The Treasure Read online

  Aside from occasionally muttering to himself about “her”—whoever that was—the professor had done the entire thing in perfect, unnerving silence, save for when he gave Brad brief directions. And once inside the hotel room he had pulled that yellow sticky note out of his pocket and lapsed into silence yet again, this time while staring at the paper as intently as if he wanted to catch it on fire with his eyes. He’d held it up to the flickering fluorescent light; peered at it cupped in his hands; closed his eyes and rubbed it thoughtfully between his fingers like he was looking for secret writing that wasn’t there; and even brought it to his mouth twice as though on the verge of eating the thing before thinking better of the idea. Brad had by this point come to the conclusion that Harvey had absolutely had the right idea by running away at the first opportunity. No amount of money was worth dealing with a crazy guy, and no amount of money was worth dealing with a crazy guy who didn’t seem to realize he was crazy.

  What Brad did know, all the way in his bones the way he had always known when a situation was way more dangerous than even a gun could handle, was that this Willis Griffin guy was only going to get worse, and that if Brad hung around he was only going to have worse and worse trouble.

  He was just starting to talk himself into bolting for the door—he’d noticed the convenience store across the street when they came in, and if he could just get inside he could probably get the cashier to call the police for him, and then if he played his cards right he might get preferential treatment from the police for turning Griffin in—when Griffin suddenly sat bolt upright.

  “That’s it!” he said.

  “What’s it?” Brad asked nervously. Griffin had turned the piece of yellow paper around so that it was upside down and he had his head tilted at an uncomfortable angle. Any farther to the side and Brad would have begun suspecting demonic possession. Not that he was ruling that out yet.

  “Here I was, thinking it was a mistranslation or a wrong number or an off calculation or a coded message,” Griffin said, clutching the paper to his chest. “But all the time it was a transposition!”

  “Err,” said Brad, who wasn’t entirely sure what transposition meant.

  “Transposition, my dear man,” Griffin said, “means to switch things around, to reverse, to, oh, etcetera!”

  Brad nodded, even though he still wasn’t sure what the guy was going on about—apparently he had figured out where the ship he was looking for had sunk—because Griffin was slightly less scary when he was happy. Case in point, the professor leapt off the bed as if he hadn’t been sitting in the same position for two hours, and then strode out the door, beckoning imperiously. “Come on, we’ve got to beat them to it,” he announced, and Brad grabbed his sweatshirt and wallet and followed reluctantly, casting a longing look at the convenience store as they plunged back into the woods. It was too far away to make a break for it, and then there was that small wrapped case the professor had paid the owner of the second marina for. Brad was not in the mood to find out if it held a gun.

  “Okay. So, the San Telmo—what are you hoping to find?” Bethy said, swinging the camera from the green blur of the passing shoreline to focus on Chris. Her voice was professionally steady and clear even though her expression was screaming “Why am I here and why am I doing this?”

  Redd and Dr. McRae had agreed, with Detective Hermann, that a filmed record of the second search for the San Telmo was a very practical idea. Unfortunately, they couldn’t fit the entire film crew of Treasure Hunter on the Meandering Manatee and still have room for the detective and both Chris and Carrie, so in the necessary absence of a film crew Bethy had been drafted. Bethy was nervous because she had a technical idea of what to do behind the camera but had only ever filmed once before, at her niece’s birthday party.

  “So the audience’s expectations are a little different,” she’d said while arranging Chris in front of the nicest section of the Meandering Manatee’s deck. Of course Chris had never been on camera before, so he was nervous too, and there was still the distinct possibility that this film was going to accidentally record something that had to be admitted to court and so would never see the light of day anyway. Detective Hermann had explained that at length before Bethy had started filming and before wandering over to the railing so he could look longingly at the fish that were occasionally drifting by. He was, apparently, fond of fishing in his very infrequent spare time.

  “Well, according to legend,” Chris said when Bethy waved the hand not holding the camera at him in a “go on” gesture, “the San Telmo was loaded down with twice the amount of gold the other ships in the 1717 fleet were carrying because it was the ship honored with bringing the Princess of Spain’s dowry back home.”

  “Princess Annamarie,” Carrie added, poking her head in.

  “Yeah,” Chris said. He resisted the urge to push her off screen, mainly because he had no idea how far to push. “And the crown princess was said to be extremely fond of gold and of flowers, so the one thing everyone who goes looking for the San Telmo really wants to find is the gold crown that was intended for the princess.”

  “And why is that?” Bethy asked.

  “It’s supposed to have been made in the shape of a flower crown, using the princess’s favorite flowers,” Chris explained. “There was a merchant who described it in a letter to his sister as being so lifelike it was as though the hand of Midas touched it, it was supposed to be so finely worked that you could see the individual flaws in each of the daisies . . . ” Chris trailed off. A very strange thought was nagging at the back of his brain.

  “Thanks, Chris,” Bethy said, because she was a very kind person who didn’t keep filming while you were having unsettling thoughts. “I’m going to go corner Redd and get to the bottom of this dratted manatee.”

  “Good luck,” Chris said absently, and then went and cornered Dr. McRae in the poky little cabin while Carrie made distressed faces at him.

  “Was my aunt’s favorite piece of treasure from the San Telmo the princess’s crown?” Chris asked Dr. McRae, who didn’t look startled by the question at all, although he did jump a little when Chris asked him—he’d had his head in a cupboard.

  “Yes, it was,” Dr. McRae mumbled through a bite of the Pop-Tart he had been looking for, rubbing his head where he had whacked it on the cabinet in surprise. “She was really phenomenally good at making flower crowns herself and she always said that a solid gold one would be really neat. Why do you ask?” He looked ever so slightly nervous.

  “Because I was curious,” Chris said slowly, “and because I knew Aunt Elsie liked flowers but not how much she liked flower crowns—wait, that was you!” Dr. McRae jumped again and choked on the mouthful of Pop-Tart.

  “What was me?” he asked, while Carrie tried to stomp on Chris’s foot.

  “You—you were the one leaving flower crowns on Aunt Elsie’s grave!” Chris said as a dozen different little things suddenly added up.

  “Well,” Dr. McRae said, “um, well, I was . . . but I wasn’t the only one!”

  “I was leaving flowers,” Chris said.

  “So was I,” Carrie added quietly. “And so was Redd—”

  “I didn’t do it!” Redd yelled from out on the deck. “At least I don’t think I did it,” he added, poking his head into the cabin. “What am I supposed to have done?”

  “You left flowers at Aunt Elsie’s grave,” Carrie said.

  “Well, of course I left flowers at Elsie’s grave. What kind of jerk goes to a funeral without a flower arrangement?”

  “Okay, then maybe it wasn’t you. I was talking about after the funeral,” Carrie said.

  “Oh, I did that too,” Redd explained. “Couldn’t find the asters I wanted for her before the funeral so I had to come back.”

  At which point Detective Hermann started laughing helplessly over the railing, but all they eventually managed to get out of him was that there had been a sudden and unexplained fad for asters that the local florists had reported to th
e police as a trend in need of careful monitoring.

  “What do I think about the San Telmo?” Detective Hermann asked Bethy in response to her asking him the same question. “Well, I think it would have been a good idea to tell the detective investigating the case about the maybe-haunted, possibly cursed, definitely dangerous ship everyone was wandering around trying to find before Willis Griffin descended into madness trying to plunder it.”

  Unlike Chris, who she’d filmed against the wall of the cabin so his hair didn’t clash too terribly with the paint job, Bethy had positioned the police detective against the bright red railing of the Meandering Manatee, chasing everyone else either into the ship’s small cabin or around the opposite side of the deck. She had a good eye for the dramatic and the visually striking, and Detective Hermann looked appropriately detective-like, framed against the sparkling blue ocean and the ship’s railing with the least terrible paint job.

  Chris was watching from a safe distance because filmmaking interested him and it was a great opportunity to get everyone’s perspective on the San Telmo without anyone noticing him listening in. Maria was sketching Redd’s inflatable manatee as it spun lazily in the wind, Carrie had cornered Dr. McRae to talk about the coordinates of the San Telmo, which were fast approaching, and Maddison had applied a layer of sunscreen and then fallen asleep in a pool of sunshine on the other side of the ship.

  “So, do you think the ship is haunted?” Bethy asked. She’d asked everyone that question, along with “Do you think the ship is cursed?” as well as “What do you hope to find when we unearth the San Telmo?” and “How long have you known about the sunken ship?” By listening in on Bethy’s interviews Chris had learned that the majority opinion was that the San Telmo was not haunted, that the eight people on the boat were evenly divided on the question of whether it was cursed, that Carrie had an encyclopedic knowledge of the treasure that was supposed to have gone down with the San Telmo, and that Robin Redd had read a storybook about the sinking of the San Telmo when he was five that had stuck with him throughout his life. Chris couldn’t help wondering what sort of parents Redd had and if they were perhaps responsible for some of his strangeness. Who read books about tragically sunken ships to their kids as bedtime stories?

  True, Aunt Elsie had. But that, Chris would maintain stubbornly if anyone pressed him, was an entirely different matter.

  “Do I think the ship is haunted?” Detective Hermann sighed. “I think it’s haunting me, if that counts.” Bethy laughed. “Yes, you can laugh, but this has been the strangest case I’ve worked since the monkey-smuggling ring. And I’ll have you know, Bradlaw, that I did not spend my early teenage years trespassing in national parks or looking for missing treasure ships. The closest I ever came was in Glee Club—yes, really—when we learned a sea shanty that happened to mention the ship.”

  “No,” Bethy said incredulously, as Chris sat up and blinked. Glee Club? “There’s a song about the San Telmo?”

  “There’s a folk song about long-lost ships,” Detective Hermann said. “And I just now realized that the Saint Elmo they mention in the refrain is really the San Telmo.”

  “Well, then, let’s hear it,” Bethy said.

  “Oh, no. I’d rather tell you about the monkey-​smuggling ring, and I swore on my luckiest coffee mug that I’d never tell a living soul who wasn’t on the case what happened that night.”

  “Well, you could always do both,” Bethy offered.

  “There’s really a song that mentions the San Telmo?” Chris asked, curiosity getting the better of him. Detective Hermann sighed. Then he clasped his hands in front of him and took a deep breath.

  “I don’t remember the whole song,” he explained. “But there is a traditional folk song called ‘Lost Forever’ that mentions a Saint Elmo that sunk off the coast of Florida, and, well, see . . . ” He lifted his voice.

  “‘For they’ve found the Katie Mary, and they’ve found the Boris Lee,’” he sang, “‘but the ship they called Saint Elmo, she still lies beneath the sea. Now her rigging’s strung with seaweed, and her anchor’s made of sand, and the men who called her deck their home, died far from solid land, hmmm hmm, hm hmmm hm . . . hm . . . hmmm’ . . . Aaaaand I don’t remember the rest.” He was blushing slightly but there was no reason for it. Detective Hermann, it turned out, had an excellent singing voice. Chris had to fight down a natural impulse to applaud.

  “That was really good!” Bethy said, saying what Chris was thinking. “Do you do theme songs?”

  “Do I do—” Detective Hermann abruptly realized what Bethy was planning and rolled his eyes. “I am not doing a theme song for Treasure Hunter,” he said firmly. “Your show doesn’t have a theme song with words. It’s just a minute and a half of enthusiastic drums with clips of Redd falling off things in the background.”

  “Ah, but little do you know that Redd actually wrote words for the theme song,” Bethy said, balancing the camera on a rickety deck chair so she could rummage through one of her file folders. “We’ve just refused to let them see the light of day because he tried to rhyme cucumber with nuclear.”

  “Nuclear and cucumber?” Detective Hermann whispered, brow wrinkled.

  “Wait,” Chris said, “how do you know what the theme song for Treasure Hunter is, anyway?”

  Detective Hermann clammed up, which was very unfair.

  There was both Scottish and Irish in the McRae family genealogy, although for some six generations neither side of Maddison’s family had laid eyes on the home country. But the Irish insisted on persisting in a stubborn streak of red hair and blue eyes, which had cropped up in one of Maddison’s cousins this generation but had skipped Maddison’s side of the family entirely. In Maddison, the genetic red-headedness meant that she came from a family with a tendency toward pale skin that burnt easily. So falling asleep in direct sunlight was probably the last thing Maddison should be doing.

  But the sun was warm without being scorching, and Maddison was running on a sleep deficit from too many long nights and odd hours chasing the secrets of the San Telmo, and the gentle rocking of the waves against the boat was so soothing, and before she quite knew what she was doing she was dreaming.

  Maddison wasn’t one of those people who always remembered her dreams, and she also wasn’t one of those people who could never remember what she had been dreaming about after she woke up. In fact, aside from one especially terrifying nightmare about sand coming to life and eating people, she’d never really worried about her dreams. True, Maddison had poked her nose into enough books about ESP and remote viewing that she had a healthy respect for how little human beings understood about what their brains did while they were sleeping, but her own dreams tended to be so simple and boring and easily explainable that Maddison had never much believed in prophetic dreams, or even that you could psychoanalyze yourself through your dreams. Dreams just were, and usually hers were especially unremarkable.

  This time, she dreamt about boats and water, and a guy only a few years older than her with dark hair and a silver ring on one hand, who needed to tell her something but couldn’t be heard over the waves and the gulls.

  The weird thing was the sense of urgency that was completely unconnected to anything that happened in the dream. Maddison felt like there was something very important hovering just out of her reach, whispering at her, and when a spray of cold seawater startled her awake it was that sense of pressing urgency that took the longest to fade.

  “Pleasant dreams?” her dad asked, offering Maddison a hand and hauling her up from the deck. It hadn’t been a detailed dream to begin with and the images were already starting to fade, so Maddison shook the last of her unease away with the last shreds of the dream itself and shook her head.

  “Just dreaming about boats,” she said lightly, ignoring the way that sense of unease was trying to come back. It was just a random dream, and anyway she didn’t even know who the guy in her dream was.

  Which should have been a warning sign right t
here, because Maddison never had dreams about people she didn’t know.

  The coordinates Carrie had so painstakingly put together and then so desperately tried to preserve led them to one of those little out-of-the-way spots that travel magazines call “hidden wonders” and thereby ruin through exposure. The raggedy edge of Archer’s Grove’s unstable limestone sort-of cliffs plunged down to meet a little half moon of a bay, the beach where they met a pretty white sand that gave way to thick grasses and dark trees. The tideline looked like it came in almost to the feet of the grass, and the limestone cliffs were riddled with holes and caves. It was wild, and surprisingly desolate, and as Detective Hermann observed grimly, very far from a police presence. It was also difficult to get the Meandering Manatee in close to the shore without beaching her in the surprisingly shallow waters; in the end they had to drop the anchor and wade in to the beach, which was how they discovered that while the sand looked pretty, it was coarse and rough on the feet, and they kept kicking up broken bits of mussel shell. There weren’t, however, nearly as many mussels as Chris had expected, what with the mussels having been an important clue to the location of the ship. When he mentioned this Carrie just sighed.