by Jane Bow
They listened. On shore nothing moved. Brigit looked at her.
“Okay, okay. Bring down the jib, and check the water for deadheads.”
Vanessa pointed Dancer’s bow at the beach, uncleated the mainsail halyard. Dancer rocked gently forward on the tide, the leftover wind nibbling at the edge of the mainsail, rattling the rigging, and now Oak Island’s sounds came across the water: waves shuffling, sucking at the pebble beach, the flap of wings as a cormorant took flight. Out in the bay, a loon’s call could have been the cry of a lost soul. And then the beach was less than six feet away, the early sunlight angling into the trees, casting shadows. She pulled up the centreboard.
“Hello-o-o-o,” Brigit laughed. “I said is anyone there?”
Vanessa winced. Aspen leaves on shore whispered in the sea wind.
“This is your last chance!”
Waves lapping, rigging chattering, human silence.
“There,” said Brigit. “If anyone was going to shoot us, don’t you think they would have done so by now?”
“Shot you maybe.”
PRIVATE PROPERTY
TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED
A white limousine stopped at the chain across the Oak Island causeway. Inside it Edward “Teach” Sanger, founder and chief executive officer of Philadelphia’s Alpha Corporation, sat for a moment listening to the final strains of a Bizet concert as the rising sun tinted the horizon a peach pink.
Edward Sanger was a morning man. Thinking, planning, where Sanger came from you did it after a five-mile run and a shower, before the dew left the roses. Timing, precision, those were the keys. Add the right research, a few dollars and some balls; that was all it took to make a profit.
The driver opened his door and Sanger stepped out, shook his legs to straighten the creases in his slacks, looked around at the ditch choked with grass and purple lupines, at the drooping Solomon’s Seal and the mosquito-infested march behind him, the endless wall of scrubby trees. Ahead of him the causeway, a line of piled boulders and gravel, crossed the shallows between him and Oak Island. At the other end, beyond the treasure hunter’s bungalow, weeds were growing knee high around the doorway of a barn with a dilapidated “Oak Island Museum” sign. Once there had been tours of the island, but money for the insurance premiums had long since run out.
Sanger had meetings with the treasure hunters set for later this morning. He would get the video one of them had shot inside the cavern under Borehole 10X. Then later today he would get the old lady at the library to give him a copy of the government’s report on its underwater exploration around Oak Island. This bay full of islands, beautiful in summer, cruel, they said, as a witch’s fingernails in winter, was ripe for the plucking. And after thirteen years of research and analysis, Sanger’s theory about where the treasure lay was as nearly formed as a bird’s egg just before it hatches. He was here to buy Oak Island, the approach, the causeway, all of it. He would pay the treasure hunters who owned it whatever it took because he had all the information now, and all the tools to match wits, in this flea-bitten Canadian backwash, with the genius who had conceived the Oak Island mystery. There was treasure here, of that he had no doubt, and an important one. But the priceless booty, its value and its beauty, would be his alone to appreciate.
Because it was in the treasure riddle, not its solution, that the richest vein of profit lies.
A year from now the economy of this whole bay would turn around.
Lights, music, characters in costume would advertise the world’s most exciting new entertainment mall, the world’s scariest roller coaster, bungie jumps, water slides, a labyrinth of tunnels and secret caves complete with clues, seawater lagoons, strategically placed “pieces of eight,” all of it under cover against the elements. Submersibles would cruise an undersea zoo stocked with real Titanic relics and fake treasure chests, robot sharks and whatever else millions of Americans from Boston, New York City and the whole eastern seaboard as well as Canadians from Toronto, Montreal, and all points west required.
The world was so small now, some strategic advertising could bring tourists, business conferences, from Japan, the new China, Europe to see the Spanish galleon replica that would shoot multi-coloured rockets through the mall’s removable roof into the empty Canadian night. A theme hotel, swimming pools, Imax theatres, restaurants would provide employment for people across this downtrodden province by catering to two timeless truths:
1. Give any ten-year-old a choice between a real and a virtual game, and he will choose the real one every time; and
2. No matter what their debts, people will always buy what they have been told they want. How many times have McDonald’s, Disneyworld proven that?
Across on the other side of the causeway the treasure hunter’s bungalow was still in darkness. Well into his seventies, the man must still be asleep. Thirty years he’d been here, according to Sanger’s research.
He must be tired. Good. Sanger would seal the deal and be home by the end of the week.
His mind drifted to the walk-up apartment he kept in downtown Philly and the girl presently occupying it, the daughter of one of his golf partners. So young, green, supple as a sapling, puppy eager. He liked to take his time with her, feeling her swell under his touch, lush as the passion fruit he had eaten for breakfast. His wife Molly did not mind; she had her own arrangements. As long as she was the woman on his arm at the galas, the openings, the $1000-a-plate fund-raising dinners, she chose not to know about his dalliances. He had been thinking he would bring the girl something from Canada. A red plastic Mountie? A wooden totem pole? God this was a boring country. Except for the young woman with the golden hair, the one at the library with the Freemason’s apron and the metal box.
Sanger stepped over the chain across the causeway. Before he invested in a new project, or executed plans, he liked to spend some private, early morning time observing, getting the lay of the land.
The surf was only as deep as their knees, and Dancer was easy enough to haul up onto the beach.
Jagged-edged sandstone, limestone pebbles, shells tossed up, boulders half buried by tides over the millennia: she should be taking notes, Vanessa thought, for the sequel to “Treasure Island North.” Because this frisson of electricity running up her spine was more than fear even though this island shore, in the wash of the day’s first light, did not speak of anything out of the ordinary. Dancer’s rigging chattered in the wind squalling through the grasses. Brigit was peering into the shadows around the bungalow, at the mob of jack pines crowding the shore at the far end of the beach, listening past the wind.
“The whole eastern end of the island is limestone and that’s where the treasure shaft and tunnels were found.” Vanessa pulled a book out of her jacket pocket.
“That’s the end that’s been dug up and bulldozed?”
“Right. But the Joudrey’s Cove treasure hunter discovered a giant cross marked out on the island with cone-shaped granite boulders. One of the boulders is right here on this beach.” A photograph in the book showed a rock with a chunk in the shape of a piece of cake sliced out of it. “There!” Vanessa jogged down the beach.
Squatting at the water’s edge, the tide nibbling its base, the rock looked as insignificant as any other glacial detritus. The granite felt cold under Vanessa’s hand.
Brigit ran the palm of her hand over the rock then closed her eyes.
“Come on Van, let’s try to empty our minds.”
Vanessa looked around, checking the chaos of jack pines at the end of the beach, the bungalow’s empty windows. Birds flittered through grasses swaying in the early morning wind.
“Just close your eyes. Let the energy of the place flow into you.”
Vanessa tried. The pines sighed, grasses whispered, waves replied.
Pebbles crunched: a footstep? Someone watching them, wondering why two women were standing stock-still …? No second crunch came.
Was it memory then, because wasn’t it right near here, under the lit
tle bluff where the grasses met the beach that she and the motorcyclist had spread their blanket? Where—
“The practice requires discipline, Van. You have to keep your mind clear. If images come you don’t get involved, you just observe them. Jung called it ‘active imagining.’ The natives call it ‘entering dreamtime.’”
Brigit was so good at it. She might be holding an interesting knot of wood or a shell patterned with whorls in a west coast forest and when she closed her eyes, reached into the still centre of the moment, tuned into the prevailing energy, the shape or design of the piece of jewellery she would make with it sometimes arrived as clearly as if she were looking at it with her eyes. Now, sneaking a peek, Vanessa saw that Brigit was trembling. She put out a hand to steady her.
Brigit took the hand and put it back on the stone.
“No.” Vanessa pulled away. “I can’t do it.”
“Think of Brother Bart’s jewelled chalice, Van! What if it’s right here?”
Vanessa looked around at the scrubby island.
“Look,” said Brigit, “we have a choice. We can go the route of all the others, get out our shovels or bulldozers or backhoes, show the goddamned island who’s boss, and get flooded out. Or we can pay attention, open up our minds. Stop thinking.”
“I’m too nervous. Let’s find the rest of the cross.”
It was marked out in the book. Vanessa began to pace up the beach, counting. Brigit followed her past the bungalow, an outbuilding, rusted pieces of machinery, over a dirt road, three hundred and sixty feet through diamond-dew grass, and in here among the mounds of disturbed earth on which new shoots of grass were sprouting, where the spring daisies nodded among the rotting logs of trees that had been sawed down, the air whispered of obsession and greed and secrecy, of the owners of the ancient Spanish coins, the piece of an old ship, the hinge of what might have been a chest, the branding iron that had been dug out of what was once a swamp.
The headstone, at the confluence of the cross’s arms with its body, was lying on its side in the grass, as if it were just any rock, its edges shaped by Earth’s shifting tempers over the millennia. Brigit tilted her head to see the overhanging brow, the eyeholes, the nose and mouth of a Caucasian male.
“It’s sandstone,” Vanessa read, “the stuff of bedrock. So what’s it doing here in the swampy lowland at the centre of Oak Island?”
Brigit knelt in the wet weeds, trying not to squash two nearby daisies.
She stared into the face.
Somewhere off to the left a twig snapped.
A mouse? A rabbit? Not a treasure hunter at this hour. Because why would they be stealthy? Vanessa checked the shrubbery but there was no one.
“Did you know the cross symbol was around way before Christianity?” said Brigit. “The Navajo, the Chinese, the Maya, the Tibetans all drew crosses as the symbol of life, the four points symbolizing the four directions. Some of them believed the cross’s axis from east to west represented the mind. North to south stood for action. The centre, where the two lines intersected was the doorway to the Otherworld, to universal mind and energy … But,” Brigit looked up at her. “Didn’t the treasure hunter who found this headstone dig under it and find nothing?”
“Right. And when you think about it, hiding anything here would have been a little obvious.”
“Still, there’s something.” Brigit gestured for Vanessa to kneel, to feel the roughness of the stone under her hand. “So let’s try again. Maybe with the two of us … Let your mind go. Focus only on breathing, and every time your thoughts distract you, say ‘thinking.’ So your mind stays open but focused. It’s a bit like walking a tightrope.”
“How would you know that?”
Brigit grinned.
“I was at a Vancouver Island fall fair. This tightrope walker set up a wire about three feet high beside my jewellery stall, so of course I had to try it. ‘Think, even for a fraction of a second that you could fall, think anything at all, and you will lose your balance,’ he told me, ‘but empty your mind, focus a couple of feet above the wire …’ This is the same thing, a matter of reaching the still point, perfect balance. So come on, close your eyes.”
Off in the trees to the right a squirrel scolded them but there was no movement, no sound beyond the cawing of a crow somewhere further inland. Still, balance for Vanessa would remain out of reach as long as the morning wind failed to penetrate the scrub bush. Mosquitoes danced, dived, buzzed in under her Blue Jays cap. And black/white, real/imagined, success/failure, Vanessa could not help it, these were the definitions of the world she lived in. Maybe there would be something about this headstone in Brother Bart’s diary. She should have finished it before they came here. Vanessa slapped her neck.
“You really are hopeless, you know.”
“I’m sorry.”
Brigit got up.
“How far to the boulder marking the end of the other arm of the cross?”
Vanessa consulted the book.
“Three hundred and sixty feet, that way.” She pointed inland. Pant legs dew-soaked, sleeves catching on sun-dappled branches that seemed to reach out, they paced the distance, tried to avoid treading on the tiny violets growing underfoot and now Vanessa recalled her father asking Brigit once why she did not set herself up in a full-time jewellery business.
“You’d make a lot more than you do tramping through the woods collecting specimens.” Brigit had agreed, but the prospect of the requisite government forms, taxes, phone calls to return, rent and license and health and safety regulations kept stalling her. She would rather spend her days collecting specimens for the biology professor, taking an hour to watch a black widow spider spin her perfect web in a shaft of sunlight between some spiky branches poking up through a jumble of boulders. And, hiking with her sometimes, Vanessa had to admit to the miracles. At first, when you stopped, knelt, unsheathed your magnifying glass, everything intensified: the blackflies, mosquitoes, no-see-ums buzzing around your head, lowering their legs, preparing to land, the hermit thrush singing, the red squirrel leaning out of a Douglas fir, scolding, birth and death playing one upon the other in the sunlit mountain woods. The spider, twice the size of a fingernail, was round and shiny, and there on her belly was the black widow’s trademark red hourglass. One of her rear legs shot out then folded in, out in, out in, efficient as a sewing machine needle, her other seven legs guiding as she reached across empty space, joined the gossamer strand issuing out of her rump to the lacework she had made. What would she snare before the storm forecast for tonight ripped through this rocky clearing?
A drop of dew fell from one of the new green hawthorn leaves above, bounced on the web, broke a sudden stray shaft of sunlight into red orange yellow green blue purple. The spider’s leg stopped.
“Polished ebony for the body,” Brigit had whispered. Her legs were black, but Brigit would use silver. “For the hourglass, a ruby? No, too expensive. A garnet? Too dark. Maybe cut crystal—”
“Symbolizing what?” Vanessa had cried. “Crimson Passion in the Face of Death? What man in his right mind is going to buy his lover a black widow spider brooch, Brig’?”
The lichen covered rock at the end of the cross’s other arm sat among the chokecherry, alder, baby firs, unremarkable, unspectacular. Vanessa read from the book.
“The treasure hunter dug up the remains of an iron stove and a pair of scissors, a broken plate, knives and forks. The stove was in pieces.”
“Was it Brother Bart’s, I wonder? Was his bare back welted red from the mosquito bites as he pushed down with all the others on the tree trunk they would have used to lever the rock up while they dug a hole under it—?”
“So no one would know they had been here.” Vanessa swiped at the bugs. “Maybe they used this rock because it’s inland and away from the treasure shaft. No one would have any reason to find it.”
“Where is the treasure shaft from here?” Brigit looked around. “Could we just look?”
There was no sign of act
ivity there either. Craters full of dirty water were open wounds on a terrain strewn with the rusted drill rig and backhoe they had seen from the water, and a pile of huge metal cylinders.
The white metal shack was padlocked.
“Borehole 10X,” said Vanessa. “Apparently there are caverns and tunnels deep under this ground.” Vanessa squinted down the road that circled the area, and at the ragged pines on the other side. There was no sound beyond the wind.
Brigit shivered.
“What?” Vanessa asked.
“Greed, there are layers upon layers of it here. Can’t you feel it?”
Vanessa pointed south.
“Rocks with strange markings carved into them and stones laid in a triangle with a plumb line through it were found.”
“A triangle, really?” Brigit sounded excited. “Where?”
“It was over there, pointing just off north, toward the treasure shaft, but it’s gone now, like everything else. Bulldozed, ruined.”
“Too bad! People all over the world have been revering the triangle for four thousand years. Think pyramids, for instance. The ancients thought the top of the triangle signified the Deity …” Brigit wandered over to look at a large crater filled with green water just above the beach at Smith’s Cove.
“That’s Sophie Sellers’ Cave-In Pit,” said Vanessa. “Sophie, whose father, Anthony Graves, owned the island then, was ploughing here one day when the ground under the oxen suddenly caved in. It was a sinkhole.”
“Sinkhole?”
“Where the tides eddy up from underneath, wearing away the stone.”
“And? Did they find anything in it?”
“Not according to the Sellers. They got the oxen out and filled in the hole. Which turned out to lie directly above the tunnel linking Smith’s Cove to the treasure shaft—”
“So the tunnelers could have dug up into the roof of the tunnel to hide something close to the surface that they would then mark with above-ground symbols. Ingenious!”
