Paranormal Mystery Boxset Books 1-3: Legends of Treasure

by Lois D. Brown

  “Beth, you can’t say anything, but the FBI told me they have strong reason to believe Justin is okay.”

  Beth’s face relaxed … infinitesimally. “Thank you. I won’t say a word.”

  Maria’s cell phone chimed.

  Will you come to my house for a Bridge game

  It was a message from Ms. Tuttle.

  Maria shot back an answer: Right now isn’t a good time.

  A moment later came the reply: It’s about the Veil Riddle.

  Maria typed back one word: Coming.

  Ms. Tuttle ushered Maria into her quaint, red rock, stucco-style home. The living room was decked out in warm, southwestern decor. Narrow shelves full of artisan pottery and rugged desert pictures filled two walls. An impressive rug with geometric patterns in striking turquoise and terracotta partially covered a hardwood floor. Several dreamcatchers hung from window rods.

  The art on one of the living room walls had been taken down. In its place, the Veil riddle was written in its entirety in black permanent marker. As Ms. Tuttle led Maria into the house, she pointed to the desecrated wall. “It was quicker than trying to find a white board that size. And I don’t mind painting.”

  Two leather couches had been scooted to the corner to accommodate a large number of card tables, which had been set up in the middle of the room. Gray-haired, white-haired, and purple-haired older women were seated in folding chairs surrounding each table. Maria expected them to be nibbling on petit fours and sipping tea. Instead there were bowls of shelled peanuts, opened cans of Red Bull, stacks of playing cards, and one woman who suspiciously cradled a metal flask. The aroma of cheesy pizza wafted into the living room from the kitchen.

  “You’ve got quite the party going on here,” said Maria, baffled by why she had been invited to what appeared to be a retirement convention for Grannies Gone Bad.

  Ms. Tuttle took her by the hand and dragged her to the front of the room. “Ladies, please welcome Kanab’s police chief, Maria Branson. She’s the one who received a copy of the Veil riddle from the kidnapper.”

  Some women waved, all smiled at her, and few called out, “Hey there.”

  “Maria,” Ms. Tuttle turned to her, “let me introduce you to the U.S. West Regional champions of the World Bridge Federation. All of these women are renowned card players, with their specialty being, of course, Contact Bridge.”

  What on earth was Maria doing here? She was in the middle of a kidnapping investigation and Ms. Tuttle had invited her to a Bridge party? The lady had gone off her rocker. However, not wanting to offend this good woman who had done so much for her in the past, Maria feebly waved at the daunting crowd of staring women and said, “Good to … uh … meet you.”

  “I need to bring in the pizza,” Ms. Tuttle said. “It’s going to be a late night. Maria, sit down at this table, and I’ll be back to explain what’s going on soon. In the meantime, you can get to know these two lovely ladies from Nevada.”

  Maria knew better than to argue with Ms. Tuttle. She sat down and sheepishly looked around. “Nevada, huh?”

  “Yes, have you ever been there?”

  “Actually … yes.” Maria felt a wave of embarrassment encase her as the image of her waking up with the worst hangover of her life in the lobby of a cheap marriage chapel came to mind.

  “Recently?”

  “Not too long ago.” This conversation was going nowhere good fast.

  “What for?”

  “You know what they say.” Maria forced a smile. “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”

  The two women both chuckled. “Fair enough.”

  “And what do you do in Vegas?” Maria asked, turning the conversation away from herself.

  “The same thing we do anywhere—play cards. I’m Karla, by the way.” The woman at Maria’s left held out her hand.

  Maria shook it, noting the strong, firm grip from a woman who had to be no less than seventy-five years old. “I don’t play cards,” Maria admitted. “I mean, maybe a few games of War and Uno when I was younger.”

  “Seriously?” The woman across from Maria acted shocked. “How can you not play cards?” As she spoke her hands cut and shuffled a deck on auto pilot. The woman’s bright red fake fingernails moved so fast they streaked the air with splashes of color.

  “Oh come on, Delores,” chided Karla. “Not everyone is like us.”

  “I know.” Delores shook her head, still shuffling. “But Uno? Heavens, I was playing Black Jack before I could talk.”

  Despite a laugh from Karla, Maria wasn’t sure the comment was meant to be funny.

  Karla patted her friend’s hand. “Delores is a recovering gambler. The Bridge club helps her deal with her compulsion. To be honest, most of us here have a bit of an addiction of one form or the other.”

  Maria ran her finger along the edge of the card table. “I believe we all have our own demons to fight.”

  “True,” said Delores, sitting back a little more comfortably in her chair, her hands continuing to cut the deck of cards. “I’ve got fifty-two of them.”

  As if making an attempt at more normal conversation, Karla eyed Maria over the top of her can of soda and asked, “So what is your thing? I mean, besides police work. Do you have children? I suppose you’re the right age for that sort of thing.”

  “Good grief, no! I’m not even marri—” Maria stopped herself. “I mean I’m not the marrying type. I mostly focus on my job. It keeps me busy.”

  “Are you telling me someone as pretty as you doesn’t have a man in her life?” Delores huffed. “Youth is wasted on the foolish. Absolutely wasted.”

  The wrinkles on Karla’s forehead deepened as she grinned. “Now, now. She only said she wasn’t the marrying type. She may have her eye on a man.”

  Maria’s throat was becoming drier by the second. “No, there’s no one in my life.”

  Ms. Tuttle walked up behind her holding several pizzas she set down on a table. “Pish, posh. What do you mean? Rod wouldn’t like to be called a no one.”

  Maria turned to look at the librarian. “I guess you didn’t hear. Rod and I broke up. I thought the whole town knew after the public ordeal at the reservoir.” Inside, Maria did her best to ignore the awkward fact that she was actually married to Rod—in a drugged-up Vegas sort of way.

  Ms. Tuttle’s face fell. “Oh no, Sweetie, I hadn’t heard.”

  Maria wondered if Ms. Tuttle was more upset by not having known a piece of town gossip or by the fact that she and Rod were no longer together. Probably both.

  Ms. Tuttle eased herself into the chair next to Maria. “I’ve been so busy with solving the riddle. I guess I wasn’t keeping up on news. What happened?”

  This was the last thing Maria wanted to talk about in public. “It just wasn’t working out. It’s best for both of us. Really.” Her attempt to save face sounded hollow. Even she could hear the tremble in her voice—sadness mixed with angry confusion.

  At the table next to them, one of the women snorted, snapped her fingers, and made an “I’m-a-single-lady” motion at Maria. “Girl,” she said, “you don’t need ‘im. That’s what I always say. Get yourself a loyal dog and you got all the loving you need.”

  The comment, meant to help, was disheartening. Looking around the room, it was easy to picture herself decades down the road, a lonely old woman scratching her dog’s chin while watching game show reruns. But there was no reason to pine over what had happened between her and Rod. She had to move on.

  Ms. Tuttle tapped Maria on the arm. “You know, being single has its perks. I was married once, years ago. Nasty experience. Now I do what I want, when I want. It’s not a bad gig.”

  “But Ms. Tuttle, I’ve never seen you do anything but work.”

  “Exactly.”

  The conversation was not helping. Nor was the fact that Maria felt anxious to get back to the kidnapping case.

  As if she sensed her concern, Ms. Tuttle changed the subject. “Maria, I need to tell you about the progress
we’ve made on the Veil riddle.”

  “I’m all ears.” Maria stared again at the words written on the wall and read it to her herself for the thousandth time.

  What you seek is in a bottle of fun with one player missing.

  Open the lid.

  South begins at SA64HQ965DJ52C65.

  East is next.

  North comes third.

  Go West and you will find what you desire.

  Beware. The monster awaits.

  The riddle made as little sense to Maria as it did the first time she’d seen it five days ago.

  “Now,” said Ms. Tuttle, using her getting-down-to-business voice, “I know you don’t have all night, so I’ll try to hit the main points.” Turning to the other women she said, “Ladies, don’t let our conversation distract you. Keep playing Bridge.”

  Her words fell on deaf ears. The group of women, who were shoving slices of greasy pizza into their mouths, attentively listened to everything Ms. Tuttle said.

  Ms. Tuttle ignored them and began her explanation. “The first line of the riddle—what you seek is in a bottle of fun with one player missing—had me confused for several days. I assumed the first line pointed to the general location of the Veil treasure, and then the directions—south, east, north, west—along with the string of letters and numbers pointed to a specific coordinate.”

  Maria wanted to focus on what Ms. Tuttle was saying, but the lack of sleep and sense of urgency made thinking tedious. Her body was in “action” mode, not riddle-solving mode.

  “After figuratively beating my head on the cliffs of insanity for a couple of days, I finally decided to tackle it in a different way. I decided I needed to understand who Steven Veil was. Well, that was a bomb. Nobody knows much about him except for what he wrote in his odd little autobiography that contains the riddle.”

  Ms. Tuttle was talking a million words a minute, and Maria was tempted to zone out. After all, it had turned into a very long day. But what Ms. Tuttle was doing was her own kind of sleuthing, and it was important—especially to this case. Maria channeled her energy into what was being said.

  “It’s then I decided the best way to understand a man is to understand a man’s mother.” Ms. Tuttle stopped to gain her breath.

  “So true!” called out a toothpick of a woman. “If I’d known my mother-in-law better, I would’ve put my tail ’tween my legs and run. Best advice. Meet the in-laws ’for makin’ any weddin’ vows.”

  Maria, sadly, had never met Rod’s parents. Perhaps that was where she’d gone wrong.

  Taking back the stage, Ms. Tuttle explained, “I went to my favorite genealogical site online and found Martha Bardslay Veil, Steven’s mother. There wasn’t much written about her either, but someone had uploaded tons of old pictures. Guess what I found?”

  “I have no idea.” The more Ms. Tuttle talked, the more Maria was drawn into the story.

  “There must have been a dozen pictures or so of Martha playing Bridge. She was an avid card player.”

  “Bless her soul.” One of the ladies in the far corner of the room crossed herself.

  “And that’s when it clicked.” Ms. Tuttle looked incredibly pleased, as if the solution should be crystal clear to Maria by this point.

  However, Maria was just as confused as before. “What clicked?”

  “That’s when I saw the connection between the words in the riddle ‘fun’ and ‘player’ and the directions ‘south, east, north, west.’ The riddle was talking about a game of Contact Bridge.”

  At this point, an entire table of women interrupted Ms. Tuttle with a shout of, “Best freakin’ card game in the world!”

  Across from Maria, Delores scoffed. “Except for Black Jack,” she murmured. Her hands had never stopped shuffling the deck since Maria had sat down.

  Ms. Tuttle shot the women a disproving glance at being so loudly interrupted and continued. “In Contact Bridge, a game people play for fun, there are four players—a north and south partnership and an east and west one.”

  “She is a seriously smart woman,” someone behind Maria said before stuffing another bite of pizza into her mouth. Maria agreed. Ms. Tuttle could run circles around her when it came to research.

  Ms. Tuttle cleared her throat. “However, here is where things got difficult. In the first line of the riddle it says one player is missing, but it still lists each of the four directions, or players. So I figured it must refer to another kind of ‘player’ in Bridge.”

  “Ohhhh.”

  Maria looked at who had made the loud exclamation and saw a woman in the center of the room with an unlit cigarette hanging from her lip.

  “I think this part is so clever of her,” the woman said, the cigarette bobbing up and down as she spoke.

  “It really is,” the woman’s neighbor at the table agreed.

  Ms. Tuttle cleared her throat … again. Maria wondered if the librarian was enjoying all of the attention. “After several strikeouts with other ideas, I began to play with the concept of the missing player being a missing letter—and I assumed that letter would be missing from the main clue—the game of Bridge. So, for example, the location of the Veil treasure was somewhere that had the word ‘bridge’ in it but was missing one letter—like ridge, bidge, brige, or bridg. Anyhow, you get the idea.”

  “Kind of,” said Maria, slowly.

  “Don’t forget to tell her about the word ‘bottle.’ ” The woman who had kept a metal flask next to her like a beloved teddy bear now held it in the air. “It’s all about the bottle.” She then turned to Maria and said, “AA graduate. Two thousand and nine.”

  “Oh yes, thank you, Julia. Of course, I can’t forget the word “bottle.’” Ms. Tuttle nodded in the direction of the recovered alcoholic. “In the very beginning of the riddle, Veil says what we seek is in a ‘bottle of fun.’” Ms. Tuttle stopped talking to let the phrase sink in before continuing.

  “Clearly, the ‘bottle of fun’ represents the name of the place where the treasure is hidden, sort of like the ‘Isle of Britain’ or the ‘Pyramid of Djoser.’” Ms. Tuttle took a few steps closer to a card table. She leaned down and picked up a can of Red Bull. Five or six large, deep gulps later she was ready to speak again.

  “If ‘fun’ represents Bridge—with a letter missing—then I needed to find a place with the word “bottle’ and ridge, or bidge, or brige, or bridg in it.’”

  “Like a compound name?” asked Maria.

  “Exactly. I looked at all the cities in the United States that had the word ‘bottle’ as well as one of the derivatives of the word ‘bridge’ with a letter missing. The most obvious combination of these was ‘bottle’ and ‘ridge.’ Do you know how many places there are called ‘Bottle Ridge?’”

  “No.” Maria waited breathless for the answer.

  “One. Bottle Ridge in Washington state.”

  “Washington!” Maria’s heart sunk. She hadn’t thought the riddle would point to somewhere so far away. Was Justin being held all the way up there?

  “Yes, Washington. Intellectually, I was positive I was on the right trail, yet something didn’t feel right. That last line of the riddle—the one about the monster—seemed out of place. I couldn’t understand how it connected to Bottle Ridge, Washington. I looked and looked but there was nothing about a monster in Bottle Ridge.”

  “But it’s got to be—” Maria began.

  Ms. Tuttle held up her hand for silence. “At that point, I hadn’t slept in forty-eight hours so I went to bed. That night I dreamed of my old sixth-grade thesaurus. It’s completely in tatters, but I still have it in my office on the bookshelf. When I awoke in the morning I pulled it off the shelf and looked up the word ‘bottle.’ That’s when I saw the synonym ‘jar’ and I knew the answer.”

  Maria’s heart beat quickly. She could hardly wait for the librarian’s next feat of riddle solving.

  “The Veil treasure is in Jarbidge—a tiny town in Nevada with a fascinating history. I had read about it years ago.
It’s an old mining town where the last mail stage robbery in the United States occurred. Originally, the Native American Shoshone tribe lived in Jarbidge, or more accurately in the wilderness next to the mining town. They are the ones who named it.”

  Whether it was the Red Bull or what she was about to say next, Ms. Tuttle appeared as if she might implode. Maria felt for her phone in case she needed to call 911. “Deep breaths, Ms. Tuttle. Deep breaths.”

  The librarian waved away Maria’s concern. “Jarbidge translates from Shoshone to mean ‘monster that lurks in the canyon.’ According to the Native American legend, Shoshone braves chased a creature into a cave in what is now known as Jarbidge Canyon. They trapped the monster there with rocks and boulders. Now, Maria, please read the last line of the riddle for me out loud.”

  Maria did as she was told. “Beware. The monster awaits.”

  Ms. Tuttle stared intently into space, as if she had given her all and had nothing left in her. Speaking to no one in particular she said, “Jarbidge, Nevada, where the monster awaits.”

  “Wow,” Maria whispered in awe. “Ms. Tuttle, you did it. You should be one of the world’s seven wonders. I’m not kidding.”

  The card players in the room agreed. A few gave each other knuckles.

  In five days Ms. Tuttle had figured out what the FBI and thousands of other treasure hunters over the last eight years had not. Maria’s voice was excited. “So this means I need to go to Jarbidge. That’s where the perp has Justin.”

  “Wait a minute.” Ms. Tuttle let out a sigh. “The Jarbidge wilderness is over one hundred thousand acres. It’s huge. So while we know the general location, we need the rest of the riddle to get more specific directions. That’s where these wonderful women come in.”

  Maria mulled a moment over the depressing news that Jarbidge included that many miles of wilderness.

  “Eugene, my librarian friend in Nevada, was the one who suggested I contact the U.S. Western Regional Bridge champions. Karla here was the one I first spoke to and she said they could help.”