Red Gold

by Robert D Kidera

  “Tell Spider Martin I said hi’ya.”

  “McKenna, you’re a tiresome asshole.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You need to be eliminated.”

  “What, again? Give it up. You’ve lost your job, you can’t go home, and you’re on the run. The cops will find both of you any day. Doesn’t matter where you go. But that’s your problem. My only problem will be counting all my gold.”

  Silence. I don’t think he was smiling. “You won’t live long enough to enjoy it.”

  I let his threat drift. “You’re still clueless, aren’t you?”

  “You’d be surprised what I know.”

  “Well I know where the gold is. I’ve still got the map, remember?” It felt so good to taunt him.

  “There is no map, old man. Any last requests before you die?”

  “Yeah. Tell Carmen the two of you can go fuck yourselves.” I hung up, as Nai’ya walked to her car.

  “Everything all right?” She opened the back door and tossed her books and handbag on the floor.

  “Looks like I’m alive again.” I told her about O’Connor’s call and how my plans had to change.

  “Shouldn’t you tell the police?”

  She was right. I dialed Archuleta. “Trouble, Sam.”

  “What?”

  “O’Connor just phoned. He knows everything. Has to have an informant on the inside.”

  “Shit. Any idea where his call came from?”

  I checked the phone log on my cell. “All it says is star-six-seven.”

  “That’s a blocking service that hides the caller’s number. Any background sounds that might provide a clue?”

  “Sorry, I didn’t notice any. One thing puzzles me, though. Why would he call me just to say he knows I’m alive? Why give that away?”

  “I can think of two reasons.”

  “Like what?”

  “One, he doesn’t have enough info on the gold and was probing to see if you know where it is.”

  “Yeah. What’s the second reason?”

  “He’s given up on the gold and has decided just to go ahead and kill you. And he wants you to think about it.”

  “Wonderful. Keep in touch.”

  Nai’ya drove us to C.J.’s, where we met in his office for privacy. I introduced them to each other and showed them the message hidden in James McKenna’s letter.

  “I-took-it-from-the-hearth-and-put-it-in-fire-and-ice,” I said.

  “The Ice Cave near Bandera volcano!” Nai’ya exclaimed.

  “Probably. Here’s what I think: James McKenna and Jose Ramos did find the Lost Adams placer gold under that cabin hearthstone in 1921.”

  “So what’s with this cave?” C.J. said.

  “For reasons of their own, at some later date they hid the gold in or near the Bandera Ice Cave.”

  C.J. nodded. “One way to find out.”

  “Tomorrow.” I didn’t care about the pain in my arm. I needed to know.

  “Let’s leave early,” C.J. said. “I have a couple of softball teams coming in for a banquet at 5 p.m. Charmaine will want me back before then.”

  Nai’ya agreed. “I’m busy tomorrow night, too. The earlier the better for me.”

  We agreed to hit the road by 7 a.m. I didn’t want to ride in C.J.’s hearse while we searched for gold—too easy to spot and follow. O’Connor had already seen my current rental SUV. I called the dealer and asked if I could do a swap on my way home. Told him I didn’t like the way my current one was handling.

  After C.J.’s chef served us a carnivore’s delight, Nai’ya drove me to my place in her Cooper so I could pick up my old SUV. I wanted to invite her in for a nightcap, but had less than an hour before the rental place closed. She kissed my cheek and drove off.

  Fifty minutes later, I pulled into my driveway with new wheels and heightened expectations.

  The dying rays of the sun lit the yard as I walked to the porch and opened my front door. I waved to the police officer parked on the street, and continued inside.

  Otis greeted me with a sharp yowl. Feeding time. I opened a can of mystery fish and gave him some hard food and fresh water. Then I poured a strong drink, bringing it with me into the spare bedroom.

  Boxes of Aunt Nellie’s things stood stacked against all three interior walls. I put my drink on the window ledge and opened the box closest to the door. If this room held any more information about James A. McKenna, I intended to find it tonight.

  My glass was still full three hours later. Twenty-three unpacked boxes lay scattered about. I sat on the floor in the middle of the room surrounded by the papers, documents, and bank records that I’d chosen for closer scrutiny.

  After filling an empty shoebox with these items, I struggled up off the floor and took the box and my drink back to the library. The clock in the corner chimed three times; sleep was the farthest thing from my mind.

  The documents, bank records, and other items covered the top of the big desk. I balanced my drink precariously on the base of the desk lamp, and got to work.

  At five-thirty, I gathered up all the items, put them back in the shoebox, and carried a large atlas from the bookshelf to the desk. I paged to a map of New Mexico, then reread James McKenna’s letters to Aunt Nellie, tracing a route to the Bandera ice cave.

  Otis jumped up on the desktop and howled. His nose twitched. He looked at me like I needed a shower. I did.

  A yellow legal pad sat on top of my desk, filled with the notes and diagrams I’d made during the night’s explorations. Slowly, surely, some of the pieces to a deadly puzzle had fallen into place.

  The glass of whiskey under the lamp was still full. Anticipation provided all my intoxication. I sat back and let out a deep breath. Early morning light poured through the picture window. Time to get going and see if I had this figured right.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  April 20

  Nai’ya and C.J. pulled into my driveway at seven the next morning. I made two trips to the SUV with a thermos of coffee, three cups, my wool hat, a small shovel and hammer, and a heavy-duty pair of flashlights.

  Nai’ya left her Cooper in the driveway. I handed her the keys to the new rental SUV and settled into the back seat with the atlas beside me, opened to its map of New Mexico. C.J. sat up front to do his DJ thing on the satellite radio.

  We headed west toward Grants, swung south along Route 53, and entered the Malpais. I hadn’t been in this area since my 1980s field research on the Anasazi.

  Fifteen miles later, a brown wooden sign with yellow letters welcomed us to, “The Land of Fire and Ice.” Jagged, broken chunks of lava, lined both sides of the road. I suddenly wondered how Spanish conquistadores traveled this terrain in heavy armor and on horseback.

  A few spatter cones of congealed lava interrupted the repetitiveness of the landscape. Scraggy pines and sage clung to any spaces that supported vegetation.

  “Man, this place is ugly.” C.J. looked back down to the radio and punched in Albert King singing Crosscut Saw.

  “Certainly not where you’d expect to find anything of great value,” I said.

  Nai’ya peered at me through the rearview mirror. “Think that’s why your Uncle Jimmy and Jose Ramos hid their gold here?”

  “Partly.” I took out the yellow legal pad.

  “You mean they were a couple of mistrusting old codgers?” Nai’ya turned halfway. I caught the edge of her smile.

  “I pieced together some interesting information last night. In the Great Panic of 1893, the silver market collapsed. Uncle Jimmy was wiped out, like so many others in this part of the country. Everything he’d earned from the Brush Heap mine was gone. All of it. I found a letter to Jimmy from a banker in Kingston. It informed Jimmy that all his investments in silver were worthless.”

  Nai’ya nodded. “That would explain why he and Jose didn’t keep their gold in the bank or invest it later on.”

  “It’s not just that. Jimmy kept careful financial records from then on. He must
have brought them east when he left New Mexico to live with Aunt Nellie. She brought them back here after Jimmy died. They showed that Jimmy incorporated his mining efforts, and that he and Jose converted some of the gold into cash each year after that. Probably for Jose’s farm or for their continued efforts to find the Lost Canyon of the Adams gold.”

  “They never found the mother lode, right?” C.J. asked.

  “There’s no sign of it. Jimmy did have a corporate bank account with the Sierra County bank in Kingston. But that bank collapsed in 1933, at the depth of the Great Depression. He lost all that money too. No wonder he says in Red Gold ‘I had learned to never trust the banker.’ ”

  “I feel the same way,” C.J. said.

  “That was also right around the time Jose Ramos died. Shortly before his wife married into your family.” I looked at Nai’ya’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

  She nodded. “Yes, that’s about right. I know they got married sometime in the early to mid-1930s.”

  “And stewardship of the gold was then shared between James McKenna, and Jose’s young son, Ka’waika Ramos; we knew him as Chato Ramos. I wonder if O’Connor realized he killed the only man alive who’d ever actually seen the Adams gold and knew for sure where it was hidden?”

  “The Ice Cave?” C.J. asked.

  “We’ll soon find out,” I replied. “The Bandera Ice Cave is a large fissure formed by volcanic activity. It used to be part of the old Mirabel family ranch.”

  “I heard about that place when I was a young girl,” Nai’ya remarked. “About sixty years ago the Mirabels opened it to the public, and started to charge admission. Uncle Jimmy and Chato must have hidden the gold there before that. It wouldn’t have made any sense afterward.”

  “It could be hidden in an area no longer accessible after the cave was opened to visitors. That’s one possible explanation.” I slid the legal pad inside the atlas as we approached the Bandera site.

  “Is this the turn-off?” Nai’ya pointed toward a weathered signpost and a dirt road that ran off to our right.

  “Yes. But pull off to the left instead. Park behind that clump of pines by the side of the road.”

  “What for?” C.J. asked.

  “To make sure we haven’t been followed. Lay low and out of sight for a few minutes to make sure nobody’s behind us.”

  Nai’ya swung left behind the pines and we waited about five minutes. Nothing. “Satisfied?” she asked.

  “Guess we’re clear,” I said.

  She retraced our route to the dirt road and took the right turn onto a gravel path. A minute later we pulled into a parking lot outside the Ice Cave Trading Post, a wooden building that appeared to be closed.

  Twenty feet from its front door, another signpost pointed out different trails and attractions. The Bandera Volcano Crater was one mile up a trail to our left; the Bandera Ice Cave lay one hundred yards to our right.

  It wasn’t a cave in the traditional sense. When lava shot forth from this ground ten thousand years ago, it cooled so fast that the tubes through which it flowed collapsed. This formed an underground chamber that collected water. The porous lava insulated the chamber from heat above and below.

  “The last time I was here the cave was thirty-one degrees Fahrenheit,” I said to my friends. “It should be the same today.”

  We hiked to the ice cave. It was 8:30 A.M. From the top of the descending stairs we could see only darkness, and a flickering green light. Nai’ya and I went down the first few steps, but C.J. looked at the hundred-step descent and shook his head.

  “No way my leg can do that. I’ll stay here and keep a lookout.”

  The gray rock walls turned bluish-green as Nai’ya and I climbed down the wooden stairs. The natural color transitions on the sidewalls fascinated me. When we reached the bottom, the rock walls shone like multi-faceted, precious gems. From the railing of the rickety wooden observation deck, the floor of the cave appeared to be a single sheet of green ice. Dim artificial lighting strung throughout the cave reflected on the surrounding rock walls. This light shifted constantly, as if we were inside a kaleidoscope looking out.

  The wooden railing kept us back, so we coordinated our flashlight beams and scanned the cave walls for ten minutes.

  We studied every square foot of the ceiling, walls and ice floor. No gold, no saddlebags, or anything that suggested the cave ever contained any gold. As we trudged up the stairs, I trained my flashlight on the openings between the wooden steps, and Nai’ya scoured the rock walls, in case we’d missed anything on our way down. Nothing.

  I was wrong. If Uncle Jimmy and Chato had hidden the gold, they hadn’t put it here. It made no sense that they’d let the gold remain somewhere open to the public. I should have known this.

  Nai’ya and I were winded when we stepped up into a daylight that was forty-five degrees hotter than the chamber below. I donned my sunglasses and looked around.

  “Well?” C.J. greeted us in expectation.

  I shook my head.

  “What next?” Nai’ya sounded as tired as I felt.

  “We go home.”

  Ninety minutes later, Nai’ya parked the SUV in my driveway and handed me the keys. I thanked her and C.J. before they left. I didn’t tell them that every time I glanced out the back window on our way home, I saw the same car behind us. It was a white Camry, like the one Spider Martin sat in when I took his picture twenty-four hours before.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  The house felt empty; just Otis and me tonight. I turned the swamp cooler on high and flushed the stale air outside. My sleepless night caught up with me, compounded by the day’s frustrations.

  I knew in my gut that the gold wasn’t a hoax. The Will, the letters, the maps and, most of all, Red Gold proved that it existed. O’Connor and Carmen agreed and were willing to kill for it.

  How far would I go? For three weeks I’d risked my life and even shot a man in pursuit of a treasure that threatened two families and had taken four lives this month alone.

  The two faces in the pictures from Aunt Nellie’s metal box stared back at me from the library desktop. I glanced back and forth between Uncle Jimmy’s countenance and my own. Two fools.

  The last swallow of my whiskey burned as it worked its way to my stomach. I could have kicked myself, so I did. I leaned back in the big chair and sent my booted right foot straight into my photo on the desktop. The picture and its frame crashed to the floor.

  The glass shattered and the frame broke into several pieces. The desktop looked better without me.

  My momentary satisfaction ended when my phone rang. Sam sounded weary.

  “Gotta pull your police protection, Gabe. We’re shifting all available personnel to this morning’s triple homicide in the South Valley. Sorry. It can’t be helped.”

  “Do what you have to do. Now can I get my gun back?”

  “Stop bugging me about that.”

  “Whatever.”

  “This might interest you. We’ve had two reports that place O’Connor and Carmen in Southern California. One reported sighting in L.A., one in San Diego.”

  “Credible?”

  “We check everything. There’s also one from Denver.”

  “They do get around. When will you know?”

  “Like I said, we’ll—”

  “—check everything. Yeah. I know.”

  “I’ll keep in touch, Gabe. Bye.”

  I poured a double and set the bottle on the desktop. The room felt hot; sweat poured down my back. Maybe the whiskey and my meds weren’t playing nice. I unscrewed the bottle, poured my drink back into it, and put it back in the bottom desk drawer. I needed air. I got up to open the window.

  My first two steps crunched on glass from the shattered picture. I crouched down, reached for the wastebasket, and dropped some of the larger shards into it. The broken frame was next. Two folded pieces of paper, one yellowed and a newer, white sheet, had been taped to the back of my picture. I peeled them off. The older note wa
s faded, scrawled in an unfamiliar hand:

  Just got back from Bandera. Too many people at the ice cave these days—even my failing eyes can see that. What should we do now?

  Below that, in James McKenna’s hand:

  I still don’t trust the banks. Take it from the ice. Go beyond the trail barrier. Hide it near the volcano. It’s too heavy to move much farther than that. I’m afraid I’m too old to be of much help.

  The last words of Ricardo Ramos’s note, the one that had first drawn me to Ybarra Place, flashed back to me:

  “If I don’t get to you, look behind you to find our secret!”

  The sheet of crisp, white paper was a letter. Dated January 10 of this year—less than a month before Aunt Nellie passed away—it was addressed to me in a shaky hand still recognizable as hers:

  My dearest Gabriel,

  If you are reading this letter, it means that Ricardo reached you upon my death, as I asked him to.

  I leave my estate to you. I want you and Holly to ENJOY it all and live out your dreams!

  Ricardo may have told you something about “the gold.” I have to admit that I myself have never seen it. I cannot swear that it even exists. But I want you to know what I know, or rather what I learned from Uncle Jimmy and Chato. (That little slip of folded paper contains their last words about the gold. I thought you might want it.)

  Uncle Jimmy, as much as I loved him, was a very secretive and suspicious man. His loyalty extended only to the McKenna and Ramos families.

  I suppose this is understandable and forgivable. In his last year with me, I heard many tales of the old days, of the first great silver fortune he made and then lost in the Panic of ’93. During the Depression, his life savings were wiped out again by the Sierra County Bank failure. All he had left were his memories, a few hard-learned lessons, and the ranch in Catron County where Chato lives.

  Uncle Jimmy never spoke to me about the gold. Only after his death did I read his final letter with its hint of something found and re-hidden. Only then did I find and read his tale of discovering “Red Gold.”