Artifact (A Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery)

by Pandian, Gigi

  Sitting alone as the torrential downpour surrounded me, I felt the car sway beneath me. Lightning flashed again, leaving me exposed to whoever might be watching.

  In less time than I would have thought possible, they were back. I unlocked the door and they piled in.

  “Derwin is gone,” Lane said.

  “But you said he was there when you were in the pub,” I said.

  “He was,” Lane said. “But he’s not in the pub now, and he’s not in his room.”

  “Where’s he gone?” I asked

  “To check on his obsession,” Angus said. “On this of all nights, it might not be safe. He’ll need to be sure.”

  “And your ex has gone to get the treasure,” Lane said. “If Derwin finds him…button your coat, Jones. We’re going out there.”

  Angus was spry, and also well prepared. He had his own flashlight in his jacket pocket, which he no doubt used when he and Fergus walked the long path home on stormy nights. In spite of the harsh rain, he kept even pace with Lane, with me a few steps behind them in my inappropriate shoes for the slippery path, as they hurried to the site of the dig—and the tree with the treasure buried beneath. The frequent lightning helped our search for the path—if not our nerves—and we found our way.

  I was out of breath and soaking wet by the time we came upon the site. Not a soul was in view. But a small tarp had been sloppily erected, and the tree had been massacred. Lane swore. Angus followed suit. Loose earth had been dug up from around the roots of the tree in an attempt to gain access beneath them. The digging was haphazard, but had not gone far. A trowel lay at the edge of the tarp a few feet from the tree. Lane went over to it.

  “Dunnae touch it!” Angus shouted. “Cannae ye see there’s blood?”

  Chapter 49

  Lane stopped before he picked up the bloody trowel. Under the edge of the tarp, the rain hadn’t been able to wash away a liquid thicker than water visible on the base of the tool. It wasn’t the pointy edge, though. Thank God it wasn’t the pointy edge.

  “There’s naebody,” Angus said. “Wot’s been done?”

  “I think Rupert tried to dig up a treasure,” I said, looking frantically around while I spoke. “Right here under this tree, and Derwin found him and tried to stop him.”

  Lane looked down over the side of the cliff near the steep walkway.

  “He didn’t kill him here with the trowel,” Lane said.

  “The tide,” Angus said. “He’s goin’ to set him out in the tide.”

  Lane and I stared at Angus.

  “He’s supposed to be dead in the sea already,” Angus said sagely.

  “Oh God, he’s right,” I said. “His car went over a cliff and they thought he was dead because they never found the body but his car was on the rocks. If Derwin means to kill him for real, then he’ll want to make it look like the way Rupert was thought to have died.”

  “We won’t be able to sneak up on him,” Lane said. “Even in the storm, they’ll see us coming.”

  “Not if ye follow me,” Angus said, a wicked smile on his face.

  Of course. He knew about the hidden path where Lane had seen the bean nighe.

  Angus led us south a few yards to a path we hadn’t noticed before. It was indeed the hidden path that Rupert had previously used to evade us. It was easy to miss, and difficult to traverse, especially in the rain. I didn’t want to go barefoot, but it wasn’t going to be easy to climb down in my heels. Lane took my hand.

  “Stay with me,” he said.

  Instead of following the path all the way down along the rocks to the edge of the sea, Angus led us down to where the rocks met the cliff’s edge. As I stepped forward, my foot gave way, slipping on the rock. Lane’s hand still held mine. He pulled me back and set me on my feet.

  Angus looked back at us. I could see him more clearly now. The storm was letting up. We continued on.

  We were still heading downward, though our movements were more up and down as we silently scrambled across the rock formation. Angus held up his hand once we had reached a flat spot directly above the entrances to the cave. Lane and I stopped in our tracks.

  The rain stopped. The only sound was the crashing sea.

  Angus motioned for us to move forward, and we stopped even with him, near the edge of the small landing above the cave.

  We had come down so far that we were almost at sea level. The rocks below us were being swallowed by the lapping tide, and I slowly made my way toward the edge. They came into view right below us.

  I saw Rupert first. He was lying on a rock, being splashed by the sea water. A red gash was visible on the side of his head.

  He wasn’t moving.

  I rushed forward without thinking, but Angus pulled me back. Yet I had gone forward enough to catch a glimpse of Derwin standing on a rock next to Rupert. The sea was crashing loudly enough that he hadn’t heard us.

  “Lane,” I hissed. “You’re the hero. Don’t you have a gun or something we can use to stop him?”

  “I don’t use guns. They get you into more trouble than they’re worth.”

  “Thanks a lot, MacGyver.”

  I wrenched my arm out of Angus’s grasp and crawled to the very end the ledge. My hair whipped around me as I looked over the edge. Derwin was close. Only a few feet below me. He stood on a rock much higher than the one Rupert was on. I swung my legs around so they were hanging over the side. Derwin still hadn’t seen me, and the roaring waves muffled our movements. He was standing in the doorway of the second opening to the cave, looking between Rupert and the opening, so that no one on his level could sneak up on him.

  “Don’t do it, Jones,” Lane’s voice whispered into my ear.

  Neither of them would ever let me act if I hesitated and gave them time to stop me. I needed to do it now.

  I jumped.

  I landed right behind Derwin, bending my knees to cushion the jump. It actually worked. There was no hiding my presence any more, but I had a couple seconds of confusion in which to act. I hadn’t counted on the fact that my legs were momentarily unsteady from the big leap. As I tried to steady myself, I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. Derwin was holding a sharp metal hook in his hand.

  I wasn’t the only one who had seen the weapon. Lane jumped down on the other side of Derwin, pulling Derwin’s attention away from me. It was a gallant effort. If the rock he landed on hadn’t been slick from the rain, and if he hadn’t been wearing so much extra weight in the padding of his disguise, he might have been even more effective by landing upright. As Derwin turned to face Lane’s fallen form, his arm flew up and I saw the metal gleam. I had only a second to act.

  My first kick hit Derwin’s thigh, and he cried out in pain. With my adrenaline so high I hadn’t been aware of how hard I had kicked him.

  When I drew my leg back, my foot pulled loose of my shoe. The heel was stuck in Derwin’s leg.

  He bent over in pain. Balancing on the ball of my now-bare foot, I swung my other foot around and clipped him in the cheek, slicing the tip of my remaining heel across the fleshy part of his face like a knife. A red line of blood spread out and ran down his face, and he staggered to the edge of the rock.

  Toward me.

  “You’ve ruined everything!” he yelled. “Why? Why didn’t you let me stop them? You said you understood. You understood that what I was doing wasn’t easy. But it was right.”

  His voice made me shiver. He lunged at me with the hook. The motion of his attack brought back the jiu-jitsu class drills of my youth. I jumped away, and from the unexpected angle I was able to pull his weight onto my shoulder from behind. Because of the center of gravity, the move is one of the few things easier for a short person than a tall one. Barely feeling his weight, my body lifted his. His tall form rolled over my shoulder and flipped onto the hard rock below.

  As he hit the ground, the sharp hook fell from his grasp and landed a few feet away. Derwin was conscious but stunned. He groped around in a daze. As he grasped for the
hook, he slid on the slick surface and slipped off the edge of the rock.

  I thought I heard him yell, but the sound was swallowed up by a wave. Lane was standing now, and rushed forward toward the spot where Derwin had gone over the edge. I ran over to where Rupert had lain.

  He wasn’t there.

  It was this rock, wasn’t it?

  I stepped forward, dreading seeing Rupert underwater on another rock that was now swallowed up by the tide.

  Two figures came into view. Angus had heaved Rupert onto a different rock on higher ground. They were both soaking wet with sea water.

  Rupert moaned.

  “He needs to be taken to hospital,” Angus said.

  “Derwin needs to go, too,” Lane said, out of breath, coming up behind me.

  “Did I—”

  “No,” Lane said. “He fell onto a sharp rock below. But he’s alive.”

  Lane looked at me earnestly. I had the strangest foreboding.

  “Can you two manage—?” he began.

  “Go, man!” Angus said, more quickly than I could get a word in. “We’ll met ye at the hospital, looking like yerself. Ye might bring an extra pair of shoes for Miss Jones. I dunnae think she’ll be wantin’ these.”

  Chapter 50

  Lane didn’t meet us at the hospital. A pair of new shoes had been dropped off with “Jones” printed in thick black marker on the box, though, so I knew he had been there. They were heels in my size.

  He didn’t return to the Fog & Thistle Inn, either. His luggage was gone from the room, and an envelope had been left for Douglas Black with double the amount of money needed to pay for our room. I heard that the local police station had also “misplaced” his arrest file.

  I can’t say I blamed him. There were bound to be lots of questions, and if he could avoid them…well, who in his position would have done any differently? The last thing people at the inn had observed about the two of us was that we’d had a fight, so he had a legitimate, unsuspicious reason for being gone.

  I savored the strong peaty flavor of yet another local Scotch on my tongue and enjoyed the warm fire on my toes. I was finally thawing out.

  It was the following evening, and I was sitting in front of the fireplace at the inn with a blanket on my lap and a single malt Scotch whisky in my hand.

  The police were quick to grasp the situation, and I had only spent a couple hours at the station. That left me the rest of the day to visit Rupert at the hospital, have a long phone conversation with Sanjay and a short one with Nadia, and to properly dig for a treasure beneath the tree.

  Malcolm had a bit of a shock when he saw the initial damage done to his site, but once the situation was explained, he agreed to excavate the tree in search of the lost Indian jewels.

  Perhaps he wasn’t completely altruistic. There are complicated laws governing treasure trove, and as the person with official government permission to be digging up that stretch of the coast, Malcolm might have thought he could fund more Pictish digs with the windfall from locating a lost treasure. He sorely needed it. Fiona had decided to leave, and I couldn’t blame her.

  Douglas Black came over to where I sat with Malcolm, Fergus, and Angus, and asked if we needed another round.

  Our drinks were quite full, but he soon got down to the real reason he was hovering.

  “The missus was wonderin’,” he said. “How did you realize it was Derwin that was tryin’ to do the harm?”

  “I didn’t know until the last minute,” I admitted.

  “She thought it was me!” Malcolm said heartily, not trying to keep his voice down. The pub was so full with locals who had heard about the adventure that there weren’t enough tables to go around, and Malcolm was enjoying being a minor celebrity. “I’ll take that as a compliment, Jaya. I do love my stones.”

  “I did have the right motive,” I said to Mr. Black, “but the wrong person. If going after the treasure wasn’t the motive, then I realized the digging for treasure could seriously disrupt the dig. Malcolm had put so much time and energy into his obses—I mean, into his passion, that it made sense for him to be passionate enough to kill to protect it.

  “When I learned Malcolm had an alibi, I realized that Derwin had the same interest. And having studied geology, he was worried about what digging in the cave underneath the dig would do to the structural integrity of the site. Once Derwin was suspicious of Rupert’s activities, he used his knife to get at the hidden bracelet in the floorboards of Rupert’s room. That’s why he tried to kill him. He also had binoculars that he used to spy on all of us. When I saw him walking back up to the crew after I found the cave, I thought he was returning from using the facilities at the inn. If I’d been more suspicious, I might have noticed then that he was watching me.”

  “He’s claiming to the police that he never meant to kill Rupert,” Malcolm said. “Only injure him so he’d leave the dig. He can’t claim that about Knox. Such a shame. I thought he had real potential.” Malcolm looked down into the fire.

  Douglas Black shook his head incredulously.

  “Never trust a fellow who dusnae smoke real cigarettes,” he said.

  “Daft,” Fergus mumbled. “A treasure worth a fortune in ‘is hands, ‘n he puts it back, ‘n goes ‘n kills instead.”

  “He’ll be in hospital for a time,” Angus said. “Nae pretty recovery for tha’ one.”

  “And Rupert’s finally getting the medical attention he needs,” I added. “He should be out of the hospital soon, as long as his father doesn’t kill him.”

  “Dougie!” a female voice called from the back. “Yer not askin’ about the treasure!”

  Angus stifled a smile. Malcolm laughed out loud. “Ach,” Fergus mumbled.

  “I’m gettin’ there, woman!” Mr. Black grimaced.

  “The treasure Jaya found is safe under guard at the police station until it can be transferred to a museum,” Malcolm said. “My treasures are still in the ground.”

  “Miss Jones found her fayrie treasure,” Fergus said approvingly, grinning broadly and revealing his gray teeth.

  The British and Indian authorities would no doubt take ages to sort out what would happen to the Rajasthan Rubies. I still had the original artifact that had set off this whole adventure, but even if I had been tempted to forget to mention the bracelet to the authorities, I doubted Rupert would let me. Not now that I was heading back to San Francisco and close proximity to Lane, rather than staying in Britain with him.

  Rupert hadn’t been able to sneak off with the treasure, so the jewels were all safely at the police station. At least I had every reason to believe they had all of the jewels….There was only a slight possibility it wasn’t the storm that had disturbed the spot at the edge of the tree after we left in search of Rupert. And it was most likely only our overactive imaginations that made it look like the antique box we found so close to the surface had been opened recently. Just because some of the dirt around the hinges looked a little disturbed….

  Could a reformed jewel thief resist?

  There was still a king’s ransom of treasure left. Ruby-laden gold ornaments for all kinds of adornment, in the same beautifully ornate style as the bracelet I had first seen only a week ago. And more importantly, the diary of Willoughby Gregor. The history, and the knowledge, had been left for the world.

  I had a few minutes with the diary before the police confiscated it for safekeeping for the proper authorities, whoever they were determined to be. The story we had pieced together was true. And it wasn’t only a story. It was a life. Many lives. Their loves, losses, successes, risks, and beginnings. Willoughby Gregor, a merchant with the East India Company, who married Ameena Bashir, an adventurous young woman who knew of a rumored treasure that had been hidden away. She didn’t survive the Sepoy Rebellion or make it out of India alive, but the fortune she found for her beloved husband and daughter did. The first page of Willoughby’s diary said more than anything else: For Elspeth. His daughter.

  Willoughby hadn�
��t revealed the treasure to anyone else, even though Elspeth had died first. He had removed some of the pieces for his estate and family, dropping one piece during a fierce Scottish storm, but not the vast majority of riches. But I had to wonder….

  Willoughby didn’t destroy that sketch showing the location of the treasure after Elspeth’s death. He wanted someone who understood to find it.

  As for me, the one who found the treasure? I’d found something much more than I was expecting. The one item Lane had left behind was a piece of paper with the address of an apartment in Berkeley. I didn’t know what I’d find there, but I knew who I’d find. And I could hardly wait.

  Author’s Note

  Though Artifact is a work of fiction and the characters and treasure in the book came from my imagination, the historical details about Scotland and India are true.

  In Scotland, the story of the Picts is presented as scholars have pieced it together. Though this particular archaeological site does not exist, Pictish standing stones are being unearthed to this day. The cliff-side setting is an accurate portrayal of that region of the Highlands of Scotland and the nearby Dunnottar Castle is a dramatic site to visit. The legends of the Tuatha de Danann and the bean nighe are alive and well in Irish and Scottish folklore.

  In India, the styles of Mughal artwork described are real, as are the challenges art historians face in separating factual depictions from artistic license. The battles and social norms of the British East India Company also existed as they are described in the book. The British East India Company transformed itself from a trading company into a military power, assuming a greater military and political role after the 1757 Battle of Plassey, with the British Crown taking over direct rule of India a century later, after the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857. Indian independence was achieved in 1947. There were many violent conflicts leading to lives and treasures being lost, but during certain periods of time there were also marriages between British men and Indian women. It’s entirely possible that the story in Artifact may have played out in unrecorded history…