Three Keys to Murder
Page 41
Fawn added. “Of course, he saved it for his son, Coyle, instead.”
“Exactly,” Pierce continued. “There was no way for Simpkins or the pirates to know the massive iron container was empty, since the side with the torn hull was braced against the shell mound. Neither could Osceola, for that matter. It must have taken Osceola weeks to heap dirt on the side and top of the container, effectively burying it.”
Fawn spoke. “It also explains why the hole Tony Liáng dug in the front of the container was composed of dirt, not shells. It wasn’t part of the original Indian shell midden.”
“Fortunately, one piece of the treasure, arguably the most valued—the Aztec crown—had been salvaged by Sarah Courtland and moved to the secret room inside Fort Clinch,” Pierce said. “Funny that she never sought to understand what was inside the small iron box, but her intuition regarding its value was dead-on.”
The one fact Pierce offered no insight to, and Fawn might never understand, was the purpose of the secret room. Obviously, Sarah Courtland had not built it, but she knew of its existence when she worked at Fort Clinch during its construction in the late 1850s as a cook. She used this knowledge to hide the small iron box for her son Coyle.
It had taken over 150 years for the truth to be revealed, and the treasure to come to light.
As for Osceola’s skull in the cemetery, St. Augustine authorities decided to keep its location a secret. They agreed to drop any charges against Fawn if she remained quiet. It seemed Florida officials feared South Carolina would argue it should be re-joined with the rest of the body at the Charleston, South Carolina grave site if its discovery was made public. Fawn was pleased to learn there were still men and women today who shared Dr. Frederick Weedon’s idealistic passion for honoring Osceola’s dying request. Therefore, only a few would ever know the truth.
EPILOGUE
One week later, just before Mike was to be released from the hospital, Juan Velarde Cortez was wheeled into Mike’s hospital room by Fawn. A gentleman in his early fifties, wearing a suit, was in tow.
Fawn had been released a couple of days before and was wearing a beautiful white wedding dress with a veil. It was the same veil that her mother had worn on her wedding day.
The date was September 27th. Their wedding, originally scheduled for October 20th, had been scratched in favor of a more intimate and private affair.
Minutes later, the minister pronounced them husband and wife.
Fawn leaned over. Mike lifted her veil and they kissed. Then she smiled and whispered, “Time for us to get out of here so we can keep Osceola’s lineage going.”
AUTHOR’S NOTES
In order to separate fact from fiction, the following is an accounting of people, places, and things described in the story.
Amelia Island, Florida
Amelia Island, with its one incorporated city, Fernandina Beach, is located in the northeast corner of Florida. The 13.5- by-2-mile island is home to a plethora of historical sites, many within a short walk of the gift shops, restaurants, and drinking establishments sprinkled along the main thoroughfare: Centre Street.
The Amelia Island Museum was a jail for 100 years, from 1879 to 1979, before it was converted into the museum it is today. Spanning 4,000 years of the barrier island’s past, the museum takes you on a journey back in time through the island’s occupation under eight different flags.
The Amelia Island Lighthouse was originally constructed in 1820 on Cumberland Island, Georgia, just to the north, when Florida was still owned by Spain. It was moved, brick by brick, 18 years later in 1838 to Amelia Island, where it sits on an elevated area of land that allows the beacon, with its third-order Fresnel lens, to project light miles into the Atlantic Ocean.
The Bosque Bello (“Beautiful Woods”) cemetery was thought to have been established by the Spanish in 1798. Located several blocks south of Centre Street, it is as described in the story.
Fort Clinch is located at the northern end of Amelia Island, overlooking Cumberland Sound. Construction of the fort began in the mid-1800s and was never finished. Nonetheless, Fort Clinch is considered a fine example of third-system masonry construction with earthen ramparts contained within a five-sided curtain wall. As far as we know, there are no secret underground rooms in the fort, but some of the locals have suggested there were once tunnels that led outside. Incidentally, Fort Clinch was named after Duncan Lamont Clinch, a U.S. Army general who fought in the first and second Seminole Indian Wars against Chief Osceola.
St. Augustine, Florida
St. Augustine, Florida, separated to the south from Amelia Island by the sprawling city of Jacksonville, is self-named “The Oldest City in the United States,” having been founded in 1521 when Ponce de Leon was said to have landed there, although navigational charts from the period suggest Ponce de Leon may have come ashore farther south. The coastal city has a population of 11,000 full-time inhabitants and hosts more than six million tourists annually.
On the outskirts of St. Augustine off US1, there is a small 100-foot-by-100-foot plot of land owned by St. Johns County that holds the badly worn concrete and coquina marker that designates the spot where Osceola was captured in 1837. The engraved metal plate has long-since disappeared. The only access, a dirt trail, is on privately owned property.
The Castillo de San Marco was built on Matanzas Bay from 1672 – 1695 by the Spanish, who occupied St. Augustine at the time. Built entirely of coquina, it was never captured as a result of enemy attack. There is a guard room to the right of the sally port with strange Spanish text etched on the wall. Its meaning has never been deciphered.
The Lightner Museum, once the Alcazar Hotel, with its expansive 19th-century collection of art and artifacts, ranks as one of the finest museums in the southeastern United States.
Nuestra de la Leche shrine and cemetery is about ¼ mile north of the Castillo de San Marcos on Matanzas Bay. It is said to be the spot where Pedro Menendez first landed in St. Augustine in 1565 and held the first mass in the Americas. A tombstone proclaims that “The remains of 17th-century Catholic Native Americans were reinterred at this site in April 1997.”
Chief Osceola
Osceola fought in the Seminole Indian Wars in the 1830s and was considered a cunning leader and brilliant strategist. As depicted in the novel, he and other Seminole Indians were deceived and captured by the U.S. Army under the white flag of truce where they were taken to what was then called Fort Marion (previously the Castillo de San Marcos) and later were sent to Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina.
History has documented U.S. Army doctor Frederick Weedon did, indeed, secretly sever the famous Indian’s head upon his death on January 30, 1838. In researching the incident, we found some most unusual claims about what actually became of the missing skull.
There was a disturbance to Osceola’s gravesite in 1966, not in 1969 as mentioned in the story. In an effort to verify the bones were still in place, officials exhumed the corpse, and discovered that the nearly 130-year-old story of the missing head was, in fact, accurate. There was no skull with the body. As an interesting side note, a second coffin was exhumed next to Osceola’s that contained an unidentified infant’s skeleton.
Proof that the body in the grave was Osceola’s would not come until years later when DNA testing had advanced. A bone fragment taken in 1966 was matched against hair fibers extracted from a brush known to have been used by Osceola while imprisoned. The DNA matched, confirming the headless skeleton in the grave was Osceola.
Some speculate Dr. Weedon’s motivation for stealing Osceola’s head and taking it back to St. Augustine, Florida was purely monetary, but his actions seem to suggest otherwise. It has been well documented that Dr. Weedon embalmed the skull and kept it in his house, sometimes stringing it from his sons’ bedpost when they misbehaved. Thus, there was no money to be made from this behavior, except by therapists treating the Weedon bo
ys in later years!
Also, there is a paper trail of handwritten letters that prove Dr. Frederick Weedon passed the skull of Osceola to his son-in-law, Daniel Whitehead, in New York. Whitehead then gave the skull to Dr. Valentine Mott in 1843, where it was put on display in his Surgical and Pathological Museum. In time, he donated it to the Medical College of New York Museum where it was reportedly lost in a fire in 1865.
Over the years, rumors have persisted that Osceola’s head was not lost in the fire. In 1966, the same year authorities believed Osceola’s gravesite had been tampered with, a businessman in Miami, Otis W. Shriver, claimed to have the Indian’s bones tucked away in a bank vault. His goal was to rebury them at a tourist attraction named Rainbow Springs in Marion County, Florida. Archaeologists later proved that the remains Shriver kept were animal rather than human.
Other unsubstantiated claims persist to this day. The overwhelming probability, though, is that we will never fully understand Dr. Frederick Weedon’s motive for his most unusual act.
Other References
Maria Hester Monroe was the first presidential child born in the White House, and, as mentioned in the story, President James Monroe had two other children: Eliza Kortright Monroe and James Spence Monroe.
Black Caesar was, indeed, a real pirate. Henri Caesar was a Haitian slave born in the mid-1760s. He was part of a slave revolt in 1791 and was said to have carried out retribution using a saw against a lumberyard overseer who had severely mistreated him. In the early 1800s, Caesar and his crew began raiding ships from their base out of Port de Paix and eventually moved their operation to South Florida. The pirate is intriguing for two reasons: First, there are stories that he hid millions of dollars worth of treasure, and second, there is no definitive account of his death.
The ships SS Pearsaw and Zaile and historical figure Richard Simpkins are constructs from the authors’ imagination. So, too, are the Florida Keys military plan to catch Black Caesar, the three keys, and the Aztec treasure.
Spain formally ceded Florida to the United States in 1821, according to terms of the Adams-Onís Treaty. The amount was said to be $5 million.
The topical chemical mentioned, Angothin, is not a real drug, nor is the plant Annothria.
The massive shell mound outside Cedar Key, Florida, covers five acres and dates back to 2500 BC. It was created by archaic Eastern Woodland Indian cultures by discarding oyster and clam shells they used as a food source.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Vicky Knerly is a native of Syracuse, New York, and currently resides on St. Simons Island, Georgia, with her husband and sons. She has a bachelor’s degree in English and two masters’ degrees, and she has won awards for her research-based writing. She currently works for a private university based in Melbourne, Florida, where she also teaches as an adjunct professor.
Gary Williams lives in Jacksonville, Florida, with his wife and children. He has a bachelor’s degree in Business Marketing and writes full time. His hobbies include fishing, history and watching football.
In 2009, Gary and Vicky formally partnered as co-writers. Their debut novel, “Death in the Beginning,” was published electronically November 2011 quickly followed by their second novel, “Three Keys to Murder”. Look for “Indisputable Proof” in September 2012.