4 Hemmed In (10 page)

Cookie was putting away
the newspaper clippings about the death of Matilda Wilkins when she spotted the albumin photograph of Rev. Billingsley Royce. She paused to study the faded image. His slightly crossed eyes had a crazed look. That wine-stain could certainly be interpreted as a mark of Cain. He was frowning, a sign of his disapproval of the ungodly world around him.

Idly t
urning the photograph over, she discovered an inked notation on its backside:
Taken on the 12 August 1897 at the church at Steppin Rock.

Hmm, where had she heard that name
before? Wasn’t Steppin’ Rock an oddly shaped limestone formation out near Gruesome Gorge? Could that have been the location of the Church of Avenging Angels?

This called for another field trip for the Quilters Club. But they would
have to call it a “picnic” for the benefit of their unsympathetic spouses. The boys considered the case closed. But Cookie knew better.

Chapter Twenty-One

Steppin’ Rock

N
obody seemed to recall where Steppin’ Rock was located. Wasn’t like it was a big tourist attraction. Just a colorful name given to a natural rock formation that didn’t even appear on area maps.

Maddy used the picnic excuse to ask her husband. Beau didn’t have a clue
about it, though he’d lived all his life in Caruthers Corners. So had she. In fact, so had all the members of the Quilters Club and their husbands.

At Maddy’s prodding, Beau checked with
the Planning and Zoning Department, Public Works, and the Tax Assessor’s Office … but none of them knew where to find Steppin’ Rock.

The Quilters Club may as well have been asking how to find the
Church of Avenging Angels. Or maybe they were, in so many words.

Despite Ben Bentley’s watermelon-allotment surveying, Edgar Ridenour’s fishing excursions, or Chief Jim Purdue’s patrols, no one had ever been to Steppin’ Rock.
Yet they all had heard the name, a local rock formation.

Young N’yen came through with the solution. He’d seen a movie where Osama ben Laden’s hideout had been observed from satellite photos.
Zero Dark Thirty
, it was called. Maddy was aghast that the child had been allowed to see such a violent film. But Bill and Kathy were very liberal in their childrearing, as with most things.

“Satellite photos,” laughed Lizzie. “Where would we get those?”

Maddy had the answer. “Not satellite images, but aerial plat maps for the entire county are stored in the Town Hall’s basement.”

“How would we ever find Steppin’ Rock among all those rolls of aerial photographs. There must be a zillion of them
down there,” frowned Bootsie.

C
ookie solved that one. “We don’t have to look at all of them. Just the photos around Gruesome Gorge on the far side of Never Ending Swamp. That’s where Howard Gunnar said it was located.”

“That narrow
s it down some,” Bootsie acquiesced.

≈ ≈ ≈

After two dusty hours in the Town Hall basement, they found it, Aerial Photo R-790-3. There it was – a rectangular rock slab. Even so, they would have likely missed it if someone hadn’t written STEPPINGSTONE ROCK next to it with a red grease pencil.

“Steppingstone?” said Lizzie doubtfully.
“That’s not right.”

Maddy squinted at the oversized photo. “That’s got to be it.”

“Um, I dunno.”

“Well –”

“One way to find out,” suggested precocious Aggie. “Let’s go look.”

Chapter
Twenty-Two

Digging for the Viking Silver

T
he outcropping known locally as Steppin’ Rock was located just inside the boundaries of Gruesome Gorge State Park. It was a flat sandstone boulder that looked like the foundation of a house. Supposedly, the rock had been the site of a Potawatomi sweat lodge.

A Personal History of Caruthers Corners and Surrounding Environs
told how the Potawatomi had been members of the Council of Three Fires, along with the Ojibwe and the Ottawa. Although their tribal name translated as “keepers of the fire,” they were considered younger brothers of the Council.

The leader of these Wabash Potawatomi was known as
Winamac (meaning “Catfish”). He and his Fish Clan had sided with the British during the war of 1812. They were the ones who had attacked the wagon train led by Col
.
Beauregard Madison, Jacob Caruthers, and Ferdinand Jinks – the battle that led to the founding of Caruthers Corners.

Actually
, there had been two Chief Winamacs, one an opponent of the US, the other an ally. The “bad” Winamac had made his camp at Gruesome Gorge.

Maddy Madison walked across the
sandstone surface of Steppin’ Rock, Aggie and N’yen following two steps behind. “So the Indians built a sweat lodge atop this outcropping?” she mused aloud.

“What’s a sweat lodge?” asked Aggie.

“Kind of like a sauna.”

“You mean this was an Indian health spa?”

“Not exactly.” Maddy didn’t want to tell her granddaughter how this settlement near Gruesome Gorge had proven quite unhealthy for the Native Americans who had died here in an ambush.

“
Martin J. Caruthers wrote about the Potawatomi sweat lodge in his history book,” Cookie noted. “But he didn’t mention Steppin’ Rock.” She was standing on the sidelines, watching as Bootsie and Liz measured the boulder’s squarish surface with a tape measure. Members of the Quilters Club always carried tape measures for checking out fabrics and quilting squares.

“Eighteen by twenty feet,” Bootsie called out. “Plenty big for a
sweat lodge.”

“Eighteen and a half,” Lizzie corrected.

“Eighteen and a half,” Bootsie repeated to acknowledge the adjusted figure.

Maddy ran her hand across the
reddish-brown surface, as smooth as if it had been planed and leveled. “This makes a natural foundation,” she noted. “A perfect place to build a sweat lodge.”

“W
hat if Rev. Billingsley Royce and his followers built their church here too? Any remnants of a sweat lodge would have been long gone by the 1890s,” Cookie posed the question. “After all, it
said
Steppin’ Rock on the back of that photograph.”

Maddy’s gaze swept the outcropping. “If this were the site of
a country church, where would the front door have been?”

“Over here, most likely,”
pointed Cookie. “The ground slopes. That makes the far side too high off the ground, I’d guess.”

“Didn’t the story
say they buried the treasure under the church steps?” asked Lizzie, always an eye on the money.

“The steps would’ve been
right here,” said Bootsie, “if Cookie’s right about the door.” The ground looked undisturbed, the rock’s shadow forming a triangle on the grass.

“That looks about right,” nodded Maddy.

“Should we dig?” Bootsie asked. She sounded uneasy.

“Why
wouldn’t we?”

“Well, this
is
state park land.”

“We’re on a picnic,”
reasoned Maddy. “Wouldn’t it be proper camping etiquette to dig a fire pit for our weenie roast? You know, to prevent forest fires and such.”

“Oh boy,” exclaimed little N’yen. “We’re gonna have hot dogs!”

≈ ≈ ≈

Two hours later there was a pile of dirt the size of a Volkswagen next to the hole they’d dug, but no silver bar
s had been found.

“Guess we
got this one wrong,” sighed Cookie. In her enthusiasm, she’d done much of the digging. Tomorrow her back would be the devil to pay.

“Not necessarily
,” said Maddy. She’d been reassessing the situation. “Maybe the story got garbled. Instead of the treasure being buried under the church’s steps, maybe it was buried under Steppin’ Rock.”

Bootsie laughed. “You mean under this giant slab of
sandstone? No way.”

“Maybe not under the entire rock, but under a corner of it,” suggested Maddy. She studied the
reddish-brown sandstone platform, looking for a likely entry point.

“
We’ve dug four feet down and haven’t come to the bottom of the rock,” Cookie groused.

Bootsie rubbed her back.
“Will Rogers said, ‘If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.’”

“Thanks for the helpful advice.” Lizzie’s tone meant just the opposite.

Maddy hadn’t given up. “Perhaps we can get under it better on the other side. With the ground sloping, there’s already four or five feet of rock showing over there.”

Cookie acquiesced. “One small hole just to see how deep th
is rock goes.”

Ten minutes later, Cookie said, “There it is, the bottom of
this big slab of sandstone.”

Steppin’ Rock proved to be about six-feet thick. The remnant of a long-ago ice age
, when glaciers moved boulders about like a game of marbles.

“Now dig under the edge
,” instructed Maddy.

“Hey, your turn.”

“Oh, all right,” said Maddy, stepping into the hole and taking the shovel.

Another ten minutes. “Anything yet?” asked Lizzie, trying to peer into the hole. Maddy had been tunneling under the
bottom of the rock.

“Nothing. And my back’s getting tired.
Want to take over Lizzie?”

Lizzie grimaced.
“No more digging for me. I’ve already broken a fingernail.”

“Here,
I’ll dig for a while,” volunteered Bootsie.

Ten minutes more. “The shovel just struck something solid,” announced Bootsie. Sounding excited.

“Is it a silver bar?” Lizzie asked.

“Not sure.”

“Brush away the dirt,” ordered Maddy, taking charge as usual. “Let’s see what you’ve found.”

Bootsie bent down to scoop the dirt away with her hands. A rounded shap
e came into view. “Oh, shoot,” she said. “Just another rock.”

“Pull it out and keep digging,”
said Cookie. “Maybe there’s something behind it.”

“Your turn. I’m tired.”

Cookie Bentley took the shovel. She’d borrowed it from her husband’s toolshed this morning before setting out on this “picnic.” Scraping away the loose dirt, the rock became more defined. An oblong chunk of limestone, about the size of a loaf of bread. “If there’s another stone behind this one, I’m quitting. This was a stupid idea.”

“Wasn’t it your idea?” Lizzie asked with a false innocence.

“Rub it in,” sighed Cookie. “I deserve it.”

“Here,” said Maddy, climbing into the hole with Cookie. “Let me help you pull it out.”

The two women struggled with the rock, wiggling it side to side. It was starting to give. “On the count of three,” said Maddy. “One … two … THREE!”

With a
pop!
the rock slid out, leaving a dark hole. “Okay,” said Cookie, “unless there’s a Viking sword and a bar of silver in there, I’m going home.”

“Hey,” wailed N’yen. “What about the hot dogs?”

≈ ≈ ≈

Maury Seiderman was lurking behind a large oak tree, a good vantage point for spying on those busybody women from Caruthers Corners. He recognized the one from the Historical Society. What were they doing out h
ere?

He’d been scouting the area
in his ’75 LeSabre, looking for ruins of a church. Nothing. Just watermelon fields and grassy countryside. An occasional Amish farmhouse, identifiable by the lack of power lines. Then he’d spotted the SUV filled with women and kids. That Bentley woman from the Historic Society had been sitting there in the front seat, big as life. So he’d decided to follow them. They had led him down an unmarked cow path along the upper rim of Gruesome Gorge. Could they be looking for the treasure too?

Now he knew the answer.

They were pulling something out from under that big sandstone outcropping. Obviously, they had found the Viking silver.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Down to No Suspects

C
hief Purdue didn’t like it one bit, but he had to cut Ted Yost free. No evidence, other than he was dating the mother of a
Lord of the Rings
fanboy. No crime in that, Lt. Wannamaker pointed out.

The police chief ha
d brought in Bern Bjorn, just as Neil the Nail had instructed. That meant no more free sprinkles for him. Bern was pretty irked.

In the end, he’d had to let Bern
Bjorn go too. Came down to the word of Lt. Wannamaker’s witness versus Bern’s. No real evidence.

Quite a coincidence that Bern was the ex-husband of Ted’s girlfriend. But this was a small town,
a population of 2,577 give or take.

“Back to square one,” g
rumbled Wannamaker, as if it were Jim’s fault he’d taken the word of an unemployed ne’er-do-well over that of a local business owner.

“Yeah, I’ll be in
touch if I turn up anything new,” said the police chief, his sarcasm as thick as watermelon jam.

“You do that.”

“I’m not paying that invoice for the DNA testing. It was a clue.”

“It w
as a hundred-year-old pig’s eye, for goodness sake.”

“
We didn’t know that till we tested it.”

“You wasted
the time of the state lab.”

“That’s what it’s there for, to help us examine clues.”

“Magic potions aren’t clues.”

“
D’you think we’ll ever find the Wilkins Witch Quilt?”

“
Naw,” admitted Wannamaker. “I’ve got a feeling that quilt’s gone for good. Probably already in the hands of some private collector where it will never again see the light of day.”

≈ ≈ ≈

Pinky Bjorn was hiding in Burpyville at the home of his cousin. He hadn’t phoned his mother, afraid she’d tell the police where to find him. Somehow they had connected him with stealing that old quilt. Not that he’d had any active part in the burglary. But he knew who did. After all, he was the one who had translated those runes. Pretty simple when you’d spent the last two years playing
Relic of the Runes
, an online Tolkien-inspired game that required a basic knowledge of Scandinavian
Futhark
or its Anglo-Saxon variant called
Futhorc
.

The
Early Futhorc
was identical to the
Elder Futhark
, except for the split the a-rune into three variants, resulting in 26 runes. No harder to learn than the ABC alphabet, truth be known.

He’d been
there in the Town Hall waiting for his mother to pay her property tax when he noticed that quilt hanging on the wall. He remembered being fascinated by its depiction of angels and devils fighting each other. Cool beans. Like a video game. Then he noticed the symbols around the quilt’s border, clearly runes.

It took him less than fifteen minutes to decipher them. He was working from memory, without
any reference books. But after two years of playing
Relic of the Runes
he was getting pretty good at it. He held the rank of Exalted Grand Wizard of the Elfin World.

The message went something like “After a l
ong journey, we are hiding our money in deep water.” He didn’t know why anybody would put that on an old quilt, but it sounded like a clue on a treasure map. Money hidden in deep water … you’d have to know something about the old woman who made the quilt to figure that out.

The
bronze plaque on the wall said this Matilda Wilkins claimed to be a witch. She must have been nuts. He didn’t believe in witches, although he
did
believe in wizards, elves, and Hobbits. He wondered if the old woman had lived around here? And did she have a pond or a well?

He’d have to ask somebody about that, he remembered thinking. Now he was sorry he’d ever seen that blasted quilt.
Or told anybody about the message. How did he know that the person he’d confided in would steal it!

≈ ≈ ≈

Ted Yost went straight home, where Wanda was waiting for him. “Have you heard from Pinky?” he asked the boy’s mother.

“Not a word.”

“The police are still looking for him.”

Wanda pressed her
fingertips against her temples, as if suffering from a severe migraine. “W-what did you tell them?”

“Nothing. I clammed up, took the Fifth.”

“Thank you for protecting Pinky.”

“Your boy didn’t have anything to do with stealing the quilt. We both know that.”

“But he translated those symbols on the Wilkins Witch Quilt. They might arrest him as an accomplice.”

“Nobody knows he broke the
quilt’s code. We’ve just gotta keep our mouths shut and he’ll be all right. They can’t prove anything.”

“How do you know that?”

“Why else would they have let
me
go?”