Gold (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 4)

by Thomas Hollyday

  “About work?”

  “I’m an astronomer too, like my father was before he died. I’ve sort of taken over his work. Anyway, Father Tom let me place my telescope on the mound in the middle of his swampland.”

  “Is that a good place for a telescope?” John asked.

  “Yes, the Nanticoke River flows around that hairpin and gives me a clear view of the western horizon.”

  “How did you get into the swamp through all the brush?” John rubbed his arm where it had been scratched by briars.

  She chuckled. “Father Tom used to go in there on all fours. Said he didn’t want to ruin the paths for the rabbits. Anyway, he showed me a path to a place near the shoreline where the brush was low.”

  “So you wanted to go in there to study the stars?”

  She nodded. “Father Tom knew all about my father’s work. He was interested in that. When I asked him about using the location for my own work, he was very excited. He came out a few nights and helped me sight in my scope, take notes, that kind of thing.”

  John asked, “Then on other nights he came out there with a flashlight by himself and you didn’t know what he was doing?”

  “Yes. I know he wasn’t looking at stars. He didn’t have a telescope and mine, of course, was back on my own deck in back of my house where I worked. Anyway, he never told me anything about his activities. We just talked about astronomy.”

  “I suppose religion too.”

  “No, we never talked about church. He’d talk sometimes about my father’s ideas about ancient peoples and their religions, that kind of thing. More like history discussions.”

  John said, “Could you show me the spot where his flashlight was moving?”

  “Sure.” She stood up. “Would you like to go now?”

  John nodded. “Let’s go.” He thought about Ricker and his relationship with the other neighbor, Tolman. He’d bet that Tolman or his wife had seen those lights too. When they heard about the money, they put two and two together and called in Ricker. That’s why he had been out at the property.

  She led him outside into the hot morning sunlight. Her car was a red and yellow van that had a lot of dents in its side panels and caked mud on its tires. In the back of the truck was an upright square box like ones on old fashioned military tanks to hold guns. The sides of the box went four feet into the air and were four feet wide at the base. A small slot stretched from the sides into the turret roof and a ten-inch diameter telescope protruded.

  “Nice scope,” he commented.

  “Do you know about astronomy?”

  “No, but I’m interested in learning about the stars.”

  Just before he climbed into the van, he looked at her across from him. She had planted herself in the driver’s seat, kicked her sandals off and put her bare feet on the pedals. She reminded him of himself, when he was a young boy working on the farm without shoes in the summer, driving his foster father’s rusty Farmall tractor.

  She turned and said, “I’m very sorry about Father Tom’s death.”

  John nodded. “I remember seeing you in church.” He smiled and said, “You didn’t have any shoes then either.”

  “I forget to wear them sometimes.” She looked down and wiggled her toes. “Like now.”

  “You cried.”

  “I’d like you to include me in the funeral.”

  “You mean you want to say something at the Mass?” John asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Sure,” John said. Then he added, looking at her light summer outfit and her bare feet. “You know getting into the land is pretty tough. You might want to go home first and change.”

  She grinned and replied, “Just ‘cause I cried at church doesn’t mean I’m not tough. Besides, we’ll go in by boat and miss the briars.” She started the engine.

  A half hour later, her rowboat, only fourteen feet in length, and in poor condition with a slop of water and seaweed in its bilge, headed out into the channel with John at the oars. The river was not more than a quarter mile across here. Andy leaned over the bow directing him through the masses of seaweed that clustered in the shallow water from the low tide.

  It was mid afternoon and the sun was blasting hot on the water. No clouds appeared on the horizon to the west or east. The air smelled of drying seaweed and dead fish.

  “I’d like to row past Father Tom’s acres and get a look at the land on the other side,” John said.

  She stared back at him for a moment, then said, “All right.”

  “That’s the farmer who sold the swamp to Father Tom,” said John.

  “James Tolman,” she said, shaking her head in disgust.

  “You know him?”

  “I tried to get a spot on his field to set up my scope.”

  “What happened?” asked John.

  “He wouldn’t let me set up. His wife was very upset about my doing anything with the scope. His wife is very religious, I guess, and told me it was blasphemy to look at stars.” She smiled.

  John asked, “They think the world was made in seven days?”

  “You got it, John. Not interested in my science. I’m supposedly working for Satan.”

  The Tolman farm looked prosperous. The corn was growing well and in the middle of the closest field the mound rose up about twenty feet above the crop. John saw activity near the mound. A man he did not recognize who was wearing a black western style hat was standing with Tolman. Two other younger men were lifting planks from a truck parked nearby and erecting them into a fence along the side of the hill. John wondered why Tolman was building a fence there.

  Oyster shells were deep in piles along the shoreline of the priest’s property indicating as John knew, that this had been a Nanticoke tribal camp at one time and these were the relics of their feasting centuries ago. Several large trees overhung the beach, such as it was, and the mud of the shoreline was littered with wind torn branches from these and other trees, broken off during the many violent thunderstorms that had come up this river over the years.

  The birds and insects in the mass of foliage coming down to the edge of the beach hushed as they stepped ashore. Except for the lapping of the wavelets in the almost mirror like surface of the river behind them, John could hear no noise of any kind. Andy had gone over to the edge of the brush. “Father Tom’s path is here,” she said.

  As she spoke, she disappeared into the brush. The foliage was thick but not so impenetrable that he could not spot the mass of a hill further into the woods. He stumbled after her stepping in wet mud that gradually changed to dried out ruts as he left the high tide point and reached higher ground. She was standing near the edge of the mound that gradually rose in front of her.

  “Yes,” she said. “This hill matches the one across the road from here and the one in the nearby field of Mister Tolman. It was on the top of this mound that I wanted to set up my scope.”

  He stopped and looked at her. “Why?”

  “It has a very good view as I said.”

  He smiled, “I can’t help but think you have more reason than that to climb through all this brush.”

  She smiled. “OK, I admit I was curious about this hill. I study the old civilizations like my dad did. I want to study what the Native Americans saw, so I had to be up on the mound to look at the sky. Do you know what one of the theories of the mounds is?

  “No.”

  “The Nanticoke built these piles of earth so that they could climb closer to their heaven, to their sky gods which were supposed to be in the north constellations.” She paused. “I know,” she said quickly and smiled. “I read about your arguments in court for Mister Knott. I know that not one of the experts has been able to prove that they are not just geological curiosities. There’s no findings of any Native American bones or tools. State archeologists have been here many times and the descendants of the ancient Maryland Native American groups have been trying to get them legislated as sacred sites but no one has any proof.”

  John said, “From
what I understand they are classified as made by glaciers. That means they can still be sold. Ricker told me that if the Native Americans ever get their way, all this land will be put into parks by the government. So every time it comes up in the legislature, the real estate interests get busy killing the bill. That was one of the few corporate things that actually helped my farm clients. Most times, those people are just trying to get land.”

  She grinned and said, “For example, do you know that this mound is at right angles to the Knott one across the road and the Tolman one in the farm field?”

  “Like points in a triangle,” he said. “Yes, I saw that from the air.”

  “Yes,” she said. “One tip to the north. The bottom leg pretty much parallels the river direction while the other leg points to the east.”

  “Where was Father Tom with his flashlight?” John asked.

  “I can’t be sure of course. It was at night. I think though that he was near the center here.” She pointed. “Probably just about the center point of the hill.”

  “Well, let’s go over to that place,” John said, as he began to push aside the briars. He held them while she moved underneath branches.

  Within a few feet she reached a pile of stones. They were stacked on the side of the mound. The slope went another hundred or so feet to where it reached its highest point and leveled out.

  “Look,” she said as she pointed at the rocks. The odd sized stones, which at one time had probably fitted snugly, were stacked with open areas and appeared ready to collapse.

  John noticed that the stonework formed two sidewalls as well as a large pile at the back, resting against the slope of the mound. “Watch out they don’t collapse on you,” he warned.

  She said, “When I came here with Father Tom, in the darkness, I didn’t see this.”

  “What is it?”

  “I think it’s an early farm structure of some sort.”

  John knelt to look at the stones. He said, “Maybe it’s something to keep animals, like a pen.”

  She smiled. “I don’t think so. For one thing, it’s too small for animals. They would need more room. It might be the remains of a root cellar for storing food in the winter.” The walls stood about four feet apart and she crawled between them toward the back wall.

  “You think there might have been a roof over this, like it was a hut of some kind?” asked John.

  “Maybe. Most important though is the fact that the stones are stacked like a wall. That shows a human touch, that a man or woman designed this. It didn’t occur just from nature.”

  She continued, “The stones are pretty well sunk into the earth here, like they’ve been here a long time.”

  John could not see much in the darkness back inside the enclosure where the walls shut out light.

  “Look at this, John. I found something interesting,” she said.

  “What?”

  “One of the rocks has been dislodged and put back into place. Maybe Father Tom was looking at it. After all he was the only one in here that I know of for the last few years.”

  He handed her a matchbook. She lit a match and held the light flickering over the wall. He crawled beside her and bent to look at the brick sized piece of rock she was holding.

  “Letters, old fashioned, chiseled into the bottom of it,” she said.

  “It’s the word ‘fancy’,” he said. “Someone took a lot of trouble to write it.”

  She replaced the stone and put out the match. They began to crawl back. John said, “Like the name on a can of peaches. Doesn’t make any sense. Can you guess what it might be? I mean, it’s a little more work than some guy would do for his girlfriend.”

  “I have some books at home,” she laughed. “I’ll look it up. Probably doesn’t mean anything. I’m sure Father Tom must have looked it up too. He was very interested in history.” She looked at him and added, “One more thing to remember. There’s a fourth mound.”

  “I didn’t know more than three existed.”

  “Most people don’t. My father discovered it. Right in our front yard. Only you wouldn’t know it now. It’s been plowed down and a cluster of trees is on top of it now. Mulberries.”

  “How come your father knew about it and no one else did?”

  “He found it in the old deeds to our property. He kept it to the family. He didn’t like to talk about his discoveries until he could use them in a book.”

  “Did you know that Nanticoke is the brand name on a kind of ice cream that’s made over in Baltimore.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Only what they don’t tell customers is that the reputation of this local tribe in River Sunday was lot more warlike than the ice cream. That’s why the name was given to the river.”

  “You mean it would not have been given unless the tribe had a lot of respect.”

  “Yes, and it would not have had a lot of respect from the Europeans unless the tribe fought back when they tried to take away its land, thereby being referred to in the old diaries as warlike and murderous by the colonists. This was a special group of Nanticokes. Most of the other Nanticoke tribes made peace with the colonists but not these people. They actually migrated north rather than surrender.”

  “You are one of the people who think all these mounds were made by the Nanticokes?”

  “No, probably not. They were built by people with a lot more science. The one here on the priest’s land is obviously bigger than the others. It may have come first and then, because of its existence, the others were built as copies. I just don’t know.”

  “So this one would be in the center of the bottom line of the triangle, kind of a center mound.”

  “Exactly. The whole triangle structure points to the north. The one in Tolman’s field is actually the north point, while this one is west and across the road is east. However each one also points in those three directions. The one at my father’s house doesn’t fit any of this, however. It’s kind of out of the triangle.”

  “So what does it all mean?”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “I remember one of the sayings of these Nanticokes that my father taught me.” She recited,

  Light gives darkness its power

  “What does that mean?” asked John.

  Andy said, “Maybe it explains why they oriented one point of the mounds to the rising sun and the other to the declining sun. You know, dawn light coming over the darkness. The tribe had a lot of sayings. You’d be surprised how advanced this particular group of Nanticokes were. Just not very scientific or engineering minded. More philosophical.”

  As they left the swamp John realized that nothing in this forlorn wasteland was going to point readily to the source of the money.

  “Let me ask you a real dumb question,” he said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Did Father Tom ever say anything about gold when he talked to you?”

  She shook her head. “You’re talking about the money people say he had, aren’t you?”

  “Do you remember that he said the words, “the golden sun,” just before he died? I can’t get them out of my mind.”

  She stared at him. “He was talking about the sun coming through the church windows, that’s all. It was so bright.”

  “I thought about that but somehow it doesn’t fit. Anyway, I’m sorry I wasted your time coming up here,” he said. He pulled back a strip of briars so she could pass through. “Besides, I got a chance to meet a real live astronomer,” he said, enjoying again looking into her blue eyes.

  She noticed his stare and turned away, but very slowly.

  She replied, “Yes, and I got a chance to meet a real live lawyer. Come on, we’ll just beat the mosquitoes back to the rowboat.” She ran ahead of him, a bit of red hair among the green leaves, her bare feet splashing the thin wave laps of the incoming high tide.

  Chapter 5

  Wednesday, July 10, 9AM

  John was on his way to Baltimore to see Rebecca Sweeney, the elderly sister and only living relative of Father
Tom. She had told him on the phone that she had spoken with Father Phillip, and advised him that she would not be coming to the funeral.

  “I’d like to attend the burial, don’t get me wrong,” she had said with a motherly tone.

  “I could arrange for transportation,” John offered.

  “No, you are very kind, young man, but I’m in a wheelchair and I think at my age, I’ll be far better off remaining within my four little walls.”

  He explained to her what her brother’s will had requested and said that he wanted to ask her advice about the disposition of the money that was in the account. He told her that not much would remain after burial expenses. He also wanted her to think about whether he should sell the land.

  His trip was delayed just as he had reached the highway heading north from River Sunday. His cell phone rang and it was Father Phillip asking him to come by Saint Gilpin’s church before he left town. The priest would not explain, and sounded anxious.

  At the church the Chief’s car was parked in front. John went quickly inside and found Father Phillip and the Chief in the sacristy, a small room beside the altar, waiting for him.

  “Father Phillip was telling me about church items made of gold,” said the Chief.

  Father Phillip explained to John, “All we have are the tall candlesticks that we use for the occasional high mass. They are gold plated but very inexpensive.”

  The Chief said, “I’ll tell you what I told Father Phillip. We found some scrapings of what looks like gold on the trunk lip of Father Sweeney’s Ford sedan.

  “Are you sure it’s gold?” asked John.

  The Chief nodded. “I’m pretty sure it’s flecks of gold that have come off something, perhaps gold plate. I was thinking maybe he was carrying around those gold plated candlesticks from the church altar.”

  Father Phillip shook his head. “They are right where they should be. They haven’t been moved for months. You can tell by the dust.”

  “Nothing else made of gold?” asked the Chief.

  “Nothing that I know of,” said Father Phillip.

  “You might ask Steve about some small rectangles of yellow metal that fell out of the altar when Father Tom died,” John offered.