by Terry Spear
She put her hand in the sack and actually felt a slim box of something that rattled a bit and a magazine. Or a paperback—oh, graphic novel. Had to be. She pulled both items out and stared at the adult coloring book featuring a wolf on the cover in vibrant colors.
“Oh wow.” She smiled up at him. “I’ve seen these at the grocery store and bookstores and kept thinking how much I’d like to try one, but then I thought I’d never have the time. I love it.”
“I was afraid you might think it was silly. I figured if you felt stressed and wanted to get out of here to do some more investigating, but had to rest up, maybe that could help relax you.”
“What about you?”
He smiled.
“Okay, which page do you want?” She thought he might love to do it too.
“It’s your coloring book. You choose first. I’ll make us something to eat for a late lunch, and we can color for a while and then rest.” He looked through the cabinets and found a can of tuna fish. “How does a tuna-fish sandwich sound?”
“Good to me.” She pulled a coloring page from the book—a peacock—set it on the table, then went into the kitchen and poured glasses of milk.
“Mayonnaise? Anything else?” he asked.
“No, that’s it.” She pulled out a jar of baby dill pickles and set it on the table.
Then he brought the sandwiches over, and she added a pickle to her plate.
“So what do you think about your brother?” he asked.
“That he was really lucky to have gotten there after the attacker left, instead of arriving right before or during the crime. And I think Kira is involved and he doesn’t want her to be. He’s either in denial, thinking she’s really not involved, or he wants to learn the truth from her before he tells us anything more.”
“Which could be dangerous.”
“You’re right. But we don’t even know where he is. Do you still think he’s guilty of anything?”
“No. I just need to talk with him. To clarify more. If he knows anything further that could help with the case, we need to know it. Like you, I think Kira could be involved in every bit of this. The fact she’s from San Diego makes me wonder if her brother and their friend Wayne were in the club the night we all were there. If Kira is involved and realizes Miles suspects she’s involved, I believe he could be in real danger.”
“I can’t make him come here to stay with us unless he wants to.”
“I know. Other than one of Leidolf’s police officers catching up to him and arresting him for his own protection, that’s about the only other option we have. Unless we find Miles first.” Vaughn finished eating his sandwich and looked at the book. He found the wolf page and tore it out.
“Somehow I knew you’d want the wolf. You’re not just going to color him all tan, black, and gray, are you?”
He smiled at her.
Jillian shrugged. “It’s fantasy. Think of the wolf being different colors of the rainbow in a fantasy world. It’s just for fun.”
He was still smiling when he began flipping through the other pages.
“Or not. It’s your picture. Your creation.”
When she finished eating, he took the dishes into the kitchen and cleaned up, then joined her again. She pulled out all the colored pencils, and he eyed them for the longest time.
“Oh, go ahead, make it all wolflike.”
“I like a wolf’s color.” Then he studied her for a moment. “I haven’t seen you as a wolf yet.”
“If I shifted now, my head would split in two.”
“Still have a headache?” He was up from the table, getting her something for the pain in a flash.
She appreciated how thoughtful he was. “Thanks.”
“So if this is fantasy, you’re going to color your peacock in something other than blues and greens, right?”
She laughed. “I like the peacock’s feathers in the brilliant colors they are naturally.”
“My point exactly.”
She sighed. “Point taken.”
They began to color—his in gray and brown, a little gold, beige, and white. Hers was blue and green and orange, but she did add purple for some fun. She couldn’t believe she was sitting at a table coloring pictures with a hot alpha SEAL wolf. He was frowning and concentrating really hard to color the tiny spaces without getting over the lines. She agreed this took her concentration, and she no longer was stressing about other matters. She enjoyed watching him while he colored too.
Jillian paused, then yawned. She needed to sleep for a while.
“Hey, let’s go lie down. I think we both need the rest.” Vaughn left the table and got some water and pain medicine for his shoulder.
“Are you still hurting?”
“Yeah, some. By tomorrow, I should be good.”
They walked toward the bedrooms. She couldn’t quit thinking about her brother. “Maybe I can still convince Miles to come here and stay at the ranch.”
“Is he a twin?”
“No. Three years younger.” She paused at her room, knowing this was such a bad idea, yet she couldn’t help but want to suggest it anyway. “Maybe you should stay with me while we rest.”
Smiling a bit, Vaughn waited expectantly.
His words and actions had helped her to change how she felt about him—from ready to strangle him for going after her brother to wanting to make it up to him for being so nice to her when she was injured. “Doc says you’re to keep an eye on me. Your mission. Are you going to be the one who tells him you didn’t do your job?”
Vaughn laughed a little. “I thought I was the enemy.” He didn’t have to be asked twice though, and took hold of her hand and led her into her room.
She liked that he didn’t seem to hold a grudge. “I think me shooting you changed your mind about my brother.”
He chuckled. “Learning the attacker had to be a jaguar did.”
“Nah. You were already changing your mind about him way before that. You even got me a coloring book and coloring pencils.”
“And ice-cream bars.”
She paused at the bed. “Really?”
“For after our nap. Or maybe after dinner.”
She smiled up at him.
“Or maybe now.” He laughed and led her back to the kitchen. “I can see we aren’t a good influence on each other.”
“What’s wrong with having an ice-cream bar? The chocolate will take all our aches and pains away. It did for you last night, didn’t it?”
“Getting a good-night kiss would have been even better.”
“Yeah, well, it’s a little early for any more of that.”
His smile said he didn’t believe she really meant it, and then he got them each an ice-cream bar. They carried them into the living room and took a seat to look at Douglas’s stuff again.
She considered the book on sunken treasures next to one of the boxes. “They didn’t have books at my cabin for anyone’s reading pleasure.” Jillian opened the book. “I didn’t see any at your cabin either.”
“I wouldn’t know. I hadn’t exactly moved in yet.”
“True. Why would this book have been there?” She lifted the book and smelled it. “It has Douglas’s scent on it. And…my brother’s.” She frowned. “He’s not much of a reader. I can’t imagine why anything like this would interest him. Or when he would have gotten his scent on it if he hadn’t seen Douglas yet.” She flipped through the table of contents and ran her finger down until she came to shipwrecks off the Oregon coast.
Vaughn leaned forward and took a closer look at the book. “What are the chances your brother and Douglas were interested in more than running, rock climbing, and boating?”
Chapter 11
Jillian couldn’t believe Miles might be into treasure hunting. Sure, he’d had a metal detector and had searched for treasure for eons whenever they had family vacations. But she didn’t see him as a real, honest-to-God treasure hunter. “Would they be searching for treasure in the ocean? My brother swims, but h
e doesn’t scuba dive. Does Douglas?” Jillian asked Vaughn as they looked over the book on sunken treasures.
Vaughn turned to the pages that listed various shipwrecks off the Oregon coast. “Not that I know of. He’s afraid of the water. As a wolf, if he’s forced to swim, he can. As a human, he’ll boat on it, but he won’t get in.”
Jillian ate another bite of her ice-cream bar and got up from the couch. “I’ll be right back.” She went to her bedroom, grabbed her laptop, and returned to the living room.
“What are you going to look for?” Vaughn asked.
“Something. Anything. Why did Douglas come here every year? And my brother too? Had they been getting together to search for treasure off the Oregon coast?” Jillian finished her ice-cream bar and tossed the wrapper and stick in the trash.
“I take it you didn’t know that your brother was doing this.”
“Only when we were younger. He used a metal detector to find treasure…which meant all kinds of trash. But I didn’t think he’d ever done anything else like that. Certainly not searching for undersea treasures.”
She typed in a search for Douglas Wendish on the internet. When she was investigating human cases, she always did internet searches. No telling what she might learn. Wolves were more careful about being in the public eye, so she hadn’t expected to find anything about him. When she got a few hits, she assumed they were for some other Douglas Wendish. But when she saw a news article about him, she recognized him right away.
“Did you know he was a real treasure hunter?” She didn’t think Vaughn could look any more surprised than he did. She brought the laptop over to him. “That’s him, isn’t it?” The sandy-haired man was grinning, holding up what looked like a Confederate coin. “There are several articles about him finding treasure. He says he always had dive partners, but they were camera shy.”
“Wolves, most likely.” Vaughn read through the article. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“I’m surprised he wouldn’t have asked you to accompany him since you’re a diver, aren’t you?” Jillian asked.
“Yeah, but I’m sure he must have already had a crew. Besides, I stay busy.”
She pointed to a story on her laptop. “Here’s an article about a family who found three hundred thousand dollars in gold coins and gold chains from a ship that sank off the coast of Fort Pierce, Florida, on its way from Havana to Spain. And here’s an article about Douglas finding some gold at a different time.”
“Good work on the internet search.” Vaughn finished his ice-cream bar and put his wrapper in the trash.
“Thank you.”
Vaughn flipped through the treasure book. “Here’s an article on the treasures off the coast of Fort Pierce. He went there last year, I remember. Looks like he has a gold mine, pardon the pun, of treasure maps in here.”
“You said he came here in the past. What if it wasn’t just for a vacation all those times, but to search for some elusive treasure? If this was something that he loved doing, I can see that he might have always taken vacations where he could also do a bit of treasure hunting.”
“If your brother was involved, Douglas never said anything to us.”
“True. In one of the articles, the reporter mentioned Douglas had been searching for five years for the Confederate gold coins. It’s not like going to the grocery store, and there they are on the shelf. It would take a lot of dedication, trial and error, luck even, and time.” She looked back at the laptop. “Lots of ships have sunk off the Oregon coast. Some ran aground on sand bars and were refloated, and others were scrapped.” She moved closer to where Vaughn was sitting on the couch so she could show him the article that really got her attention.
She got a little closer to him than she’d planned, though she wanted to be near enough so he could see the screen. But her leg was touching his, and as if he couldn’t see the monitor well enough, he leaned into her space even more.
Trying to get her mind on the article and off the hot wolf sitting next to her, she pointed to the screen. “This is the one I’d go after. The ship was carrying wealthy Spanish passengers and might have sunk off the Oregon coast. The ship was also carrying beeswax in its cargo hold. People keep finding beeswax on the shore. Now, it also states that several ships traveling that same route carried beeswax, but if it was the same ship, the Spanish passengers were fleeing their homeland due to strife, and they would have taken all their valuables with them. How much do you want to bet Douglas has been looking for that treasure for some time?”
“Could be. Or just got interested in it after he’d been coming here for a while. So what would the deal be with your brother? He didn’t know Douglas was going to be in the area until the last minute. He was already here.”
“Yes, and Miles had already contacted me to have me join him. We usually do our separate things during the day, so the guys could have gone diving and I wouldn’t have known about it.”
“I’d like to know just who his camera-shy divers were. You didn’t see Miles with any scuba gear, did you?”
“No. But then again, he might have had it in the trunk of his car or in his bedroom, and I never saw it. Yet, he wouldn’t have known he was going anywhere with Douglas, so he might have planned to rent it and not brought any with him. Can you ask your pack leaders to see if anyone in the pack is a diver?”
“Yeah, already on it.”
They both pulled out their phones and made the calls. When Miles answered his phone, Jillian asked, “Have you been treasure hunting with Douglas?”
The silence on the other end of the phone spoke volumes.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Vaughn looked at her while he was talking with his pack leaders.
When Miles still didn’t say anything, she said, “Okay, listen, I think it’s great. Tell me about it.”
“Don’t you dare tell Dad.”
“What has Dad got to do with anything?”
Vaughn ended his call, and she put her phone on speaker. “Vaughn’s here. Now talk.”
“You know how Dad is. Unless you’re doing something worthwhile, he thinks you’re a slacker. Treasure hunting?” Miles snorted.
“Don’t tell me your secrecy has to do with that one time in Pompano Beach, Florida?” She couldn’t believe it. Then again, she remembered how irritated their dad had been. She’d wished her brother had found a treasure chest full of gold bullion. Instead he found a lot of trash. Which confirmed what her dad had said. Just once, she’d like her brother to prove their dad wrong.
“Yeah, and countless other times. Even though he badgered me about wasting my time—when I reminded him we were on vacation, and wasting time was part of the vacation experience—he micromanaged how I was searching for the treasure.”
“So how long have you been doing this?”
“Forever. I mean, Dad was right. Locating treasure can be a pie-in-the-sky adventure, but when I have a chance, I go with Douglas. That was one of the common interests Douglas and I had.”
“How? You don’t dive.”
“I’m technical dive-certified. And don’t tell Dad that either. He thinks anything you do should be job-related. Probably because I don’t have a regular job all the time. He’d just think I was some beach bum.”
Jillian closed her gaping mouth. Maybe she didn’t know her baby brother all that well. “So you were planning to look for treasure off the Oregon coast? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I was afraid you’d let it slip when you were talking to Dad. I’d get the lecture all over again.”
“Vaughn said Douglas had been in Fort Pierce before. Were you going to Fort Pierce with Douglas to hunt for treasure?”
“Later, probably. He always checks things out first. Then we get together, rent a boat, rent some equipment, and go out. We usually take a week. Then I’m back to looking for a job and he’s back at his job. I was just here on vacation, like I said, wanted to get together with you when Douglas couldn’t get away, and all of a sudden h
e said he was going to be here too. Maybe we could check out the Oregon treasure again.”
“How were you going to hide the fact you were doing it from me this time?” Jillian sagged against the couch, not believing he had kept it secret from her all this time.
“I thought I might have to tell you. But then Douglas was injured, and I knew we weren’t going anywhere.”
“Would the jaguar who injured him have known you were treasure hunting?”
“How did you learn of it?”
“We saw the book on treasures, and then I did a web search.”
“So see? The guy who did it might have too. I’ve been thinking back on all that has happened the last few months. Wondering if our treasure hunting was connected to the guy who injured Douglas. Well, and damn it, you too. I mean, if you can look up and find what Douglas has discovered, what if they did also?”
“Exactly. Did you ever have other divers with you on dives?”
“In Belize that one time. It was a group thing, and the two of us went there to check things out. We weren’t really with them. There were six of us total, and the dive guide.”
“So it wasn’t just a boating trip!” Jillian said, totally exasperated with her brother.
“No.”
“Did any of the other divers smell like cats?” Vaughn asked.
“Well, on the boat and with everyone wearing wet suits, it was impossible to tell. All I could smell was the rubber, the salt air, and suntan lotion. Afterward, we met them at a dive bar later in the evening. So yeah, they smelled like cats. Now that I know better, I’d say like jaguars.”
“Did they meet up with you at the dive bar on purpose or by accident?” Vaughn asked.
“Kira invited us to join them.”
“Did you talk to them about other treasure hunts you went on?” Jillian asked.
“Yeah. Everyone did. That was the fun of getting together on a group tour for a change. We all shared our various experiences, finds, and the locations.”
“So Douglas dives?” Vaughn sounded surprised.