by J. S. Brent
“Not sure what you’re getting at,” said Liv, looking slightly rattled.
“What I mean to say is, I’m not sure I’m safe.”
To my surprise, she laughed. “What are you planning to do, rob me? Henry, I know the cave you live in. I’ll send the police straight there.”
“This isn’t a joke!” I said earnestly, shaking her slightly. Her tiny frame swayed like a bamboo tree in a high wind.
She stopped smiling. “Are you really going to hurt me?” she asked.
I couldn’t tell whether she was truly scared, or whether she was mocking me. Somehow both possibilities sent explosions of color into my brain. Olivia the sassy archeologist appealed to the mature half of me, while Olivia the scared, helpless woman drove me mad with passion.
“Get back!” I said, pushing her backwards. “Once I get wound up, I can’t help myself!”
Olivia stumbled, but caught herself before falling. “Henry, are you okay?” She looked genuinely panic-stricken, like she was regretting ever having come on this outing, ever agreeing to be with me.
“I can control myself,” I said, “if you can control yourself.”
Now she looked confused. “I can’t do that if I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I feel like at any moment I could set you off, and now, frankly, I have no idea how you might react.”
“As long as we agree to keep our relationship strictly professional,” I said, “I’ll be fine.”
A thin light of understanding slowly spread across her face. She took a tentative but bold step forward and looked me in the eyes.
“You’re into me,” she said.
“Liv, please…”
“… and maybe you’ve never had a real relationship, so you don’t know what it’s like?” For once her voice was hesitant, insecure, though she was making a game attempt to speak with confidence. “But you don’t have to be afraid of me. I’m a big girl, and I can take care of myself. I’m not a china doll.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I think I know what you meant,” she said, undeterred. “You knew you were starting to like me, and you didn’t want things to become awkward between us. Is that it?” She seemed to be trying to convince herself as much as she was me. Her breath shaky, she said, “Well, I don’t care if you like me. We don’t have to talk about it. We can focus on the treasure and it doesn’t even have to come up again.”
“I’m sorry…” Somehow I had been the one to come out utterly humiliated and defeated in this exchange. (I’m not saying I would have preferred it the other way. I’m not sure what I wanted).
“You don’t need to apologize. I’m a professional woman, and I’ve had to deal with boys’ crushes before.”
Something about the way she said boys infuriated me. Anything would have been preferable to this callous display of condescension. “Fine,” I said slowly, swallowing my pride. “We won’t bring it up again. But will you promise me one thing?”
“Anything.”
“Don’t act like a scared little girl again. Just… don’t.”
* * *
Our search led us to Smith’s Cove, a small, partially enclosed body of water with a smooth, sandy beach. Gulls circled overhead, regarding us ominously. The ground was strewn with glass bottles, beer bottles, miniature seashells and the occasional bone of some long-dead animal. An empty bag of Doritos lay half-peeking out of the sand next to a rotted pair of underwear.
“People have really done a number on this place, haven’t they?” said Olivia, shaking her head in disgust.
“This whole place used to be so beautiful,” I said. “Not even that long ago.”
“‘Nothing gold can stay,’” she said sadly.
Liv explained that in the mid-1970s the Gilman Foundation had taken up residence on this island, cramming it with Volkswagens and scientific laboratories where they conducted bizarre experiments. One of their experiments was to fill the money pit with several hundred thousand tons of red dye, which later turned up in three other places. Smith’s Cove had been one of those places, revealing to the scientists and archeologists stationed here that there was a flooding canal connecting the cove and the pit. Subsequently, five scuba divers explored the cove and were able to swim from one part of the island to the other, though one of them got stuck and died when her oxygen tank ran out. (The Gilman Foundation had tried to hush up both the existence of the canal and the death of the scuba diver, but both were exposed in the documentary Way to Go, Gilman, which led Congress to cut funding in 1981, forcing the foundation to leave the island).
“If that’s the case,” I said, “it’s entirely possible that the treasure everyone has been seeking so assiduously for the last 60 years or so is actually hidden under the island, but is only accessible via water. Which would explain why no one has been able to find it.”
“Which means that if we really wanted to find it,” said Liv, “we’d have to get our own scuba gear and go down there. Are you trained?”
“I have a scuba license,” I said proudly. “Granddad made sure of it.”
“And I trained when I was working in the Caribbean. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves; it would be extremely dangerous. We would both risk drowning or being eaten in shark-infested waters.”
“Sharks don’t scare me,” I said. Liv raised a skeptical brow. “Once when we were vacationing in Trinidad, I went pearl-diving and a shark swam right up to me. I bopped it on the nose and it swam off, with this look on its face like I had hurt its feelings.”
“You probably did,” said Liv. “What if it just wanted to say hello?”
“If you had seen the look on that shark’s face,” I replied, “you would know that saying ‘hello’ was the last thing on its mind.”
“Maybe it was trying to be friends. You never even gave it a chance.”
“If I had, you would be standing here talking to a very dead Henry.”
* * *
Wind pressure began dropping as we circled the island on foot, passing from one dirty beach to another. The air became unusually cool as thick, fluffy clouds blotted out the sunlight. Olivia shivered and goosebumps appeared running up and down both her arms. Angry waves pounded the surf, flaring up against huge rocks only to sink back down again.
An hour and a half later we found ourselves staring down at a set of enormous stones that had been pushed together to form a cross, spanning 20 feet horizontally and 60 feet vertically. I speculated that the cross must be the work of Christian explorers who had come to this island in the last three or 400 years, but Olivia shook her head. She said it was 3,000 years old, at least, which made it about the same age as the stone statues on Easter Island. Both were marvels of engineering, even if modern archeology had once and for all dispelled the mystery of how they had been designed and transported.
In the middle of the cross, where the vertical axis met the horizontal axis, rudimentary drawings depicted human figures wearing elaborate hats. Some were standing upright, while others were lying down on what looked to me like some sort of bed. Some were men, some were women.
“The primitives who built this cross,” said Liv, having to raise her voice above the roar of the wind and the pounding of waves, “designed it as a sacrificial altar. Every year, at the beginning of their harvest, they would kill 20 people to ensure prosperity for the coming year. Of course this eventually became unsustainable, because the island can’t support that many people. The islanders split in two, with one half wanting to continue the sacrificial system that had served them so well, and the other half wanting to do away with it. There was a great battle and the latter group won, though not before slaughtering scores of their opponents.”
“So in a way, everyone got their wish,” I said.
“In a way,” she replied. “Later, pirates and seafarers found their way to the island, and were spooked by the sight of the stone cross and the stories of what was once done here. Concurrent with the tales of a great treasure hidden somewhere on the
island, there arose a legend that if the blood of an innocent victim was poured on the cross, the blood would flow along the ground until it reached the sacred heart of the island, where the treasure was buried for all time.”
“The treasure of Oak Island,” I said.
Liv shivered.
“Did any pirate ever try it?” I asked. “You know, to sacrifice one of their own in the hopes of finding the treasure?”
“If they did, there are no records of it,” she said. “You have to remember that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pirates weren’t nearly as savage as their reputation suggests. Plunder and kidnapping, even the occasional murder was one thing, but most, if not all of them, drew the line at actual human sacrifice.”
“I don’t understand it,” I said. “How people can be so cruel. How history can be so full of darkness, and then someone comes along to remind you that there’s love in the world, just when you had given up on the human race.”
Liv didn’t respond; instead she drew closer, wrapping one slender arm around mine. For once I didn’t mind; there was no way her body could affect me in a place that had been the sight of so much suffering and death. We took a final look at the abhorrent cross where so many people had expired, then continued on our way.
As we neared the pier where the ferry was waiting to take us back to the mainland, trying to forget the gruesome tableau we had just witnessed, we debated our plans for the evening. Liv wanted to stay in and eat in the tavern. I had lost my appetite, but didn’t know how to say so. Instead, I tried to think of a plausible excuse.
“Do you think that’s really wise?” I asked. “Given the looks Kim was giving me last night, I wouldn’t be surprised if she poisoned my soup.”
“If you’re that worried about it,” said Liv, tip-toeing ahead of me in sandals, “I’ll taste the soup first to make sure it’s safe.”
“But then what if you die?” I replied. “I’ll have to continue the expedition with a very dead Olivia.”
“Poor baby.”
I waved a hand in front of my face. “Can you imagine the smell?”
“There are worse things. Besides, what’s the joy of life without a little risk?”
“I have a better idea,” I said. “Let’s eat at Maude’s. I owe you a meal anyway.”
Liv disputed this, and we were both playfully exchanging unflattering names when it began raining.
Hard rain drops pounded our heads and hands like tiny stones. My vision clouded. To our left the trees were waving their branches in fury, as though about to rise up. Rain was forming huge puddles on the dirt trails ahead of us. Small animals were scurrying for shelter. A brown worm that had had the misfortune to get caught out in the deluge struggled towards a hole, failed to find it, and died.
“There’s no use trying to outrun it,” I said. “Whatever we do, by the time we make it back to the ferry we’ll be completely soaked.”
“In that case, we should head for the nearest available shelter,” said Liv.
“The cave,” I said. “It’s less than half a mile from here.” Abruptly she turned off the path and I followed, my blood racing, kicking up water and mud as I went.
Chapter 7—Olivia
For just a moment, when Henry was shaking me, I was 17 years old again.
It was the night of the fall dance and I had been asked out by two different guys. Lenny was sweet but awkward. His hair stood straight up and his letter jacket was two sizes too small. He asked me through a friend, who asked another friend, who finally asked me, because he was too shy to ask me in person. I felt so bad, I almost said yes out of pity.
But then there was Louis.
Louis was the coolest kid in our senior class. He drove to school each morning in a convertible with doors that didn’t open, so he had to leap out of it. With his slicked-back, jet-black hair, warm-colored button-down shirts, and impeccably polished black dancing shoes, he was the star of the school swing club. He had dated three girls but broke up with each of them because he felt they were keeping him from his studies. As a first-generation son of immigrants, he was determined to get into Harvard and couldn’t let romance get in the way of that. Each of the girls still adored him.
But not my mom.
“I don’t want you going out with that man,” she had warned me one night over spaghetti in our tiny, cluttered kitchen. “I don’t like the way he looks at you. He’s too hungry. He’d do anything.”
“Well, what’s wrong with that?” I asked, dousing my salad in raspberry vinaigrette.
“Someone like that,” she said, “he’ll be whatever he has to be, to get you to go out with him. Then, once he’s won you over, he’ll change. Mark my words, you don’t want to see the kind of man he’ll become.”
“Ellie, all men are like that,” said my dad. “I think she should give him a chance.”
“Yeah, Mom,” I said, “I’m a grown woman.”
She threw me a withering look. “Grown and almost grown are two completely different things. Why don’t you give this Lenny guy a chance? He seems to like you.”
I didn’t really have a good answer to that question, except that I didn’t want to. I sent a message through my friend, who told another friend, who told Lenny that I wouldn’t be able to go to the dance because I already had plans that night. But the more I thought about this, the guiltier I felt. It was unlikely he would be able to find another date, and I thought I could make it work if I spent part of the night with Louis and part of it with Lenny.
Unfortunately I didn’t schedule my night as well as I had planned. Lenny and I never made it to the dance, but we did go to Sonic, where we sat in my car drinking milkshakes and generally not speaking. I kept checking my watch, watching the hour tick by until the date was over and I could meet up with Louis, who had agreed to meet me there.
But he showed up 10 minutes earlier than I had expected.
“Lenny, could you please leave?” I asked, feeling my heart sink.
As Lenny walked away, Louis turned to me coldly and said, “What were y’all doing?”
“Nothing,” I lied. “He just came up to the car and started talking to me.”
Lenny turned at that moment and looked at me, an expression on his face that I will never forget.
I continued to argue with Louis the whole way to the dance. He wasn’t paying attention to the road and careened into another car. We were both lucky we weren’t killed. But that wasn’t the worst part. When the driver of the other car got out to inspect the damage, he and Louis exchanged words. Then before I knew what was happening, before I could stop him, Louis had him pinned against the car. He was beating every square inch of his body. He was pummeling his face. He was smashing his ribs. If I hadn’t intervened, screaming, if I hadn’t thrown myself in front of him (getting a nasty blow across my face in the process), Louis might have killed him.
I listened to my mom after that.
And as Henry stood over me, glowering and half-mad, as he shook my bones till they rattled, it occurred to me: I should have listened to Kim.
* * *
So while we were holed up together in a cave trying to escape the rain, I put on my best smile. He didn’t have to know how scared I was. He didn’t have to know I had measured the number of feet from the fire to the opening in case I had to make a quick exit. He didn’t have to know I had insisted on clutching the torch in case I had to use it.
The light of the torch flickered on the walls above and around us. Grey gusts of daylight were still filtering in from outside, lending the whole cave the appearance of an undersea grotto. Henry’s scarred and rugged face took on a sinister appearance in the semi-darkness.
With a swift motion Henry again pulled off his shirt and placed it at his feet, just far enough away from the fire that it could dry off without getting burned. I could see him quietly eyeing my own soaked shirt out of the corner of his eye, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. He was obviously wondering whether I was going to follow his lea
d, but for the moment I played coy and resolved to dry by other means.
Internally I was chiding myself. I should have run away ages ago, yet I was still here. I was afraid, but not just afraid. I feared him, in part because of my bad experiences in the past and in part because of Kim’s warnings. Yet at the same time I was intoxicated by the danger he represented, the danger he carried with him in every cool glance of his eyes, in every sweeping motion of his broad and muscular arms. I remembered reading stories of gods who came to earth and walked among men, and here was one come to life. Those stories never ended well for the people involved, but for a shining moment they were happy beyond the dreams of mortals.
In the light now, as he sat beside me, I had a better opportunity of examining the tattoo that I had glimpsed from a distance that morning as he stood in the cave’s entrance tantalizingly brushing his teeth. Instinctively resisting the urge to run my hand over his chest, I noted (with what I hoped and half-believed was mere professional interest) that it was composed of the same markings that were on the green amulet.
