The Treasure

by E. A. House

  But at the time, Chris was bewildered. And he wondered. Because for just a second, when he looked over the side of the dock at Professor Griffin’s body, his reflection was joined by Dr. McRae’s, Robin Redd’s, and two more reflections, both less distinct but still clearly visible.

  One, in fact, was a silhouette Chris would recognize anywhere.

  “I know it sounds crazy,” he told Carrie and Maddison days later, “but it was Aunt Elsie.”

  Carrie thought about it for a minute and a half—Chris timed her—and finally said, “That makes sense.”

  “Wait, really?”

  “He shouldn’t have fallen through the dock the way he did,” Carrie said. “I read the insurance investigator’s report and the entire rest of the dock was solid? How?”

  “Not an act of God but the act of a ghost,” Maddison said thoughtfully.

  “Two ghosts, actually,” Chris said, and described the second reflection he had seen in the water, that of a dark-haired man not much older than they were. “I couldn’t make out his face, but his shirt was red,” he remembered. “And there was something silver on his hand, so he might have been wearing a ring? Or it was the light reflecting on the water. I didn’t recognize him but he still seemed familiar.”

  “Ryan Moore,” Maddison said, suddenly. They were meeting in Chris’s bedroom again and she lunged for the desk drawer where Chris was keeping all their supplies from the San Telmo investigation. “Ryan Moore had an argument with his parents a week before he disappeared about his hair length,” Maddison explained as she upended Chris’s filing system. “It was a problem with the investigation because none of their pictures matched what he looked like when he disappeared—imagine him with longer hair,” she said, shoving the missing-persons poster under Chris’s nose.

  “Holy—that’s him, that’s the guy I saw reflected in the water!”

  “That’s the guy I was dreaming about right before we found the San Telmo,” Maddison added, and explained the dream she had nearly forgotten, of a man wearing a silver ring and conveying a great sense of unease. It had been Ryan Moore—the same Ryan Moore, it was now obvious—who had appeared to them in the cistern of St. Erasmus.

  It made a grim sort of sense, if you thought about it long enough. Ryan Moore had died while looking for the San Telmo when a wooden support had given way and his “friend” Willis Griffin had refused to help him up, instead shoving him over the edge. Willis Griffin died when the wooden boards of a deck gave way as he tried to steal the discovery of the San Telmo away from its rightful holders. It did not take much imagination to see revenge long delayed and finally fulfilled.

  Maddison went back to the cistern at St. Erasmus later that summer with her EMF meter and checked, and she wasn’t surprised to get no anomalous readings whatsoever. The same thing happened when she went back to the dock with the EMF meter to where Professor Griffin had died; whatever ghostly presence had once been there was long gone by the time Maddison got around to looking. It was disappointing, in a way—Maddison would have liked to confirm, if just to herself, that Ryan Moore had really been there that day. But it was also a good thing. His spirit had done what it needed to do, and he was now at peace. And he wasn’t the only one who’d been watching over them that day.

  “Aunt Elsie was looking out for us at the site of the wreck, too,” Chris realized, thinking of golden flower crowns and the danger of tripping and hitting your head in shallow water. “That crown tripping Professor Griffin was just a little too convenient.”

  DETECTIVE HERMANN DID NOT FALL TO HIS death when Professor Griffin sent him over the edge of the dock. Instead, he landed conveniently on a latticework of boards a few feet from the same rocky shoreline that Professor Griffin later crashed into, and he spent much of the confrontation between Griffin and the crew of the Meandering Manatee trying and failing to untangle himself from the dock supports. At about the point Redd joined the argument he looked up from a failing effort to get a bent nail detached from his belt loop and discovered Brad, clinging to a crossbeam and whimpering in fear.

  “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know,” the small-time crook gasped when he made eye contact with Detective Hermann. “Just get me down from here, and keep me away from him!”

  “Griffin?” Detective Hermann asked, and then they both gave a start as a body crashed to the sandy shore between them. Detective Hermann peered down at Professor Griffin. Then he craned his neck up to meet the eyes of Dr. McRae and Robin Redd, and then back down to look at the body.

  “Well,” he said, “I think you’ll be safe from Griffin from now on.”

  Brad risked a glance down, gulped, and screwed his eyes shut. Detective Hermann sighed. He hated it when cases ended like this; it always felt like the perpetrators got away scot-free and the victims didn’t get the closure they deserved. Then again . . . there had been the same eerie feeling Detective Hermann got from graveyards hanging around this whole case, and an unnerving number of “accidents” that happened at just the right moment. And furthermore . . . Detective Hermann looked at Brad, still clinging to the underside of the dock and whimpering . . . this time, the death of the main perpetrator didn’t mean that the secret of the San Telmo was lost to a watery grave.

  Maddison finally got to go home just after sunset. It would have been even later, but the sheer number of police officers undercover at the marina meant that there were plenty of people on the scene. Agent Grey, in fact, had been seconds from going after Professor Griffin herself when he’d fallen, and was only relieved that she hadn’t had to tackle someone off a cliff again. Forrest had reassuringly explained that the dock wasn’t a cliff and that it looked like there were fewer rocks underneath the dock than there had been under that Scottish cliff, and thereby succeeded in making Brad cling more tightly to the underside of the dock while the fire department was trying to get him down.

  All Maddison wanted to do was get one single good night’s sleep, uninterrupted by her dad having a crisis or Chris making a discovery or someone trying to break into someone else’s house. What she got, when they finally pulled into the driveway, was an unusually high number of cars in the drive.

  “Please tell me you know who all these people are,” Carrie begged, opening the passenger door of the car anyway. They’d vaguely planned on putting Chris and Carrie up in the spare room overnight and both Carrie and Maddison desperately needed to pee, so it wasn’t as though they could just turn around and spend the night somewhere else.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen some of these cars in my life,” Maddison admitted, but her dad was trudging grimly up the front drive and Chris had scrambled out of the car and followed him, and she had no choice but to do the same. “It can’t be that bad,” Maddison told Carrie, privately thinking it was a good thing Bethy and Redd had left for their hotel rooms and Maria had zipped off on her motorcycle. Maddison’s dad had veered off to check the mailbox, as was his habit, and Chris got to the door first and opened it.

  Then he promptly shut it again and turned around to leave.

  “Maddison!” someone yelled from inside the house, and the door sprang back open, revealing Mr. Lyndon, retired police chief and normally an inhabitant of Nebraska.

  “What are you doing here?” Maddison asked. Mr. Lyndon snagged Chris by the back of the shirt and smiled at Maddison.

  “At the same time I booked your family the red-eye tickets last week, I booked myself a plane ticket for today,” he explained. Maddison’s dad turned away from the mailbox with a letter in his hand and froze dead in shock. Mr. Lyndon smiled at him. “I was hardly going to let Kevin go running off into massive amounts of trouble without coming to check in on him. And then I got in and you and your dad were off on a boat and your mother had invited the Kingsolvers over for coffee and moral support. What have you two been doing?”

  “Greg,” Maddison’s dad said, “we found it.”

  “Your common sense?”

  “No, the San Telmo,” Chris said. He l
ooked magnificently resigned, caught by Mr. Lyndon. Maddison didn’t figure out why until after they’d braved going inside and she had managed to get to the bathroom, when she walked into the living room and discovered Chris sitting awkwardly next to his mom and dad.

  “I may not have told my mom about the San Telmo,” Chris told Maddison in a hushed whisper when she sat down next to him. “Or my dad. Or my aunt and uncle.” He sucked in a breath. “And now they know all about it because your dad told them, and Mom wishes Professor Griffin hadn’t fallen off the dock because she wanted to push him off herself, and I think that’s everything you missed.”

  “Did they explain what they are all doing here?” Maddison asked. Her mom inviting Chris’s mom over for coffee made a certain amount of sense, but they had somehow collected both Carrie’s parents, Chris’s dad, and Mr. Lyndon as well.

  Chris fidgeted. “Exchanging embarrassing stories about us?”

  In the end, despite what Detective Hermann had feared, the tragedy of the San Telmo was not swept away by time and tide and human error. Professor Willis Griffin was dead, but there was the testimony from Brad, the testimony from Harvey, and Bethy Bradlaw’s videotaped recordings. Together, the body of evidence was overwhelming and condemning. True, there was nobody left to prosecute aside from Brad and Harvey, who had so obviously been pawns of Griffin that neither the Kingsolvers nor the McRaes even worried about taking them to trial, although both young men were so badly shaken by the experience that even if they had gotten off lightly they weren’t inclined to step off the straight and narrow for a while. But Ryan Moore was finally laid to rest under his own name with a proper funeral, and Elsie Kingsolver’s inexplicable death was explained to her family and friends.

  The funeral for Professor Willis Griffin was sparsely attended. By the time his body was released, the discovery of the San Telmo, and the incident at the marina in which he had lost his life, were both the hottest topics in town. Everyone knew about the tragic, crazed demise of the oceanography professor. Few people wanted to be associated with him, and even fewer had any sympathy. Professor Griffin was exactly the wrong kind of publicity for an island that based its tourism around being family friendly. The only attention he got after his death was from a handful of out-of-town journalists looking for a sensational story; and they gave up pretty quickly when nobody at the college or the Edgewater Archive would talk to them. Professor Griffin had left his savings and his belongings to the oceanography department and it was Abigail, his oldest and longest-lasting graduate student, who organized the funeral and carried out his final wishes. He had no surviving family.

  Chris went to the funeral. He didn’t tell his parents, who were both furious with the professor and simply glad he couldn’t hurt another member of the family, and he didn’t tell Carrie, who’d been very quiet about Professor Griffin since he’d turned on them. But Chris had far more years of good memories than bad ones when he thought of Professor Griffin, and he couldn’t move on without saying goodbye.

  It was an outdoors ceremony on a rainy afternoon, and Chris was sitting in the back row spinning his umbrella from hand to hand when Carrie slid into the seat beside him.

  “I think I can forgive Professor Griffin for everything except for this one thing,” Carrie said without looking at Chris. “I wanted to pick him up and shake him and demand to know why he did it, and now I can’t.”

  “I’d heard so many good things about him,” Maddison agreed, sitting down on the other side of Chris. “I think I met the nice side of him exactly once, and then Dad rushed me out of there and halfway across the state and I never got to get to know him. Dad’s here, by the way,” she added. “But he and Redd are hiding by the pine trees right now.”

  Dr. McRae only stopped lurking after the ceremony. Chris went up to look at the headstone and Dr. McRae was suddenly there, hands stuffed in his pockets and umbrella dangling from one wrist.

  “Did you ever read his favorite book?” Dr. McRae asked.

  “Moby-Dick?” Chris asked. “No. I started it a couple of times but it was so long I never got far.”

  “Well, we always used to disagree about the fundamental point of the book,” Dr. McRae said. Chris couldn’t see where on Earth this conversation was going but he listened politely all the same. Professor Griffin had been so fond of Moby-Dick he had named his submersible after the whale. “I said that the great white whale is unattainable,” Dr. McRae explained, “and that Ahab wrecks himself with his determination to catch Moby Dick. I maintained, and still do, that that is the tragedy of the whole book. Terrible things happen to the people around Ahab, and then finally to Ahab himself, just because he couldn’t stop chasing that stupid whale.”

  “What did Professor Griffin think about the book?” Chris asked.

  “That it was about the tragedy of the rest of the world not understanding the lengths someone might have to go to in order to achieve greatness,” Dr. McRae said. He pulled his hands out of his pockets only to cross them over his chest. “In retrospect, we probably should have seen that as a warning sign.” Chris winced. “Anyway, he’s beyond our human sensibilities now. I hope he’s happy wherever he is,” Dr. McRae sighed.

  Chris discovered Redd lurking among the pine trees while taking a shortcut through the cemetery, and although he knew it was a solemn and sad occasion, all he could think to say when he saw Redd was, “I saw you in this same outfit at Aunt Elsie’s funeral.”

  “It’s difficult to go incognito when you have a distinctive flowing mane and trademark hats,” said the television star. He was wearing a ball cap pulled low, with a dark hoodie and sunglasses to complete the picture.

  “Do you know that you look like the Unabomber?” Chris asked.

  “Ah, but I don’t look like Robin Redd, star of Treasure Hunter!” Redd pointed out, which was true. “And this way, nobody in their right mind is going to approach me and ask for directions.”

  Which was also true.

  When Abigail stopped by the cemetery a few days after the funeral and walked out to Professor Griffin’s grave to see that it hadn’t been disturbed, she found a Spanish doubloon lying on the fresh dirt. She didn’t have a photographic memory, but it looked such an awful lot like one of the doubloons they kept retrieving from the San Telmo that she started to pick it up to return it but then she stopped. It had so obviously been left on the grave for a reason that she didn’t have the heart to bring it back to where it belonged.

  Dr. Kevin McRae had a streak of loyalty running through him.

  Ryan Moore was finally laid to rest in a Georgia churchyard near his childhood home on a hazy July day, in a small, quiet afternoon ceremony under the willow trees.

  It had taken that long to sort out red tape and hammer out time of death on the very distant chance that they decided to prosecute one of Griffin’s associates for the murder of Ryan Moore. It would have taken longer but Agent Grey had finally lost her patience and marched down to the coroner’s office and asked, in a voice only pretending to be polite, if they really needed to make a grieving family wait another twenty years to get some closure.

  She was exaggerating on the years, but not by much, and she was scary when she wanted to be—really, she was one of those people who were always a little scary, but most people were too scared to tell her that—so Ryan Moore was finally laid to rest fifteen years after he had disappeared. His family had not wanted a media circus and they’d gone to great lengths to keep the date and time of the ceremony under wraps, and although there were two people there who were not members of the family, out of respect for the Moore family’s privacy, they hung back.

  Kevin McRae waited until all but one of the other mourners had left before he made his way up to the grave, hands in his pockets. There had been white roses to scatter over the coffin and he paused with his in hand.

  “I’m going to be yelled at if anyone notices this,” he said, and pulled something shiny out of the pocket of his suit jacket. The gold doubloon from the San T
elmo glittered even under the overcast sky; Dr. McRae tossed it in a high arc and caught it, then knelt so he could toss the rose and coin in gently. Then he stood up at the sound of feet crunching on the gravel.

  “Was that what I think it was?” Robin Redd asked.

  “Depends on what you think it was,” Dr. McRae said, hands back in his pockets. Redd was holding his own rose in the same hand that had his hat.

  “How’d you get it past Maddison?” Redd asked. Because they didn’t have the right sort of training and practice to do the hands-on work, Maddison, Chris, and Carrie were stuck on cataloging duty whenever they went down to the San Telmo site to help. This duty included standing watch at the door and over the six tables set up for laying out relics to prevent people from accidentally wandering off with gold coins, and Maddison had taken to that particular job with a gleeful ferocity.

  “I tucked it into my pocket before I even left the cave,” Dr. McRae admitted. “It’s not like she pats people down before they leave.”

  “Huh,” Redd said. He was fiddling with the decorative band on his hat; this one a somber black affair with a simple black-and-white checked band. “I just put it in my hat,” he said when he’d finally worked the gold coin loose from the band.

  Dr. McRae smiled despite himself. “Typical,” he said, as Redd let a white rose and a second gold coin fall onto the coffin. Dr. McRae politely ignored the way Redd’s eyes were watering.

  “Allergies, you know,” he sniffed and blew his nose in the Kleenex Dr. McRae handed him. “Now he’s got two gold coins to pay for the ferry.”

  “Ryan was Methodist,” Dr. McRae said gently. “I don’t think they believe in paying the ferry to cross over.”

  “Well, it can’t hurt,” Redd said. “And he got so close to the San Telmo before Willis got in the way, he deserves—he deserves something.” He looked down at the coffin and swallowed. “I hate going to funerals.”