by Pratt, Scott
After twenty-seven steps, the tunnel opened onto yet another space, not as long and wide as the cathedral, but still huge, with a ceiling that was much, much higher, maybe eighty, ninety feet. There was a small crack in the rock almost straight above her through which oozed the faintest bit of daylight. She looked around; something to the left caught her eye. The beam had passed over something that definitely didn’t fit, but it was far enough away that she couldn’t quite comprehend the shape. She held the beam, hesitant. It wasn’t conical or funnel shaped like so many of the rock formations. It didn’t seem to belong. She moved toward it carefully, staring, and she came closer, she realized what it was.
A still.
There was a vat to the right, large and made of wood, shaped like a barrel that had been cut in half. Just to the left of the vat was a pile of neatly-stacked firewood. To the left of that was a cooker, jacked up on columns of flat rocks. It looked like the fuel-oil tanks Charlie had seen sitting on metal stands outside of people’s homes. She wondered how many gallons it held. Beneath it was a fire pit, full of burned coals that glittered like black diamonds under the flashlight. A shiny, spiral copper tube rose from the top of the cooker and descended to another metal container, this one much smaller than the cooker, but still twenty-five gallons or so. A pipe that looked like an outdoor water spigot came off the bottom of the container. Charlie realized she was standing on the spot where Roscoe’s great-grandfather made his liquor. She flashed the light around nervously, feeling, like yesterday, as though someone, or something, was watching her.
She stood for several seconds without moving, heard a sound, a small splash like a fish breaking the top of the water. The light from the candles flickered off the cave walls. She took a few steps toward the sound, shining the light along the cave floor. The stream came into focus after her next step. The cave, at that spot, was about sixty feet wide. The stream itself was less than ten feet across. Charlie walked carefully down a short slope and shined the light onto the water. She could see the water moving, slowly, from her right to her left. It disappeared beneath the rock face to her left. Roscoe’s letter said that direction led out of the cave. She moved the light to her right to another rock face, but there was a little clearance, maybe eighteen inches or so, between the top of the water and the bottom of the rock. She walked close to the spot, knelt and shined the light beneath. There was clearance between the water and the rock for as far as the light would penetrate, but there was only one way to see what was in there.
Charlie removed her backpack, took everything out of her pockets and set it all on the rock floor. She took a deep breath and waded into the water.
It took a few seconds for the water to seep through her boots and jeans, but when it did, it nearly took her breath. The water was freezing cold. She slid her feet along the bottom until she was in the center of the stream. It was above her waist, just a few inches beneath her chest. She held the flashlight at chin level, bent over just a little, and moved beneath the rock.
She tried to count the number of steps she was taking, but the freezing water made it impossible. She turned her head to make sure she could still see the spot where she’d gone under the rock. When she turned back and took another step she heard a sound like a fountain, water falling into water. The sound grew louder and two steps later, she found herself in another chamber, this one about the size of her bedroom. About fifteen feet ahead and above her, an underground stream bubbled through the rock face and fell into a pool. She shined the light around…
There.
Right there.
Charlie’s heart almost stopped. On a wide ledge to her left was a line of stacked, wooden crates. Charlie scrambled out of the water and stood. Could this be it? Could it?
The crates were small, about sixteen inches long by eight or ten inches wide, maybe four inches deep. They were stacked ten high, five stacks, fifty crates in all. Charlie forgot about the cold, the darkness. Nothing existed accept what might be inside the crates. She lay one of the flashlights down on the stack on the far right. The top crate looked as though its top had been removed. The others were nailed shut. She hooked her fingers beneath it, lifting slowly.
Sawdust.
How could that be?
She removed the glove from her right hand and reached down, began brushing the sawdust away. The pad of her finger touched something solid and cold. She leaned down, pursed her lips, and blew. The particles of wood separated like fairy dust. Charlie straightened.
Beneath the light, a brilliant, lustrous glow appeared. Charlie’s eyes widened. She reached down again. Her hand wrapped around the hardness, the coldness. She had trouble lifting it with one hand, so heavy. She reached down with her other hand and lifted a bar of gold from the crate. It had to weigh twenty-five pounds or more.
There was a small circular imprint on the top of the gold bar, about the size of a wedding ring. Charlie bent closer, focusing the light. The words “Johnson and Matthey” were stamped around the top of the ring. At the bottom: “London.” In the center of the circle were the words, “Poured by.”
Charlie put the bar back in the crate, straightened and took a step back. She stood motionless, her eyes wide, her mouth open. The gold, illuminated by the flashlight, glowed like fire in the night.
“I found it, Roscoe,” Charlie whispered. “I found Prometheus’s fire.”
Chapter 19
I walked into Perkins Restaurant at eight-thirty on Saturday morning and spotted the man I was meeting immediately. Pete Sams was sitting in a booth by a window against the far wall. He waved and I walked over.
Pete was a reporter for a little weekly in Carter County called The Carter County Comet. I wasn’t sure of his exact age, but my guess was he had to be mid-to-late sixties. He was a slim, jovial man with long teeth and thinning, silver hair. I’d talked to him a couple of times about cases over the years and had always found him to be cordial. He wasn’t overly aggressive, didn’t lean toward sensationalism, and had never misquoted me or tried to play me. He was just one of those small-town newsmen who popped up on the grid from time to time. He’d called late in the afternoon on the day Roscoe Barnes took his plunge from the courthouse clock tower and had asked if we could meet Saturday morning. He said he wanted to talk about Roscoe. I told him I didn’t think there was much I could tell him, but he was insistent, so I finally relented.
I slid into the booth and ordered a cup of coffee, hoping the conversation wouldn’t take too long. Caroline and I were planning to take our grandson and niece to Dollywood that afternoon and I wanted to be back home by ten. Pete was already munching on a muffin and sipping from a glass of milk. He smiled and offered his right hand across the table.
“Appreciate you taking the time to talk to me,” he said.
“Are we on or off the record?” I asked. “I always like to get that straight on the front end.”
“How about we just have a discussion and then if I want to quote you on something, I’ll ask.”
“Sounds good,” I said. “What do you want to discuss?”
“Have you ever heard of Russo’s gold?”
“Russo’s gold? I don’t think so, Pete.”
“It’s one of those legends that might actually have some truth to it,” he said. “Starts back in the thirties. This Philadelphia mobster named Carmine Russo supposedly did a lot of business with a local moonshiner named Hack Barnes. Hack Barnes was Roscoe Barnes’s great-granddaddy, and the story goes that he and Russo became pretty tight over the years. He lived on the property Roscoe owns, or owned until he killed himself. Carmine Russo was the top mobster in Philadelphia and finally got himself arrested by the feds. He was looking at five, maybe six years in jail for tax evasion, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to hold onto his rackets from inside prison. He also apparently didn’t have anybody in Philadelphia he could trust, so the story is that he converted a bunch of his cash to gold and brought it down here to Hack Barnes so Hack could hide it and hold it for him u
ntil he got out of jail. His plan was to retrieve the gold when he got out and buy his way back into power on the streets, but his plan didn’t work out because he wound up with pancreatic cancer and died a little over a year after he went to jail. Right around the same time Russo died, Hack Barnes, his wife and two of his children were murdered in their home. The old news stories called it the Buck Mountain Massacre. Nobody was ever arrested for the murders, but a Thompson sub-machine gun was used in the killings and there was a lot of speculation that mobsters were involved. The scuttlebutt has always been that Carmine Russo – or his wife – sent some of Carmine’s boys down here to get the gold back from Hack Barnes since Carmine knew the cancer was going to kill him. Hack wouldn’t give it to them so they killed him.”
“And the gold stayed put wherever Hack Barnes hid it,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“Nice story. You planning to print it and somehow tie it to Roscoe’s death?”
“I was hoping you might be able to help me out with that. You were representing Roscoe in a lawsuit that was filed by his son. Did he say anything about finding any gold?”
“If he did, I wouldn’t be able to tell you, but what I can tell you, with complete honesty, is that Roscoe Barnes didn’t say a word to me about any gold.”
“Was he crazy?”
“Not that I could tell. Seemed like a normal person to me. A little rough around the edges sometimes, maybe a little eccentric, but nowhere near crazy.”
“Then why did his son try to have him committed?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Well, here’s my guess. My guess is that Roscoe found the gold and Zane somehow found out about it, or at least Zane thought Roscoe found the gold. Zane wanted it and Roscoe wouldn’t give it to him. Everybody who knows anything about Zane and Roscoe knows they couldn’t stand each other. I think Zane filed suit to have Roscoe declared mentally incompetent so Zane could take over his property and eventually wind up with the gold. Roscoe was so enraged that he splattered himself all over the courthouse steps right in front of Zane. On the surface, it appeared that Roscoe may have cut off his nose to spite his face because he didn’t have any heirs besides Zane, which would mean that Zane would wind up with the property anyway. But then I got a phone call from a clerk in the probate office who said a will had been filed. I got my hands on a copy of the will, and it leaves everything Roscoe owned to a neighbor of his, a young girl named Charleston Story, who also happens to be a brand new lawyer working under your supervision and who was also representing Roscoe in the commitment proceeding. Interesting, don’t you think?”
“Interesting? Maybe. Also a little far-fetched for a news story.”
“It isn’t really a news story. More of a feature. It’s got a little history, some violence, gangsters, gold, intrigue—
“Speculation.”
“Nothing wrong with that in a feature story. Were you aware that Roscoe willed everything to Miss Story?”
I nodded. I didn’t see anything improper or unethical about telling him the truth.
“The lawyer who filed the will had a courier bring it to Charlie at my office a few hours after Roscoe died,” I said. “Roscoe had apparently planned things very carefully.”
“I know,” Pete said. “I talked to the lawyer, Gerald Benton. Nice guy. He said there was a sealed envelope in the packet with the will, but he said he didn’t know what was in it. Do you?”
“No. Charlie is the only person who knows what was in that envelope. She didn’t offer to tell me, and I didn’t ask.”
“I guess I need to talk to her. Would you mind giving me her cell number?”
“I don’t think I should do that without asking her first.”
“I’ll figure out a way to talk to her, you know. Even if I have to show up at her place unannounced.”
“When are you planning on running this story, Pete?”
“We publish every Thursday. I should have it ready by then.”
“Have you considered what might happen if you run a story that says there might be gold somewhere on Roscoe Barnes’s property? That’s what you’re planning to imply, isn’t it? Crackpots and criminals will come crawling out of the wood work. Or what about this? What if Carmine Russo has living relatives who think they have some kind of claim to it?”
“I guess they’ll file their own lawsuit.”
“What if they’re mobsters? Mobsters don’t file lawsuits. You could get someone hurt, Pete. Maybe even killed. How much gold is supposed to be up there on the mountain?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve heard it was worth a million dollars back when Russo brought it down here.”
“Which would make it worth what today? Twenty million?”
“You don’t follow the price of gold, do you, counselor? If it was worth a million back in the thirties, it’s worth about fifty million today.”
I shook my head and breathed deeply. Fifty million dollars? I’d seen people do terrible things to each other over fifty dollars, let alone fifty million. The chances of Pete’s conjectures actually being fact were slim, but the entire situation with Roscoe had been bizarre from the beginning.
“Do me a favor,” I said. “Hold off until I can talk to Charlie about this. She’s just a kid, a sweet, naïve kid. I’d hate to see this blow up in her face and get out of hand, especially if there’s nothing to it.”
Pete picked up the last piece of his muffin and stuck it in his mouth.
“How long have you been practicing law, Joe?” he said.
“Let’s see… more than twenty-five years, I guess.”
“Well sir, I’ve been sticking my nose in other people’s business for more than forty years,” he said, “and I’m here to tell you there’s something to this one. This is the best story I’ve ever run across, and I’m going to write it. I’ll give you until next week.”
Chapter 20
WHEN Charlie emerged from the cave, she looked up to see another bank of black thunderheads boiling out of the west like flying tidal waves. The wind was howling across the mountain. A storm was almost on top of her. Sadie was wide-eyed, and Charlie was grateful she hadn’t pulled away from the laurel bush and bolted. One bar of gold was all Charlie had managed to get out, and even that had been a struggle. The bar was heavy, and only seemed to get heavier the closer she’d gotten to the mouth of the cave. She tucked it quickly into one of the saddlebags. Heavy drops of rain began to pelt her face. The storm was upon her. Charlie jumped into the saddle and Sadie took off at a gallop.
The first crack of lightning exploded so close behind them that Charlie felt the shock wave. The wind was roaring like a wild animal and the day had turned to near-darkness. The rain began to pour about a mile from the barn, and by the time they reached it, Charlie was drenched again. She removed the bar from the saddlebags and put it in the bottom of a trunk in which she kept her grooming tools and some tack. She covered it with a couple of old saddle blankets and closed the lid. She took off her backpack and set it aside, unsaddled Sadie, replaced Sadie’s bridle with a halter, and groomed her while the lightning flashed and the thunder crashed outside. Biscuit was cowered in Sadie’s stall, whining and shivering. The dog was normally fearless. He slept in the barn with Sadie – Jasper had never let him in the house – but thunder terrified him.
When she was finished, Charlie covered herself with a saddle blanket and trotted through the rain down the path to the house. Jasper was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a cookie.
“How was your ride, Peanut?”
“It was great. Really great.”
“Great? You look like a drowned rat.”
Charlie walked past the table and down the hall to her bedroom. She peeled her wet clothing, dried off, and pulled on a bath robe. She picked her laptop up off the dresser, went to the Google search engine, and typed in “price of gold.”
Fourteen hundred dollars an ounce.
She typed in “gold bars” and read for a little wh
ile. She discovered that the bars she’d found weighed four hundred troy ounces each, around twenty-seven pounds. She’d opened another crate before she left the cave – there were two bars in it. Fifty crates. Ninety-nine bars. She pulled up the calculator on the computer screen. Thirty-nine thousand, six hundred ounces of gold. She punched more numbers into the calculator.
“Oh… my… god.”
The number was staggering. She did the math again. If the gold was real, each bar was worth five hundred and sixty thousand dollars at the current market price, which meant there was more than fifty-five million dollars worth of gold in the cave.
Fifty-five million dollars!
She started to jump around the room like a little girl, her hands in tight fists against her sides. She sat on the bed and bounced. She put a hand over her mouth and giggled. Should she tell Jasper?
No. Don’t tell anyone. Not yet. Not until…
She’d found it! She’d found gold!
The first thing she’d do would be to buy a car. She’d been driving her little Ford pick-up for six years. It had almost two hundred thousand miles on it. What kind of car? What color? She could fix up the place, add on and give Jasper all the space he needed for his junk. She could buy a new place if she wanted. A place for her dad. And she’d travel. She’d never been more than a hundred miles from home; had never ridden on an airplane. Europe was a must, and Hawaii, and the Caribbean, and New York City. She’d stay at five star hotels and see everything there was to see. She’d shop in the best shops, eat in the best restaurants, visit the most interesting places on earth. She’d do all the things she’d only been able to dream about. She’d learn to snow ski and water ski, scuba dive, maybe even to sail. She’d buy another horse, maybe two, maybe ten. She could buy a ranch if she wanted.
Fifty-five million dollars!
Charlie suddenly stopped bouncing as the enormity of the situation hit her. Who could she tell? Who could she trust? Who could help her? How would she get the gold out of the cave? There was so much of it. It was so heavy. The cave was deep and huge and in a rugged, remote location.