I’d also searched for information about Cari Murphy and her connection to a certain small band of goblins, but I’d found nothing. Either that wasn’t her real name, or she’d managed to keep herself completely off the internet. Which I would have sworn was impossible. Especially for a teenager.
A search in each of the goblins’ first names brought up several different sites written in German, but by then I’d been too tired to try to decipher the contents armed with nothing but a serious buzz and a browser tab open to Google Translate. Instead, I’d shoved the printouts in my duffle bag with the envelope of cash and collapsed onto my bed, just as the first morning rays shone through my living room window.
Nine and a half hours later, I had run out of time to waste.
Most of the information about Oak Island was stuff I’d heard years ago, but since I couldn’t remember any of the specifics, I read through the entire file, to be sure I wasn’t missing anything important about a mystery almost as old as I was.
In the fall of 1795, three boys came across a depression in the ground beneath an oak tree on a small island off the coast of Nova Scotia. The branch over the depression was noticeably scarred, and the boys concluded that it had been used as a support to help lower something into the ground. Naturally, they assumed they’d found the proverbial X marking the spot: buried treasure.
The boys ran home for their shovels and came back determined to dig up their fortune. After ten feet, they hit a layer of solid oak planks, three inches thick. They kept digging and hit another layer of planks. Then another one. After the third layer, the boys gave up, but over the next few decades, the pit continued to draw interest, first from locals, then eventually from treasure enthusiasts worldwide, including the independently wealthy and at least one U.S. President.
Over time, several different privately funded digging companies tried to reach the treasure. None of them made it. They broke through wooden barrier after barrier, but a series of accidents and money shortages got in the way every time someone seemed to be getting close to something.Almostas if someone or something was trying to stop them.
Though none of the diggers found gold or jewels, before they admitted defeat, a couple of teamsdiduncover several interesting and perplexing things. They found a layer of charcoal around eighty feet down and a layer of a fibrous material beneath that, which turned out to be from the outer rinds of several hundred coconuts. The diggers also pulled up a slab of stone, supposedly engraved with indecipherable writing thought to be some kind of code.
What eventually put an end to the miners’ efforts was nothing so complicated as mysterious stone tablets or impossibly deep oak platforms. It was something simple and infuriating, and impossible to overcome.
Water. Lots and lots of water.
One night in 1803, after work had stopped for the day, the pit flooded with nearly sixty feet of salt water. At the time, the technology didn’t exist to pump it out as fast as it came in. Left with no other choice, the workers abandoned the dig.
Forty-five years later, a fresh set of diggers found the source of the water: the pit was booby trapped. Literally. In 1849, a new crew discovered a complex system of horizontal tunnels converging into one main channel which connected the money pit to a beach on the north side of Oak Island. The tunnels were lined with rocks and more coconut fiber, which absorbed huge amounts of water at high tide. Anytime diggers dug deep enough to expose the main channel, the fibers discharged the water they had absorbed into the pit, until the pressure equalized. It was genius, really. The fibers, along with large amounts of eel grass, filtered the water to keep out sand and debris, leaving a huge hole full of water. Like a salt-water well.
Of course, the diggers tried to plug the channel, but the water pressure was too strong. It broke through every kind of barrier they could think of, even when they used dynamite to try and collapse the tunnels. Years later, yet another set of workers discovered a second system of tunnels connecting the pit to a beach on the south side of the island, and once again, workers were stumped. By that point, at least two people had died excavating the hole, more had been injured, and rumors were circulating about the pit being cursed, though goodness knows, a human wouldn’t know a curse if it rendered him blind, deaf, and mute. Regardless, digging in the pit ceased for good after the discovery of the second channel, at least as far as the public knew.
But they didn’t know a thing about Troy Devich.
According to Devich, a subsidiary of his parent corporation bought the deed and the digging rights to Oak Island in its entirety in the late nineteen nineties and had been working to bring the treasure up ever since. Three days ago, they’d succeeded. They pulled up a large stone box, caked with mud and completely sealed shut.
Later that day, less than an hour after takeoff, Devich’s private cargo plane crashed in the woods near the tiny town of Dayton, Maine, with the “treasure” on board. Though the plane made no stops along the way, no sign of the stone box was found in the wreckage. It had simply vanished, along with the co-pilot, whom Devich believed to be involved.
He wanted me to find his new toy and deliver it to him, still unopened—along with whoever took it.
Across the room, Lacey turned up the radio volume, now bobbing his head to the rhythm of Must Be the Money on his favorite “old school” rap station, and completely destroying my concentration. He was peacefully oblivious to my inner turmoil, and I wanted to keep it that way. I couldn’t tell him what information I was working for, and if this job was as dangerous as I suspected it would be, I wanted Lacey left completely out of it in case something went wrong. Which was a distinct possibility on this one, since I was supposed to bring in not only the stolen object, but the thief who had taken it.
Ihatelive extractions.
Sure, last night’s job went well, but Cari Murphy wanted to be found. Devich’s thief probably would not.
To make matters worse, I harbored no illusions about what would happen to the thief once I’d turned him or her over. While I’d learned nothing specific about Devich during our conversation last night—other than the fact that he wouldn’t go down easily—I did come away from the meeting distinctly wary of him. The man talked like Dr. Jekyll but walked like Mr. Hyde. And he definitely wasnotthe kind of guy who would pat an opponent on the head and let him go—at least, not while that head was still attached to the rest of the body.
Generally speaking, I have no philosophical problem with eliminating the bad guy when the situation calls for it. In my experience, very few truly violent criminals were capable of rehabilitation anyway, and in this case, I wouldn’t even be the one pulling the trigger. But Devich wanted me to bring in a thief, not a serial killer. A man who took an old box. Not a psycho who murdered babies in their sleep.
Some consider my entire line of work little better than thievery. Did I deserve to die—again—because I made my living acquiring things through extrajudicial means?
If I turned the thief in, I would be partially responsible for his fate, even if I never touched him. He wouldn’t get a trial or an attorney. He’d have no chance to explain himself, and I, of all people, knew just how wrong that was.
But if I didn’t hand over the thief, Devich wouldn’t hand over the rest of my information.
And that wasn’t even my most immediate problem. No matter how much I muddled over it, I couldn’t make sense of three goblins snatching a human teenager—at least, not since their primary motivation obviously wasn’t consumption. If they weren’t after a midnight snack, what could they possibly have wanted from Cari Murphy?
Frowning, I dug my cell from my pocket. I didn’t mingle with any goblins, mostly because I was not okay with a species that would just as soon eat me as talk to me. Still, I did know one guy…
Janssen answered on the fourth ring.
“Walker, s’at you?” a familiar, deep voice croaked into my ear.
“None other.” I glanced at Lacey across the room and found him still occupied with the succubus’s television. But I could tell he was listening. “I need a favor. Some information, if you have it.”
