Fortune

by Craig W. Turner

  “Yeah, but let this blow your mind,” Jeff said. “What’s to say people aren’t going back and doing this all the time? How would any of us ever know?”

  “Alright, alright. One earth-shattering conundrum at a time, okay?” He sat, then immediately stood up. “Sorry, I can’t sit. We have to get out of here. C’mon, let’s go get some dinner. My treat.”

  Jeff stood. “How about we let Joe Wilton buy?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  On the flight home to California, Erica had spent most of her time assessing the two men she’d met. There was something about their story – actually, there was a lot about their story – that still wasn’t setting well with her, and while she desperately wanted to pin that something on these two guys, she couldn’t find good reason to do so.

  Needing some degree of better understanding, she’d changed her flight at the Newark Airport to take her to Sacramento as opposed to home. Now, as she drove west toward the Gold Rush Museum, she thought about how Kevin Pierce had aggressively made his offer to the men for the Smithsonian to buy the relics from them. They hadn’t answered by the time she left, but she hoped dearly that they’d accept the offer. She knew the reality was that they wouldn’t, though. As dedicated a historian as she was, she herself would’ve had a hard time accepting a quarter of what they actually could get for the gold. She wanted them to be bigger people than she was believing them to be.

  The desire to head out to the Museum had come over her while she’d been lying in the hotel bed the night before. It wasn’t that there would be any more research materials there than she had at home – she wasn’t the top resource on the Wilton heist for nothing – but she felt like she needed camaraderie. Something that Kevin Pierce and his offer to discuss the situation over dinner couldn’t necessarily provide her. Sure, there probably was no one in the country more knowledgeable than him on American history in general, but he hadn’t been steeped in the Gold Rush and in the history of Joe Wilton, not the way her comrades at the Museum were. If anything, the chance to bounce her thoughts off of people in the know was appealing to her.

  It had occurred to her before she even left the airport grounds that the absurdity of her desire to be around the Museum staff was in order to not share the excitement of the day. One would think that a Museum full of people dedicated to a certain time period in history would rejoice in one of their lost treasures being found. But that wasn’t her sentiment. In fact, it was far from it. It was more about making sense of everything. She did give herself a little leeway, though. It wasn’t every day your world got turned upside down.

  Not going home, she’d rented a car at the airport and pulled it into the gravel parking lot of the Museum, the noise of the stones grinding against her tires awakening her from her daydreaming. There were two other cars in the parking lot, and she recognized them both as staff. A quiet day in Gold Rush tourism.

  Once she got inside, she made her way to the display case holding Joe Wilton’s diary. It was her Holy Grail, and she never tired of looking at it. To know that Wilton sat at night writing in this book, with her great-great-great-great grandfather right by his side, was breathtaking to her. She was so fortunate to have this invaluable piece of history so close.

  Being a historian, she was often consulted on genealogical studies – usually wealthy baby boomers trying to put their family history on paper before they died. While every story was fascinating, it seemed that every family line she uncovered was comprised of good, but historically insignificant, people. It made her feel even more fortunate to have an ancestor whose history was so meticulously documented. Everyone could trace their family tree back to someone of importance through cousins or uncles, but she remembered every time she looked at this book that, without the story that Joe Wilton had put on paper, her life could have taken a different track.

  “You’re back,” Lionel said from her side. She looked up to see him. “How was it? Was it really Wilton’s gold?”

  “I have no reason to believe otherwise,” she said, smiling wearily. “This wasn’t a particularly relaxing trip.”

  “Was it amazing?” He ignored her emoting. She understood, though.

  “To be honest with you, I’m having trouble getting my brain around the idea. Two days ago, this was one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in American history. Today, it’s like, ‘Okay, here’s your gold.’ You would expect some grandiose story about the gold being stolen and the pieces of it going all over the country and creating wealth or business empires. Nope. Buried in a barn in Arizona. Kind of depressing, right?”

  “I don’t think you’re grasping the magnitude of what’s happened,” Lionel said. She must’ve looked pretty distraught because he rubbed her arm comfortingly. “Joe Wilton’s gold was found. It doesn’t confuse everything he wrote in this diary. It makes it better.”

  She smiled in spite of herself. “I guess so. It’s probably just going to take some time for it to sink in for me. It’s a life pursuit, or at least I thought it was. I’m not old enough to have completed it.”

  They left the diary display and headed into the makeshift office in the rear of the building. Lionel tossed her a Coke in a can. She opened it and sat down on the treated wooden bench along the wall. For the first time since she’d taken the call from Pierce two days before, she relaxed her shoulders and let out a deep breath.

  “The Smithsonian offered them five million for the gold,” she said.

  “That’s it? I read it was worth about twenty-five. They won’t take it. I wouldn’t.”

  “I’m trying to have faith that they’ll do the right thing, but I’m not having much success,” she said, slouching on the bench. The hurried trip and flurry of emotion was already catching up with her. She probably should’ve headed straight home instead of driving two hours away from home to the Museum. “I bugged Kevin Pierce for us to get at least one of the bars if it goes that route.”

  “Well, that’s good. Anything we can do to press the issue?”

  “What, should I use my feminine charms?” Erica said, twirling her ponytail with her finger and laughing. She could only imagine she was the picture of sheer attractiveness after eight hours of traveling.

  “That’s not exactly what I had in mind, but whatever works in this case.” They laughed together. “Really, though, what are they like?”

  She sighed and took a drink from the can. “Hmmm. What are they like? Unfortunately, they’re like any schmucks you see walking down the street. Actually, that’s not fair – that’s the way they appear. The one guy, the friend of the guy whose grandfather owns the farm, is a scientist. He’s got a federal grant to do some thing where he can change atoms into molecules or something. It sounded impressive. The other guy is an ex-marine, thin but muscular and I’d bet has kind of a violent demeanor, even if he was soft-spoken with us. Not somebody you’d want to meet in a dark alley. That’s my impression.”

  “He’s the one who owns the barn?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I want to be fair to them. But nothing in their story seems out of place – except for the fact that their story exists at all. You don’t just stumble upon a historical relic that’s been missing for over 150 years. It just doesn’t happen.”

  “Maybe it does.”

  She leaned forward on the bench. “Listen to this, though. Wilton’s diary – do you remember the description of the man who held the knife to Wilton’s throat?”

  “The guy with the ‘grotesque’ scar on his cheek?” They were all such Gold Rush geeks.

  “Yeah, with the scar on his cheek. This guy, the Marine, has this big, dramatic scar on his cheek. Exactly like the description in the diary.”

  “And...”

  She started to say something to connect the two, but it wouldn’t come out. It was ludicrous. “It’s a really crazy coincidence.”

  “That two people living 150 years apart both had a scar on their face? What, do you have some kind of conspiracy theory?”

  “Well, no. It jus
t-” Something clicked in her memory. She’d been studying unsolved mysteries of American history for so long that her mind was like a database, and a spreadsheet cell from long, long ago was suddenly accessed.

  “It just... What?” Lionel was still trying to get her to realize her train of thought was inane, no matter what she was about to say.

  “Is that thing on?” she asked, pointing at the computer as she headed toward it.

  “Should be,” he said, but she was already flicking the mouse. The screen came on quickly, giving away that Lionel was playing Scrabble on Facebook. He started to justify it, but she was beyond it, closing his screen and opening up a search window. She typed in “scar and cheek” and ran a search. Some 70,000 pages came up, the first bunch advertising various plastic surgery services. She started to page down, but then narrowed her search – “scar and cheek and robbery.” That minimized the number, but there were still a ton. She tried again – “scar and cheek and robbery and baseball bat.”

  “What are you looking for?” Lionel asked, reading over her shoulder. “Baseball bat?”

  She talked slowly as she scanned the page. “There was a robbery – Prohibition Era – a guy robbed a bank, and while he was trying to get away he himself was robbed. If I’m remembering correctly – yes, here it is.” She clicked on a link that led her to a Wikipedia page, the biography of the infamous criminal Robert Miles. She ran her finger along the words on the screen until she found what she was looking for.

  “There,” she said, nearly jumping from her chair. She read out loud, “The following day, Miles returned to the same bank, intent on robbing it again, but was subsequently arrested, as the bank had hired a security guard to protect against future theft. The guard clubbed Miles in the head with the butt of his gun, knocking him unconscious. When Miles came to in police custody, he told the story of how, during his escape the day before, he had been ambushed about two miles outside of the town by four people with weapons – three men and a woman – who had taken his plunder. The aggressor of the group was a man with a violent scar on his cheek,” she raised her voice as she talked, “who threatened him and took his weapon. Miles later admitted that the ‘gun’ that he’d used to rob the bank the day before was actually made from a whittled down baseball bat.”

  She looked up at Lionel and pointed at her cheek. “The scar on the side of the guy’s face.”

  “I get it. You’re obsessed with cheek scars.”

  “The people who took Miles’ cash were never seen again,” she said. “The people who bushwhacked Wilton were never seen again. Why does this same scar keep showing up?”

  “The same scar, Erica? Are you talking about... time travel?” He said it condescendingly, and while she understood why, it wasn’t her favorite thing.

  He’d stopped her short, though. Was she really getting this overanxious about the gold? Could it really just be a coincidence and should she just relax? Didn’t it have to be a coincidence? Unfortunately, that wasn’t her style.

  She bounced up from the computer desk and started toward the door.

  “Hold on,” Lionel called after her. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going back to New York.”

  “Just like that?”

  “I need to confront those guys. Before they make an announcement about the gold. I need to find out what this all means.”

  He chased her down and got in front of her, impeding her progress toward the door. “You have to understand that it probably means nothing.”

  “Then it means nothing.”

  “You’re actually going to fly back across the country just to find out that it means nothing?”

  “I have to know.” She turned to leave again, but he grabbed her wrist. “What?”

  “One more question,” he said. “How the hell did you know that about the bank robbery?”

  She smiled. It was pretty impressive, she had to admit. “You don’t get to be a regular on The Mystery of History just for having a pretty face.” Just the host gets that gem, she thought.

  A moment later, she was in her rental car exceeding the speed limit, well on her way back to Sacramento and the airport.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Jeff peered through the blinds, down from his second floor lab to the parking lot behind the building. He’d done so at least fifteen times and felt like he did as a kid waiting for his uncle, aunt, and cousins from Buffalo to pull into his family’s driveway during Christmas break. Still nothing, though.

  He turned his attention back inside the lab, where Abby and Emeka were waiting with him for Dexter to arrive. Abby was fiddling with her tablet, working on the coordinates that they would put into the time travel device for their next mission. He had finally talked Dexter into the mission, but these two were always game. Which was probably why they were there on time, even early, to work on the plan. Emeka was sitting in a plastic chair with his feet up on a table, listening calmly to his music player. Jeff envied him that he was never plagued by a sense of urgency, related to anything personal or professional, it seemed. He imagined that after seeing what he’d seen at war, there probably wasn’t too much that could get him overly excited.

  “Jeff,” Abby said, looking up from her screen, “can I get the device? Might as well get this information into it.”

  He nodded and crossed the lab toward the extraordinary safe he’d had developed specifically for the time device. Concerned that if anyone found out about his device, with its small size, it could be easily stolen, Jeff had contracted out to create a safe-within-a-safe to protect it. The time device was set into a non-descript, briefcase-sized box, which was itself locked and then slid into the lowest track on the shelves holding his computer server hard drives. Without knowing what they were looking for, no one would, first, know to look for it, and second, be able to beat two advanced systems to get to it. It was quite secure when it wasn’t in his hands.

  The lab itself was not large, with only enough floor space to hold Jeff’s workstation, comprised of several linked computers which were continuously running; his server; a handful of cabinets, file drawers, and equipment storage cases; and, of course, the particle accelerator in the center of the room – the one that he was using for his “real” research on behalf of the U.S. government. Off to the side was a small office area that Jeff used more for storage than for work. The building itself was an amalgamation of start-up technology companies – medical devices, software development, etc. But with his stimulus grant, Jeff was the all-star when he walked into the place.

  Now, he unlocked the various protection mechanisms on the time device and pulled it from its padded environment. He handed it to Abby, then returned to the window. This time, when he looked out, he saw the familiar shape of Dexter’s black SUV pulling into the lot and parking in front of the garage behind the building.

  “He’s here,” he said, tapping Emeka on the arm. Emeka removed his ear buds. “He’s here. Can you see if he needs help carrying anything?”

  Without a word, Emeka leapt from the chair and headed out the lab’s main entrance. A moment later, he saw Emeka emerge in the parking lot as Dexter was pulling garment bags out of the lift gate on his truck. They shared the load and walked together through the building’s rear doors.

  When they made it to the lab, Jeff grabbed a couple of the garment bags and hung them on the small but adequate coat rack near the door.

  “I don’t know how you got me to do this,” Dexter said, unzipping the first one right away. “Remember, I had to borrow these, so that’s extra incentive for us to be careful. Got it?” He was looking at Jeff, who he clearly was blaming for his influence over him.

  Dexter pulled out a long white and green dress that he handed to Abby, who had set her technology down and joined the group, curious. She took it and held it in front of herself as Dexter moved onto the next.

  “What do you think?” she asked, doing a faux modeling pose.

  “I think the gangster outfit was sexier,”
Jeff said, smiling.

  “Well, good thing we’re not going for sexy,” she said.

  Emeka was next – a baggy blue shirt and brown knickers that knotted just below the knee. His ensemble came with a wide-brimmed brown hat that he slapped on his head. “I feel like I could pick up a musket and fight the Brits right now.”

  Jeff laughed, but stopped when Dexter pulled his costume out of the bag. A bright flash of red was followed by the emergence of a full-fledged British “redcoat” uniform. Had they not already successfully traveled through time, Jeff might not have had the reaction he had, but the idea that he would be in Colonial America wearing something that had been such a hated symbol for him since the time he was in elementary school, was breathtaking.

  “That’s what we’re wearing?”

  “Yep. You and me,” Dexter said.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know that that’s such a good idea.”

  “You haven’t even heard the plan yet.”

  “We’re going to get shot,” he said, holding the uniform up in front of himself.

  “No, we won’t. The war won’t have started yet.”

  Emeka was off to Jeff’s side, laughing quietly. “Maybe I’ll shoot you myself, just to keep up appearances.”

  “Might be easier. This had better be a doozy of a plan, so let’s hear it.”

  Dexter waved each of them to seats so he could explain what he was thinking. For the first time since they’d started working together, Jeff was doubting his friend’s logic. And sanity. There was no way that dropping into a volatile atmosphere in the uniform of the enemy was wise. “The war hadn’t started yet, but when was the Boston Massacre?”

  “Stop with the uniform,” Dexter said. “Bottom line is that we won’t be able to get anywhere near Garvey’s house looking like commoners. The uniform is our ticket in.”