by Mark Romang
Damien nodded and pointed upwards. “The attic will work. I was up in it earlier. There’s only one way in and one way out. We can barricade the door.”
“How do you get to it?”
Damien looked sideways. “It’s right here. This short flight of stairs leads to an outward opening door.”
“Excellent. Call Iris and Colette on your two-way radio and have them help you barricade the door.” Arcadias looked at the Rafters. “Let’s go. The attic awaits you.” Arcadias followed the couple to the door Damien referred to. His brother opened the door, allowing entrance. A musty smell filtered out onto the landing.
Arcadias gently nudged Jon Rafter’s back with the Glock. “In you go. Trust me; it’s only for a little while. You’ll be fine. Take a nap while you’re waiting. Before you know it, this will all be over with.”
Chapter 6
The attic door slammed shut, plunging them into cave-like darkness. Annie latched onto Rafter’s hand. “Did that really just happen? Are we prisoners in our own home?”
“Unless this is a dream and we’re both dreaming the same thing, I would say yes,” Rafter answered. He listened intently to the sounds on the other side of the attic door. He heard grunts and curses as someone placed something heavy in front of the door. And then he heard a drill securing something to the door frame.
No way out. And the attic would become a sauna before long.
Still holding Annie’s hand, Rafter moved deeper into the attic.
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see. Hold your other hand out in front of you. There’s plenty of stuff in here we can run into,” Rafter said quietly.
They shuffled forward bit by bit like penguins on an icepack. When they approached what Rafter considered the middle of the attic, he held his right hand straight up. A few more halting steps and he felt the chain.
Rafter pulled the chain. A sixty watt light bulb turned on and brought the dark attic to life. The flickering light bulb revealed an antique lover’s dream. Forgotten furniture, trinkets, and clothes from a bygone era crammed every nook and cranny. Dusty sheets covered the more ornate furniture pieces and protected them from cobwebs. “Let there be light,” Rafter said.
“Gosh, we could open an antique store with all this stuff,” Annie said, looking all around. “I can’t believe I never made it up here. I wouldn’t have dragged you all over shopping for furniture if I knew all this antique furniture was up here.” Annie pointed at a phonograph sitting on an accent table. “Is that a Victrola I see?”
Rafter walked over to the phonograph. It sat uncovered. He ran a finger along its mahogany wood horn, wiping away perhaps a hundred years or more of dust. “No, a Victrola had their horn inside a cabinet. This is a Victor Talking Machine phonograph.” A disc sat on the turntable. Rafter picked it up and blew off the dust. It was a recording by Harry Macdonough—To Have, To Hold, To Love. On a whim, Rafter put the record back down on the turntable and wound the winding arm several turns.
He looked at Annie and held out his hand, tried his best to smile. He would do just about anything to lighten the dark mood and reassure his wife everything would be okay. “May I have this dance?”
Annie nodded. Rafter took her into his arms, prayed a silent prayer that the old phonograph would work one more time. Amazingly enough it worked beautifully. Harry’s voice came out loud and strong. They had just enough room amongst the antiques to slow dance.
Annie rested her head against his. Rafter drank in her smell. Annie had a knack for smelling good all the time, no matter how stressful the situation. They swayed in time to the old love song, bodies pressed against one another, forgetting for the moment their awful circumstances.
They continued to dance long after Harry crooned his last note. The old music still played silently through their limbs. “Jon, why did we ever stop dancing? We used to dance almost every night on the upper gallery. You would bring out your entire Sinatra and Glen Miller collections. We would dance for hours, the moonlight shining through the trees and onto our skin. Those nights were so romantic. They were magical.”
“I don’t know. I really don’t. We’ll start dancing again real soon, I promise.”
“We have to get our house back from the Charbonneau brothers before we do anything.”
“I’m thinking we should find a way out of this attic and let the police handle our guests.”
“But I resent how they’re tearing up our house.”
“I know, Annie, but our lives are more important than this house. The house can be repaired. And we have plenty of experience at renovations. But if something were to happen to you…I would be lost.”
Annie pulled back and released his tender embrace. She looked around. “So do you have any ideas how we can escape?”
He had no ideas, not even a clue. The only way out seemed to be through the roof. But he doubted he would find an axe or a chainsaw or anything else in the attic he could use to breach the roof.
They were stuck, but he wouldn’t tell Annie that. “Out the roof somehow. Let’s sort through all this stuff and see if we can find some tools.”
Annie nodded. “Our attic is big. I’ll take this end if you take the other end.”
“That sounds like a plan. We’ll meet in the middle. With any luck we’ll be out of here before sunrise.”
Chapter 7
“I’m not proud of my past, Arcadias. I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life, but I’ve never committed a felony until now,” Iris said. She sat tensely in an easy chair in the parlor, her back rigid and straight. Colette and Damien sat nearby on an antique sofa. Arcadias paced back and forth in front of the marble hearth. His boots squeaked with each anxious step.
“We’ve hardly started our search. It’s too early to say whether things are going well or not. There’s a lot of house left to explore,” Arcadias replied. “We’ll find it, Iris.”
“But then what do we do? Where will we go? We’ll be on the run the rest of our days.”
“You can go wherever you want. You’ll have the means to do it.”
“I’ve never had any money to speak of. But the way you talk, it sounds as if you’re not coming with me,” Iris said.
“They’ll be looking for couples, Iris. When we find the treasure we should settle up and go our separate ways to increase our chances at evasion.”
“But how do we convert the gold into money?”
“There are all kinds of rare coin and gold buyers out there. It’s also easy to melt the coins down into bars. You’ll need to get you a graphite crucible, an acetylene torch, and an ingot mold. Put the gold into the crucible, sprinkle a little boric acid onto the gold and melt it with the torch. Then, using the tongs, you pour the molten gold into the ingot mold. That’s what I’m going to do. The melted gold will attract less attention.”
“I don’t mean to be a wet blanket, Arcadias,” Damien interjected, “but have you considered that Lafitte may have come back and dug up his treasure? You showed me the note. It looked to me like Lafitte wrote down the coordinates so he could find it later.”
Arcadias stopped pacing and faced his younger brother. Looking at Damien was almost like looking in a mirror. Same hair, same height, and nearly identical weight, the only noticeable physical difference between them was the color of their eyes. Damien sported blue eyes instead of gray ones like Arcadias. Two years younger, and a longtime construction worker, Damien possessed as many sun-induced wrinkles as Arcadias.
“Your point is valid, Damien. But I don’t think Lafitte would have had time. The treasure came from a Spanish galleon he plundered late in 1816. Not long thereafter Lafitte agreed to be a spy for Spain and left his Barataria Bay smuggling port in April of 1817 and settled on Galveston Island in Texas.”
Damien shook his head, still unsure. “Why would he leave that much money lying around in the ground? It seems foolish.”
“There wasn’t much of a banking system back then. The ground was as good a pl
ace as any for safekeeping.”
“Except that much of Louisiana is below sea level and the soil is unstable.”
Arcadias nodded. “I think this is why Lafitte buried the loot this far inland. He had to find a stable place where it would stay put.”
Damien sighed. “That sounds logical, Arcadias. We just need to find it.”
Colette patted Damien’s knee. “Yes, you do need to find it, honey. If you don’t find it I’ll haunt you from the grave. You’ve made me a criminal. So if I am to be a lawbreaker I better be a rich one.”
Arcadias looked at Colette with hidden antipathy. Colette was the laziest person he’d ever met. She and Damien maintained a more traditional relationship, while he and Iris were simply friends with occasional benefits. “Then we need to get busy if we are to find the treasure,” Arcadias said. “Damien, you should continue scanning the grounds. And maybe the carriage house as well. Iris, you and Colette search all the rooms in the house with the handheld scanners. I’ll go under the crawlspace and search there. Keep your two-way radios handy and set to channel 1. We’ll convene back here in two hours.”
Chapter 8
Grand Isle, Louisiana
Lorelei and Alisha Charbonneau stood in front of the small treasure hunting shop and peered into the storefront window. A “Closed” sign hung on the locked door. “I’m sorry, honey. But it looks as if your father isn’t here,” Lorelei said to her daughter.
“It’s just as well, Mom. He probably doesn’t want to see me anyway.”
Lorelei placed an arm around her daughter’s shoulder. “It doesn’t matter whether he does or doesn’t. I’m just so proud of you that you want to reach out to your father. You’re only fifteen approaching sixteen, but you’re already more mature than Arcadias is at forty-seven.”
“Something the pastor said at youth group convicted me. He quoted scripture from the Bible. Matthew 6: 14-15 says, ‘For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.’”
“That’s not easy to do, Alisha. We all struggle to forgive someone who has wronged us.”
“Do you think you can ever forgive, Dad?”
“I don’t know. I hope at some point I can. But he abandoned us. And I begrudge him so much for that. Maybe on my deathbed I’ll forgive him. But right now my heart is too hard. It’s not soft like yours, Alisha.”
“I just don’t understand. Why did Dad leave us, Mom? Doesn’t he love us?”
“I’d like to think Arcadias loves us. But if he does it’s not nearly as much as his treasure hunting. When you were small he doted over you. You were his little princess. But then his obsession with Jean Lafitte took over. It’s all he can think about now.”
“He chose a pirate and a legend of buried treasure over us?”
Lorelei sighed. “I’m afraid so. At one time everything was perfect. Your father was a respected professor. His students enjoyed his classes. We were always asked to attend faculty parties. And we had a stable income and lived in a nice home. But then the lure of gold enticed him, and he couldn’t resist its pull.”
“Do you think he’ll ever find the treasure?”
Lorelei shrugged. “Arcadias often said he’d one day hold Lafitte gold in his hands or die trying.”
“I hope he finds it. Maybe his obsession will end when he finds it.”
Lorelei scowled. “And maybe he’ll finally realize his real treasure was at home all along.”
“Mom, someday I hope to get married. Who will walk me down the aisle? My grandpas are both dead.”
“You don’t need to worry about that, honey. That’s a ways off. I’m sure we’ll figure something out by then. I’ll start praying right now that God will bring a virtuous man into our lives that will count it an honor to walk you down the aisle.” Lorelei took her daughter’s arm. “Since Copeland is hosting the town hall debate tonight, let’s skip all the traffic and news crews and stay here in Grand Isle tonight. We’ll buy some food and have supper on the beach. The sunsets are so beautiful here.”
Alisha smiled. “That sounds fun.”
“Great, let’s do it,” Lorelei said, handing the keys to Alisha. “You might as well drive. You have your learner’s permit now.”
Alisha smiled and grabbed the keys. “Thanks, Mom. You’re the best.”
Mother and daughter descended a set of steps to the ground—every building in Grand Isle sat on stilts to combat flooding from hurricanes—and climbed back into their faded Honda. Driving carefully, Alisha chauffeured her mother toward the other end of the island, leaving Charbonneau’s Treasure Shack far behind them.
Chapter 9
Up in the humid attic, Annie quickly picked her way through the antiques, sifting through forgotten items from yesteryear. Any other time, and under normal circumstances, she would be moving along at a snail’s pace, admiring the antique collection with a dumbstruck gaze.
But with psychopaths on the loose in her house, she had no time to admire and reminisce over the memorabilia and forced herself to examine the attic’s contents with only cursory glances. So far she’d found nothing that would create an exit hole in the attic’s ceiling and roof. And she was beginning to think she never would find anything useful.
She operated in a state of disbelief as she searched. A question kept repeating in her head. Can this really be happening again?
This was the third time in her life she’d been held hostage: once when she was eight-years-old by Claude Boudreaux, and then again a little over three years ago by Sebastian and Jean-Paul Boudreaux, Claude’s equally twisted sons. She’d been an FBI agent the second time, assigned to tracking the Boudreauxs, who had abducted a small girl from a car ferry. But things went south when the Boudreauxs ambushed her and took her hostage too.
She’d always called Louisiana home, and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. The vast majority of people in Louisiana were friendly and wonderful to live with. But for some reason the state’s dregs kept finding a way into her life.
At least this time she wasn’t alone. She had Jon with her. And she took great comfort from having him here with her. Despite his easygoing demeanor, Jon had another side to him. Like Superman, Jon could go from mild-mannered artist to action hero in seconds. He didn’t possess super powers, but was a force to reckon with when riled. Annie had a hunch the Charbonneau brothers would likely experience his heroism before morning.
Despite her law-enforcement past, Annie had never met anyone similar to Jon. Storms of life could batter him at will and he’d remain calm. She supposed it was his background as a NYPD hostage negotiator—a stressful job that demanded calm nerves—that kept him serene. But more than that she knew Jon’s faith attributed the most to his intrepidness. He could stare death in the face and not blink because nothing could shake his trust in God’s provision.
She was a believer herself, but her faith—strong and vibrant at first—stagnated after her miscarriage. Forgive me for not praying sooner, God. Jon and I need your help. Please help us escape this attic. Show us a way out of here. We need a miracle.
Annie came to a large wardrobe. She grabbed the small brass knobs, opened the richly stained doors and looked inside. A gasp escaped her mouth. Vintage clothing—elegant and fashionable for their time—hung inside. She couldn’t resist their lure and burned precious time examining the dresses, hats and blouses. They were the clothes of a debutante. Annie examined every dress, admired them all except for one. A black funeral dress hung incongruously amongst the evening gowns and summer dresses.
Annie assumed the clothes belonged to Rose Whitcomb, the late heiress to Lloyd Whitcomb, whose fortune could be traced all the way back to Rutherford Whitcomb. Rose had been a spinster, and Jon inherited the house upon her death. Even though he wasn’t a relative, and served only as a caretaker of the house while Rose still lived, she thought so highly of Jon she wanted him to have it.
Annie pushed aside the funeral dress and found a purse draped from a hanger. She removed the purse from the hanger and looked inside, curious as to what a young, genteel woman carried with her back in the day. But all she found in the purse was a book. She flipped the book open and discovered it was actually a journal—Rose’s journal.
Annie skimmed through an entry. The subject matter captivated her from the first few words. She marked her place in the journal with her finger and made her way over to a nearby side chair. She sat down and began to read, and it didn’t take long before she felt drawn into another timeframe.
Chapter 10
Copeland, Louisiana—April 1942
As the song ended, Rose Whitcomb hugged her dance partner, resting her head on Bobby Hoxley’s shoulder. “I’m so tired, Bobby. I don’t think I can dance anymore,” Rose panted.
“Ah, Rose, we’re just getting started.”
“We’ve been waltzing and fox-trotting for two hours now. I’m beat.”
The party started at seven pm. But guests started showing up at six. And by six-thirty gleaming Dodges and Chevys, Buicks and Fords lined the long driveway. No one wanted to miss a gala put on by Lloyd Whitcomb. Anyone who was anyone came from all over Iberville Parish to sample expensive food, drink vintage wines, and dance to a talented swing band playing Tommy Dorsey and Glen Miller songs.
“But the band is just getting warmed up. They’ll be playing Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington songs before long.”
Rose kissed Bobby’s neck. “Let’s go somewhere quiet, where we can be alone.”