“Maybe Cole left some clues behind.” Piper tried to sound optimistic. “I know it’s a long shot, but at least it’s something.”
They all agreed, and Macey headed south toward the Red Trail, bound for Billy’s Island.
As the day continued to warm, Perch warmed with it. Now that he knew the full truth and had agreed to help, he seemed to be his usual, happy-go-lucky self once again, animatedly pointing out the denizens of the swamp. Numerous basking cooters—the swamp’s most extroverted turtle—scooted through the water, playing peekaboo with the world above. An appearance by a pair of playfully twining otters prompted Perch to say, “I don’t believe in reincarnation, but if I did, I’d want to come back as a swamp otter. Look at them. That’s pure joy you’re seeing there.” The group saw egrets, ibises, herons, and more of the ruby-pated sandhill cranes. Smaller birds were plentiful, too. Piper thought of Grafton and wondered how he was faring in his search for the ivory-billed woodpecker. She hoped his quest was off to a better start than theirs was.
The dilating sun brought the swamp’s most infamous inhabitants, the alligators, to life. Everywhere the kids looked they saw the large reptiles soaking up rays, basking on hammocks, logs, and sometimes even on top of one another. A clutch of newborn hatchlings formed a squirming crown on their mother’s partially submerged head. The most daring of her brood slithered into the water, careful not to swim past the tip of Mom’s toothy mouth, and clucked a challenge to the Mud Cat as it passed by.
“Junior’s not a fan of the visiting team,” said Perch.
Piper had to admit, the babies were sort of adorable. Still, in clusters, the big ones made her nervous. She thrummed her fingers on her bare knees and jerked her head toward every splash. Perch was astute enough to notice.
“You don’t need to worry about the gators,” he assured her. “They’re afraid of people and just want to be left alone. In the last forty years, there’ve been only twenty or so fatal attacks in the U.S., and all but one of them happened in Florida.”
“And the one?” Piper asked, of course.
“Well, that one did occur here in Georgia,” he said, then quickly added, “but not in the Okefenokee. A woman was attacked while swimming in the waters off Skidaway Island. Twenty deaths total in forty years means attacks are super rare. You have a better chance of being stung by bees while getting hit by lightning as you’re being run over by a bus. They’re not man-eaters like the crocs of Australia and Africa. There’s never been a single fatality by alligator in the history of the Oke refuge.”
“So they aren’t aggressive?” Tad asked.
“Oh, they’re plenty aggressive during mating season,” Perch said. “But mainly toward one other. They only attack humans when they feel threatened. We leave them alone, they leave us alone, and we get along just peachy. Still, it’s best not to swim in the Oke for a whole lot of reasons, the gators being just one of them.”
Shortly after noon, Piper’s appetite returned. She declared it lunchtime and opened up her backpack, retrieving the two bologna sandwiches she’d made. She handed one to Creeper. Tad had brought a few slices of cold broccoli-and-mushroom pizza from last night’s dinner. He opened the Tupperware container and offered a slice to Perch and Macey, but Perch declined and Macey preferred a smoke.
Piper hadn’t realized how hungry she was, and before she knew it, she’d wolfed down her sandwich, the granola bars, and the apple. She peered into the bag, hoping she’d forgotten something, but it was empty.
“I’ve got some snacks inside my bench stowage,” Macey told her.
“Thank you,” said Piper. “Maybe later.”
It was a little weird to see this side of Macey. Since Piper had opened up about Grace, the woman was treating her differently. Even Macey’s physical appearance had seemed to soften a bit. There was motherliness there, despite what the crew cut and tattoos implied. Tattoos, plural. Earlier, when Macey was yanking on the motor’s pull cord, her sleeve slid up to her elbow, and Piper noticed a second tattoo, this one on Macey’s forearm. The word Georgia in simple black lettering. The woman seemed fond of one thing, at least: the almighty Peach State.
The dock at Billy’s Island was long, narrow, and floating on the water next to two giant pond cypress trees. The water here was so reflective it looked as though the dock was hovering in the air. They moored the Mud Cat and headed onto the island.
They set their equipment down on the shore and put their heads together for another look at Dr. Cole’s map. The plant hunter had marked his campsite with a triangle. His tent, maybe?
“Billy’s Island is five square miles,” said Macey. “That triangle ain’t exactly a pinpoint, but I think I know where that is, maybe three klicks from here.” Macey, former navy, still thought of distance in military terms.
“All right, Mace, we’ll follow you,” Perch said. “Lead the way.”
They kept to the worn trail for about a mile, passing along the way the rusted shell of a discarded steam boiler, corroded metal containers, and the skeleton of a railway car. Creeper spotted a two-foot section of track that had become overrun by time and weeds. Nothing could seem more out of place than a train in a swamp.
“Used to be a logging camp on the island back in the nineteen-twenties,” said Perch. “They built a railroad through the swamp to transport timber out of the Oke. This is all that’s left of Billy’s human occupants. This, and a little graveyard on the northern end.”
Creeper, overcome by heebie-jeebies, rose on his tiptoes and squirmed. “Yuck! People are buried here?”
“Yes,” said Perch. “Members of the Lee family, the first whites to settle and farm Billy’s Island after the army chased off the Seminoles.”
“How’d they die?” Piper asked.
“Pneumonia, cholera…sicknesses we’ve mostly got a handle on now. But the Lees ain’t the only dead folks buried on Billy.”
Before Perch could elaborate, Macey left the path, leading the procession into the tangled forest. For a huge woman, she had a quick stride. The kids had a hard time keeping up, and she wasn’t waiting on them. Piper checked her phone for the time. It was 1:04 P.M. Even though the search had really just begun, she could feel the minutes slipping away, like the smallest fish wriggling free from a net, each one stealing off with a bit of hope, then disappearing into the murk of despair.
A twig snapped behind her. Piper spun in time to see something small and furry—a chipmunk, maybe—scamper up the back side of a tree. Her heart thrummed. A hawk screeched overhead. She almost stepped on something slithering beneath the leaf litter, but it was just passing through and was gone in a rustle. Up ahead, she saw a brume of black particles swirling close to the ground. It rose up and hovered between two oaks like a dark specter. When the cloud came into sharper focus, she realized there was nothing supernatural about it at all. The swarm of gnats swirled around a tree, and then the smoky black scarf of tiny insects abruptly disintegrated into thin air.
Piper found it hard to breathe. She feared the onset of a panic attack (having suffered a few since Washington). She felt like she was being smothered by nature, as though the whole forest was one giant eye, unblinking, watching her, judging her. It was a horrible, crushing feeling. A flutter. A hot, groping breeze. A scratching noise. Intense silence. The memory of a rabid wolverine stabbed into her brain, wresting the courage from her. She wanted out. Out of the forest, out of the swamp, out of the outdoors before she went out of her mind. OUT!
Suddenly, mercifully, the woods released her from its shadowy clinch, as the group marched into a sunny clearing. A breeze caressed her sweaty face, and Piper felt calmer at once.
“We’re here,” Macey announced.
In the center of the clearing was a large grassy mound roughly twenty feet long by ten feet wide and three feet high.
“What is that?” Tad asked.
“Like I said, the Lees ain’t the only ones buried on Billy,” Perch said. “This here is an Indian burial mound. A mas
s grave.”
“Is this some kind of themed tour you offer?” Tad asked sarcastically. “The Native American ghost tour? You don’t charge extra for this, do you?”
“Don’t be a wiseacre,” Macey growled.
“Native Americans lived in the swamp first,” Perch said. “Archaeological evidence—bits of clay pots and the like—says they were here as early as 3000 B.C. Over the centuries, the Weedens, the Timucuans, the Seminoles all made homes in the Oke until the whites drove them out. The Native Americans were the first to die here too. They buried their dead in mounds called tumuli. Once upon a time these graves dotted all the islands.”
“The whites destroyed most of ’em,” Macey added. “It’s a dang shame. There’s still a few around, but not many. This one here is special. Even the Lees knew better than to crack this one open.”
“What’s so special about it?” Creeper asked. “Looks like a big lump to me.”
Perch said, “We think this particular tumulus—tumulus is singular—belonged to the Tasketcha tribe from South America. The story goes, they fled north to Georgia to—”
“Escape the invading Spanish,” Tad finished Perch’s thought. “The conquistador Pizarro destroyed the Incan army at the battle of Cajamarca in 1532, then he executed the Incan emperor Atahuallpa, kicking off the Spanish conquest of Peru.”
The group stared at him.
“What?” Tad asked. “I pay attention in history class.”
“That’s exactly what happened,” Perch said, impressed. “Which makes this here tumulus the oldest in the swamp, maybe as old as three thousand years. The tribes that came after the Tasketcha were afraid to go near it. They suspected the Tasketcha were practicing dark magic, and avoided them like the plague.”
Creeper shuddered. “Spooky.”
“Yayup,” Macey said. “There’s an Oke legend. Before the last Tasketchan died, he performed a ceremony over this mound. He used wicked magic to free all the spirits of the dead into the dark heart of the swamp. Their bodies remained here to rot. To avoid fading away like smoke, the spirits took possession of various critters, predators mostly. Gators, black bears, red wolves, and the like. When the animal hosts died, the spirits just jumped into other animals. Into people too. Some of those possessed folks may have wandered out of the swamp, spreading the Tasketcha evil into the world beyond. But some, the legend tells, are still here, waiting for their chance to leave the Oke too.”
“That’s a great story!” Creeper showed Macey his arms. “Look, I’ve got goose bumps!”
“The Tasketcha were gone way before Cole’s arrival, right?” said Piper. “What does this tumulus have to do with him?”
Perch explained. “Around the time when Cole was looking for the silver flower, tensions between the Creek Indians and the invading whites were high. Some of the natives would have found pleasure in cutting his throat while he slept. Like Macey said, those tribes steered clear of the Tasketcha graves. Cole would have been perfectly safe camping beside this tumulus.”
“Safest place in the swamp,” Macey agreed.
Piper panned around the clearing. She hadn’t expected to see Cole’s abandoned tent, of course, not after all this time, but other than the mound, there was nothing there, not even the remnant rocks of a former fire pit.
“That’s it, then,” she said. “It’s another dead end.”
“We didn’t expect to find a blinking neon arrow, now did we?” Perch bumped her shoulder playfully. “If Cole left us any clues, nature probably gobbled them up a long time ago. We gotta look deeper.”
“How do we do that?” Creeper asked.
“I’ll show you.” Perch fished into his pocket and took out an iPhone. He set his backpack on the ground and pulled a black cylinder-shaped object from a long pocket on the side. He tugged at both ends of the cylinder, and it telescoped into a three-foot-long wand, about the size of a walking stick.
“You said we had to dig deeper. That’s a funny-looking shovel,” said Tad.
Perch chuckled. “That’s because it’s not. It’s a metal detector. But it’s a little different from the ones you see folks using on the beach. This wand is a three-D ground scanner. It uses radar to penetrate the earth, and then it sends images to my phone’s screen. Tourists drop all kinds of valuable stuff on the islands. This baby paid for itself in the first month. I’ve found rings, coins, even old mining tools. Found a kid’s retainer once, but some things are best left buried.”
The kids watched Perch in utter amazement as he assembled the pieces of the radar.
Perch noticed their reaction. “Well don’t look so surprised, y’all. Just because I’m a swamper doesn’t mean I’m a hick. Thought I’d proved that by now. Guess what, I’ve got a Mac laptop at home too. And Macey drives a hybrid. Now, c’mere and take a look.”
They huddled in close to the screen. It was green, with little glowing blue and red spots. As Perch moved the wand, the spots moved with it. “Rocks,” he said. “It’ll be obvious if we scan something metal. Metal shows up on the screen as white.”
“I’ll sit this out.” Macey retrieved a silver lighter from the pocket of her overalls. The navy insignia was etched in its metal casing. She lit up a cigarette with it, her fourth of the day.
“You smoke a lot,” Creeper scolded her. “That’s not healthy, you know.”
“Well, bless your little pea-pickin’ heart.” Macey glared down at him. “Are you and me havin’ what my daddy would call a teachable moment? Scram, boy. Let me smoke my ’backer in peace.”
“She means tobacco, of course,” Perch told Creeper as he ushered the group away from Macey. “It’s best to leave her to her vices.”
Perch began to walk the clearing in an orbit around the tumulus, followed closely by the others. He stepped slowly, deliberately, sweeping the scanner in front of him low and wide, like a blind man’s cane. When he’d completed each lap, he moved a few feet farther away from the mound and started another.
The day slipped away. An hour passed. Then two. Then three. Piper knew that as their shadows grew longer, so did the odds of finding the flower. But this was their only plan, so they had to keep looking. Perch never complained, took a break, or even slowed down. He moved steadily around the mound like a planet circling the sun.
Roughly five hours had passed when he stopped dead in his tracks. “Whoa!” He raised the phone close to his eyes.
“What is it?” Piper asked. She jammed her nose next to his for a look. There was something new on the screen. It was about the width of a brick but twice as long. The radar displayed it as a luminous white rectangle.
“I don’t know,” Perch said. “But it’s definitely nonferrous.”
“Huh?” said Tad.
“Yeesh, you city kids need to pick up a book once in a while,” Perch said. “Nonferrous metal. It means there’s no iron in it. Could be aluminum, copper, lead…”
“Or silver?” Creeper asked. He was crouching down, staring intently at the spot on the ground directly below the tip of the wand.
“Unlikely,” Perch said. “It’s pretty big. A silver object that size would be worth thousands. I’m sure its owner would have returned for it. It’s probably more trash from the mining camp.”
“I bet it’s buried pirate treasure!” Creeper started wringing his hands.
“Right,” said Piper. “Because a pirate ship in a swamp makes total sense.”
“I wouldn’t be quick to scuttle the idea,” Perch said. “Edward Teach, old Blackbeard himself, plundered the Georgia coast. Legend says he buried his treasure on an island and boasted that only he and the devil knew where. People assume he meant an island off the coast, but if I wanted something hidden, and hidden well, I’d sail the St. Marys River from the Atlantic Ocean to the Oke and bury it right here.”
“I knew it!” said Creeper. “It’s Blackbeard’s treasure!”
“Probably not, but there’s only one way to find out,” said Perch. “Let’s bring it up.” He handed
his backpack to Tad. “There’s a folding spade inside. Start digging.”
Tad found the tool, and they formed a circle around the object. Monitoring the screen, Perch told him where to thrust the shovel point. In short order, Tad had scooped out a rectangular moat around the hunk of metal.
“All righty, now try to get the spade under it,” Perch instructed. “Then pry it up carefully. It could be very old. Go easy so it doesn’t break apart.”
Tad pressed down hard on the handle grip and got underneath the thing. He pushed down on the shovel, and the object rose up easily, in one piece.
“That was good luck,” Perch said. He passed the metal detector to Piper to hold. He took the dirt-caked object in his hands and set it in the grass, brushing the dirt off. Yellow peeked through the crud. “Creeper, there’s a bottle of water in my pack. Get it, quick.”
Creeper did as told and handed him the bottle. Perch poured the water in a steady stream over the object, from end to end, revealing more yellow. In a fit of exuberance, Perch yanked off his T-shirt and used it to wipe away the remaining layer of soil, revealing luster.
Creeper’s eyes bloomed wide. “That can’t be for real.”
Perch was grinning like a madman. “Oh, it’s real, all right.”
The thing in his hands was a cylindrical-shaped, slightly flattened box with a hinged door on it. The box was made of solid gold.
“This is unbelievable!” Tad exclaimed. “I know what it is!”
“You do?” asked Perch.
“Yes! It’s a botanist’s container for holding plant samples. A vasculum. Dr. Brisbane Cole’s vasculum, to be exact. It’s the same one he’s holding in the painting at the Jesup Nature Center. And you’re right; it’s made of pure gold. That’s why it’s so well preserved. Unlike most other metals, gold doesn’t deteriorate, because it’s an element, not an alloy.”
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