CHAPTER ONE
Gabriela Rose was standing in a small clearing that led
to a rope-and-board footbridge. The narrow bridge spanned a gorge that
was a hundred feet deep and almost as wide. Rapids roared over enormous
boulders at the bottom of the gorge, but Gabriela couldn’t see the river
because it was raining buckets and visibility was limited.
She
was deep in the Ecuadorian rain forest. Her long dark brown hair was
hidden under an Australian safari hat, its brim protecting her brown
eyes from the rain. She was a martial arts expert. She ran five miles
every morning. She was a crack shot and a gourmet cook. None of these
skills were keeping her dry. She was wet clear through to her La Perla
panties. Her camo cargo pants and Inov-8 Bare-Grip hiking shoes were
caked with mud. She was carrying a Glock .38 in a Ziploc bag tucked into
a hip pocket. Other pockets held her passport, a folding Buck knife,
and moisturizing lip gloss. Her daypack held a useless waterproof
poncho, protein bars, her Ziploc-bagged cell phone, and assorted other
necessities for jungle trekking.
She was with two local guides,
Jorge and Cuckoo. She guessed they were somewhere between forty and
sixty years old, and she was pretty sure that they thought she was an
idiot.
“Is this bridge safe?” Gabriela asked.
“Yes, sometimes safe,” Jorge said.
“And it’s the only way?”
Jorge shrugged.
She looked at Cuckoo.
Cuckoo shrugged.
“You first,” she said to Jorge.
Jorge did another shrug and murmured something in Spanish that Gabriela was pretty sure translated to “chickenshit woman.”
Let
it slide, Gabriela thought. Sometimes it gave you an advantage to be
underestimated. If things turned ugly, she was almost certain she could
kick his ass. And if that didn’t work out, she could shoot him. Nothing
fatal. Maybe take off a toe.
It had been raining when she landed
in Quito two days earlier. It was still raining when she took the
twenty-five-minute flight to Caco and boarded a Napo River ferry to
Nuevo Rocafuerte. And it was raining when she met her guides at daybreak
and settled into their motorized canoe for the six-hour trip down a
narrow, winding river with no name. Just before noon, they’d pulled up
at a crude campground hacked out of the jungle. They’d immediately left
the river behind and followed a barely there trail through dense
vegetation. And it was still raining.
“Insurance Fraud
Investigator” was printed on Gabriela’s business card, and she had an
international reputation for excellence in the field. As an independent
contractor she had the luxury of accepting jobs not related to insurance
fraud, whether because they paid well or because they were fun. Her
current job had checks in both boxes.
She’d been hired to find
Henry Dodge and retrieve an amulet he was carrying. She didn’t have a
lot of information on the amulet or Dodge. Just that he couldn’t leave
his jobsite, and he’d requested that someone come to get the amulet.
Seemed reasonable since Dodge was an archeologist doing research on a
lost civilization in a previously unexplored part of the Amazon Rain
Forest. The payoff for Gabriela was a big bag of money, but that wasn’t
what had convinced her to take the job.
She was possibly a
descendant of the infamous pirate Blackbeard, and she was fascinated by
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pirates and the civilizations they
touched. The opportunity to visit the site of a lost city was
irresistible. It was also her thirtieth birthday. What better way to
celebrate it than to have an adventure?
“How much further?” she asked Jorge.
“Not far,” he said. “Just on the other side of the bridge.”
Twenty
minutes later, Gabriela set foot on the dig site. She’d been on other
digs, and this wasn’t what she’d expected. There was some partially
exposed rubble that might have been a wall at one time. A couple of
tables with benches under a tarp. A kitchen area that was also under a
tarp. A stack of wooden crates. A trampled area that suggested it might
have recently been used as a site for several tents. Only one small tent
was currently left standing.
There were no people to see except
for one waterlogged and slightly bloated man lying on the ground by the
rubble, and a weary-looking man sitting on a camp chair. The first was
clearly dead. The second stared at them as they approached.
“This is not good,” Jorge said. “One of these men is very dead and something has eaten his leg.”
“Panther,”
the man in the chair said. “You can hear them prowling past your tent
at night. This site is a hellhole. Were you folks just out for a stroll
in the rain?”
“I was sent to get an amulet from Henry Dodge,” Gabriela said. “I believe I was expected.”
The man nodded to the corpse. “That’s Henry. Had some bad luck.”
“What happened?”
“He
was checking on an excavation in the rain first thing this morning,
fell off the wall, and smashed his head on the rocks. Then a panther
came and ate his leg before we could scare it away. Everyone packed up
and left after that. Too many bad things happening here.”
“But you stayed,” Gabriela said.
“They
couldn’t carry everything out in one trip. I stayed with some of the
remaining crates and the body. Cameron said he would be back with help
before it got dark.”
“Do you know where Henry kept the amulet?” Gabriela asked.
“Usually
on a chain around his neck,” the man said. “He felt it was the safest
place. Right now, it looks to me like he’s got it in his hand. You can
see the chain hanging out and part of the gold trim.”
Gabriela looked at the dead man’s hand. It was grotesquely swollen and clenched in a fist. The amulet was barely visible.
“Someone needs to get his hand open,” Gabriela said.
No one volunteered.
Gabriela
flicked a centipede off her sleeve. She knew the rain, the mud, the
bugs, the sweltering heat were all part of the Ecuadorian experience.
The dead man with the swollen hand was not. The question now was, how
bad did she want the amulet? The lost-cities site had turned out to be a
bust, but there was still a payday attached to the amulet. So, the
answer to the question was that she wanted the amulet pretty damn bad.
Without the amulet, there would be no big bag of money. She was well
respected in her profession, but big paydays didn’t come along every
day.
“I’ve come this far,” she said. “I’m not going back without
the amulet.” She looked at the man in the chair. “I need to pry Dodge’s
hand open. I need gloves and a baggie. Archeological sites usually have
them.”
The man shrugged as an apology. “They were all packed out.
Truth is, we were shutting down before Henry happened. Henry was the
holdout. He found the amulet, and he thought there was more here. The
rest of us didn’t care.”
“We need to leave now,” Jorge said. “It
will be bad to be in this jungle after sunset. Hard to find the way, and
panthers will be hunting at night. We have maybe five hours of daylight
left.”
“I’m not leaving without the amulet,” Gabriela said.
Cuckoo took his machete out of its sheath and whack! He chopped Henry Dodge’s hand off at the wrist.
“I suppose that’s one way to go,” Gabriela said. “I would have preferred to try my way first.”
“He’s dead,” Cuckoo said. “He doesn’t need the hand.”
He picked the hand up by the horribly swollen thumb, grabbed Gabriela’s daypack, and dropped the hand in.
“Problem is solved,” Jorge said.
“He’s
right about the jungle at night,” the man in the chair said. “If you’re
going back on the same path you came on, you don’t want to go alone.
And you don’t want to stray from the path.”
“If everyone packed out this morning, why didn’t we see them?” Gabriela asked.
“They took the road behind the wall,” the man said. “Forty-five minutes to walk, and it cuts the river trip in half.”
Gabriela looked at Jorge and Cuckoo.
“Road has bad juju,” Jorge said. “Anaconda highway.”
The walk back to the motorized canoe took a little under four hours. Easier going without the rain.
Gabriela
stopped at the river’s edge and dropped her daypack. “I can’t take the
smell coming out of my pack. One way or another I’m going to get the
amulet out of Dodge’s hand,” she said to Jorge and Cuckoo. “Hopefully
the swelling has gone down and the rigor has relaxed.”
“Not good to stay here,” Jorge said. “The hand will draw predators.”
“No problem,” Gabriela said. “The predators can have the hand as soon as I get the amulet.”
Gabriela
removed a folding Buck knife from her cargo pants pocket and opened the
blade. “This shouldn’t take long.” She unzipped the daypack, held her
breath against the smell of decomposing flesh, and looked in at the
hand.
Jorge and Cuckoo inched away from Gabriela, moving closer
to the canoe. Gabriela couldn’t blame them. This was going to get worse
before it got better. She was about to do surgery on some necrotic
fingers, and it wasn’t going to be pretty. She dumped the hand onto the
ground and tossed the pack toward Jorge and Cuckoo.
She didn’t
want to grab the hand without gloves, so she stepped on it to secure it
and tried to pry the hand open with the knife. No luck. She took a
moment to assess the situation.
“I hear something in the brush,” Jorge said. “We should right away go now.”
“We’ve been hearing things in the brush for four hours,” Gabriela said.
“Even worse,” Jorge said. “Could be the panther stalking the hand you are standing on.”
“That’s
ridiculous,” Gabriela said. “He would have attacked by now. The brush
is filled with small animals doing whatever it is they do.”
As
she bent down to try the knife one more time, a panther crept out of the
jungle. He was thirty feet away and he was in a crouch. His bright
yellow eyes focused like lasers on Gabriela.
Jorge jumped into
the canoe and started the engine. Cuckoo was at the bow, pushing off
from the bank. Gabriela had her gun trained on the panther.
“Very bad to shoot panther,” Jorge said from the canoe. “They are on critically endangered list.”
“He ate Henry Dodge,” Gabriela said.
“Humans aren’t endangered,” Jorge said. “Okay for panthers to eat them.”
Gabriela took two steps back. The panther rushed forward, snatched the hand, and disappeared into the jungle with it.
“I would have shot him,” Cuckoo said.
“We can track him,” Gabriela said. “He won’t eat the amulet. He’ll leave it behind.”
Jorge and Cuckoo exchanged glances.
“You track him. We’ll wait here for you,” Jorge said.
They
aren’t going to wait, Gabriela thought. They’re going to take off the
instant I’m out of sight. I’ll be stuck here with no cell service and no
canoe. And by the time I walk back to the dig site tomorrow it’ll be
completely abandoned. And the truth is, the cat was terrifying.
Magnificent, beautiful, and terrifying. It would be terrible to have to
shoot him, and even worse to be his main course after he enjoyed the
hand as an appetizer.
It was a little after 9:00 p.m. when
Gabriela climbed out of the motorized canoe and onto the dock at Nuevo
Rocafuerte. She paid the guides and tossed her empty daypack into a
trash barrel. Not one of her better outings but not the worst, either,
she thought. She got to see a wild panther on her birthday. How often
was that going to happen?
She powered up her cell phone and was about to check messages when her mom called.
“Hi, honey,” Maeberry Rose said. “Happy birthday. We’ve been trying to call you all day, but you haven’t been answering.”
“I’m in Ecuador,” Gabriela said. “I didn’t have cell service until just now.”
Gabriela could hear her grandmother Fanny in the background shouting happy birthday.
“It sounds like Grandma is still living with you,” Gabriela said to her mother.
“At least for a while,” Mae said. “We’re thinking of selling. We can’t afford to fix the damage. No one can.”
Six
months ago, a cat 4 storm blew over Scoon, the little South Carolina
coastal town where Gabriela grew up. Double-wides were moved off their
foundations, boats were beached, cottages that had stood for generations
had their roofs stripped off and windows blown out. It was said that
the fishing wharf was swept all the way up to Ocracoke Island.
“What about insurance?” Gabriela asked.
“We weren’t insured. Just about no one in the town had insurance. It’s too expensive.”
“Where will you go?”
“We
haven’t figured that out yet. Wherever your father can find work. Even
if he could get the boat put back together, there’s no place to dock it.
The boat docks are gone. Only the pilings are left.”
Gabriela’s
father owned a charter fishing boat. When Gabriela was ten years old,
she started working as mate on the boat. She put herself through college
with the wages she earned every summer. When she left to live in New
York, her cousin Andy took over the mate job.
“When I was home at Christmas you didn’t seem to be worried,” Gabriela said.
“We
all thought the town would qualify for emergency funding, but the
funding never came through,” Mae said. “And now there’s a real estate
developer making offers on all the houses. They’re really low offers,
but most of us have no other choice.”
“I’m not giving up my house,” her grandmother Fanny said into the phone. “It was my mother’s house and her mother’s house.”
“It doesn’t have a roof,” Gabriela’s mother said. “It’s got a blue vinyl tarp over it. There’s a tree in your living room.”
“It
can be fixed,” Fanny said. “All the houses and boats and the dock can
be fixed. We just need some money, and I have a way to get it if
Gabriela will help us. I have a plan.”
“Your plan is crazy talk,” Gabriela’s mother said. “It’s not a plan.”
Gabriela checked the time. She needed to get into clean clothes, and she needed to make some phone calls.
“I’m
leaving Ecuador tomorrow,” she said to her mother. “I’ll change out my
ticket to New York for a ticket to Charleston and we can discuss this
when I get home.”
The ticket change had required taking a red-eye
out of Quito. It dropped Gabriela in Charleston at 1:30 in the
afternoon. She’d rented a car and taken her time driving through her
hometown of Scoon. Not that there was a lot to see. It was a hardworking
little town located an hour out of Charleston. The storefronts were
mostly brick. Some of the windows were still boarded up. The houses were
clapboard. Nothing fancy. It wasn’t a picturesque tourist town, but the
fishing was phenomenal. Backwater fishing to the west and perfect ocean
currents to the east. A natural harbor.
Gabriela was thinking
that this was sweatshirt weather if you were born in Scoon. Gray sky
with cold drizzle. If you were in from Atlanta or Tampa, you might have
wanted a winter jacket. There was a scattering of cars in the Publix
parking lot. Lights were on in Eddie’s Coffee House. That was about it
for activity. A year ago, things were different. A lot more cars at
Publix and more foot traffic on Main Street. The parking lot for the
wharf would have been packed.
Her parents lived on the town’s
outer edge. Close enough to the shoreline to smell the briny mist on a
day like today, far enough inland and on a slight rise to be protected
from the surge tides. It was a small clapboard house on a quarter acre
of land. A Ford F-150 pickup and an empty boat trailer sat in the
driveway.
Gabriela knew exactly how the inside of the house would
smell. It would smell like her childhood. Febreze air freshener,
store-bought powdered-sugar donuts, and cat food.
She’d been away
for enough years that the smell of her childhood was no longer the
smell of home for her. Home was a condo in Soho. It had no smell.
She
parked behind her dad’s truck and twenty minutes later she was at the
small kitchen table with her mother and Grandma Fanny. Gabriela had her
hands wrapped around a mug of hot peppermint tea, and she was forcing
herself to focus on the table talk.
Her mind kept drifting back
to the conversation she’d just had with the New York lawyer who’d hired
her to collect the amulet in Ecuador. The conversation hadn’t gone well.
Telling him that a panther ran off with the valuable amulet was the
equivalent to telling her fourth-grade math teacher that the dog ate her
homework.
“This developer is the devil,” Fanny said. “He wants
to build one of those awful couples resorts here. He’s forcing the bank
to foreclose on a whole passel of properties, and he’s trying to buy
houses on the cheap. That includes your mother’s house and the houses of
just about everyone you know.”
“At least we have someone willing to buy the houses,” Mae said. “The alternative is to just walk away and lose everything.”
“I’m telling you we need to fix the wharf. We need to get the fishing business up and running again,” Fanny said.
“How much would it cost to fix the wharf?” Gabriela asked.
“I figure around fifteen million,” Fanny said.
Gabriela leaned forward a little. “Excuse me?”
“That
includes some other stuff that would go along with the wharf,” Fanny
said. “I figure we’d want to rebuild Fred Grimlet’s fish-and-chips hut
that was right at the parking lot. It got washed away. And we could help
some of the people who want to stay. We could give them a loan until
they get back on their feet.”
“How are you going to get fifteen million dollars?” Gabriela asked.
“That’s
where you come in,” Fanny said. “I have a plan. Remember when you were a
little girl, I used to tell you stories about a secret room in your
Great Auntie Margareet’s house on St. Vincent? Well, I just learned it’s
under the floorboards of Margareet’s bedroom. And in that secret room,
there’s supposed to be all sorts of things that belonged to Blackbeard.
Margareet used to talk about a chest that had maps and a diary. So, what
I’m hoping is that you can go there and find the chest and maybe find a
map that will lead to a treasure.”
“How did you just find out about the room?”
“Annie told me.”
“You aren’t serious,” Gabriela said. “Annie the ghost?”
“Yep.
She dropped in the other night and told me about the room and that’s
when I got the idea about you finding the chest. That’s what you do,
right? You recover treasure.”
“Yes, but this is different. This is fairy-tale treasure.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s real,” Fanny said. “Margareet said it was real.”
Margareet
was Gabriela’s great-grandmother’s sister. When most of Margareet’s
family migrated from the Caribbean to South Carolina, Margareet stayed
on St. Vincent in the little house that had been passed to her from her
grandmother. Margareet never married and when she died, she left the
house to Gabriela.
“And besides, it’s not just me. Annie wants you to find the treasure so you could save the town,” Fanny said.
For
as long as Gabriela could remember, her grandmother had told her
stories about the tragic love affair between Blackbeard and a beautiful
woman from Barbados named Annie. Sadly, Annie died while giving birth to
their daughter. And according to Fanny’s family legend, Gabriela was a
descendant of Blackbeard and Annie.
Gabriela had never personally heard or seen Annie the ghost. Fanny often dragged Annie out during moments of minor crisis. Annie is very upset that you didn’t eat breakfast, Fanny would tell Gabriela. Annie is disappointed that you got a D in math. Annie is horrified that you smoked a cigarette.
Fanny
set a box of powdered-sugar donuts on the table. “So now all you have
to do is hop over to St. Vincent and get the treasure chest.”
“That’s
not going to happen,” Gabriela said. “I no longer own Margareet’s
house. Rafer got it in the divorce settlement. I haven’t seen him or the
house in seven years.”
“I’m sure he’d let you get the treasure chest,” Fanny said.
“It
wasn’t a friendly divorce,” Gabriela said. “I gave him the St. Vincent
house because I didn’t want to see him every time I came back to Scoon.”
“You two always fought like cats and dogs,” Fanny said. “I never understood why you married him.”
Gabriela
had no good answer. She got into a fight with Rafer Jones on the first
day of kindergarten and from that day on they argued about everything
and yet they were inexplicably inseparable. They were also the scourge
of the town. If a cow got painted red or an unoccupied car ended up
submerged in the marshland behind town, the sheriff knew who to call on.
They dated all through high school and got married while still in
college. They fought over breakfast cereal, laundry detergent, which
movie to watch, the temperature of the bedroom, and just about every
other aspect of their lives. They had phenomenal makeup sex and then
argued about its merits when they were done. They got divorced a week
before their second wedding anniversary. The inhabitants of Scoon
acknowledged that this was the loudest, most contentious, most fantastic
divorce in the history of the town.
“I loved him,” Gabriela said. “He was fun.”
Plus,
he was adorable and sexy from kindergarten straight through to the end
of the marriage. Best not to share that part with her family, she
thought. He was also a slob, lacked ambition, drank too much, and
insisted on calling her Gabs.
“There’s no way I can go to St. Vincent and search for a treasure chest stored under Rafer’s bedroom,” Gabriela said.
“Without the treasure it’s hopeless,” Fanny said. “I get that it sounds crazy, but I can’t come up with anything else.”
Gabriela looked at her mother.
Her mother gave up a sigh. “I’m afraid she’s right about being hopeless. We’re all scraping bottom on ideas and money.”
“I’ll think about it,” Gabriela said. “I need to get back to New York first. I have some pending business commitments.”
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