Contest

by David Wood

  “She wouldn’t do that, would she?” Not sure he wanted to know the answer, he made his way to the living area.

  Spenser and Riv sat hunched over their laptops, the journal open in between them. Bones sat with his feet propped up on the coffee table, a big mug of coffee in his hands. He flashed a knowing smile when his eyes fell on Maddock.

  “Morning,” he greeted Maddock with exaggerated warmth. “Sleep well?”

  “I’ll say,” Spenser said, not looking up from her laptop. “Starting about ten seconds after we finished discussing the journal. And he snores.”

  Bones’ smile melted. “So, when you said ‘not much’ happened,” he said to the young woman, “that’s exactly what you meant.”

  “A woman can crash in a guy’s room and not hook up,” Riv said to Bones. “It’s perfectly normal among mature adults.”

  “And Maddock proves that time and again.” Bones returned his attention to his coffee, an injured expression painting his face.

  Spenser paused from her work long enough to greet Maddock, while Riv merely grunted, never taking her eyes from her work.

  “You’re not working on the show?” Maddock asked.

  “Are you kidding?” Riv said. “This is way too juicy to pass up, and it’s not the sort of thing Grizzly could help with. So, today I’m experimenting with this thing called ‘delegating.’ I’ve heard of it but never tried it. Grizzly’s taking care of the show while Spenser and I work on this.”

  Maddock poured a cup of coffee and joined them at the table. “How’s the project coming?”

  “Very little,” Spenser said. “Nothing we’ve tried has worked. Every once in a while it spits out a word, but that’s probably a coincidence.”

  “There’s one page that we could tell right away was different,” Riv said. “It turned out to be a simple substitution cipher, so we got a few words and phrases out of it. Looks like research notes.”

  “We’ve got a friend who is pretty good at these things,” Maddock said.

  “If you’re talking about Jimmy,” Bones said, “I already called him. He’s on vacation with his new girlfriend and said he didn’t have time to fool with it.” Jimmy Letson was a fellow Navy vet, a journalist, and an accomplished hacker. His computer skills had assisted Maddock and Bones on many occasions. “I sent the first four pages to him anyway.”

  “Have you heard back from him?”

  Bones nodded. “He said it looked to him like it wasn’t any code at all, just a bunch of random stuff. He also said that I should jump up my own ass, or something like that.”

  Maddock chuckled. He knew Jimmy. The man wouldn’t be able to resist the lure of an uncracked code that might lead to a lost treasure. In fact, he was prob- ably already at work on it.

  “The bits you did manage to decipher, what did they say?”

  Riv consulted her legal pad.

  “Lake Cahuilla ebb and flow. Map the shoreline. Stages.”

  Maddock took a sip of coffee and turned the words over in his mind. Lake

  Cahuilla was a prehistoric lake that once covered portions of southern California and northern Mexico. It occupied an area of nearly six thousand square miles and encompassed the Salton area as well as the fertile regions of the Coachella and Imperial Valleys. Fed primarily by the Colorado River, the lake formed, disappeared, and reformed many times over the centuries, before disappearing for good sometime after 1580. The Salton Sea now stood in Cahuilla’s lower basin.

  “Any idea what to make of that?” Maddock asked.

  “If the treasure predates the last known incarnation of the lake, it could mean we shouldn’t bother looking in the area covered by the lake,” Spenser suggested.

  “Oops. You made a mistake in your Morse code decryption,” Riv said. “You thought it was ‘cluster guardian’ but this word is not ‘cluster;’ it’s ‘Clusker’ with a k. Could that be somebody’s name?”

  And then Maddock knew why the phrase had rung a bell the night before.

  “It is a name. Charley Clusker.”

  “Was he a guardian of some sort?” Spenser asked.

  “The Guardian was a newspaper.” He took another swig of coffee and tried not to smile triumphantly.

  “I’ll save you all some time,” Bones said. “Maddock will sit there with a smug look on his face until somebody asks him to tell them the story.”

  “Screw you, Bones.” Maddock drained his cup and went for a refill. “Charley Clusker was a prospector who came west to California during the Gold Rush. When he passed through this area, he met some Cahuilla tribesmen who told him the story of a great stretch of water that once covered the land. According to legend, one day a giant white bird died and eventually turned into a tree. Clusker didn’t think much about the story until years later, when he saw an article in the San Bernadino Guardian about a party of travelers who came across an old sailing ship half-buried in the desert sands.”

  Bones was nodding. Spenser listened in rapt attention. Riv was typing furiously on her keyboard.

  “Clusker thought back to the Cahuilla legend and it occurred to him that the white bird that turned into a tree could have been a sailing ship that had run aground. The white bird represents the sails, but as they grew tattered and the winds stripped them away, the masts that remained looked like trees.”

  “I remember this story,” Bones said. “Clusker got in late on the Gold Rush and didn’t strike it rich, so he was determined to be the first to find the ship and recover any cargo that might be on it.”

  “Hold on,” Spenser said. “How does a ship like that end up in Lake Cahuilla in the first place?”

  Maddock explained that Lake Cahuilla had drained into the Gulf of California, and it was believed that in years of extreme flooding, a large ship could have easily navigated its way well up into the Salton Sink area. “The water level can rise and fall rapidly, which would make it easy for a ship to run aground.”

  “What kind of ship might it have been?” she asked.

  “Depends on which legend or account you believe. The more far-fetched tales say it’s a Phoenician vessel, a Viking longboat, or a pirate ship.”

  “I heard it’s a graveyard for ships from the Bermuda Triangle,” Bones added.

  “I think that’s the Gobi Desert,” Maddock said. “If the ship existed it would most likely be Spanish in origin.” He took another sip of coffee. “Clusker gathered a team and set off in search of the ship. The wreck was about seventy miles from San Bernadino in the middle of a remote part of the desert.”

  Riv nodded. “Seventy miles through the desert on foot or horseback would be dangerous even today. Back then that was a daunting journey.”

  Maddock nodded. “The terrain itself is rough. Mountains, valleys, cliffs, rock- falls, pits, caverns, arroyos, wide open stretches under the burning sun. You’ve got to deal with the heat and the lack of water. Then there are the natural perils: poisonous snakes and spiders, wolves, coyotes. And then you’ve got the human factor. Outlaw gangs, some American, others coming up from Mexico, and of course, not all Native Americans are friendly to trespassers on their land.”

  “But the thing that could really get you is a simple accident,” Bones said. “A broken leg or even a sprained ankle could mean death out here.”

  Maddock nodded. “So, Clusker and his team set out in the fall of 1870, and it’s not long before they find themselves in the middle of nowhere. They navigated by dead reckoning, which is a highly subjective process involving estimates based on known distances and travel times. It’s an unreliable method in the best of situations, but it’s even more difficult in the desert. Distances are difficult to estimate. A mountain that looks like it’s three miles away is in fact, thirty, or vice-versa. It’s slow going for Clusker and his team. They finally get within ten miles of their destination when Clusker’s horse walks into quicksand.”

  Spenser gasped and covered her mouth.

  “The horse was okay,” Maddock assured her, “but it was the f
inal straw for Clusker’s team, and he was forced to return to San Bernadino with them.”

  “Was that the end of it?” Spenser asked.

  “He made another attempt. This time he went alone, following a new route that he hoped would keep him out of quicksand. Problem was, this route proved to be so slow-going that he ran out of food and water. But just as he was about to turn back, he found seashells.”

  “Which meant he was somewhere along the old shoreline,” Riv said.

  “Exactly. This convinced him that he was close to finding the ship, so instead of turning back, he kept moving forward, searching for food and water as he went. Finally, he came to a cliff overlooking the desert. He scanned the area with his telescope and spotted what appeared to be an old sailing ship far in the distance. He didn’t believe it at first, but every time he looked, it was there. But without sup- plies, and in his weakened condition, there was no way he would survive a journey to the ship and back. In fact, he barely lived through the return journey to San Bernadino. But he never gave up on the lost ship of the Mojave, as it came to be called.

  “Back then the competition between newspapers was cutthroat, and a story like Clusker’s was bound to sell papers. He sold his story to the highest bidder, which ended up being one of the San Bernadino Guardian’s biggest competitors. The story was picked up back east and Clusker became a minor celebrity. The editor of the Guardian, I don’t remember his name...”

  “Josh Talbott,” Riv prompted, her eyes locked on her laptop screen.

  “Thanks. Talbott made a deal with Clusker. The Guardian would finance his next excursion in exchange for exclusive rights to the story. Clusker agreed, and Talbott joined him on the next excursion. This time he had plenty of supplies and a support team. Once again, he tried to approach from a different angle. Because he was navigating by landmarks, this made it even more challenging.”

  “Because a landmark can take on a quite different appearance when viewed from a different angle,” Spenser said.

  “Also, the desert landscape can change rapidly. Flash flooding can cause erosion and collapses, sand drifts can cover or uncover large objects. Long story short, Clusker never found his way back to the spot where he claimed to have seen it. Talbott eventually concluded that Clusker was a con man who was using the newspaper to improve his celebrity status and to finance his prospecting.”

  “And no one ever found the ship?” Spenser asked.

  Maddock shook his head. “As I said earlier, if it even existed.”

  “There have been plenty of sightings,” Riv said. “Starting in the late 1800s all the way up to the mid-1900s. And those are just the ones I’ve found. And there’s even a pictograph in a canyon near the southwest shore of the Salton Sea showing what many believe to be a Spanish sailing ship.”

  “I wouldn’t believe it were possible if I hadn’t seen for myself just how desolate the land in this area is,” Maddock said.

  “And it’s possible that the ship has been intermittently covered and uncovered by shifting sands,” Bones offered. “Which would explain why people sometimes see it but others don’t.”

  “According to the party who first reported finding it, only about a third of the ship was visible above the sand,” Riv said. “But what they could see was in pretty good condition.”

  “Do you think it’s possible?” Spenser asked hopefully.

  “Hell yes!” Bones said.

  “It’s possible,” Maddock admitted. “But we should probably decode the journal before we jump to any conclusions. But it’s our first lead. We might as well follow up on it.”

  Chapter 25

  ––––––––

  It was early afternoon when Maddock and Bones set out beneath the scorching sun. Spenser and Riv had remained at the ranch, working on decrypting the journal and digging into the legend of the lost desert ship. Riv was ecstatic with the new developments and was convinced she could have networks bidding on a new series tomorrow if she wanted. Meanwhile, he and Bones would attempt to follow Shipman’s trail from the night before. They followed a path that wound through parched hills and down into a rock- strewn valley. Maddock was still suffering the ill-effects of the previous day’s accident and sleep deprivation, but now that they finally had a clue related to lost treasure, he was eager to continue the search. They soon came to the spot where Bones had abandoned his pursuit of Shipman.

  “The desert opens up out there,” Bones said. “We should hydrate before setting out.”

  “Assuming you can find his tracks,” Maddock said.

  “Oh, ye of little faith.” Bones unhooked his water bottle from his belt and took a drink. “Sundown can’t come soon enough. It is freaking hot out here.” He cast a baleful glance up at the sun’s blazing orb.

  “It’s going to be a while.” Maddock took a swig of water. “But it should start cooling off soon.”

  “Not soon enough.” Bones said. “Did you ever hear from Franzen?”

  Maddock shook his head. “I tried her cell phone again, but it went directly to voice mail. Then I called the station and the officer I spoke with said she wasn’t working today.”

  “You appear skeptical.”

  “Maybe I’m overly suspicious, but there was something in his voice. I think something’s up.” He turned and gazed back in the direction of Shipman’s house as if he could see through the arid landscape. “I hope the girls are all right.”

  “They’re fine. Grizzly’s got security there at the ranch house.”

  Maddock nodded. “And Riv can handle herself.”

  “Spenser might surprise you, too,” Bones added.

  “Did Shipman leave any tracks?” Maddock asked, abruptly changing the subject.

  “I’m not seeing any, but I know the general direction he went. We can start there.”

  “Can’t wait.” They took out bandannas and tied them on, do-rag style, before setting out again.

  Although he was accustomed to working long hours beneath the blazing sun, the desert was a different animal from the sea. The dry air sponged the moisture from a person’s skin. You never even got the chance to sweat before it evaporated, leaving the skin dry and salty. Dehydration was a constant threat, so water was a must. It was an environment that was not meant for humans.

  They soon picked up Shipman’s trail, with Maddock being the first to spot a freshly dislodged stone and a scuff mark on the ground. Bones insisted he’d seen it first but had allowed Maddock to find it as a gesture of goodwill. “I figured it was obvious enough that a white guy could find it,” he explained. Maddock was about to offer a rejoinder when a flicker of movement caught his eye—a figure slipping behind a boulder.

  “I think someone’s following us.”

  “Not many places to hide out here,” Bones said.

  “Let’s keep going. Maybe we can find a place to duck out of sight.”

  They continued in the direction they had been heading but could not find any more signs of Shipman having come this way. Wherever possible they moved behind cover, boulders, rock piles, juniper, or cactus, and tried to espy the person who was shadowing them, but never spotted anyone. After several failed attempts, Maddock began to wonder if he’d imagined it, or merely misidentified what he’d seen. The desert played tricks on the eyes, messing with apparent size and distance.

  The heat began to take its toll. The exposed skin on his arms and legs began to prickle beneath the hot sun. His battered body was beginning to tire. He might have to turn back soon or risk not making it back.

  “What do you think?” he asked Bones when next they stopped for water.

  Bones looked out at the vast bowl that swept out before them. The hot desert air shimmered, giving the distant hills a surreal quality, as if they were floating.

  “I think we’re headed in the wrong direction,” he said. “Even if he knows a shortcut, I don’t think Shipman could have gone this far and still gotten back to his house so quickly.”

  “Agreed.”
<
br />   From where they stood, the ground sloped gently downward. Maddock knelt and brushed at the sand. It was soft and loose. He scooped up a handful and let it spill between his fingers until only a bleached seashell remained.

  “Bones, look at this.” He held it up. “This place was underwater at some point in the past.”

  Bones knelt and sifted through the sand. “Lots of shells and they’ve been here a long time.”

  “If there really is a lost ship, we’re headed in the right direction,” Maddock said.

  Bones looked around. “It’s hard to believe. This place is so wide open,” he made a sweeping gesture that took in the wide expanse of desert, “you’d think any ship that was lost out here would have been found by now.”

  “Not if it’s been covered up by the desert.”

  “That’s true. As far as we know, Striker never found it, and neither has Ship- man. Which suggests it’s buried,” Bones said, his lips curling in a smile. “And finding undiscovered treasure is what we do.”

  He clapped Maddock on his bruised shoulder, sending sharp knives of pain shooting down his arms.

  “Yeah,” Maddock grunted. “Which means there’s a whole lot of ground to cover. This could take a long time.”

  “Better than someone beating us to the punch.”

  Maddock stood, folded his arms. “I think we should try and chart the old shoreline. Then we can identify the most likely places to search, and we can formulate a plan.”

  “That sounds like a great plan,” Bones said.

  “Really?” Maddock was surprised his friend didn’t argue.

  “But we can’t start on that until we get back to the ranch, so for now, I say we wing this mother.”

  With that, Bones stood and set off down the sandy slope. Grumbling, Maddock followed behind.

  They hadn’t taken fifty steps when something pinged off a boulder ten yards in front of them. The distant report of a gunshot rang out.