The Treasure

by E. A. House

  “Development wrecked their habitat,” she explained. “And the resulting changes from erosion didn’t help. The mussels Father Gonzales wrote about like deeper water and less sun, so you don’t find them on this beach anymore except as shell fragments. There are a couple of protected areas farther up the coast, though.” So at least they weren’t disturbing the habitat of an endangered species while looking for the San Telmo.

  “This sand must all have come from the white limestone in the cliffs,” Maria said as they splashed to shore, her mask in one hand and air tank in the other. “You can see that the cliffs are almost exactly the same color as the sand, and there must be a lot of erosion when storms blow up. Look at those caves!” She sounded delighted.

  “Scuba divers,” Maddison’s dad said with the sort of sigh he usually only reserved for people who had been driving him nuts for a very long time.

  “Oh, this is going to be fun!” Maria said in response. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”

  “Well, all my friends said I left it behind in a well the last time I went treasure hunting,” Maddison’s dad said, and then Redd choked violently on air and had to be pounded on the back. Bright red and shamefaced, Maddison’s dad said, “That was maybe not the politest way to put it. Too soon, huh?”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything,” Maddison said, shocked despite herself. Maybe her dad wasn’t as okay with this whole mess as he seemed. She shared a worried glance with Carrie, who must have been wondering exactly the same thing Maddison was. Could they actually finish this without everyone losing their tempers and getting into another fight?

  “It was a cistern,” Chris grumbled under his breath. “A cistern, not a well.”

  Or the natural level of goofiness Maddison’s best friends possessed would get them through this. Way to focus on the least important point, Chris, Maddison thought.

  The sand didn’t get any softer when they made it to the beach. In fact, it got worse, because the sand on the beach was both coarse and hot from the sun. Maddison was wearing sandals that she hadn’t taken off underwater but her dad did a small dance of pain before he found a rock to sit on while he put his shoes back on.

  “So, now where?” he said as he tied the laces.

  “I don’t know,” Carrie admitted, sitting down on a piece of driftwood. Chris was thoughtfully burying his feet in the sand. “The latitude and longitude point actually comes to right in the middle of that cliff over there”—Carrie pointed—“and I just realized I was expecting the point to be in the middle of the ocean and that we were going to send down Moby to check out a wreck on the ocean floor.” Which couldn’t happen now because the beloved submersible was back at the local college, and Maddison had heard that what was left of the oceanography department had Moby under strict lock and key so the submersible couldn’t disappear again. Professor Griffin’s actions had the entire college in a state of panic, and nobody had time for the renegade professor’s friend’s niece and nephew. “So, now I can’t even tell if we’re in the right place,” Carrie finished.

  “Oh, we’re in the right place,” Chris said suddenly. He was grinning, a delighted and only slightly manic grin. “There are pieces of eight washing up on this shoreline.”

  DR. MCRAE HAD BROUGHT ALONG A METAL detector. Under different circumstances Chris might have found this the tiniest bit suspicious—why did he have a metal detector in the first place, if he had given up treasure hunting for good?—but Chris was far too excited by his discovery of a piece of eight to complain about a piece of equipment that made treasure hunting easier. And he’d already figured out that Dr. McRae might have tried to leave treasure hunting behind him but you could never really get it out of your blood. Case in point: Dr. McRae not only had a metal detector, he also had a plan for mapping the beach out in a grid so they could graph where they found something and catch any emerging patterns. The only thing he didn’t have was graphing paper, and Bethy was in the middle of pointing out that they could just sketch it out on a piece of paper or even use a smooth spot on the beach when Carrie produced several sheets of graphing paper from a Ziploc bag that also held pens and a sheet of acid-free paper. Sometimes Chris’s cousin was the weirdest thing in existence, and that existence had included gun-wielding maniacs and ghosts.

  With the aid of the metal detector they found a shockingly large pile of old coins. They also found a big handful of regular old pennies and quarters, a Canadian penny, a pound coin, a button, the remnants of a box of fishing tackle—Redd narrowly avoided finding several of the hooks that went with it by stepping on them, but Maria yanked him out of danger just in time—and a car key.

  “It would make so much more sense if this was a boat key,” Chris said as Dr. McRae finished a second sweep of the beach. Carrie and Maddison had a highlighter and were studying the map hastily drawn on a piece of graphing paper and Chris had flopped down on the beach next to them to poke at the pile of found metal objects. “Who drops their car keys into the ocean?”

  Maddison giggled over the map. “Well, I have this cousin with more dramatic flair than common sense who threw her car keys into the ocean in the middle of a fight.”

  “Oh, are these hers, then?”

  “No, my aunt actually made her go get them back,” Maddison said. “Aunt Ruth is kind of scary when she’s mad.”

  “Yeah, and you know what else is scary?” Carrie said, capping her highlighter and spreading the crude map over a convenient rock. “This.”

  There was a pattern to where they’d found the coins. Especially after Carrie had tossed all the modern coins out, along with the car keys and the fishing tackle. This left her with only the pieces of eight and the other rarer Spanish coins, some scattered around the beach but most in a rough cluster that ran from the shoreline up to the base of the cliff.

  At the base of the cliff, what had, from the Meandering Manatee, looked like crevasses now revealed themselves to be caves, cut into the cliff by years upon years of erosion.

  It occurred to Chris that a graduate student who really was studying coastal erosion would be fascinated by the caves they were puzzling over, and that a graduate student who really was studying coastal erosion would also be a lot of help in this situation. The universe was funny sometimes.

  “Okay, now what?” Carrie asked when they’d scrambled up the slight incline and avoided a nest of irritable ants and were all standing in front of the three largest and most tempting cave openings. “Eeny, meeny, miny, mo?”

  The wind picked up. Suddenly, it became obvious why the caves in the area were called the “screaming” caves and why people might think the place was haunted.

  “Did you hear that?” Detective Hermann asked when the first gust had passed and the moaning from the caves had died down to a whimper. It was still creepy. Chris had heard the wind blowing through all sorts of old buildings but it was usually a low moaning. These caves moaned and screamed in a higher pitch.

  “I can’t believe you don’t hear this in the middle of town,” Chris said, wandering closer to try to get a good look inside. Were they sure there weren’t any Skunk Apes in the area?

  “No, I meant that chiming noise,” the detective said, turning in a circle with a frown, just as Chris noticed something carved into the side of the mouth of one of the caves, and wandered closer to look. Someone had chipped the letter R into the side of the cave, and recently too, because the chips in the rock were still pale from lack of weathering, and when Chris ran a finger across the carving the edges were still sharp.

  “‘R’ what?” Chris muttered thoughtfully. “R. Rrrr. Arrr? Are we looking for pirates?”

  He didn’t find any pirates, but he did find, when he wandered over to the cave next to what he decided to call “Cave R” and then again to the cave beyond that, a D and a M carved into each mouth. RDM? What did that mean? There were hardly enough letters to even start figuring out a cypher, and then what three-letter word could be decoded from RDM even if you did manage to figure
out the key to the cypher? He was missing something.

  “Chris!” Maddison said, skidding around the corner and almost crashing into him. “Come here, Detective Hermann’s found something!”

  “And I have no idea what it is I’ve found,” Detective Hermann said when Maddison dragged Chris up a short incline to where the trees started popping up. Carrie, Redd, Bethy, Maria, and Dr. McRae were already clustered around one of the trees, a short pine with a wind chime hanging from one of the scraggly branches at the top.

  “Wind chime,” Chris said, staring at the object tinkling in the wind. It was handmade, just three copper pipes of different lengths suspended from a wire frame and swaying in the wind. “Oh-kay, that’s a new and unexpected development. Who leaves wind chimes on deserted beaches?”

  “Who makes wind chimes and leaves them on deserted beaches?” Maddison added, reaching out and grabbing one of the chimes. “It’s actually kind of pretty in a really understated way—huh.”

  “What’s ‘huh’?” Chris asked. In his experience someone stopping halfway through a sentence to go “huh,” usually meant that something shocking had just been discovered. And from the way Dr. McRae was suddenly looking interested and concerned, Maddison’s father felt the same way.

  “There’s a number on this chime,” Maddison said. “And on this one,” she added, dropping that chime and snagging another as the whole wind chime tried to revolve away in a light wind. “And I’m willing to bet that there is also . . . ”

  “A number on this one,” Carrie finished, tapping it. “This is wind chime number three. Two and one?” she pointed to Maddison’s chime and the one floating free. Maddison nodded.

  “There are three caves back there with letters carved into the entrances,” Chris offered. “R, D, and M.”

  “Not ABC?” Maddison asked.

  “Nope,” Chris said. “Do the letters RDM mean anything to you?” Maddison shook her head. So did Carrie, Bethy, Maria, Redd, Detective Hermann, and Dr. McRae, although Detective Hermann shook his head slowly and thoughtfully, like he was reserving judgement for the time being.

  “I guess it could be someone’s initials,” Carrie offered dubiously.

  “But why put them on wind chimes?” Maddison asked. She was still turning one of the chimes over in her hand, and suddenly froze. “Plus, this one has a star on it.”

  That did not help matters. It was abundantly clear that this was a clue to which cave they needed to go into, hopefully a clue to which cave had the treasures of the San Telmo buried in its depths, hopefully left by someone on their side—but what connection could there possibly be between a wind chime and the letters RDM? They tried rearranging the letters in a handful of ways, went back to the wind chimes themselves a second time, and even walked down to the caves again, but nothing jumped out at Chris.

  “What do you think?” Maddison asked her dad after counting the number of tips on the star she’d discovered didn’t go anywhere.

  “I think I miss Ryan,” Dr. McRae said. “I’m good at codes and cyphers; he was much better at the whole ‘cross-discipline’ thing.” He flicked one of the chimes absentmindedly, and then squinted in concentration as it rang out. “I doubt it’s relevant, and my ear isn’t the best,” he said, “but these have a really good tone, don’t they?”

  Detective Hermann dropped the doubloon he was fiddling with. “Oh,” the detective said. “I was thinking it was just a flight of fancy. Do you mind doing that again?” Dr. McRae raised an eyebrow but he flicked the chime again. Then he did the same thing to one and then the other of the chimes, everyone watching Detective Hermann intently as he did. The detective tilted his head and nodded, and when the last of the ringing had faded out he said, “Do, re, and mi.”

  “Really?” Maddison yelped.

  “It’s a scale?” Chris asked. Also, was that “re” like in McRae, and so a secretive message from Aunt Elsie, or was he reading too much into things?

  “Do that again and let me get it on camera,” Bethy said.

  “Those chimes do have a really clear tone,” Detective Hermann said, “and they’re each a tone on a scale. So, do, re, mi, one, two, three—which chime has a star on it again?”

  “Number two,” Maddison said.

  “Well that makes it even easier,” Dr. McRae said. “We don’t have to figure out if the scale is supposed to be descending or ascending, we know re is in the middle either way.”

  “Unless this is a trick to throw us off the track,” Chris said, suddenly worried. He didn’t have an ear for music; Carrie had done piano lessons in elementary school but Chris had never been interested. He would never have figured out what the wind chimes were supposed to tell him if they hadn’t brought Detective Hermann along. And if the person who’d gotten this far before them (but not too far before them) had been Aunt Elsie, then why would she leave a clue that Chris didn’t have a hope of figuring out, and Carrie very little?

  “I don’t think this is a trick,” Redd said. He shared a look with Dr. McRae, who nodded. They both looked much more somber than two people looking for buried treasure had any right to look, especially since if Detective Hermann was right they’d all just gotten one step closer to finding the San Telmo. “Ryan Moore was a halfway-decent saxophone player,” Redd said, “and what he was lacking in real talent he made up for with practice and determination. He’d have figured this clue out in a heartbeat, and Elsie would know that one of us would know that she’d be thinking of him right about now.”

  “If that sentence made sense, which it really didn’t,” Dr. McRae sighed, “this was most likely a clue meant for me or Redd, or even for Griffin,” he clarified. “And knowing Elsie, she also did this specifically to remind everyone of Ryan and to make sure that if any one of us had a guilty conscience, he would suffer going forward.”

  On the one hand, that was reassuring. And if Redd and Dr. McRae were right, then they were safely one step closer to the San Telmo and Aunt Elsie had left them one last clue. On the other hand, Chris couldn’t help feel like the caves were darker and creepier now that Aunt Elsie had reminded them of Ryan Moore. It was like she’d come back from beyond the grave to remind them that she was beyond the grave—and going into a cave, underground, to the underworld, just after talking about a guilty conscience, was a little too metaphorical for Chris.

  And did the mouth of the cave have to have so many teeth-like edges?

  “Chris, stop daydreaming and come on,” Carrie said, rapping gently on his head with her flashlight. “We still have to find this ship.” And she led the way into the mouth of the cave marked “R.”

  IT WAS DARK INSIDE, AND EVEN DAMPER AND MORE humid than it was outside, and the one saving grace was that there did not appear to be any bats. Chris swept his flashlight across the ceiling looking for them before it occurred to him that a bright beam of light might wake up and startle a ceiling full of bats, which was not conducive to a bat-free existence.

  And maybe there were so few bats because there was so much water. The screaming caves were, after all, sea caves, and they had been carved out of the white limestone cliffs by centuries of pounding waves, and something of the ocean still soaked through the very rock. They had water-worn walls and floors gritty with sand and shells, seawater pooled in depressions on the floor or running in small streams through the caves, on the way from one mysterious underwater river to another.

  The cave Aunt Elsie had carved an “R” into had a wide opening, which led into a winding tunnel through which the wind screamed at odd intervals. For the first couple of yards they even had a little natural light to offset the flashlights they soon had to switch on, along with Maddison’s headlamp. Then the cave narrowed and sloped downward a bit and the walls got closer, and they came to their first problem.

  “Two different branches,” Redd said, halting in front of them. “Should we flip one of the pieces of eight?” They had packed all the coins, as well as the modern coins and the car key, into paper-towel-lined plastic
bags. Chris had only gotten a moderate number of alarmed looks when he’d produced the bags. “It pays to be prepared,” he’d insisted.

  “We have enough people to split into two groups,” Carrie pointed out, and Redd grimaced. “I don’t want to either, but unless we—what is it, Maddison?” Maddison was frowning intently at the ground by their feet, and when Carrie asked, she knelt down and scooped something up from the floor.

  “It’s your necklace,” she said to Carrie, whose hand immediately flew to her throat, where she’d been wearing her aunt’s locket the way she almost always did.

  “I’m still wearing my necklace,” Carrie said, bewildered.

  “Well, then, this is an excellent copy,” Maddison said.

  She rubbed a bit of sand from the face of the object in her hands and held it out to Carrie, who said, “What on Earth?” and continued to stare. Chris leaned over Carrie’s shoulder. Resting in Maddison’s palm was a compass, only a little bigger than Carrie’s necklace and the exact same shape and bronze color.

  “I found it lying on the ground next to this branch of the tunnel,” Maddison said, turning it over so Chris could see the back and then handing it to Detective Hermann, who was stuck at the back of their little adventuring party because he was bringing up the rear in case of unexpected Griffins. “It looks almost exactly like the necklace your aunt gave you but I think it was supposed to be a working compass,” Maddison said.

  Detective Hermann passed the compass to Dr. McRae, who looked at it and gasped.

  “Mads,” he asked, squeezing the compass to death in a fist, “did you find it lying randomly on the floor, or was it propped up?”

  “It was leaning against the wall where I could see it,” Maddison said. “Dad, what’s the matter?”

  “We could never get it to work,” Dr. McRae said to himself. “This—it was supposed to be a working compass when Ryan gave it to Elsie.”