“For starters, Robert Murphy didn’t become rich until later in life, when his son, Rory, started to make it big in the bootlegging business producing rum in Saskatchewan and selling it to Al Capone in the 1920s,” Sam said. “Secondly, there’s still the matter of where Jack Holman found the gold.”
“What gold?” David asked.
“A few days ago, we ran into a man named Yago. He told us he was the son of Jack Holman. He said his father had come to the Ontario wilderness to find gold. Turned out, somewhere out there, in the process of it, he started to work for Murphy. In doing odd jobs, he located the remains of the CSS Mississippi and later returned with a number of gold Confederate coins.”
David interrupted. “How did you know Holman found gold coins, let alone the Confederate ones?”
Sam flicked the coin in between his fingers and smiled. “Because his son, Yago, described it exactly like this one.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” David argued. “I mean, no pilot or anyone else who found the ironclad would have deduced that there was buried treasure a few miles away, hidden beneath an old prospectors mine.”
“That means, Holman must have come here with Robert Murphy.”
David shook his head. “Can’t have. Murphy was long dead by the 1930s.”
“Agreed,” Sam admitted. “But what if Holman came here to fulfill Robert Murphy’s life-long ambition, perhaps a pact he’d made with himself or someone else, to find the treasure.”
“Sure.” Tom, who had been stacking piles of slate to make his version of a castle with a moat, looked menacingly at the empty Confederate chest. “But that still doesn’t answer where the gold coins got to. I mean, if Holman took it, or even Murphy, the coins would’ve turned up somewhere by now, but there’s been no record of them surfacing anywhere.”
“What are you suggesting?” David asked.
Tom sat up straight. “How do we know there was ever any gold in here?”
Sam handed him the gold coin. “This looks real to me.”
Taking the precious metal, Tom ran his eyes across it, then burst into sudden, unexpected laughter. “No, it isn’t. It’s a forgery and a very good one.”
“Whoa. What are you saying?” David asked, his nostrils flaring. “This entire thing our two families have been searching for has been some giant hoax dating back to the Civil War?”
“No. But how much do you know about Confederate coins? Everyone knows the Confederacy printed paper money, but have you ever seen a Confederate gold coin?”
“Hey, you’re right,” Sam said. “I hadn’t even thought of that.”
“No. The gold coin’s real.” David was adamant. “I grew up hearing of the unimaginable wealth of gold Confederate coins from the CSS Mississippi. Why would my father make up such a story? More to the point, why would people be willing to kill for it?”
“Who knows?” Tom said. “All I know is that the Confederacy didn’t mint any of their own coins.”
Virginia looked up from Holman’s journal which she was still industriously reading from start to finish. “I can answer that.”
“Really?” Sam asked, surprised. “How?”
She shrugged. “I collected coins when I was a kid. Some of the most valuable coins were those few which were minted by the Confederacy.”
“Such as?” Tom asked.
“In January of 1861, the Federal government produced about 330,000 silver coins.” She sighed and then paused. “Technically, they were only 90 percent silver and 10 percent copper. Either way, they were termed silver half dollars at New Orleans. Of course, when Louisiana seceded, the state took over the mint and continued production, turning out about 124,000 of the coins.”
“If they made 124,000 coins, wouldn’t eBay and other online auction houses be full of the old Confederate minted coins?” Sam asked.
“No, because it’s impossible to tell the difference.” She put Holman’s book down. “You see they used the original die – the metal block used to cast the blank coin – so their coins still read, United States of America. The Confederate Treasury Department then took over and minted another 963,000 United States half dollars. Coins of this period contained approximately the amount of metal equal to the face value of the coin and these Louisiana and Confederate-produced coins had the same amount of silver as the U.S. produced coins and were thus just as valuable. There is no way to determine if an individual coin was minted by the U.S., Louisiana, or the Confederacy as the same workers used the same die and machines and the coins had the same amount of silver.”
Tom smiled. “Okay, so I was right, the Confederacy never minted any gold coins.”
“Technically, you’re still wrong,” she said. “Louisiana and the Confederacy also minted United States $20 double eagle gold coins in New Orleans. The product runs for these coins was about 5,000 by the U.S., 9,750 by Louisiana, and 2991 by the Confederacy. The South also minted approximately 10,000 United States gold $1 and $5 coins at Charlotte and Dahlonega before running out of stock and closing down these two operations.”
“Sure, but those were still, fundamentally U.S. coins.” Tom turned the gold coin over in his hand. “This has a clear depiction of Jefferson Davis’s face, and an ironclad with a Confederate motto. How do you explain that?”
“The Confederate States, as an independent nation, wanted to produce their own coins, not just copy U.S. coins. My guess is these gold coins were privately minted for the Confederate States of America.”
Sam asked, “Any way we could find out who that was?”
Virginia made a thin-lipped smile. “Who minted this batch of coins, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
“Normally during that period, the name of the goldsmith would be imprinted on the coin, as a means of confirming its authenticity. A good craftsman earned his reputation by ensuring the specified amount of gold or silver to any other metal was found in the coin. What’s the name on the coin?”
Sam said, “C. Bechtker.”
“I’ve heard of Bechtker. He was a German-born industrialist from Carolina named Christopher Bechtker and produced gold coins from the first private mint in 1830. But he couldn’t have minted this.”
“Really? Why not?”
Virginia said, “Because Christopher Bechtker died in 1843. Some of his coins have fetched hundreds of thousands of dollars in today’s markets.”
Tom said, “So that proves it. This is a fake.”
Virginia nodded. “I guess so. Albeit a very good one.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Sam said, putting away his satellite smartphone after making a quick internet search. “The C doesn’t refer to Christopher. It refers to his son, Charles, who had learned the family trade. As such, he’d been commissioned in secret to mint a particular batch of gold coins for the Confederacy.”
“That makes more sense,” Virginia said, returning to leafing through Jack Holman’s journal. “But it still doesn’t answer my question. If the Confederate treasure was real, where did it all go?”
Chapter Sixty
Virginia continued to study Jack Holman’s journal, while Sam contacted Elise to get her to do a search of Murphy and Holman’s finances at their death, in the off chance they could pick up the otherwise cold trail to the treasure. Tom and David got a nice fire crackling. As it burned to lower embers, they began heating up ration packs for lunch.
There was something hidden in the journal. Like a sixth sense, Virginia felt certain of it, but so far, she just couldn’t find anything to back up her gut feeling.
She turned another page. Sam had spoken about Holman’s son telling stories about his dad getting drunk and showing off gold Confederate coins, but that could have simply been the imaginings of a young child. Still, there was more to it. She felt certain that Holman hadn’t just spotted the pyramid-shaped casement of the CSS Mississippi.
He’d been inside and found the treasure.
His journal would prove it, she was certain.
“What d
o you expect to find in there?” David asked, bitterly. “Jack Holman didn’t know anything about the gold. His relationship to this entire thing was that he spotted what he thought to be a pyramid in the middle of nowhere out from North Dakota.”
“I’ve no idea, but it’s the only lead I have right now, so I’m going to keep searching for it.”
David shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
Virginia flicked another page, looked at the date, and stopped. She went back a couple pages, and then skimmed forward. There was something wrong with the dating sequence. At first, she thought she’d made a mistake, turning the pages out of sequence, but now realized it wasn’t her fault. Dates were all over the place. Events that happen on one day would be repeated several years later and vice versa. Three or four dates would follow a natural sequence of events, before fluctuating to a period sometimes years earlier.
How can that possibly be?
No one makes that sort of blunder. It was almost like a form of dyslexia, where the author of the journal had ended up writing the dates in a jumbled, disordered mess. It was hard to believe. Much more likely, Holman had intentionally made the anomalies.
But why?
The answer hit her like a heavy rock to the chest.
To protect the Confederate treasure if his journal should be discovered.
It was a simple code. Dates appeared as though they had been randomly placed, but there was a purpose hidden within. Regarding the year, the first two digits always remained unchanged – 19 – whereas the second two would fluctuate between 10-31.
Looking at just the year column in regards to dates in the journal, it appeared Holman had given each entry a year date entirely at random. Likewise, pairing the day and month appeared entirely random. It was only when the two were compared with each other, that Virginia started to see a sequence.
Her heart hammered as her eyes scanned the next page to confirm her theory. She had an analytical mind that naturally computed complex algorithms quickly. In this case, something simply didn’t look right, until she’d stared at it long enough, for the code to reach the surface.
She was right.
Most of the journal was filled with trivial information, in which to bury the code. For example, on two pages, the month on the first page would be subtracted by the month on the second page, to achieve the actual month the event took place on the third page.
The same algorithm was applied to the day and year.
She tried it on an event that she already knew about and after applying the formula the date came to 12/5/1925 – the year Jack Holman won the Schneider Cup with his experimental Seaplane.
Her heart raced.
She flicked back to the page she’d marked earlier with dogears, where Holman discussed seeing a pyramid through the trees near North Dakota. The corrected year for 1931 became 1922. Six years before Robert Murphy died.
David shifted. “I’m going to get some more firewood.”
“You want us to come?” Tom asked.
“Nah. You’re all right. I don’t need to collect much,” David said as he pushed to his feet. “I just thought we might as well be comfortable while we have lunch.”
Virginia continued to read. Some entries referred to routine flights, abnormal weather, important events coming up. Nothing that referred to the ironclad.
Virginia skimmed the barely legible writing that she recognized as Holman’s scrawl. She turned to the previous page. The handwriting was similar, but not the same. She flicked over another four to five pages. There was no doubt about it.
Someone else regularly joined him on his flights.
Virginia quickly turned the pages back to the section describing the sighting of the ironclad. The notes were written as though by Holman, but it wasn’t his handwriting. The revelation was startling as it was irrefutable.
Holman wasn’t alone when he spotted the ironclad!
She folded a couple dogears into the paper, feeling a familiar twinge of guilt. Mrs. Brand, her fourth grade English teacher would have put her in the corner during recess for the abuse of the book, much less an old document like this one.
Frowning with concentration, she continued to scan more of the pages. If Holman wasn’t alone when he spotted the ironclad, the real question remained, who was?
Sam interrupted her thoughts. “Food’s ready, Virginia.”
“Thanks. I’ll just be a minute.”
She continued to skim, confident she was onto something, but unwilling to mention it to anyone else until she was certain. It took several pages before she found what she was looking for.
There was a story regarding a car, an old rumrunner from the 1920s. She read the notes, and turned the page, where a black and white drawing of the car was still visible. There notes referring to the car’s make and model appeared blotched and unreadable, but next to them were some other information that might help her identify the car. Color: burgundy. Year of manufacture: 1927. And a lot of technical gibberish that would only interest car lovers.
Virginia beamed a wide grin.
Sam took a seat next to her, still holding his pony-bottle of oxygen. The regulator seemed to have seized on the bottle and he was having trouble separating the two for the flight out. “What’s so interesting?”
“This,” she handed him the drawing of the car. “Any idea what sort of car that is?”
“That’s a Model A Ford Tudor.” Sam matched her smile, his lips setting deep creases in his cheeks. “What about it?”
She whispered, still afraid to jump to the wrong conclusion. “There’s a chance this car still holds the Confederate gold.”
“Really? That’s what you think?”
“No. That’s what Holman thought.”
Sam asked, “And how did Holman work out the gold was hidden inside Murphy’s car?”
Virginia answered, “He’d searched and ruled out every other location, but then he’d recalled that Robert Murphy loved his car more than any other possession. Murphy had even joked on multiple occasions, and I quote: ‘within my car, is all that my heart has ever desired.’”
“But surely someone would have found the gold by now? It’s not like the driver wouldn’t notice the additional weight, is it?” Tom asked.
Virginia scanned the specific lines referring to the design of the Ford Tudor. “It was originally specifically built with double leafed springs, to take the additional weight of the contraband rum. There was a secret compartment built beneath the false floorpan, filled with lead weights to reduce the vehicles center of gravity. This improved maneuverability in the event of a police chase.”
Sam’s eyes widened, and his intense blue eyes lit up like sapphires in the sun. “Robert Murphy switched the lead for the gold. Anyone who knew the car would have instantly assumed the heavy weight was from the lead, never guessing it had anything to do with the gold of a nation.”
Tom whistled. “Find the car and you find the gold.”
“Find what car?” David asked, dropping the wood by the fire, suddenly interested in their conversation.
Virginia said, “A Burgundy 1927 Ford Tudor, heavily modified to make it fast and agile, as a rumrunner during the bootlegging era.”
“Hey, my dad owns one of those. My grandfather bought it back in the 1930s.”
“You’re kidding. What color was it?”
“Burgandy. A 1927 Model A Ford Tudor,” David said without hesitation.
“Certain about the year?” she questioned him.
“Yes. Of course, I’m certain about the year. It was a new model. Ford changed from the last run of the Model T in 1926 to the brand-new Model A in 1927.”
“Where did your granddad buy it?”
“What’s with the twenty questions?” David asked, curtly.
“It’s important. It has to do with the Confederate gold.”
David raised a cynical eyebrow. “Okay. Apparently, the car was Robert Murphy’s pride and joy. Stanford liked the concept of owning it when it went
to auction after Murphy died. Even though his father, William Chestnut had long been dead, he somehow felt it was a fitting end to a family feud that had lasted a lifetime.”
“No joke? Where does your father keep it now?”
“At private residence in Minnestra Minnesota, where he lives when he’s in office as a sitting senator. He’s kept it meticulously maintained and has even shown it at various car events throughout the years.” David smiled. “Why do you want to know?”
Virginia expelled a deep breath of air. “Because, according to Holman, there’s a hidden compartment within that car, where the entire contents of that chest have been hidden all this time.”
“Get out of here.” David’s face flushed red. “Are you certain? It’s been in my family’s possession all this time?”
Virginia handed him the book with the markings. “See for yourself.”
David read the note enthusiastically.
“Okay, so Robert Murphy and Jack Holman went back in 1920 to find the treasure. Jack Holman helped the man return it to his home in Saskatchewan. Jack looked up to Murphy. Then, when Murphy died, and there was no mention about the gold, he started to search for it himself. He was certain that Murphy had simply decided to hoard it away somewhere like a miser.”
“What do you think?” Virginia asked, her heart pounding.
David grinned. There was something reptilian in his wide eyes. “So, the gold has been hidden in my father’s Ford Tudor all these years?”
“It appears so,” Virginia said.
“That’s amazing.” David reached inside his backpack and retrieved a handgun. A Beretta 92. He leveled it at her. “I guess I don’t need your help anymore.”
Chapter Sixty-One
Startled, Virginia opened her mouth to say something cutting. Thinking better of it, she quickly shut it again. Sam and Tom stayed stock-still in stunned silence.
“I’ll have that journal now,” David commanded, holding out his open palm.
Virginia, still frozen with shock, didn’t move.
An instant later he flicked the side mounted safety of his Beretta 92 forward with his thumb to emphasize the point.
The Ironclad Covenant (Sam Reilly Book 10) Page 23
