Don't Take Any Wooden Nickels (21 page)

My voice echoed in the morning stillness: “The Lord is my light and my salvation—whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life—of whom shall I…”

I faltered, closing my eyes, concentrating.

“…of whom shall I be afraid?” I finished, and then I leaned down to check the page in front of me to verify I had gotten it right. I repeated the sentences again, loving the way it rolled together so beautifully on my tongue.

Sal and I were on our morning canoe run, and since it was a Wednesday, it was my day for memorizing Scripture. This fall I was working on the psalms. I thought Psalm 27 was a good one for today, and I was determined to commit it fully to memory before the month was out, despite the limitations of my poor, aging brain.

I picked up my paddle and started again, moving with the current, heading toward home. We had done the full five miles today, as we had yesterday, and I loved the warm strength I could feel in my shoulders and waist as I worked the paddle. Between my two weeks of vacation and now the days I was having off this week, I had gotten more than my share of excellent rowing time lately, and I was truly grateful.

I tried the psalm one last time as I paddled, making it all the way through the fourth verse before my memory petered out. Ah, well, I had the whole chapter printed out on a page I could carry with me throughout the day. Maybe later I would make it through a few more verses.

For now I tucked the paper away in my pocket and enjoyed the lovely view of the last few strokes toward home. It was a little later than usual, nearly 10
A.M.,
but after staying awake again half the night, I had finally managed to get some sleep. This morning I felt surprisingly good, considering, and now I was feeling in an especially bright mood.

My e-mail inquiries about CNA on behalf of Verlene were already yielding some results. I had heard from three of the contacts I had e-mailed yesterday, and of those, two were familiar with the agency and its work. So far, so good, since both e-mails indicated that as far as they could tell, CNA was on the up and up. That was exactly what I had hoped to hear.

My third and fourth criteria, “plans and spends wisely” and “pays salaries and benefits on a par with nonprofit industry standards,” were going to be a bit harder to research. I had heard back from my investigator friend in Akron, who said that he had received my e-mail and that he would be in touch.

Of course, the salaries of the CNA upper echelon would be on file with the IRS, but I was well aware that that didn’t always tell the full story. Sometimes, nonprofit executives were able to hide their income by receiving disproportionately valuable benefits. I was reminded of the woman I once investigated who ran a soup kitchen at a mission in California. She earned a yearly salary that was at the low end for her region by nonprofit industry standards. On closer examination, however, I learned that her “company car” was a limousine, and that the “Director of Community Outreach” was actually her full-time chauffeur. On top of that, she received free housing in a home that had been donated to the mission by a wealthy widow—but what didn’t show up on paper was that the house was a small mansion, worth millions of dollars, complete with a lap pool and separate servants’ quarters. After that experience, I was always on the lookout for the types of financial abuse that didn’t always show up on paper.

The literature from Verlene had shown the structure of the CNA organization, and there were about five people at the highest
level of the company headquarters that I was concerned with. How much money were they making? More importantly, what was their
total
value of compensation from the company? I was always glad when a nonprofit could afford to offer reasonable salaries and benefits to their employees. It was hard to attract capable people from the corporate sector, and decent wages were always a plus. Still, no one should be getting rich from working at a nonprofit, either. As a good middle ground, I used industry standards to establish fair and logical pay rates. Now, I supposed I would have to wait to hear back from my PI friend in Akron before I would have the full picture on how CNA stacked up in that regard.

In the meantime, I was eager to get back to work on Shayna’s case. Something told me that today was the day that investigation was going to turn the corner.

Sal startled me by barking, and I looked up, quite surprised to see a man standing at the end of my dock. As we got closer, I realized it was Kirby Collins, the handsome neighbor with the wooden nickels. He waved at me as we floated toward the shore, and when we got closer, he spoke.

“Greetings, Pocahontas!” he called. Sal started barking again, so I just waved and smiled and then tossed my rope up to him when we were close enough for him to catch it.

“Hey, Kirby,” I said as he tied me off to the cleat. “What are you doing here?”

“I saw you row past my window in this direction, so I knew you were headed home.”

Sal jumped onto the dock, stopped barking, and began furiously sniffing the cuffs of Kirby’s pants. He let her, finally leaning down with an outstretched hand, allowing her to sniff it before he gently patted her on the back. She seemed not to mind.

“Hey, girl,” he cooed softly, rubbing behind her ears. It was a done deal already, I could see. She snuggled up against him like they were old friends. I was surprised, for Sal almost never took to anyone quite that quickly.

“She’s adorable,” Kirby said to me. I climbed from the canoe to the dock and finished tying the boat off myself.

“Thanks. She’s my pal, that’s for sure.”

“A Yorkie?”

“Maltese.”

“Hey, cutie.”

“Sal.”

“Hey, Sal.”

He stood finally and grinned at me, and I couldn’t help but again admire the man’s teeth. I had a thing about nice teeth, and his were about the most perfect I had ever seen.

“Guess what?” he said happily.

“What?”

“I solved the mystery of the wooden nickel.”

“What do you mean?”

“My dad. I called my dad in New York. He knew exactly what you were talking about.”

I
knew
this was going to be a good day! I met Kirby’s grin with one of my own and invited him inside for tea. Chatting idly as we went into the kitchen, I busied myself with hot water and tea bags. Kirby waited until we were both seated at the table, steaming mugs in front of us, before he explained.

“Okay,” he began, “here’s what happened. A couple of months before my mom got sick, she went with my dad to a meeting of this club he belongs to. The club was trying to drum up activity for their website, and they had a bunch of these wooden nickels in a bowl by the door. Members were supposed to grab a handful and then circulate them elsewhere, like at work or other places. My dad already had a whole box at the office, so he didn’t grab any, but my mom took one. According to my dad, it was for me. She said something like, ‘Oh, look at this, Walter. Wooden nickels. Just like Kirby used to collect when he was little.’”

His face reddened for a moment, and I realized he was choked up about his mother. I took a sip of tea and allowed him to compose himself before he continued.

“She brought it home to give it to me,” he said finally, his voice a little hoarse, “but she must’ve forgotten about it. So it stayed in the jacket pocket and eventually ended up making its way to Advancing Attire.”

I reached for a paper napkin and dabbed at my mouth.

“What kind of club is it?” I asked. “What’s the buried treasure?”

“How much do you know about GPS?”

“GPS? You mean global positioning systems?”

“Yeah.”

“About as much as I need to know, I guess. GPS tells you where you are and how to get where you need to be, using satellites to do triangulation. Right?”

“Well, technically the correct term is trilateration, not triangulation, but yes. GPS calculates position by taking the time travel of radio signals from several different satellites and analyzing the resulting intersection of spheres.”

“Gee, Kirby, you sound like an engineer or something,” I teased, causing him to blush. “But what does this have to do with the wooden nickel?”

“My father’s group, the one advertised on the nickel, is a GPS club. They do geocaching.”

“Geocaching,” I repeated, vaguely familiar with the term. “What’s that, exactly?”

“It starts with a container or a capsule, usually small, about the size of a shoe box or maybe a toaster oven. That’s the cache, which gets hidden in a publically accessible location, like under a rock near a hiking trail, or in a tree alongside a highway. After it’s hidden, the coordinates are posted on a website, showing the points of latitude and longitude. To find that hidden cache, you look up those coordinates online and then use GPS technology to track it down. In a nutshell, that’s geocaching.”

“What’s the point?”

Kirby shrugged. “Fun?”

I raised one eyebrow skeptically and then we both chuckled.

“My dad says that it’s all about the thrill of the hunt, the challenge of the pursuit,” he explained. “He originally joined the club for business reasons, being the owner of an electronics firm and all. But once he got involved he really liked it. Not me. I mean, I’m fascinated by GPS technology, and I’ve dealt with digital mapping and KML though my work. But I never really took to the sport of geocaching itself.”

I nodded, trying to picture it. I could see doing it as a learning exercise, or maybe for some fun family time with kids. But in Kirby’s father’s case, it sounded more like just a bunch of rich old men running around in the woods with fancy gadgets, playing hide-and-seek.

“And the treasure?” I persisted. “What’s in that hidden cache to make it all worthwhile?”

“Nothing of value. In fact, once you find a capsule, you don’t take anything from it at all. Instead, you put something in, to prove that you found it. The goal is to do that with as many capsules as you can before time’s up.”

“Time’s up?”

“Once a year. They get together monthly, but once a year they round up the containers, bring them to the meeting, and then go through them to see what’s inside. You get points for every container you put something in. When they’re done, the guys with the most points win trophies and stuff.”

“I see.”

“Then the whole process starts all over again. They hide the capsules somewhere new, you download the coordinates, and you try to find them. That’s what the club does. They go geocaching.”

“Okay. Wow. Thanks for explaining it to me.”

I sat back in my chair, the mug in front of me empty. Even though I had never seen Eddie Ray alive, I could picture him following the trail of this wooden nickel, stumbling across a
capsule full of trinkets, thinking he had discovered buried treasure worth a million dollars. Had he really been that dumb?

“Kirby, what kinds of things are these men putting inside the capsules when they find them? Is it valuable stuff?”

In other words, is it stuff worth killing for?

“No, it’s kind of corny. At first, they used business cards, but some of the men were uncomfortable with that. They wanted it to be a little more secretive. So they came up with a ‘thing’ that they have, like a little object, to represent them.”

“Like what?”

“Well, one guy is a car salesman, so he always puts in a key chain. Another guy collects eagles, so he bought a bunch of little plastic eagles, and he puts one of them in.”

“What does your dad put in?”

“He’s the electronics expert, so he said he always puts in a little tangle of electric wiring. About the size of a small bird’s nest. He said that’s his ‘symbol.’”

I rose from the table and carried our mugs to the sink. Keychains? Plastic eagles? Tangled wire? This wasn’t buried treasure, and even Eddie Ray had to have known that. So what was worth so much money?

“Did you go to the website yourself?” I asked. “Have you looked it up?”

“No, I came right over soon as I talked to my dad. But I wrote it down. Do you want to take a look?”

I nodded, gesturing for him to follow me down the hall to my office. Once there, I turned on the computer and sat at my desk. Kirby pulled up a stool behind me and watched over my shoulder. He read off the web address that his father had given him, and I typed it in, holding my breath as I pressed “Enter.” The site appeared on the screen, large letters spelling out “SEARCH FOR BURIED TREASURE!” across the top. Below that was a smaller headline, “Official Website of the Chesapeake GPS Society.”

The site was much as Kirby’s father had described. Besides a history of the club and a list of contact numbers, it also provided all sorts of links to related websites, information about how GPS works, even instructions on how to set up your own GPS club. We had to sign in to access the “members only” area of the website, and there we found the coordinates list for the last four years. There seemed to be more coordinates each year than the year before, and Kirby mused that as the club increased in size and as the members became more GPS-savvy, they probably needed to increase the number of degree confluence points.

On a hunch I printed a list of this year’s coordinates. I remembered next to nothing from geography class about latitude and longitude, but the website was very thorough, and after studying it for a while I felt as though I had a rudimentary grasp of the basics. Frustrated with the limitations of online mapping, I finally clicked away from the site, grabbed the list of coordinates from the printer tray, and walked back to the kitchen, Kirby following closely behind.

“We need a real map,” I said, “something we can spread out on the table and study in its entirety.”

I didn’t know where any of this was leading, but I could guess as to how we should proceed. Obviously, Eddie Ray had also found the website and had probably pursued some of the coordinates, expecting the “treasure” to be valuable. I wasn’t sure what he had found, but I knew I had to keep my mind open. Perhaps one of these rich men had played hide-and-seek with something a little more important than a trinket.

I led Kirby out of the door and across the lawn to the shed at the edge of the trees. I kept my lawnmower and a few tools in there, but now I was headed for the stack of navigational charts that were curled up in waterproof tubes in the corner. When I first moved here, I let an overzealous canoe salesman convince me I needed a full set of Chesapeake navigational charts for my canoeing, lest I get lost or confused. I had used them only a few
times before realizing that getting lost was half the fun—and that finding my way along the waterways around here was a much safer and more intuitive process than he predicted.