“Oh yes,” Alex chuckled. “I know a lot more. As a matter of fact, I was just talking to Leo and the person who hired him when you called. Let me conference them in.”
Enzo frowned but maintained his silence. He seemed to be brooding. Kathleen didn’t have any time for that kind of nonsense, so she just ignored him.
After a short pause, Alex said, “Leo, Carlotta, this is Enzo and Kathleen.”
“Kathleen, always a pleasure to speak with you again,” Leo said.
Enzo grunted, his lips pressed into a thin line.
Kathleen shot him a quelling look, then said, “Hi, Leo. Hi, Carlotta.”
Nothing.
“Carlotta, be nice,” Leo pushed.
There was a loud huff. “Fine. Hello.”
Alex spoke up. “So, Carlotta, would you fill us all in about the statue and the story behind it?”
There was another sigh. “I fail to see why this is important. Who are these other people? Why do they need to know? The circle’s gotten large enough as it is. This is not what we agreed upon.”
Enzo said in an icy tone, “One of my friends has been kidnapped by a dangerous man because of your statue and what it contained. So perhaps you could deign to start talking. Otherwise, it’s not going to be so pleasant for you.”
Kathleen blinked. Enzo had just threatened some stranger on the other end of the phone. Things were getting out of hand. She cut in.
“Carlotta, we just really need to know what’s going on. Let’s just say the threat level has gone up immensely.”
“Kidnapped. Someone’s been kidnapped?” Carlotta’s voice had gone from sullen to the edge of hysteria in the blink of an eye. “Oh my God. This is just such a disaster.”
“Start talking, Carlotta,” Enzo growled.
“Yes. Fine.” Carlotta paused, and Kathleen assumed she was taking a deep breath. “My father, the esteemed Ronald Wilson, thought it would be fun to create a treasure map and stuff it in this stupid, ugly statue so that when he passed, we would have one last adventure.”
“OK, wait,” Enzo’s voice changed. “Ronald Wilson? The adventurer Ronald Wilson?”
“Yes.” There was no doubt Carlotta was speaking through gritted teeth. “My father loved adventure. He loved traveling around the world and exploring undiscovered, unpopular places, hard-to-get-to places, anything along those lines. He loved looking for treasure; he loved doing all of those things, and as kids, he dragged my brothers and me all over the place. We saw the world through the adventure lens, whether we liked it ornot. When he found out he had terminal cancer, he apparently decided to set up one last adventure for us.
“The thing is, none of us really loved his adventures to begin with. That was for him. We were all much more like our mother. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. He…my father, made a lot of money on his adventures. Not just because he found shipwrecks and things like that, but because he knew how to invest and when to invest, and because people invested in him. He was sort of an influencer before influencers were big.
“Anyway, my father decided to take his entire fortune and invest it in whatever the treasure is. Then he left this map for us to find it. But he couldn’t just leave the map. No, he had to put it in that ugly little statue. We had no idea. He just told us that the map was hidden somewhere in the house. We’d all searched the house top to bottom and started getting rid of things. That’s when we donated that stupid statue, along with some artwork, to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. That was his favorite museum. None of us had a clue that the map was inside it.”
“First of all,” Kathleen said, her hand flashing up to cut off Enzo before he could say something mean. “Let us extend our condolences on the loss of your father. That’s hard.”
“Thank you,” Carlotta said with a small sniff. “But he has made it so much harder,” Carlotta continued. “If he had just been a regular dad, a responsible father, he would have just left everything to the three of us equally. But, instead, he set it up as a stupid treasure hunt. Problem with that adventure is we’re not the only ones to know about it now.”
Enzo cut in. “We’ll get to that. But let’s go back. You have no idea what the treasure is?”
“Not a clue,” Carlotta agreed
“And it’s worth a lot of money?”
“Yes. No. Maybe? We don’t know exactly how much, because we don’t know what it is. The guess is it’s worth close to onehundred million dollars. My father was very savvy when it came to investments.”
Someone on the other end let out a long whistle.
Kathleen recognized Mitch’s chuckle. “That’s a big number.”
“It is,” Carlotta agreed. “We don’t know how much he had to invest to begin with, and we don’t know when exactly he turned his cash and investments into the treasure, so honestly, it’s all a guess.”
