che
ek, 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.
“I also feel ashamed, guilty and weak.”
Her tongue had loosened, and she was practically rattling off a Shakespearian soliloquy.
Dr. Roberts had mentioned to talk to her ghost about her hopes. But did she have any? When was the last time she hoped for anything? At least, anything of substance? Sometimes she wanted to splurge and buy ice cream in the middle of the night and eat the carton by herself. But as for deeper hopes, those were gone.
Then, without thinking about it, a word came out of her mouth completely unexpectedly.
“Love.”
Maria had always been the kind of woman who told herself she’d worry about love later—after she’d done everything that she wanted to do in life. But after Tehran, she’d told herself it was now impossible to ever think her future held that in store. Who could believe in love after what she had seen humans do to each other?
The word seemed to hang in the air, waiting for the approval or mocking of the three ghosts that still shimmered in the muted bathroom light. There was the one that had first appeared on the counter with the missing leg, one in the shower who was decapitated, and the Aztec in the closet.
What did they care if she wanted to be loved? The thought was ludicrous.
“Go away! All of you!” Maria shouted. “I’m sick and tired of you bothering me. Get out of my bathroom!”
One by one, the remaining three figures dissipated. Feeling slightly victorious, but mostly emotionally exhausted, Maria bolted out of the tub and wrapped herself in the large yellow towel that matched her sunshine bathroom décor. Without looking around, she ran from the room, nearly falling on the wet tile floor. She dove for her bed, pulled the covers high over her head, and wept.
Would she ever feel whole again?
Freddie and his companions soon realized that the job was too big for them. It had taken hundreds, perhaps thousands, of laborers to transport the treasure into the tunnel and to seal it in such a way, and obviously it would require more than a handful of men to dig it out. With the exception of a few skeptics who insisted on hard and immediate cash, the Kanabians expected to be paid for their labor with gold bricks from the enormous Aztec treasure. A large tent city, complete with commissary, sprang up at the foot of the White Mountain.
–Argosy. “White Mountains $10,000,000 Secret” by Steve Wilson, March 1966.
Chapter 14
AS BETH MASSAGED THE shampoo through Maria’s thick tresses, Maria sank deeper into the cushioned chair and yawned. It was Monday morning and she was exhausted. The weekend had been anything but relaxing.
Trying to speak to the Aztec ghost on Saturday night had drained her strength, and Sunday had been long mentally. For hours she’d poured over interview notes, Mayor Hayward’s bank records and journal, the voting history of Cal Emerson, and everything else Ms. Tuttle—Kanab librarian turned temporary police officer—could find. In addition, she’d double-checked everyone’s alibis and they’d all been on the up and up, including the alibi of Emily Hayward, the mayor’s wife. She really had been shopping with a friend for the entire day at outlet stores in a city an hour and a half away. She couldn’t have had a better alibi if she’d done it on purpose.
By the end of the day, Maria had been excited to find a number of clues in the material that connected Hayward and Emerson. Even so, her vision had eventually blurred and she’d fallen asleep, her head propped on her desk. Nancy had found her that way late in the evening and sent her home to get some rest. Later today she had to drive to Richfield to meet with the senator, an appointment Nancy had set up for her. So for now, she was going to try to enjoy this break while she could.
“What have you been doing to your hair?” Beth asked Maria over the noise of the running water. “It doesn’t look so bad, but it feels like straw. It used to be so soft. I was always so jealous of it. That and your dark eyes, perfect skin, full lips—well, I could go on forever.”
Robbed of Soul: Legends of Treasure Book 1 Page 10
