Deep Waters Read online

  Deep Waters

  Treasure Hunters: Book #4

  Written by E. A. House

  Copyright © 2018 by Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.

  Published by EPIC Press™

  PO Box 398166

  Minneapolis, MN 55439

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  International copyrights reserved in all countries.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without

  written permission from the publisher. EPIC Press™ is trademark

  and logo of Abdo Consulting Group, Inc.

  Cover design by Laura Mitchell

  Images for cover art obtained from iStock and Shutterstock

  Edited by Ryan Hume

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: House, E.A., author.

  Title: Deep waters/ by E.A. House

  Description: Minneapolis, MN : EPIC Press, 2018 | Series: Treasure hunters; #4

  Summary: Chris and Carrie have the location of the lost treasure ship San Telmo. With their friend Professor Griffin and two slightly sketchy grad students, they’re off to find it. Meanwhile, Maddison’s dad has dragged her off to Nebraska, to consult with a retired police detective about the disappearance of an old college friend.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017949810 | ISBN 9781680768794 (lib. bdg.)

  | ISBN 9781680768930 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Adventure stories—Fiction. | Code and cipher stories—Fiction.

  | Family secrets—Fiction. | Treasure troves—Fiction | Young adult fiction.

  Classification: DDC [FIC]—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2017949810

  This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

  For all my English teachers, who made this happen

  “The sky had been calm, but on the night of the twenty-third a wind came in from the east, bringing with it heavy rains and stirring the seas into a mad frenzy,” Father Michaels read. He was reading from the parish register itself; the translation he’d written out on a yellow legal pad was lying on Carrie Kingsolver’s lap, forgotten. “The will of our Lord, or of some darker being, caused the fleet of Our Majesty the King to be passing by the tip of our island as the worst of the deluge broke, and I witnessed the breaking of seventeen ships upon the unforgiving shores of the nearby islands. Four I saw crumble on the cliffs of St. Juan. Seven, I saw succumb to the waves in open ocean, five were blown beyond the eyes of this your servant, and one, poor souls, made it nearly to shore before the deluge claimed it on the farthest edge of this island, where the white cliffs look over the waters thick with mussels. The prow of this ship bore an octopus and it was trimmed in red, and I pray that I may offer some relief to the families of the sailors lost to the waves upon her deck.”

  Father Michaels closed the register, leaving a single strip of acid-free paper in as a bookmark. “It’s rough,” he said. “It’s been a while since I needed to do much Latin translation and there are some variations from the priest’s native Spanish that complicated things, but the bit about the octopus is suggestive.”

  “The prow of the San Telmo was decorated by an octopus,” Carrie agreed, fiddling with the corner of the translation. Father Michaels was being extraordinarily helpful and the translation he had produced, only a week after being asked, was just about all Carrie could have hoped for, but she still felt exposed and adrift sitting there in the rectory without Chris to ask awkward questions.

  Chris had begged off visiting Father Michaels with the excuse that he had a job application he needed to fill out, which was either a blatant lie or a symptom of just how hard Maddison’s leaving had hit Chris. Carrie had not had time to decide. He was moping, but that was to be expected. The question was mostly what direction his moping was going to go—would he decide to throw all his energy into the search for the San Telmo, or would he decide to try pretending it had never existed in the first place? Although Carrie was usually the only one who ever tried to pretend things never happened. Chris got more and more attached to something the harder you tried to discourage him, and the harder you tried the more obvious he made it that he was still on the problem.

  “Carrie?” Father Michaels said, and Carrie abruptly realized she’d zoned out. The priest was looking at her with some concern. “Is everything all right?”

  “Yes!” Carrie said, and then inwardly winced at how fake she had sounded. Luckily Father Michaels was kind enough not to press the issue, and instead pushed the register across the coffee table to her.

  “Well, as I was saying,” he said, deftly removing a cat from the side table and shaking cat hairs off of a map. “That’s the only part of the parish register that mentions the wreck. I did skim the rest, but it seems that witnessing the wreck was terrible enough that Father Gonzalez did his best never to mention it again. What is interesting is that description of white cliffs and mussels, because . . . ”

  “Archer’s Grove used to have white cliffs somewhere?” Carrie asked. White cliffs put her in mind of Dover Castle and the English Channel, not Florida. But there were some endangered mussels that grew almost exclusively on Archer’s Grove . . .

  “I honestly don’t know,” Father Michaels said. “But they sound as though they might be a landmark of sorts, so if you were going looking, that would be a good place to start.”

  “Huh,” Carrie said.

  “Only about a quarter of the island is the right place for sand marshes,” Father Michaels added, spreading out the map, which proved to be a geological map of the island. “It narrows down your search a bit.”

  “So if there’s a point on the island that once had white cliffs and currently has beds of mussels . . . ” Carrie said thoughtfully. “You don’t happen to know anything about the history of the geography of this island, do you?” she asked.

  Father Michaels shook his head. “I’m afraid not,” he said. “I studied divinity in school, with a minor in Greek and Latin, so if you wanted to know about the religious history of the island I could help, but not the mineral composition of the island.”

  Carrie sighed and started gathering up the translation Father Michaels had given her. It looked like she was going to spend the rest of the week in the library. “Anyway, thank you for translating this for us,” she started to say—

  Her phone buzzed.

  “Sorry,” Carrie said, and fished it out of her bag.

  Ask Fr. Michaels about the dead body, Chris had texted her. Carrie winced and stuffed the phone back into the pocket of her sweatshirt.

  “Everything okay?” Father Michaels asked.

  “Ah, yeah,” Carrie said, trying to hit the N and O keys without looking. “It’s just a wrong”—her phone buzzed again. Cringing, Carrie tugged it out of her pocket far enough to see that Chris had responded:

  On?

  And then, ASK about the dead BODY!!

  “Give it a rest, Chris,” Carrie muttered, and savagely texted back, NO.

  “I’m a bit surprised your cousin hasn’t called me yet to ask about the dead body in the cistern,” Father Michaels said conversationally, and Carrie was so startled she dropped her phone. The priest blinked, then added, “Was that what he was texting you about?”

  “You really don’t have to tell us,” Carrie said. “Chris is a little, um, paranoid right now.”

  “There actually isn’t a lot I can tell you,” Father Michaels said. “Despite what always happens in TV crime dramas, DNA testing and fingerprinting take a while with an unidentified corpse, even if the faint possibility exists that it might be the body of Cesar Francisco.” He crossed his arms thoughtfully. “I did get a call from the local FBI office asking for the names of any pastors here during the
fifties and sixties, so I assume they’re looking into that angle.”

  “So they think he was murdered?” Carrie asked.

  “Well,” Father Michaels said, “and I apologize if this brings up disturbing memories, but when you saw the corpse, do you remember how well preserved it was?”

  “It looked fine except for the . . . ” Carrie swallowed. “The skull.” The skull, in fact, had had a nice, large jagged hole in the back when Carrie had caught a glimpse of the corpse as it was being moved.

  “And even in the sixties there wasn’t a good way for someone to find their way into that cistern and die accidentally,” Father Michaels said. “The problem is that I have no idea who owned the skeleton in the cistern.” He sighed. “For all we know it could simply be an unfortunate soul who was seeking sanctuary, although—” He stopped himself.

  “What?” Carrie asked.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” Father Michaels said.

  “But . . . ” Carrie pressed, since in her experience when someone said that it was nothing, they actually meant that it was something but they didn’t want to bring it up.

  “Well . . . I gathered, from the last time I met you, that it’s Miss McRae who’s an expert on ghosts, but you’ve probably heard that finding the body and affording the ghost a proper burial is one way to quiet a haunting.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I find it a little worrying that we’ve had more activity in the church since the body was found.”

  Only a few miles away, a plain black car pulled into the Archer’s Grove police station, and the blond man driving it tucked a slim wallet and a badge that flashed in the sunlight into his suit jacket as he got out of the car. He left a small stack of brown file folders on the passenger seat as he went inside to introduce himself to the chief of police, and if anyone had happened to glance at them they would have been very puzzled by the contents. They were not at all related to the very old disappearance of Cesar Francisco. Instead, the first file held photographs of three high school students and a television star, and the rest were simply full of blank paper.

  “Chris,” Carrie said while she was halfway through his bedroom window, ignoring the yelp he gave when she started talking, “has it ever occurred to you that asking priests about dead bodies is both a horror-movie-cliché and disturbingly unnecessary?”

  “Did he know anything?” Chris asked in response, and Carrie sat down in her cousin’s desk chair with a glare for him.

  “No,” Carrie said. “The FBI asked him about the pastors of the church in the fifties and sixties—”

  “One of them was a radical,” Chris offered.

  “I don’t even want to know how you know that,” Carrie said. “He suspects the person was murdered, which he very kindly did not have to tell me but told me anyway.” Carrie paused to poke Chris in the shoulder for emphasis. “He has no more idea than we do who it is. Oh, and . . . the ghostly activity hasn’t really died down.”

  “Huh,” Chris said. He ran both hands through his hair, which did nothing to alter his appearance, since he currently looked as though he’d stuck his finger in an electrical socket. “Well, I did the FBI one better,” he added, handing Carrie a sheaf of papers. Many of them were missing-persons flyers. “I went through all reported disappearances in the past seventy years.”

  “And found?” Carrie asked, flipping through the papers. At least Chris had sorted them by decade, although it was unsettling to see how many people had disappeared in the area in the past almost-century.

  “Nothing,” Chris admitted. “Well, nothing that looked like it had anything to do with the church, or the ship, or—what is it?”

  Carrie had paused. There was something about the church . . . and . . . lists? It was hovering just at the edge of her memory—there was something weird about the church and lists of people . . .

  “Did something happen in the nineties?” Chris asked, tugging the stack of missing-persons flyers away from Carrie. “Did you see one of these names at the church today?”

  “Names . . . ” Carrie murmured as the memory formed. “Chris! Did you look at the visitors’ log in the church entryway the last time we were there?”

  “Yeah,” Chris said. “I mean, I didn’t read the whole thing but I glanced at it?”

  “Did you notice—it goes all the way back to the forties,” Carrie said, “but at some point somebody tore out the three pages that would have been the 1990s.”

  “Yeah, I did,” Chris said. “Wait—Carrie, that might mean—”

  “I know!” Carrie said. “I looked at it for a really long time when we were hanging out in the entryway waiting for Dr. McRae, but it didn’t occur to me to wonder why those pages, and only those pages, were missing!”

  Chris put the three missing-persons flyers from the nineties on his bed, lining them up in order of disappearance. There had been an Emily Adderson who had last been seen leaving a local bar on February tenth, a Ryan Moore who had disappeared from his dorm room at Florida State in early October, and a Benjamin Coors—just seven—who had disappeared from his front yard.

  “I don’t think Benjamin is the right person,” Chris said. “He couldn’t possibly be the dead body and I don’t know why he would be in the visitors’ log at a church. But maybe Emily Adderson or Ryan Moore?”

  “Yeah,” Carrie said. “But how do you find out who signed a visitors’ log in a Catholic church over ten years ago when the visitors’ log itself has been tampered with?”

  Outside in the driveway, a jeep gave a cheerful blat of its horn.

  “And do we even want to go down this road?” Carrie added, as Chris looked out the window and then started gathering papers. “I mean, if we want to go with the professor . . . ”

  Professor Griffin was gratifyingly enthusiastic about the idea of taking Chris and Carrie with him on his next sea voyage. As the only full-time and fully qualified oceanography professor at the local branch of the college, Professor Griffin spent time on the open ocean, in the shallows, in the Everglades, occasionally in tide pools, and generally wherever the current oceanography graduate students needed to be in order to complete their particular concentrated area of study. At the moment he was at loose ends, since there were no pressing end-of-year papers and thus no frantic grad students who needed six more soundings and at least one more night of reading ocean currents, so he had time to be the only bright spot in an otherwise confusing and depressing week.

  As a result, he dropped by every day to check on Chris and Carrie and to wear down one or both of their sets of parents until they agreed to the boat trip.

  “I’ve got two grad students who need to do some coastal mapping,” Professor Griffin explained the evening after Carrie got the translation from Father Michaels. “Deathly boring, to be honest, but Brad and Harvey are immensely interested in coastal erosion and this is for their thesis. It would get the smaller Kingsolvers out of the house for a few days and give me an excuse to take Moby along—and if we do that, then this is an educational outreach opportunity for the college and one more reason to convince the board to foot the bill for Moby’s new propeller.”

  “Willis, I thought you just replaced the propeller,” Chris’s mom said carefully.

  “Er,” Professor Griffin said. “Well, you see, there was an unfortunate incident involving the propeller and a large, well . . . ”

  “Moby ran into another boat again?”

  “Yes,” Professor Griffin admitted. “But this time it was a freak ocean current, and not something to do with Moby’s balance.”

  “Uh-huh,” Carrie’s dad said. Actually nobody really believed Professor Griffin or was the least bit surprised. The fact that the college had a remote-operated submersible would have been impressive if not for how regularly the submersible malfunctioned in creative ways. There had been many, many comments on the fact that the sub must have been named Moby because getting it to work correctly was about as likely as Captain Ahab finding the great white whale. Meanwhile, if Profe
ssor Griffin could be said to have any blind spot it was his firm belief that Moby was a functional piece of equipment.

  “How do I know that terrible submersible isn’t going to eat my child?” Carrie’s mom said.

  “Chris and Carrie have been around Moby before and nothing terrible happened,” Professor Griffin protested. “And they have done trips before, just nothing quite as long.”

  The truth everyone was dancing around was that Aunt Elsie had been with them on those trips. Aunt Elsie, despite having once been knocked off a boat by Moby, managed to keep the peace between the people who adored the submersible and the people who thought it was a curse on all ships that carried it. Clearly, it was up to Carrie to keep the peace now, especially since Chris was badly shaken by Maddison leaving and firmly in the “Moby is an amazing piece of technology” camp to boot.

  “If we promise to steer very clear of Moby would that help?” Carrie asked.

  “Oh sweetheart,” her mother sighed.

  Carrie kicked Chris under the cover of the coffee table. “If we promise not to fall overboard would it help?” Chris asked, kicking Carrie right back.

  Carrie’s father sighed. Her aunt and uncle shared one of their “it comes from both sides of the family; we’re doomed” looks.

  “Well, I suppose . . . ” Chris’s mom said.

  “If you three are very careful . . . ” Carrie’s dad added, giving Professor Griffin a significant look. “ . . . you can go.”

  “Thank you!” Carrie said, mentally calculating how much digging she still had to do before she got a narrowed idea of where to look for the ship. “When do we leave?”

  That question got passed back and forth for the next hour and a half, because the Professor had two grad students who were perfectly ready to leave that night and Chris’s parents had been assuming it would be a weekend thing, and by the time they’d agreed to leave mid-morning the next day it was getting quite late and Chris and Carrie had yet to pack.

  Then Professor Griffin pulled them aside on his way out the door.