Gold (River Sunday Romance Mysteries Book 4) Read online

  “Yeah, they might have figured they would come back and need it,” reasoned John.

  “Or they left it for the mummies to use in eternity,” she said.

  The boat looked of an old design and even in the darkness John could see the fancy scrolling on the woodwork. “Do you recognize the construction?” he asked.

  She said, “No. I’ve seen nothing like that on the Chesapeake, that’s for sure. I’d bet though that it’s related to ancient Native American designs.”

  Andy led them into the temple, climbing up a small set of stone steps that were at the edge of the building. These went to a floor of stone on which was a raised structure again in trapezoid form. It rose about four feet off the floor.

  “An altar,” she said.

  She stood on tiptoe at the edge and put her light on the surface of the altar.

  A strong glare bounced forth from its polished golden surface. The shine reflected off more hammered gold plates of metal on the ceiling, brightened both Andy and John in the brilliance.

  “It’s like sunlight. What is it?” asked John.

  She looked again with her light not directly causing the glare but aimed off to the side of the altar.

  “It’s designed to reflect like sunlight.”

  Carefully they investigated the gold circle. It was more than six feet in diameter. When they had climbed up on the altar and examined it closely, they could see encrusted emeralds and precious stones fitted into the gold surface.

  “We seem to be met with cathedrals no matter where we go,” she grinned.

  “Yeah,” said John. “First the cathedral that Father Sweeney wanted to build with the money he got from treasure here and now we find that the cavern below is loaded with treasure for another temple.”

  “Yeah, it’s ironic,” agreed Andy. “It’s definitely not my father and mother’s kind of simplicity.”

  John looked behind the great altar. “More things are behind it,” he said.

  She disappeared into the darkness, her light moving up and down on the cavern walls. Then she called back in an excited voice. “I’ve found three mummies back here.”

  John climbed through the treasures to stand beside her, their lights shining on three very old rolls of dusty but once colorful cloth. Three leathery shrunken skulls and bones stuck out from disintegrated wrappings.

  “What can you tell about them?” asked John.

  “I think these are Inca, not Mayan. They are very old though, and I suspect they were dead long before the visitors came here.”

  “They were brought here?”

  “Yes. For one thing, the wrappings are much more decayed than the ones in the tunnel. If nothing else that would show me that these are older by maybe centuries.” She looked at him. “See, John, this temple was set up for these mummies. That’s what the Incas did. They kept their mummies with them for centuries. They gave them land. Believe it or not, the mummies had as much land as the living in that culture, and they had whole teams of bureaucrats hired just to take care of the needs of the dead mummies. Actually, the living descendants in ancient Peru were running out of good land just about when the Spaniards got there.”

  “Kind of doomed to failure if the dead outnumber the living,” said John.

  “That’s so. This place is underground too. That fits with the Inca religion.”

  “Some more of the Milky Way stuff, the dark spot in the universe?” asked John.

  “You got it, and that ties in with Cygnus,” she said as she excitedly picked through the items.

  “So the gold was a second thought, I mean, hiding it as a treasure.”

  She nodded. “I’m not sure they thought of the gold the way we do. It was to honor the sun god and to help out the mummies, not to be rich. The yellow color of gold was a symbol of the yellow sun, of life.”

  “I never thought of gold that way before.”

  “It makes our belief in earthly wealth a little weak compared to what these people thought, doesn’t it?” she said.

  John put his light over the dead clump of cloth and black tape in front of him. Two eye sockets peered forth, long dead but still staring.

  “You say, they believed in this fellow, like a god.”

  “Yes. If I’m not mistaken the rest of his family are around here too.” She looked up and down the wall among the treasures piled there.

  “Who?”

  “His workers, wives, whatever was part of the assembly that was sacrificed when he died. They got to go the underground reward with him.”

  “Murdered?”

  “People in that culture actually wanted to be with him where ever he went. They didn’t think of it as murder. This fellow must have been a great king.”

  She searched around the base of the platform. “Here they are,” she said, from the other side. Her light stopped and outlined the square top of the platform. He could see glimpses of several other mummies.

  He moved ahead to join her, using his flashlight and feeling his way with his boots, brushing against piles of stone containers, which fell over and tumbled to the side with clangs of falling metal.

  “Careful,” said Andy.

  “These guys should have had a course in packing and storage theory,” said John.

  She grinned and said, “Millions of dollars’ worth of treasure is worth a little clutter, I think.”

  When he reached her, she was standing with her light on a row of skeletons, their faces grinning at them in the way that the dead have of looking at the living.

  Her light moved to another spot nearby. She said, “I didn’t see that before. See the golden disk on the temple floor propped between the other items?”

  “What?” he said, looking where she pointed.

  She gasped, “Of course. My God. I never thought of it. Children of the sun,” she said. That’s it, that’s the meaning of the children in the legends.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That disk. It comes from a famous sun temple of the Incas. It is for the sun, not a reflector like in the altar but something for the priests. John, it’s a very famous lost treasure.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It’s part of the treasure of General Ruminahui, one of the Incas. He collected a ransom of all the gold in the kingdom to free his captured king. This is when the Spaniards had captured the empire. Then he disappeared with all the gold and hid it in 1535. Pizarro treacherously killed the king, Atahaulpa. Ruminahui was executed in 1535 without revealing its location. The General must have sent it north to this place to be hidden.” She paused. “Now I know why the Spanish came here. Somehow they found out that the gold had been moved and they came here looking for it.”

  John looked at the golden wheel and thought back to the day the old priest had died, and his final dying words, “the golden sun.” He said, “Father Sweeney must have known it was here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Remember what he said just before he died?”

  Andy smiled, running her light over the sun wheel, and said, “I’m not sure he really knew it was here, but we’ll never know. He used to tell me about the myths of the past. He liked to read. I think he saw something about that treasure in a book from the River Sunday library and it must have impressed him. People think of all kinds of things when they are about to die.”

  She went on, “John, my father would have jumped for joy. This explains the Nanticoke legend. This is what the stories meant about the children of the sun. You see, the visitors weren’t children at all. They were adults but they referred to themselves as children, children of the sun.”

  She stopped moving her light. She had reached the etchings on the back wall. He looked on as she traced with her finger the designs of the ancient writing.

  “It’s Inca petrographs telling of the journey here.”

  “Can you read it?”

  “Some of it. It’s very hard unless you are an expert and I’m certainly not that. I learned some of them when I
was working on early astronomy and studied the discoveries of the ancients. I can see a design here or there that I know. I can tell that all this is about the journey though.”

  She went on, “This section proves that they came here by an ocean voyage. These marks are islands like say, what we call Cuba. I think this one here refers to the movement up the coast. See, here is a mark for a storm,” she said and then paused, looking carefully at one of the marks.

  “What is it?” John asked.

  “The same dots as we saw out in the ceiling when we were traveling across the lake,” she said.

  “The strange solar system?”

  “No, the other one about the constellation of stars.” She turned to John, his flash filling her face with light, the glare reflecting off her eyeglasses. “The Inca craftsmen copied the drawing from the ceiling for some reason, John.”

  She paused, looking back at the wall, “More important, how did they know about this place? Maybe they knew from some earlier source than explorers. Maybe they knew from the same source that those Nazca people had. John, somehow they found out about this place the same way they did about the figures of people on the ceiling. I’d bet that is true. I can’t wait until some experts get a look at the ceiling and these words.”

  She read slowly, “It’s some of what my father had discovered. I recognize the symbols. They represent some of the same thoughts. Here, see this line. It says,

  “good and evil energy binds the universe in balance.”

  She paused, studying, then said, pointing, “It goes on here,

  “the universe is good and evil. Life is the balance of the two forces but only good will rejoin the universe at death.”

  The wall was filled with many more designs. “I wish I could read this faster. I’m sure the answer is here somewhere.” She moved the light downward and got on her knees following the petrographs along the floor. “Here’s one with the little rectangle person like on the ceiling. It seems that the Incas who brought the gold and these strange rectangle people are somehow related. This is the symbol for the concept of family. Oh gosh, I need more time to read the words.”

  That’s when they heard a powerful explosion behind them, echoing from far across the lake in the darkness. The sandy shoreline where they were standing trembled. A shower of small chunks of hard clay broke loose from the ceiling of the cavern and fell around them.

  The ground shook slightly. John pointed to a crack that was opening along the wall at the back of the temple ground.

  He said, “What happened? Whatever it is, we have to get away from the temple, back into the raft. That crack proves this whole temple is constructed on a ledge. It might break off and slide into the water.”

  Chapter 22

  Friday July 19, 1PM

  All they saw at the other side of the lake was a faint glimmer of what might have been sparks from the explosion. That light died out immediately and all that was left was the blackness of the cavern. Their flashlight beams went out over the water but met nothing.

  “What do you think that was?” Andy asked him. She had dropped her camera from surprise and it lay against one of the objects, broken into several parts.

  “It’s Mouse. He’s opened the cave again with explosives,” he said firmly. “I told you he and the Captain would be coming for us.”

  “However, I think we are still in big trouble, Andy.” John showed her with dismay that the edge of the lake water was rising quickly up the sand beach. The raft that he and Andy had beached was now afloat. He quickly pulled it further up on the shore. Andy explained what was happening. The explosion had allowed more air to escape, at once easing the pressure that was keeping the water level down. Added to the river water coming in from the tunnel, the lake would rise and drown them as the air above it leaked away. The only hope was that Mouse would arrive in time to rescue them.

  He and Andy called and began waving their flashlights but no one answered or appeared in the darkness. After a few more minutes of trying, they returned to the exploration of the temple, looking for another way out. Andy thought that the symbols might give an answer to an escape route perhaps through another of the mounds. They were at the wall trying to decode the drawings when John heard the splash of paddles.

  He raced back to the beach and called again, “Mouse!” He moved his light on the water but saw nothing. Then, a bright glare hit his eyes and he heard the command, “Don’t move or we’ll shoot you right where you stand, John Neale.”

  He blinked, trying to see but the glare was too powerful. He recognized the gruff voice though. He called out, “Bent. What have you done to Mouse?”

  No answer was forthcoming. The glare continued. He heard other voices.

  Out in the darkness, he heard Wink Ricker say to Bent, “You told me that they were still up at their dig waiting for the water to go down.”

  Bent answered him. “Ricker, how was I to know they’d be stupid enough to come down here in a storm?”

  Ricker said, “They aren’t any stupider than we are.”

  Bent laughed, “Yeah, but our tunnel was dry, not wet like theirs.” John realized what he was seeing. These men had been digging next to their site, but not down. What Mouse had heard was the sound of a tunnel being built towards Father Tom’s site. These people had finished the tunnel and with an explosion, had broken through to the lake.

  Ricker answered, “Dry is better than wet, that’s for sure, Bent.”

  John looked behind him and saw Andy coming forward. He motioned to her to wait. He realized what was happening. Bent was doing what Penny had said he would, coming down here to steal the treasure after John’s team had done all the work and had found the gold.

  “I guess we engineered that tunnel pretty good,” Bent said.

  John heard their raft grate on the shallow pebbles at the edge of the lake.

  Ricker said, “We could have missed this place with our tunnel. We were still taking a big chance.”

  Bent called him by name. “This is your chance to be rich, Wink. Quit talking like a pussy real estate agent.”

  The light dropped from John’s face and it moved over the intruders and their raft. Ricker was in the front of the raft, only a few feet away from where John stood. Bent was behind him and had a large pistol in his hand.

  “Johnny. My friend Johnny,” said Ricker, smiling. He had a revolver stuffed into his belt.

  Andy had come up by John’s side. “Ricker,” she said, slowly. “What have you done with the others?”

  “Don’t you worry your pretty face, bitch,” Bent said. “They don’t even know we are here. They’re still up there fighting that storm.”

  John said, “They came in by their own tunnel. Mouse heard them but we didn’t know that was what they were doing.”

  Ricker smiled again and said, “You got it, Johnny. Say, meet my friend, Jack Bent. He talks a little rough though. Best way to get along with him is to do what he says.” John could hear the greed lubricating Ricker’s words. The words on the real estate entrepreneur’s ball cap seemed out of place in the darkness.

  Ricker real estate where your grass gets greener

  Bent put his light in John’s face and said, “Don’t you try nothing, lawyer. I had my fill of you kind of people.”

  John thought fast. He knew Ricker was corrupt because he had witnessed his business deals. He didn’t seem to be a killer though. Bent was another story. He suspected that Bent was capable of just about anything to get his hands on the gold. He felt sure this man was the killer everyone had been searching for.

  John saw the astonishment in their eyes as the thieves tried to take in the magnificence of the treasure in the structure. Ricker could not contain his joy and yelled out, “Damn, we hit the jackpot, Bent.”

  “No,” screamed Andy. “You don’t understand.”

  “What’s she talking about, Bent?” asked Ricker. “This is treasure, pirate gold.”

  “Don’t pay her no mind. Let’s just get what
we come for,” said Bent.

  “Get out of here,” said Andy, her voice firm. “We have to study this place, not steal it. Don’t you see? We can find out about the origin of life on earth.”

  “You’re telling me all this gold belongs to you, lady? Get real,” said Bent. He had come ashore and roughly went into the temple. He began pulling out golden artifacts and dragging them back to his raft. Ricker moved his own light up and down in excitement.

  “The water is rising,” John said. “When you blew that new hole in the cavern wall, you destroyed the air pressure balance. That was the only thing that was keeping the water level down. The whole cavern will fill up and fast. We have to get out of here, back through the tunnel you made.”

  “What’s it to you? You aren’t going anywhere, lawyer,” said Bent.

  Ricker then said, nervously, “I don’t want to kill anyone, Bent. You said we’d come in here when they weren’t around and take our share. That’s all. No killing. That’s what you promised.”

  Bent replied, “You best lift out some of this smaller stuff and put it in your knapsack.”

  Then he stopped working and turned to Ricker. “You want to bring them back up to the surface with the gold? What you going to tell that River Sunday chief of police after they get out of here and tell about us? You think your farmer friend is going to want that?”

  “We can’t kill anyone,” said Ricker.

  “Tolman’s sitting up there right now waiting for his share. His wife too. Them two don’t want no problems with police either. You didn’t object about killing anyone when we planned this, did you? You were just counting all the money you were going to make. Well, we leave them behind or we go to jail. You better get used to it.”

  Ricker looked at the ground, his grin gone, as he pondered what he had done. John could see that the real estate entrepreneur was having trouble with his role as murderer.

  “You’re in over your head, Ricker,” said John.

  “Maybe, Johnny,” Ricker replied, his familiar grin returning to his face as he pulled his ball cap tighter on his head. “On the other hand, I’m on this side of the gun and that’s better than where you are, seems to me.”