Don Bruns - Too Much Stuff

“Whoa.” James was asking for a time-out.

“We might get as much as three thousand dollars for those?” He pointed to the two pieces now lying on paper towels.

“Very likely.”

James looked at me, licking his lips.

“Dude, we weren’t hired to find gold coins.”

Amy said, “I thought that’s what you were looking for.”

Behind her back, he rolled his eyes.

“What’s your point?”

“His point is,” Em stepped up, lifting the coin and admiring the yellow portion that was visible. She admired the exquisite engraving on the actual surface you could see, “Mrs. T. wants the ‘other’ gold.”

Looking at Amy, she nodded her head. “You know, the other coins.”

“Okay.” Amy was confused, as she should have been. “But I’m not sure I understand this.”

“We know the coins we are looking for. These are not those coins.”

“So these coins are ours.” James put his arm over her bare shoulders. “You see, Amy, these are not the ones she hired us to find. Skip found gold coins that are legally ours. Isn’t that great?”

“Morally, ethically-” Em gave me a thumbs-up.

We’d actually made some money on this expedition. And that didn’t happen very often with our ventures.

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

We were silent on the drive back to Pelican Cove. There was shock over the value of the coins, and an uncomfortable aura over the parking lot blowup between Em and the lovely Amy.

“Well,” I tried to start the conversation that needed to happen. “That was a real shock. I mean, that’s a lot of money.”

No one offered any response. I figured Amy and James were both pissed off. At Em and at me. It was an awkward moment. James focused on the road and no one else offered any comment.

We pulled into the resort parking lot, James parking right below my unit. His room was just down the way.

We all sat there for a moment. Finally James reached into his T-shirt pocket and pulled something out.

“Pitch his card, Skip.” He handed me the flowery business card the jewelry clerk had offered him. On the back was the guy’s cell phone number.

“You sure, James?” I shouldn’t have goaded him, but it was second nature. “He seemed awfully interested.”

James gave me a grave glance and again he shuddered and stared out of the windshield, looking at the pool.

Closing his eyes as we all sat there, he let out a long sigh. It had been a long morning. A long afternoon.

Turning to Em before he got out of the truck, James put a hand on her shoulder.

“Look,” his hand tightened, “I realize that Amy doesn’t have all the facts about what just happened.” He glanced over his shoulder at Amy, the bathing suit beauty. “So, I’m going to explain everything to her in a minute.”

She gave him a wry smile.

“James,” I said.

“No, no.” He held his hand up, stopping me from getting involved. “I’ll do what is right. Don’t worry, pard.”

Hesitating, he looked at my girlfriend, “I’m just saying, Em, I appreciate what you did back there. The tire and everything. Standing up for us. It was time somebody let those guys know that they can’t keep messing with us.”

Em nodded.

“I just wondered what you would have done if the nail file hadn’t worked.”

She smiled. “I would have taken out the revolver and put a bullet in their engine block. Think they would have gotten the message then?”

My girl had turned into this gun moll that even I didn’t recognize.

I had never experienced a morning so full of events. Diving with Amy, finding the gold coins, discovering that our two nemeses, one of whom we thought was dead, had followed every step we took and were now trying to find the gold, watching my girlfriend destroy the front tire on their Harley-Davidson, and having James and Em actually on the same page.

Three thousand dollars. In the history of our independent business adventures James and I had never made that much money free and clear. Mrs. T. was picking up the tab for finding her relative’s stake in this hunt, the gold bars that were worth forty-four million dollars. This money, the value of the coins, would be clear profit.

And I wondered if Weezle and his friend had found more coins. Maybe they would give up their search for the gold bars. I doubted that. My real fear was that they would find the sought-after gold bars and that I had missed them.

Em went to the room and I wandered out to the beach, watching a lone guy on a bright yellow sailboard as he maneuvered it over the water, catching the breeze wherever he could. It was a big ocean. Trying to find ten crates of gold in that massive body of water was practically impossible.

But then again, I’d found three thousand dollars’ worth of gold coins in about ten minutes and that was by accident.

Walking by one of the docked boats, I nodded to the older man sitting in a deck chair, thumbing through a magazine.

He glanced up as I walked by. “Interested in fishing?”

“No, not really.”

“I know this island like the back of my hand. And the waters. You can ask anybody. I find the fish when no one else can.” He tilted his long-billed cap up on his head, his weathered face smiling.

“I’m sure you’re good.”

“Good? I’m the best.” He stroked his chin. “You got any friends who are looking for a charter-half day, all day, you send ’em to me.”

“You know the area pretty well, right?”

“I do.” He slowly stood up, thrusting his hands into his khaki cargo shorts and twisting his neck as if it were stiff.

“What do you know about Cheeca Lodge?”

“Fishing?”

“I was thinking more about the property.”

“What about it? You know they rebuilt some if it a couple of years ago. Place had a big fire and they had to close up. Some guy tossed a cigarette on the thatched hut bar on New Year’s Eve. Nasty situation. But it’s a fine resort. Fanciest one in this area. Very modern, upscale-”

“Quite a bit of property?”

“Oh, I’d say. Got a golf course, big pool, and lodge. Plus all them bungalows. But it’s a bit pricey.”

“Quite a history.” If the gold wasn’t buried in the ocean, Kriegel said it would be buried somewhere on that property. Where Cheeca Lodge now stood. Hey, it wasn’t the size of the ocean, but still a sizable area to cover.

“Started out the settlers built a two-room schoolhouse and a Methodist Cemetery.”

“So now there’s this fabulous resort-”

“And an old cemetery.”

“The cemetery is still there?” We’d heard that, but I still had a hard time believing it. You don’t have an old cemetery on a resort property.

“Yep, right on the beach beside the swimming pool.”

I wondered if they sold that photo on a postcard. “Swimming next to dead people. Wish you were here.”

“Pinder Cemetery. Used to be called that. Named after Etta Pinder. Died sometime around nineteen fourteen. Now they call it Pioneer Cemetery, but it’s still there. The statue kind of guards it.”

“Statue?”

“The broken-winged angel. I think she was there before the hurricane back in thirty-five. She’s still there, in the middle of that plot of ground.”

I was trying to picture this ancient, deteriorating cemetery and this high-class resort coexisting.

“The resort is-”

“Built up around it.”

“So you’re swimming, fishing, laying out in the sun and there’s this old cemetery right beside you?”

“That’s exactly the way it is.”

“And the bodies are above ground?”

“No. Buried under the ground.”

Again I remembered the letter we’d found. Kriegel was concerned that if you dug straight down, you’d hit water before you could bury anything. His assumption was that the land was almost at sea level.