Gold (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 4) Read online

  John smiled, “You mean, the money might be dirty money?”

  “We like to provide charitable forgiveness to those who wish to donate.”

  John said, “Charity for charity. However, since the money has stopped, now you have decided to forego your traditions and chase the money trail. In other words, you want to find out more?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes.” The Monsignor moved back into his leather seat.

  John sat forward. “Why not tell the police about your concerns?”

  “These days all kinds of evil things are attributed to the church. Who knows what the public might think? We do not want to be in the role of defending ourselves in whatever crimes have been committed regarding this money. For one thing, we don’t have the money to support lawyers to do that.”

  John nodded.

  The church official stared into John’s eyes and said, “You are a lawyer, Mister Neale. Do you go to church?”

  “Yes.”

  “When you light a candle do you want someone to ask you why you do it or where you got the money for the donation?” His eyes bored into John and his face was taut.

  “No.”

  The monsignor’s face relaxed as he said, “That’s the same when we don’t ask where our funds come from. You can see our need for discretion in this matter. It should not get to the newspapers.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “You are the only person who can award the proceeds of any treasure that you find. We want to make sure you realize that it should come to the church.”

  John said, “I’m not sure that it should come to the church.”

  “I can only pray that you do eventually see.”

  “If I don’t see?”

  “Then the cathedral will be cancelled. It may be cancelled anyway with all the bad press that Guthrie and some of our younger priests are causing us.”

  John leaned forward and said slowly, “What will the church do if it does not get the funds? Will it fight me in court?”

  “We have dealt with our enemies for two thousand years,” he said. “The church moves in mysterious ways. We may not fight you or on the other hand, we may. I am sure that Rome will advise us on this matter if the money in question turns out to be a large amount. I should tell you also, that the church does provide much legal work already budgeted in our regular church activities, much billing income which does go normally to our friends. We can make sure you get your share.”

  “What will you do to your enemies?”

  He laughed, and said, “It’s not the Middle Ages. Have no fear of being burned at the stake. These days, we pray for our enemies but only after we pray for our friends.”

  “Do you pray for these people?” John asked pointing outside the tinted glass of the big car.

  “You may not realize this, Mister Neale, but they are here not for digging but to promote this man Guthrie’s cause. He is misleading the media. Can you see that? In a way, these people do need prayers but to preserve them from charlatans like this blue robed man.”

  “You may be right, but if the world can begin to help them, perhaps that will be treasure enough.”

  “Perhaps,” said the churchman.

  John said, smiling, “Thank you for warning me, Father. I wouldn’t want to be on the short end of the church’s prayers.” He opened the limousine door and felt the outside hot air rush at him. As he climbed out he waved at Andy who waved back with much energy and a look of relief on her face as if he were returning from a bloody combat tour in some horror filled war overseas.

  Chapter 12

  Monday, July 5, 9 AM

  The Captain and Andy were working at the sifting table when suddenly the Captain’s yell broke the hot summer air. John looked over and saw him holding up a rectangular clod of earth. Andy was pointing at it, intently looking at the underside of the dirt.

  “What did you find?” called Mouse as he ran over to the table. “That’s from five feet below where we found the remains of the treasure box.”

  The Captain handed the object to Andy and she began chipping at the dirt encrusted specimen.

  “Definitely metal underneath the dirt,” she said. She began to see a glint in the object as sunlight fell on it.

  “Yeah, it’s an axe head,” said the Captain. “I’ve seen them all over the Chesapeake at these sites.”

  “You’ve seen iron ones like that Indian one that they found at Steve’s mound. This is bronze,” she said.

  The Captain said, “This is an older style, very curved and ornate. I’ve seen ones like this that were left by the Spanish explorers.”

  “What were they doing up here in the Chesapeake?” said Andy. “How come they were digging here?”

  “Could they have traded with the Nanticokes?” asked John.

  “I don’t think so,” said the Captain. “Now, you might think that I am crazy but that’s the way you get in this business. I think they were looking for something just like we are.”

  “What would have brought them here?” Andy said, her face thoughtful. “That is, unless they were drawn the same way the pirates were. That would mean that the Nanticoke legends were even older, say back into the late Fifteen Hundreds when the Spanish were active.”

  “It’s hard to say,” said the Captain. “Something drew them here, though. I don’t think they were pirates in those early days, and they did explore these parts long before Every and his boys. You can guess that because the hatchet is below where we found the chest remains. The Spanish did not touch the chest so I suspect it wasn’t here when they dug down.”

  “Whoever put it there had something to do with all this, that’s for sure,” said John.

  “We could say that,” agreed the Captain.

  John suddenly held up his hand. They looked at each other as they heard the sudden loud noise, a cracking as of splintering boards. This was followed by a cry for help from Hoadley.

  “Get me up. The water is coming in.”

  Mouse was the first back to the side of the hole and yelled, “I thought nothing could have taken down that structure. I was wrong.” He watched as water came rushing to the top of the well, pieces of plywood siding with bent corrugated steel still attached floating to the surface in wild confusion in the frothing liquid.

  John jumped into the water, preparing to dive below. “We’ll have to get him out of that mud. He won’t last long,” he cried as he pushed aside a large beam. John ducked his head under the water and followed the rope that they had been using to lower and raise themselves from the hole. Around him was dark water with chunks of splintered wood launching at him from all directions. He fielded his left hand to ward them off while his right continued to clutch the rope.

  In the murk he saw Hoadley’s arm and hand coming toward his face and he grabbed at it. He missed and the arm disappeared back into the dark water. He pulled harder on the rope to descend further. His lungs hurt as they yearned for fresh oxygen. Again, Hoadley came into sight, and John witnessed his searching fright filled face. He grabbed the man, this time managing to hold him tight.

  John pulled upward on the rope as hard as he could, his head butting against the timber missiles in the water. He could feel Hoadley pushing hard to help them rise. Their heads broke surface at the same time, both gasping for fresh air. Mouse reached down and pulled John up beside him. Hoadley came out with the assistance of Captain Penny.

  “I didn’t do anything,” said Hoadley. “The walls just started falling inward and then I was covered with water.” They stood around him as he got his strength back. “I’m all right,” he said finally and stood up, moving back to the hole to help the Captain lift out some of the broken wood.

  Mouse put down his phone. “I’ve just asked my people to get the big stuff ready. I’ve got pumps you won’t believe. I should have brought them sooner. We’ll have that water out of there pretty quick.”

  “Where are you going to pump it?” asked the Captain.

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nbsp; “Into the river,” said Mouse.

  “I don’t think you understand, Mouse. That’s where it came from,” said the Captain.

  “What do you mean?” asked John.

  “It’s just like Oak Island,” said the Captain.

  “What are you talking about?” asked Mouse.

  “Oak Island,” said Hoadley. “Now we are really in for it.”

  “What’s all this?” asked John.

  “The well shaft didn’t fall in by accident,” said the Captain. “It was planned to happen like this. Whoever engineered this site set up the river to flood it if anyone got too close to whatever is buried.”

  “Something hit that wall with a lot of force,” said John.

  “Water has that kind of weight. This place is rigged like Oak Island,” said the Captain.

  “You’re saying the whole site was planned to fill up with river water?” asked Mouse, a thoughtful look on his muscular face.

  “When we dug far enough down, the pressure built up against the walls of our hole. Then when it got too much, the water broke through the walls and filled the hole.”

  “Tides cause it?” asked John.

  “Not really. It’s engineered pressure,” said the Captain.

  “It’s been leaking water since we started digging. I thought it was underground springs, this far away from the river,” said Mouse. “What is this Oak Island?”

  The Captain explained. “Springs could still be part of the leakage. Anyway, Oak Island is a small island in Nova Scotia where treasure was buried by pirates. The site was supposedly discovered a couple hundred years ago and legends say some of the treasure was recovered.”

  “How does it apply to us?” asked Andy.

  The Captain smiled and said, “Up there, the hole that the treasure hunters dug kept filling up with water no matter what was done. The problem, you see, is that the builders, whoever they were, arranged a series of inlets that would flood just like here today when excavators got too far into the ground.”

  He began to sketch a diagram on the ground. “Here’s the well hole. Assume that water tunnels or inlets come in from the river and congregate on the well. These tunnels are started way out in the bed of the river at assorted hidden spots.”

  “So the tunnels feed the water in here?” asked Mouse.

  “Yes, and keep us out of the well hole.”

  The Captain said, “The inlets let the river fill our hole up the river level. Might be higher at high tide and lower at low tide but definitely full. You’ll ask why the inlets held off. I imagine that the dirt in the hole that we took out was like a stopper and where we are digging is the junction point of the inlets.”

  “So at least we are in the right place for possible treasure,” said Mouse. “At least we know someone went to a lot of trouble to make this hole. What did the engineers come up with at Oak Island?”

  “No one ever solved it. You can’t pump out the whole river that is coming in. All you can do is keep it down with the pumps to the point at which the inlets can’t fill it fast enough.”

  “Why not close off the inlets?” asked John.

  “All the inlets were never found.”

  “Who could have built this? I mean, this is serious engineering,” said Andy.

  “Historians and treasure researchers have suggested that the builders of Oak Island could have been the British or French military who were known for fortifications in the area, or pirates, or even ancient peoples with engineering knowledge who might have roamed the East Coast of America long before the European colonists landed.”

  He continued, “Most people figure that the whole area was dug out and the inlets set into the ground but no one knows for sure. The land was restored and the inlets opened so the site was protected. Whoever did it knew how to divert the inlets but no one has ever figured out the secret.”

  “So all we have to do is understand how to turn off the inlets here,” said Mouse.

  “You got that right,” said his father, Jesse.

  “The question is how.”

  “They tried everything?” asked John.

  “Just about. They were a lot of smart dedicated people with a lot more experience than we have.”

  “Tell me what they did,” said Mouse.

  “They suck deep wells like this one and when the water came in they tried to pump it out. The pumps broke down.”

  “That makes sense. The old pumps weren’t much.”

  The Captain nodded. “Then they tried to shut off the inlets. Some tried to stop the inlets and some tried to find the tunnels. All failed. They sank parallel holes too and tried to come in alongside their main hole and try to drain off the water. That failed. One guy even tried to dig out the site with a very large hole. Nothing worked and pretty soon the place was all chopped up so no one even knew where the original spot was.”

  John said, “They turned it into a mess.”

  “Yeah and I forgot that they also tried dynamite. That sent whatever was there even farther down. They drilled, you see, and found tidbits of treasure or what might be parts of chests. They knew something was there, just like we know a chunk of something is down there with our radar search. They were working in the days before ground penetration electronics. I don’t know what has happened up there now but I know no treasure has been found recently. The place is so wrecked I doubt anything will ever come of it. If the treasure was balanced over more water, it might have sunk down further, way out of reach.”

  “We don’t want to make those mistakes, that’s for sure,” said John.

  “We’re going to have to find the inlets where this water is coming in from,” said Mouse.

  “How are we going to do that?” John asked. The others grew silent and looked at the hole full of water.

  John left them and walked out to the fence where he could see the road. The tourists were there and they came by car after car from surrounding towns and cities. Jesse continued to make sure the newspapermen remained in the road and did not come inside Father Sweeney’s site. John would say little to them and Mouse glared at them saying nothing at all and frightening them with his immense size. The Captain might go out to the edge and talk to a reporter but his comments tended to be scholarly, mostly about the history of piracy in the area.

  At the homeless site John noticed that the digging was more and more not a simple well type hole but a large open space like a bowl into the earth. The dig stretched back more than a hundred feet in diameter. Moving out from the bowl center were trenches. Workers dug as they carefully knelt or sat working with small shovels at the earth walls of the bowl. Occasionally as he watched one or the other of the diggers would stand up and run to his neighbors to show something he or she had found.

  As he looked at the homeless dig he thought about its shape, how it was growing to resemble a great sun with rays of light heading out as the trenches were dug. Perhaps Guthrie was producing a great message to the helicopter reporters which kept flying over the site, a message about his Easter Sunlight organization. He smiled as he remembered his geography book back in elementary school and a picture of an emblem drawn in the earth by ancient South Americans to communicate with their gods in the sky. Perhaps Guthrie had read the same book.

  Andy was pensive when she joined him. She watched the road for a while and then said, “The fact that this place has been visited by at least two groups, the pirates and the Spanish, and the fact that it was protected by a strange tribe, lead me to think that something very precious is buried even deeper. I am thinking that others came here to leave things, valuable things, like they were putting them into a special bank.”

  “Seems like the Spanish came here to rob something. Why would any others but the pirates put their money here?” asked John, looking at her. He was taller than her and looked down.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’ve read all my father’s notes too much, but all the records seem to state that something is very different about the River Sunday area.”
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  “Anyway now you know why the old man stopped. Why the pirates and the Spanish did too.”

  She nodded. “They dug down until the water came in.”

  John said, “Father Tom was an old man with people depending on him making those payments. When he couldn’t find any more coins, that might have been enough to make him sick, make him have the heart attack.”

  Mouse came up to John and Andy. He said with a grin, “Boys and girls, here’s what we are going to do.”

  Chapter 13

  Tuesday, July 16, 9AM

  Mouse’s plan was simple enough. He intended to fill the water in the well hole with red dye and let the tides pull it out into the river. When the dye showed up in the current brought out by the receding tide water, that spot of color in the river surface would indicate an inlet on the bottom.

  When John arrived the next morning, two vehicles, one a fire truck and one a highway wrecker, were backed up to the well hole. He thought that perhaps someone had called the fire department. As he got closer he saw that the fire truck was not what it appeared. It had once been a fire pump vehicle, the little dog on its hood identifying it as one of the famous Mack trucks, but its once bright red door with its former fire department identification was painted over with rough brush strokes of black color. The truck’s engine was not rumbling but John could see hoses coming from couplers on the side of the vehicle. They were aimed to pump water away from the dig towards the river.

  Mouse was with the others at the side of the hole. He had finished pouring dye into the well and the surface of the well water was a deep red. He said, “I’ll start the pumps as soon as we spot the dye coming up in the river.”

  “Where’d you get that thing?” asked John with a grin.

  “You like my pump? I picked it up after the side of a warehouse came down on it and killed two of the firemen running it. Got it cheap. The men thought it was spooked and wouldn’t work it anymore.”