by Jane Bow
Sirens had been signalling the arrival of the fire brigade for the last several kilometres. There was no way to get through or turn back. Vanessa pulled onto the shoulder and got out.
A stench of burning oil seasoned with something putrid-sweet clutched at the back of her throat. Her eyes smarted. An ambulance was parked at the gas station but the paramedics were not hurrying. By the time Vanessa arrived the fire fighters were dousing the spiky black ruins of the building. The gas pumps were stumps. Angled across the tarmac, its nose smack up against one of them, was a dripping black car chassis. Near it what had been a pickup truck was a charred skeleton of steaming steel.
A fat man in green overalls was holding a bandana against his nose and mouth. He shook his head at Vanessa.
“I was standin’ at the diesel pump fillin’ my truck when she comes cruisin’ round the bend, a big Olds, white, and it looked like the car was drivin’ itself, the driver was that little. Then this car pulls out to pass her but there’s a truck comin’ the other way, see? So she swerves right to make room but,” his voice shook, “she musta lost it when her wheel hit the gravel ‘cause she kept on comin’ right into the station, right at me and the look on her face—” His big body was trembling. “I tell you, I near pissed my pants. She come sailin’ in not two inches from my bumper and I’m yellin’ and runnin’ for my life, round behind the building ‘cause I could see she was gonna hit the pumps. She tried to brake and I seen her face all panicky, hands wrenching the wheel, but then whoosh!” He looked away, then back at Vanessa. “There was a man in the passenger seat. Roasted alive, the both of them.”
Heat rose like a nightmare from the pavement, rippled the air.
It must be some other white Olds. People keep them forever—
No. Mademoiselle and Robert had been driving to meet her and Brigit at the Oak Island causeway. Mademoiselle’s happy laughter: Robert got down on one knee … And I have bought a lot—
“Where’s the car that passed her?”
“Didn’t stop. Bastard.” The man stuffed the bandana into his pocket but he was in no hurry. To leave would mean resuming his normal life, to have to go on as if the roots that kept him upright had not been shaken loose.
“What colour was it?”
“Um …” The man scratched his upper lip. “Couldn’t say for sure. I was pumping my gas, see, and it happened so fast. Blue, maybe?” He watched with sympathy as the young woman beside him turned, shoulders heaving, to lose her breakfast at the edge of the parking lot.
An arm came around her shoulders.
“I was coming to get you,” said Brigit. “I heard the explosion all the way down at the causeway.”
Litter on the ground at Vanessa’s feet, gum wrappers, bits of fly-away newspaper, crushed pop cans, skittered in a squalling breeze that, full of the cloying odour of burning flesh, must be the smell of hell.
She looked at Brigit.
“If she hadn’t been coming to meet us—” Vanessa’s body began to shudder.
“Easy, Van.”
“Blackbeard wrote me a note this morning. He said—” She could not shape the words.
There was a coffee shop down the road. But inside voices were vying, rumbling, whispered details rising and falling about who had been where when the explosion happened, how much it would cost to fix the front windows, when the hell was the government going to stop letting old folks drive, how many more could have died. Vanessa looked at the people — overalls, greasy baseball caps, bottle-yellow perms, waitresses delivering plates loaded with eggs, bacon, home fries, patrolling with the bottomless coffee pot as if the evil that had produced this ‘accident’ was nothing more than grist for the morning’s conversation.
Brigit got up.
“We’ll walk.” Outside the relentless sun still shone. Clouds scudding east across a blue sky were already sweeping away the oily black smudges at the top of the column of smoke.
“He must not even have asked her to sell,” said Vanessa. “He knew she was friends with us, Brig’. If I hadn’t got involved with him … You both warned me—”
“Stop.” They held each other. The traffic would not unsnarl for hours. Turning away, they walked down the shoulder of the coastal highway. When finally she could speak, Vanessa told Brigit about Sanger’s presents.
“He returned the diary?”
“Yes.”
He must have planned this, giving even as he was in the act of taking. The diary in return for Mademoiselle’s life. The smell of hell followed them down the road.
A highway sign pointed to the right, inland. “New Ross 25 km.”
“That sign used to annoy Mademoiselle Durocher every time she saw it,” said Vanessa. “Remember her talking about New Ross, where they found earthworks of what may have been a Templar castle? ‘If you were a Knight Templar landing in Nova Scotia in the 1300’s,’ she always used to say, ‘why would you build your castle twenty-five kilometres inland? Why not close to the bay, where your ships were?’”
Vanessa turned left on impulse, down a side road away from the highway and the stench of smoke.
“I was going to tell her about the new clue I found in the diary.” Vanessa told Brigit about “the light of Your sun will always reach Mia’s people’s treasure once a day.”
“The light of the sun? So it’s close to the surface.”
It was hard to care.
The road wound down to a large bay. The land on the far side of it, to their left, rose into a bluff. Cottages dotted the shore.
“This is Chester Basin, where I jumped overboard.” Vanessa pointed to the bluff. “That’s where the pirates must have buried Brother Bart alive.”
A little peninsula jutted out of the coastline in front of them, a tiny cove curving around on the near side of it. The tide was out, the smell of seaweed drifting across the water from the scrap of beach where a large cone-shaped granite boulder sat just above the water line.
Up in the trees to their right someone had built a house. Wrought iron gates, wedged open, had not been moved in years. Brigit slipped between them then scrambled down to the sea, out of sight of the house.
She was running her hand over the boulder when Vanessa joined her.
“How weird that it should have been placed here.”
Vanessa just stood there. When the tide came in it would cover everything except this rock, but now Brigit slithered around the seaweed and mossy stones to find another granite boulder further around the point. A third one sat alone at the seaward edge of the water. From this side it looked conical, but actually it was long, shaped like an animal squatting, waiting to pounce.
Vanessa turned back. Oak Island, treasure, the meaning of clues so obscure no one could decipher them, in the end why did any of it matter? In the schemes of life and treasures and death only death had any staying power.
A small cemetery up a little hill on the inland side of the road overlooked Chester Basin. An ancient oak tree stood watch by the gate.
Brigit climbed the steps. Vanessa, following, found her bending over the most prominent tombstone.
“It says: ‘Joudrey.’” Behind it another, older stone was black with lichen, the chiselled letters partially erased by the weather. Brigit rubbed it with the palm of her hand.
“Look.”
Henry P. Sellers
Born 1838 Died 1912 74 yrs.
Wife
Sophia Sellers
Born 18 Died 1931 87 yrs.
“Sophie Sellers was the daughter of Anthony Graves,” said Vanessa.
“The guy who never cared about the Oak Island treasure but paid for his groceries with gold doubloons?”
“Right.”
Brigit gazed at the tombstone.
“Whose daughter is buried right across the road from cone shaped boulders like those of the Oak Island cross, in the very same bay where you and Mlle Durocher imagined a 14th Century knight would build his castle, and where Brother Bart was initiated into the French pirates’ secre
t society four hundred years ago.” She looked around. “Would this be a good place to honour Mademoiselle?”
“Honour her? How?”
Brigit chose a spot beside the Sellers’ tombstone, facing the sea, and patted the ground beside her. Vanessa sank onto the grass. Brigit crossed her legs, closed her eyes, put her hands on her knees, palms facing up, fingers touching. Vanessa sat watching, numb. What did this morning peace have to do with exploding glass and burning bodies just half an hour away?
“Close your eyes.” Brigit waited until she did so.
“Dear Mlle Durocher …”
So skinny in her fake silk blouse with the make-up on the collar, always so happy when Vanessa came through the library door.
“We want to thank you for being a wonderful friend to Vanessa and …”
Her pale blue eyes lit with humour, mischief, intelligence, annoyance behind her glasses. Ah chérie, the history we read is only the part the conqueror wants us to know. Her new sheepish happiness with Robert—
“We hope that you did not suffer.”
Her burnt, blackened bones—
Vanessa’s body began to shudder. Brigit took her hand.
“Let it come, Van.”
Solar plexus, chest, neck, body an earthquake now, shattering the cemetery peace, sucking in the gathering wind, the trees, the water, the clouds. Until all that was left was a scoured, tinny emptiness. And the sound of Brigit’s voice, struggling not to break.
“May peace and happiness be with you and Robert now, Mademoiselle. May Vanessa treasure always all that you have given her. And may we both take up and carry your marvellous courage.”
The breeze played across the grass, hushed through the oak tree’s new green leaves. A gull shrieked. A squirrel chucked.
Vanessa stood up. The sea, the little peninsula, Chester Basin bluff still looked the same but now she caught a sense — no more than a whiff, gone almost as soon as it arrived — that something inside herself, something beyond “good” or “bad” or any words, something movable, changeable but hard, non-negotiable, that had been there all along but pushed away as unacceptable, was coming alive. She looked out to sea.
“Will you come with me down the coast to Oak Island? It’s not that far and we’ll be the last people Blackbeard will expect. I want to find the spot where the light of the sun shines every day. For Mademoiselle.”
XVII
SANGER’S LIMOUSINE WAS PARKED JUST this side of the chain across the causeway. The bodyguard/driver was reading the sports section of the newspaper.
“Harvey?”
He looked up in surprise.
“Is Edward over there?”
“That’s right, miss.”
“Well, don’t call over.” Vanessa moved toward the chain. “Let me surprise him.”
“I don’t think that would be wise, Miss. Mr. Sanger does not like to be disturbed while he’s doing business.”
“Oh.” Vanessa looked at her shoes, lost in thought apparently, then back to the driver/bodyguard. “And what about you, Harvey, I bet you don’t like to be disturbed either when you’re doing business for him, going into people’s houses to swipe things, hiring spies, taking care of all the messy details.”
“I beg your pardon, miss?” The driver’s face was blank.
Vanessa stepped over the chain.
“Don’t look back.” Vanessa did not break stride. “If Gorpo makes the call and they come out of the treasure hunter’s bungalow, leave it to me.” She did not know what she would do, only that the new force coming awake within her felt powerful as a tidal wave. If she could harness and control it.
No one appeared.
“They must be touring the sites.”
The road wound around behind the dilapidated museum to run down the centre of the island to its eastern end where the diggings were.
The wind picked up the sound of engines, scattered it among the trees swaying and whispering above their heads.
“We better get off the road,” said Brigit. “Come on,” She seemed to know her way. “There’s something I want to show you at South Cove. They won’t be able to hear us in the woods.”
South Cove, the place where treasure hunters had found the second intake tunnel, where just offshore the government oceanographers had found a hole in the floor of the sea. Vanessa gazed out over the tumble of rocks at the sea, but—
What did she think she was doing? Mlle Durocher was dead. Beside that, what did anything matter? Her father and Gran were right, Oak Island was dangerous, a place of greed, a hoax.
Oh? How then do you explain … Mademoiselle’s faded blue eyes snapped at her. How many times must I tell you, Vanessa, think it through. We will make sense of these symbols.
Brigit must have been reading her feelings.
“There’s evil here, Van.”
Vanessa nodded.
“But like my Maharishi used to say, evil will always be here. Our job is not to let it cloud our minds, to keep ourselves pure.” She put a hand on Vanessa’s arm. “For Mademoiselle’s sake.”
“Right.”
The mainland was no more than several hundred yards across the water from them. Vanessa told Brigit what Sanger had said about the rising sea level.
Brigit explained erosion:
Erosion = change = new growth in a changed landscape.
Behind them the wind brought the sound of an engine coughing, from the direction of the treasure shaft.
“Natural erosion takes millennia, but any disturbance of a shoreline speeds it up.” Brigit looked at Vanessa. “Just like human behaviour, don’t you see? Greed, the need to have more and more, dams up the natural flow of people’s energies, twists their motives, causing all kinds of destruction.”
Like Mlle D.’s death.
“That’s why those who knew this always hid their meanings in symbols, to protect against the erosion of human values, and that’s why greed has been forever condemned to roam above the ground on Oak Island, every one of its shafts and dams flooded, caved in.”
“Like Seth.” Vanessa told Brigit the story of Isis and Osiris. Seth, unregulated violence, destruction. Sanger murdering to get his way. How quickly its energy spread, contaminating everyone it touched. Unless it was harnessed.
Vanessa scanned the surface of the sea beyond the rocks, looking out to where the undersea hole was supposed to be.
“So it’s a matter of uneroding.”
“Right. All we have to do is reconstruct the way it was, and then see how the symbols fit together.”
Vanessa dug into the pocket of her shorts, came up with the map.
“I’m thinking maybe the lines of the cross show the fault line where the limestone on the island ends. There could have been caves as well as sinkholes—”
“What about the treasure shaft, was it a sinkhole?”
“No, the sides of it were clay,” said Vanessa.
“Even though it was on the limestone end of the island.” Brigit looked over her shoulder. The engine across the island was running now, and there was a clanging sound. “What do you think they’re doing?”
“I don’t know. Not chasing us, anyway.” Vanessa told Brigit about her visit to the library in Halifax. “The Templar knight who came here was called St. Clair, which stemmed from the French St. Clere—”
“Cool!”
“And we know the Knights worshipped an older wisdom represented by a severed head—”
“Called Sophia. Wait!” said Brigit. “Sophie Sellers! I wonder if her father, Anthony Graves, knew this stuff.”
Vanessa was reading her list.
“So what if the cross they found here has nothing to do with religion? What if it has its ancient meaning as a symbol of life?”
Vanessa took a pencil out of the pocket of her shorts. Brigit watched as she drew a straight line on her map, extending the eastern arm of the cross diagonally across the island, past the edge of the swamp, through the opening of the flood tunnel drains here where the
y were standing, at South Cove, into the ocean between Oak Island and the Mahone Bay shore, straight through the middle of the underwater hole. Mlle Durocher had told them it was surrounded by piles of stones.
“Remember Mlle D. said the east-west line is the mental line.”
They looked at each other.
“Erosion,” breathed Brigit.
“And the rising sea level. Sanger said it would have gone up a few feet—”
“So the hole could have been above ground?”
“It’s pretty far out, about a hundred yards, if this drawing is to scale. But there’s been a lot of work in that cove—”
“And it’s on the shore side of the island, across from the mainland, so the water was probably quite shallow to begin with. So what if Henry Sinclair walked the treasure into the underground hole? But then why mark the place with piles of stones?”
They looked at the sea that knew so much. If only the water rippling could speak. Behind them, across the island, the motor ground on. And now there was the sound of another engine, a vehicle. The road looped around the eastern end of the island a few metres behind them. Vanessa and Brigit looked at each other.
“If he finds us—” said Brigit. “Who knows we’re here?”
“Only his driver.”
“So what do you want to do?”
“Kill him.”
“No. Better to nail this sucker. Now, for Mlle Durocher.”
“And Brother Bart.”
“And Mia.”
Vanessa looked out at the water, heard it chuckling at the stony shoreline.
“The hole that’s in the sea now was just above the water level. What if the natives told Henry St. Clair that it would lead him into an underground cavern?”
“Too obvious. If the natives knew about it, it wasn’t safe enough for treasure.”
Vanessa nodded.
“What if the hole was between the high and low tide levels?”
“So the underground cavern was full of water.”
“Right. A perfect hiding place if you could seal your treasure in watertight containers.”
