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  Secrets of the Old Church

  Treasure Hunters: Book #2

  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: Secrets of the old church/ by E.A. House

  Description: Minneapolis, MN : EPIC Press, 2018 | Series: Treasure hunters; #2

  Summary: Somewhere in Saint Erasmus’s Catholic Church, there’s a parish register containing a firsthand account of the sinking of the San Telmo. To find that ship in honor of their murdered aunt, Chris and Carrie first have to find the register. And it turns out that the church is supposed to be very haunted.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017949808 | ISBN 9781680768770 (lib. bdg.)

  | ISBN 9781680768916 (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/2017949808

  This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.

  For Mom

  MADDISON MCRAE WAS NOT STUPID. CHEERFUL, yes, and often optimistic, and not a perfect straight-A student, but stupid? No. Maddison was not stupid, and Maddison knew a secret when she saw one. Or perhaps more accurately, she knew a secret when people went to great lengths to keep it from her.

  Maddison was sitting cross-legged on her bed, flipping through an illustrated collection of Florida urban legends and letting her bowl of cereal slowly turn to mush. Dawn was just breaking over Archer’s Grove, Florida, on the last Tuesday in the month of May, and several people might have been murdered over the course of the night. Maddison had been up worrying the whole night because she liked most of those people.

  It really just figured, Maddison thought, that she had managed to get mixed up in some sort of secret—if it was a conspiracy or a society or just one of those secrets people kill to keep quiet, Maddison wasn’t sure—within one week of moving to a new neighborhood. Back in Fredericksburg she had been the co-founder and only sane member of a paranormal research club and had been locked in a battle of wills with an ex–best friend from kindergarten, and yet most of the time she had been bored. The club had been nothing but lunch meetings and it had taken Maddison an embarrassingly long time to figure out that half the members just wanted an excuse to kiss in dark corners, and Katie had just been generally mean. In Archer’s Grove, Maddison had volunteered to help the school secretary with data entry and stumbled into a massive secret that seemed to involve the archives, her father, half the Kingsolver family, and a couple of ghosts.

  Maddison was scowling darkly at her book while trying not to upset the bowl of cereal on her quilt, so she didn’t register the sound of a car in the drive until a door slammed, even though she was listening for her dad. Immediately after the door slammed, the screen on the front door made a sound like a cat caught in a rocking chair, then there was a murmured conversation between her parents, a heavy sigh from her mom, and the stairs creaked. All the way up to Maddison’s attic room and her open doorway.

  “Mads,” her dad said, leaning against the doorframe, “cereal on the bed?” He looked rumpled and as though he’d been running his hands through his hair, but he didn’t look injured or, you know, dead, and a lot of the worry Maddison had been refusing to admit she was feeling disappeared. It was promptly replaced by the guilty realization that she’d just been caught misbehaving, and when she took a large mouthful of chocolate crispies it was a gesture of defiance. Her dad just smiled at her. Maddison had once seen a character in a book described as having a “wry smile” and she finally had a name to put to what her dad did whenever he caught Maddison doing something she wasn’t supposed to and thought she was adorable. It drove Maddison nuts.

  “It’s . . . so that . . . you’d have to come home to yell at me?” Maddison offered when she’d finished the mouthful of cereal. She was allowed to eat in her bedroom, but she was not supposed to eat things that could spill and ruin upholstery in her room, and cereal with milk was the worst culprit.

  “Uh huh,” Dr. Kevin McRae said, coming all the way into the room and holding a hand out. Maddison passed him the bowl and he took a large spoonful, then winced.

  “I put chocolate milk on them,” Maddison admitted guiltily.

  “I can see that,” her dad gasped, fanning at his mouth as if he’d eaten something hot. “Gaaah, that’s sweet.” He cleared his throat and swallowed a couple of times. “Okay then, now that I’ve given myself a sugar rush to take the edge off the adrenaline crash—” Maddison had opened her mouth to ask what he meant by adrenaline crash when he added, “We need to talk.”

  Okay, so her dad didn’t want his explanation of what happened at the Kingsolver’s house to turn into twenty questions. Maddison was still teetering between worried and mad, so all she said was, “You took my cereal so I can’t pretend to have my mouth full.”

  Her dad studied the bowl of soggy cereal for a second, took another spoonful, and then handed it back to Maddison.

  “Well I certainly didn’t do it for my health,” he said, and then he softened, a little bit, and added, “Everyone’s fine, Mads. Your young man is going to have a magnificently bruised tailbone and his sister is frankly quite terrifying, but nobody died.”

  “He’s not my young man,” Maddison protested, a half second before she realized this was exactly the right way to convince her father that Chris was, and added, “and Chris and Carrie are cousins, not siblings.”

  “Well they certainly act like siblings,” her dad said. “And that’s . . . not actually what I wanted to talk to you about, but I did need to reassure you that everyone was fine. I think it would be better for you to call up Carrie and spend an hour or six letting her tell you what happened. That is, when she’s worked off the adrenaline enough to call. What I actually need to do,” he said, settling himself in Maddison’s desk chair, and again sidestepping Maddison’s frantic demands for answers, because why would Carrie need to work off the adrenaline? Was everyone running on frenetic adrenaline right now, except for Maddison, who was going to be in a minute or two if she didn’t get some answers?

  “I need to tell you a little bit about my past,” Maddison’s dad said.

  Maddison fumbled the cereal bowl directly into her trashcan.

  Maddison hadn’t gotten into ghosts and aliens and Bigfoot because her dad was a historian. That just made for an easy excuse. She’d gotten into the stuff at the age of eleven because her public library kept the books on the CIA and the history of intelligence agencies right next to the books on ghosts, and ghosts were . . . well, ghosts were safe, as strange as that sounded, or at least safer than what Maddison had actually been worried about at that age. Maddison had really been trying to determine if her dad had been in witness protection.

  By the time she was eleven Maddison had known that her dad was hiding something from her. Kevin McRae had a carefully concealed blank spot in his past, one a l
ot of people didn’t ever seem to notice. He would happily share family history and early childhood memories, his wedding photo was proudly displayed on his desk, and he was still in contact with his parents, but nobody knew anything about Kevin McRae from age eighteen to twenty-two. This was, coincidentally, the age during which he ought to have been getting his bachelor’s degree from college, and that must have been what he was doing because he had then gotten a doctorate and gone on to teach. And yet not even Dr. McRae’s students could tell his daughter with much certainty where he had gone to school; the general impression seemed to be that he’d studied abroad.

  There were other things that puzzled Maddison. For one, McRae was her mother’s family name, which her father had taken when they married. For another, her father’s oldest friendship was with a retired police detective named Gregory Lyndon, who was thirty years older than Maddison’s dad and lived halfway across the country. And then there was her dad’s very strange behavior over the past months, which had probably started the year before when the Edgewater Maritime Archive started a project with the Archer’s Grove State Park. They had wanted to preserve and map out some old ruins in the local state park and had asked Maddison’s dad to consult with them on the old Spanish mission hidden somewhere in the park. Maddison’s dad loved getting his hands dirty. He regularly volunteered at state and national parks and was a well-regarded expert on the subject of Spanish mission churches. He would even have been paid for his work, and yet he had refused outright. There was something in her dad’s past that cast a long, dark shadow over his present, and Maddison was becoming increasingly certain that whatever the secret was it had roots in Archer’s Grove.

  “You want to tell me about your past,” she repeated, in case she hadn’t heard right. But there weren’t a lot of words that sounded like “past,” so unless her dad really wanted to talk about his pants, or his pest, or his . . . pasta . . . ? That was stretching it.

  “You don’t . . . ” Maddison’s father started to say, and then the corner of his mouth quirked up. “I was going to say that you don’t have to sound so surprised,” he said. “But to be brutally fair you do have a right to be surprised.”

  Maddison had never truly thought that pretending to be interested in ghosts would keep her dad from figuring out what she was really worried about, and they’d been in a slightly uncomfortable, unspoken truce for years. Maddison made it very clear that she knew her dad had secrets he wasn’t telling the rest of the family, and Maddison’s dad steadfastly pretended he wasn’t hiding anything. Maddison’s mom did a lot of eye rolling but that was easy for her, because Maddison was pretty sure she knew what her husband was hiding.

  “You have a giant hole in your life history,” Maddison said very fast, so that she could pretend not to have said it if it turned out to be the wrong thing to say.

  “I do,” her dad said. “And I’m not going to fill it in very much with this, so I apologize in advance.” He was sitting in a swivel chair, and he took a moment to spin himself back and forth before he started.

  “So, when I was a little older than you, I read this book called Treasure Island,” he said. “And promptly became enamored with the idea of finding buried treasure. Not so much the treasure at the end, really, as much as the adventuring around, dodging sinister pirates and keeping an eagle eye out for clues. And I was already a history nut, going off to college in Florida, so it was a bit like I tripped and fell into studying Spanish colonial history.”

  All of this was new, but none of it was very surprising or worth hiding, and some of this must have shown in Maddison’s expression, because her dad sighed. “I know, I’m getting there.” He picked up Maddison’s pen, the one that had a pink, fluffy pom-pom on the end, and turned it over in his hands. “So, I went away to college. And one of the things about college is that it’s so much more open and broader than high school. You meet so many people that you eventually find your niche—I look forward to you discovering that, Mads. And in my case, the niche was treasure hunting.”

  Maddison blinked.

  “Yeah,” her dad said. “We spent all our free time looking for treasure—a specific treasure trove, to be exact. It was the early nineties, and the excavating had just started to get interesting with regards to the 1717 Fleet. And that,” he said, “led me and a couple of friends to spend all our free time looking for the San Telmo—it’s one of the missing three, and there are some great rumors that it went down around here. We never found the ship,” Maddison’s dad added, “and I . . . grew out of the whole treasure-hunting thing, but I’m afraid it’s in your blood all the same.”

  “What about Mom?” Maddison asked, instead of what she really wanted to ask, which was why are you telling me this and what does it mean?

  “Your mother knows all about my dark and sordid past,” Maddison’s dad said lightly. “And now so do you.”

  Maddison raised a single eyebrow at him, although it was a slightly wobbly eyebrow.

  “Okay, yeah.” Her dad pointed the pom-pom end of the pen at her. “I know, Mads. But I don’t want to tell you. It won’t be a fun conversation.”

  Which was more or less what Maddison had imagined he’d say the many times she rehearsed a confrontation speech and then chickened out at the last minute.

  “Oh, I’m awful at this,” her dad added, and then he squared his hands on his knees and said, “Maddison, I want you to be careful if you get mixed up in some sort of treasure hunt. Very, very careful. There are some nasty, opportunistic people out there and you’ve got my bullheadedness and drive. And you’ve got my mind for mystery, I’ve always been able to see that.”

  And before Maddison could think of a reply, he had stood up, clapped his hands together, said, “Good talk!” and marched out of the room. Maddison was left to wrestle with a warning that might have been very clear and an explanation that wasn’t, but before she could do much thinking about either, Carrie called her. Her father possibly had superpowers, either to see the future or to warp it to his will. Carrie had a shake in her voice that suggested she’d had a very terrible evening, and then she told Maddison about being attacked by a gun-wielding maniac who turned out to have been the person who’d killed her Aunt Elsie, proving that she had had a very terrible evening. Maddison told her, in full, what had happened before her father rushed out of the house in a panic the night before, and they both agreed that Mrs. Hadler, school secretary and unexpectedly terrifying person, should never know. Then Carrie hung up and Maddison went to deal with the bowl of cereal in her trash can, wondering just what Chris and Carrie were trying to hide from her. And how much of it her father knew about and was also trying to hide from her.

  Chris Kingsolver was beginning to fear for the life of his windowsill. It was a muggy Tuesday evening and Chris had spent the day hollowing out an old book into a secret compartment for hiding his Aunt Elsie’s letter. He had, for once in his life, enjoyed the peacefulness, although it was broken by the creeping feeling that he should be doing more research into the mystery his Aunt Elsie had left him, and the nagging sense that he was never going to successfully evade his mom’s attempts to get him to find a summer job. His mom had stopped turning every conversation they had into a list of local businesses that were currently hiring, probably because she felt sorry he’d almost gotten shot by a home invader, but had started leaving job applications everywhere instead. She had shoved three applications from her friend’s bakery under the door over the course of the day, and Chris actually tried to fill one out, before the facts that he couldn’t bake and that the bakery had been the only place Aunt Elsie bought muffins from brought him up short. Job hunting was stressful enough without it reminding him of his aunt.

  It had been less than a day since Chris and Carrie had unlocked a hidden box, discovered the secret clue to buried treasure hidden in their Aunt Elsie’s notes, and gone up against a gunman who had then admitted he was responsible for murdering their aunt. Chris, at least, was exhausted. What nobody ever told
you about getting stuck in an action-adventure movie was how stressful it was, even if you did end up sleeping for a full day afterwards. How Carrie had dug up the stamina to go to work early Wednesday morning Chris couldn’t imagine, and why she was climbing through his window again he didn’t want to imagine. This time, too, she had her school backpack over one shoulder. It was bulging.

  “Carrie,” Chris said as the mattress bounced impressively from the weight of her backpack and Chris realized he was lucky she had not dropped a backpack the size of a boulder on his head, “we have a front door.”

  “So, I did a little research,” Carrie said instead of answering.

  “A little?” Chris asked, peering into Carrie’s backpack. It was stuffed full of books.

  “Yeah, I stopped at the library on the way home from work,” Carrie said. “This is just what they had on the shelves, I’ve got a couple of things on hold too.”

  “Are you sure that’s wise?”

  “Well,” Carrie said, “libraries don’t usually—or at least our library doesn’t—keep a record of which books a patron checks out after they return them. It’s a little safer than buying books somewhere, and besides I spend a lot of time there anyway.”

  Chris was cautiously piling up books on his bedspread. Carrie had a dozen state and local histories stuffed into her backpack, along with a general book on early Spanish settlements in Florida and a pile of things about archeology and treasure hunting. And several maps that looked like she’d printed them off Google. And when, Chris wondered, had Carrie found the time to mark pages with colored sticky notes, or found the time to collect all these different colors of sticky notes?

  “Find anything?” he asked.

  Carrie sighed. “Soooorta?”

  “Oh great,” Chris said, and grabbed a pen and piece of paper.

  “So,” Carrie said, flipping open the book on early Spanish settlements. “First things first. Aunt Elsie found a letter from a deacon that talks about a Father Dominic Gonzalez who saw the wreck. According to this County History”—she dumped a musty book with a fraying cover on Chris’s lap and thought for a moment—“and the one in the reference section that I couldn’t check out, he would have to have been priest of the Spanish mission Santa Maria de la Mar, because that was the only mission in the area and on the coast. The Mission doesn’t exist anymore, but I looked at the history page of every Catholic church in the county that had a website and got lucky.” Carrie handed Chris a printed sheet. “And found this.”