Pearl Jinx

by Sandra Hill

  “You should probably check with a museum or preservationist on how to store these properly. And could you please blow that fucking smoke in the other direction? You oughta quit.”

  “I’ll quit smokin’ when you quit swearin’.” She blew some more smoke, but in the other direction now. “I already contacted the Palmer Museum. Until I brought them out today, they’ve been in special acid-proof enclosures I bought from the curator. I keep them in a safety deposit box at my bank. I made copies, but I wanted you to see the originals at least once.”

  He was already engrossed in the journal’s contents.

  First, there were several yellowed newspaper clippings, most about the massacre of ninety Christian Delaware Indians—twenty-nine men, twenty-seven women, and thirty-four children—by a Colonel William Crawford, who was later burned at the stake to atone for what came to be called the Gnadenhuetten Massacre. The Indians had been taken into two slaughterhouses, where they were beaten to death with wooden mallets. There were also clippings about county events and local news, such as new laws pertaining to loose pigs and marriage announcements. And there were receipts for farm products purchased and sold.

  Next Mark turned to the journal itself. “Look at this for 1784. April 2, James Aaron Franklin born just past dawn. Agnes in labor half a day. Indian midwife, Little Dove, assures me she is doing well. Little Dove says war drums sound as more Delaware tribes move east, pushed by British.

  “May 5, heavy rain, pray for good crop. God willing, we will be eating corn till we grow tassels. Half dozen Delaware passed through and stopped for water. Agnes gave them bread and dried venison. One woman and baby with them.

  “May 10, market trip to Huntingdon and baby baptism. Two birds, one stone, baby cried the whole way. Thank God we go only twice a year.

  “May 20, Cousin George from Punxsutawney visited with his family. George said they are seeing Indian migration east up his way, too. Some are being pursued by the British and their allies, the Iroquois. Who knew one man could drink so much corn liquor? Who knew five children could make so much noise?”

  “Nice to know one of our ancestors had a sense of humor,” Abbie interrupted.

  “Yeah, but he wasn’t laughing here,” Mark said, moving ahead several pages. “September 13, Iroquois on war path. Headed this way. We leave for the stockade at Fort Roberdeau.”

  “That’s not all.” She pointed to a later entry. “September 25. Returned today. House and crops burned to ground. Total massacre at Lenape village on Little Juniata. Retaliation for living peacefully alongside ‘pale faces.’ God help us!

  “Christmas, living in small cabin, will rebuild house in spring. Money tight. Will survive.”

  They remained silent for a moment, picturing just how hard that time must have been.

  “Then, here. Two years later.” Mark skipped ahead quite a few pages. “Explored the cave with neighbor Frank Willets and his boy Harry. Couldn’t go in far, even with torches. Black as pitch. And spooky with all them bats. But found decomposed corpses, almost skeletons, of five males, two females, a boy child and a baby. All minus scalps. Must have been Lenapes hiding during that Iroquois attack two years past. We buried the bones on the hill above the cavern.”

  “Oh, how sad!” she said.

  Mark just shook his head.

  There were about twenty entries for each year. Mostly everyday things like harvest totals, three more babies born, family marriages, people who died. But in the last year, 1789, there was startling news. Mark read it aloud. “February 11. Great-Grandpa Franklin died up in Ohio. Left me and cousin Ellie each a thousand dollars. Where the old buzzard got that much money is a puzzle. He for certain never shared it with anyone whilst he was living, not even with Great-Grandma Abigail, who never had no help on that big farm of theirs. Maybe he got it way back when he prospected for gold as a youngun’. Maybe he stole it.”

  “If you read more, over the next few months you’ll see Zeb debating with his wife Agnes whether they should take the money and move to Bellefonte, where they would be safe from Indians. In the end, Zeb convinced her to stay by promising to build her a fine brick house, which he did.” Abbie waved a hand, with a smoking cigarette, of course, to indicate the very house they were in.

  “And that was their downfall,” Mark said. “November 2. Iroquois on war path again. I will not leave my house again, by damn. Three of the neighbors and their families are holed up with us in the house. I dare them savages to burn down my brick house.”

  “That was the last entry,” Abbie pointed out. She pulled out an old history of Huntingdon County, which she had bookmarked to a certain page. “November 10, 1789. Homesteads from Alexandria to Warriors Mark were hit last week by bands of Iroquois moving west.” She skimmed over some of the text, till she came to the part most important to them. “Three families in Spruce Creek were among those who died. Zebadiah and Agnes Franklin and their three children; Frank and Esther Willets and their two children; and John and Harriet Jacobs. One of the Franklin children, five-year-old James, survived after hiding in the forest during the raid. The Franklins’ fine brick house still stands, but the interior was burned and vandalized by the savages. Governor Curtin promises more troops for the fort.”

  His grandmother was smiling like a Cheshire cat. There must have been something more, and she was dying to tell him.

  “What?”

  “Once I found the journal, I did a little more digging up in the attic and found a box of old letters that one of our ancestors, that five-year-old James who survived, wrote when he was about thirty-six years old.” She removed several old newspaper clippings first. All of them dealt with a famous highwayman who was born in 1790 and died in a Bellefonte jail in 1820. David Lewis, better known as Robber Lewis or Davie Lewis. His exploits, all over central Pennsylvania, involved robbing from wealthy landowners and merchants to assist poor farmers. The interesting thing, though, was that Lewis died without disclosing exactly where he’d hidden his last treasure in gold.

  “Many people believed that the money was stashed in Indian Caverns, but thus far no one ever found it. However, this James Franklin, in letters to a cousin in Ohio, thought the coins might be in the cave right here on the Franklin property. In fact, he mentioned a huge boulder having been pushed over the hole where the gold was hidden. Ironically, it was the same place where there was supposed to be cave pearls, or so the legend went.”

  “This is unbelievable, Gram. How come we never heard about this before?”

  She shrugged. “James and his cousin urged secrecy in their letter.”

  “That’s some secret.”

  “James Franklin tried to recover the treasure himself, to no avail, a year or so after Lewis died. See here: ‘Black as pitch in that hellish hole. I almost killed myself getting up and down from the high ledge. Ladder broke halfway down. There’s bat shit a foot deep in there.’ Well, if you keep on reading, you’ll see that James got very ill soon after from some mysterious illness. He believed the cavern was cursed and boarded it up. His descendants must have felt the same way, and that’s why it was never opened up till your grandfather’s days.”

  “He got sick from the bat droppings, I’ll bet,” Mark said. “Everyone knows today that breathing in guano dust can cause an illness with flulike symptoms that can be fatal if not treated.”

  “Probably.”

  “And you used to have me shoveling that shit. Shame on you, Gram.”

  “How was I to know it was dangerous? I just wanted bigger roses, for heaven’s sake.”

  “So, all these years that people have been trying to find the treasure in Indian Caverns, it might very well have been here instead?”

  “Yep.”

  Mark sat down with a sigh. “You really should do something with these documents, Gram.”

  “Like what? Give them to a museum or something?”

  “Well, yes, but more than that. There’s a lot of family and local history in these pages. Maybe you should write a bo
ok.”

  “Me? Cripes! I’m too old for that. Maybe you should write a book. And I’ll tell you something else,” she added before he could protest, “it’s about time we did something to open that cavern up to the public. Other folks are makin’ money off their caves. Why not us?”

  “It would take a helluva lot of money to make Spruce Creek Cavern a tourist enterprise.”

  “If this Pearl Project is successful, we might just have that money.”

  Understanding suddenly bloomed in her grandson’s eyes as he realized just why she’d shown him the old journal. “Ah, now I see. There’s a chance there’s a lot more than pearls in that cavern.”

  “Yep.”

  His shoulders slumped. “Gram, I’m not physically able to go after that hidden treasure.”

  “I know that, honey. But you can help.”

  “Does that mean you’re willing to share with the Jinx team?”

  “Ain’t got no choice, the way I see it. That’s where you come in. I want you to negotiate a fair split with Jinx. I ain’t willin’ to give them half, but maybe a third. Start with ten percent and work from there.”

  “Why can’t you—” he started to say.

  “No! It’s past time you started to carry your own weight around here. Besides, I’m going to be busy with other stuff.”

  Mark’s eyes narrowed. “What other stuff?”

  “Me and Louise are thinkin’ about doin’ an intervention.”

  He frowned. “Louise who?”

  “Tante Lulu.”

  “Oh. What kind of intervention? Holy shit! Not for me, I hope.”

  “Everything in the world isn’t about you, Mister Potty Mouth.”

  He looked suitably chastised. But then his eyes narrowed again. “Who, then?”

  “Lily. We were thinkin’ about goin’ to The Red Zone and doin’ an intervention for Lily. I’ve never been to one of those places before. Tante Lulu has, though. She’s gonna show me the ropes.”

  Now he looked like he was going to have a heart attack. Either that, or he was about to strangle her. “You are not going to a strip joint.”

  “You’re not the boss of me.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Will you go?”

  “Where?”

  “The Red Zone. After all, it’s your fault she’s turned to a sad life of boob barin’ and hiney shakin’.”

  “Aaarrgh! Lily does not work at The Red Zone. She’s a student at Penn State, studying to be an architect.”

  “Are you sure about that? Maybe she was so devastated by your jiltin’ her that she quit school.”

  “Our breakup was mutually agreeable.”

  She snorted her opinion. “You know, if you burn your tail, you’ve just gotta sit on the blister.”

  “I think Tante Lulu is having a bad influence on you.”

  “What? I can’t get ideas on my own?”

  “Here’s the deal, Gram. No Red Zone. No matchmaking. You stop bringing up Lily, and I’ll help with the project. I’ll even think about opening up Spruce Creek Cavern to the public.”

  She nodded. I better hurry on over to Lily’s apartment in Julian and warn her that Mark thinks she’s a stripper. Oooh, boy!

  Up bat-shit creek without a paddle . . .

  “Don’t you laugh. Don’t you dare laugh, or your pretty little ass is going to be sitting right down here in the bat shit with me.”

  Claire laughed anyway.

  And wouldn’t allow herself to relish the fact that Caleb thought her ass was pretty. Or little.

  Caleb had slipped up to his calves in a pudding-like mixture of mud, bat guano, and slimy critters. His boots made sucking sounds as he lifted himself back onto the hard dirt path.

  “It’s barely noon, and already everything has gone to hell in a handbasket.” Caleb threw his hands up in the air and stomped away, up the steps, through the corridor, flipping the bird to Sparky along the way. Outside, he yanked off his paper mask and waded into the stream, where he jiggled one foot, then the other, to remove the goop from his boots. He was wet to his thighs when he joined her up on the arched bridge overlooking Spruce Creek, about forty feet wide at this point.

  Claire had just arrived in the cavern after spending several hours studying the Franklin journal. Even with the temporary lighting strung along the corridor of the cavern and down into the first chamber, there was a sensation of total blackness and silence. Otherworldly. Now, back outside, the sunlight blinded her, and the chatter of birds and the ripple of the stream seemed almost raucous.

  “It’s not that bad . . . your progress so far,” Claire said. “In fact, all things considered, you should be very happy.”

  “How so?” He glanced at her, then leaned his elbows on the bridge rail. When he did, the muscles on his back bunched.

  Good golly! The man was gorgeous. He wore a long-sleeved denim shirt tucked into jeans, which were tucked into heavy boots. His hard hat with carbide light was still on his head, same as hers, and work gloves hung from a back pocket. He hadn’t shaved this morning, so there was a slight stubble of beard. All in all, he looked like one of those construction worker calendar models . . . the Diet Pepsi guy, but better.

  She shook her head to clear it of her inappropriate thoughts. “That journal that Abbie and Mark showed us this morning ratchets this enterprise up another notch or two, I would think. Not only will you be making history here, but chances are there’s more treasure to be found than the pearls. Even with a one-third cut, you could hit the mother lode of treasure hunts.”

  “Yeah, but this is no longer a simple project. We’re going to have to build a walkway from the path through the mud and bat shit, over to the wall. Not an easy job when trying to avoid damage to those crystal stalagmites rising from the floor, or hitting our heads on the stalactites hanging from the ceiling. And snakes . . .” He shivered. “I must have flung a dozen of those buggers out of my way this morning.”

  “Sparky’s kids, no doubt.”

  He pinched her arm for razzing him. “My luck that Sparky’s a superstud. Anyhow, Famosa and Mark went into Tyrone to get some precut planks. We can get to work once they get back.”

  “Didn’t you already know this about the cavern? I saw your maps last night.”

  “We knew the logistics, except Abbie and Mark have now decided that they might want to develop Spruce Creek Cavern as a tourist attraction, and that means minimal or no damage to the formations. They’re demanding extra-special care. That’s not the worst thing, though. That boulder has got to be chipped away, bit by bit, and the pieces removed carefully from the cavern. Again, to preserve the natural state. Which I can appreciate. LeDeux is trying to rent some tools from the archaeology department over at Juniata College so we can chip away at the boulder, granule by friggin’ granule.

  “And we need way more lighting and longer extension cords. And, by the way, you never mentioned that you’d been semi-engaged until recently.”

  “It appears that Adam has a big mouth,” she said. The question was why. Why would Adam consider her personal relationships important enough to mention to Caleb? “When I was studying the maps last night, I pointed out some of the unusual rock formations to Adam. The only reason I know about that kind of technical data is that my friend Del Finley, a geologist from Penns Valley, has studied caverns in the region. We’re just friends.” Actually, she might have hinted to Adam, when he pressed her for a date, that she had something going with Del. But semi-engaged? She’d never used that term.

  Was Adam goading Caleb?

  Why would Caleb care?

  “Friends with benefits?”

  Whoa! “What gives you the right to ask that?”

  “When you ask a guy for a sperm donation, that gives him rights. Why didn’t you get Del to be your sperm donor?”

  “I didn’t want his sperm.”

  “Should I be flattered?”

  “I’m thinking seriously about pushing you over this rail and into the creek.”
/>   His lips twitched with suppressed laughter. “Hey, I’m sorry. I was being an ass.”

  “Yes, you were.” The question is why? “Del is a friend. Adam was yanking your chain.”

  “Oh, great! That makes me feel better.”

  “Del’s a nice guy, though, and I don’t rule out a connection in the future.” She had to add that to get the last word in, even though it was a lie.

  Unfortunately, the ass wasn’t about to let that happen. “Just out of curiosity, how many men have you mentioned that ticking-clock business to?”

  Just you. “Dozens.”

  He scowled at her.

  And Claire was oddly pleased.

  Caleb glanced around at the serene setting with absolutely no human activity taking place. He exhaled on a loud whoosh. “Holy hell, we’re gonna be here a month at this rate.”

  The conversation they’d been engaged in the last ten minutes contained more words put together at one time by this usually taciturn man than usual, so she just let him keep talking. Would a month here be so bad? she wanted to ask, but she knew it would set off alarm bells in Caleb’s already red-alert system where she was concerned.

  “I heard John on the phone before he left. Sounded to me like he was making a date.”

  “Hah! No surprise there. LeDeux could work as a garbage collector and manage to attract chicks. In fact, Famosa came crawling into my room about two A.M. last night. Don’t think that didn’t give me the creeps. But he only wanted to sleep in the other bed. LeDeux brought some babe to the room he was sharing with Famosa. How could the kid have possibly hooked up so soon out here in the boondocks?” He paused. “I talk too much when I’m around you. Dammit.”

  “Do I fluster you?”

  “Fluster? Now, there’s a new word. Not my favorite F-word, but it’ll do.” He winked at her. “Yeah, you fluster me.”

  That wink went straight to unmentionable places in Claire’s body.

  She decided to get back to the subject at hand. “I can help with the walkway and with the rock. Mark could help, too, if we manage to get him up to the ledge, which I think would be a good idea, regardless.”