Wilson stopped to catch a breath and take a sip of water. It was just long enough for Jerk to cut in. “Can you get to the part of the treasure? The paper said you were going to show how Mark Twain put a secret code in his book on where to find a fortune in lost gold. It didn’t say anything about you reading to us like a bunch of preschoolers.”
The look on the author’s face would have made Medusa jealous, but I doubt anyone noticed. Jerk must have changed his shirt, but his pants were still wet, making it look like he had a bladder accident.
“Craig, please. Not here,” Shelia said, turning to face him. Her cheek was bright red, and obviously it wasn’t because she had too much sun at the lake, or embarrassed by his remarks. Even I knew it would soon turn a dark blue. She should have let him drown.
I whispered a little too loud to Bonnie, “I think the name Jerk suits him better.”
My remark resulted in a laugh from a few people next to us.
“I’m sorry if the news article was misleading, sir,” Wilson continued, unaware of my joke. “My publisher hired a new publicist straight out of school who is trying to make a name for herself. The treasure in my book is folklore as is its location. I suggest if you are looking for a treasure hunt, then maybe you should go out and buy Forrest Fenn’s book.”
“Who the hell is that?” asked a kid sitting next to the jerk I now knew as Craig. He had the weirdest hair I’d ever seen. His head was shaved bald on one side and long, purple hair on the other.
“That guy who claims to have buried a treasure so people will buy his book, Cory. Now shut up and let him finish. Or have you forgotten why we’re here?” It was the punk’s girlfriend, or at least that’s the impression I got. It could have been his sister, for all I knew. Either way, they were definitely a matched set with nearly identical tattoos covering their necks and arms.
“Thank you, miss,” Wilson said. He began to read where he had left off, then looked back at the audience. “Well, considering how my publisher may have brought most of you here on false pretenses, I guess it won’t hurt to skip ahead to the treasure. But please remember, this is historical fiction. I have simply taken an incident from the past and used it to create a story.”
Wilson lowered his eyes again and started flipping pages. Fringed with graying hair, his shiny bald spot reminded me of my grandmother’s doilies. He seemed to find the page he wanted, and woke me from my daydream of Grandma setting the table at Thanksgiving dinner. But instead of reading, he held a finger on the page, removed the glasses he kept on a rope around his neck, and raised his head. “I need to at least fill you in on some details first. The story is about an old miner, I call Drake, who in the late summer of 1895 went searching for the Lost Tenderfoot Mine in the hills above Breckenridge. Drake and his brother had lost their jobs working the silver mines of Leadville after the big crash of eighty-three. His brother needed money desperately so he could move his family back to Denver, where they could find care for his daughter, Penny, who was dying of consumption. The story of the lost mine had been around for nearly twenty years by then, and Drake had nothing to lose, so he went looking for it. Legend has it that some unknown Tenderfoot had brought out twenty pounds of gold in 1880, and couldn’t find his way back. Miners and fortune hunters have been searching for it ever since.
“Anyway, Drake must have found the mine and dug out five thousand dollars worth of nearly pure gold, for he left a message describing his find and the location of where to find his gold and the lost mine. However, according to an article I found in the Rocky Mountain News, his message wasn’t found until some uranium miners stumbled on the remains of his pack mule in the early fifties. There was a frenzy of sorts, searching for the gold, but because Drake had encrypted the location in code, the treasure was never found, and it soon became just another forgotten fable.”
“You’re telling us there’s only five thousand dollars?” It was Cory again. “I don’t call that no treasure.”
Wilson didn’t seem to be very upset at the latest interruption. He smiled and looked back with cold, gray eyes at the kid. I’d seen that same smile before. I think it was Hannibal Lecter in the movie, Silence of the Lambs. “Well, son, that would be about twenty pounds at the price of gold back then. Do the math if you want to know how much twenty pounds of gold is worth today. Twelve troy-ounces per pound, times twenty, times twelve hundred dollars is a nice day’s work. But of course, the real treasure is the mine itself. Crack Drake’s code and you have wealth beyond imagination.”
Cory didn’t say another word. I couldn’t see his face from where I sat, but I could imagine him counting on his fingers trying to calculate the sum.
Wilson didn’t wait for the kid to come up with a figure. “That’s nearly three hundred thousand, Son,” he said before refocusing on his book.
He waited a moment for it to sink in then continued. “I think I left off where Drake had found shelter in an abandoned silver mine and lost his frostbitten fingers when the wind blew the mine door shut on his outstretched hand. I’ll skip ahead now to the good part where he has started a makeshift fire from all but one book in his pack.
“‘Drake huddled over the flames, trying to catch every last ray of its nefarious warmth, as the fire burned with the words of dead writers. Drake needed all the help Penny's friends could give him if he were to make the twenty-mile trek into Leadville once the fire died out. As he fed more pages to the fire, and watched them slowly die, he remembered a story Penny had read to him about how British spies would send coded messages keyed to a popular book. It was a simple code: a series of numbers representing a page and word count for each word of the message. The cipher would search the book for a word he wanted to use and then count how many words came before the chosen word on the page. To decipher the code, the spy simply found a copy of the key book, and wrote down the word corresponding to each pair of numbers.
“‘Hours later, Drake finished his Last Will and Testament in which he says Penny’s consumption will be cured when she solves his riddle. On the back side of the will, he put twelve lines of numbers, and a note telling her to read the story where a boy gets his friends to do his chores. Then he put Penny’s copy of Tom Sawyer in his pack with the gold, and threw it down the shaft at the end of the mine.’”
“So you’re telling us we got to buy your book to find where the gold is hidden?” It was Cory again. His tone suggested more than a question; it came out like an accusation.
Wilson answered condescendingly. “I told you, this is a fictionalized story of an article I read from a 1953 issue of the Rocky Mountain News. The book you want to buy, if you insist on believing the story is real, is written by Mark Twain, not me.”
“And what book is that, Mr. Wilson?” asked a bald man in the front row, wearing worn Levi's and a sleeveless shirt that showed a crude tattoo of the Marine Corp symbol and the words, Semper Fi, beneath it.
Craig took it upon himself to answer for the author. “Jeez, dumbo, any idiot can see it’s Tom Sawyer.”
The bald guy in the front row turned to Craig, allowing me to see his face. There was real hate in his eyes, and for the brief second I saw him before he turned back, I thought he looked familiar.
“I’m right though, ain’t I, Wilson?” Craig asked as though nothing had happened between him and the bald guy.
“Yes, but not just any copy of Tom Sawyer. You must remember, Drake wrote the code in 1895 and Tom Sawyer was first published in 1876, so it’s anybody’s guess which version was used. The wrong edition will throw off the word count.”