At either side of the entrance to the bookstore, middle-aged black women called higlers wearing colorful clothing sat in front of stands made of produce boxes. Each of the women held up a mango in one hand and a bunch of bananas in the other. They were part of Jamaica’s informal economy that usually consisted of women who had one or more children staking out regular spots along the market streets to sell their wares.
“Yes, my dear. I will buy some of your beautiful fruit after my friend and I conclude our business inside,” Gaylord said while flashing a flirty smile at the buxom woman sitting on the right side of the entrance to the bookstore.
“I be wait’in right heah fo you, honey.” Beaming, she winked and batted her eyes.
Mandrago chuckled and shook his head. He thought of Jac’s comment last night referring to Gaylord’s escapades with Jamaican women.
A little bell hanging over the door jingled their arrival. The store was tidy. The outside walls were lined with neat rows of bookshelves filled with old books. A highly polished wooden ladder attached to a rail that ran around the perimeter provided access to the higher shelves. In front, at the center of the store, an attractive well-dressed woman with graying hair sat behind a desk piled high with books and papers. She stopped typing and turned toward them, her lips parting into a smile of recognition that revealed beautiful white teeth. When she stood up, Mandrago noticed she was unlike the women outside. Curvaceous and about five foot nine, she wore a gray suit with a white blouse ruffled at the collar. Her curves were in all the right places.
She extended her hand toward Gaylord. “Hello, Gaylord. It’s been a long time.”
“Chauncey, my dear, you are more beautiful every time I see you,” Gaylord said as he leaned in, took her hand, and kissed her on the cheek.
“There you go with that blarney again,” said Chauncey while her questioning eyes focused on Mandrago.
“This is my very dear friend, Mandrago Kidd. Oh, and Chauncey, you’ll have to watch out for him. He’s a rogue. A pirate like his ancestor, Captain Kidd.”
She extended her hand, asking, “More of your blarney, Gaylord?”
“No, I swear it’s the truth.”
Mandrago took her hand, adding, “It’s the truth, and I’m very glad to meet you.” He looked deep into her mahogany eyes while something inside his mind kept saying, Don’t let go!
Shattering the spell of the moment, the little bell over the entrance jingled.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Glaring and pointing a finger in Gaylord’s face, the man towered above him with an over-six-foot muscular frame. He looked to be in his early thirties with sun-streaked curly brown hair and golden skin giving him the look of a surfer. A thin jagged scar on his right cheek extended below his jaw.
“James, don’t talk to Mr. Burke that way!” Chauncey scolded. “He’s always welcome.” Her voice softened, “Now, son, you apologize.”
James grumbled, turning his butterscotch eyes upward into Mandrago’s gaze.
“You gotta problem?” challenged James.
“No. But you will … if you don’t back off,” Mandrago whispered. His eyes fixed on James like a rattlesnake about to strike, waiting for any threatening move.
“James, stop it now!” Chauncey implored. She turned to Mandrago. “Please excuse my son. I don’t know what gets into him.”
“Okay, Mother! I just have trouble understanding what you see in this piece of Irish shit,” James sneered. He turned again to look into Mandrago’s eyes as he flipped his arms upward in disgust before he headed toward a curtained doorway at the back of the store.
“I’m sorry, Gaylord, Mr. Kidd,” Chauncey said. “He doesn’t mean what he says.”
Mandrago nodded, but sensed that he and James might run into a few problems in the near future.
“He has his father’s disposition,” Gaylord offered. “No harm done. Now listen, Chauncey, Mandrago here needs to pick your brain about Caribbean history. I told him you’re an authority and could help.” Gaylord walked to the door and turned with a mischievous smile on his broad face. “I’ll be right back. I need to see about getting some fruit.”
“Thank you, Mr. Kidd, for not challenging James,” said Chauncey. “What is it that I can help you with?”
Mandrago explained what Jac had asked him last night, omitting any reference or implication that might connect his inquiry to a potential treasure. Since security was always of paramount importance, Mandrago lied, telling Chauncey his sons were coming to Jamaica to research a book.
A noise caused Chauncey to abruptly turn her head toward the back of the store. “Hmmm, I see,” she said.
Mandrago began to give her the information and noticed a hesitation when he mentioned the names Anne Bonney and Mary Read.
“I’ll try to get some research done and get back to you in a day or so,” said Chauncey dismissing any further conversation. “I have to get back to work.”
“That’ll be great. Why don’t you and your husband have dinner with us tomorrow evening?” He noticed another hesitation when she began to thumb through an open book on her desk. When she didn’t respond, Mandrago thought she may not have heard him, and reiterated the dinner invite.
“My husband is dead. If you wish, call me tomorrow … I’ll let you know,” Chauncey said in a loud whisper while her gaze remained fixed toward the back of the store. “I must get back to work.” She fumbled with some papers, picked up a book, looked at it for a moment, and started to walk toward the back of the store. Mandrago could see she was intent on avoiding further conversation and decided not to call after her.
Gaylord stuck his head in the door to say Jac’s plane would be landing in about thirty minutes and they needed to run.
Chauncey was at the back of the store near the curtain. She turned around.
Mandrago called out that he would call her to confirm about dinner and hurried out of the shop.
What the hell was that all about? Mandrago thought. He sensed fear in Chauncey’s demeanor after James’s arrival and made a mental note to delve further into her circumstances. He’d felt a curious twinge in his gut while he was talking to her, almost like the one he’d felt when he first saw Jac’s mother sitting on a dock as he sailed into the port at Cartagena.
“Where the hell you been, Mandrago? I’ve been talking to you for five minutes. You look as if you’ve seen a ghost,” Gaylord probed.
“Yeah, something … like … that.” Mandrago felt another twinge in his stomach.
CHAPTER 18
Montego Bay Airport
Jac’s eyes popped open when a booming voice over the loudspeaker announced the plane would be landing in fifteen minutes. He looked down through the billowing white cumulus clouds streaking by and saw the turquoise waters and white beaches of the emerald green island of Jamaica.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” said Abigail, sitting next to Jac. Roni and Peri were behind them.
“Yes.”
While everyone slept, Jac had worked on his theory. He had some ideas of where to start looking. Of course it would take some time to find a starting point. And then it might still be a false positive. He needed to find the location that Anne mentioned in the diary—the location where Calico Jack and his band of marauders assaulted the Spanish caravel. Then they may have a starting point. It was iffy, Jac knew, since Calico could have sailed away from the area. Jac needed to create a time line from the evidence in the diary. The key would be to count on some reliable fact in the diary. Hopefully, Jac thought, the fact could be that Calico had stayed relatively close by and found a deserted islet where he could maroon Anne and Mary while the crew went off to spend their booty. Anne had written about how long she and Mary were stranded, and this might provide clues to a location if they were able to get a fix on how many days it took Calico Jack to get to Tortuga and back. He could create a circle around that
area, and the Spanish ship would be in the center. Jac felt it was a place to start. He also hoped his father had come up with some new facts that would give him a few more puzzle pieces.
“Jac, do you think Austin will follow us to Jamaica?” Abigail asked.
“The box was empty—what do you think?
CHAPTER 19
Dockside, Montego Bay, Jamaica
Several seagulls were squawking challenges at a pelican who had stolen and was about to eat the remnants of a freshly gutted fish. Nearby, a fisherman cursed at a seagull for stealing bait off his hook. Amused by the aggressive bird’s behavior, Jac and his father, each with a cup of coffee in hand, watched the birds battle from the deck of the Golden Adventurer.
“Let’s get back to business,” Jac said, rolling out the blown-up image of Abigail’s leather map across the top of the cabin that covered the main salon.
“Jac, you have any idea what these large circles around the X represent?” Mandrago moved his finger around the map.
“Peri and I believe they’re levels of a mountain with the marked Xs being the top, or the indication of where something could be buried.”
“That makes sense.” Mandrago carefully moved his finger toward the edge of the map where one of the circles was cut in half and appeared to be twice the size of the others. “What do you make of this one?”
“That’s where the map was split in half. I believe it’s the key to the location we’re looking for.”
“Yep, I agree.” Mandrago looked Jac in the eye. “But we still will have to find the other half of that circle to help pinpoint the location.”
Jac nodded his affirmation, walked to the starboard rail, and looked out to sea toward the horizon. He was thinking of the many maps he had seen that used the letter X to mark a spot. They didn’t only mark locations of buried treasure, but marked meeting locations, safe havens, or reefs that couldn’t be seen along coastlines or coves. The X had one other very significant meaning. Most pirates couldn’t read or write, so they signed their names with the only letter they knew to mean something—an X.
The lore and mystery of “X marks the spot” and the buccaneers who scribbled the associated documents had made Jac’s decision about what he wanted to do with his life easy. He loved puzzles, maps, and rumors surrounding treasure, either buried or sunk in ships. His imagination wouldn’t let him sleep at night without dreaming about the related problems, and sometimes he would wake up and jot down a possible solution or key to the solution.
He was really hooked. He remembered a particular day when his father had arrived home after being away for several months at sea. Jac was around five years old. Mandrago sneaked into Jac’s bedroom while Jac was asleep. He tickled Jac’s feet and then hid. After repeating the tickle several times, Mandrago’s bellowing laugh woke Jac, who opened his eyes and screamed out with joy at seeing his father peeking out from behind his door. Jac jumped up on top of his bed and leaped into his father’s arms. After a big hug and another tickle to set the mood, Mandrago reached down to the floor beside Jac’s bed. He always brought some treasure home to Jac after a hunt. Jac was wary of his father’s proclivity for playing tricks. If the hunt had been unsuccessful, this would be just another, as Jac called it, smelly fish.
His father handed him the wrapped present. Jac assessed the evidence. It was long and skinny. It felt solid, and it was heavy. It could be a fish, he thought, but when he tried to bend it, it resisted. He examined the covering. It was wrapped in newspapers from the island of Barbados. Jac, still wary, snuck a look to see if the expression on his father’s face would give him a clue. But that didn’t work. His father was being coy, and had his eyes focused on the ceiling. After several seconds of contemplating, Jac couldn’t contain his curiosity any longer. He tore into the paper and found it wasn’t a fish. It was a cutlass—no, it was a really a large boucan knife.
His father had told him the story of the Spanish settlers being forced to move off the island of Hispaniola in the early seventeenth century when the French were about to take over the island. Large herds of livestock were left behind to roam wild. The marooned sailors and convicts who couldn’t leave the island started to hunt the animals. Arawak Indians taught the men to cure and preserve the meat using a barbecue grill called a boucan. The men became proficient with the boucan knives and learned to slice the meat in perfect strips. They would trade some of the seasoned dried meat—jerky—to the French for rum, guns, and provisions. The French called the men boucaniers and considered them part of the tradesmen on the island. The French called pirates filibustiers, or filibusters. It was the English who derived the alternative name for pirates. They called them buccaneers.
“Where did you find this, Dad?” the young Jac had asked Mandrago had smiled. “Well, Jac, it all started when a close friend of mine bought an abandoned building on the island of Barbados. It was originally built in the late seventeenth century. He asked me to help him tear down some of the inner walls to open the space up for a restaurant he wanted to build. Behind one of the walls we found a secret room the size of a closet. It was filled with assorted artifacts like carving tools, an old musket, and even a peg leg. Hidden in an old cabinet we found a coded map marked with an X on it. The outline around the X didn’t make any sense. And the code was a riddle that made no sense. After the restaurant was finished, I went home and went back to work. Several hunts turned out to be dead ends. And for two years my friend and I kept in touch to kick around possible solutions because we couldn’t get the gibberish out of our minds. Finally, we enlisted an expert code breaker and two university English history professors. After several months, they found a possible solution to the code. The map, along with the broken code, led us to an underwater cavern on a nearby islet. We discovered the remnants of an oar and the hilt of a cutlass sticking up through the sand at the spot where the X was depicted on the map. We dug around the blade, and two feet down, we found it went through the bones of a buccaneer and pinned him to a chest filled with silver and gold coins.”
Jac smiled at the memory and reached into his shirt. Hanging on a gold chain was a gold coin—one of the coins his father had found in the chest.
It was the story that had stirred Jac’s imagination more than the actual cutlass. Jac realized the real treasure is in the hunt for the clues. What excited Jac even more was putting himself in the place of the person who had devised the clues, and following in his footsteps to the metaphorical X. It wasn’t always an X. Sometimes it was a riddle, a poem, or a series of letters with bits of information that, when assembled in logical order, represented the X.
Jac had been captivated. It was no longer just the fictional accounts of the pirates he read about like the conniving Long John Silver, from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, but the real rogues who were legendary in folklore.
Hanging above the door in Jac’s cabin on the Golden Adventurer, the cutlass from his father’s adventure became the symbol of reality that fired his imagination. That birthday present had changed his life. Vowing to hunt down the lost treasures of the nefarious scalawags called buccaneers became the course he was destined to follow for the rest of his life.
In every novel Jac read, he pictured his father as the adventurer who always won out over evil and rode into the sunset with the fair lady at the end.
It wasn’t until years later, after many disappointing dead ends, that Jac found it was not only difficult work investigating mysteries clouded by the passage of time in legend and conjecture, but that the X didn’t always mark the spot, and the fair lady at the end wasn’t always a lady, and was never fair.
“Yep, the cook may be right,” Mandrago said. “You know, son, we’re going to need a helicopter to ascertain the general location.”
“We’re going to use the power chutes.”
Mandrago paused to look into Jac’s eyes questioning, “Peri? Fly? I hope he doesn’t land on his head l
ike a gooney bird.”
“He’ll surprise you, Dad. But it’s going to take us a while before we’re ready to attempt landing on the boat,” Jac said before taking a sip of his coffee. “Tell me about this bookstore lady you met—Chauncey Rutherford. Do you believe she really will help us?” Jac started to trace his finger around the circles on the map, thinking of Anne’s words, hid, hide.
“According to Gaylord, Chauncey knows just about everything there is to know about all the pirates who sailed in and around the Caribbean. And I suspect she knows more than she’s saying about Anne Bonney and Mary Read. I can’t put my finger on what she’s hiding.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I told her what you needed she became aloof, wouldn’t commit to having dinner with us, and immediately refused eye contact. It was as if she’d seen a ghost.” Mandrago paused to drink from his cup. “It was strange how her attitude changed. I saw fear in her eyes. Then, on the way to the airport to pick you up, Gaylord filled me in on what he knows about her. Seems Chauncey’s husband, James Murdoch, was in and out of trouble with the law. He was a small-time hood with big-time aspirations He was the strong-arm enforcer running the collection operation for a gambling syndicate.”
“Seems like crime runs in the family.”
“Not exactly. Let me tell you the rest of the story,” Mandrago said. He cleared his throat and began. “Gaylord was working undercover writing an exposé on gambling in the islands when he met Chauncey. When the series of articles was published, it caused an investigation by the police that put James Sr. and several others under indictment for racketeering. Months before her husband’s arrest, Chauncey filed for divorce and was waiting for the final decree.” Mandrago paused to rub his eyes.
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