by E. A. House
“I didn’t want to say anything in front of your parents,” he said quietly, “but I need to ask you—do you happen to know where your friend Maddison and her family are? Besides Montana, I mean?”
“No,” Chris said, “why?”
“Look, it’s most likely just a mix-up or a misunderstanding,” Professor Griffin said. “There was an FBI agent at the archive this morning, asking when Dr. McRae would be back in town.”
“I don’t know,” Carrie said. “You were there when her dad picked Maddison up, you heard the same thing we did.”
“That’s true, I do remember, I was just wondering if you happened to know more, or if Maddison had called either of you . . . ” Professor Griffin said.
Carrie’s foot was firmly on Chris’s. It would be just like him to admit to the not-quite-SOS Maddison had sent them, and something about the way Professor Griffin was asking made Carrie nervous, although all he did was sigh and readjust his hat before wandering off in the direction of his car.
It was probably nothing. Or it was Carrie’s bad habit of getting possessive about secrets. Chris insisted she had a habit of overreacting to people who were just trying to help. Carrie tended to counter this observation with the fact that in her experience, people who suddenly popped up and agreed with your ideas at the very end of a research project were just trying to get a good grade without doing any of the work. Chris tended to do research projects at high speed the day before they were due and so had no idea what Carrie was talking about, and Carrie trusted Professor Griffin to have no hidden agendas, but . . .
The professor had always been as changeable and difficult to pin down as the ocean he loved so much, and Carrie had never been able to really tell what he was thinking at any given moment, but recently he had dialed up that tendency up to—and now past—eleven, and Carrie was starting to worry that he was worried and trying to hide it. Something about Dr. McRae alarmed Professor Griffin, although whether it was something about Dr. McRae personally or something about the whole situation and Dr. McRae in general that alarmed him, Carrie didn’t know. The professor couldn’t think Dr. McRae was dangerous (or up to something suspicious), or he’d have warned Chris and Carrie, and the professor clearly liked Maddison—but then why was he acting even odder and jumpier than normal? And how much trouble was Chris going to cause before they found out?
At least Chris waited until Professor Griffin’s taillights were fading down the street before pulling a knotted purple hair ribbon out of his pocket. Carrie did not want to add Maddison’s cryptic warning to the conversation, especially since she hadn’t figured out what Maddison had been trying to tell them yet, and by Chris’s expression, he hadn’t either.
“I haven’t magically come up with a new answer for what she was trying to tell us,” Carrie said. “But I still don’t think it was her dad she was warning us about.”
“I know,” Chris said. “I haven’t got an answer, either. I just wish she’d call me. I have no idea what Maddison is doing.”
MADDISON WAS STARING AT A CHICKEN. IT WAS AN especially unintelligent chicken, and chickens, in Maddison’s experience, were generally very dumb. But Nebraska in the middle of the summer, and in the midst of an unexpected wave of cool, rainy weather, was green and humid and boring. Gregory Lyndon owned a small farm in the middle of what he claimed was Newtonville and was more accurately nowhere, and Maddison was suffering from a strange combination of nervousness and boredom. It was made even worse by the fact that her phone got almost no reception in this middle-of-nowhere farm, and she was not at all sure that her messages were getting through to Chris and Carrie. So she was currently staring at one of the dozen brown hens that roamed the Lyndons’ front meadow and sat in their flower boxes. Maddison was trying to decide what her next step should be and wondering distantly if the chicken was in the process of laying an egg.
Maddison’s father’s friendship with Gregory Lyndon was one of the many mysteries that had taken on a slightly sinister edge since Maddison had started asking questions about the San Telmo. Kevin McRae and Gregory Lyndon had known each other since before Maddison had been born, and, based on a few comments from her mom, had also known each other since before Maddison’s parents had even met. But Gregory Lyndon was twenty-five years older than Maddison’s father, and a retired police detective. He was—based on the football team he rooted for—originally from Florida, but living in the same state wasn’t enough to explain a friendship that had spanned decades, or why Maddison’s father had stayed in touch with Mr. Lyndon even after the retired police detective had moved to Nebraska, which he had done when Maddison was two.
Maddison had a growing suspicion that the answer to the puzzle lay in where the two had met, but she still hadn’t figured out a good way to ask an old family friend, “Were you the police chief in the college town when my father and this oceanography professor I happen to know had some weird and terrible falling-out that’s scarred my dad for life, and by the way, did it have anything to do with a ship called the San Telmo?” Especially since her father had been suppressing the story for most of her life. Thus, she was trying and failing to engage a chicken in a staring contest, and wondering what to do next.
There was also that picture she had snapped with her phone of the picture her dad had of Carrie, burning a hole in her pocket. Maddison had taken it at the last minute, when she’d ducked into her father’s office back home while he was loading suitcases in the car. Maddison couldn’t decide how much of the nerves were really a feeling of guilt. An irrational feeling of guilt, she told herself stubbornly. And maybe just a little anger.
Why did her father have a picture of Carrie, obviously taken unawares and clearly tucked away like a secret? What did he feel he couldn’t tell Maddison, even after she had clearly been threatened by someone chasing the San Telmo’s legendary treasure? And for that matter, what had been the purpose of the file folder marked THC? Maddison had barely looked inside, not wanting to invade her father’s privacy, but she had seen what looked like maps sketched on graphing paper, a number of equations, a bunch of random pictures, and several sheets of notes in her father’s careful handwriting. Lots of pictures, actually. What possible connection could there be between a bunch of photos of random trees, bushes—if Maddison remembered correctly there had even been a harbor—and Carrie?
“You know, I almost wish he hadn’t explained anything at all,” Maddison told the chicken, who clucked.
“Now there’s a comment I never thought I’d hear from a McRae.”
“Mr. Lyndon!” Maddison said, looking up, startled. Retired police chief Gregory Lyndon was a naturally commanding sight; he was tall, with silvering black hair and an air that seemed to say, “Yes, I am in my mid-sixties, but that doesn’t mean I can’t still punch someone through a wall.”
He had, as a young man, played football in college.
Maddison had known him for years and distinctly remembered the last family Christmas card from the Lyndons, which had prominently featured Mr. Lyndon holding his tiny, pink-blanket-wrapped, first-ever grandchild and looking awed and terrified, and she still had to fight the urge to quail.
“Half the truth can give you a worse understanding of what’s going on than an actual lie can,” she said instead. “And it’s easier to kid yourself into thinking you’re being fair and honest when you really aren’t.”
“And that,” Mr. Lyndon said, “is a McRae thing to say.” He picked up the chicken, who seemed resigned to her fate, and extracted a fresh brown egg from amongst the pansies. “You have a nesting box,” he told the chicken as he replaced her. She ruffled her feathers in offense and hopped out of the flower box to waddle off in the direction of the garden. “I don’t know why you insist on using my flower pots.”
“I don’t think she’s very good at planning,” Maddison admitted, as they watched the chicken stalk away in a huff. Mr. Lyndon tossed the egg absently from one hand to another and nodded thoughtfully.
“Want to com
e help me make a start on lunch?” he asked. Maddison almost bowed out—she was busy thinking—but then it occurred to her that, with her dad in town getting the groceries necessary for feeding extra people and her mom and Mrs. Lyndon halfway across the property at the farm pond fishing, she had a perfect opportunity to ask Mr. Lyndon a lot of questions about her dad while chopping onions.
Starting with “What’s going on with my dad?” was probably a little too direct, if the way Mr. Lyndon nicked his thumb and cursed was any indication, but Maddison was tired of beating around the bush.
“Many things,” Mr. Lyndon said, pressing a paper towel to his thumb. “Including a greater level of paranoia than usual. I knew he didn’t just offer to do a grocery run to be nice.”
“My dad almost didn’t graduate from college because of something that happened back then,” Maddison said to the onions she was chopping. “I’m beginning to wonder if it involves this local oceanography professor and a lost treasure ship nobody’s ever been able to find. He won’t tell me what it was!”
“Oh boy,” Mr. Lyndon told the carrots.
“Which would be fine, except I can’t keep avoiding the professor, and it’s making everything uncomfortable and awkward,” Maddison continued. If Mr. Lyndon was going to carefully dance around telling her anything, he was at least going to know why doing so was a very bad idea. “I think—I think that events might be repeating themselves.”
She had cut the second onion in half and diced a good quarter of it before Mr. Lyndon spoke again, and when he did it was quietly and to the carrots he had started carefully cutting into slivers.
“Technically,” he said, “it’s still a cold case. But either you have excellent instincts or people are talking who shouldn’t be, because you happen to be nearly right.”
Maddison looked up.
“I have a friend in records who knows my interest in the case,” Mr. Lyndon said, “and he called me yesterday to say that the paperwork had been pulled. Something about finding a dead body?”
“Case?” Maddison asked. “What kind of case?”
“At the time, missing persons,” Mr. Lyndon said. He put the carrot down and looked at her. “With the understanding that this is not something I should be doing . . . ”
“Oh, totally understood,” Maddison said, before he could get scared off the topic.
“Before you decide that you aren’t going to give up until you either find the truth or get yourself killed looking for it,” Mr. Lyndon continued, “I should tell you that it looks to be turning into a murder investigation.”
Maddison gulped. Murder?
“In early April of 1997, a twenty-year-old biology major from Florida State named Ryan Moore went missing from his dorm room,” Mr. Lyndon told her. “The last person said to have seen him was your father, and the two colleagues of mine who were determined to call the disappearance foul play were also determined to prove that your father did it.”
“But he didn’t,” Maddison said. Hoped, really.
“That was never proved one way or the other,” Mr. Lyndon said. “Several of his former friends were firmly convinced that he was responsible—a Willis Griffin among them, I assume he’s the oceanography professor you mentioned, he was majoring in oceanography at the time—but we could never establish a motive or a method or even so much as an eyewitness who saw them together. With no other leads the case fizzled out and went cold.” He slid his pile of carrots into a bowl and picked up a bottle of salad dressing. “Until now,” he added.
“What are you two up to?” Maddison’s father asked as he entered the doorway. Startled, Maddison jumped as her father bustled in the door weighed down with shopping bags and began unloading them.
“Carrot salad,” Maddison told him as he stuck a gallon of milk in the fridge, and luckily he took her at her word and didn’t ask what else they’d been talking about.
It was, after all, part of the truth.
She realized the other part of the puzzle at six-twenty-seven the next morning. Maddison hadn’t slept well. The thought of her father accused of murder wasn’t comforting, even if Mr. Lyndon didn’t seem to think he’d been responsible for anything and the case had quietly fizzled out. But that didn’t mean it would go away quietly this time. You could still be accused of a crime a second time if you weren’t tried for it the first time. What if her father became a person of interest in the case a second time around?
Well, she’d probably end up in another fight with Chris, which was not something to look forward to.
But what kept Maddison up was not just the idea of her father accused of murder, uncomfortable as that might be. It was the nagging feeling that Mr. Lyndon had worded his explanation very carefully, as though there had been a hint somewhere that he wanted her to pick up on, as though there was something he wanted to tell her that he couldn’t, in good conscience, come right out and say to her?
. . . I say . . . I will say . . . I have said—I said, Maddison thought. Why specifically “said”?
“The last person said to have seen him,” she announced, trailing blankets behind her into the kitchen. Unlike everyone else in the house, Mr. Lyndon was an early riser. He was sitting at his kitchen island stirring honey into his tea and he didn’t look surprised to see Maddison up. Maddison claimed the chair next to him.
“So who said they saw my dad with Ryan Moore before he died?” she asked.
“And that’s the interesting part,” Mr. Lyndon said, as though Maddison hadn’t just restarted an earlier conversation, hours after the fact. “Which everyone, including your father, has so far skipped over completely.” He blew on his tea. “After he disappeared, the police interviewed everyone who knew Ryan. On the night Ryan disappeared, your father claimed to have been in his room studying, which was of course—”
“Impossible to verify,” Maddison said. Mr. Lyndon nodded.
“Naturally enough, we never verified it. But, it seems to have escaped the notice of everyone except perhaps your father that of the three people who told us Ryan Moore and Kevin McRae—well, he was actually Kevin Greenwood at the time, not having met your mother—were out hiking together that night, only one actually saw them together. The other two either remembered Griffin saying he saw them together or were honest enough to admit that they couldn’t remember how they knew the two boys were out together.”
“So, Professor Griffin was the real source of the worst evidence against my dad?” Maddison asked.
“Mm-hmm.” Mr. Lyndon nodded into his mug.
“S-so the person who got my dad in trouble all those years ago, theoretically, is the same person who turned back up in his life just as the San Telmo came back into his life,” Maddison said slowly. “And somebody died because they got too close to the last-known location of the ship.”
“The San Telmo?” Mr. Lyndon put his mug down, looking curious. And worried.
“It’s . . . this long-lost treasure ship,” Maddison said, surprised that Mr. Lyndon didn’t already know about it. Hadn’t she mentioned it to him already? “Dad’s mentioned having friends who were looking for it, and I, er, also have a couple friends who were looking for it, and as soon as they started to, weird things started to happen to everyone around them. Especially—especially when Professor Griffin was around,” Maddison finished, scrambling to her feet and almost tripping on a tangle of blankets.
“Maddison?” Mr. Lyndon asked.
“Can I borrow your home phone?” Maddison asked, frantic. “I have to at least warn them, if Chris and Carrie are going to be on a boat with Professor Griffin like he offered before we left then they need to know about him being involved in this disappearance—”
Mr. Lyndon had already nodded his permission and Maddison was already dialing Chris’s number as fast as she could—she misdialed the number the first time and got a dial tone, and had to pull her own phone out to get the number right—and then it rang and rang and rang until it went to voicemail, and the uneasy feeling she’d woken u
p with and misdiagnosed as worry over her father got worse and worse. So she didn’t hear all of what Mr. Lyndon muttered to himself as he dumped his tea down the drain in an apparent fit of sudden disgust with the universe, so she could have been mistaken.
But Maddison would later have cause to wonder, because she could almost swear that Mr. Lyndon had muttered under his breath, among other things, “Of all the things for the Wyzowski kid to be right about.”
In the moment, though, Maddison had bigger things to worry about, mainly that after calling Chris she tried Carrie and got the same lack of response, and she almost didn’t need to call Chris’s mom’s phone and ask as calmly and politely as possible where Chris was. Murphy’s Law said that the worst thing that could possibly happen had happened, and Murphy’s Law told Maddison she was already too late.
“Oh honey, you just missed Chris and Carrie,” Mrs. Kingsolver said. “They’re spending a few days with Professor Griffin and his grad students. The signal must not be any good out on the water.”
“It just figures,” Maddison muttered when she’d hung up.
THE MORNING OF THE SEVENTH WAS THE FIRST DAY of what was hopefully going to be a simple, two-day expedition “not involving any whales or alligators or waterfalls, in case that was a concern,” as Professor Griffin had put it before Chris had managed to stop him from babbling away their best chance of finding the San Telmo. It was a Wednesday, and it dawned clear and warm and with a very irritated Carrie.
Carrie was very irritated because Chris had turned up on her doorstep half an hour before she was planning to get up. He had his bags packed, an abundance of excited energy, and two sheets of paper with code phrases on them.
“I’m sorry, what?” Carrie asked, glaring at the offending sheet of paper and wondering why her toes were freezing. She’d been up much later than she had meant to and was already irritated with herself because she wasn’t as prepared with the directions to the San Telmo as she’d hoped to be. And now Chris wanted her to memorize a whole page of utterly meaningless statements?
