Maria was grateful. She couldn’t have communicated if she’d tried. She was so angry it used up every ounce of energy she had. She was angry at her weakness. At Tehran. At herself.
Especially, at herself.
When they hit the outskirts of town, Rod raised all of the windows. It made the quiet between them unbearable. He cleared his throat as if he was about to say something. Changing his mind, he flipped on the radio.
Maria sighed in relief. If he asked her what had happened, she had no answer to give. Nothing she could say would make sense to anyone. It didn’t even make sense to her. How could she lose control like that? That hadn’t been her usual panic attack or moment of depersonalization. She’d gone completely out of her body. She hadn’t even known it was her, for goodness sakes. And all because some strangely dressed Native American had touched her? Well, the ghost of the Native American, at least.
Why did it matter what any of her ghosts did? They were all just symptoms of her PTSD. None of it was real. It was a trick the scared, hurt part of her mind played to make her give up. Give in. Roll over and play dead.
And today it had won.
They pulled up in front of Maria’s condo. Pete must have told Rod where she lived. It was weird, like she was being “taken home” after an incredibly awkward date. Should she tell him thanks? Should she reassure him she was all right?
So much for making her position as “lead investigator” clear to Rod and the other men. Rod, with his overbearing personality, would certainly put her in her place and take over the case. But who could blame him? She’d do the same thing if she were him. She wouldn’t want anyone as pitiful as herself in charge.
“Chief.” The tone in Rod’s voice changed. “What did you see in the cave?”
Maria about choked on her own spit. “What?” Her head was spinning with advice from her therapist: Act normal. Keep it simple. Don’t forget to breathe.
Rod repeated the question. This time a little louder. “Did you see someone in that cave?”
Of course, Rod wouldn’t give up that easily. He would pelt her with questions until she broke. Her only chance was to divert attention. “Yes. I saw the mayor.”
“That’s not what I meant. Did you see something out of the ordinary? Was there someone else in there besides the mayor?”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about.” Maria wrapped her cold, stiff fingers around the car door handle.
“Did you see someone who isn’t like you or me?” Rod’s face was unruffled, except for his light, turquoise eyes. Eyes that offset the dark eyebrows above them. Even though they were so light to be almost translucent, they burned with intensity as he spoke. An urgency.
The man was prying. Trying to make her give up her secrets. And to do it when she was weakened like this—how pompous!
Maria’s muscles twitched. Her physical defenses had kicked into gear, but mentally she was struggling to keep the façade up. “Why are you asking that?”
“You had a pretty crazy reaction to something in that cave. Is it because you saw something … or someone in there?”
Again, he was trying to trick her into incriminating herself. A confession would come back to bite her in a few weeks. She imagined the front page story in the local newspaper: Kanab’s New Police Chief is Insane.
“I’m confused. What do you mean when you say ‘someone?’” asked Maria.
Rod shifted in his seat so he could look straight into her eyes. “Did you see a ghost?”
The metal floor of the car seemed to open up and swallow her into a gaping hole of dread. She needed to get out of there, but it was her car. Rod needed to leave, but how was he going to get home?
Rod asked the question a second time. “Did you see a ghost?”
Despite everything Maria tried, her body shook from the top of her head all of the way down. “I d-don’t know.”
Something about what Maria said, or how she said it, changed Rod’s demeanor from ardent curiosity to discernible discomfort. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, pulling the keys out of the ignition and handing them to her. “You need to get some rest. This is your car. I’ll walk home.”
He opened the door, jumped out, and jogged down the street.
Maria felt deflated. He knew. He knew she was a mess inside. She hadn’t been able to hide it for more than a week in this town. Her plan to have a normal life wasn’t working.
Maria was certain she should have been one of the prisoners to die. Tehran should have killed her. And on days like today, she wished it had.
Treasure existed there can be not the slightest doubt. That Kanab residents can find at least a part of it there can also be no doubt. That is, provided they look for it in the right place.
–Deseret News. “About Town” by Horace Green, Thursday, February 16, 1967.
Chapter 7
WHEN THE CLOCK SAID 3 a.m., Maria finally got out of bed. She was exhausted trying to make herself go to sleep. Maybe a cup of chamomile tea would do her some good.
As she waited for the microwave to heat up the water in her favorite mug, she sat at the kitchen table and rested her forehead on the hard surface. Her long dark hair spread out around her like a fan.
What would Pete say to her when she got to work later that morning? What kind of an excuse could she give him? Could she play the seizure card? Doubtful. Something like seizures would be on her profile. The only reason Tehran wasn’t was because the whole thing was still classified.
Something more temporary than seizures might work. Maybe she could claim she’d had a bad reaction to medicine? She knew several high powered antibiotics that mixed poorly with other meds, making temporary neurological spells. That sounded innocent enough.
Sitting up, feeling a little better now that she had a cover story, her arm bumped into the box she’d picked up from her grandparents’ house. She must have brought it in from the car after Rod brought her home, though she couldn’t remember doing it.
The microwave beeped. Maria stood up, flipping on the overhead light. She put three bags of chamomile in the steaming cup. She liked her tea strong. As the bags steeped, she began looking through the items in the old box. There was a stack of photos, some in color and some black and white. All were of pictographs and petroglyphs.
On the back of a photograph of a crude etching of a trapezoidal human body with hands raised into the air carved into a red rock cliff, Maria’s grandfather had written a short note:
Fremont in origin.
If Maria remembered correctly, the Fremonts were the inhabitants of Utah several thousand years ago. They were the ancestors of several Native American tribes still living in the area.
Studying the other photos, Maria saw that many had been classified by her grandfather as Fremont. Some were pictographs of random creatures like lizards. Others were of odd-shaped humans chasing what looked to be big horn sheep or deer.
Some of the other photos, ones with more stick-like figures and circled spirals had the word “Anasazi” written on the back. On a few of the other photos where the petroglyphs were hard to make out, Maria’s grandfather had written:
“Possibly Archaic Period?
There were several photographs, however, that caught Maria’s eye more than the others. These were of rock paintings that were sharp and angular in comparison to the others. The pictographs depicted animals which weren’t native to Utah—monkeys and jaguars. On the back of these photos, Maria’s grandfather had made an asterisk and noted:
Aztec in nature!
Maria had never known Grandpa Branson had been such a rock art junkie. But the box she’d picked up from Whitney Thatcher held more than just photographs. It also contained notebooks made by her grandfather as well as a stack of newspaper and magazine articles. There were even some Native American arrowheads and other small artifacts at the bottom.
He’d obviously loved this kind of stuff, and Maria could see why. Just looking at the ancient drawings and stone art made her realize for the
first time all day that life was bigger than her problems. People had been on this planet a long time. Surviving. Even thriving. Maybe she could learn a lesson or two from them.
Maria’s eyes fell onto the newspaper article from the Southern Utah News printed decades ago in 1990. Something had spilled on it in years past, leaving only about half of it legible. The title caught her attention.
“Is Montezuma’s Treasure in Kanab?”
She leaned back in her chair, took a sip of chamomile, and read:
The search for Montezuma’s treasure continues in the Kanab area. Legend has it that when the Aztec king, Montezuma, was killed by his own people in Mexico in the 1500s, and the Spanish Conquistadors were driven from Tenochtitlan, the Aztecs took their treasure and hid it from the Spaniards. That was four hundred years ago.
In 1914, Freddie Crystal arrived in Johnson Canyon, just north of Kanab. He had a newspaper clipping of Mexican petroglyphs he thought indicated that Montezuma’s treasure was hidden nearby …
Here the paper was stained. Maria tried to make out the words behind the browned area, but they were too faded. She resumed reading what she could:
In the spring of 1989 … found an Aztec treasure sign, a circle with an arrow pointing down, carved in the rock eight feet above the water level on the wall above the lakes. The site fits the criteria for an Aztec treasure hiding technique, called a “water trap.”
… a dive to explore the lake. The divers got seventy feet back in the tunnel. Their sonar equipment showed the tunnel was a hundred feet long and ended in a room 80 feet in diameter. Detectors registered heavy metal at the end of the tunnel. It was late, so they quit for the day. That night one of the divers had a dream. In the dream he swam back to the cave; an Aztec warrior with a spear was waiting.
The description of the Aztec warrior startled Maria. He sounded so similar to the ghost she had imagined in the cave. Maybe as a child her grandfather had read her this newspaper article with the description of the Aztec ghost? Maybe that’s where her mind had come up with the hallucination in the cave. Perhaps she wasn’t so crazy after all. The ghost had just been an idea planted in a child’s mind that had surfaced as an adult. Like some kind of a suppressed memory.
A little bit of legible text remained:
… the next morning. At a certain point in the tunnel, he started screaming that someone was grabbing and choking him. As he was pulled from the water he appeared white as a sheet. Another diver went down and had the same experience. The divers left and returned in two weeks. They experienced the same choking sensation in the tunnel and had to be pulled up. The diving crew did not dive in the lake anymore.
Everything about the story seemed too close to home. But even worse, it had been printed in a newspaper—as if this was stuff people thought could actually happen in real life. Ghosts weren’t real. Only the dead people they represented were.
Maria stood up quickly and put the photos, articles, and artifacts back into the box. She shoved the entire thing into a cupboard where cooking appliances should have been. She ate mostly simple foods and didn’t have a bunch of kitchen stuff to make fancy meals.
Her day at the office would start soon. She’d gotten a text that said the city council and other city employees were meeting at seven o’clock to discuss the current situation. Hopefully, she could get some rest before heading to the station. She could use some sleep before having to face Pete. She remembered the “bad reaction to medicine” story and breathed out a sigh.
“One day at a time,” she said out loud to herself. “Just one day at a time.”
In 1916, Freddie disappeared as suddenly and mysteriously as he had come—a moon-eyed, apparently aimless tramp whose bunkhouse blankets were unrumpled one morning … But out of the blue, four years later [he was] on the doorstep, his tobacco-stained grin, unchanged.
—The Saturday Evening Post. “Anybody’s Gold Mine,” by Maurine Whipple, October 1949, pages 24, 102-108.
Chapter 8
TYPICALLY, MARIA DREADED MEETINGS—especially those where nobody was really in charge. The morning’s city council meeting, called at short notice, was no exception. Everyone was tense and strained. The city was in turmoil.
The mayor was dead. Most likely murdered—unless he’d been able to reach behind and shoot himself in the back, which was basically impossible. And now it was up to the city council to pick up the pieces. Maria couldn’t blame them for being in shock; things like this didn’t happen often in a town like Kanab. Life here was usually quiet and slow. The way everyone liked it, or they wouldn’t live in a town like Kanab.
Other than Pete, who was at Maria’s left, seven additional men and six women sat at the large cherry wood table. Not as much of an “old boy’s club” as Mrs. Wolfgramm, the elderly woman in the cemetery, had insinuated. In the CIA, the gender gap had been much larger. Perhaps that was why Maria had always volunteered for the most risky assignments. She always felt she had something to prove to her male counterparts. Would things be different for her if she hadn’t offered to head up the arms deals sting in Tehran?
She shook her head. Of course things would be different, but there was no use crying over spilled milk. Or, in Maria’s case, a damaged psyche.
“We need to make some tough decisions today,” said a man with a gold embossed nameplate on the table in front of him that said, “Lavern Darwin.”
“Agreed,” said one of the female council members. “But first I think introductions are in order. We have a new police chief who hasn’t met most of us.”
Maria smiled and lifted a white tissue to her face. Hidden inside the Kleenex was a teaspoon of cinnamon—a spice that always made Maria sneeze. Her plan was to make it clear to Pete, and everyone else, that she had a very bad sinus infection for which she had been taking a very high powered antibiotic along with large doses of ibuprofen, a mixture which could make someone experience an “out of body” reaction. She even had the page from WebMD that explained the whole reason why.
A quick breath in through the nose and … “A-choo!” She wiped her face with a tissue in the other hand that contained none of the brown, nose-tickling spice. “Excuse me, I’m fighting a horrible sinus infection right now.”
Pete looked at her curiously.
The woman council member began introductions. “I’m Sylvia Manning, a resident of Kanab for about ten years now. My husband and I own a restaurant in town, and I strongly believe we need to continue our efforts to boost Kanab’s tourism industry. That is why I invited Tara Crane, Kanab’s Director of Tourism and Public Relations. We’ve got to get the news out that Kanab is safe, despite our mayor’s death.”
Tara was a smart-looking woman in a fitted suit. Her sun-streaked auburn hair was pulled up in a high-powered bun. Maria was sure she had seen her before. She studied the features on the woman’s face, which was a perfect blend of concealer, eye shadow, blush, eyebrow pencil, the whole bit.
It took a second for Maria to realize Tara was the Barbie-doll looking woman on Search and Rescue. Only today she looked like a business executive. Physically, the woman had it all.
“The mayor was shot. He died from a bullet wound to the back,” Pete interjected. He sat to Maria’s right. “An initial report came back from the coroner this morning.”
“Officer Richins,” said Maria slowly, “I wasn’t aware the coroner had already submitted a report. Where did she send it?”
Pete blushed. “It came to me because I was the one that … uh … delivered the body.”
Fair enough, thought Maria. She nodded and took in another whiff of cinnamon and sneezed. It made a nice effect. “Thanks for getting us that information, Officer Richins. Good work.”
The uncomfortable interchange between the two of them, along with the confirmation of murder, dampened the spirits of everyone in the room even more.
“As I was saying,” Councilwoman Manning continued, “we have to put our best face forward. I propose we vote to put our city manager, Riles Ho
dgins, in charge for the time being. He could take care of the day-to-day tasks, with anything large being brought to the council for a vote.”
“I disagree,” Councilman Darwin said, raising his hand. “We should make nominations from the seven of us for an interim mayor who could serve until the elections next November.”
In the corner of the room, a pale-faced woman hurriedly scribbled on a notepad. Thinking that she must either be the city secretary or the mayor’s administrative assistant, Maria made a note on her agenda to talk to her after the meeting. Maybe she could shed some light on the mayor’s relationship with the senator whose name had shown up in the mayor’s journal as well as on the sheet of paper hidden in his cell phone case—Cal Emerson.
Another whiff of cinnamon produced a rather large, boisterous sneeze this time. Even Maria’s eyes started to water. She reassured herself the story was going to work. Once she explained herself to Pete, yesterday’s melt down would be forgotten.
“I think Councilman Darwin is right,” said the man at Darwin’s left. “We need to take on the job of mayor amongst ourselves.”
A heated discussion ensued. No one else bothered to introduce themselves to Maria, which was fine. From the debate, she was able to identify everyone present. There were the seven members of the city council, a city manager, the mayor’s admin, the director of tourism, a city treasurer, and—
The council room door opened and Rod Thorton walked in. He had the same nicely trimmed three-day’s facial growth that he’d had the day before. It blended into his short, dark hair that set off his eyes, which seemed to vacillate between blue and green depending on how the light hit them. Instead of a brightly colored Search and Rescue t-shirt and tan hiking pants, he had on dark gray, flat front slacks and an executive fitted dress shirt that perfectly complemented his muscular form. Much to Maria’s relief, however, she still found his nose too large for her liking.
Why she continued to notice the other attractive traits he possessed, however, was absolutely infuriating.
Robbed of Soul: Legends of Treasure Book 1 Page 5