The Glass Thief (A Jaya Jones Treasure Hunt Mystery Book 6)

by Gigi Pandian

  I recognized the young man next to her, but he wasn’t in a class with me this semester. I was fairly certain his name was Wesley Oh. His black hair stood on end at various angles, as if he’d been struck by lightning, and I couldn’t for the life of me tell if the look was purposeful or not.

  Wesley grinned shyly as he ran a hand through the messy mop of hair. “It’s not an emergency. Not exactly. We need your help.”

  “These two,” Tamarind said, ushering them into seats around the break room’s round wooden table, “made the biggest discovery at the library this afternoon.”

  Tamarind Ortega was a librarian at my university’s library, so the enthusiastic grin on her face was understandable. I knew her well enough that I should have guessed the urgency and secrecy involved a library discovery.

  One of my best friends, the librarian was a few years younger than my thirty-0ne years, and we’d met at the library shortly after I started my job as an assistant professor of history. It was sisterhood at first sight. She was nearly a foot taller and twice as heavy as me, so we were never confused for each other, but people frequently underestimated both of us. We’d bonded over our love for academia in spite of the fact that neither of us looked or acted like traditional academics.

  “You’d already left your office hours,” Wesley said as he slid his backpack off his shoulders and under the table. “Tamarind thought we’d be able to catch you here. Sorry to interrupt your evening, Jaya, but we didn’t want to wait until tomorrow.”

  I tried to cover my amused smile as I joined them at the table. I asked my underclassmen students to call me Professor Jones, but told my advanced seminar students they could call me Jaya. Wesley Oh had only taken an intro class with me but hadn’t called me Professor or Dr. Jones once, while my advanced seminar student Becca Courtland couldn’t bring herself to use my first name.

  The two couldn’t have been more different. Becca, in a baby blue sundress, long blonde hair in a low pony tail, and her slim shoulders weighed down by a pristine pink shoulder bag stuffed with books. Her pink lip-gloss smile reflected the enthusiasm she showed in class. Wesley, his black hair askew, in frayed flip flops, a ratty T-shirt and skinny jeans, and an oversize black backpack encumbered only by a skateboard. The front wheels and the tip of its scuffed tangerine orange deck stuck out the top of the backpack and reached above his head like a crown.

  My stomach rumbled, but I couldn’t resist asking about their find. “What’s the discovery?”

  It was nearly the end of fall semester, and the final assignment I’d given my seminar students was to do original research into a forgotten piece of history, telling a story through original historical documents that wasn’t told in history books or online encyclopedias. Becca was looking at forgotten aspects of the California Gold Rush, but Wesley?

  Tamarind elbowed Wesley. “Go ahead and show her already. Oh wait! You aren’t in her class with Becca. But you know about the notorious JAJ, right? Jaya Anand Jones, treasure hunter extraordinaire. One of the most brilliant minds in history on the planet. I’m sure you read about the treasures from India’s colonial history that were hidden until she found them.”

  “Yeah, I had a class with Jaya last year,” Wesley said.

  “So you know not to let her small stature and boring hair fool you.”

  “What’s the matter with my hair?” I ran my hand through my thick black hair.

  “It’s been the same since I met you.” Tamarind’s short hair was dyed lavender this week. Her natural hair color was black, but I’d rarely seen more than the roots that color. Last week it had been electric blue. “That’s no way to live. Stop changing the subject. Check out what these two found.”

  Wesley handed me a faded document in a plastic sleeve. It was a handwritten letter. The paper was thick and expensive, and yellowed with age. The writing was cursive, written with a steady and educated hand. I couldn’t read it, though. It was in French. The bottom section was missing, appearing to have been ripped at some point, so there was no signature.

  “She gave us the acid-free plastic sleeve,” Becca said. “The letter wasn’t like that in the book.”

  She held up her cell phone. My first thought was that young people couldn’t pay attention for more than a few seconds, until I realized she wasn’t checking her social media feeds. She was holding up the screen for me to read.

  “You’re translating the French,” I said, understanding dawning on me. I accepted the phone and read the translation.

  Son,

  My ship sank at port. Most of my possessions are buried at sea with the ship. But your inheritance is hidden safely. As for the fragile pieces, I will need to go back for them. I hope to return home soon.

  I’m not above admitting that my pulse quickened. I felt bad for the future historians of the world, who’d be sifting through sterile email files instead of handwritten letters. I looked up at them. “Where did you find this?”

  “Here’s where we found it.” Becca handed me an old hardbound book with library markings. “Hidden between the pages of this book that was published in the late 1850s. That’s when ships were being abandoned at the port and helping expand the city as landfill, right?”

  Droves of sailors in the mid-nineteenth century abandoned their ships in the San Francisco Bay to go in search of their fortunes. While India’s colonial history is my specialty, not San Francisco’s, my town never stops surprising me. The ground we walk on in the city’s Financial District was created out of landfill poured over a shallow part of the bay—much of it directly on top of the ships that had been abandoned during the Gold Rush when it was impossible to resist the lure of gold. If you walk through downtown San Francisco, you’re literally walking on top of a graveyard of sunken ships.

  Wesley grinned. “I can’t believe they never taught us in high school how San Francisco is built on top of abandoned ships.”

  I looked back to the letter. Something was wrong. Not its age—it looked authentic, though we could test for that later. It was the words themselves. Again, it would be good to have a native French speaker translate it rather than a computer program, but even a slightly different wording wouldn’t change what was nagging at me.

  “What’s up?” Tamarind asked. “We thought you’d be more excited that they found a buried Gold Rush treasure. Who do you think would own the gold today if they find it? This dude didn’t sign his name.”

  “That’s not what they found,” I said. “Look at what the letter says. ‘Son, My ship sank at port. Most of my possessions are buried at sea with the ship. But your inheritance is hidden safely. As for the fragile pieces, I will need to go back for them. I hope to return home soon.’ What’s he telling his son?”

  The three of them looked blankly at me.

  “Why do you think he’s writing home about sunken gold that he found in the California Gold Rush?” I asked.

  “Because the letter—” Wesley began.

  “What does the letter actually say?” I prompted.

  “Socratic method,” Tamarind murmured. “I love it.”

  “That there’s some sort of treasure,” Becca said, “buried with his sunken ship.”

  Wesley shook his head. “Most of his possessions were buried, but the inheritance is safely hidden. That doesn’t mean his Gold Rush riches were on the ship. They might be safely hidden in the sunken ship, now covered by landfill. Or he might have gotten them off and hidden them elsewhere. The letter doesn’t give us enough information to know.”

  “No,” Becca said, comprehension lighting up her face. “I get it. The letter doesn’t mention the Gold Rush at all. If he took the ship to get here, like all those men with adventurous spirits who were flocking to California and leaving their ships to sink, that means he already had whatever it was that he’s talking about as his son’s inheritance. Something fragile. Gold is sort of fragile, but it’s not usuall
y described that way.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “From the contents of the letter and where you found it, we can speculate this was written by a person—probably a man, but not necessarily—from France or another French-speaking country, who came over on a ship that sank once it arrived. This person brought something with them.”

  “Some of which was hidden safely,” Wesley said, “and some of which wasn’t.”

  I rested my elbows on the table and looked from Wesley’s excited grin to Becca’s parted lips. I could almost see the gears whizzing in her mind. She was almost there. I leaned closer. “What does the location of the letter tell us?”

  Becca gasped. “He never sent the letter. He stayed in San Francisco. So did his son’s inheritance.”

  “Shut. Up.” Tamarind smacked her palms onto the table. “Looks like we’re off on a treasure hunt.”

  Chapter 2

  “Midnight excursions underneath San Francisco!” Tamarind squealed.

  “I’m sure the banks in the financial district have security cameras,” I said.

  “Buzz kill,” Tamarind pouted.

  “This starts with an armchair treasure hunt,” I pointed out. “And it’s not ours anyway. This is Becca and Wesley’s project.”

  “Technically just Becca’s,” Wesley said. “At least she’s the only one who’ll be getting credit for it. I don’t think it’ll count for credit in my Historical Research Methods class. But I don’t care. If I can help, I’m in.”

  Becca nodded. “This is going to be the coolest research project ever.”

  “Even if you don’t find a treasure at the end?” I asked. “Beyond the fact that it could be anywhere, it’s likely this unnamed man already retrieved his riches.”

  “But this is real.” Becca grinned. “Not some boring account in a history book.”

  “Who cares if we find it,” Wesley added. “It’s the hunt, right?”

  I smiled back. I love sharing my passion for history with my students. From the first day of the semester I could tell Becca was bright, but until today, I hadn’t seen a spark of genuine interest in her. That was the most exciting thing about this discovery. There was the possibility that Becca and Wesley had stumbled across a missing piece of history that everyone else had overlooked, but, exciting though that was, the best discovery here was that the next generation of historians was being created before my eyes.

  “The mystery letter is legit,” Tamarind said. “The book Wesley found is an original edition from the 1850s, not a modern reprint, and nobody has checked it out in decades. Decades! Really, Jaya, your brethren need to step up their game. It’s not like the internet can tell you everything.”

  “Or even be trusted,” Wesley added.

  “Don’t even get me started,” Tamarind said. “This kid gets it.”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “I’d love to, but my boyfriend would kill me.”

  “But you can still help us at the library, right?” Becca cut in. “With whatever Dr. Jones recommends?”

  Tamarind cracked her knuckles. “Damn straight.”

  I couldn’t help feeling giddy that they were all so excited about this great project. An enticing find, but one that would require a lot of work. For the first decade I studied history, from my own undergrad years through graduate school and my first year as a professor, my most exciting archival finds were long-forgotten references in housekeeping ledgers of the staff of British East India Company merchants. I get a bigger rush from finding original documents that nobody has read in centuries than driving fast in my roadster. There’s not much I love more than libraries and sifting through archives. In a world filled with so much uncertainty, it can ground us when we untangle the interwoven strands of the lives of those who came before.

  When people think about history, they often think there are facts you can read in a book and accept as the truth. But in reality, it’s a painstaking process to piece together what really happened at any given place and time. Painstaking, but also exhilarating. The remnants of history that have survived might not be dramatic in and of themselves, but the stories they tell when assembled can be miraculous. People who lived long before us had similar hopes and dreams, and their messages could reach us across the centuries and continents. In a world that can feel simultaneously connected and divided, history can show us our common humanity through the ages.

  Like this letter. Was it written by someone who’d worked hard to save a few dollars over the course of his life that he considered a treasure? It was a possibility. It was also possible he was an adventurer who’d been on many ships and had accumulated items that could tell us more about missing gaps in history.

  “This place smells like heaven,” Tamarind said. “Since I’m here, I’m staying for dinner. I’ll be back in a sec. Gonna call Miles.”

  “He’s on his way already,” I said.

  Tamarind raised a pierced eyebrow.

  “Don’t ask,” I said. “I don’t have any answers. Apparently this was a bad day for me to leave my office earlier than usual.”

  “I’ll get answers,” she said, stepping out of the room with her phone to her ear.

  My own boyfriend, Lane Peters, had been planning on coming to listen to tonight’s set as well, but he’d had to cancel. His job as an art consultant didn’t give him the most regular hours.

  “What are our next steps?” Becca asked me.

  “That’s for you to figure out as your project,” I said.

  Becca groaned, but she did so with a smile on her face.

  “I’ll give you a hint to get started,” I said. “Begin with the most obvious ideas, and narrow things down from there. For example, the letter certainly looks like it could be more than a century old. But there are all sorts of things that could make it look aged, like coffee stains or being wedged between the pages of a book made with poor quality, acidic paper.”

  “That’s what I thought at first,” Becca said. “I figured it was a joke some bored student had put into the book, which is why I ignored it—”

  “Until she asked me to watch her stuff,” Wesley said.

  “He’s doing a research project for Professor Veeran’s class,” Becca said, “so we were in the library together this afternoon. I had a big pile of books I hadn’t finished with yet, so I asked him to watch my stuff while I went to get a snack, and when I came back he was upset that his own research wasn’t as cool as mine. I asked him what he was talking about—”

  “And I held up this letter she’d left on top of the book,” Wesley said. “I was drowning in my own research, so I looked at what she was doing.”

  “I would never have taken it seriously,” Becca said. “But when Wesley thought it looked real, we took it to Ms. Ortega.”

  Tamarind stepped back into the break room while Becca was speaking. “Ms. Ortega? What? You went to my mother? Not cool. Anyway, Miles wouldn’t tell me anything either. Except that he’ll be here soon. I’m telling you, strange things are afoot at the Circle K today.” She shook her head. “We don’t need a reservation or anything do we?”

  I shook my head. “Not on a Wednesday.”

  “You want to eat here as well?” Becca asked Wesley.

  “I can’t afford this place,” he murmured. It was soft enough I didn’t think he expected anyone else to hear.

  “My treat, you two,” I said. “You made my day with this intriguing find.”

  After Becca and Wesley were seated I pulled their server aside to make sure she knew not to let the students pay for anything, that their table would be my treat, then went to sit with Tamarind.

  “The dishy waiter said he’d bring out papadums right away,” Tamarind said, “so you can at least have a few bites of food before your set.”

  It was five minutes before Sanjay and I were due to begin our first set of music, and Sanjay hadn�
�t yet arrived. At least that was one thing that didn’t worry me that night. It wasn’t unusual for Sanjay to show up right before our set began, often in a dramatic flourish so his audience (even when it was the Tandoori Palace diners, not members of the audience of one of his magic shows) could witness a brief magic trick before the music began. I was the one who arrived early to eat at the restaurant, since head chef Juan’s secret menu items were off-the-charts spicy. Sanjay had been born and raised in the Silicon Valley, the child of parents who’d immigrated from India, and at an early age had rejected his mom’s home cooking for being too spicy, begging for pizza instead. While he adored Indian desserts, he rejected even the mildest level of spice in a meal. Sometimes I really didn’t understand my best friend.

  A crispy papadum with imli chutney would have to do before I could eat a proper dinner after our first set. But as Miles walked in and I saw the look on his face, I forgot all about the steel thali platter that appeared at the same time.

  Miles held a stack of papers clutched in his hands. He sat down at our table and rested his elbows on the oak table top. The owner, Raj, used to cover the tables with starchy white table cloths, but he was a businessman who changed with the times, so when exposed wood became de rigueur, he ditched the table cloths. Personally I thought his decision to start serving water out of mason jars had gone a bit too far, but the restaurant was always packed, so what did I know?

  Miles usually had eyes only for Tamarind, but tonight he was laser-focused on me. He handed me the sheets of paper that had been stapled together. I glanced at the typed page and the first thing that caught my eye was the sketch of a cobra drawn on top of the page.

  “Someone sent this to me?” I asked.

  Miles had been screening emails and letters being sent to me ever since I’d uncovered a few historical treasures. Last year, a young reporter with more enthusiasm than accuracy had written that I was interested in having people contact me with their own historical mysteries. In spite of a retraction and my own efforts to inform people that I was actually a professor of history with a full-time teaching job, I’d been so inundated with correspondence that I’d had to change my personal email and get someone to help me sort through my inbox.