Blood, Ash, and Bone

CHAPTER Twenty-two

The Boneyard lay on the eastern shore, inaccessible during high tide, so we waded onto the rippled beach instead, dunes and sea oats tumbling to white sand, dragging the kayak behind us. Over two thousand acres of pine and oak and palm trees all to ourselves.

Dee Lynn consulted her compass. “Come on, you two. Grab your stuff.”

She handed Trey and me our flashlights, showing us how to switch from regular light to black light to signal flare. Compasses next, then radios in case we got separated. Trey noted each piece of equipment with satisfaction. Dee Lynn was as prepared as a Girl Scout, and he approved.

I played the light around the deserted beach. “What do we do?”

“Keep your eyes down. Look for anything out of place—freshly turned dirt, manmade objects, broken tree limbs. There’s been a storm and three tides since he disappeared. You’ll have to look close and thorough.”

Trey’s specialty. He and Dee Lynn moved in the natural searcher’s pattern, within five feet of each other. I followed behind.

The beach was clean of human evidence, the previous night’s rain having beaten the sand into a flat clean plane. It crunched beneath our feet, marbled and pocked in the moonlight, strewn with seaweed clumps. The skitter of crabs sounded like stage whispers from an unseen audience.

Soon the Boneyard lay in front of us, its jagged coastline broken by the stark lines of the downed trees, some lean and gray and eroded smooth, others fresh-fallen. One weather-beaten specimen jutted upright in the water like a ghostly hand, skeletal fingers reaching for the fat moon. The wooded interior of the island lay to the right, crisscrossed by narrow trails.

I moved to Dee Lynn’s side. “So where would you hide treasure?”

“Me? I’d think like a pirate, move inland.”

“So let’s do that.”

“Fine by me. But you gotta know where he started to know where he ended up.”

I looked around the beach. Vast and dark. No way to track Simmons’ movements, no way to predict what he’d been up to or if he’d even made it this far. But my fingertips itched, and not from my usual nicotine withdrawal. If only I had the real map…

Trey touched my elbow. “Tai?”

“Hmmm?”

“Tell me again…what do alligator eyes look like?”

“Shiny red dots.”

He sent the beam of his flashlight into the woods. A single ruby light glittered back. Then he looked at me, one eyebrow raised in accusation.

I laughed. “That’s not a gator.”

“Are you sure?”

“Unless it’s a one-eyed gator that can climb trees, I am totally sure.”

“Then what is it?”

Which was an eminently sensible question.

When we got close to the palm tree, I ran my finger along the bark. A single red triangle winked at me when I played my flashlight over it.

Trey peered closer. “What is it?”

“Reflective marker. The real question is, what’s it marking?”

Dee Lynn ran the metal detector around the base. It whined in an undulating crackle, and she knelt and sifted her fingers through the leaves and crumbled sand. A few scrapes revealed a beer cap. Trey stood and sent a clear beam of light along the perimeter. Soon, another flash of red winked at him.

“It’s marking a trail,” he said.

We followed the light to another tiny plastic marker. Trey slowly panned the trees and sure enough, another flash of red appeared. We could barely see the boat bobbing at the horizon. The next marker would take us where we couldn’t see it at all.

Dee Lynn pulled out a compass. “It’s following a southwesterly heading.”

I followed right behind her, Trey bringing up the rear. The last marker took us another hundred feet inland. Trey’s light scanned all around, but no further red dots flared at us, only the one that would lead us back to the beach.

“The trail stops here.”

Trey stood very still. Even in the dark, I knew he could take the measure of a place. Like a computer, he could feed the data into his head and reproduce a map. He’d been pacing off distance since we’d arrived.

But this wasn’t the urban landscape of Atlanta, with its traffic and ever-present haze. The enormous moon and scudding clouds created shadows as thick and liquid as ink. They spilled onto patches of clear illumination, creating a black and white mosaic, growing darker as the cloud cover increased.

Trey crouched. “Dee Lynn?”

She knelt beside him. He ran his hand along the ground, a mix of sand and Spanish moss. “This is freshly turned.”

Dee Lynn reached for the top layer and brushed it aside. Two sweeps and her fingers hit something hard and smooth. She looked up at me, her eyes brilliant in the flashlight.

“There’s something metal under here, bigger than a bottle cap.”

She pulled out her digging tools. Gently, with her fingers and trowel, she unearthed a square metal box about the size of a toaster. It was a little rusty, but otherwise in fine shape.

I sucked in a breath. ”Trey?”

“I see it.”

“It’s a box.”

“I know.”

We stared at it. I knew he was running the flow chart through his head. Evidence or not evidence? If it was evidence, then there was a definite procedure, and it didn’t involve prying things open and rummaging around inside. But how to determine if something was evidence without examining it?

Dee Lynn reached for the lid. I held my breath as she tugged it open.

The flashlight caught the dazzle of gold, fiery and molten. Coins, dozens of them, winked seductively in the flashlight’s beam.

“Shit. Oh shit. Trey—”

“I know.”

“That’s—”

“I see.”

He reached forward, a little gold-dazzled himself, then froze. He pulled his hand back, but peered closer. “Is that a notebook?”

“A what?”

“A small ledger.” He directed his flashlight. “Right there.”

I squinted at the tiny notebook. It had a dark black cover, and was in impossibly good shape for buried treasure. And then I saw the trademark. “Wait a second, that’s not Confederate. That’s from Office Max.” I picked it up and opened it. “Oh good Lord.”

I turned it around and showed it to Trey and Dee Lynn. It was a running list of signatures and dates. They both looked puzzled. I’d been too, for a second, but the ledger cinched it.

“This isn’t treasure, it’s a geocache site,” I said. “People bury things and then post the coordinates online, and other people try to find them. They’re all over Savannah. It’s an obsession, especially with tourists.”

I picked up a coin. It was feather-light, with a leering skull on one side and a Jolly Roger on the other. “Plastic.”

Dee Lynn cursed. “So this is a hoax?”

“Not a hoax. A game. Only I’m thinking the old guy took it very seriously.”

“I would too if I had an antique map.”

“This part may be a game, but the map wasn’t. Someone created it to tempt him and blame me, and they used geocaching coordinates to do it.”

Dee Lynn stared at the plastic hoard, the light gone out of her eyes. I felt deflated too. Trey, however, was still on point. He’d switched his flashlight from incandescent to UV and was casting the bluish beam around the trees.

“Tai? Dee Lynn? I think I’ve found something else.”

He pointed the flashlight to a fallen tree a few yards away. A piece of paper was jammed into a hollow, barely visible. It wouldn’t have been seen in ordinary light—only the glow of the UV flared it into brightness.

Dee Lynn hurried over and pulled it out. It was an ordinary envelope. She reached inside and extracted a piece of old paper, crumbly with age. Trey illuminated it with his flashlight. It was a map of the island, complete with geographical codes and strange images, including a crescent moon. My excitement soared yet again.

“It’s the map, the real one! He made it out here after all.”

“Then where’s his boat?”

A good question. Trey turned the paper in his light. I smacked my forehead.

“Look! These numbers are latitude and longitude markings. That’s what brought Simmons here.” I pointed to an eight-number sequence in the middle. “But I have no idea what these are.”

Trey examined them. “It’s an alphabet code. See? There isn’t a number larger than twenty-six. A simple replacement system.” He did a quick calculation, then looked at me. “It says ‘boneyard.’”

“So this is the original map.”

“The evidence suggests so.”

I peered closer. In the corner next to the crescent moon was a circle with a dot in the center followed by a capital M with a tiny little tail, a fanciful flourish that looked vaguely devilish, and oddly familiar.

“I’ve seen this before,” I said.

He nodded. “It’s an astrological glyph for the sign of Scorpio. Gabriella has it tattooed on her instep.”

Gabriella. His ex. Suddenly I remembered the dark curving lines against her milk-white foot, gleaming wet-black through her strappy sandals. Of course this would be how he knew this odd scrap of occult signage.

I saw the flare of lightning at the horizon. “Uh oh.”

Dee Lynn gathered our things. “Yep. Time to go.”

I looked at Trey. “I know the rules say this is evidence, and that we should let the authorities handle the chain on it, but if we don’t take this in, the storm’s gonna ruin it.”

He thought for two seconds, then decided. “Okay. Take it in.”

“We’ll turn it in at the ranger station. They can keep it until the Savannah police can come pick it up.” I tucked it under my jacket. It would fit nicely in the dry bag. “In the meantime, do you think Gabriella would help us do a little deciphering?”