“It’s amazing it still works.” She turned, to watch the needle spin. Nothing happened. “Except it doesn’t.” She turned again. “It’s broken. Frozen.”
“What do you mean?”
“The needle always points the same way on the dial. Sort of northeast.”
Jake took it from her and tapped the instrument. The needle didn’t budge. “You’re right.”
“What if that’s a clue?”
“Why would a broken compass be a clue?”
“What if he fixed the compass so it wouldn’t turn and then put it in the safety deposit box with his finger?”
“You mean it’s a bearing, a heading?”
“Yes.”
“But from where?”
“I think we have to assume this cabin. Find where we are on your survey map, use the compass bearing, and draw a line.”
Jake did so. The line crossed several mountains, but it still wasn’t clear which, if any, was supposed to match Hood’s fingerprint. “We’re still missing something. What next, Woodward?”
She pondered. “Elementary, my dear Bernstein. The other stuff in the tin has to mean something, too. The only question is, what?”
He shook his head. “Oh boy, this is not like jotting notes at a press conference. My brain does not work like this. A pistol and a scarf? It makes no sense, this calendar has no guidepost, no… wait a minute. Is that gun loaded?”
“God, I hope not. I waved it around in the bank. With seventy-year-old ammunition?”
He picked it up, aimed it away, and worked the mechanism with an efficiency that surprised her. Did Jake know about guns, too? A shell, green with age, was ejected. It fell on the floor.
“Oh my, what if it had gone off?”
“Well, it didn’t.” He picked the round up, studying it curiously. “Look.” He moved the bullet to the calendar. Its diameter matched the hole that had been made through the pages to hold the calendar up. “The hole is ragged. I think Ben Hood shot through this baby before he drew his map, or finger, or whatever the heck he was doing.”
“Why?”
He pointed at the open pages. “To give a reference point. Either where we’re going or where we are.”
“Yes!” She liked this collaboration. “Where we are, I’m guessing. Our starting point. So your compass bearing can be drawn from the bullet hole.”
Using the N to orient the broken compass, Jake drew a line from the hole the. 45 bullet had made across the calendar map to the northeast. It crossed Hood’s fingerprint. “Which means?” he asked.
“I don’t know. The scarf. What’s that for?”
“Your great-grandfather was a lunatic, wasn’t he? Or completely paranoid, locking everything away until a relative comes along to claim it-someone who likely wouldn’t be with the government, or Tibet, or the Nazis. And here you are, junior detective.” His tone was admiring, which she liked. Rein it in, Rominy.
She picked up the scarf and examined it. The silk was dirty, frayed white, and unremarkable in every way. Had it been given to him by some potentate in Tibet? Or was there something hidden in its meaning? What would a junior detective do? Or a man at the end of his life at the end of a terrible war? She held it up to light from a window. Parts seemed cleaner than others. Which meant… what?
“Jake, light your lantern.”
“Sun’s up, Rominy.”
“Light it anyway. I need some heat but I don’t want to hold this by the fire and risk setting it ablaze.”
The lantern was the old gas type, and its mantles flared to life with a familiar hiss. In short order the glass cylinder enclosing the mantles was too hot to touch, and Rominy held the scarf near the light. “This is something we used to do as kids.”
“Hold scarves to lanterns?”
“Invisible ink. You can use juices, honey, diluted wine, urine, you name it. Coke, even. You mix with water, write, and let it dry. You can’t see it.”
“Until you heat it?”
“Yes. Voila!” Brown characters had appeared on the scarf. Rominy pulled it away and they read.
360/60/60=1”
“That’s perfectly clear,” Jake joked.
“No, it obviously means something. Is it a date? A year has 365 days, not 360.”
“The ancient Babylonians and Egyptians started with that as the length of the year, before astronomy was refined. And that’s why we use it for bearings today. I think three hundred sixty means degrees, like compass degrees. This is another bearing, perhaps. Sixty… plus sixty. That’s one hundred twenty, about opposite where the needle is fixed. And one is… I don’t know.”
“Why have another bearing?”
“To cross the first?”
“But it wouldn’t cross. It just leads in the opposite direction. That doesn’t help.”
“Let me think.” He pursed his lips, studying the relics, in a way she thought was irresistibly cute. Yes, she’d fallen. “Have you ever used a nautical chart?”
“No,” she said, silently condemning her own lack of caution in affairs of the heart, but then sometimes magic just happened, didn’t it? And…
“The nautical mile is based on the length of one-sixtieth of a degree, or one minute of one degree of latitude on the earth’s surface. That’s a distance just a little longer than our land mile.”
“But his invisible writing has two sixties.”
“Which would suggest a nautical second, which my boating days taught me is about a hundred feet. A hundred and one, I think.”
“So one inch on his map equals a hundred feet.”
“Is that all? That means to his fingerprint from the bullet hole is only a few hundred yards.”
She looked at the cloth again. “Wait. Is this another number?”
They peered. Less distinct than the first were more numerals:
72.1.
“Look at your contour map again.”
“So?”
“What if it’s seventy-two point one times a hundred and one feet? Where does that put us?”
He multiplied it out. “That’s seven thousand two hundred eighty-two feet. That could be”-he looked from modern map to Hood’s fingerprint and back again-“the far side of this peak here, Lookout Mountain and Teebone Ridge, toward Eldorado.”
“Plot it on your USGS map.”
“Here, about. Below Little Devil Peak, above Marble Creek Canyon.”
“And what are the coordinates?”
He read them off.
“I think that’s where we need to go,” she said. “A little tricky to find in the woods, I’m guessing.”
“Not necessarily,” he said. “I have GPS. We can use it to walk exactly to this spot.”
“Cool! Then what happens?”
“I don’t know. He seemed to go to a lot of trouble to plot this, but then make it obscure. If you didn’t have the contents of his safety deposit box, nothing would make sense. Maybe our interpretation is still off. But I think you’re on to something, Rominy. We follow this frozen bearing the required distance and find… treasure. Maybe.” His tone was cautious. He was trying to control his hope. “What are the coins for, then?”
Rominy thought a moment and then beamed, triumphant. “That’s easy. You said yourself these mountains are riddled with old mines. We’re going to find a gold mine!”
“I like your optimism.”
“Maybe he found something in Tibet to help him mine.”
“I’ll get the daypacks,” Jake said.
“I’ll clean up the breakfast. When you go out, could you check for ghosts and skinheads?”
“And raccoons.”
Jake had started a garbage sack the night before. He was out by his old truck, dragging stuff from his big toolbox and poking around in the cab, when Rominy stooped to scrape leftovers into the bag. She saw he’d lumped in some perfectly good recyclables: the spaghetti can and two plastic water bottles. Odd for a Seattle boy; he was no tree hugger. She decided to fish them out for proper disposal. When she did so, something small, round, and shiny dropped from some crumpled paper towels where it had been caught. Had Barrow lost a coin?
Diving past strands of spaghetti, she picked it up. Not a coin but some kind of small battery. Odd that he’d think to toss one here.