Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
My immediate urge was to follow Hunter and not let him out of sight, but I stayed behind.
If Hunter had wanted to hurt me, he would have done so already.
Easily. With his six-something-inch muscled frame to my everything-opposite-of-that body I stood no chance.
Even when I held a knife. I usually had a good instinct about people (except Phill, but life with him taught me lots about narcissists).
Meeting Hunter for the first time didn’t alarm me.
It was quite the opposite—it gave me a sense of security.
I had to trust the first feeling that Hunter was a good man.
The lost treasure twist was, I must admit, a bit … dodgy? Iffy? Cuckoo?
All of the above?
I busied myself by cutting mangos and squeezing juice from the oranges we’d collected last night. I wasn’t hungry, but my body craved a little pick-me-up sugar, and if the day ahead of me still held a chance of combat, I might as well make sure my bloodstream had some fuel to burn.
By the time Hunter returned, carrying a light brown mailing tube and several journals in his hands, I had made two full glasses.
We settled at the picnic table with two diaries, a rolled-up map, nautical charts covered in a grid of crossed-out or shaded-in squares, and pencil scribbles in two different handwritings—Hunter’s neat, boxy writing with perfect and equally spaced letters, and the other, sloppy and similar to mine, must have been Edward’s.
The journals had newspaper cutouts, some dating back to the 1950s, multiple printouts, and photocopies of book articles about the Treasure of Lima.
The remarkable National Treasure meets Indiana Jones movie props presentation in front of me eased the prickling sensation at the back of my neck.
Pushing skepticism aside, I willed myself to believe that Hunter was honest with me about his reasons for being (and digging) on this island.
Whether or not the treasure was real was another matter.
“In 1820, Peru started a war against the Spanish Empire colonizing the Americas. The Spanish Viceroy decided to remove all their treasures, so they commissioned British Captain William Thompson and his vessel Mary Dear to take them to Mexico for safekeeping. Unfortunately, Captain Thompson was more greedy than honorable, so he and his men killed all the Spanish soldiers and priests on board. Historians believe they arrived at Cocos Island on the coast of Costa Rica and buried the bounty there.” Hunter eyed me over the brim of his mug.
“Later, a Spanish warship captured them, but Thompson and his first mate escaped, and were never recaptured.”
“I hate to break it to you, but this is the wrong island,” I said.
At least I knew that much. “We are nowhere near Costa Rica.” The knife now rested at my thigh on the bench.
My curiosity had shoved my fear aside, but not to the point where I was convinced this wasn’t some elaborate cover-up story designed by someone who failed high school geography.
Hunter put down his mug and grinned. “Everyone thinks it is on Cocos Island. Hundreds of explorers have tried to locate the Treasure of Lima over the decades, but all have failed, because Captain William Thompson never went there. He sailed to Australia, and on the way, he hid all the treasure somewhere around these islands.” Hunter circled the area between French Polynesia and the Cook Islands on a map with his finger.
“Legend has it they sank it somewhere with the idea to come back later and retrieve it. In 1955, during his vacation, my grandfather caught a two-hundred-pound blue marlin. Inside the fish, he discovered not one but two gold doubloons.”
I bit into a slice of mango. I could humor him in return for a good story. “Really? Spanish gold coins?”
Pulling a journal out from under a map, he opened to a page with taped yellowish newspaper cutouts, then flipped a few pages more, before stopping on a pencil sketch of the coin. “Like this.”
Pressing my elbow on the table, I leaned sideways to take a look, my shoulder brushing Hunter’s arm. Somehow, in the last few minutes, we’d moved closer.
“And where are they now?”
Hunter’s face dimmed. “Edward gambled them away.”
“So you have no proof it’s true?”
“I don’t need the proof. I know it’s true.” His voice was gruff and hard in a way I hadn’t heard yet.
I shrugged. “Okay. What happened next?”
“Grandpa got invested in research. A few years later, he purchased this island as his base and began to explore these waters. He lost his family and eventually his sanity because of the Treasure of Lima. Everyone in my family thinks Grandpa brought down some kind of Holden curse upon us when he found these coins.”
I was a firm believer that there were no jinxes or curses, just consequences of our actions and human error. But I was curious to know Hunter’s thoughts. I raised an eyebrow. “A curse?”
“There are no curses.” Hunter waved his hand in dismissal and flipped a page in the journal.
“As a kid, I always thought his stories were just crazy tales an old man told me when we visited him, but now, I believe him. Edward and I found ship parts that dated back to the mid-1800s about half a mile from here and then…” He held my gaze. “Don’t be alarmed.”
I wouldn’t say I liked the sound of that, but I desperately wanted to know what he would say next because a tiny part of me was intrigued now.
“Edward found a skeleton holding a brass compass with numbers etched into its base.” He turned to the page with a detailed sketch of a compass like the one on Hunter’s forearm. “It was missing its lid and gnomon but that’s not important.”
“What is a gnomon?”
“It’s a piece that you’d use on a sundial to cast a shadow to tell the time.
In this case, it would be a triangular one that you’d put over the glass connecting its points from here to here.
” Hunter pointed to the drawing, placing the pencil tip to a dot above north, and then to a dot in the center of the glass.
Wait a minute.
“Did you say a skeleton?”
“Yes.”
“You have a dead body on this island? And you’re just now telling me about it?”
Hunter outstretched his arms. “How would it sound if I told you there is a skeleton in the jungle?”
“I don’t know.” Chills ran down my spine. I would’ve died if I found it on the way to the bathroom or something. “How about why didn’t you tell the truth from the day we met?”
“Because I didn’t know who you were.”
I dropped my chin and pinned him with a look from under the brows. “And what makes you trust me now?”
He mimicked my stare. “I have no choice now, do I?”
Touché.
I wouldn’t have spilled the beans about the treasure the first day to an outsider, especially one who so conveniently washed up on his island.
“Is there someone else who is looking for it?”
Hunter’s gaze dropped to the notebook, and he ran a finger along the edge of the pages. “Many are looking for this treasure.”
“But you said everyone thinks Captain Cook hid it on Coconut Island.”
“It’s Cocos Island. And Captain William Thompson, not Cook.” Hunter let out a resigned sigh. “You are not taking me seriously.”
“I am.” I cupped the back of my neck, my fingers kneading a tensed muscle.
Everything Hunter said about his grandfather and Edward no doubt was true.
Even Captain Thompson’s story could be true.
I never was interested in sunken treasures, but I had lived my entire life in Miami and heard a lot of stories about a friend of a friend who found silver or gold coins, bejeweled daggers, or ship’s bronze bells while snorkeling or scuba diving in the Bahamas or even around the Florida coast. So it was all possible.
I just didn’t expect to end up in the company of the treasure hunter in the middle of a hunt.
“Can I see this compass?” I asked. Hunter flattened his lips into a tight grimace. “Ah, Edward gambled that away, too?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that sucks.” I pulled the page with numbers closer.
7863221 1698 2232626311 1526231019 1698 18191518 2327231819
2126 2613674175 1814641755 9131617 212661 1617172 1417181417 1117 5171723
1021181 72118 21618141 152106 25210 227 1811326186 141621222525186 191471425 19251410
194110 211117 223251 1611 223251 195164 26123164 211117 23141 510 1641 1453416 12823251
“This is exactly how they were written?” I glanced at Hunter. “It looks like a message, not coordinates.”
“Yes. Edward was sure they were cryptic nautical coordinates. But the more time I spent on this island alone, the more I thought, why would you hide something in the water when there are many islands between the two continents? And why not this place? Why leave a trap if you have nothing to hide? I stopped searching in the ocean and explored here. I’ve measured, sorted, jumbled, added, and subtracted numbers in every possible way and marked it on this map. ”
“Why are two, three, six, and nine standing out more than the other digits?”
“I wish I knew.”
I studied Hunter’s handwritten notes, sketched maps, and his mathematical calculations. “You have been doing this for a year?”
“I don’t work on it every day. During the tourist season, I stay in Rarotonga and barely spend time here, just enough to check on the cats and chickens.
I work on it nonstop in the off-season. When I grow frustrated with constant defeat, I stop.
Then, when I have a new idea, I work on it, but then it leads nowhere, and I lose interest, again. ”
Hunter picked up another journal and turned it toward me, showing a page with an itemized list. “This is presumably what we are looking for.”
I arched my eyebrow at him. “We are?” I must have misheard him.
“Don’t you want to help me?”