Treasure in the Woods

by E. A. House

“Wouldn’t it then be inhabited by ghosts?” Chris asked.

  “I was thinking ghosts wouldn’t count as inhabitants since they probably won’t leave tracks or, you know, poop.”

  “Annie Six-Fingers!” Carrie exclaimed triumphantly, effectively ending a conversation that had started getting silly. “She . . . ugh, she grabs you around the throat with her unnaturally strong hands and squeezes until your head pops off. In revenge against the townspeople who chopped off her hands because they thought her extra finger was a sign of the devil.”

  “She squeezes people’s heads off?” Maddison asked. Chris made the terrible mistake of trying to picture how that might work.

  “If she catches you out in her woods at night and you don’t heed her warnings,” Carrie said. “First she moans ‘my hands, my hands’ at you, then she makes bloody handprints appear on the trees and rocks around you, and then she comes up behind you and grabs you with her cold, strong fingers . . . it’s been a local legend since the 1920s.”

  “Is there any truth behind it?” Maddison asked.

  “No,” Carrie said, picking up one of her open books, giving it a quick scan, and then dropping it. “No.” She did the same thing to another book. “No, no . . . Maybe, if we count a newspaper article about a six-toed murderer . . . And yes.” She tossed the last book onto the pile. “But the one book that supports the legend cites the dissertation Father Michaels told us was faker than fake as a reference. And there are a whole bunch of versions of the story online but none of them are very reliable, and one of them looks like it might be about a ghost story from Ohio.”

  “But let me guess,” Chris said. “Annie Six-Fingers is supposed to haunt the area we want to go hiking through.”

  “According to two of these books, the legend claims that her home was on the edge of the island,” Carrie said. “And you can glimpse it from the Pine Lick equestrian trail.”

  “Okay, well, Annie hopefully shouldn’t be much of a problem,” Chris said.

  CHRIS WOULD LATER INSIST THAT ANNIE SIX-FINGERS was the last thing on his mind when they started out that morning. Alligators were, although they were not likely to get far enough into the cypress or swampy parts of the park to come across alligators. But Chris thought that considering the strange things that had been happening recently, if they found alligators hanging happily in poisonwood trees he wouldn’t be at all surprised. The heaviness of the backpack containing his sleeping bag, water, food, and bug spray was on his mind, because he hadn’t been camping in a little over a year and he’d forgotten how heavy everything was.

  And the fact that Maddison and Carrie turned out to both be the sort of hikers who went marching directly ahead with a purpose and set a pace that didn’t leave Chris much of a chance to admire the wildlife was very quickly on his mind, since he ended up taking the rear more or less by accident. Carrie had gone on family hiking trips often enough to know Chris’s ability to get distracted, though, and Maddison turned out to be the type of person who followed the recommended rules for hiking to the letter, so they never actually let themselves get out of visual range of one another. That way led to losing the slowest member of your party to be eaten by bears, and Maddison and Carrie liked Chris too much.

  Chris and Carrie both had a very good instinct for keeping track of each other. Carrie insisted it was because she could sense Chris’s terrible ideas, but Chris figured it was more about being able to tell if another person was near him. He was able to pick out Carrie’s footsteps among hundreds of others; Carrie could probably do the same thing with him.

  So, when Chris stopped short to investigate a strange flash of color he caught in the corner of his eye both Carrie and Maddison turned around and backtracked. Carrie, from the sound of it, stopping abruptly in the middle of the path, and almost getting plowed over by Maddison.

  “You okay?” Carrie asked when she got back to him. Maddison was a few steps behind her, wrestling a water bottle out of a backpack pocket where she’d zipped it in too tightly. “Or did you find a painted bunting?” Painted buntings were somewhat rare Florida birds. Chris had done a science report on them once and yet hadn’t actually seen one in the wild, so he kept an eye out for them whenever they were outside in the woods. But that wasn’t actually why he’d stopped.

  “Tell me you don’t see a handprint on that tree,” Chris said, pointing.

  “Huh,” Carrie said, squinting. The tree in question was several steps off the path and in a shady patch, but when the wind shifted a few branches you could clearly see a reddish, handprint-shaped smear on the trunk. It was at about the right height for an average person to rest their hand on the trunk. “Well it’s a bit blurry . . . ” Carrie offered.

  “Smeared,” Chris corrected.

  “Blurry,” Carrie said. “It’s blurry, Chris, and it is not a bloody hand print from Annie Six-Fingers.”

  “Oh good,” Chris said. “You said it so I didn’t have to.” He was very slightly more unnerved than he wanted to be.

  “I think it looks more like a blaze,” Maddison offered. She’d come up behind them and was squinting, her sunglasses perched on her head. “You know, path marking?”

  When Chris continued to stare at the tree and Carrie to stare at Chris, she edged between the tree and Chris’s line of sight and poked him in the middle of the forehead.

  “Would it help if I pointed out that we haven’t heard any ghostly cries about hands?” Maddison asked.

  “Yes, actually,” Carrie said, cheerfully ignoring the fact that ghost stories were notoriously unreliable, especially where fine details like the order of scary ghostly activities were concerned. “See? It probably is just vandalism.”

  Which was just asking for trouble. Or to hear mysterious noises in the woods, which was what actually happened.

  At first it was so minor a detail that it could easily be brushed off. The day had started off lovely and quickly turned cloudy, the air still and heavy with humidity, and they had the trail mostly to themselves, aside from a family of six who caught up to them, and engulfed the three teens in chattering kids. (One offered them a bag of trail mix, and another complimented Chris’s hat before pressing on ahead.) And they were only going to the midpoint picnic area. So, at first the law of averages said that the distant shrieking Chris suddenly realized he’d been hearing was coming from small children and he didn’t worry that much.

  Except, of course, when the second time someone shrieked faintly in the distance it sounded like it had come from somewhere behind Chris.

  “Did you hear something?” he asked Carrie, after speeding up to catch up to her.

  “Err,” Carrie said.

  Somewhere off to their left this time, faint but unfairly unmistakable, someone shrieked in anguish.

  “Well, yes,” Carrie admitted. The hair on the back of Chris’s neck was standing on end.

  “But you know what rabbits sound like when something’s got them . . . ” Carrie added.

  Chris was going to say something incredulous about the difference between skepticism and willful blindness to the obvious, but Maddison interrupted them by winging the bag of trail mix she had been elected to carry at the space between their heads. She had good aim, and had been just around the bend of the trail when Chris had stopped, hidden in a tall tuft of grass, so Chris jumped a mile and almost fell into a trailside stand of trees when she did.

  “Sorry,” he said, once he’d grabbed at Carrie and overbalanced them both and been unceremoniously dumped on the side of the trail by a flailing cousin.

  “Just chill. Just a bit, okay?” Maddison said, exasperated. “Before I snap and run screaming back to civilization?”

  Belatedly, Chris remembered Dr. McRae sounding genuinely astonished that Maddison was willing to go hiking, and realized that she might not even want to be out here. And that jumping at every little noise, even if there was a reason to be suspicious of every little noise, was not at all the right way to keep a nervous friend from freaking out.

>   “I really am sorry,” he said, attempting to help Carrie dust trail dirt off her knees. “I forgot to ask if you even like hiking.”

  “I like hiking just fine,” Maddison said woefully. “I just don’t really like bugs and the woods always seem to be full of things staring at me.”

  As one, and almost entirely by instinct, they all glanced worriedly into the woods in the direction of the shrieking. The woods continued to be a thick tangle of grasses and pines, with rich green deciduous leaves popping up here and there. There were a couple of smallish butterflies fluttering around the path. Everything looked sleepy and peaceful, not as though there was a ghost hiding behind a tree waiting to jump out and yell, “Boo!”

  “I’m pretty sure she won’t say ‘boo!’” Maddison said over lunch. They’d made it to the little clearing with picnic tables and a “You Are Here” map without running into anything more alarming than a girl trying to hike while texting. It had been Carrie’s friend Hailey from debate club, in fact, and they’d had to stop and catch up, and then Hailey and Carrie had tried to recruit Maddison to the debate club. Chris tried to be inconspicuous in the background while they were talking, and decided that he needed to get a better service provider for his phone because Hailey was able to text in the middle of the woods while he only got one bar.

  “Right,” said Chris. “She’s just going to pop up out of the trees and shriek at us about trespassing on her property, and then try to squeeze our heads off.”

  There had not even been a whisper of a ghost among the trees, or unearthly shrieking, and they’d stopped at the picnic area just as the family of six was leaving it. So Chris might have complained about the noise little kids could make for a specific reason, that reason being to turn the conversation in the general direction of the ghost of Annie Six-Fingers. He was really hoping he hadn’t completely ruined Maddison’s peanut butter and jelly sandwich but the weird noises in the woods were scaring him more than he let on.

  “But doesn’t that kiiiinda contradict the fact that she’s supposed to moan about her hands?” Carrie pointed out.

  “Which is why I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s not Annie at all, but somebody trying to scare us away,” Maddison said to her sandwich.

  “Oh drat,” Carrie said. “You were supposed to let Chris be the voice of paranoia so we could all pretend that there isn’t a very good reason to be worried we’re”—she dropped her voice—“being followed.”

  “Voice of paranoia?” Chris protested. “Hey, it isn’t—”

  “—paranoia if they really are out to get you,” Carrie and Maddison finished for him.

  “We don’t know that they—” Carrie stopped. “We don’t know why they would be out to get us,” she amended. “The best suspect kind of died.”

  “Carrie thinks it might be somebody who knew Aunt Elsie,” Chris said, instead of making a big deal out of Carrie admitting that he might be right about something for once.

  “Well, that would make sense,” Maddison said. When both Chris and Carrie frowned at her she added, “Cliff Dodson—the guy who—you know. He worked for a company that provides food service for a lot of academic institutions all over Florida, and I caught Dad on the phone with his police detective friend the day before yesterday, complaining about how many places use the same catering service.”

  “Police detective friend?” Chris asked.

  “The archive only has a sandwich shop,” Carrie said, because she was nit-picky like that.

  “Yeah,” Maddison said, “but what about the branch college that they do a lot of work with? Or the people they hire when they have an event that needs catering?”

  “Oh, that’s a good point,” Carrie admitted. “I have no idea.”

  “Your dad is best friends with a police detective?” Chris asked, because nobody seemed to have noticed this yet. Except probably Maddison, since she’d mentioned it.

  “Oh, him!” Maddison said. “Yeah, it’s weird, I don’t actually know why they’re friends. Detective Lyndon is twice Dad’s age, so he’s retired, and he lives somewhere in Nebraska with his wife and a bunch of grandkids and a lot of chickens. But he and Dad talk all the time. Dad’s been on the phone with him a lot recently, though,” Maddison added, like someone who knew exactly why that was suspicious.

  “So, somebody who needed to murder Aunt Elsie paid the caterer to do it,” Carrie said slowly, while Chris was still trying to decide how to feel about Maddison’s most recent revelation. Maddison suddenly remembered she had half a sandwich left and took a huge bite. “And it’s likely that Dr. McRae suspects, at the very least, the point of contact.” Carrie stopped abruptly and looked at Maddison. “Your dad isn’t the type of person to stake out a cafeteria in a terrible wig and glasses, is he?”

  “That was one time!” Chris interrupted. “And Greg was being a jerk to you, and we promised never to speak of it again! Mom and Dad swore an oath on their lucky cowboy boots!”

  “Mrs. Hadler told Chris that undercover was not in his future,” Carrie told Maddison, as she hadn’t sworn an oath on the lucky cowboy boots. Maddison looked delighted, but in a pleasant way, not a nasty one, so the story of how Chris had disguised himself and skipped French class so he could spy on Carrie’s lunch period because one of the boys in her geometry class had been saying mean things to her wasn’t as embarrassing as it could have been. At the time, he foolishly hadn’t thought of an endgame—other than to thoroughly scare the guy. It turned out that dressing up as what Carrie had later deemed a “psychotic Inspector Gadget knock-off” and throwing your cousin’s geometry textbook at the boy who had been calling her names got you in a lot of trouble. Specifically, a threatened year-long detention, which was mercifully avoided when Carrie and Greg formed a lasting friendship based entirely on “Can you believe Chris does stuff like this,” and Greg’s mother didn’t let the principal get all the way through explaining the situation before bursting out laughing. Chris’s parents were thoroughly shaken at getting called in to a meeting with the principal and had been the only people upset.

  Greg was one of Chris’s closest friends at the moment, even though he was physically so far away since his mom had decided that a trip to France was necessary this summer, but that didn’t have any bearing on the matter at hand, Chris explained. They could all just forget Carrie mentioned him now. Chris didn’t think Maddison believed him, but at least she was kind enough to pretend.

  “My dad would be excellent at undercover,” Maddison said, still grinning. “He would never go with a terrible wig, though. And, um, I may have made him promise not to do any extra investigating until I got back?”

  “Are you worried?” Carrie asked.

  “I think your aunt may have given the notes and everything she had on the treasure to you because she didn’t know who to trust,” Maddison said carefully. “And if she lived here for years but didn’t know who to trust, then how is my dad supposed to figure that out?”

  Carrie gave Chris a significant look while Maddison was distracted by the trail mix.

  “Maybe we should have put Professor Griffin in touch with your dad,” Chris said. “We told him the same thing, except not exactly because sometimes he does this thing where he remembers part of what you’ve told him but not if it was something he needs to do or something he must never do and we didn’t want him to think he needed to go out looking for trouble.”

  “I still don’t know if they’d get along very well,” Maddison admitted. She was picking the raisins out of the trail mix and leaving everything else. “Dad doesn’t trust other people very easily and whenever Professor Griffin comes up in conversation he makes a face like he doesn’t want anyone to know what he thinks, and I don’t think they’ve ever been in the same room together.”

  “Do not dare suggest that they are secretly the same person,” Carrie told Chris sternly.

  Chris attempted to stare heroically into the distance.

  “But if Cliff Dodson was hired by someone at a campus whe
re he worked, there are at least three different cities that would point to,” Carrie said to Maddison. “So, haven’t we just widened our pool of possible suspects?”

  “Pretty much,” Maddison said. “And that’s not counting the other places that might hire caterers, or the fact that we have no idea how many people are involved. But I wouldn’t be surprised if someone was following us. Remember how my dad was worried that there was someone at the church before us? Whoever is after the San Telmo besides us might have been there since we left.” Maddison bit her lip. She looked, Chris noted, uncomfortable with how exposed they were in the picnic area. “They might be after us not so much because we have, or might have, a clue Aunt Elsie left behind, but because they want to let us do the legwork for them.”

  Ah. Well, that would explain why he felt uncomfortably exposed in the picnic area; pretty much the only positive part of sitting alone at a wooden picnic table in the middle of a clearing in the middle of the woods was that they could see if anyone tried to get too close, and if they were talking quietly it would be hard for anyone to hear them. Provided, of course, that you absolutely discounted ghosts as a possible explanation for the creeping feeling of not being alone in the woods, which had not left Chris since he’d first heard the shrieking. And Chris was not sure he could discount the ghost theory yet, considering what he’d noticed while trying to stare heroically into the distance.

  “Chris?” Carrie said, since apparently, Chris not joining in the conversation about suspects was suspicious. “Is something the matter—oh, seriously?”

  She’d followed his line of sight to where a fat, not–poison oak grew just off the curated part of the grass-and-dirt picnic area. Someone had put another handprint on the tree . . .

  “Is it just me, or does that handprint look like it was made by someone who had an extra finger?” Chris asked. Carrie groaned and put her head in her hands. Maddison, however, abruptly stood up and stalked across the short, cleared area, aiming right for the tree.