Gold (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 4)

by Thomas Hollyday

  “Yeah, Mouse is a good man. So’s his daddy. The best thing, though, is you being in charge.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” said John, giving the Chief a thumbs up as he got back into his truck, started the engine and drove on up the lane to Andy’s. He didn’t go by the grove of mulberry trees without a smile. Now that he knew the story of them and the relevance of the mound that they were planted on, the drive up the lane took on more significance. He slowed and looked at the grove, wondering what the ancients must have been thinking when they put in the mound in the first place and what secrets might still be buried there.

  The trees were in shadow now as the sun was lower and the darkness came out from the silhouette of the house at the top of the lane. He pulled into the gravel area in front of the house and parked behind Andy’s telescope truck.

  Andy and Mother had left his skirt set out for him by the front door. He put it on and realized that he was getting used to it, and even enjoying wearing it. She was in the kitchen preparing dinner. Her mother was at the table by the back window looking at the river and patting two cats at once.

  Andy met him with a quick hug. She said, “Mother’s thinking about writing a book about the old days and Diane and her friends visiting here. Talking to you got her excited about those days. She’s been puzzling over two lines of a poem she started about Diane. She keeps telling me that if Dad was still alive she would have finished it by now.”

  “Tell me the two lines,” said John.

  Andy recited,

  When I die

  Let the sun take me back.

  “The sun?” asked John.

  Her mother said, “Like it adds to the richness of life. Like it reminds both of us we’re still alive.”

  Andy opened a beer for him. John drank some and said, “Father Tom mentioned the sun just before he died. I guess I never thought about the sun like that.”

  Andy’s mother said, “Think of yourself on a boat out in the middle of the ocean, John.”

  “OK.”

  She continued. “One with a big engine. Go down to the engine room and watch that engine. That’s you in the world, John. You are the engine in the middle of all that water.”

  “Where does the sun come in to it?” he asked, pulling on his beer.

  “The fuel for the engine is oil but the fuel for you is the sun. You are like the boat, adrift in the world. It’s what keeps you going, you see. It is present in everything you eat,” she said. “The trees, all of nature. All relies on the sun.”

  “Unless you get a sunburn,” Andy said, with a laugh.

  Later, he and Andy were finishing dinner on the porch overlooking the river. Mother had gone inside to read. The darkness was all around them. In the distance fireflies lit up intermittently and out on the river were the casual cries of birds and wildlife. To the right, a few dim lights showed where Mouse and the others were beginning the night shift at the hole.

  “What do you plan to do if we find any treasure?” John asked.

  “It’s not mine,” said Andy.

  “I’m the executor. I get a fee based on the size of the estate. You and Mouse and the Captain are all people hired by the estate. So if we find any treasure, you’ll get some money and if it’s a lot of treasure you’ll get more, some good money.”

  “What would I do with it?” she said, looking out at the river. “I’ve always wanted to spend all my time working on the stars. Writing books. I suppose it could help me afford to spend more time right here looking at space.”

  “Maybe you’d find a boyfriend to replace that one you talked about at the funeral.”

  “Yes, someone who is capable of love. The one I used to have couldn’t love anyone. He tried but he couldn’t. He wanted the kind of success with big cars and houses and lots of public respect, bowing and scraping. That took up all his love. That’s why I had to leave him.”

  “You wanted love,” said John in a soft voice.

  She nodded. “Whatever. I have nothing against success. I do worry that if I make a lot of money that’s money that has to come from someone else. That has to leave someone else without.” She paused. “I can’t live with that, not in this world with all the people and animals living without. I still don’t know how I wasted so many years with him.”

  John grinned and said, “Maybe he was handsome. That’s a good reason to waste time with him.”

  She smiled and said, “He was handsome outside but not inside, John.”

  “Well, I’m leaving to start making some money in Baltimore. I guess I fit the category of that guy too.”

  “You haven’t left yet. I still have hope you’ll do the right thing for yourself,” she said.

  He grinned. “So tell me something. If I dated an astronomer, how would I share the telescope? It only has one eyepiece.”

  She said, her eyes twinkling, “I’d have to design an eyepiece that could be used by two people at the same time, wouldn’t I?”

  “You would do that?”

  “Sure,” she said, still looking out at the river darkness, “If I had the right someone to share it with.”

  “Do you find any trace of human love in all that astronomy science?”

  “My father and my mother did when they were studying the stars,” she said.

  After a pause, she said, “I guess lawyers are different than astronomers and historians. Like you. The first time I saw you, you seemed so overwhelmed by the problems you helped your clients with.”

  “I guess I don’t believe in heroes anymore,” he said.

  She turned and looked into his eyes and said, “You don’t believe in anything, do you?”

  “Not much,” he said.

  “You should, John.”

  He moved his face closer to hers.

  “See, I think like my father,” she said. “He believed that the universe was a source of answers and all the religions shared those answers.”

  “You mean the notes on the Nanticoke Manito ideas?” His face was close to hers.

  “Yes. One thing plagued him, though. He couldn’t figure it out.”

  “What?”

  “All the religions mention the need for love. The children referred to learning to love.” She quoted,

  “You must constantly strive to keep your energies in balance by learning to love, the only way to survive the lifelong battle of good and evil inside you.”

  John said, “I guess it’s when people like each other that’s all.”

  She pulled back from him so they were a few inches apart. She kept talking. “It’s more than that. Love should have no purpose. My father wrote that everything else in life has a reason, a purpose. Except love. Even then, he wrote that most of what we think is love is emotion but it is really for a reason. People care but it’s in their interest. So what we think is love is not really love. Love means that you should love without expecting anything in return. I mean, the Christian believes that if you do right, if you love Jesus, you can go to heaven. That’s something for something. So where is the love that is real love and where does it come from? In our universe where everything has a purpose, here’s this thing called love, which doesn’t fit, among all the rational reasonable things of life. Like he loved Mother but he didn’t know if it was the real love, love for no purpose or somewhere in it he still had his own selfish interests. Do you see what he was trying to say?”

  He had to tell her of his own love experience. He described his foster parents, about what had happened to them.

  He said, “I used to ride with Fred, my foster father, sitting on his lap when I was little, my bare feet hanging down, as he drove the furrows. He’d say that if you got one furrow wrong then the whole field was messed up.”

  “So he was a friend like you say, but then he was more than that,” she said softly.

  “His life went astray because of that tractor. The old tire blew out. They were filled with water and water was all over the place. The mechanic came and said the axle was gone. He
wanted his money up front and Fred didn’t have it and the field had to be finished. So he went to the bank.

  “He came home with a credit card. I remember Mimi going over to the window in the parlor, just chairs around the wall, that was the parlor, but it was clean. She held the card up to the light and saw the picture on it, big harvesters running on a corporation farm field out west and below it the words, “plant the seed.” She said it was pretty.

  “They used the card for the axle and paid it off. Then she got a bad mole on her face and pretty soon her whole face was gone from operations. The farm business was not good, because the prices for the harvests were all down in the market. Fred said the big farms controlled the prices. Anyway, pretty soon that credit card was filled up. Mimi died. Last thing she said to me was something about making me a pumpkin pie. Then Fred had to sell out. He died in a little room, his boots gone and his feet in cheap slippers, saying to me on my last visit before he left me, ‘You go get them, boy’.”

  “Did you go get them, John?”

  He didn’t answer her.

  She said, “My father translated one phrase that he had over his desk and looked at every day. Some Spanish explorer wrote it after hearing some of the Nanticoke stories.” She quoted, in a low voice,

  “Love is a golden path in a dark forest filled with a thousand black trails.”

  She continued, “Anyway, it’s a spiritual thing and I don’t try to figure it out. These days, I prefer to look at meteors, asteroids, that kind of thing. I’m hoping that any book I write on the subject will sell well.”

  John asked, with a chuckle, “What will you write? How to jump out of the way?”

  She pretended to cuff his cheek. “No, silly. I tell them about probabilities and describe the big ones that have hit the earth and where. We call them killer rocks.”

  “Pretty well documented ones?” asked John.

  “Yes,” she said. “Like the one in the Yucatan that killed the dinosaurs. We look through the telescope at the ones coming this way only they are so small that most people can’t see them in the scope.”

  “You can.”

  “Yes. You want to see?”

  He nodded and she aimed the big scope for him. Then she took her eye from the eyepiece and said, “Here. I haven’t designed one with two eyepieces yet. Just don’t move the scope when you look.”

  She described the asteroid in the frame, “That’s zm345.”

  “A killer rock?”

  She nodded. “We’re not too far away from the other parts of the universe. We just don’t think about it.”

  John felt her warmth. He couldn’t stay away any longer. He said, “Don’t talk any more.” He reached over and took the big eyeglasses from her face. Her bright face was revealed in its natural beauty. She looked up at him and smiled.

  “You’re very beautiful,” he said.

  “I am?”

  “Yeah,” he said. His heart was beating hard as he kissed her.

  Afterwards, she started to draw back then stopped and reached up to clasp the back of his head and draw him to her. They kissed again, this time longer.

  Suddenly a strong light went on at the site. John looked up and saw flashlights beaming around the tops of trees and then back at the ground. Larger lights went on and John could see Mouse moving around. The site was protected by heavy vegetation from outside spectators. The only reason he and Andy could see what was going on was that they were higher than the swamp and were looking down over a fifty-foot elevation.

  “Something has happened,” John said.

  Andy pulled away from him and swung the telescope around. She aimed it at the lights.

  “I see Mouse,” she said. “He’s standing beside the hole pointing down, calling to someone working in it. John, they’ve found something.”

  Chapter 15

  Wednesday, July 17, 10 PM

  Jesse shone his flashlight from his guard post on Andy and John as they arrived at the gate. Outside, the steel wire fence line was deserted, free of the crowds this late at night. Across the road, the homeless tents were quiet with only a few lights still lit and with campfires burned down to embers in the darkness.

  Jesse said, “Mouse is pretty excited. He and Hoadley discovered an object at the bottom of the hole.”

  When they emerged from the brush and approached the well, Mouse was bringing Hoadley up from below, the truck lift winch creaking.

  “What’s going on?” asked John.

  Mouse turned and said, “We were flushing out the last of the water and brought up a batch of silt. That’s when we noticed this under the last of the mud.” He shone the light below.

  “That’s rock,” said Mouse

  Andy looked at it. “It’s huge,” she said. “Let me get down there and look at it.”

  Mouse signaled to his father. As Hoadley climbed off the seat of the hoist, Andy took his place. The older man bent over the winch engine and pulled back the lever that lowered her.

  “I’m going to get the Captain over here right away,” said Mouse, as he opened his cell phone.

  Andy had reached the bottom and John looked over the side with Mouse’s flashlight. He watched her far below examining the rock, the light circling her.

  “What do you think?” he called down

  “It’s so very smooth,” she said.

  “Water all these years must have made it that way.”

  “No.” she said, “It was made this way. Whatever it is, it’s covered with metal, maybe copper.”

  “That’s what showed up on the Captain’s radar,” called Mouse.

  Andy busied herself at one side of the hole, digging back into the mud. “The other thing,” she started to say, and then stopped as she dug.

  “What’s that?” said John.

  “The sides are like a geometric shape, a trapezoid. Two sides parallel and the other two slanted. I’ve seen stonework like this before. I’m sure of it. I’ll have to check in my books at home.”

  A few minutes later, John heard the squeal of truck brakes as the Captain arrived out on the highway. He watched as Penny’s flashlight worked its way through the woods toward the hole. In a few minutes he emerged from the brush and walked into the bright lights of the workplace.

  Mouse filled him in and then, as the Captain stood by, went down on the cable and spent a few minutes looking around at the slab. When he came up he had a grin on his face. John recognized the look, that Mouse had figured out the problem, knew what criteria needed to be accomplished, and was ready to tell them how he was going to solve it.

  “The slab,” he said, sitting down on the ground with his pad of paper on his lap and beginning to sketch, “is like this.” He proceeded to draw a flat stone with four edges. “Andy was right about the sides. Whoever put that stone in there also gave it a surface angle so it would drain to one side, the side away from the mound.”

  “The way it is set in there makes it hard to get a grip on it,” said John.

  Andy had been hoisted out and sat beside the others. She said, “I don’t think the pirates got to this point. I don’t think the Spanish did either. The water stopped them. That slab has not been moved since it was installed centuries ago. The Spanish or the pirates would have left some indications, scratches on the surface and I could find nothing.”

  “I doubt the Spanish had good pumps,” said Mouse.

  “Yes, the water stopped them,” said the Captain, nodding.

  “It may stop us,” added John.

  “It won’t stop me,” Mouse declared, as he winked at his father.

  The old man went over to the stand of various muddy shovels lined up beside the well. He selected one and Mouse lowered him into the well, holding a strong light on the old man. In a few minutes Jesse signaled to come back up.

  When he came back to John and Andy, he said, “I don’t know what is below the slab but I pulled out enough dirt below on the surrounding walls to see that the slab overlapped only a little bit the edge of
our hole.”

  Mouse said, “What my father means is that whoever put this slab down there measured it for a bigger well than our hole. In other words, it is wider.”

  Jesse said, “Exactly. When they were constructing this, their slab may have been out in the open with stone going off on its sides.”

  “Anyway,” Mouse said, “we have to assume that it is supported somehow below and that if we pull up on its sides that it will come off its supports.”

  “Down below might be solid dirt or stone, or it may be open to a smaller hole,” said Jesse.

  “I can agree that it is covering something, but why would the hole be smaller?” asked John.

  Mouse sketched on the ground. “Supports. Figure the supports of the slab and the walls below have to be at least the width and height of the slab. They are irregular because it is a trapezoid. Anyway, that means a hole with sides for support so the hole is smaller. I’d say, judging for the size of the slab, that the hole would be about four feet in diameter with sides of another foot.

  “We’ll take turns digging out the slab edges so we can get hold of it and raise it,” he said. “The one problem we’ll have is that if we pull it wrong, it might split in half. I’d like to bring it out in one piece.”

  “I’ll take the first shift,” said John as he got into the harness of the well hoist.

  Mouse added, “All of us have to remember that we are taking out some of our own shored up walls to get that slab loose. We face a possible cave in. Be careful.”

  As he pulled dirt out from the sides, John noticed the space was stuffed with many small carefully placed stones, some of them chipped to fit.

  Mouse swept his light over the material John was digging out.

  “Fill,” said Mouse. “That slab was carefully set into place. The engineers were well trained in stonework.”

  After hours of work stretching into the darkest part of the night, the bottom of the well shaft had taken on a slight bell shape, relieving the earth and stone over the sides of the slab. Mouse sent down hooks to grapple the edge of the slab. Mouse figured to pull hard on one side to get it loose.