“I’ll prove it. Wait here.” Hunter marched in the beach’s direction, and once he reached the sand, he pivoted left and continued down the shoreline, soon disappearing out of view.
My week just escalated from crap to apeshit.
ChapterNine
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. Iusuallyhad 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 remarkableNational TreasuremeetsIndiana Jonesmovie 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 vesselMary Dearto 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. Mycuriosity 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 agood 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 afew 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 totell 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.”
