A Treasure Deep (31 page)

“Mercurial,” Perry corrected. “Like mercury
in a thermometer.”

“Yeah, that’s it,” Montulli said.

“Give me a few minutes with her,” Perry
said.

“Sure, but if you need help, just scream,”
Jack said. “I’ll send the sergeant in with guns blazing.”

“You’re trying to get me killed,” Montulli
said. “He’s on his own. As for me, I’m going to call it a night.
There are enough deputies to handle what’s left of the crowd until
your rent-a-cops get here.”

Perry turned to the officer; he held out his
hand. “Thanks for your help and concern,” Perry said. “I know we
have been . . . something of a problem.”

“You got that right,” Montulli shot back. He
paused then said with a slight nod, “I’m glad you weren’t
hurt.”

Perry returned the nod and started toward
Anne, steeling himself for another onslaught.

ANNE TOOK A deep breath as she watched Perry
approach. She was relieved to see him walking. From what Montulli
had told her when he escorted her up the slope, Perry was lucky to
be alive.

“Um, hi,” she said with a slight smile.

“Hello,” Perry said. “I didn’t expect to see
you again, especially at this hour.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she offered. “Greg . . .
Sergeant Montulli told me what happened. I’m glad you weren’t
hurt.”

Perry laughed lightly. “Me too.
Unfortunately, my worker wasn’t so fortunate.”

“Will he be okay?”

“I don’t know. He had a head injury, and it
looked serious.” Perry motioned to one of the camp chairs. Anne
took it, and Perry pulled another chair close to her. On the ground
behind them rested six crates in two rows. An uncomfortable silence
grew between them. Anne shifted in her chair. “May I ask what
happened?”

Perry explained what little he knew, leaving
out Jack’s idea about an ancient booby trap.

“And you just jumped in?” she asked with
amazement.

“Well, it seemed like a good idea at the
time.”

“You’re a brave man, Perry Sachs. I don’t
know anyone else who would have done that.” She shifted in her
chair again. Her stomach turned; her breathing went shallow.

“It has nothing to do with bravery,” Perry
said. “You seem nervous.”

“What does it have to do with?”

She watched Perry look off in the distance,
staring at the big hole in the ground. “Faith, I suppose. Faith and
responsibility. He worked for me. I felt responsible.”

Anne inhaled deeply. “You were right,” she
blurted. She felt her throat tighten.

“About what?”

“About my owing God an apology.” She bit her
lower lip then continued. “Something happened to me tonight,
something good . . . wonderful. I didn’t expect it, but it happened
anyway. I don’t know how to explain it.”

“You faced God,” Perry said flatly.

“I suppose you could say that. What you said
got to me.”

“No, it wasn’t what I said. I just brought up
what you already knew, at least subconsciously. The Holy Spirit did
the rest. Care to share what happened?”

Anne did, recounting her trip to O’Tool’s,
her anger with him, her frustration with herself, and the spiritual
catharsis that followed. She left nothing out, and when she
finished, she felt new, fresh. “The pain of my husband’s loss is
still there. I suppose it always will be.”

“Did you love him?”

The question surprised her. “Yes, I did. I
loved him very much.”

“Grief is a function of love,” he said. “Much
love means much grief in loss. Hard as it is to live with, it’s a .
. . tribute.”

“I suppose. I’ve never thought of hurt as
honorable.”

“Our society does everything it can to avoid
discomfort. We are pleasure driven these days, not purpose
driven.”

“Is that what you are? Purpose driven?”

Perry ran a hand across his face and then
through his hair. Dust flew skyward; dirt fell earthward. “I guess
so. I’m happiest when I’m working at something that matters.”

“Like your secret mission here?”

“It won’t be secret forever,” Perry said.
“Hopefully not for much longer.”

“So you’re pressing on?” Anne asked.

“I have to. I’m meeting with my key people in
a few minutes. We’ll make decisions then.”

“Looks like that’s them,” she said, nodding
toward the bottom of the slope. A yellow Ford explorer was pulling
up the slope.

“Jack went to the road to wait for Gleason
and Brent.” He stood. “I’m going to have to cut this short.”

Anne understood. She rose. “I’ll leave you to
your planning. I just wanted to apologize for trying to slap
you.”

He smiled. “I was pretty direct. Maybe we can
start over.”

“Agreed,” she said and held out her hand. He
took it in both of his. His touch was warm and strong. “No more
jumping in pits.”

“I’ll do my best.”

THE SMALL TRAILER was crowded with somber men. A
narrow worktable served as desk and equipment catchall. Several
metal folding chairs were stacked against the opposite partition.
Perry moved coffee cups, handheld radios, and a few other items to
make room for survey drawings made the previous day. Finding a red
marker pen, he drew a loose shape on one of the drawings. It
represented the cavity that had swallowed the backhoe and its
operator in one gulp.

“We were blindsided, guys,” Perry said.
“Somehow this got past us all.”

“There was no indication from the GPR or any
other survey we did,” Gleason offered. “We did it right, and we did
it multiple times, except . . .”

“Except we didn’t do a deep search,” Jack
said. “Our initial survey found what we were looking for in
general. We used shallow survey devices. Once we got returns on
that, we were able to map out the site and plan our coring and
digging. I should have called for a deep radar search. That would
have shown the sinkhole.”

Perry turned to his men. Jack stood straight
and met his eyes, but Perry knew he felt responsible. It had been
he who oversaw the project until Perry’s arrival. Gleason looked as
if the world had been dropped on his shoulders. He leaned against
the wall, head down. Dr. Curtis stood silently in the corner, hands
dangling at his side. These were men with unique qualifications for
the work they did, but they were also men with feelings and pride.
Something had gone terribly wrong, and with the exception of
Curtis, they felt responsible.

“Hindsight is always 20/20, guys. You know
that.” Perry spoke directly and firmly. His men, his friends,
didn’t need to be soothed; they needed to know that they were not
to blame. “You did things exactly as I would have. If we knew of
every possible problem ahead of time, then we could test for it,
plan for it, even avoid it. That’s not an option available to us.
We do the best we can and take what comes our way. I could have
asked for a deep GPR survey, but I didn’t. Why? Because I knew, as
you did, that what we were looking for would be shallow. We weren’t
looking for geological faults; we were looking for something
man-made. And we found it.” Perry turned to Curtis. “When do we
ship out the crates, Doc?”

“I’ve made all the contacts with researchers
that I trust, and they’re ready to receive the finds. I didn’t tell
them what they would be receiving. I thought they might enjoy
receiving the shock of their lives. Just a little academic humor on
my part. I’d pay money to see their faces.”

“You’re an animal,” Jack said. “We can’t take
you anywhere.”

“Is that true for . . .” Perry was having
trouble saying it. Like the others, he was having trouble believing
his own eyes. “ . . . Site Six?”

“No,” Curtis said. “She will be sent to my
university. I have a couple of aides to receive the shipment and
put her under lock and key. I’ve also notified the president of the
college. He said he’d make sure security was provided.”

“So you told him what we found . . . who we
found?” Perry inquired.

“No. Just that the college was about to be
put on the map.”

“Will he open the crate?” Gleason asked.

“I asked him not to. He’s a man of science
himself so he understands protocol.”

“Good,” Perry said. “I need advice, men, and
I’m turning to you. I want to press on toward the mark. Am I
crazy?”

The silence only lasted a moment. “Of course
you are, Perry,” Jack answered. “You’ve always been crazy. That’s
what we like about you. Normal people are boring. I say we push on
without interruption.”

“Even though you think we might have our own
Oak Island here?”

“It would explain a few things,” Jack
said.

“Oak Island?” Gleason asked.

“It’s an island off the coast of Nova
Scotia,” Jack explained. “In 1795 two young men went exploring on
the island. They found an oak tree with unusual marks on it, like
rope marks. Long story short, they found a treasure pit, and a
deviously clever one at that. To this day, despite many repeated
attempts, the pirate treasure has eluded recovery. Six people have
died trying to get it out.”

“What makes it so hard to excavate?” Curtis
asked.

“It appears that whoever buried the
treasure—and ideas ranging from Captain Kidd to Francis Bacon have
been suggested—booby-trapped the site. In a nutshell, there is a
thirteen-foot-wide shaft that descends to about two hundred feet.
Coring has brought up bits of oak board, charcoal, putty, spruce,
bits of gold coin, cement, iron chain, and more. The booby traps
were as ingenious as they were deadly. Sloping shafts ran from the
vertical shaft to the ocean. When the digging got deep enough, the
shaft opened and flooded the site. Over the years other would-be
treasure hunters found another such shaft.”

“But there’s evidence of treasure there?”
Gleason asked.

“Oh, yes. One group bored a hole about ninety
meters from the money pit and found several artificial cavities.
They lowered a remote camera down the borehole and they saw three
chests, a severed hand, and a body.”

“So you’re suggesting that the sinkhole was a
cleverly devised trap?” Curtis said.

“I’m suggesting that we consider the
possibility. A lot of time has passed since our Roman friends set
up camp here. Maybe they planned a trap, and the passing years made
it more dangerous. Or maybe this was exactly what they meant to
happen. We don’t know, and we won’t know until geologists have had
time to do a proper examination.”

“Jack’s point is well taken,” Perry said.
“The Oak Island pit was probably dug centuries after this site, but
it does show that such traps can be devised and implemented by
people with nothing more than hand tools.”

“Considering everything else that has
happened,” Gleason said, “I think it would be wise to assume that
there may be other dangers.”

“You advocate pulling back?” Perry asked.

“No, just the contrary. I’m saying that we
move forward, but we assume that something else is going to happen
and take precautions. If you’re right, we’re after more than mere
gold.”

“I agree,” Perry said. “We may or may not be
facing dangers from the past, but we know that we have present-day
problems to deal with, not the least of which is a murderer. We
push on. Agreed?”

The men agreed.

“All right then. I want to limit the crew’s
access to the site. The fewer bodies, the less chance of injury.
Now, we have one other thing we need to do.”

Perry turned his back on the table with its
papers and reached for one of the folding chairs. He passed one to
each man, who opened it and took a seat, each facing the other.
Perry sat leaning his arms on his knees, his head bowed forward. He
closed his eyes and shut out the room, the trailer, the site, and
the rest of the world. Silence settled in the cramped trailer. A
moment later, Perry spoke. “Our Father in heaven, we praise You for
this day and this opportunity . . .”

The prayer lasted fifteen minutes as each man
intoned praise and lifted a request for wisdom and safety. They
prayed for their fallen worker, Lenny, and asked for healing. When
each man had prayed, Perry made one last intercession, a heartfelt
prayer for Anne Fitzgerald.

JOSEPH SET THE crayon down, folded his hands in his
lap, and started rocking. “Perry . . . uhh . . . uhh.”

Claire rose from the chair she’d been sitting
in for the last few hours. Emotions churned wildly within her,
alternating anger with depression, despair with determination. The
place they were held in now was a better room, cleaner, larger, and
not so oppressive, but it was still a locked room, a cell in which
she and her son were held captive. More than once she’d tried the
door, but it remained locked from the outside.

The fact that the door could be locked from
the outside told her that her captors had thought things through.
Prior to Joseph’s birth, Claire had taught elementary school, and
she knew that fire codes prohibited rooms in which people could be
accidentally locked inside. Someone had changed this lock just to
keep them from leaving, and that worried her.

For the first time since Joseph’s birth,
Claire felt glad for his condition. They’d not eaten since the
previous day, and she was feeling the effects, but Joseph showed no
indication of discomfort. He was oblivious to the danger, to the
fact that they were not home. She was grateful for that.

Walking to Joseph, she placed a hand on his
shoulder. He immediately ceased his rocking. Yes, she was glad that
he was unaware of the danger, but she still wished he could turn to
her and say, “It’s going to be all right, Mom. You’ll see.
Everything is going to be fine.” It was a senseless, useless wish.
Such a thing could never happen. In most ways, she was totally
alone.

Allowing her eyes to drift, she let her gaze
fall on the picture Joseph had been drawing. At first she thought
he’d just colored the page black, but when she looked closer she
could see a faint outline.