Trouble and Treasure (#1, Trouble and Treasure Series) (17 page)

In the few glances that I had managed to
snatch at Arthur Stanton's journal, I was starting to appreciate
that he was the other treasure hunter: the kind that solved
puzzles, that looked for clues, that tried to respect the old and
dated logic of whatever dead culture they were trying to uncover
treasure from.

Amanda was like her great-uncle; annoying
though she could be, she seemed to at least think things through,
and at least slowed down long enough to look for clues.

There was also the fact she'd known him:
Amanda had grown up with Arthur Stanton. That gave her a distinct
advantage in understanding how the old codger had thought. It
hadn’t taken her long to realize that the scales held a clue. I’d
been frankly impressed that she had realized what the clue had
meant, even if I had ignored it and destroyed the scales with a
spade.

I wanted those globes, I really did. If
keeping Amanda Stanton along for the ride was the key to getting
them, then so be it. If it made me a monumental bastard to do this
to her, then so be it – I would make it up to her later. I’d share
the treasure with her, maybe even represent her for free if this
adventure ever ended up in the courts.

Even I had to shake my head at my own
thoughts: seriously, there was no way I could rationalize this to
make it sound as if I was justified in stringing her along. Nope, I
was going to have to come to terms with the fact that I was a
universal-level dick.

“
Why are we going to the coast?” Amanda
asked. There were great long pauses between her questions, and I
didn't know whether she was so tired it was taking her that long to
think of a new one, or whether she was processing my answers that
hard it was taking her virtually minutes to complete her analysis.
Was she on to me? Did she appreciate how dodgy my story sounded?
Was she thinking about ditching from the car at any moment and
heading to the authorities?

“
We are heading to a coastal town,” I said,
trying to keep my voice even, trying to keep all emotion out of it
lest I accidentally reveal to her what was going on.

“
Why?”

“
The scales, I know where they were made,”
I answered, with 100% honesty.

“
So you're going to the location where they
were made?”

“
Yes.”

“
How is that going to help? The clue didn’t
say anything about going to the place where the scales were made,”
she said, and though her voice was still quiet, her words were
gradually growing in strength.

“
Amanda, trust me, I know how these clues
work.”

“
I know how my great-uncle thought, and he
would never have done something so straightforward,” she replied at
once.

Taking an enormous swallow, not
necessarily because my throat was constricted, but more because I
was trying to swallow my ego here, I tried to loosen up my
shoulders. “What do you think the clue means, Amanda?”

She sat there for a long while. When I
glanced over to see if she had withdrawn again, she was sitting
there looking thoughtful. She scratched at her hair, her teeth
biting into her bottom lip as they always did when she appeared to
be thinking. When I felt that familiar flick in my gut at how cute
the move looked on her, it was followed by a wave of even harsher
guilt.

I am such a bloody bastard.

“
The clue said something about the next
clue being at the point where the shadow crosses the light,” she
repeated. You said that the scales are from a town on the coast...”
she trailed off. “I guess that might be important, but I doubt that
the next clue is where the scales were made.”

Amanda began to count on her fingers
quietly. I had no idea what she was doing, and for a fleeting
moment I wondered whether she was counting the reasons not to
believe me and to get the hell away while she still could. But that
familiar look of thoughtfulness was back on her face, as was the
rumple to her nose and the bite to her lip. Rather than smile at
it, though that was my first inclination, I glanced back at the
road, shook my head heavily, and tried to keep it together.

“
My great-uncle used to say there is an
infinity of answers to any question, but that if he could think of
at least 10, that was usually enough.” She kept trying to count on
her fingers, teeth drawing over her lip lightly. She had a faraway
look on her face, a curled smile on her lips. In that moment, at
least, she didn’t look as though she’d been fleeing from a gun
battle hours before.

“
10 different things?” I joined in the
conversation. “You only need one, the right one.”

“
There is no such thing as right, or at
least that's what my great-uncle used to say. He said there were 1
million different ways to find lost treasure, and there were 1
million different things you could find other than lost treasure.
You had to pick where, when, and how. If you fool yourself into
thinking there is only one right way, and only one right answer to
a clue, then you restrict your possibilities.”

That was total bullshit; I’d been in this
business long enough to know that. Maybe that was the reason I was
bringing Amanda along. It was obvious I didn't think like Arthur
Stanton, and that she did. Yeah, that made me horrible, and yeah, I
was still having trouble coming to terms with what I was doing, but
it didn't mean I was about to stop. “So, what do you think the clue
means?”

She leaned back in her seat, eyes blinking.
It drew my attention to them, made me realize that they were a
pretty almond shape, one you don't see too often.

“
Okay, what are 10 things on the coast that
make light and shadow?” She put her hand up, getting ready to
count. “Lights,” she held up a thumb, “Um, I guess there could be
some luminescent fish,” she said, voice awkward as it was obvious
she realized how stupid the suggestion was.

I couldn't help but snort with laughter.
“Luminescent fish? Are you serious?” I knew I should be nice to her
yet I couldn't imagine Arthur Stanton leaving one of the Stargazer
Globes to the watchful protection of a school of luminescent
fish.

“
It's just a suggestion. The entire point
of this exercise is that you try to think laterally and creatively.
If you knew the right answer to begin with, then you wouldn't be
doing it, would you? Do you know the answer, Sebastian?” She
crossed her arms and looked across at me challengingly.

I took my hands off the steering wheel and
held them in the air in surrender, careful to ensure the car was
going straight before I did.

“
Put your hands back on the wheel,” she
said tersely.

“
Okay, okay,” I said through a light
chuckle, “And ignore me. Keep on thinking.”

She looked across at me, eyes narrowed. She
was sitting straight in her seat, her hands no longer tensed in her
lap, and that sick, pale white color was gone from her face.
Apparently all it was taking was an argument with me. Well there
you go, I didn't know that I could have that effect on women, but
life is full of surprises.

She held up a third finger. “Well, it
could mean,” she pressed the finger into her palm and looked
around, “Perhaps there's a specific streetlamp somewhere, or for
all we know there might be a famous lamp store in that
town.”

I nodded, not wanting to discourage her, but
realizing her suggestions weren't amazing. I was starting to
question whether she could solve the clue, and obviously, whether I
should keep her along.

“
What's the name of this town anyway? Can
you tell me anything about it? Are there any famous landmarks?
Anything particularly notorious that happened there?” She asked one
question straight after the other, hardly with a breath between
them.

“
There's not much there, a beach made of
rocks, a pretty boring promenade, a couple of pubs, and a
lighthouse,” I listed off all I could remember. Though I hadn't
been to that town for some time, I could remember it wasn't the
pinnacle of culture, history, or infrastructure. We would be lucky
to find a seat at the local pub that didn’t smell powerfully of
fish; most of the town being populated by fishermen, and fishermen
being what they were, never giving a fuck what they smelt
like.

You should have seen her eyes – they
widened so quickly and she blinked with such a stiff, wild look on
her face I couldn’t help but be drawn in, my own jaw slackening,
lips parting.

“
Did you say a lighthouse?” She waved a
hand in front of her face as if she was hot or
flustered.

My eyes narrowed; I didn't get where she
was going. I nodded nonetheless. “A big one, out on the
headlands.”

The look on her face was damn near
infectious. “My great-uncle loved lighthouses. He had a picture of
this big one up on his wall when I was young.”

I didn’t laugh at her, though the
inclination was there. After her reaction, I'd expected her to come
up with a brilliant insight, not a fairly innocuous fact that her
great-uncle had been partial to lighthouses.

She must have seen the less-than-impressed
look I gave her, and her cheeks dropped. “You don't get it, do
you?”

Though I didn't think there was anything to
get, I shrugged.

“
The point where the light crosses the
shadow.” She put one hand down as she said light and one hand down
as she said shadow. “My great-uncle wouldn’t have given that clue
unless it was important, unless we could locate something that had
a light source, but also a shadow, and that the both of them
crossed at the same time.” She played with her hands as she spoke,
crossing them and uncrossing them. “If you think about it, a
lighthouse can do that. If it is during the day, or if it is at
night and there is a bright enough external light, then the
lighthouse will have a long shadow. Because you can—”

“
Turn on the lights,” I jumped in, “You
could shine the flood lamps over the light house’s
shadow.”

She leaned back and nodded.

I didn't want to tell her it sounded crazy.
Firstly, why would you turn on the lighthouse during the day? If
you had enough sunshine to cast a shadow from the building, then
presumably the atmospheric conditions were such that you didn’t
need the lighthouse to be on to shepherd ships.

“
Look, I know how my great-uncle used to
think, and trust me, this is the riddle he would have thought up,
and the solution he would have made to it.”

I mumbled, not saying yes and not saying
no.

Sebastian Shaw

It wouldn't be long until we reached the
coastal town, just as it wouldn’t be long until the growing ominous
gray clouds above roared into a thunderstorm. If, on the slimmest
of chances, Amanda was somehow right, and somehow the next clue
would be found at the lighthouse, then we were running out of
daylight.

I put my finger in my collar again and
pulled my shirt away from my neck. I was sweating something chronic
here; the heat had been on full bore for the last half hour. Though
I wanted to turn it off and open a window, I noted Amanda was still
huddled, her arms wrapped around her middle. She looked cold, so I
kept them on, because maybe I wasn't that much of a bastard after
all.

We spent the next 20 minutes in complete
silence. Soon the road before us opened up and a clear view of the
coastal town opened out below, the headland visible beyond, a small
white and red line indicating the lighthouse.

Though my first choice would have been to
drive to the site where the scales had been manufactured, I decided
to go to the lighthouse. We had half an hour before the heavens
opened up and things got wet and rumbly. While it wouldn’t bother
me to work in the rain, I wasn't entirely sure I could do that to
Amanda, not after what she been through today.

It took us less than 10 minutes to negotiate
the narrow road up past the town to the headland, and we hardly
passed any vehicles on the way. As we drew closer and closer to the
coast, the road on my right dropping off to the sea below, I
couldn't help but notice how choppy the waves were getting. With
the promise of a storm brewing, and the wind whipping up, pushing
the car as I drove, the sea below was getting ever more violent.
That was another fact against us: not only were we running out of
light here, but lighthouses were built to resist storms, people
weren't so much. If the next clue was buried at the point where the
shadow crossed the light (notwithstanding that that could be any
point along the circumference surrounding the lighthouse) then I
didn’t want to be digging during a freaking storm.

Amanda had her face turned towards the sky
above, her lips opened slightly, her eyes blinking occasionally as
they fixed up at the racing clouds. She looked cold, she looked
thirsty, she looked tired, and she didn’t look as if she was
prepared to go digging for a clue at a lighthouse in a storm.

Not for the first time I checked my
rear-vision mirror, twisting around in my seat to ensure I got a
full view of the road both in front and behind. So far I’d seen
precious few vehicles, and none that piqued my interest or elicited
any concern. This was a good thing, because I didn’t need more
company. I could imagine battling a crew of criminals in a
lighthouse as a vicious storm whipped up waves on either side. I
could imagine what would happen to Amanda in such a situation, too.
She would either drown, be captured, be shot, or worse. Dammit if I
hadn't promised to keep her safe.