“Alex and I will go to the crew village and call the police,” Maren offered. “We’ll tell them exactly where to go.”
Alex nodded. “We’ll take the dingy tied to the stern.” She appraised Maren. “As long as you can handle some speed rowing?”
“I can handle it,” Maren said.
“Wait! the satellite,” I remembered. Maren knew what I meant—no one else did, not yet anyway—and she got my backpack off the beach.
“There isn’t too much battery left,” I warned. “Save it until you’re far enough away and you know you can get a signal.”
“Aye, aye, Cap’n,” Maren said. She and Willa boarded the dingy and disappeared into the night, just a couple of badass girls on a routine rescue mission. I turned to Porter.
“What are you looking at me for?” he said. “I’m going wherever you go.”
“Very sweet,” AJ said. “That means you’re coming with me, because if I know Riley, she needs to go find the treasure.”
“Oh, don’t you worry,” Porter said, pulling me close so my face was pressed against his chest. His heart was thumping almost as fast as mine. “I know Riley just as well as you, and of course she’s going to find that gold.”
I was standing between two people who had just said they knew me. They knew me! And so did Willa and Maren and . . . it was overwhelming. I’d come here lost and alone, but now I was part of a group who actually cared about me.
“Ready?” AJ asked me, holding out his hand. “Fist bump.”
I took a breath before holding out my own.
“Ready,” I said. I took a breath. “Let’s finish this.”
36
Deb and Harry were hiding in a grove of trees by the sheer rock wall. The same place, most likely, where the pirates had concealed themselves before they’d jumped us. Harry lowered his camera—that’s how happy he was to see us—and Deb squeezed each of us tight. It was ironic, but throughout most of the game I’d trusted Joaquin way more than Deb. He turned out to be a slime, and she was the one who’d had our backs the whole time.
“You guys . . .” she said in a whisper. The wind had all but disappeared. “I had no idea that Phil . . . you’ve been in such danger.” She threw her hands up. “I don’t even know what to say.”
“Say it later,” AJ advised. “Right now we’ve got gold to find.”
We watched Phil and Serena for a few minutes, evaluating our next move. It was clear Serena was in charge. Phil had the gun now, but she was the one giving the orders and directing everyone else. She was getting more and more agitated. The gold fever had definitely passed from Miles to her.
“It should be here.” She was visibly angry.
“We’ve looked for hours. It’s not here, but you still owe us our money,” one of the men told her. “You need to pay us.”
“No one is leaving until we find it, so keep looking. Harder.”
The pirate left her to talk to his men. None of them looked happy. The air was oddly quiet. After thrashing around for hours, a strange stillness had arrived, as if we were in the eye of a hurricane. It felt eerie, as if the storm was holding its breath and getting ready to let loose even harder.
“Serena, calm down,” Phil said.
“Never in the history of being told to calm down has anyone ever actually calmed down, Phil, so shut it.”
“I’m just trying to say—”
“I knew it was a mistake to involve you,” Serena ranted. “Don’t even start, Phil. We are not giving up. None of us. Not them, not you, and definitely not me.”
“It’s the middle of the night, it’s dark out, we’ll never find it,” Phil said. He sounded reasonable, as if none of this was bonkers. “Let’s get back to the boat, untie the kids, tell them we escaped.”
“Quit, you mean?” Serena snapped.
“The film equipment needs to be packed, the arena dismantled. You can come back while all that’s happening. The kids will have gone home, so it’ll only be you here.”
Deb cursed under her breath. “That bastard,” she said. “Using our show—my show—like this. I’m going to kill him.”
Porter looked around. “Uh oh. Look—the pirates are drifting off. What if they go back to the boat? If they find out we’re gone, we’ll lose our edge of surprise.”
“We should sneak attack Phil and Serena now,” Rohan said. “I’ll count to three, and then we rush them.”
“They’ve got a gun, Rohan,” Deb said. “I can’t authorize a move like that.”
“I’m with Rohan,” Cody said. “We jump ’em now, before they’re expecting it.”
Serena was still berating Phil. “You don’t get it, do you?” she said. “I am not leaving this spot without the gold. I’ve been waiting for it for six long years. It was almost mine. It would have been, if he hadn’t—”
Serena broke off. I realized it then. She had killed Miles. Of course she had. Miles always intended to give the treasure to the government and collect the bounty. Serena, as I well knew, had plans to splash the gold around on the black market. She and Miles must have argued about it and things had gotten heated to the point of no return, or even worse, she’d plotted his death. How she did it hardly mattered; she’d been the one responsible, and then she’d plotted her chance to get back here.
Cody had started to count. “One, two . . .”
Rage blew up inside me and I felt a force pushing me to move, and before the third count, I was pushing my way out of the bushes.
“You!” I said, to Serena. “You killed Miles!”
Phil looked from me to his cousin in shock, and taking advantage of his surprise, Serena lunged for the gun. They struggled.
Suddenly, there was a loud crack, and I watched in horror as Phil slumped over. Blood started to seep onto his Hawaiian shirt, turning the white flowers black. He clutched his side.
Porter grabbed me from behind and threw me to the ground.
The only pirate who’d stayed behind made an attempt to grab the gun from her, but there was another shot, and then he, too, collapsed.
Rohan and Cody ran for Serena. Her hands were shaking, but she still had the gun.
“Don’t do it, ma’am,” Cody said, holding his hands out. “Just put the gun down. Nice and slow. No one else needs to get hurt.”
“No,” Serena said. And then she repeated the word over and over as she backed into the woods. “No, no, no.”
Phil was starting to cough up blood. We looked at each other. Go after Serena, or help Phil? There was no choice. Even Deb came over to help. Each of us dropped to our knees beside Phil, and Cody quickly tied a tourniquet around Phil’s bicep. He’d been hit in the arm just above his elbow, a deep wound, and the bullet had gotten his side, too.
“Keep pressure on this,” Cody told Rohan. He had me rip up the injured pirate’s shirt, and instructed Porter on how to tie additional tourniquets.
“Help me with this guy,” Cody said. The pirate was unconscious, but he was still breathing. “Jesus. He’s in bad shape.”
There were lights in the distance—a boat. Rescue was imminent. And then, even better, the sounds of a helicopter. A few hours ago this man had kidnapped us, but now that he was so near death, I hoped he got help.
“There might be a doctor on the helicopter,” I said. “They’ll know what to do.”
Cody shook his head. “I don’t think he’s going to make it.”
I didn’t know what to feel. To be so close to someone about to die was overwhelming. Cody sat back on his heels. “I’ll take it from here,” he said. “I’ve seen plenty of life and death on the ranch. It’s not pretty.”
I leaned back on my heels, unsure of what to do. “Go,” Cody said. “Just go.”
I stumbled up to my feet. Porter and Rohan were busy with Phil, who was conscious—that was a good sign. I wasn’t quite ready to
think of Phil as someone who’d betrayed us. To me, he was still the easygoing Phil I’d known from the past two weeks, and I didn’t want that person to die. If he lived, there would be time enough to be angry at him.
AJ hadn’t given a thought to either Phil or the pirate, as far as I could tell. He was busy examining the rock face.
“The gold should be here somewhere,” he said, pointing to a triangle carved deeply into the stone. “I don’t understand it. That sign tells us it’s nearby.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rohan stand up. He shook his head. “The pirate didn’t make it.”
A light from the helicopter flashed across the rock face, and for a second it glinted off my pendant. I touched it. Come on, Lady Luck. A gust of wind from the helicopter’s blades knocked a branch into the rocks, and it sliced off a chunk.
Wait, what was that, in the rock wall? Was there something there? A crack, maybe. I walked over, as if in a trance. There was a light illuminating it, but it almost seemed to be coming from inside the rock, not from the helicopter’s searchlight.
Seven must die. Six had died already. I looked at the motionless body of the pirate. Now there had been seven.
Was the island finally ready to reveal its hiding place?
I pressed my face to the crack and looked inside. A cavern, much like the one housing the shrine, and inside that: gold. Piles and piles of coins and statues and chalices, and yes, jewelry, too. All glowing gold.
We’d done it! We’d found the treasure.
37
One Year Later
The limo came to pick me up at the airport, a giant hulking thing that was more of a bus than a car. I was the last to arrive in LA, and before I’d even reached the sidewalk, Maren and Alex and Maddie were leaning half way out of the windows screaming my name.
Everyone was inside the car, and why not—there was plenty of room. I squeezed past AJ, Cody, and Rohan. I hugged all of them, saving a smile for Porter who was sitting in the back row. I didn’t need to hug him yet; we’d just seen each other last weekend. We spent virtually every weekend together now. Willa was a frequent guest in my New York City apartment, too—we’d become friends after the island, real friends this time. She still lived in LA but she was applying to art school in New York, so if I stayed there for another year we planned to get an apartment together. People asked me afterward how I had forgiven her, but I didn’t consider her behavior on the island a personal betrayal. Finding out she’d been placed among us to push our buttons explained away so many inconsistencies. I chose to focus on the good moments we’d shared together.
She’d meet up with all of us later tonight, which was going to be interesting. Not everyone—Maren, specifically—had forgiven Willa. Of course, of all my new friends Willa had been the one who’d loved the meme backstory the most. She’d known about it ahead of time through her sleuthing, but she hadn’t realized how much the online notoriety had bothered me.
“You’ve been looking at it all wrong,” she told me the first time I’d visited her in LA after the island. We were at the Santa Monica pier, doing some of those things I’d imagined us doing. “You and those losers at your old school are the only ones who care about why this meme was created in the first place. The rest of the world doesn’t care about that. That picture just means I can’t even now. That’s it. Nothing more. You should embrace it. I mean, why not? It’s classic.”
In fact, it was Willa who had helped me pick out the red dress I was wearing today. “That’s your color now,” she’d told me. “Make it your own.”
I adjusted the strap nervously. I’d gotten used to the color, but it was a little more form-fitting than I would have chosen if Willa hadn’t been there pushing me. We were going to an early screening of Deb’s new documentary, the one I’d spent the past year working on. It was a story of the gold, but it was our story, too.
My parents were flying down from San Francisco. Everything that had happened between me and my father felt very small in comparison to what I’d just gone through, so we’d been able to move on after I’d returned, triumphant. Although that’s the funny part about families: when we were reunited after the island, it was hard to remember that there was anything to move on from. I was sure issues would bubble up again, but for now, my father and I had managed to find respect for each other and our different ways of doing things. It helped that I’d found the gold, too, of course.
Phil would be at the theater tonight as well. It had taken a long time, but he’d recovered from the gunshot if not his cousin’s betrayal.
I had gone to see him in the hospital after that crazy night.
“I had no idea Serena was capable of any of this,” Phil had said. His throat was raw. Deb told me he’d spent much of his first few days out of recovery crying.
“My father believes that gold fever catches certain people and doesn’t let go. It happened to Miles first, and Serena became a victim, too. I felt it a little bit, myself.”
“I had no idea she was so far gone. I think she arranged the food poisoning, too,” Phil said. “Some of the crew was hit, but not her. She was happy—and prepared—for the extra time to search.”
“You’re a good guy, Phil, but things got out of hand. Do you think she was . . . intentionally . . . aiming for you?” I asked tentatively.
“I don’t even know. Maybe. Maybe not.”
“I guess it’s up to you to choose what you want to believe,” I told him.
Belief and the power of choosing what to believe was a major part of my own story, it turned out. I’d worked it into the documentary, too, and it made sense: all treasure hunters, in their own way, choose the signs to follow.
Serena was still on the run, but I had no doubt that wherever she was, she would have followed the reports of the treasure’s discovery. The cave had been full of amazing things. Statues, masks, chalices, and jewelry. I thought back to that first conversation with Sean back on the helicopter after we’d found out we’d have the option to search. As it turned out, there would have been a few things for him to pocket, but he was doing just fine without any of the gold. He’d recovered, and his role on the show seemed to have brought him a wave of new followers, which were probably more valuable than treasure to him anyway.
I could relate to that sentiment. Willa had come to the cave the next day—everyone had, all the players and crew—and after we’d all had a chance to marvel and exclaim over our discovery, she’d directed a mini-photo shoot like the one she’d fantasized about. Her sharp visual eye was the reason that an Internet search of my name now would immediately pull up a picture of me smiling in amazement amidst the gold: holding it, wearing it, and draped in it. And yes, there was a crown. I can’t even had a whole new meaning now.
After the discovery, the rest of the night had been a blur, but the next day we met with representatives from the Brazilian government to show them what we’d found. Deb had never gotten the proper permits—intentionally—but after the discovery she had negotiated with the government for their usual bounty payment. She’d worked it out so that it was split between me, AJ, Maren, Alex, Cody, Porter, and Rohan, with her production company getting a share as well. We were each going to clear a little over two hundred and fifty thousand, a substantial surprise, considering we’d expected to all split that amount. I’d planned to give my allocation to Maren, but she’d refused it. She had enough to pay for college and beyond, so I’d asked to have my slice of the reward go to a charity in San Francisco that focused on mental health. I’d given it in Miles’s name.
I looked around at all of us sitting in the limo. It was a nice bookend to our arrival on the helicopter. We’d all come so far since then—me, especially. I’d been right, finding the treasure did help shift my reputation, but that wasn’t even the best thing to have come out of the experience. The best thing was that I’d found myself again.
“Now that the mo
vie is done, what are you going to do next?” Maren asked me. She was wearing a special T-shirt, picked out just for the event because it had a couple of “fancy” references. This shirt was a wordy one: Ain’t no party like a Gatsby party, because a Gatsby party don’t stop until two people are dead and everyone is disillusioned.
I touched Maren’s hair. It was brown now, not black. I’d gotten my answer after all.
She pulled back and slapped my hand away. “Hands off the goods, creeper,” she told me. She’d kept the colored tips—pink, today—admitting that the black dye had been “a little extra.”
“To answer your question, I’m going to Black Rock one last time,” I said. “Deb and I are going to do some wrap-up interviews.”
“Ugh, better you than me.” Maren shuddered. “I’m happy I’ll never have to see that place again.”
I felt differently. My time on the island had been a turning point. It was why I hadn’t hesitated when Deb had asked me to work on the film with her.
“I have all this footage,” Deb had said. “I have to do something with it, and I think it’s better suited for a documentary anyway. I can tell the story. Yours, mine, Phil’s. Our stories are all intertwined with the treasure now. It’s only fair that we be the ones to tell it. You’ve got a storyteller’s eye, and I want you to help me.”
Agreeing had been one of the best decisions I’d ever made. That, and choosing to give Porter a second chance. I’d learned I could trust other people again—including myself.
Porter had heard Maren’s question. “So what are you going to do next?”
“Probably join AJ at Harvard,” Alex guessed. “After the gap year you had, and the résumé you have now, any school would be crazy not to admit you.”
“Yeah, I don’t know about that. Harvard’s pretty far out of reach,” I said. “But that’s okay. You know what? I love New York. NYU has a pretty amazing film school, and one of the film editors I worked with said she’d write a rec for me there, so I might have a shot . . .”
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