by MK Alexander
We walked on slowly. I was too stunned or too afraid to ask any more questions. The swamp petered out, the boardwalk ended abruptly and the ground began to rise. We started a very slow ascent up a sandy path that led us back to the dunes. “You said that you’ve met me before… Is that what you mean?”
“Yes.”
“When exactly?”
“Let me think… in California as a musician… in Seattle… I think you were an artist of some kind, something to do with computers… and in Colorado of course… maybe there were other times as well.”
“Other times?”
“Perhaps I am mistaken.” Fynn paused for a few steps. “Let me ask you a question. It will help me understand which timeline I am in at present.” Fynn smiled. “Who invented the telephone?”
“Alexander Graham Bell.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course.”
“Not a man called Elisha Gray?”
“No, it was Bell... come here Watson, I need you.”
“This makes sense, the telephone, it rings like a bell.” Fynn smiled again, obviously bemused. “The light bulb?”
“Thomas Edison.”
“Not Nikola Tesla?”
“No.”
“And World War Two? How did it end?”
“That’s complicated.”
“Did it not end in nineteen forty-four with the assassination of Hitler?”
“No, there was an invasion called D-Day.”
“Hmm. And in the east, in Japan. How did that end?”
“That was less complicated: Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
“I know of these places, but why did it end there?”
“The atomic bomb.”
“Not the Russian invasion of China and the north islands? Not Curtis LeMay’s low altitude napalm bombing, and a firestorm that engulfed Tokyo and killed the emperor?”
“No.”
“Interesting.”
“That’s all you can say?”
“Well, the result is more or less the same. We have telephones that ring, lights that glow, the big war is over, the world moves on.”
“How can you say this? What you describe seems very different than what history records.”
“I suppose so, from your perspective. But to me, these are minor details.”
“Minor details?”
“I understand this is probably very upsetting to you.” The inspector patted me gently on the shoulder. “It is a temporary state of affairs. I doubt any of your events compared to mine will drastically alter the future.”
“What about the present?”
“What about it?”
“Isn’t it different? Shouldn’t I be in another timeline or something?”
“Ah, I see your point. But I have no answer for you. I am here and you are here. We share this very moment. That’s all I can say.”
“Uh-oh, I think I just had a major deja vu.” I stopped in my tracks. My head was spinning. I felt a strong desire to sit, just to plop down on the side of the path and rest. Fynn kept walking and I followed a couple of steps behind. I barely made it back to the car.
***
Every meeting with Fynn seemed more and more distressing, more taxing on my emotional reserves. Kind of like trying to have a conversation with paste-up Amy, only much, much worse. Honestly, my life was in complete turmoil. I was always on edge. My time with Fynn had changed my life, and not in a good way. I was a wreck, paranoid, sleepless, anxious, and always on edge. The slightest thing might set me off… some small detail that might be out of place would send me into a spiral of twisted thinking and paradoxical conclusions. I was firmly convinced that my timeline was constantly shifting. Nothing was sure. I’d wake each morning in a start, almost a panic. How did I get like this? I couldn’t exactly blame Fynn. All he did was talk. And all I did was listen.
Frank was sporting an Oakland A’s cap as of late. I guess there was nothing weird about that, really. But why do I keep thinking that our sales rep is named Jo-Anne and not Lucinda? I had the lingering memory of a dark girl, super cute, not Lucinda. We went from Jo to Lu in a single day. Lucinda almost seemed like a foreigner to me, though a foreigner I knew. She had short brown hair, and to call her plain would be a kindness; she was this side of bitchy and not at all likable. Yet, she seemed to know me intimately, or acted that way. And, honestly, I don't know how she did it, how she even worked at the Chronicle. Lucinda was not pretty, she was not charming, not even personable, but somehow, one way or another, she got the advertisers to advertise. I guess it helped that she got along with Eleanor famously. They were always laughing together about something. And I will admit there was something sad about her, like she was perpetually lost and somewhat confused.
Perfect Melissa seemed pretty much the same as usual, Eleanor too. Amy behaved a little less prickly and a lot more touchy-feely. Walking into the studio now was almost like walking into her boudoir. Jason and Joey were also hanging around in there lately. Rumor had it she was giving free tours of her tattoos.
And Evan James, our stringer? I could never find him when I needed him. He never picked up when I called, yet somehow he would always turn up at exactly the right time. It was weird. And then he’d just stare at me with that one eye...
I went to the break room for a cup of coffee. Of course it was up to me to make some. No filters, no sugar, no half-and-half. It was almost the perfect storm. I wondered how black coffee might taste and then realized we were even out of that.
“There’s decaf, oh… but it’s hazelnut,” Lucinda said and breezed by with a tupperware container of unidentifiable salad.
What’s the point? I thought, and gave up entirely. I headed out to Christie’s Deli for a real cup and a sandwich.
chapter 19
considered clues
“Joey, how does a half-Italian, half-Korean guy from Indiana end up in Sand City?”
“Ohio, you mean.”
“Right, sorry.”
“My mom retired here and bought a house… I moved in after college. How about you?”
“Me? Well, um…” I couldn’t actually remember. “It’s a long story…” I said and paused. “You live with your mom?”
“Yup, we got a place in the Village.”
“Your Dad?”
“He died about ten years ago.”
“Oh, sorry… a tough thing to go through.” I paused again. “How did your parents meet?”
“Traveling in Australia.”
“So, you’re Australian?”
“No, I was born in Cleveland. They both went to Case… engineering majors.”
I still didn’t know what to imagine, a little Asian lady or a little Italian one. But working with Joey on the Treasure Hunt actually became a fun project. It was wonderfully normal and predictable, and I craved normalcy as of late. We worked feverishly, spent many nights around my kitchen table researching shipwrecks and legendary pirates. Lots to work from. Apparently rounding North Point took quite a bit of seamanship, avoiding the shoals especially at night, was harder than it seemed. The ocean beaches were littered with old wrecks, well, just off shore at least.
Joey was a regular visitor now. We kept sullen Jason out of the loop, Amy too. I’d get a text and not long after, I’d hear the musical bounce on my staircase, then see his head pop up out of nowhere. And Joey took a special liking to my cat… it seemed mutual; they’d often enter through the sliders in tandem. The time flew by. We only had a month left to complete the whole project and get it to the printers. Our deadline: May 15.
In the end we came up with our own mythical pirate: Captain Barnaby Beaumont, one badass buccaneer known for plundering and looting every colony from here to the Caribbean… and completely fictional. It better suited our purposes and gave us a lot more flexibility when it came to making clues. The real pirates, the local legends would make great red herrings though. Everybody would be chasing them down first and futilely… they’d all be dead ends. Joey saw to that.
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I have to say, he had a fiendish side to him, an almost cruel genius, designed to manipulate people, well puzzle-people. He had a lot of great ideas about embedding clues in codes, in verse, and on old maps. I have to admit he was good at this, though I began to wonder if anyone was actually going to find the buried treasure. One night he impressed me with a really complicated flow chart; the decision making process, how one clue led to another, and more: all the blind alleys and the real trail. This clue leads to the next and so on… lots of dead ends...
Joey demonstrated how complicated complicated could be: “What would you make of this clue: Buccaneers and Beaches, Booty and Blunderbuss?” he asked.
“Um, the answer would be two.”
“Two?”
“The second letter of the alphabet: B.”
“Not two, one, two, two, one, two?”
“That’s too complicated,” I said.
“How about eight?”
“Eight?”
“Adding all the B’s as twos.”
“Maybe we’re making this too hard?” I asked.
“It’s got to be a challenge for people. That’s what makes it fun,” he said.
“What if nobody finds the treasure?”
“I don’t know… escrow account for next season?”
“I’m not sure that’s going to fly… but we should think of a contingency plan just in case.”
“Maybe some kind of meta-clue that we could release in the last week, if nobody finds the treasure by then.”
“That might work…” I paused to think. “Joey, I just want to remind you that as a Chronicle employee, you are ineligible for this prize.”
“I know that.”
“Okay, you do know we’re not actually burying real doubloons.”
“Of course.”
“And it would not look very good if say, your girlfriend won, or your mom, or—”
“Yeah, I know, I know… no friends and family.”
“Okay, sorry, just double-checking….”
My Map Quest with Inspector Fynn became the backbone of our project. “We start with a map… like the placemat map, only really old fashioned, drawn on a torn piece of parchment, burned along the edges. Like it was made up in pirate days, in the eighteenth century. We can get Amy to do it. Then, we have like twenty locations where we hide clues, pieces of the puzzle, maybe like in a poem, or a story, or in verse.”
“How many locations?” Joey asked, looking for a specific number.
We both compiled lists of places that seemed most appropriate: various cemeteries, the quarry, the lighthouse, the swamp trail, the scuttled Liberty ships up on Bayview Beach were all obvious choices, and we were in full agreement: definitely not at Saint Alban’s. That would be too creepy, too anachronistic and besides it was behind a giant chain link fence. We also got a list of sponsored places from Melissa and Lucinda. Even Donald Pagor had a few. Places they thought they could sell…
We were both horrified. “Pirates don’t eat ice cream, they don’t rent bikes and they don’t eat at buffets,” Joey said. The last point was debatable, but I was totally down with it. Still, the commercial links were key to a successful hunt this year. If you were a Chamber of Commerce member, you’d have to get a mention. That ended up being the hardest part of the deal. I tried to think of a way around it. “Okay, in real life they’re tacky tourist traps, but on the map, they are spooky, mysterious places.”
“That might work,” Joey said hopefully.
“Mel and Jo have to sell these locations…” I reminded him.
“What?”
“Our locations, they have to be sponsored.”
“Mel and who?”
“Jo— I mean Lucinda.”
Admittedly, we got a little bogged down over anachronisms. Should we use only landmarks that were present in pirate days? Joey said no to any anachronisms. He was a purist. I said yes. I was pragmatic. There just weren’t enough historic landmarks to go around. Besides, it was a fictional pirate anyway. We had to use some modern things, though I agreed we should keep them thematic and not entirely dependent on sponsorship.
As for placing the actual clues, we had a lot of grunt work to do.
“You know, stuff you can read around town: plaques, memorials, those metal historical signs that are all over the place… We can embed our code in those,” Joey started.
“How?”
“Oh, like choose every other word… or choose the words we want, to spell out a message, and make the clue a number.”
“Like?” I asked.
“Like the clue is six, four, seven, nine. On the sign the words say: go north twenty yards.”
“Okay, okay, I’m getting this. We’ll have to research a bunch of signs then.”
“We could also put the clues in the journals and on the map, and in real life…” Joey offered.
“A journal… how about a ship’s log?”
“Cool, that’s it, the captain’s log. They got like shipwrecked, and then Captain Barnaby leaves clues all over town from the log book.” Joey grinned.
“Perfect. And we can add characters.”
“Characters?” he asked.
“Other people from the ship, the cook, the boatswain, the first mate… they can leave clues too.”
“Like?”
“Um… like… the cook made fleet to Baxter’s farm but a musket laid him bare beneath the elms.”
“Oh, you are good…” Joey said with some enthusiasm.
We had a lot of fun with the language, stuff like: Dig ye not, use only thine eyes…
This was critical. We didn’t want people running around just randomly digging up half of Sand City.
“Everybody’s gonna guess that we buried the treasure in the sand,” Joey pointed out.
“Why’s that?”
“It’s logical. We have to bury it first. Other people have to dig it up: sand. And the beach makes the most sense.”
“How about if we bury it metaphorically?” I suggested.
“Isn’t that cheating?”
“Okay, how about burying it in the sand, but not on any beach?”
“Like where?”
“Like this is Sand City. Anywhere.”
“Specifically?” Joey persisted.
“The quarry?” I suggested.
“I don’t know…” Joey seemed dubious.
“Yeah, probably kind of dangerous for little kids.”
“How about a cemetery?” he asked.
“Perfect… hmm... wait, maybe a little sacrilegious… hallowed ground and all that?”
“How about near a cemetery? We could make our own fake gravestone.”
“I’m liking that… what, maybe Spooky Park?”
“Too much out in the open… maybe that other place, up near the bluffs?”
One night Joey asked, “Hey, you know those little fences all over the dunes?”
“For erosion control, yeah.”
“How ’bout we count the slats on them? Paint one of them black, and that number leads to another clue. Or we paint it with…”
“A skull and crossbones,” we both said in unison and laughed.
“We could make a really small Jolly Roger stencil and spray paint it anywhere, anyplace we want to put another clue.”
“I like it.”
“Do we need permission?”
“Nah… we’ll just do it…”
Towards the end of the project Joey had a flash of brilliance: “Maybe we could package this?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like a kit, like a bag filled with stuff… the parchment map, a compass, a toy spyglass, some foil-wrapped chocolate doubloons, maybe the journal?”
“I like it. We could probably sell that to the Chamber. You buy the kit, find the treasure… all proceeds go to charity.”
“I bet Mel’s husband could make this happen.”
“Why?”
“He’s like in marketing or something.”
; “I’ll ask Mel. This is an awesome idea.”
In the end we decided not to make it interactive on the website, much to Jason’s relief. Even Eleanor didn’t seem to care that much. All the info would be posted online of course, but you’d have to physically travel to the various locations if you had a hope of finding the treasure. Melissa talked to her husband Julian. She absolutely loved the idea and it would be an easy sell. Joey volunteered to make the treasure chest itself. He claimed to be good with tools, but I think his mom helped with that. I also sent him on a mission to find pirate clip art. Not just low resolution stuff for the website, but art we could use to print from. That took a little explaining… and we’d probably have to enlist Amy’s help.
***
Meanwhile, the two murder cases had gone cold. Well, maybe. Not much had turned up on the veterinarian, Samuels. The medical examiner couldn’t say for certain whether he had been pushed or not, but homicide could not be ruled out. Time of death was put at around seven a.m. Five new suspects emerged as well: two paramedics, myself, Fynn and Durbin. Shoe prints from all of us were found and identified. Forensics also managed to lift a sixth set of prints from the dusty basement floor. Dress shoes, size eleven. Fynn mentioned this to me in confidence and seemed convinced they were Italian. The doctor’s mysterious friend had not been traced, though Alyson’s description could fit Doctor Hackney, according to Durbin. Not that he was a suspect, apparently they were old friends, Samuels and Hackney. They had gone to school together back in the day. Phone records confirmed many a conversation between them. I wondered briefly whether there was a conflict of interest thing here. Durbin said no.
On Jane Doe number three, or one, depending on your perspective, forensics had turned up a couple of things. Her earrings proved to be old, maybe forty, fifty years old. The lab could tell by the amount of silver in them, and by the fact that they were not made in China. Her clothes also seemed to be of a similar vintage, at least not of recent manufacture. Cause of death? Still undetermined. Shock, heart failure? It was anybody’s guess, but she had not been sexually violated, nor were there any signs of extreme violence. And there was one other important discovery. This Jane Doe had fought back. Trace bits of tissue and blood were found under her fingernails. It was Inspector Fynn who had first noticed. The DNA was run through every known database without success. There was no match, but the police were now theorizing her assailant was male.