“Are you sure this wasn’t a Halloween party gone wrong? He looks like Captain Sparrow.”
Hunter chuckled. “I’m pretty sure he is John Keating.”
“This is your rope?” I pointed at the cable, tightened to a healthy tree and tossed into the hole, its end reaching the bottom.
“Yes. I left it there on the off-chance I accidentally fell into this trap.”
“Why do you think it was a trap?” I stood up and rubbed my palms on my jean shorts. “What if he was digging the treasure up? What if he dug it all out and then accidentally fell into it and broke his neck? And what if he didn’t dig deep enough and was sitting on it?” Good grief, the questions piled up in my head quicker than sand in an hourglass.
“He didn’t have a shovel, and at the base, there were stakes. I removed them all just in case, with the exception of the one in his back. I didn’t want to disturb the fellow much.”
“Do you think there are more traps?”
“I crisscrossed this place a million times and haven’t found another”—he gave me a warning look—“yet.”
Hunter rose and motioned for me to follow him around the hole. “I numbered each landmark that would have been here two hundred years ago and used the numbers to measure in feet. I marked the waterfall landmark number one.”
I scrunched up my face. “Why did you decide the waterfall was number one?”
“Because John was here. I rotated landmarks. First, I tried the waterfall, then the cave.”
“The cave?”
“Yes, I’ll show it to you soon.”
From there, we went to the beach, where, not far from the black rocks at the edge of the woods, Hunter pointed out remains from the old sunken vessel he and Edward discovered in the ocean half a mile from the island and dragged onto the beach.
“Edward believed it’s the barkentine John and his men sailed on to here,” Hunter said. As he and I got closer, medium-sized crabs raced sideways to the water while smaller ones dashed into the nooks and crannies of the debris.
“I don’t know what barkentine means.”
“It’s a smaller three-mast ship with only the foremast square-rigged, whereas a full-rigged ship is square-rigged on all three masts.”
“Ah.” I smiled, shaking my head. “Yeah. I still don’t understand, but it doesn’t matter. I’m trying to understand the story. So they came to this island, then John got killed, and then their ship sank somewhere nearby. Or did it sink first, and he was the only survivor and somehow made it to this location, just to fall into a trap?”
Hunter scratched the back of his neck. “We don’t know. It might be someone else’s boat. I haven’t found any markings on the pieces.”
“Assuming it was John’s, wouldn’t he need a bigger ship to take all the treasure back?” I asked as we meandered our way into the jungle and strolled north.
“What we found is just a small part of it. From what we can tell it was a large vessel that could fit all that treasure.”
My head spun slightly from all the ship types and too much uncertainty. In reality, the only boat we had to worry about was theReely Nauti, but Hunter seemed to want my help to figure out the location of this loot, so we needed to focus more on what he knew and not what he didn’t know about old scraps of wood on the beach.
“Go back to how you searched the island,” I said.
“With each starting mark,” Hunter explained, holding a large branch out of my way and letting me pass, “I first walked seventy-eight north, then turned right and walked sixty-three, then turned left and moved two hundred and twenty-one, then?—”
“Do you know the numbers by heart?” I glanced at the digits above the arrows on his tattoo.
“I do.” He frowned. “I can recite it backwards too.”
Shaking my head, I walked on. “And when you found nothing, you started all over, but with a different turn order. Instead of going right, you went left, and so on?” Hunter gave me a pitiful glance. “Ouch.” I cringed at the idea of how many possible patterns there were. “In one of your journals, you have a complicated table with digits that went on for days. Was it the list of combinations you completed?”
“Yep.”
I came to a stop. If I had my laptop, I could easily code a simple program that could spit out results within seconds, but doing it by hand… my brain hurt just thinking about it, and my feet ached at the miles it would take too. “And you have walked them all?”
“I’m not even sure if I finished writing all the combinations. I did it for some time, then gave up. Once in a while, I’d pick up where I left off.”
