Trouble and Treasure (#1, Trouble and Treasure Series)

by Odette C. Bell

  Chapter Twelve

  Sebastian Shaw

  Shit, I was being a bastard, I really was. I mean, look at the girl, she was covered in scratches and mud, with torn clothes, and her shoulders huddled as she could hardly look at me. I shouldn’t have left her alone in the car; I should have gone with my gut instinct, and we should have continued along in my shot-up Lexus, ditching it at the first chance, but not going anywhere near old Arthur Stanton’s manor again. I knew Maratova, and I knew he would have left some look out around the manor. Sure as hell they had found her, chased her through the woods, and given her what looked like the fright of her life.

  That wasn’t the only reason I was a bastard. Number one on the list of reasons to hate myself was that I was fucking lying to her. In all honesty, the best thing she could do was to go straight to the police, hell, maybe even straight to Maratova. While the guy was a monster, he wasn’t nearly as bad as the others after her. Obviously the army could offer her more protection than I could. But there was this great fucking big problem for me, the singular reason that I was truly a bastard: if I lost Amanda, I might lose my chance at getting the Stargazers.

  Though I honestly wanted to check on her to see that she was still okay, and wasn’t about to black out or anything, I was finding it harder and harder to turn to her. I usually compartmentalized my work, rationalizing away the shitty things I did in order to get to whatever treasure waited for me, but this was a new low for me. I hardly ever had to deal with people outside of my profession. I wasn’t talking about lawyers here: I was talking about treasure hunting. It was a closed off, specialized world, where everyone was cutthroat, and it didn’t matter if you had to tread on someone else’s toes to get to what you wanted, because the toes belonged to a hairy, mean, son of a bitch who would as soon as kill you as look at you.

  Amanda was normal, or at least innocent. She wasn’t from this world, and it was clear that she didn’t belong here.

  I shook my head several more times and sliced my gaze to the side to check on her, without turning to her fully. I was worried that if I faced her, she would be able to see the lie dancing through my eyes. Pick up that I was leading her astray, that honestly the best thing she could do was ditch me and flag down the next police car she saw.

  I’d been honest about one thing: I was going to do everything I could to keep her safe. But I was going to do that while getting my hands on those globes. I’d been tracking them my whole life, and I couldn’t let go of them. Even if it meant that I had to do what I was doing: lying to a woman who looked as if she couldn’t take any more.

  Rather than taking her to the hospital or at least a pharmacy to get some bandages to clean her up, I was heading straight to the next clue. Because I didn’t want to lose any time, because I didn’t want to give anyone else any time to catch up. I didn’t even want us pulling into a service station to grab her a drink and a bite to eat.

  Dear God, I was a bastard.

  “Where are we going?” she asked again, voice gentle, but not kind, I fancied, because she wasn’t trying to be nice – she probably lacked the strength to make her words any more forceful. She was likely using all she had left to sit there.

  “The coast,” I answered, honestly. Although I hadn’t planned on telling her everything, the words came out. I did owe it to her.

  She nodded, hands still clutched in her lap. They were dirty and covered in scratches, like the rest of her. Those fitting cute clothes that Elizabeth had given her were ruined and muddy. There were several leaves and small sticks hanging out of her hair, but I didn’t bother telling her, considering her general state.

  For the millionth time, I thought about how much of a bastard I was. Did I need her? Could I get through this on my own? Could I deposit her at the nearest police station? Maybe even call Maratova myself? I still had that worn leather journal of her great uncle’s. I knew the locations of the four Stargazers were in there, so surely I didn’t need her anymore, right?

  That would be the case if she hadn’t proved to be so useful at that church. Though I hadn’t admitted it to her, I wouldn’t have solved that clue without her. I took the direct approach when finding treasure and solving clues: the one that involved the most explosives and the least thinking. It didn’t matter how many permutations there were to a particular puzzle that kept you from the treasure within; if you packed enough c4, you could blast right through it.

  In the few glances that I had managed to snatch at Arthur Stanton’s journal, I was starting to appreciate that he was the other treasure hunter: the kind that solved puzzles, that looked for clues, that tried to respect the old and dated logic of whatever dead culture they were trying to uncover treasure from.

  Amanda was like her great-uncle; annoying though she could be, she seemed to at least think things through, and at least slowed down long enough to look for clues.

  There was also the fact she’d known him: Amanda had grown up with Arthur Stanton. That gave her a distinct advantage in understanding how the old codger had thought. It hadn’t taken her long to realize that the scales held a clue. I’d been frankly impressed that she had realized what the clue had meant, even if I had ignored it and destroyed the scales with a spade.

  I wanted those globes, I really did. If keeping Amanda Stanton along for the ride was the key to getting them, then so be it. If it made me a monumental bastard to do this to her, then so be it – I would make it up to her later. I’d share the treasure with her, maybe even represent her for free if this adventure ever ended up in the courts.

  Even I had to shake my head at my own thoughts: seriously, there was no way I could rationalize this to make it sound as if I was justified in stringing her along. Nope, I was going to have to come to terms with the fact that I was a universal-level dick.

  “Why are we going to the coast?” Amanda asked. There were great long pauses between her questions, and I didn’t know whether she was so tired it was taking her that long to think of a new one, or whether she was processing my answers that hard it was taking her virtually minutes to complete her analysis. Was she on to me? Did she appreciate how dodgy my story sounded? Was she thinking about ditching from the car at any moment and heading to the authorities?

  “We are heading to a coastal town,” I said, trying to keep my voice even, trying to keep all emotion out of it lest I accidentally reveal to her what was going on.

  “Why?”

  “The scales, I know where they were made,” I answered, with 100% honesty.

  “So you’re going to the location where they were made?”

  “Yes.”

  “How is that going to help? The clue didn’t say anything about going to the place where the scales were made,” she said, and though her voice was still quiet, her words were gradually growing in strength.

  “Amanda, trust me, I know how these clues work.”

  “I know how my great-uncle thought, and he would never have done something so straightforward,” she replied at once.

  Taking an enormous swallow, not necessarily because my throat was constricted, but more because I was trying to swallow my ego here, I tried to loosen up my shoulders. “What do you think the clue means, Amanda?”

  She sat there for a long while. When I glanced over to see if she had withdrawn again, she was sitting there looking thoughtful. She scratched at her hair, her teeth biting her bottom lip as they always did when she appeared to be thinking. When I felt that familiar flick in my gut at how cute the move looked on her, it was followed by a wave of even harsher guilt.

  I am such a bloody bastard.

  “The clue said something about the next clue being at the point where the shadow crosses the light,” she repeated. You said that the scales are from a town on the coast…” she trailed off. “I guess that might be important, but I doubt that the next clue is where the scales were made.”

  Amanda began to count on her fingers quietly. I had no idea what she was doing, and for a fleeting moment, I wondered whe
ther she was counting the reasons not to believe me and to get the hell away while she still could. But that familiar look of thoughtfulness was back on her face, as was the rumple to her nose and the bite to her lip. Rather than smile at it, though that was my first inclination, I glanced back at the road, shook my head heavily, and tried to keep it together.

  “My great-uncle used to say there is an infinity of answers to any question, but that if he could think of at least 10, that was usually enough.” She kept trying to count on her fingers, teeth drawing over her lip lightly. She had a faraway look on her face, a curled smile on her lips. In that moment, at least, she didn’t look as though she’d been fleeing from a gun battle hours before.

  “10 different things?” I joined in the conversation. “You only need one, the right one.”

  “There is no such thing as right, or at least that’s what my great-uncle used to say. He said there were 1 million different ways to find lost treasure, and there were 1 million different things you could find other than lost treasure. You had to pick where, when, and how. If you fool yourself into thinking there is only one right way, and only one right answer to a clue, then you restrict your possibilities.”

  That was total bullshit; I’d been in this business long enough to know that. Maybe that was the reason I was bringing Amanda along. It was obvious I didn’t think like Arthur Stanton, and that she did. Yeah, that made me horrible, and yeah, I was still having trouble coming to terms with what I was doing, but it didn’t mean I was about to stop. “So, what do you think the clue means?”

  She leaned back in her seat, eyes blinking. It drew my attention to them, made me realize that they were a pretty almond shape, one you don’t see too often.

  “Okay, what are 10 things on the coast that make light and shadow?” She put her hand up, getting ready to count. “Lights,” she held up a thumb, “Um, I guess there could be some luminescent fish,” she said, voice awkward as it was obvious she realized how stupid the suggestion was.

  I couldn’t help but snort with laughter. “Luminescent fish? Are you serious?” I knew I should be nice to her yet I couldn’t imagine Arthur Stanton leaving one of the Stargazer Globes to the watchful protection of a school of luminescent fish.

  “It’s just a suggestion. The entire point of this exercise is that you try to think laterally and creatively. If you knew the right answer to begin with, then you wouldn’t be doing it, would you? Do you know the answer, Sebastian?” She crossed her arms and looked across at me challengingly.

  I took my hands off the steering wheel and held them in the air in surrender, careful to ensure the car was going straight before I did.

  “Put your hands back on the wheel,” she said tersely.

  “Okay, okay,” I said through a light chuckle, “And ignore me. Keep on thinking.”

  She looked across at me, eyes narrowed. She was sitting straight in her seat, her hands no longer tensed in her lap, and that sick, pale white color was gone from her face. Apparently all it was taking was an argument with me. Well there you go, I didn’t know that I could have that effect on women, but life is full of surprises.

  She held up a third finger. “Well, it could mean,” she pressed the finger into her palm and looked around, “Perhaps there’s a specific streetlamp somewhere, or for all we know there might be a famous lamp store in that town.”

  I nodded, not wanting to discourage her, but realizing her suggestions weren’t amazing. I was starting to question whether she could solve the clue, and obviously, whether I should keep her along.

  “What’s the name of this town anyway? Can you tell me anything about it? Are there any famous landmarks? Anything particularly notorious that happened there?” She asked one question straight after the other, hardly with a breath between them.

  “There’s not much there, a beach made of rocks, a pretty boring promenade, a couple of pubs, and a lighthouse,” I listed off all I could remember. Though I hadn’t been to that town for some time, I could remember it wasn’t the pinnacle of culture, history, or infrastructure. We would be lucky to find a seat at the local pub that didn’t smell powerfully of fish; most of the town being populated by fishermen, and fishermen being what they were, never giving a fuck what they smelt like.

  You should have seen her eyes – they widened so quickly and she blinked with such a stiff, wild look on her face I couldn’t help but be drawn in, my own jaw slackening, lips parting.

  “Did you say a lighthouse?” She waved a hand in front of her face as if she was hot or flustered.

  My eyes narrowed; I didn’t get where she was going. I nodded nonetheless. “A big one, out on the headlands.”

  The look on her face was damn near infectious. “My great-uncle loved lighthouses. He had a picture of this big one up on his wall when I was young.”

  I didn’t laugh at her, though the inclination was there. After her reaction, I’d expected her to come up with a brilliant insight, not a fairly innocuous fact that her great-uncle had been partial to lighthouses.

  She must have seen the less-than-impressed look I gave her, and her cheeks dropped. “You don’t get it, do you?”

  Though I didn’t think there was anything to get, I shrugged.

  “The point where the light crosses the shadow.” She put one hand down as she said light and one hand down as she said shadow. “My great-uncle wouldn’t have given that clue unless it was important, unless we could locate something that had a light source, but also a shadow, and that the both of them crossed at the same time.” She played with her hands as she spoke, crossing them and uncrossing them. “If you think about it, a lighthouse can do that. If it is during the day, or if it is at night and there is a bright enough external light, then the lighthouse will have a long shadow. Because you can—”

  “Turn on the lights,” I jumped in, “You could shine the flood lamps over the light house’s shadow.”

  She leaned back and nodded.

  I didn’t want to tell her it sounded crazy. Firstly, why would you turn on the lighthouse during the day? If you had enough sunshine to cast a shadow from the building, then presumably the atmospheric conditions were such that you didn’t need the lighthouse to be on to shepherd ships.

  “Look, I know how my great-uncle used to think, and trust me, this is the riddle he would have thought up, and the solution he would have made to it.”

  I mumbled, not saying yes and not saying no.